The Winners, page 8
That may have been an exaggeration, but it certainly wasn’t untrue. Tails knows that everything is connected, the flags are a symbol of the club, if they get torn to shreds in the storm, tomorrow people will think hockey is weak. But if they’re flying as proudly as ever, as if Beartown was immortal, people will feel instead that that’s the truth. That’s why Tails ran, because he sees a little farther ahead than everyone else.
* * *
And because he’s a massive idiot.
* * *
The storm is so loud in his ears that he doesn’t even know if he screams or not when his fingertip gets caught in the knot of one of the ropes and his fingernail gets torn right off. The pain is so immediate and so unbearable that he sinks to his knees and feels both his hand and his cheeks get wet.
He drags himself to his feet and hammers on the door of the ice rink. When no one opens up he kicks at the metal in despair.
* * *
Bangbangbang.
13 Kings
Matteo cuts through a smart residential area in the hope that the wind isn’t blowing quite as hard between the houses. He holds on to walls and fences whenever he can, keeping his eyes closed, but the wind cuts through the gap between his eyelids anyway, as if it wants to force him to see the destruction. He walks past a house with a wooden sign on the door, written a long time ago by a small child who’s a teenager now: “LEO AND MAYA AND PETER AND KIRA ANDERSSON LIVE HERE.” Matteo walks a little too close to the driveway and a motion detector switches a light on. The electricity hasn’t been cut off in this part of town yet, only on the outskirts at the edge of the forest where Matteo lives. The man inside the house jumps up in the living room and peers out through the window. Matteo knows who he is, everyone knows, his name is Peter Andersson and he used to be general manager of Beartown Hockey. He was once a professional player in the NHL. All hockey towns are monarchies and Peter used to be king around here. But he looks older now than he used to, more alone, more unhappy. That makes Matteo happy. The boy hopes that all the hockey men in this town, every single one, lose everything they love so that they can find out how it feels too.
Peter peers through the window and tries to see what made the light come on in the driveway, as if he’s hoping to see a car there meaning that someone has come home. But he sees nothing, Matteo has already run off, into the wind. Peter will never know that he was there, he doesn’t actually even know who the boy is. Not yet.
14 Chocolate balls
Bang bang bang.
* * *
Bangbangbangbangbang.
* * *
For a moment it sounds like hockey pucks against the wall of the house, but it’s only the wind knocking a branch from the garden hedge against a fallen bin. Peter Andersson looks out at it in disappointment through the window, the storm is sweeping the whole town out there but he’s dry and safe inside, he doesn’t have to go out to rescue anyone, because no one needs his help. He feels sorry for himself about that, he feels sorry for himself a lot of the time these days, but mostly he feels sorry for himself for feeling sorry for himself. It’s a form of internalized hatred that he can’t see an end to.
It’s only been two years since he resigned as general manager of Beartown Hockey, but he looks ten years older. It takes less and less time to comb his hair in the morning, longer and longer to pee. He’s cleaned and cooked and baked bread today, he’s started to get good at it, the way you do if you have too much time to practice. Maya is at her music college on the other side of the country and Leo, although he may be in his room, feels just as far away. Kira is still at the office over in Hed, and Peter is keeping her meal warm even though he knows there’s no point. Small rituals in the war against loneliness, fleeting illusions of being needed.
“Dad, have you… I mean, maybe you should talk to someone? You seem so low!” Maya said when she was home during the summer.
That was the time she accidentally let slip that she was going “home” when she left Beartown, and saw how sad it made him. He lied, of course, and said he was just tired, because who would he talk to? A psychologist? That would be like paying someone to complain about the weather. Because how could he possibly explain? In Canada he had a coach who used to like repeating that it’s “speed that kills” on the ice, it isn’t the size of the player you get tackled by that’s dangerous but the speed at which he approaches, and Peter didn’t realize that was a lie until the day he left the rink for the last time. It’s silence that kills. Not being part of anything anymore. He stepped down from his position as general manager of Beartown Hockey of his own accord, started working with his wife because he wanted to be a better husband and a better dad, and he’s fairly sure he succeeded. He’s better now. So how can he explain that he doesn’t actually regret it, but regrets it nonetheless? That he just wasn’t prepared to be forgotten so quickly?
The club is in better shape than it has been for a long time. They have new sponsors, the support of local politicians, stronger finances than they had for years, and a good team. A really, really good team. Last season they thrashed Hed Hockey each time they played by such a margin that it was almost humiliating, the towns are no longer equal, Beartown almost won the whole league and Hed almost got relegated. The clubs will meet each other again this year, but it feels as if this will be the last time that will happen, Hed seems to be set on an inexorable downward trajectory through the leagues, and Beartown is heading upward. One club is getting poorer and the other richer, it all changed so fast, just a few years ago their positions were re-versed.
