The Winners, page 7
“Sorry! I’m sorry!!!”
“What the HELL?” Maya yells, dropping the knife into her bag in panic, she’s shaking uncontrollably now and the girl stammers nervously:
“Can I… can I walk with you? They took my phone and I didn’t want to tell them the code, so they chased me and I saw you and thought…”
Only then does Maya see the other three girls, the same age, farther away in the park. Maya’s heart is beating so hard that her ears are buzzing, and all she can think is what her mother said about the difference between moving to little Beartown from Toronto with its several million inhabitants: “In Beartown you only need to worry about wild animals if you go out at night, Maya, but in a big city you have to be afraid of everything.” She was wrong, and she probably knew it even back then, it was as much a lie for her own sake as her daughter’s. There are predators everywhere, just different sorts.
“Here… your phone…,” the girl in front of her whispers.
Maya sees the red marks on her wrists and knows how you get those: you tear yourself free, you fight for your life. She takes the phone, the girls farther away see the screen light up her face, maybe they think she’s calling the police, because they turn as quickly as they appeared and vanish.
“Come on. Hurry!” Maya whispers, pulling the girl with her in the other direction.
The girl runs close beside her until they reach the end of the park.
“Where… where can you get a knife like that?” she asks when she eventually dares to speak.
Maya is leaning over breathlessly, hands on her knees, and wishes Ana was here to make fun of how out of shape she is. She avoids the girl’s gaze and mumbles:
“A witch in the forest gave it to me.”
“What?”
“Never mind. You shouldn’t get a knife.”
“Why not?”
“Because you should only have one if you’re prepared to use it,” Maya whispers, and hopes the girl is never as prepared as she is.
She hands the girl her phone and tells her to call her parents, and the girl does as she says. Maya hears her explain what happened, and swear over and over again that she’s fine, Maya can see she’s trying not to cry, not for her sake but her parents’. Most people don’t know when their childhood ends, but this girl will always know exactly.
Maya remembers the hospital, after the rape, when her own mom wanted to murder the whole town and her dad whispered: “What can I do?” and all Maya could manage to say was: “Love me.” It’s a terrible moment for all kids when we realize that our parents can’t protect us. That we won’t be able to protect our own. That the whole world can come and take us whenever it likes.
The girl hands the phone back, says her mom wants to talk to Maya, and she hears a woman sobbing at the other end of the line:
“Thank you, oh, THANK YOU, I’m so happy my daughter was lucky enough to find you! We’ve taught her that if anything happens, she should run to an adult!”
This is the first time anyone has called Maya that. She waits with the girl until they see her parents’ car come around the corner, the girl looks away from Maya for a moment, and when she looks back Maya has disappeared. Disappeared into the city where no one knows who you are and you can be who you want to be.
* * *
But who do you want to be?
* * *
A couple of blocks away Maya sits down warily on an ice-cold bench and goes to pieces. She sobs so hard she can’t breathe. Everything she has spent all these months trying to forget is suddenly back: the sound of the buttons of her blouse bouncing across the floor, the posters on the walls of Kevin’s room, the weight of his body, and the panic, the panic, the panic. The smell of him on her skin afterward, which she tried to scrub away until she was bleeding.
People say that our worst moments reveal who our real friends are, but of course most of all we reveal ourselves. Maya pulls out her phone. She could call any of her classmates, but what could she say? They don’t have knives in their bags. They wouldn’t understand.
Most of all she just wants to call her mom, she wants to hear her ask: “Is everything okay, darling?” and whisper back: “No, Mom, no, I’m not okay I’m not okay I’m not okay.” She wants to yell into the phone that her mom should drive the whole way across the country and pick her up, the way she did so many times as a child when she went camping in the forest with Ana and got scared of the dark. Her mom was always in the car before Maya had time to finish the question, she always slept with her clothes on when the children weren’t home. That’s the only thing that stops Maya calling now. Her mom would have set off at once, driving all night, all the way, without any hesitation, but Maya has just been called an adult. So that’s what she tries to be.
So instead she calls the only person she’s got, the only person she’s always had, because that’s the question a crisis asks us: Who’s your person? She calls Ana.
No reply. She calls again and again, and in the end she sends a text: Pick up! I need you! She’ll feel so ashamed of that a few hours from now. She’s going to hate herself so much when she finds out what’s been going on at home.
11 Flagpoles
Home. It’s never felt like home for Matteo. This town has never been interested in him.
He’s sitting crouched in the ditch, when he flew off his bike he landed on his arm and now it’s hurting so badly that for a few seconds he wonders if he was actually run over. He lets out a whimper as he stands up, the car is already long gone in the darkness. Ana, who was driving it, and Hannah, sitting beside her, didn’t even see him. The trees shriek in the wind like metal scraping against porcelain. It’s the space of a blink in an entire life, but perhaps it’s there and then that Matteo finally decides he’s had enough of being powerless. Enough of being weak. He decides to give as good as he gets, to anyone, any way he can.
