* * *
She was the one Kevin broke. But they were the ones who snapped.
* * *
William Lyt gets hesitantly to his feet. “Lucky for you I don’t hit women,” he pants.
“I’d advise you not to try!” Jeanette replies even though all the voices of reason in her head are yelling “Keep quiet, Jeanette!”
“I’m going to report you, you—” Lyt begins, but Jeanette snaps back, “And say what?”
She’s an idiot, she knows that, but she’s an angry woman in an angry town, and normal rules no longer seem to apply around here. The youths at the ends of the tunnel have backed away. They’re not fighters, just bullies, tough only when they’ve got the upper hand. William is different, Jeanette can see that, he’s got something inside him that makes him worse. He spits on the ground but doesn’t say anything else. Perhaps he’s worried that he’s killed Leo when he turns and walks away, unless perhaps his brain is suppressing it, finding excuses: “He shouldn’t have provoked me. He knew what would happen.”
When the tunnel is empty, Jeanette bends over Leo. His face is bloody but his breathing is regular, and to Jeanette’s surprise his eyes are open. Calm and alert. William stamped and kicked him, but something must have restrained him, because Leo’s face hasn’t been smashed in. Nothing is broken, His body is covered in bruises, but those can be concealed by clothing, just like the scratch marks, and the swelling around his eyes and nose is no worse than for him to be able to lie to his mother and say he was hit in the face by a ball during a gym class.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” the boy tells the teacher.
“No,” she agrees.
She interprets it as a mark of consideration, but that’s not what Leo means.
“Don’t you ever watch wildlife documentaries? Wild animals are always at their most dangerous when they’ve been wounded,” Leo gurgles, tasting blood in his mouth.
As soon as the blows stopped raining down on the twelve-year-old, he started to think about how he could get his revenge. He could feel William choosing to stamp on his thighs instead of his kneecaps, aiming for the softer parts of his body instead of knocking his teeth out, giving him bruises on his shoulder instead of trying to break his arm. Leo won’t regard William’s display of mercy as goodness, merely as weakness. He’s going to get his own back.
When the twelve-year-old crawls to his feet, Jeanette says dutifully, “We have to report this to—”
Leo shakes his head. “I fell. William was trying to help me up. And if you say any different, I’ll say I saw you kick a pupil!”
The teacher should protest; it will be easy to condemn her in hindsight for not doing so. But you learn to keep your mouth shut in this forest, for better and for worse. She knows who Leo’s big sister is, knows all his reasons for being angry. If Jeanette reports this to the school or the police, he will never trust her again. She will never have a chance to get through to him then. So she says instead, “Let’s make a deal. I don’t report this to anyone, and you come up to Adri Ovich’s kennels. You know where that is?”
The boy nods, not cockily, and wipes blood from his nose on his sleeve. “Why?”
“I’m running a martial arts class there.”
“You want to teach me to fight?”
“I want to teach you not to fight.”
“I don’t want to be unkind, but you seem pretty bad at not fighting,” Leo points out.
Jeanette’s face cracks into an embarrassed smile. Leo starts to move away, slowly and painfully, but when she tries to help him, he brushes her hand away. Not aggressively, but definitely not as the start of any negotiations. Leo knows what the teacher is trying to do. She’s trying to rescue him.
* * *
She won’t succeed.
26
Whose Town Will It Be?
You try to be a good parent, in every way, but you never know how. It’s not a difficult job. Just impossible. Peter is standing outside his daughter’s room with a pair of drumsticks in his hand. She used to be his little girl, it was his job to protect her, but now he can’t even look her in the eye because he feels so ashamed.
When she was little, they lay together on a bed that was too narrow on one of those nights when it felt as though they were the last two people on Earth. The little child lay asleep against his neck, and he hardly dared breathe. Her heart was beating like a rabbit’s, and his kept pace; he was so happy that he was terrified, so complete that he could think only of the fragments if life shattered again. Children make us vulnerable. That’s the problem with dreams: you can get to the top of the mountain and discover that you’re scared of heights.
She’s sixteen now. Her dad stands outside her room, too much of a coward to knock. He always used to call her “Pumpkin” when she was little. She never liked hockey, so when she fell in love with playing the guitar, Peter learned to play the drums, just so he could play with her in the garage. That happened less and less as the years passed, of course, because he was always so busy. Work, the house, life. You start to say “Tomorrow” more often. When his daughter brought him the drumsticks he would ask, “Have you done your homework?”
But now he’s the one standing there with the drumsticks in his hand. He knocks tentatively on Maya’s door. As if he almost hopes she won’t hear.
“Mmm?” she grunts.
“I just thought I’d see if you’ve . . . got your guitar? Do you feel like . . . having a jam in the garage?”
She opens the door. Her sympathy crushes him. “I’m studying, Dad. Tomorrow, maybe?”
He nods. “Sure. Sure, Pumpkin. Tomorrow . . .”
She kisses his cheek and closes the door. He can barely look her in the eye. He’s trying to find a way to be her dad again, but he doesn’t know how. You never know how.