So how can Peter admit that the success everyone has been dreaming of cuts him like a knife? That it feels as if he was the problem? He lived an entire life in Beartown Hockey, but when he left it was like lifting a boot out of a bucket of water, he left no trace, it was as if he had never even been there. To an outsider hockey might be a ridiculous game, but never for someone who has been involved in it. It’s as impossible to explain how the ice feels as it would be to explain what flying is like to someone who has lived their whole life on the ground. What does the sky matter if you’ve never seen it?
So what would he say to a psychologist? That he wishes someone needed him? That his life isn’t enough? No. It’s enough. It has to be enough.
The storm rattles the windows and gutters in its hunt for something that’s hanging loose and can be torn off. Peter peers through the window when the light on the driveway comes on, hoping that Kira has come home. But there’s nothing but shadows and senseless wind out there.
He looks at his phone and thinks about calling her, but he doesn’t want to nag. He thinks about calling Maya too, but he doesn’t want to be a nuisance.
* * *
So he just stands at the window, hating himself for feeling so sorry for himself.
* * *
Bang bang bang.
* * *
Maya is still out of breath, and her heart is beating so hard it’s making her feel sick. She walks toward the apartment where her classmates are having a party, but stops in the street outside the building, alone, and can’t bring herself to go in, far too terrified that her classmates will ask questions and that they’ll be able to see what she’s done in her eyes. They would never understand, they’ve never thought about animals that hunt and animals that take flight, the only animals they know anything about are in the zoo or in the refrigerator. They’re sweet, naive children. Unlike Maya.
She looks around. There’s a small pub on the other side of the street, a broken neon sign outside and a row of drunks on stools in front of a bartender who’s tired of life. She’s still so unused to being eighteen that she often forgets she’s allowed to go to bars, she’s fought so hard not to grow up that she missed when it happened, but now she crosses the street and opens the door and lets the gloom swallow her up instead of going up to her friends’ party. She’s met by the smell of spilled beer, but no raised glances, the clientele just stare into their glasses even when they speak to one another, it’s the sort of place where it’s an act of mercy that there are no mirrors in the bathrooms.
Bang bang bang. She takes a seat in the far corner, orders a glass of wine, downs it. The bartender asks to see some ID, but when Maya starts searching through her bag he just sighs and waves her away.
“Just wanted to know that you’ve got ID,” he grunts.
Maya downs the next glass too. Her heart is still beating hard, partly because she had to run, and now because she realizes how close she came to stabbing that girl in the park. Now she knows what she’s capable of. She’s never felt more lonely than she does with that realization.
Bang. Bang. Bang. It slowly dawns on her that it isn’t her heart making the noise, it’s coming from the television on the wall. She knows what it is before she even looks up, she could recognize that sound anywhere, hockey is a sport of sounds more than anything else. The blades on the ice, one heavy body being slammed into the Plexiglas screen by another, the echo of the rink, the puck shooting like a bullet against the side of the rink: bangbangbangbangbang. She looks up and sees the game on the screen above the bar, the same sort of men as always, even if they look younger with each passing year. She hears the commentator say that it’s a training match, the real season hasn’t started yet, Maya thinks back to when her dad tried to explain that to her when she was little, and she exclaimed: “You want us to watch a TRAINING MATCH? That’s like watching someone’s PE lesson, Dad!” She’ll never forget the way her mom laughed at that.
She drinks another glass of wine, slower this time. Her heart is thudding and thudding and she thinks about the psychologist her parents took her to two years ago, who said that sometimes it’s hard for the human body to understand the difference between mental and physical exertion, between being out of breath because you’ve been running, and because you’re having a panic attack. “That might be why some sportsmen play as if their lives depend on it, because that’s what it feels like for them,” the psychologist smiled without thinking, because where Maya grew up even the psychologists use hockey in their analogies. Even after what happened to her.
* * *
Bangbangbang.
* * *
The hockey doesn’t make Maya angry, for the first time in ages. Maybe it’s the wine, or the adrenaline, or the loneliness. But she’s sitting in a pub in a city on the other side of the country and hockey sounds like… home. Bang. Bang. Bang. It sounds like being eight years old and holding her dad’s hand.
* * *
Knock. Knock. Knock.
* * *
Peter taps gently on the door to Leo’s room. When there’s no answer he sticks his head in anyway and asks if his teenage son wants anything to eat. Children never understand that’s the easiest way for us to feel useful: when we eat. But of course his son just swears when his dad distracts him and he loses his game. It used to be easier to be a dad, Peter thinks, it used to be possible to put a sandwich down without someone on the internet shooting your child in the head. No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.
“Close the DOOR Dad!” Leo yells angrily.
