“The important thing now, the most important thing of all, is that we think of the children! Don’t you agree? For that reason, I think we should agree that all the teams at Hed Hockey, which has so tragically lost its ice rink, should be allowed to come and train in Beartown’s rink. That’s an obvious gesture of solidarity, isn’t it, so can we agree on that?”

  The moment he starts to get murmurs of agreement from the room, he adds:

  “So obviously we need to clear all the roads to Beartown ice rink first! Agreed?”

  The murmuring isn’t quite as enthusiastic now, everyone knows that the roads to the ice rink just happen to be the same roads that lead to Tails’s supermarket, but pointing that out now would look like you were anti-children. Or even worse: anti-hockey. To silence any potential critics before they’ve even opened their mouths, Tails gives a didactic speech in his own defense:

  “Do you know what always runs out first in my supermarket whenever there’s a crisis? Toilet paper! Do you know why? Because it gives us a feeling of being in control of the chaos. When the world doesn’t feel safe, people go and do a big shop, because it makes them feel like they’re DOING something. But they don’t know what they should buy. Milk? You can’t buy a hundred gallons of milk, it’ll just go bad. Cans? Pasta? People rush around like headless chickens buying thousands of different things, but do you know what every single one of them buys? Toilet paper! Because that’s the sort of thing you buy every time you go shopping, and the whole family uses it every day. Can we live without it? Of course we can! But it has been imprinted on us as an everyday item, as normality, so when we get scared we drag great bundles of the stuff home with us, not because we need it but because it feels like we’re taking control of the situation. Do you get what I mean? People need normality in a crisis. And around here, for people like us, hockey is toilet paper. It has to be there. It mustn’t run out. What we need in this district right now more than electricity and more than heat are symbols and dreams. There was a storm yesterday, but today life goes on. And life starts with hockey!”

  No one there is really able to argue against that, so the decision about which roads should be cleared as a priority is passed, along with the decision to let Hed and Beartown share ice time at Beartown’s ice rink.

  We will remember that meeting in different ways, depending on which town we live in. As the years pass, some of those involved won’t even remember if they were actually present at the meeting, or if they have had the story told to them so many times that it just feels like they were there.

  The only thing we will agree on is that both decisions were a disaster. We kicked a hornet’s nest. Maybe that was Tails’s fault, maybe that was his intention.

  * * *

  But no one, absolutely no one, loved Star Wars more than he did as a child.

  25 Clichés

  Amat wakes up early the morning after the storm. He ties the laces of his running shoes as if he’s forgotten how to do it, creeps out of the apartment, and scuttles through the shadows by the walls of the buildings like a rat, as if what he’s about to do was a terrible sin. It’s actually the opposite, but he doesn’t want anyone to see him in case he fails.

  Fatima sees him leave the apartment but pretends not to notice, singing inside but trying to stop herself dancing on the ceiling. When they got home the night before, after he came to get her on the road in the storm, he whispered: “I’m sorry I let you down, Mom.” She replied the way she always does: “You’ll never let me down as long as you don’t give up.”

  So now he’s running again. A few tentative, shameful steps at first, but soon at full speed. Anxiety and alcohol have piled on the pounds since summer, but his feet have been longing for this. They just need to learn everything afresh, become a machine again, so that his brain can switch off without his body stopping. Over the past few years he’s heard so much about what a “talent” he is, but the people who use that word know nothing about hockey. They say “talent” as if it comes for free. As if Amat hadn’t been the first person at the ice rink every morning and last to leave ever since he started junior high school, as if he hadn’t trained harder than everyone else year after year, covering thousands of miles on his skates, running until he threw up, dribbling empty cans at home in the apartment until his hands were blistered and the neighbors furious. As if hockey hadn’t cost him precisely what it costs everyone who wants to be any good: everything.

  The one thing he has learned about talent is that the only sort of talent that’s worth anything is to submit totally to training. To tough it out. He was already out of breath when he started running today, but as soon as he is away from the built-up area he runs at full speed away from the Hollow, up the hill toward the forest, into the jumble of fallen trees. A few times he has to leap sideways, terrified of torn roots and falling branches, because the forest can be even more dangerous after a storm than during it, but there’s nowhere else for him to go. He couldn’t bear the judgmental looks he would get if he were to run through the town, and he doesn’t even know if he’s welcome at the ice rink after everything that happened in the spring. He only has himself now. He stops in a clearing at the highest point on the hill, there was no clearing here before the storm, an invisible fist has punched right through the trees. From here he would have been able to see the whole town if his eyes weren’t full of tears after he throws up from the exertion. He used to be able to run up and down here a hundred times without even getting out of breath, now he feels like an old alcoholic who can’t cope with a flight of stairs without gasping his way to a heart attack.

  But at least he’s here. He’s running again. All the way back to the person he used to be.

  * * *

  “What are you saying? You’ve got her in the CAR?” the man from the undertakers exclaims when he finally arrives.

