But in the end they compromise, in spite of everything, because they want the same thing: what’s best for the club. Always. Tails keeps promising the caretaker that “Beartown Business Park” will soon be built, including plans for a new, ultra-modern training facility next to the ice rink, and then there’ll be enough time on the ice for everyone. He has a finger in every pie, the pea-brain, for good and ill. Officially it may have been Peter Andersson who got Ramona a place on the club’s committee two years ago, but it was Tails who gave him the idea, and for that he has the caretaker’s respect. Ramona’s too, even if she’d never admit that. Once, after eleven or possibly twelve beers in the Bearskin, she told the caretaker in confidence: “People think Tails loves a TEAM. Bullshit—he doesn’t love any team. He loves a CLUB. Anyone can love a team, that’s a selfish sort of love, demanding and easily hurt and easy to give up… but loving a club, an entire club, the whole way from the little kids’ team to the A-team and the rivets that keep the roof and the people together… that sort of love has no place for selfish-ness.”

  “YOU’D BETTER HOPE THIS WAS IMPORTANT, BAMBI!” the caretaker yells above the wind once they’ve taken down all the flags. His hands are bleeding as well now.

  “I SWEAR!” Tails shouts back.

  He isn’t actually as certain as he sounds, but he’ll end up being right, just not in the way he thinks.

  * * *

  Not one flagpole will be snapped by the storm. Tomorrow Tails and the caretaker will hoist the flags up all the poles once more. What they don’t know now is that they’ll be hoisting them at half-mast.

  19 Screams

  People say that bad news travels faster than good, that if someone dies people in the town know about it sooner than if someone is born, but if you ask Ramona down at the Bearskin pub of course she’ll grunt: “Bullshit. It just feels like that because plenty more people die than are born in this town these days, more funerals than christenings.” She should know, the Bearskin is the district’s watering hole but it’s also its unofficial census office, every change up or down is celebrated or mourned by someone at her bar. Most of them have learned to celebrate twice as hard as they grieve, to compensate, and that’s probably why they’ve loved hockey more than ever in recent years. They’re a winning town again, they live more than they die.

  If you think that sounds like an exaggeration and ask Ramona straight out if hockey is really that important, she’d probably reply: “No. But what the hell is important in life, really?” She doesn’t get to give many speeches at funerals, it has to be said, but she probably has a point.

  There’s a story people often tell, about her and a tourist from the big city who was passing through one summer and stopped his car outside the Bearskin pub. He saw through the window that there was a television inside, so he hurried in and asked: “Can I watch the soccer game here?” The television was showing a grainy video recording of an old hockey game, and a small group of elderly men were watching and telling each other what was going to happen next, evidently not for the first time. Ramona stood behind the bar glaring at the tourist, and muttered: “Soccer? What soccer?” The man exclaimed with equal amounts of surprise and bemusement: “What… what soccer? It’s the World Cup FINAL!” Ramona shrugged her shoulders. “We only watch hockey in this town. Are you going to order something? This isn’t public transport, you can’t just stand there looking stupid for nothing.”

  It’s only a story, it might not even be true, but that doesn’t mean it’s improbable. This is the sort of pub that one way or another says everything about a town and its inhabitants, about their place in the world and their view of the rest of it. The Bearskin is as close to the factory as it is to the ice rink, and most of the people who drink there live their lives between these three places. The suggestion that the Bearskin has been here longer than the town, and that houses were built around it the way they used to get built around a well is such an old lie that it almost feels true. Two years ago the whole building almost burned down, and now, after it’s been rebuilt, people often joke that it smelled better immediately after the fire than it did before.

  There are photographs of hockey players all over the walls. Some of them, like Benji and Vidar, probably spent more time in the Bearskin than the ice rink some seasons, and that says quite a lot about them. Others, like Amat, have never set foot here, and that says even more about them. Ramona has always had room in her heart for those who have succeeded in life, but the space she spares for those whose lives have gone to Hell will always be infinitely larger.

