Benji stares at her. “Everyone thinks you are.”
“People think a lot of things. They’re far too obsessed with their emotions.”
Benji just gawps at her for a long time. Then he starts to laugh. He can’t help it. “Seriously, Zackell, you must see that everything would have been a hell of a lot easier for you in this town if you’d just told everyone that you’re not—”
“Like you?”
“Yes.”
Zackell snorts. “I don’t think you have any obligation to tell everyone who you want to have sex with, Benjamin. I don’t think I have, either.”
Benji scrapes the side of his skate against the ice. He thinks for a while before he asks, “Do you ever wish you were a man?”
“Why would I?” Zackell wonders.
Benji looks at the bear on the ice. Tries to find the right words. “So you didn’t have to be a female hockey coach.”
Zackell shakes her head slowly, but for once she doesn’t look entirely unmoved. “My dad probably wished I was a boy sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew I’d always have to be twice as good as the men to be accepted. The same thing applies to you now. You’ll be judged differently. The people who hate me might let me coach a team, but only if we win. And they’ll let you play, but only if you’re the best. Just being good isn’t enough for you anymore.”
“It’s fucking unfair,” Benji whispers.
“Unfairness is a far more natural state in the world than fairness,” Zackell says.
“Did your dad tell you that?”
“My mom.”
Benji swallows hard. “I don’t know if I can be captain.”
“Okay,” Zackell replies.
* * *
Then she turns and leaves him without any more words. As if any more were needed.
* * *
Benji is left standing alone at the center circle. Eventually he fetches a stack of pucks from the boards, drops them onto the ice one after the other, for possibly the last time. This sport is never happy being just part of you, you have to sacrifice too much, there are too many things you know only if you’ve spent your whole life in here. How much your feet hurt when you skate for the first time after the summer. How unbelievably bad your gloves smell at the end of the season. The sound when you slam into the boards or fire a puck into the glass. How every rink has its own unique echo. How every stride sings when the stands are empty. How it feels to just play. How your heart beats.
* * *
Bang bang bang bang bang.
* * *
The first morning Ana sits next to Vidar, neither of them says anything. Ana is too weighed down by guilt and loss to speak. For the entirety of her childhood she has always gone to school with Maya, and the loneliness is a shock. She’s sleeping a lot, because she’s hoping she might wake up and realize that the mistake of her life was a dream. It never happens.
But the second morning she sits next to Vidar again, and just as the bus is approaching the school she glances at him. He pretends to be busy with his phone, but she sees him looking. He’s the sort who can’t help it.
“What are you playing?” she asks.
“What?” he mumbles, as if he’s only just noticed her.
She’s not that easily fooled. “You heard.”
He starts to laugh; he does that when he’s nervous. He will soon discover that when Ana gets nervous, she makes sarcastic jokes instead. If they spend their whole lives together, they might become the least suitable couple to encounter at a funeral: one who can’t stop making jokes and one who can’t stop giggling.
“Minecraft. I’m playing Minecraft,” he says.
“Are you seven or something?” Ana wonders.
He laughs. “It helps me to not . . . I have trouble with my impulse control. My psychologist says Minecraft is good. I can concentrate better when I just play.”
The bus stops. The students spill out. Ana doesn’t look away from him. “You’re Teemu Rinnius’s little brother, aren’t you? You were the one who was in prison?”
Vidar shrugs. “It was more like a holiday camp.”
“What do you mean, about not being able to concentrate? Have you got some sort of syndrome or something?”
“I don’t know.”
Ana smiles. “You’re just an ordinary nutter, then?”
Vidar laughs. “Some people say I’m a psychopath! You shouldn’t be talking to me!”
Ana looks him carefully up and down. His black hair is draped around his eyes. “You look too kind to be a psychopath,” she says.
He frowns. “Watch out! I might have a knife!”
She giggles. “If you had a knife I wouldn’t be scared of you, even if I was a loaf of bread.”
* * *
Vidar falls head over heels for her, because he’s the type who doesn’t know how to stop himself.
36
“Don’t psychopaths go for walks, then?”
Elisabeth Zackell holds her open tryout early one morning. A handful of players show up, a few juniors who haven’t got anywhere else to play because Beartown didn’t manage to put together a team for them this year and some older players who have been let go by other clubs and are out of a contract. None of them is anywhere near good enough to get onto Zackell’s team, but that doesn’t matter; they’re only there as extras so that the club can say it was an open session. Vidar is the only player of interest, but Zackell has to go and look for him when he doesn’t appear on the ice. She finds him in the equipment storage room.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“Have you got a saw?” Vidar asks.
“What for?” Zackell wonders.
Vidar holds up his goalie stick. “This is too long!”
During all those nights he was locked in the unit and played with Baloo, Vidar needed to be able to fire the balls and pucks back to the other side of the basement after he’d saved Baloo’s shots. He couldn’t wear skates in the basement, so he sawed the top off his stick to make it the right length. He accidentally sawed off too much and it ended up too short, but he discovered that that meant he could make harder passes and more accurately, too. The only thing you have an excess of when you’re locked up is time, so Vidar started to experiment with different lengths and types of tape on his stick. He ended up taping it without leaving a lump at the end, the way most goalies do, which made his grip better.
