Page 19

19

A drenaline does strange things to the body. When the final signal sounds, it makes moms and dads jump over the boards, respected entrepreneurs and factory managers slide around on the ice on slippery shoes, hugging each other like overtired toddlers in diapers. When Kevin drapes himself and Benji in a huge green flag and starts skating a lap of honor, the stands are already pretty much empty. The rink has filled up with the entire community. Everywhere people are jumping, slipping, tumbling, laughing, celebrating, crying. Childhood friends, classmates, parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors. How long will the town remember this? Only forever.

***

When you lose in hockey it feels like having your heart scalded. When you win, you own the clouds. Beartown is a heavenly town this evening.

***

Peter stops by the boards in one corner. He sits down alone on the ice and just laughs. All those hours in the office, all the arguments, the sleepless nights and angst-ridden mornings, they’re all worth it now, every last one of them. He’s still sitting there when the rest of the town, one inhabitant at a time, leaves the ice. Robbie Holts comes and sits down next to him. They just grin.

Adrenaline does strange things, especially when it leaves you. When he was a player, Peter kept getting told how important it was to “control your adrenaline,” but he never understood that. For him, his complete, unquestioned focus and concentration out on the ice, his ability to live absolutely in the moment, came quite naturally. It was only when he had to watch a game from the stands for the first time that he realized how close adrenaline is to panic. What rouses the body to battle and achievement are the same instincts that instill mortal dread in the brain.

During his career as a player Peter used to think of the final signal at the end of a game as a roller coaster that’s come to a halt: Some people think, “Good, that’s over.” And some think, “Again!” His first wish after every game was always to be allowed to play another one. Now, as GM, he needs migraine pills just to be able to function normally afterward.

When the last supporters, parents, and sponsors, delirious with victory, finally leave the rink over an hour later and spill out across the parking lot, chanting, “WE ARE THE BEARS, WE ARE THE BEARS, WE ARE THE BEARS, THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!” Peter, Robbie, and their memories stay behind.

“Do you want to come up to the office?” Peter asks, and Robbie bursts out laughing.

“Bloody hell, Peter, this is our first date—I’m not that kind of girl!”

Peter laughs too.

“Sure? We can have some tea and look at old team photos?”

Robbie holds out his hand.

“Say hi to your lads from me, okay? Tell them a proud old soldier was here watching them this evening.”

Peter squeezes his hand.

“Drop around for dinner one evening. Kira would love to see you too.”

“Sure!” Robbie lies, and they both know it.

They part. We only get moments.

***

The locker room is empty. After the adrenaline, after the singing and dancing and jumping on benches and banging on walls, after having just been packed with young and old men alike with bare chests and beer in their hair, it’s now numbingly silent. Amat is the only one left, he’s going around picking up scraps of tape from the floor. Peter walks down the corridor and stops in surprise.

“What are you still doing here, Amat?”

The boy reddens.

“Don’t say anything okay? About me doing a bit of tidying up? I just want to deal with the worst of it.”

Peter’s throat starts to tighten with shame. He remembers when he used to see the boy collect empty cans from the stand so that Fatima could afford to buy hockey gear for him for the first time, when he was eight or nine years old. They were too proud to accept charity, so Peter and Kira had to place fake adverts in the local paper so that every year some cheap, secondhand equipment in Amat’s size would just happen to show up. Kira built up a network of people all the way to Hed who took turns pretending to be the sellers.

“No, no... of course not, Amat, it would never even occur to me to say anything to the other players,” he mumbles.

Amat looks up, baffled. Then he snorts.

“The players? I don’t give a shit what you say to the players. Don’t say anything to Mom! She gets really pissed off if I do her job!”

Peter wishes he could say something to the boy just then. Something about how incredibly proud he made him out on the ice that evening. But he lacks the words for that; he doesn’t know how to go about it. And feels like a bad actor when he does try. Sometimes he gets so envious of David’s ability to make these young guys love him that it drives him mad. They trust David, they follow him, worship him. Peter feels like a forlorn parent at the playground watching some jokey mom or dad farther away who manages to get all the kids roaring with laughter.

So he says none of the things he’d like to say to Amat. Just smiles and nods, and manages to say:

“You must be the only teenager in the world who gets told off by his mom for cleaning too much.”

Amat hands him a grown man’s shirt.

“One of the sponsors left this.”

It smells of alcohol. Peter slowly shakes his head.

“Look... Amat... I...”

Words fail him. All that comes out is:

“I think you should go out into the parking lot. You’ve never gone out of this rink after a match like this. I think you should, it’s quite an experience, one not many people get to have. You can walk through that door as... a winner.”