  It’s the day after the storm, the town is in chaos but the man is still wearing a suit and smart shoes, a gray man who gives the impression of having been sixty years old ever since he was fifteen.

  “The circumstances were rather unusual,” Peter says.

  “She was wearing a seat belt, for God’s sake,” Teemu mutters.

  If he had been a different man in a different town, the man from the undertakers may well have said one or two ill-chosen words about this, but this is the notorious Teemu Rinnius and this is Beartown, so the man clears his throat and just says quietly to Peter:

  “This isn’t the way it usually happens. This really isn’t the way it usually happens.”

  Peter nods sympathetically, and says that the storm and the power cut and the shock made him take an ill-considered decision. He doesn’t blame Teemu, takes all the flak himself. In a vain attempt to find a comfortable topic of conversation, he asks the man:

  “So what do you think about the hockey team this year?”

  “I don’t follow sports,” the man replies curtly.

  Teemu rolls his eyes so far that Peter thinks he’s going to faint. The man goes into the building and Peter sighs and follows him. The man makes some calls about dealing with Ramona’s body, and Peter and Teemu sit like two naughty schoolboys in the headmaster’s office, passing the time by reading the framed extracts of poems that are popular in death notices that are hanging on the wall. “Don’t say there’s nothing left of the most beautiful butterfly life bestowed,” one says, and Teemu nudges Peter in the side and grins:

  “She’d have hated that one, right? Let’s have that on the grave-stone!”

  Peter bursts out laughing, then has to spend several minutes apologizing to the undertaker, who stares at them and mutters “hooligans” when he thinks they can’t hear him, and then Teemu laughs so loudly that he loses his breath.

  Peter reads the other poems on the wall: “When a mother dies, you lose a point on the compass, you lose every other breath, you lose a glade in the forest. When a mother dies, weeds sprout up everywhere,” one of them says.

  “That doesn’t even rhyme!” Teemu says.

  “Tell me more about your great knowledge of poetry,” Peter teases.

  “Roses are red, violets are blue, give me a beer and I’ll try not to hit you!” Teemu retorts with a grin.

  Peter nods toward a quotation at the far end of the row and says:

  “I think she’d have liked that one.”

  Teemu reads it and for once says nothing. “One day you will be one of the people who lived long ago,” it says. He nods. When one of the old men in the Bearskin was complaining as usual about her raising the price of beer, and she was drunk enough herself to come up with some completely new insults, she replied: “Yeah, yeah, we’re all going to die and before we do, everything we love will be taken from us. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you miserable old cunt!” That would have looked good framed.

  The gray undertaker clears his throat, clearly as keen to get rid of his visitors as they are to leave, and asks when they’d like the funeral to take place. Peter hasn’t even thought about that, but when he counts the days he says instinctively:

  “It has to be this Sunday.”

  The gray man looks horrified.

  “The day after tomorrow? Impossible! It’s customary to wait at least…”

  “It can’t be the week after, because that’s the start of elk hunting season,” Peter says seriously.

  “Nor the week after that, because that’s when the hockey season starts,” Teemu notes, even more seriously.

  “So it has to be this Sunday,” Peter declares.

  The gray man stares down at his diary and manages to say:

  “There’s already one funeral booked for Sunday. Two the same day? In Beartown? This really isn’t the way it usually happens!”

  Teemu kicks Peter’s shin excitedly and giggles:

  “You know what we should put in the death notice? ‘Ramona has left us. Now the beer in Heaven will be more expensive.’ ”

  Peter glances at him, suddenly feeling mischievous in a way he hasn’t for years, and says:

  “Yes, well, death notices are something of a speciality for you. What was it you said in mine?”

  “For Christ’s sake, it wasn’t ME who…,” Teemu snaps, insulted, and Peter laughs so loudly that the gray man from the undertakers looks like he really, really regrets answering his phone this morning.

  * * *

  Amat has played hockey his whole life, and every locker room is a cliché factory, you get so used to most of them that you don’t even hear them, but one which Sune, the former A-team coach, used to shout has stuck: “The only day you can influence is today. You can’t do a damn thing about yesterday and tomorrow, but you can do something about TODAY!” Amat repeats those words quietly and manically to himself as his throat burns and his legs buckle, and all he can think is how long the way back is. Today, only today.

  He stands up in the clearing and looks at the Hollow, the cluster of apartment buildings way below him, it’s survived the storm better than other parts of the town because it was built on the slopes leading down to the old gravel quarry. Things are worse for the Heights, the wealthiest area up on the hill on the far side of town, with its open view of the lake. When the wind arrived it didn’t give a damn if you had money, it tore the roofs off the largest houses and tossed ridiculously expensive gas barbeques through newly cleaned picture windows. It’s the first time Amat can remember that an injustice in Beartown has afflicted those at the top. Every time he feels schadenfreude course warmly though his body about that, he knows that’s how everyone else must have felt this summer when everything went to hell for him.

