“Violence? What the hell do you know about violence?” Maya hisses, then marches past them all, out into the street.

  They’re too shocked even to call after her. For two years they’ve wanted to know more about her, and now they know everything. Now she’s shown them what sort of animal she is.

  * * *

  Peter rests his elbows on the coffee table and his forehead on the palms of his hands and hopes desperately that he’s going to see light on the drive. He got his friend Hog to install a motion sensor that turns the light on when Kira turns in to the drive. Peter says it’s for her benefit, so she can see better, but really it’s for him. So he can count the minutes she remains in the car before she comes indoors. The number keeps growing and growing. Often he pretends to be asleep when he hears the key in the lock because he knows that’s what she’s hoping.

  He sends her a text message. She replies in brief, that’s how they communicate these days, two or three words at a time.

  On your way?

  Yes. You?

  Yes. Home.

  Leo ok?

  All ok. You?

  Ok.

  But she never sets off. Peter closes his eyes and rubs his eyelids as hard as he can, and when he opens them again it’s still dark. He blinks, at first surprised, then horrified, he fumbles around in the darkness and stumbles away from the coffee table. Then a single source of light dazzles him and he hears Leo’s voice:

  “What the hell are you doing, Dad?”

  He’s shining his cell phone toward Peter.

  “Nothing. Why did you turn all the lights off?” Peter gasps.

  Leo snorts.

  “It’s a power cut! Have you had a stroke or something?”

  Peter blinks away everything inside him. He reaches for Leo and leads him to the garage to fetch flashlights. Leo takes one and at first goes back into his room, then comes back out. He’s fourteen years old, so obviously he isn’t scared of the dark, of course not, but maybe he’ll sit on the sofa next to his dad anyway?

  He plays games on his phone until the battery dies, then he plays with Peter’s until that dies too. The last thing Peter sees is a text from Kira: About to leave.He replies with a simple Ok, and as soon as the screen dies he regrets not writing “Love you.”

  * * *

  At home in her student room Maya is sitting on the floor beneath her bookshelves refreshing news websites and weather forecasts over and over again to get news about the storm. She cries and calls Ana in turn, until in the end she’s just crying. She spends ages thinking about calling her parents, but they’ll hear that she’s drunk and her mother will be angry and her dad disappointed. In the end she calls her little brother, but his phone is switched off.

  “Shit, Leo, please answer…,” she whispers into the darkness, but he won’t even see that she’s called until the power comes back on the following morning and he can charge his phone again. That’s how he ends up being the one who calls and wakes his sister and tells her what’s happened.

  “Dead? Wha-what do you mean, dead?” Maya will slur, half-asleep and hungover.

  Then she’ll book a train ticket, pack a bag, and head north. She’ll think about her dad the whole way home.

  17 Dead

  “Home.” There really ought to be more words for that. One to cover the people we have there, another with room for those we have lost.

  Kira stands in her office in Hed staring out into the night until the storm presses the building’s windowpanes in so claustrophobically hard that she starts to panic. She turns toward her desk but suddenly that goes dark as well, the power goes off so abruptly that it feels like an assault. She starts and swears out loud as she hits her knee on a chair, then she sinks down onto the floor alone, overwhelmed by a feeling of impotence. The darkness seems to make the deserted office gigantic.

  She and her colleague moved the company here last year when the business was expanding and they took on more staff, it was really far too big but Kira fell in love with the premises, in an old station building more than one hundred years old. She had started to love old things, even though she had always dreamed of fresh, modern interiors, perhaps that’s a sign that she’s more of a forest person than anything else now. I’m only missing the cross-country skis and refusal to conjugate verbs now, she thinks bitterly.

  She lies on the floor with her eyes closed as the windows start to rattle worse and worse. She thinks that she should have gone home to Peter and she feels ashamed that she ought to want to go home more than she does. She knows something is wrong, somewhere inside her, if she would rather stay here.

  Somewhere between dozing and almost being asleep she remembers how Peter took the car, not all that long ago, and drove down to Maya’s new city, her new home, to help her put some shelves up in her student room. And how Kira sat here in her office in the meantime, and how her phone buzzed with a text message from him. He had sent a picture of the car, parked fairly close to a junction, with the question: Can I park here without getting a ticket, do you think? She starts to laugh in the darkness at how stupid it is. Their love story is so peculiar that he seriously thought she could judge thirty feet on a PHOTOGRAPH and determine if he was too close to the intersection or not. Perhaps that was why she dared to set up this business, because he genuinely believes she can do anything, and sometimes that can be infectious.

  Maybe, she thinks to herself somewhere between thought and dream, it’s actually no more complicated than that she simply won’t tell him the extent of the company’s financial problems at the moment. They’ve lost some big clients and are up to their eyes in unpaid invoices, but she just keeps quiet about it to him because she can’t bear to disappoint him when he’s sacrificed everything. When you’re young and in love you think the difficult part of being in a relationship is admitting when you need help, but when you’ve been married for half your life you know that the hardest thing is admitting that you really don’t: you don’t need anyone’s help to feel inadequate and a failure and worthless. Because no one is as good at making us feel all those things as we are ourselves. Kira can see it in Peter’s eyes every time she happens to criticize him. “I don’t need any help,” he wants to yell at her, but all she gets is silence. She knows exactly how he feels, because she too is the best.