He hauls himself up onto the road again, leaning into the wind and dragging his bicycle behind him. He loses his bearings. When he looks up he realizes he’s gone in completely the wrong direction. He’s up in the Heights, where the most expensive houses in town are, he can walk here from his own street in less than half an hour, but it’s like a different country. The houses here are so large that two people could probably shout at each other from either end and still not hear each other, the windows so high that Matteo can’t imagine how anyone cleans them. There are two cars parked in each drive, and a trampoline in each yard. This town is incredibly good at telling you what you can’t afford to have.
He stops on the jogging track where there’s a view across the whole lake, if you follow the shore with your eyes you can see all the way to the ice rink. Outside it there are twelve flagpoles arranged in two neat lines, green flags with the bear on them are always fluttering at the top of the poles, but someone is taking them down now, one by one, so they don’t get torn to shreds in the storm. As carefully and tenderly as if each one of them were incredibly valuable.
The chain on Matteo’s bicycle has come off, he tries to put it back on but his frozen fingers are shaking too much. He drags his bike most of the way into the center of Beartown, but in the end he gives up and abandons it.
No one who is out sees him, no one offers to help, all they care about is flags.
12 Roofs
Everything and everyone is connected in this forest, we’re connected to the extent that when the roof collapses at an ice rink in Hed, a man automatically starts running in Beartown. One of the man’s former coaches once said: “You get success by having extremely high integrity but absolutely zero prestige. Because integrity is about who you are, whereas prestige is only about what other people think of you.” The man often thinks that this might be true in sports, but when you’re talking about the survival of a town the opposite is true: prestige is everything. That’s why he’s running.
At some point during the past two years, hardly anyone knows exactly when because it wasn’t even reported in the local paper, a few men and women gathered in a small room in the council building and made a political decision that seemed like a formality at the time: it has been proposed that the renovation of the ice rink in Hed should be postponed and renovation of the rink in Beartown brought forward instead. Afterward no one can remember on which grounds the decision was made, exactly, but it’s the usual story, politics isn’t always decided by politicians around here.
What actually happened was that a small but vocal “interested party” in Beartown had spent months cultivating the people in power, in conference rooms and in hunting lodges and in the supermarket, while the committee over at Hed Hockey was too busy trying to recruit a new coach to have time to object. Naturally not all the politicians were convinced that Beartown’s ice rink was more important than Hed’s, but enough of them buckled out of fear of losing allies. Political reality is harsh: the gaps between elections seem to get shorter and shorter, and election campaigns longer and longer.
The interested party managed to produce a survey which concluded that the risk of a collapse at Beartown ice rink was suddenly “imminent,” which was obviously of additional concern given the club’s extensive youth program. Surely they had to think about the children? The fact that the survey was conducted by the brother of a committee member at Beartown Hockey was never discussed. When someone asked to look at the report a couple of weeks later, no one could find it. But by then the decision had already been made and one ice rink had been prioritized over another.
The biggest item of expenditure in the renovation was the new roof for Beartown’s ice rink. Right after the work was finished one single sponsor funded twelve flagpoles in the parking lot, with huge Beartown flags fluttering at the top as if in celebration. The same sponsor happened to have been the leader of the “interested party,” which naturally hadn’t contributed a penny toward the cost of the roof, because of course roofs aren’t as much fun as flags. People see flags every time they go to a game, but no one pays any attention to a roof until it gets blown off.
Hardly anyone took any notice of the political decisions at the time, but now the storm has arrived, and the first thing to collapse over in Hed is the roof of the ice rink. At the same time a man is running through Beartown to save twelve flagpoles. That seems ridiculous, of course, until we see the consequences. A storm strikes a forest, one ice rink collapses and another remains standing, this will soon drive the inhabitants of two towns into a new battle for resources, and it will finish the way everything seems to finish around here: with violence. So much will have happened by then that we’ll have forgotten how it all started, but it starts here. Now.
The man running toward the flagpoles is six feet tall, weighs well over two-hundred pounds, and his coat flaps behind him in the wind. He tries to untie the knots to get the flags down, but the knots are tight and his fingers are cold, and he ends up screaming out loud in frustration. Anyone who doesn’t know him might think he’s gone mad, but if you were to ask anyone who does, they’d exclaim: “Gone mad?”
He’s known as Tails but has another, real name, of course. Many grown men in this town have two names: the one their parents gave them, and the one hockey gave them. As a young man he always tried to stick out from the crowd by wearing a suit when everyone else was wearing jeans and T-shirts, but on one occasion the whole team attended a funeral and all wore suits, so to stand out there he wore a tailcoat. Ever since then, he hasn’t been called anything else.
His loafers are sliding on the ground and he keeps having to hoist his trousers up, but he struggles on with the knots regardless. He rushed past a boy on his way here, he doesn’t know his name is Matteo, he didn’t even see him. All he could think about were the scraps of green fabric fluttering at the top of some poles. For God’s sake, they’re only flags, people from other places might think, it’s only a damn hockey club. But not for Tails.