* * *
That evening the Andersson family are as far from each other as it’s possible to get in a small house. Maya is lying on her bed with headphones on at high volume. Kira is sitting in the kitchen dealing with emails. Peter is sitting in the bathroom with the door locked, staring at his phone.
Leo hides the bruises on his body under a thick tracksuit and blames his swollen face on the fact that he got hit by a ball in gym class. Perhaps they believe him. Unless they just want to believe him. Everyone is caught up in his or her own anxiety this evening, so no one hears when Leo opens his window and sneaks out.
* * *
Peter calls Richard Theo. He answers on the third ring.
“Yes?” the politician says.
Peter gulps, even though his mouth is dry, and the only thing he seems to swallow is his pride. “I want to ask something about our . . . agreement,” he says. He’s whispering, sitting in the bathroom because he doesn’t want his family to overhear.
“What agreement?” the politician asks, wiser than anyone who talks about that sort of thing on the phone.
Peter takes a deep breath. “It might be difficult to . . . get hold of a carpenter in Beartown. At this time of year.”
It’s his way of asking the politician not to force him to rip out the standing area in the rink. Not to force him to confront the Pack. Not right now. But the politician replies, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But . . . if we had an agreement, you and I, then I would have expected you to keep your side of it. Without exception. Because that’s what friends do!”
“You’re asking me to do something . . . dangerous. You know a local politician around here has had an ax embedded in her car, and I . . . I’ve got a family.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything. But you’re a sportsman, and I didn’t think sportsmen defended violent hooligans,” Richard Theo replies scornfully.
Peter holds the phone to his ear long after the politician has hung up. He can still see the announcement of his death in front of him if he closes his eyes. He’s going to be able to save his club, but what dangers is he exposing his family to? He’ll be able to give this town a hockey team.
But whose town will it be?
* * *
They say “Small leaks sink big ships.” But sometimes not fast enough for some men. Richard Theo makes a call to London. Then an email is sent from the factory’s new owner to the general manager of Beartown Ice Hockey. Its content is simple: as the new sponsor, he demands a guarantee that Peter Andersson “really does intend to keep his promise to create a more family-friendly, fully seated arena.” No one mentions anything about the Pack or any “hooligans.” The email never reaches Peter; it’s obviously just a harmless mistake—the sender spelled his surname with one s instead of two.
If anyone were to ask later, everyone will be confused: Peter will say he never received the email, the sponsor will say that it negotiated through a go-between, and the harder it is to get a clear idea of what actually happened, the more convinced people will be that everyone involved is hiding something.
No one will ever need to explain exactly how a copy of the email suddenly ended up in the hands of the local paper. The reporter will refer to a “trusted source.” Once the news is out, it won’t matter where it came from.
In the end no one will be able to prove whose idea it was to get rid of the standing area at the rink.
* * *
The members of the Pack always embrace when they meet and before they part, with their fists clenched against each other’s backs. Some people see this as a sign of violence. But to them it isn’t.
* * *
Teemu Rinnius still lives at home with his mother. Police investigations have suggested that this is because he can’t get a home of his own using the illegal earnings he lives off of, and he lets everyone believe that. The truth is that he can’t leave his mother alone. Someone needs to do the counting at home. There are lots of jokes about the Rinnius brothers’ criminality, such as “What’s a triathlon for the Rinnius brothers? Walking to the swimming pool and cycling home!” and “The Rinnius brothers are sitting in a car; who’s driving? The police!” When Vidar became the goalie on the boys’ hockey team, someone in the stands joked, “Of course that family make good goalies, they can’t keep their hands off anything!” That joke was told only once. You can say what you like about the Rinnius brothers, but math was their best subject at school. They’ve been counting all their lives: How many pills are left in the bottles in the bathroom, how many hours has Mom been asleep? When Vidar got caught and was sent away, that responsibility fell to Teemu alone. It was worse then because all their mom wanted to do was sleep longer and deeper once her youngest son was taken off to the treatment center. Vidar was always her little baby, no matter what he got up to.
Teemu is sitting at her kitchen table now. She’s clattering with frying pans and saucepans, and he’s not used to it; she laughs out loud, and it’s been a long time since she last did that. When Teemu told her that Vidar was being released early, she cleaned the whole house in a rush of happiness. The next morning was the first time in years that Teemu counted the same number of pills in the bottles two days in a row.
“My baby, my baby,” his mom sings happily to herself over at the stove.
She never asked why Vidar is being released or who arranged it, but that anxiety is gnawing away at Teemu. He tells himself that he just wants the same as all simple men do: to have his little brother home, make his mom happy, live a simple life. But that isn’t true: he has to protect them, too, that’s always been his responsibility, his obsession.
“My baby, my baby, coming home to Mama!” his mom sings.
Teemu’s mind wanders off. The Pack was never as coordinated or as militarily organized as people thought. Everyone says “What pack?” or “Teemu who?” if strangers ask, but that isn’t entirely put on. He isn’t a dictator; the black jackets are basically just a group of friends who stick together because of two simple loves: hockey and each other. The politicians and board members and journalists talk an awful lot of bullshit about “hooligans” when it suits their purposes, but those greedy bastards don’t love the club or the town the way the members of the Pack do.