  She loves this office, the only real problem with the old station building is that it’s in Hed, not in Beartown. She has been obliged to live with Peter’s unspoken fury about that, so much so that she has occasionally asked herself if that might have been the subconscious reason for her choosing it, to force him to distance himself even more from hockey, so that it couldn’t drag him back. But for what? For whose benefit? It hasn’t saved their marriage, possibly just prolonged it. She doesn’t even go home when there’s a storm coming, so when would you go home then? What is it, anyway, “home,” when she spends more time in Hed than in Beartown these days? What does that make her?

  These crappy towns, she thinks, perhaps mostly to feel that there’s someone else to blame. These crappy towns and their childishly petty feelings of jealousy and hatred that always force everyone to pick a side in everything. Because of course Peter wasn’t the only person who was annoyed that the office was in Hed, his childhood friend Tails turned up here only a couple of weeks ago with four other men, they were careful to explain that it wasn’t an “official visit,” and that they weren’t “representing either the council or the club,” but were just “a sort of interested party.” Beartown and its bullshit interested parties, Kira thought as she heard them running on, that pathetic town and their pathetic game. Tails was, in line with his nickname, ridiculously overdressed, this time in a pin-striped suit over a waistcoat and tie, while the other four were in the usual uniform of the district’s entrepreneurial cowboys: jeans, shirt, tight jacket, and delusions of grandeur. Kira thought about what her colleague said when they first started the company: “The only thing two women like us need to succeed in the world of business is ten years of combined study of the law, thirty years of combined professional experience, and the collected self-confidence of one really mediocre middle-aged man.”

  The five men were all successful businessmen from the area, sponsors of Beartown Hockey and regular “concerned residents” in the local paper’s letters page. They gathered around Kira’s desk as if it were an art installation, because of course it looked like a man’s desk, only there was a woman sitting behind it, and that seemed to fascinate them. One of them thought that Kira’s colleague was really her assistant, so he asked if he could have a cappuccino, to which her colleague replied that he’d get one in the face if he wasn’t careful, and Kira had to grab hold of her arm to stop her demonstrating that this was no empty threat. One of the other men asked if Peter wasn’t going to take part in the meeting, whereupon her colleague replied: “Sure, he makes a really good cappuccino!” Tails picked up the hint and threw his arms out grandly: “Ladies, we don’t want to take up your valuable time.” After which he promptly took up forty minutes of it.

  “This really doesn’t look good,” he smiled, by which he meant the fact that Kira, in her capacity as Mrs. Andersson, wife of the former general manager of Beartown Hockey, had chosen to locate her successful business in Hed. “We need to stick together, don’t we, us Beartown folk? Don’t you think? In a small town everything is connected, Kira, businesses and politics and inhabitants…,” he declared, stopping himself from adding “and hockey!” seeing as he saw that Kira’s colleague was weighing her coffee cup on her hand as if trying to determine how hard she could throw it. Instead Tails proudly pulled out, as if it were a Renaissance painting, a document that turned out to be a very advantageous rental contract for some newly renovated office premises in Beartown. They were owned by the council but that wasn’t a problem, Tails assured them, because he had negotiated a reduction in the rent directly with the politicians. “And of course this is only TEMPORARY, because within the next couple of years you’ll be able to move the company HERE!” More documents were produced and spread out across the desk. “Beartown Business Park!” Tails declared triumphantly.

  These pompous men and their grandiose plans, Kira thought, there’s always something. In recent years they have fantasized, successively, about an airport, an art gallery, hosting a skiing world championship, and now this. New office buildings right next to Tails’s supermarket, a center for business life in the whole district, built with council money and with him at its center. And down by the ice rink a new training facility will be built at the same time, Tails explained, adding proudly: “We’re investing in the children, Kira, all this is for the children!” None of it ever is really, of course. Children are always just the alibi. Beartown Business Park, even the name was perfect in its sparkling stupidity. She never ceases to be surprised at how they never cease to surprise her, these aging men. Tails took her silence as admiration and grinned the way only men who don’t know the difference between dialogue and monologue can: “We have to stick together, Kira, don’t we? What’s good for the town is also good for us!”

  Instinctively, Kira felt like throwing him out of the window without opening it first, of course, but sadly she noticed from the contract on the desk that the rent he was offering in Beartown was half what they were paying for the old station building here in Hed. Their finances could certainly do with the help. Not even her colleague knows how badly things are going, Kira has hidden everything from everyone, stubbornly thinking that she’s going to find a way to solve everything herself. It’s wrong, she knows that, but it’s gone on for too long for her to be able to retreat now. So when her colleague squinted suspiciously at Kira when she saw that she was even considering the offer in the contract, Kira felt obliged to play hardball and ask: “What about you, Tails? What do you and the club want in return?”

  Tails threw his arms out in a gesture so dramatic that he knocked over a stack of files. “What do we want? We HELP each other, surely, Kira? We’re friends. Neighbors, almost!”