  The Bearskin is in a basement, you can only see the sky through its small windows. But if you stand on the steps with the door open, where Ramona smokes when the weather is at its worst and you can’t get your lighter to work out in the street, you can see all the way to the flagpoles outside the ice rink. She would never admit it to Tails, but she’s started to like them, every time she goes to a committee meeting and passes beneath them she walks extra slowly, elated at the chance to cause trouble for the old men up in the conference room one more time.

  But someone is taking the flags down now, and the storm stops even Ramona from lighting her cigarette outside, so tonight she smokes inside. The door would probably have been torn off its hinges if she opened it anyway. That’s why she doesn’t see Fatima leave the ice rink a short while from now and stand at the bus stop on the main road, before she gives up and starts walking to the Hollow on her own. Nor does Ramona see the fourteen-year-old boy, Matteo, who has been wandering around the town on his own all evening. She doesn’t hear him yelling and banging on the door of the Bearskin, she’d almost certainly have opened up if she’d heard. She’s let all manner of idiots inside over the years, even tourists who like soccer, so she’d probably have had room for a frozen and frightened fourteen-year-old. She just doesn’t see him. But that isn’t how Matteo will remember this moment, he’ll just remember it in the simplest words possible.

  * * *

  “They only watch hockey in this town.”

  20 Cats

  The last thing Fatima does is clean the upper floor in the rink, which used to be dominated by offices and the committee room, but they’re squeezed into a smaller space at the back now. Most of the upstairs is now occupied by the new preschool. Some children around here learn to stand on skates before they can walk, which really says all you need to know about this town’s relationship to hockey, the sport always forces life to move on. As terrible as that might be.

  Fatima has started avoiding people in the supermarket recently, everyone wants to know what’s happened to her son, and she can’t answer. Back in the spring everything was like a dream, he was winning and everyone loved him, then he got injured and disappointed everyone. Then he went to North America to be selected for the NHL draft, which Fatima barely understands at all. He sat at the kitchen table and explained it as if she were a child and he the grown-up: “The NHL is the best league, Mom, where the pros play, in North America. Every summer the league has a draft, where the clubs take turns to choose two hundred young players who get the chance to become pros over there. That’s what could happen to me now. Like Peter did!” Amat promised he would buy his mom a big house in the Heights, and a Mercedes, when he got his first professional contract. She laughed: “What would I want that for? If you want to give me something, get me a new dishwasher and a bit of peace and quiet.”

  Amat had such big dreams in the spring that there was hardly room for them in their cramped apartment. All that is left of them now is a broken dishwasher. He shut himself away in his room and has barely emerged for several months, and what sort of mother does that make her if she can’t even tell people what’s wrong? The caretaker has taught her that in hockey you never say exactly where a player is injured, because then opponents will seize the chance to hurt him there again, so you just say “lower body injury” or “upper body injury.” But Fatima doesn’t even know which of those Amat has. If it’s his leg or his heart that’s broken.

  She turns the lights out and goes up into the stands and looks down at the center circle, fighting back tears. New players will triumph and lose there, long after Amat, the ice doesn’t care. It’s so easy for other people to think that if you want to know about youth sport, you should look at the smile on a teenage boy who has just managed to turn professional, because every year Fatima sees hundreds of parents devote thousands of hours to this ice rink, hoping for precisely that. They arrive stressed and leave exhausted, sweating in their cars and freezing at training sessions, paying a small fortune in membership fees and even more for all the equipment, but they still have to sell lottery tickets and work for nothing in the kiosk whenever the club asks them. They’re expected to have all the time in the world, never complain, to dry wet skates and wipe tears and, most of all, do the laundry. Dear God, all the laundry. Naturally everyone is expected to be self-sacrificial in the pursuit of a dream for their children, but if you want to know anything about youth sports, really know, then it isn’t enough to know the name of the child who made it all the way. You also need to know the ones who only almost made it.

  Fatima lets her eyes roam across the ice, from one end to the other, trying to remember how quickly he could skate that distance. “Like a cat out of a sack,” as the caretaker put it. “One day that boy could go all the way.” That meant turn professional, Fatima learned. “All the way” meant earning money from a game. That’s why it wasn’t a game for anyone here, because it wasn’t just Amat who would profit from that, everyone would. “Nothing comes for free in hockey, Mom, you have to give it all you’ve got!” Amat said when he was little, and he was right. He played in secondhand equipment all his childhood, they were always dependent on charity from people like Peter Andersson. “Don’t call it charity, it’s an investment,” Peter said, he meant it in a friendly way but when Amat became the best she understood what it meant: they wanted payback.