His whole life he has been underestimated and dismissed, declared stupid and laughed at. His grocery store has come close to collapse, he’s been on the brink of bankruptcy several times, but his enemies say he’s like a garden weed: you can’t get rid of him. He’s been chased by the Tax Office, he’s so notorious for financial graft and cooking the books that “he could find a shortcut on a straight line” is actually one of the kinder things that is said of him these days. But Tails keeps going, he just keeps going. Always with a smile and clenched fists, and the constant battle cry: “Let’s do this!” He’s survived every battle and in recent years has accumulated a small fortune. If you ask him, he’ll say it’s because he always looks a bit further ahead than everyone else, and if you don’t ask him he’ll tell you anyway. After the hospital in Hed and the factory in Beartown, his supermarket is the largest employer in the whole district. He’s also one of the biggest sponsors of Beartown Hockey, and one of the town’s worst kept secrets is that he personally handpicked several of the committee members. If you want to control this town, first you have to control the jobs, and secondly you have to control hockey, and if you want to have anything to do with either of those, these days you have to go through Tails. No one has any real idea precisely when the hell he has time to run his supermarket, because he seems to spend more time at the rink than the players, and more time in the council offices than the politicians. Everyone has an opinion about him, but no one can ignore him. They tried that around two years ago, and he won’t let them forget him again.
That was after what he calls “the scandal,” because he can’t quite bring himself to say “the rape.” He never says “Maya” either, even though he’s known her father practically his whole life, he just says “the young woman.” It was obviously a terrible year for everyone, but as usual no one seems to appreciate who the real victim was: a middle-aged man with large financial interests. Tails came close to losing every-thing.
Very few people around here probably realize just how close the politicians came to closing down Beartown Hockey and letting Hed Hockey take over everything. Beartown was only saved at the very last minute, by its supporters and new committee members and new sponsorship money from the factory, but everyone knows that Tails worked tirelessly in the background. Just in case anyone didn’t know before, he was interviewed in the local paper last spring and he told the reporter: “I work BEHIND THE SCENES, you see, without being seen!” Then he offered some very useful advice on how the reporter ought to photograph him, and how large the picture ought to be, and then he showed him the brochure he had had printed for all the local businesses: “It isn’t just easy to sponsor Beartown Hockey, it’s also the right thing to do,” the brochure said. Because when Beartown was facing the worst crisis in its history after “the scandal,” Tails raised his eyes to the horizon and looked farther ahead.
Beartown had been just a club like all the others, he claimed, but now it was going to be a club like no other. Suddenly he embraced everything he had previously snorted at as politically correct innovations, so wholeheartedly that hardly anyone managed to keep up with him. He told the local paper proudly: “There are plenty of clubs that don’t acknowledge their social responsibilities, but Beartown Hockey is different! Have I mentioned our huge investment in girls’ hockey? Unique!”
Some people might call his actions shameless opportunism, but Tails would take that as a compliment: being an opportunist means seeing a chance and grabbing it. During his time as a hockey player he learned that every tactical decision is seen as either an act of genius or idiocy in hindsight, depending entirely upon the end result.
Naturally Tails also held up Amat, who came from the poorest part of Beartown but had gone on to become the club’s biggest star, as proof that hockey “is open to everyone.” Obviously he doesn’t have precise figures for how many other players from the Hollow have ever played on the A-team, but didn’t Benjamin Ovich’s mom ALMOST live in the Hollow, so surely he should count? Admittedly, Benjamin moved abroad two years ago and no longer plays hockey, but he was actually HOMOSEXUAL, did the reporter know that? “Not that it makes any difference to us, of course, in this club we treat everyone the same!” Tails declared, without really explaining why he didn’t feel the need to identify all of the other players on the team by their sexual orientation.
Of course Tails doesn’t want to talk about “the scandal” with the reporter, “out of respect for those involved,” because respect was very important to Tails. But in the brochure Tails had made sure that a photograph of Peter Andersson was displayed prominently, even though he no longer worked at the club, and next to Peter, Tails had added a picture of a little girl from the kids’ team. You couldn’t see her face, but you could see her long hair, the same color as Maya’s, a subtle reminder that the sponsors should remember whose club Beartown was. Not Kevin’s, but Maya’s. Well, it was “subtle” for Tails, anyway. And it was “the right thing to do.”
He paid for the twelve flagpoles outside the rink out of his own pocket, so that everyone on the way to a game now passed through a majestic avenue lined with huge green flags with the bear in their center, and because the local paper wrote about it and because people in general like flags far more than they like roofs, plenty of people got the idea that it was Tails who had funded the entire renovation. Not the council.
Tails himself was obviously too modest to boast about that, so he just said it in confidence to a couple of hundred people as well as the reporter. Shameless opportunism? Only if you regard that as some-thing bad.
Of course Ramona over at the Bearskin pub always takes every chance to tell Tails how stupid he is. But behind his back, because that’s the only time she doesn’t make fun of him, she even admitted once: “Damn easy to tease men like Tails, but do you know what he is? He’s the right sort of passionate. This town is his life’s work. You might laugh at that, but what the hell have you ever created? What have you built in this town? And what’s the state ever built? Do you think the government’s going to come here and organize jobs and homes? They don’t even know we exist!” Then she drank her supplementary breakfast and added: “Tails might be a massive idiot, but without massive idiots like him places like this don’t survive.”