  Only then did one of the other men lean forward and suggest, in good faith and to “add my thoughts,” that Kira and her colleague might consider sponsoring Beartown Hockey for an amount that might, purely coincidentally, match the reduction Tails had negotiated on the rent with the council. “And of course as sponsorship that would be tax deductible, our accountants can sort that out. Win-win for you and us!”

  So that was why. Of course. Always an ulterior motive, always a plan. Graft, graft, graft, it never ends. If Beartown is a family, the ice rink is the spoiled child who eats everyone out of house and home.

  “Well… look… that’s only a suggestion,” Tails said, clearing his throat, and Kira could see that he wished the other man hadn’t been quite so plainspoken.

  Tails loved secrets, he understands that secrets are power, so when the man beside him opened his mouth it probably wasn’t planned. The old man was just getting impatient and was doing what all old men do when they meet women like Kira and her colleague: underestimate them.

  “Soon NO businesses are going to want to be left in Hed, you know, because soon there won’t be anything here! Soon Hed won’t even have a hockey team!”

  Aghast, Tails nudged him hard with his elbow, but it was too late, Kira raised an eyebrow and put on her most naive smile and asked:

  “Really?”

  Naturally the old man couldn’t resist:

  “The council wants to close down Hed Hockey! They only want one club in the district, that was why they spent years trying to shut Beartown down, but now Beartown is the big brother and Hed the little brother. Do you see? We have the best team and the best finances and the biggest sponsors! So Hed Hockey will be the one that gets closed down, and soon everything else will follow! By the time we’re done Beartown will be a big city and Hed a small backwater, so take the chance to move back while you can, because soon you might not be able to afford it!” The old man laughed so hard that his stomach bounced, like the wind on wet canvas. Tails had a strained smile on his face and avoided Kira’s gaze as he mumbled, almost embarrassed:

  “Well… obviously… that’s not official. That business about the hockey clubs. No one knows that discussions are taking place, not even… your husband.”

  He couldn’t even bring himself to say “Peter.” Kira and her colleague stood up to indicate that the meeting was over. They nodded diplomatically, or at least Kira did, and shook hands and promised to think about the offer to change address.

  As the jeans and jackets lumbered out of the office Tails raised one hand in mournful greeting to Peter, alone in his office behind a transparent door. Peter sat there in his glass box like a lion that had lost its mane, and Kira felt like a woman who had lost her man. Once upon a time Peter used to know all the secrets in this forest, but now Kira knew more about the hockey club than he did. Now she was more important than him.

  The door closed behind Tails and the other middle-aged men. Kira sat at her desk staring at photographs. During the weeks that had passed since then, Peter has gone home earlier and earlier to pick up Leo and she gets home later and later and sits longer and longer in her car on the drive. It was his idea to start working here, but maybe he only did that because he thought that was what she wanted, and now she doesn’t know what she wants anymore. The most impossible thing about a marriage is that even if you do everything right, you’re never done with it.

  It isn’t Peter’s fault that the job ended up like this, nor hers either, the company simply grew too big too quickly. When he started working here, Kira promised that he would work with “human resources” and “staff issues,” which was fine when they didn’t have many employees, but now there are too many and he’s like the weakest player on a hockey team that has been promoted to a higher league. He’s not cut out for this level. Everyone else has training and experience, he’s merely married to the boss. Kira tries to hide his lack of serious tasks with paperwork, but it’s just getting worse and worse. Peter hasn’t shrunk with her success, but she’s grown so much that he now looks smaller by her side.

  “Soon you’ll have to start a pretend company and hire in actors to do pretend jobs so he can think he’s doing something important,” her colleague teased her recently.

  “It’s not that bad!” Kira countered.

  Her colleague shrugged. She teases Peter a lot, so much so that he thinks she hates him, which eventually made her feel sympathetic instead. When he started work here it was the first time in his life he had to wear a tie, which turned out to be a challenge in itself: it always seemed to end up either too short or too long when he knotted it. So he started using a ready-knotted version, until Kira’s colleague caught sight of the Velcro strap sticking out from under his collar and exclaimed: “I didn’t know they made those in your size!” Peter blushed and tried to defend himself, saying it wasn’t a child’s tie at all, but a “safety tie,” the sort bodyguards wear so they don’t get strangled if anyone pulls on it. Kira’s colleague’s face cracked into a delighted smile: “A bodyguard? Like Kevin Costner in that film?” Peter realized his mistake far too late, and now he had to put up with her singing “I will always love youuuu” every time she went past his office, which she found an improbable number of reasons to do each day seeing as her own office was at the other end of the building. Kira had pretended not to notice Peter practicing over and over every morning since then, but his tie still ends up being either too short or too long. He’s never going to feel completely comfortable in her world.

  So in the end Kira’s colleague looked her in the eye the other day and said: “Listen, my experience of men is that most of them only want two things from a woman: that she bolsters his self-confidence and that she leaves him alone. When a man gets really stupid, it’s usually because he has poor self-confidence or because he feels smothered. But in Peter’s case? Hell, I think you’ve probably left him alone far too much…”