“The old boys in the bar call you that, because Ramona always used to go on about how good you were at everything. You’re the reason why we dream impossible dreams in this town—God, the number of times she said that! Because you came from nothing and became the best!”

  Peter blushes so hard he can feel it all the way down to his throat. He’s never heard a less appropriate nickname for anyone in his entire life.

  “Second best,” he murmurs.

  Teemu sees his shoulders slump, so doesn’t say anything else. He finds a photograph near the bottom of one wall and takes it off its hook and places it carefully on the bar instead. It’s of Ramona, she’s standing next to Vidar, they’re both laughing. Peter sees it, and he says nothing either. They clean the bar and sort paperwork for several hours, and when they eventually start to talk again, it’s about hockey. It’s autumn now, and that’s when the new year starts here, a new season when everything is possible again. When you can forget everything that was and can discuss everything you hope for instead. Dream impossible dreams.

  Teemu goes to the bathroom and leaves his phone on the bar. It buzzes as a text message arrives, Peter doesn’t react, he doesn’t even react when it buzzes ten more times. The rumors have begun, people have started talking, but not to Peter, not yet. So he doesn’t know what was agreed at that meeting between Tails and the politicians today. He doesn’t know that every time Teemu’s phone moves a few inches across the bar, the whole community is shifting at the same time. In the wrong direction.

  26 Rumors

  In a corridor in Hed hospital stand a midwife and a fireman. Hannah feels exhausted mentally, Johnny feels exhausted physically. They’re doing what they can not to take it out on each other, but that isn’t really working. It’s the day after the storm and he’s been working in the forest nonstop, so she’s had to work nonstop with everything else. The hospital staff who live over in Beartown can’t get to work because the road is blocked by trees, so Hannah and the rest of the staff who live in Hed are having to work double shifts, but someone has to take care of the children at home, and that’s an impossible equation: Hannah can’t go home until the road is cleared, but Johnny can’t go home because he’s the one clearing the road. That pretty much sums up their relationship, both to each other and to their community. Hannah once heard a marriage guidance counselor on television say that “the important thing in a marriage is to have shared goals and to keep facing the same direction,” but she often thinks that the problem with that is that if you’re both facing the same direction, you never see each other.

  “So what do you want me to do?” Johnny wonders now, grimy and sweaty.

  Hannah just sighs in the absence of a good way to explain. He set out as soon as the wind began to die down, that’s his job, but he’s also offered to help another fireman’s father clear his field tonight after work, and to help the hairdresser in Hed replace a large pane of glass. Hannah can see the obsession in her husband’s eyes, he thinks he’s got to save the world again now, that he can save it. She hates being the person who has to hold him back, but no one else will do that. Everyone thinks he’s Superman.

  “Take a break? Go home and see your children for an hour so they can see you’re still alive? Maybe stop thinking you have to do everything yourself?” Hannah suggests, crumpled and desperate and in serious need of a bath, a glass of wine, and sixteen hours’ sleep.

  She can see how much that last remark hurts him, because she knows he’s working twice as hard as all the others out there with the chain saw to make up for the fact that he wasn’t there yesterday. He had to stay at home when Hannah went off with that crazy eighteen-year-old, Ana, out into the forest to deliver a baby, while his colleagues at the fire station were already out in the town trying to help people. A tree fell on one of them, Bengt, and broke his leg. That’s why all the firemen are at the hospital, a fact that escapes no one because the sound of a dozen men laughing echoes from Bengt’s room every ten seconds. He’s a popular boss, always quick with a joke and slow to chastise, he’s twenty years older than Johnny and was the person who helped get him his job as a fireman. That was in the days when fire stations had to do their own recruitment, not like now when they have to go through a complex application process. Johnny often mutters that the new system is “supposed to make everything so damn equal, so that we employ the same number of useless firemen as good ones, so that no single group in society feels left out.” In his day you got recruited straight out of the hockey team, because then the men who had spent half their lives next to you in the locker room could vouch for the fact that you were the right sort of guy. You can learn to become a fireman, but you’re either the right sort of guy or you aren’t. Bengt knew that, and now Johnny feels he’s let his mentor down. He should have been there last night. All trees that fall are his trees. All broken legs are his fault.

  “I should have been there, I could…,” Johnny begins irritably.

  “You couldn’t have changed anything!” Hannah replies.

  It was the meanest thing she could have said, she knows that, claiming that someone who has devoted his working life to making a difference is powerless.

  “I should…,” he mutters.

  “I know, I know, sorry,” she replies, and they both feel ashamed.