Peter obeys and goes and sinks onto the sofa. The framed photographs on the wall next to the window rattle from time to time, the storm is really getting going outside now, the house is in the middle of town but they won’t be safe even here. He eats the sandwich he made for his son, thinks once again about texting Kira or Maya, but doesn’t. There’s hockey on television, he raises the volume, but it doesn’t feel as good as it used to. Sports used to remind him of who he was, but now it just reminds him of who he no longer is. He even changes channels for a while, but soon clicks back, forcing himself to concentrate on the game so he can’t worry so much about everything else.
The game is between teams from the big city down south, down where there’s no wind, so they don’t give a damn about the fact that the forest up here is falling, he thinks. “As long as there are no trees on the motorways the national media doesn’t care about the countryside being destroyed, but if they get two inches of snow the trains are canceled and the newspapers report it like the country’s been invaded,” Ramona used to say, and there’s a lot of truth in that.
The photographs on the wall rattle again, so he gets up and takes them down. Almost all of them are of the children, of course. They had three, buried one. Maya and Leo don’t even have any memories of their older brother, Isak, he was so young when he died, but his dad is still almost knocked flat every time he sees his firstborn son’s smile. There are fingerprints on the glass of the frames because Peter leans against them at night sometimes when he feels like he has no identity. He may not be a hockey player or the general manager of a hockey club anymore, but he belongs to them.
He holds one photograph in his hands longer than the others, taken when Maya and Leo were little, skating down at the lake. Peter remembers it as if they used to do that every weekend, even though they probably only did it a few times each winter. He didn’t have time more often than that during the hockey season, but everything that happens in childhood is a postcard that parents send to themselves. Things are never quite the way we remember them.
Once when Maya was little, she was still in primary school, she had new skates and started complaining that she had blisters after ten minutes. Peter shouted at her for giving up so easily, so harshly that she started to cry and he started to hate himself. She tried to carry on skating, but fell and hit herself, and then he was the one who almost cried instead. “It wasn’t your fault, Daddy,” she whispered as he hugged her and said he was sorry, and he whispered back: “Everything that happens is my fault, Pumpkin.” Then they sat on a jetty and ate chocolate balls and she put her hand in his and he can’t remember any moment in his life being better than that.
* * *
The door of the bar opens, Maya doesn’t have to look up to hear the young men stumble in, they’re the sort who always make themselves heard everywhere, they keep their scarves on even though they’re inside and they ask the bartender to recite the whole range of beers on offer. One of them looks up hopefully at the television and sighs dramatically when he sees it’s hockey.
“Damn, I thought it was soccer! What the hell are you watching HOCKEY for?”
Maya empties her wineglass and contemplates throwing it at him. When she moved here she thought she’d find a thousand different types of men, but they’re all the same here as well, only they’re the same in a different way to where she comes from. They like soccer instead of hockey, they vote for different political parties, but they’re just as convinced that their own worldview is the only one that exists, they think they’re worldly when they actually live in the same narrow-minded little village as everyone else.
She remembers a story the neighbors always told her when she was a child, about when her dad was team captain of Beartown Hockey and they were playing a crucial match down here in the capital, and the way the newspapers derisively called the club from the small town in the forest “the call of the wild.” Maya’s dad, who hardly ever raised his voice, heard about that and yelled at his teammates in the locker room: “They might have the money, but hockey? Hockey is OURS!”
She thought it was a silly story when she was young, but now she’s sitting in a bar and feels like yelling the same thing at strangers. The young man at the bar asks the bartender to change channels, and the bartender raises the volume instead. Maya decides to tip him double just for that.
Her dad gave everything he had out on the ice in that game twenty years ago, they still lost. He never really recovered, it was as if Beartown as a community never did either. That was probably one of the reasons he persuaded Maya’s mother to move back home from Canada all those years later, to try to regain that, to make up for what he couldn’t quite manage the first time around.
Maya stares down into the wineglass and tries to slow her heart rate by force of will. Bang bang bang comes from the television. It sounds like childhood. She used to love eating pumpkin, seeds and all, but when she was nine she made her dad stop calling her that, and secretly missed it from then on. She liked the lake in winter because he was so happy on skates, so calm, they were to him what her guitar is for her.
“Christ, what a retarded sport this is, go out and screw a lynx or something instead, stupid rednecks!” one of the young men slurs at the television, and his friends laugh in a dialect that isn’t even a dialect, just a big, anxious nothing.
Maya feels the alcohol burning her synapses like fireworks in her brain. She thinks about one winter when she was a child, one of those perfect, still days when the whole family was skating down on the lake and her mother said: “What an incredible place this is, though.” Her dad replied: “The most incredible thing is that it’s still here. That there are still people here.” He sounded so sad, Maya didn’t understand it at the time, but she does now: everything gets shut down in the forest, everyone moves to the big cities, even your own daughters. It’s incredible that there’s anything left. “They don’t feel enough shame,” people in Beartown say about the people down here, Maya never used to agree, but now she does.
