Page 11

11

A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.

***

Lars has no leadership style. He just yells. Amat has had him as his coach throughout his time on the boys’ team, and there are few things that worry him more than David being given the job of coaching the A-team next season, so that Lars ends up in charge of the junior team just as Amat gets there. Two more years with this man is more than he could handle, even for the sake of hockey. Lars has no grasp of tactics or technique, he just thinks everything is warfare. His only pep talk is bellowing that they “have to win the battle for the fortress!” and that they mustn’t “get fucked up the ass!” If the fifteen-year-olds had been clutching axes in their hands instead of hockey sticks, he would have coached them in exactly the same way.

Obviously it’s much worse for the others on the team. You can get away with a lot when you’re the best, and that’s what Amat has become this season. Zacharias has had to suffer one of Lars’s patented saliva-fountains as he yells: “Are the scars from your sex-change itching, Zach?” but Amat has sailed through. When he thinks about how close he came to giving up completely twelve months ago, he isn’t sure if he should feel happy that he carried on, or aghast at how close he came to not doing so.

He was tired, that’s all he can remember. Tired of fighting, tired of everyone shouting at him, tired of dealing with so much crap and abuse, tired of the locker room, where the juniors snuck in during one training session to cut up his shoes and throw his clothes in the shower. Tired of trying to prove he was more than the things they called him: a zero from the Hollow. The cleaner’s son. Too small. Too weak.

One evening after training he went home and didn’t get out of bed for four days. His mom very patiently left him alone. Only on the fifth morning did she open his door, ready to go to work, and say:

“You might be playing with bears. But that doesn’t mean you have to forget that you’re a lion.”

When she kissed him on the forehead and put her hand on his heart, he whispered:

“It’s too hard, Mom.”

“Your dad would have been so proud if he could have seen you play.”

“Dad probably didn’t even know what hockey was,” he mumbled.

“That’s why!” she replied in a raised voice, and she was a woman who took great pride in the fact that she never raised her voice.

She’d managed to clean the stands and the corridor and office, and had reached the locker room that morning when the caretaker walked past and knocked gently on the doorframe. When she looked up he nodded toward the ice and smiled. Amat had put down his gloves, hat, and jacket between the lines. That was the morning the boy realized that the only way to become better than the bears at their own game was to stop playing it their way.

***

David is sitting at the top of the stands. Now thirty-two, he’s spent more of that time inside rinks than outside them. When David became a coach, Sune forced him to watch every A-team game for an entire season from up here in the nosebleed seats, and now it’s a habit he can’t shake. Hockey looks different from up here, and the truth is that Sune and David always saw eye to eye about the questions, they just didn’t agree on the answers. Sune wanted to keep all the players in their own age group as long as possible, so that they would have time to work on their weaknesses and form rounded, focused teams without any shortcomings. David thought that attitude only led to the creation of teams where no one was exceptional. Sune believed that a player who was allowed to play with older players would only play to his strengths, and David agreed—he just couldn’t see the problem with that. He didn’t want a whole troupe of players who were all pretty good at exactly the same things, he wanted specialists.

Sune was like Beartown: a firm adherent of the old faith that no tree should grow too tall, naively convinced that hard work was enough. That’s why the club has collapsed at the same rate that unemployment in the town has rocketed. Good workers aren’t enough on their own, someone needs to have big ideas as well. Collectives only work if they’re built around stars.

There are plenty of men in this club who think that everything in hockey “should be the way it’s always been.” Whenever he hears that, David feels like rolling himself up in a carpet and screaming until his vocal cords give out. As if hockey has ever been constant! When it was invented you weren’t even allowed to pass the puck forward, and two generations ago everyone played without a helmet. Hockey is like every other living organism: it has to adapt and evolve, or else it will die.

David can no longer remember how many years he has been arguing about this with Sune, but on the evenings when he gets home in his very blackest mood his girlfriend usually teases him, asking if he’s “fallen out with daddy again?” It was quite funny to start with. Sune was more than just a coach when David himself became one, he was a role model. The end of a hockey player’s career is an endless series of doors closing with you on the wrong side, and David couldn’t have lived without a team, without feeling he was part of something. When injury forced him off the ice at the age of twenty-two, Sune was the only person who understood that.

Sune taught David to be a coach at the same time as he was teaching Peter to be GM. In a lot of ways they’re each other’s opposite. David could get into an argument with a door, and Peter was so averse to conflict that he couldn’t even kill time. Sune hoped they’d complement one another, but they’ve developed a mutual loathing instead.

For years David’s deepest shame was the fact that he could never get over the jealousy he felt whenever Sune and Peter would go into Peter’s office without inviting him along. His love of the camaraderie of the sport was grounded in a fear of exclusion. So eventually he did what all ambitious pupils do to their teachers: he rebelled.

He was twenty-two when he began coaching this group of seven-year-old boys, Kevin, Benji, and Bobo among them. He has been coaching them for ten years now, melding them into one of the best junior teams in the whole country, and he has finally realized that he can no longer stay loyal to Sune. The players are more important; the club is bigger than that.

David knows what people in the town are going to say when he gets Sune’s job. He knows a lot of them aren’t going to be happy. But they’re going to like the results.

Lars blows his whistle to signal the end of the practice so close to Zacharias’s ear that the boy trips over his own stick. Lars grins unkindly.

“And worst in training today was, as usual, little Miss Zach. So you get the honor of collecting the pucks and cones!”