  She blinks away her tears, takes a deep breath with her eyes closed, and goes down to the main door of the rink. She meets the caretaker, he hesitates for a moment and glances out at the storm, and says tentatively:

  “Look, Tails is here, I can ask him to get his car and give you a lift…”

  “I don’t need anything from that man, I’ll take the bus,” Fatima replies.

  There’s no hatred in her voice, but that tone is as close as she gets to it. The caretaker tries to persuade her, but there’s no reasoning with her. So he sighs and lets her go.

  Tails is standing outside, his hair is a mess, and he has blood on the cuffs of his shirt. They almost get blown into each other but Tails jumps out of the way and Fatima walks past him before he has time to open his mouth. She knows he wants to ask how Amat is, because everyone in town asks, but no one really cares. They don’t care if he’s happy. They just want to know if he can play, if he can win, if they can use him in their brochures. But not even his mom knows what he can do anymore.

  She walks to the bus stop, hunched up against the wind, half a step back for every step forward. She waits for the bus but it never comes. The storm has emptied the community. She could have gone back to the ice rink and asked Tails for a lift, in spite of everything, but she can’t help feeling that she’d rather die than ask that man for help.

  So she sets out on the long walk home to the Hollow along the main road, alone. The wind tugs at her hair but she struggles on, a few steps at a time. Her legs ache the whole while but the pain in her back comes in bursts, without warning, sometimes so sharply that it makes her stagger.

  The trees lean over the road, making the sky disappear, and she remembers how scared she was of nature here when she and Amat first arrived, all those years ago. The wind and the cold and the ice and the endless forest, everything seemed to be waiting for a chance to kill you, it was so cold that she didn’t think she was even going to get through the first winter. Now she can’t think of anything more beautiful. Sometimes nature still makes her giddy, when the snow is so white that her eyes can’t look at it for more than a few seconds at a time, when the ice is so shiny that if you stand on the lake behind the ice rink the landscape goes on forever until it merges with the sky. The shapeless world can make you dizzy, the forest can be so silent that it makes your ears pop, as if the trees were sucking all the sound from the world. She used to like people and want to protect her child from nature, but now it’s the other way around.

  She stops at the side of the road. Deep down she knows she shouldn’t, that it’s dangerous, she needs to get home before the storm gets even worse. But her legs can’t carry her any farther, her back aches, her lungs are shrinking. She’s halfway between the ice rink and the Hollow, the worst part to be alone on, this section of road is nothing but pavement and loneliness. She stands with her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. Thinks about hockey. That isn’t so strange, when you’re scared you seek refuge in your happiest moments, and her happiest moments are her son’s. Sons never understand that.

  Amat is so like his dad, the same soft voice, the same determined look in his eyes. It’s both a delight and a curse for Fatima that every proud moment also comes with a stab of grief. Amat’s father died before they came here, and he never saw his son get this good at a sport his dad never even knew existed, the boy was born in a town close to the desert, but found a home in a place made of ice.

  Everything is her fault, she thinks, because she was the one who taught him to be grateful for everything. It was this town that broke him, but it was her fault it was able to do that. “We need to be grateful,” she repeated, until the words were invisible tattoos on the inside of his eyelids. He became the best, and she was happy, because finally he was treated as if he belonged here. As if this was his club, his town, his country too. She just didn’t know that the only thing heavier than Beartown’s prejudices were its expectations. Amat is still only a boy, this is only his eighteenth year on the planet, but hockey placed a burden on him that no adult man could bear.