Teemu’s two best friends, Spider and Woody, can fight like wild animals. But they never attack innocent people, and when the worst storm in a century hit the forest a few years ago, those two were the guys who went from house to house clearing trees from gardens and mending roofs and windows without asking for any form of payment. Where were the journalists and board members then? Police investigations describe Woody and Spider as gang members, but to this day they can’t walk past any of those houses without being invited in for coffee. Teemu isn’t a child, he knows his guys haven’t got hearts of gold. But they have honor. Their own sort.
Spider was bullied as a child, never wanted to shower after PE, so a gang of boys in his class thought that meant he was gay. They threw him into the shower and beat the crap out of him with twisted wet towels. “Gay” was the worst insult they could think of, the weakest thing a boy could be. So Spider has hated two things ever since: gays and bullies.
After an away game six or seven years ago, the Pack got stopped by the cops. Teemu’s little brother, Vidar, who was only twelve at the time, was sitting alone in a branch of McDonald’s, and a gang of opposing fans were on their way there. When Spider realized that, he tore free from the police. Dogs, horses, and a rapid response unit were unable to stop him. He and Vidar held off ten of their opponents inside McDonald’s for twenty minutes. Spider landed four people in hospital, and twelve-year-old Vidar smashed a chair and used the legs as weapons. A warrior even then.
Woody is different. He comes from a nuclear family, lives on the edge of the Heights, works in his dad’s business. But he has the same things inside him as Spider. When Woody was a teenager, his cousin was raped by some lowlife when she was on holiday. When Teemu found out, he stole a car, drove through the night, and got to the airport just in time to stop Woody from getting onto a plane, because Woody was planning to go and take on the whole country. He sobbed with rage in Teemu’s arms, his fists clenched behind his back.
Woody has a girlfriend now, she has a good job in administration at the council’s housing association, and they’ve just had a daughter. It was Woody who persuaded Teemu that the Pack should take Maya Andersson’s side in the spring rather than Kevin Erdahl’s. “I don’t care if we end up in the lowest league on the planet, I’ll stand in that rink anyway, but I’m not standing up for a rapist!” he said. The Pack made a decision then, and now they’re dealing with the consequences.
They voted to keep Peter Andersson in the club, and now they’ve heard that the rat has brought in sponsors who want to get rid of the standing area. Teemu’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing. The guys want war.
* * *
“But I don’t understand why my baby can’t live at home with his own mother!” Teemu’s mother suddenly repeats, and he is wrenched from his daydreams.
“What?” Teemu mutters.
His mom tosses an envelope from the council’s housing association on the table. “It says in that letter that Vidar’s got an apartment of his own! What’s the point of that? He’s got a mother!”
* * *
Only then do the pieces of the puzzle fall into place for Teemu.
* * *
When the man in a suit comes out of the council building and opens the door of his car, the figure is suddenly standing behind him. Richard Theo is alarmed but not surprised. He collects himself quickly and asks, “Who are you?”
Teemu Rinnius takes two steps forward. He doesn’t lay a finger on him, but he’s close enough for them to feel each other’s breath, meaning that the politician feels physical fear. That afflicts all of us, those of us who can’t fight, it doesn’t matter if we have money or power or know that a courtroom could give us justice. No one can protect us in a dark parking lot for the few seconds it takes a man like Teemu to assault us and knock us out. We know that. As does he. So he says, “You know who I am. My little brother, Vidar, has been locked up, but now he’s suddenly being released. I did
n’t understand why, but then I heard that Beartown Ice Hockey’s new coach wants him on the team. No hockey club could get my brother out of that clinic. But perhaps a politician could?”
Richard Theo’s pulse rate speeds up, but he manages to keep his voice steady. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Teemu looks at him ominously, but eventually he backs away and gives the politician some air. He raises a warning finger, to let the politician know that he isn’t the only person in Beartown who’s good at gathering information.
“My mom got a letter from the council’s housing association. My brother’s been given an apartment. We checked to see who filed the application. It was you.”
Theo nods. “It’s my job to help the town’s inhabitants. All of them . . .”
The fact that Theo’s address appeared in the housing association’s register could, of course, have been a mistake. Unless it was a message that he assumed Teemu would eventually find. After all, his friend Woody does have a girlfriend who works in the offices of the housing association.
Teemu snarls, “I’m the wrong person to play games with! What do you want with my family?”
Richard Theo plays dumb. Which is brave of him. “I’m not the sort of man who asks people for things. Especially not people who belong to . . . what are you called again? The Pack?”
“What pack?” Teemu asks.
His face doesn’t even harden; he’s had years to practice that fake nonchalance, and it impresses the politician. So Theo raises his hands and says, “Okay, I confess. I know who you are. And I think you and I can be friends, Teemu.”
“Why?”
“Because we have a lot in common. We don’t always do what we should, but we do what we have to. I get portrayed in the media as dangerous and wicked, simply because I don’t follow all the rules that the establishment has created to stop men like us. I daresay you can recognize yourself in that.”
Us Against You Page 23