Lars leaves the ice with the rest of the boys’ team trailing behind him. A few of them laugh at Zacharias and he tries to give them the finger, but it’s surprisingly hard to do that when you’re wearing hockey gloves. Amat has already started circling the ice to gather the pucks. Their friendship has always been like that: as long as Zacharias is left on the ice, Amat doesn’t leave.

Once Lars is out of sight, Zacharias gets angrily to his feet and mimics the coach’s exaggeratedly forward-leaning style of skating as he scratches himself hard between the buttocks:

“COLLECT THE PUCKS! DEFEND THE FORTRESS! DON’T GET FUCKED UP THE ASS! NO ASS-FUCKING ON MY ICE! HOLD ON... WHAT THE...? WHAT’S THIS? IN MY ASS?! IS IT A FUCK? IS IT A LITTLE FUCK? THERE’S A LITTLE FUCK IN MY ASS, AMAT! I ORDER YOU TO GET IT OUT AT ONCE!”

He tries to reverse into Amat, who slips nimbly out of the way, laughing, leaving Zach to back straight into the open team bench and land in a heap.

“Do you want to stay and watch the juniors practice?” Amat wonders, even though he knows Zach would never do that of his own accord.

“Stop saying ‘juniors’ when you mean ‘watch Kevin.’ I know he’s your idol, Amat, but I have actually got a life. Carpe diem! Laughter and love!”

Amat sighs.

“Fine, forget it...”

“IS THAT KEVIN ERDAHL IN YOUR ASS, AMAT?” Zacharias cries.

Amat taps his stick restlessly on the ice.

“Do you want to do something this weekend, then?”

He really does try to make the question sound nonchalant. As if he hadn’t actually been thinking about it all day. Zacharias gets up from the bench with the body language of a baby elephant that’s been shot with a tranquilizer dart.

“I’ve got two new games! But you’ll have to bring your own handset, seeing as you broke my other one last time.”

Amat looks offended by his friend’s recollection of events, given that he had broken the handset with his forehead when Zacharias threw it at him in a fit of temper because he was losing. He clears his throat and collects the last of the pucks.

“I just thought we could go... out.”

Zacharias looks as if his friend has suggested pouring poison in each other’s ears.

“Go out where?”

“Just... out. People go... out. That’s what they do.”

“You mean Maya does?”

“I mean PEOPLE. ”

Zacharias gets up on his skates and starts dancing on tiptoe and singing:

“Amat and Maya, sitting in a treeee, Amat squirts her with his seeeed...”

Amat slaps a puck hard into the boards beside him, but can’t help laughing.

***

David is standing with Lars in the corridor outside the locker room. “It’s a mistake!” Lars insists.

“However unlikely it might sound, I heard you the first twelve times. Go and get the juniors ready for practice,” David replies coldly.

Lars lumbers off. David massages his temples. Lars isn’t an entirely useless assistant coach. David can put up with the shouting and swearing because that’s part of locker-room culture, and, dear God, some of the guys on the team do need a tyrant at practice to make sure they actually put the pads on the right parts of their body. But sometimes David can’t help wondering how the junior team will function if Lars is going to take charge of it. The man knows no more about hockey than the average noisy fan in the stands, and David could go out into the street, throw a stone, and whatever he hit that had a pulse would know as much as them.

Amat and Zach are laughing as they approach but fall silent abruptly when they catch sight of David. The boys squeeze against the wall so as not to get in his way. Amat visibly starts when David holds up his hand.

“Amat, isn’t it?”

Amat nods.

“We... we were just collecting the pucks... we were only messing about... I mean, I know Zach was imitating Lars but it was only a j...”

David looks baffled. Amat gulps.

“Actually, well, if you didn’t see anything, then... it was... nothing.”

David smiles. “I’ve seen you sitting in the stands during the junior team’s training sessions. You’ve been there more often than some of the players.”

Amat nods nervously. “I... Sorry... I just want to learn.”

“That’s good. I know you’ve been studying Kevin’s moves; he’s a good example. You ought to check out how he always looks at the defenseman’s skates in any one-on-one situation: as soon as they angle their skates and shift their center of gravity, Kevin taps the puck and makes his move.”

Amat nods dumbly. David is looking him right in the eye, and the boy isn’t used to adult men doing that.

“Anyone can see that you’re fast, but you need to practice your shooting. Practice waiting for the goalie to move, shoot against the flow. Can you learn that, do you think?”

Amat nods. David slaps him hard on the shoulder.

“Good. Learn it fast, because you’re training with the juniors in a quarter of an hour. Go into the locker room and get a jersey.”

Amat’s hand moves instinctively toward one ear, as if he needs to clean it out to make sure he hasn’t misheard. David has already walked off.

***

Zacharias waits until the coach has swung around the corner before wrapping his arms around his friend’s neck. Amat is hyperventilating. Zacharias clears his throat:

“Seriously, though, Amat... if you had to choose between sleeping with Maya and sleeping with Kevin, you’d pick...?”

“Shut up,” Amat says, laughing.

“I’m just checking!” Zacharias grins, then pats him on his helmet and growls: “Kill them, my friend. Kill them!”

Amat takes a breath as deep as the lake behind the rink, then for the first time walks past the boys’ team’s locker room and steps across the threshold into the juniors’. He is met instantly by a hurricane of booing and swearing and a chorus of “GET OUT OF HERE, YOU FUCKING MAGGOT!” from the older players, but when David emerges from the hallway a silence so complete settles that you could hear a jockstrap drop. David nods to Lars and Lars reluctantly tosses a jersey at Amat. It stinks. Amat has never been happier.

***

Standing outside in the hallway is his best friend.

***

There are no almosts in ice hockey.