***

Amat doesn’t really understand what that means until he actually packs his equipment away, heads out into the corridor, and pushes through the outside door. Grownups cheer and applaud when they see him, a few of the older girls from school shout his name, Bobo gives him a hug, Benji ruffles his hair, and everyone wants to shake his hand. Farther away he can see Kevin being interviewed by the local paper. Then he writes autographs for a sea of children while their mothers nag him to let them take two photographs each: one of Kevin and the child, and one of Kevin and the mother.

Amat bounces around between the hugs and pats on the back, and hears himself join in a shouted rendition of “WE ARE THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!” so loudly that his chest stings, and he hears the others singing louder because he does, because they want to feel that they’re participating in what he represents now.

The rush lifts him up, his endorphins are bubbling, and afterward he will remember thinking: “How can anyone possibly experience this without thinking he’s a god?”

***

Kira is cleaning the cafeteria. Maya and Ana emerge from the washroom; they’ve changed and put on makeup, and are full of laughter and expectation.

“I... I’ll be staying at Ana’s tonight. We’re going to... study,” Maya smiles.

Her daughter is lying, of course, and her mother is lying when she pretends not to understand that. They’re balancing on that defining moment in life when they’re each equally concerned about the other. The teenage years offer a brief period of equality after childhood, before the balance shifts and Maya becomes old enough to worry about her parents more than they do about her. Soon Maya won’t be Kira’s little girl anymore, and then Kira will become Maya’s little old mom. It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.

***

Peter steps into the president’s office. It’s full of grown men stumbling about, already very, very drunk.

“That’s what I’ve been looking for!” Tails yells, and comes staggering toward Peter, bare-chested, and grabs his shirt from Peter’s hand.

Peter glares at him.

“I never want to hear that you’ve taken alcohol into the players’ locker room again. They’re kids, Tails.”

“Pah, they’re not KIDS, Peter, give it a rest! Let the boys celebrate!”

“I let the boys celebrate, I just think that grown men ought to have their limits.”

Tails waves his words away as if they were persistent little insects. Two men behind him, clutching cans of beer, are engaged in a heated debate about the club’s A-team players. One forward is described as “so fucking thick he can’t even go and buy a loaf of bread without someone to hold his hand,” a goalie is “soft in the head; you can tell because he married a woman everyone knows slept with half the team before him, and probably the other half afterward.” Peter isn’t sure if the men are sponsors or just part of Tails’s group, but he’s heard remarks like that a thousand times and still hasn’t gotten used to the hierarchy in these rooms. The players can talk crap about the referee but never the coach, the coach can criticize the players but never the GM, the GM can’t criticize the president, the president can’t criticize the board, the board can’t criticize the sponsors. And at the very top are the men in suits in this office, talking shamelessly about the players as if they were racehorses. Products.

Tails tweaks Peter’s ear affectionately to lighten the mood.

“Don’t sulk, now, Peter, this is your night! Do you remember ten years ago when you said you were going to develop our youth program? When you said that one day we’d have a junior team that could hold their own against the best in the country? We laughed at you then. Everyone laughed at you. And now here we are! This is YOUR night, Peter. YOU made this happen.”

Peter wriggles out of the headlock Tails—drunk and happy—tries to get him in. The other sponsors start loudly comparing scars and capped teeth, trophies from their own hockey-playing days. None of them asks Peter about his. He has no scars, he never lost any teeth, never got into any fights. He has never been a violent man.

One board member, a beer-sodden director of a ventilation company in his sixties, starts bouncing about and slapping Peter on the back as he grins:

“Tails and I met our local councilors! They were here this evening! And off the record I can say that things look pretty damn promising for your new espresso machine!”

Peter sighs and excuses himself, then goes out into the hallway. When he sees David he actually feels relieved, even though the junior coach’s constantly supercilious attitude normally drives him mad, because right now he’s the only sober person in the vicinity.

“David!” he cries.

David carries on without so much as glancing at him. Peter jogs after him.

“David! Where are you going?”

“I’m going to watch the video of the game,” the coach replies mechanically.

Peter laughs.

“Aren’t you going to celebrate?”

“I’ll celebrate when we’ve won the final. That’s why you appointed me. To win that.”

His arrogance is even more pronounced than usual. Peter sighs and stick his hands forlornly in his pockets.

“David... come on, now. I know the two of us don’t always see eye to eye on everything, but this is your victory. You’ve earned it.”

David’s eyes narrow, and he nods toward the office full of sponsors and says:

“No, Peter. Like everyone in there keeps saying, this is YOUR night. After all, you’re the star on this team, aren’t you? You always have been.”

Peter stands rooted to the spot with a growing dark cloud in his stomach, unsure if it’s made up mostly of shame or fury. His voice sounds angrier than it should be when he calls after David:

“I only wanted to congratulate you!” David turns around with a bitter little laugh.