  Just a few years ago he seemed too small and weak for hockey at all. The latter of those was worst, of course, you’re not allowed to be weak here. It was Peter who consoled Fatima back then, she’d heard the stories about him standing in a locker room ahead of the town’s biggest match and yelling that the big cities might have the money, but “hockey is ours!,” so she listened. Peter said that what the others saw as weakness was actually the boy’s great strength: he was supple, when he skated it looked like he didn’t have to make an effort, that’s why everything happened faster for him than it did for anyone else. Fatima thought to herself that that might perhaps be true, but maybe he was also just trying to get away from all the boys who were twice his size and were trying to kill him. It’s such a violent sport, and she never got used to that, either in the young bears on the ice or the big ones off it, because that was what all the dads of the other boys looked like as they hung around the side of the rink yelling during games: slow and heavy on the surface, and lightning-fast and brutal as soon as they got you in their sights. She learned that around here hockey was like nobility, that was how they wanted it, only someone born into the right family should have access to it. That was why they invented so many traditions and codes, an entire language with its own terminology, so that even the youngsters could tell the difference between those who belonged here and those who didn’t. One time she heard one of the men joke that “there’s too much sport in sports!” and she knew what he meant by that. They didn’t want a pure sport, not really, they wanted a rigged game where they could buy a place for themselves and their kids.

  It was Tails who said that, he had hardly said a word to Fatima in all the time she had worked here until Amat made it onto the A-team. Then, suddenly, he wanted to give Fatima advice about “the future,” tell her what was “best for the boy,” discuss the NHL and agents and contracts. Fatima may not have understood all the big words, but she understood that he thought Beartown owned her boy. Tails printed a brochure containing a picture of Amat with text saying that it wasn’t just easy to sponsor Beartown, it was also the right thing to do, because suddenly the fact that he was from the Hollow was perfectly acceptable. Tails even wanted a picture of Fatima, showing her and Amat collecting empty drinks cans from the stands, because he’d heard that they did that to help with the money for the rent, but the caretaker yelled at him so hard that the windows of the rink rattled. Fatima herself said nothing, she tried to be grateful, but it was getting harder and harder.

  She opens her eyes. Crouches down in the middle of the road between the ice rink and the Hollow. Slowly she digs her heels into the ground and stands up and starts walking again, but she hardly has the strength. The wind is coming from behind, like a kick in the small of her back, and she tries to fight against it but fails, stumbles and falls headlong into the ditch. She lies on the ground with the wind roaring in her ears. And drifts off.

  Back in the spring Tails gave an interview to the local paper, and she read everything he said about Amat, how he was “a Cinderella story,” and how he proved that “anyone can play hockey in Beartown.” No, Fatima thought, that’s precisely why it’s a Cinderella story: because it hardly ever happens. She read Tails’s boasts about the “investment in the girls’ team” too, even though she knew that every week he tried to persuade the caretaker to give them the worst times on the ice and the rich dads’ boys the best. They didn’t want girls in the club any more than they wanted kids from the Hollow, they were all competitors for time on the ice. Because hockey belonged to them, just like Peter had said.

  Fatima’s thoughts drift off to her very first years here, she knew nothing about bears then but there were pictures of them all over the ice rink, so she borrowed a book from the library and started reading in the hope of understanding the town better by understanding the animal. And she did. One of the first things she learned was that up to forty percent of all young bears die during their first year of life, and that the most common cause of death was being killed by an adult male bear that wasn’t their father. That was when Fatima realized that one day she would have to be a bear as well, when someone threatened her offspring. So she fought for his right to be a carefree bear, naive and untroubled, like all the others. For him to be able to play and have fun. Because, to be honest, not even she believed that Amat would become as good as he did, that he would make it “all the way,” she just loved the fact that he didn’t have to think on the ice. He had no pain there, he was free, that was enough. But gradually, the older he got, the more fair hockey actually seemed to become. When they were young the rich kids had an advantage, but by the time Amat was a teenager no one cared who his parents were anymore, they just cared about his talent. As long as the team was winning, everybody loved him. He soon got used to it. Fatima too, maybe. She feels ashamed of that now, she’s worried she might have challenged God and the universe and has taken everything for granted, everything that is given can be taken away just as quickly. She was the first person to notice that something was wrong back in the spring, Amat was still scoring goals in every match but he was no longer as supple. He looked tense, because he was playing with the weight of the world on his shoulders, until his body couldn’t take it anymore.