  He runs down from the hill, stops to breathe with his hands on his knees, then turns and staggers back up once more. “Sports always show us the truth,” he used to be told by all the adult men in Beartown when he was a child. “There’s nowhere to hide in a league table.” They love their sayings, the men around here. “Pressure is a privilege,” “Only losers have excuses,” “Attitude beats class.” The whistle at the end of a game is a simple liberation for them when other aspects of life are full of gray areas. In hockey we know who the winners are, because winners win. That made the sport an easy thing to live inside, even for Amat, until it eventually became unbearable.

  This time last year he was seventeen, everyone knew he had promise but no one had said anything about the NHL, not yet. Beartown is a small club in one of the lower leagues, it takes something remarkable to drag agents and scouts all the way out here. Someone heard about him last autumn, then more during the winter, and all of them in January. He had grown several inches, had put on a few pounds of muscle, and suddenly everything was so simple. He could do whatever he wanted on the ice, as if time moved slower for him than everyone else, he felt immortal. Just three years ago, when he was fifteen, even playing on the junior team with Kevin, Benji, Bobo, and the others seemed like an impossible dream. Then suddenly he was there, and the A-team felt out of reach, and then suddenly he was THERE. Everything moves so fast in hockey, a change of line, a game, a whole season just rushes past. Last winter everything was spinning so fast that in the end he lost his footing.

  It started with love, it always starts that way. He scored goals in every game and old men in the supermarket would stop him and his mother to shake his hand and tell him how proud the town was of him, the sort of men who used to feel the pocket holding their wallet if he got a bit too close to them suddenly started acting like they were family. Naturally they liked squeezing his upper arms and chuckling that he “needed more muscle,” and occasionally they would tease him, saying that “in years gone by we always had five yards of thread ready for each Beartown game, and sometimes that wasn’t enough, so they’d just stick a bit of duct tape over your eyebrow and then you could play again!” They didn’t like the fact that he preferred to jump out of the way rather than get hit on the ice, he was regarded as being a bit weak, but they loved him when he won. They wrinkled their noses when his friends from the Hollow started coming to games, but he just kept on winning and winning and winning. First the kids in the Hollow started yelling “I’m Amat!” when they played out in the street, then the kids in the Heights started to do the same. Eventually the kids over in Hed started doing it as well, even if they didn’t let their parents hear.

  Suddenly everyone started talking about the NHL, life as a pro, all the millions. Amat tried not to listen. “Be grateful and humble,” his mother said when he helped her clean the ice rink late in the evening, but when enough other people are sufficiently convinced that you can go all the way, in the end it’s hard not to start believing in yourself. Then “can” turns into “will,” and then “will” becomes “must.” You must go all the way now. Hope becomes pressure, happiness becomes stress, the old men in the supermarket stopped praising him if he scored two goals because he should have scored three. When the season began they were happy if he could save Beartown Hockey from relegation, but by the time they were top of the league at New Year’s suddenly that wasn’t enough: they started talking about the chances of the club being promoted. In just a few months everyone went from talking about what Amat had given the town to what he owed it. So he bowed his head and trained even harder. Grateful, grateful, grateful. Humble, humble, humble.

  * * *

  He did everything they asked. He did everything right. And everything still went to hell.

  * * *

  Peter and Teemu leave the undertakers after the gray man asked “how payment was to be resolved” and Peter discovers how incredibly quickly and quietly Teemu can sneak out of a building when the question of payment is mentioned. He’s standing by the car smoking when Peter comes out.

  “Can you give me a lift home?” Peter asks.

  Teemu nods down toward the pavement.

  “Sure. Sure. But could you, I mean, can I, erm… all the paperwork at the Bearskin. The bank and… the grown-up stuff. Can you help me with that? And the funeral? Can you… do you know what to do?”

  Peter clears his throat uncomfortably.

  “Shouldn’t you ask someone who was closer to Ramona about that?”

  “Who the hell was closer to her?” Teemu asks bluntly.

  It comes as something of a shock for Peter to realize how lost for words that leaves him. So he doesn’t say no, he doesn’t say anything at all, they just head off to the Bearskin and he texts Kira to say he’s going to be gone a couple more hours, and she just replies: Ok.He fiddles with his phone for several minutes, but doesn’t write anything else.

  Ramona’s accounts look like they’re written in code, to conceal any clues that might lead to the buried treasure, but all they actually lead to are tax debts and missing VAT returns. Peter makes phone call after phone call to resolve one thing at a time, and is surprised by how good it feels: organizing something again. It briefly reminds him so much of what being general manager used to be like that he almost imagines that Ramona has died on purpose just to mess with him.

  “Have you seen this? Obviously your photograph was going to hang in the best spot, Mr. Perfect!” Teemu says, pointing to the row of pictures of former Beartown players on the wall.

  Peter glances at the photograph of himself as a young man, he’s never liked it, it’s from the season they were second best in the country. Only second best. It reminds him of how he never achieved what everyone demanded of him. “One day you will be one of the people who lived long ago,” he thinks to himself, then asks absentmindedly:

  “What did you mean by that? ‘Mr. Perfect’?”

  Teemu chuckles.