“You should congratulate Sune instead. He was the one who predicted that you and I could do this.”

Peter clears his throat.

“I... He... I couldn’t find him in the stands.”

David holds Peter’s gaze until Peter looks down. David nods sadly.

“He was sitting in his usual place. You know that.”

Peter swears under his breath and turns away. David’s words creep after him:

“I know what we’re doing here, Peter, I’m not some naive little kid. I’ll be getting Sune’s job because the time has come, because I’ve earned it, and I know that makes me a bastard. But don’t forget who’s holding the door open for him. Don’t try to kid yourself that this isn’t your decision.”

Peter spins around, fists clenched.

“Be careful what you say, David!”

David doesn’t back down.

“Or what? You’ll hit me?”

Peter’s chin is trembling. David stands motionless. In the end David snorts derisively. He has a long scar across his chin, and another between his chin and cheek.

“No, I thought not. Because you’re Peter Andersson. You always let others take penalty suspensions for you.”

David doesn’t even slam the door behind him when he goes into his office, he just closes it silently. Peter hates him for that more than anything. Because he’s right.

***

Kevin looks completely unmoved when he’s being interviewed by the journalist from the local paper. Other boys his age would go to pieces with nerves, but he’s calm and professional. He looks at the reporter’s face but never in the eye, he fixes his gaze on her forehead or the top of her nose, he’s relaxed but not nonchalant, he’s not unpleasant, but not pleasant either, and he answers all her questions without saying anything at all. When she asks about the game, he mutters that “it’s all about doing a lot of skating, getting the puck in the net, creating chances.” When she asks what he thinks victory in the final would mean for the town and the people here, he repeats like a machine: “We’re taking each game as it comes, concentrating on the hockey.” When she points out that one of the opponents checked by his teammate Benjamin Ovich toward the end of the game was left concussed, Kevin claims without blinking: “I didn’t see that incident.”

He’s seventeen years old and already as media savvy as a politician. The crowd carries him away before the reporter has time to ask anything else.

***

Amat finds his mother in the crowd and kisses her on the forehead. She merely whispers, “Go! Go!” with tears in her eyes. He laughs and hugs her and promises not to be late home. She knows he’s not telling the truth. And it makes her so happy.

Zacharias is standing at the far end of the parking lot, in the outermost circle of popularity, while his best friend is in the innermost circle for the first time. The adults get in their cars and drive off, leaving the youngsters to enjoy the biggest night ever, and when the stream of players and girls starts to move off toward the party that almost all of them are going to, it becomes painfully obvious who belongs and who’s going to be left behind.

Zacharias will never ask Amat if he forgot about him or simply didn’t care. But one of them goes, and one stays behind. And nothing will ever be quite the same again.

***

Peter bumps into Maya and Ana when he’s on his way to the cafeteria. To his surprise, his daughter throws her arms around his neck, the way she used to every day when he came home back when she was five years old.

“I’m so proud of you, Dad,” she whispers.

Rarely has he let go of her more reluctantly. Once the girls have rushed down the stairs laughing, the entire rink falls silent. A silence only broken by his own breathing, followed by his wife’s voice:

“Is it my turn now, superstar?” Kira calls.

Peter’s face breaks into a melancholic smile and he walks toward her. Gently they take hold of each other’s hands and dance slowly, slowly, in tiny, tiny circles until Kira takes his face in her hands and kisses him so hard that he gets embarrassed. She can still do that to him.

“You don’t look as happy as you should,” she whispers.

“Oh, I am,” he ventures.

“Is it to do with Sune?”

He hides his face against her neck.

“The sponsors want to go public with the news about David taking over after the final. And they want to force Sune to hand in his notice voluntarily. They think it’ll look bad in the media if he gets fired.”

“It’s not your fault, darling. You can’t save everyone. You can’t carry the weight of the whole world.”

He doesn’t answer. She tickles his hair and smiles.

“Did you see your daughter? She going to go back to Ana’s to ‘study.’?”

“Quite a lot of makeup for solving equations, eh?” Peter mutters.

“The hardest thing about trusting teenagers is the fact that we used to be teenagers ourselves. I can remember when some boy and I were...”

“I don’t want to hear this!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, darling, I did have a life before I met you.”

“NO!”

He sweeps her up off the floor and into his arms, and all the air goes out of her. He can still do that to her. They giggle like a couple of kids.

***

Through the window of the cafeteria they see Maya and Ana go off down the road with the hockey players and their school friends. The temperature is falling rapidly in the darkness, and snow is swirling around the girls’ bodies.

***

There’s a storm brewing.