Zackell finds him a saw, without understanding what he’s doing. But when Vidar is happy with his stick and goes out onto the ice, he stops a puck and fires it without any effort, sending it from one end of the ice to the other.
“Can you do that again?” Zackell asks.
Vidar nods. Zackell puts him in front of one net and goes and stands by the other one. “Pass to me!” she calls.
So he does. Right across the whole rink, right to the blade of her stick. It might not sound like a big thing if you’re not bothered about hockey, but Zackell knows that most goalies in Beartown’s league couldn’t get a puck to hit water even if they fell out of a boat. “This guy will be our goalie when we haven’t got the puck but an extra player when we have,” she thinks. And she can win that way.
“Get in goal,” she commands.
He obeys. She starts firing puck after puck, and she’s a good shot, but he saves everything. She lets the other players in the open session have a go, but not one of them manages to score. She gets two of them to shoot at the same time, then three, from different angles. Vidar pretty much doesn’t let anything past. His reflexes are remarkable.
Zackell looks around the stands. At the top, over in one corner, sits Peter Andersson. As far away as it’s possible to get on the other side, in the standing area, is Teemu Rinnius. Spider and Woody are standing next to him. Teemu tries to hide how proud he is but fails. Spider and William don’t even try.
Zackell turns to Vidar and calls, “Take a break and have a drink!”
The other players stop shooting. Vidar takes off his h
elmet; his sweaty black hair is stuck to his face. He turns his back on Zackell and lifts his water bottle. So she takes aim and fires a slap shot that hits him hard right in the back. Vidar jumps and turns around, and Zackell immediately fires another shot that whistles past his unprotected head just a foot away.
Teemu yells “No!” from the stands, but Vidar doesn’t hesitate, he’s already set off toward Zackell at full speed. No one on the ice has time to realize what’s happening, so if Teemu hadn’t known his brother so well, Zackell might not have got out of the rink alive. Vidar throws himself at her, taking wild swings with his gloved hands, and Teemu sets off from the stands, wrenches open the door to the bench, and leaps over the boards. His boots slip on the ice, but he manages to grab hold of his brother and uses all his strength to wrestle him onto the ice and pin him down. Spider and Woody are a few steps behind, and it takes all three of them to stop Vidar from getting up and beating Zackell to death.
“ARE YOU COMPLETELY INSANE???!!!” Teemu yells at her, but the female coach isn’t remotely frightened and is grinning from ear to ear.
“Can you promise that he’ll show up for practices on time and he’ll play every game?”
Vidar is still struggling frantically to pull free of his friends’ iron grip. Teemu glares at Zackell. “You could have killed him! He . . . You could have died! He could have killed you.”
Zackell nods delightedly. “Exactly! Vidar doesn’t give a damn about me being a woman, he was going to kill me anyway, wasn’t he? To him I’m just a hockey coach. Can you promise that he’ll show up on time to each practice?”
Teemu peers at her. She’s obviously crazy. “You mean he’s got a place on the team?”
Zackell snorts. “A place on the team? I’m building the whole team around him! I’m going to make him a professional!”
Teemu swallows hard and replies tersely, “Okay. I promise he’ll show up on time for practice.”
Zackell nods and leaves the ice at once. She’s done here. The other players at the open session will merely receive a short message telling them that they’re not good enough for her team. She’s honest, fair, and unsparing. Just like the sport.
* * *
Out on the ice Vidar eventually calms down. He lies on his back, sweaty and exhausted. Teemu sits down next to him. Vidar turns to him skeptically and mutters, “What the hell, bro, are you crying?”
“I’m not fucking crying,” Teemu snarls, and turns his face away.
“You look like you’re—”
“BACK OFF!” Teemu yells, and hits Vidar’s arm so hard that his little brother curls up whimpering on the ice while Teemu gets to his feet and walks out of the rink.
* * *
Elisabeth Zackell bounces into Peter Andersson’s office. “Did you see the tryout?” she blurts out.
“Yes,” Peter says.
“Can he play?” Zackell asks.
“Can you control him?” Peter asks.
“No! That’s the whole point!” Zackell says jubilantly.
She looks happy. It gives Peter a headache.
* * *
Outside in the parking lot there’s an old Saab. Teemu comes out of the rink, lights a cigarette, walks alone toward the car, gets into the passenger seat, and closes the door behind him. When he’s sure no one is watching, he leans his head on the dashboard and closes his eyes.
* * *
He’s not crying.
* * *
Back off.
* * *
The next morning Ana sits next to Vidar on the bus again. He’s playing Minecraft, because he has to concentrate so he doesn’t get too nervous to dare to ask her, “I’m going to be playing on the Beartown A-team. Do you want to come and watch?”
Ana sounds suspicious. “I didn’t know you played hockey. I thought you were a hooligan, like the others in the Pack.”
She says “the Pack” without fear. No one else in this town does. Vidar’s counterquestion is shy, almost hurt: “Don’t you like hooligans?”
She snorts. “I don’t like hockey players.”
He laughs. She’s pretty good at making him laugh. But before the bus stops at the school he says seriously, “The Pack aren’t hooligans.”
“What are they, then?” Ana asks.
“Brothers. Every one of them is my brother. They stand up for me, and I stand up for them.”
* * *
She doesn’t judge him for that. Who wouldn’t want to have brothers?
* * *
Maya is driven to school by her mom. Kira doesn’t ask why Ana doesn’t go with her anymore, she’s too happy that Maya lets her drive her all the way to school without feeling embarrassed. Just six months ago her daughter always asked to be let out a few hundred yards away so she could walk the last bit herself. But now Kira is allowed to drive all the way to the bus stop and her daughter leans over the seat, kisses her on the cheek, and says: “Thanks! See you later!”
Those words are far too insignificant to topple a grown woman, but they mean the world if you’re someone’s mom. Kira drives away on a cloud.
* * *
Maya, on the other hand, walks into school alone. She fetches her books alone, sits in classes alone, eats lunch alone. It’s her choice, because if she can’t trust her best friend, who can she trust?
* * *
Ana walks into the school not far behind Maya. It causes a very particular sort of chill to have to see your best friend every day and know that she’s no longer that. They used to part with a secret handshake that they came up with when they were children: fist up, fist down, palm, palm, butterfly, bent fingers, pistols, jazz hands, minirocket, explosion, ass to ass, “outbitches.” Ana came up with the descriptions. At the end, after they banged their backsides together, she always threw her hands into the air and yelled, “And Ana is out, bitches!”
Now Maya walks into school without even noticing that Ana is behind her. Ana hates herself, perhaps more for what she has done to Maya than for what she did to Benji, so this is her final act of love. To make herself invisible.
Maya disappears into the corridor. Ana stands motionless, broken. But Vidar reaches out his hand. “Are you okay?”
Ana looks at him. There’s something about him that makes her answer honestly, so she replies, “No.”
He runs his fingers manically through his hair and mumbles, “Do you want to get out of here?”
Ana smiles sadly. “Where?”
Vidar shrugs. “Don’t know.”
Ana looks around in the corridor. She hates it. Hates herself here. So she asks, “Do you want to go for a walk?”
“A walk?” Vidar repeats, as though it’s a foreign word.
“Don’t psychopaths go for walks, then?” Ana wonders.
He laughs. They leave the school and walk side by side through the forest for hours, and that’s where Ana falls for him. For all his clumsy, jerky, nervous gestures. He falls for her because she’s invincible and brittle at the same time, as if she were made of both eggshell and iron. He tries to kiss her, because he can’t stop himself, and she kisses him back.
* * *
If they had lived their whole lives with each other, they would have become something remarkable together.
* * *
The headline in the local paper after the press conference reads “New Jobs—But Half Earmarked for Workers from Hed!”
The article includes numerous quotes from politicians. Most are shocked when the reporter demands a response and try to give neutral answers, to avoid provoking either side. The only one who deviates from that line is of course Richard Theo. He manages to make his statement sound spontaneous, even though he’s prepared it in minute detail. “What do I think about the factory’s quotas? I don’t like any form of quota. I think that Beartown jobs should go to Beartown workers.” It’s hardly soaring oratory, but it travels fast.
Within hours the slogan “Beartown jobs for Beartown workers!” is being repeated not only online but in bars and
around dinner tables. The next morning there is a note on the hood of the Spanish-home-owning politician’s car.
To stop the note blowing away, the person delivering it has pinned it down with an ax. Notes can blow away so easily otherwise, when the wind changes direction.
* * *
Immediately after the press conference, Peter starts calling builders. They all answer, they are all available for work, until he tells them what the job is: demolishing the standing area in the arena. Suddenly some of them have no time after all, while others say they’re “not qualified to do that.” Some just hang up. Some spell it out in plain language: “We’ve got families, for God’s sake, Peter!” At one of the firms Peter calls, the phone is answered by a voice identifying itself as Woody. When Peter explains why he’s calling, Woody laughs loudly. And derisively.
Later that day Kira finds a cardboard moving box outside the Andersson family home. Most people who opened it would have thought it was empty, but she knows better. She tips it slowly onto its side and hears the little metal cylinder roll across the bottom. She sees it glint in the light reflected from her children’s bedroom windows.
* * *
A rifle cartridge.
37
What We’re Capable Of
Most of us don’t know what terrible things we’re capable of. How can we, until someone pushes us far enough? Who has any idea how dangerous we can be until someone threatens our family?
Kira is standing hidden in the shadows. She’s followed Teemu from the supermarket; he’s carrying a bag of groceries in each hand, one mostly full of cigarettes. He goes into the Bearskin. When he comes out again, he’s alone and the street is empty. Kira doesn’t know what sort of demons take possession of her, but she suddenly finds the nerve to march forward.
Us Against You Page 31