  When they first got together, a hundred years ago, Johnny once said: “I can’t talk about how I feel the whole time, because I’m not an emotional person like you,” and that might be the stupidest thing Hannah has ever heard him say. Not an emotional person? That’s pretty much all he is! Maybe she talks a lot about her feelings, but he’s entirely governed by his, that’s the difference. But that’s what makes him a good fireman, and a good dad too, and it was his emotions she fell in love with. And it’s emotions that have made their sons good hockey players and their daughter a fantastic figure skater, because you can’t get good at a sport if you’re not sensitive enough for it to mean everything to you, if you don’t take every setback personally, if every loss doesn’t feel like dying. So don’t try to talk to Hannah about “emotional people,” because they’re all she lives with.

  “I’ll be careful, there’s no need to worry, we’re mostly just going to be sawing trees and directing traffic…,” Johnny says tentatively.

  “Don’t tell me that! What is it you always tell the kids when there’s a fire? That there’s a greater statistical risk of you being run over attending an accident on the highway than of you dying in a fire!” she retorts.

  “I’ll be home for dinner. I promise. And I can drive the kids to hockey tomorrow,” he says, his voice wavering with guilt.

  “Drive them in what? We need to get the car…,” she sighs, angry at herself for sounding angry with him.

  The van is still parked outside Ana’s house, where she left it during the storm.

  “I’ll get it this evening, one of the guys can drive me over as soon as we’ve cleared the road,” Johnny nods. He hadn’t even thought about the damn van.

  She nods slowly.

  “Sorry, I’m just tired, it’s been a stressful day. Everything’s just so… crazy. Did you get the email from the coaching staff? All the kids are going to be training in…”

  She bites her tongue. Too late. He explodes instantaneously.

  “Over in BEARTOWN’S ice rink, yes! I heard that at the station! What colossal nerve! So now we’re expected to be grateful for their kindness, letting us come and borrow their rink? Of course it withstood the storm, seeing as it was recently renovated at a cost of millions while ours was left to decay! The council should have renovated OUR rink before…”

  He stops himself, he knows she can’t bear it when he gets like this, but Beartown brings out the worst of him in every way.

  “Yes, yes, I know, but it is what it is,” she concludes sternly.

  “It is what it is because we let it! Have you seen where we were sent to clear the roads first? To Beartown, the road to their ice rink and that bastard Tails’s supermarket. As if there aren’t any roads to clear in Hed! As if there’s no one who lives here!”

  He mutters at the start of the sentence, and he mutters at the end of it. The road that always gets prioritized first is actually the road here to the hospital, but she understands what he means. If the council keeps saying that one town is more important than the other, then eventually the inhabitants start to believe it. Especially emotional people. She leans forward, puts her hand on his cheek and whispers:

  “We do what we can. Okay? We just have to ignore the things we can’t control. Concentrate on the things you can actually do something about.”

  He nods, and the corners of his mouth twitch beneath his stubble.

  “Okay, Dalai Lama.”

  She hits his arm and he kisses her a little longer than is probably suitable for a workplace. He whispers that he loves her, and she whispers various indecent things back that leave him so dumbfounded that she bursts out laughing.

  “Okay, take your little playmates out into the forest again before they wreck the whole hospital,” she says, nodding along the corridor where the sound of the firemen’s voices are still echoing from Bengt’s room.

  Johnny obeys. But before he goes he bursts out eagerly:

  “Do you want to hear a funny story? It’s one of Bengt’s!”

  “I haven’t got time, darling…,” she begins, but of course it’s already too late.

  “So, there’s this hunter called Allan who dies in a fire. Have you heard this one? No? Well anyway: Allan’s face is so badly burned that he can’t be identified, so the hospital calls his two best hunting friends and asks them to come to the mortuary. They look at the body but can’t tell from his face if it’s him or not, so they ask the doctors to turn the body over. The doctors are surprised, but they do it, and when Allan’s body is lying there on its front naked, one of his friends says: ‘No, that’s not Allan.’ And the other friend says: ‘No. Definitely not Allan!’ The doctor scratches his head and wonders: ‘How can you be so certain?’ And the friends squirm a bit, then they say: ‘Well, Allan had a particular physical… defect. He had two assholes, you see.’ The doctor stares at the friends: ‘Two assholes?’ They nod: ‘Mmm, two assholes.’ The doctor shakes his head and says: ‘Are you CERTAIN about that?’ The friends look a bit hesitant now, but then they say: ‘Well… we haven’t actually SEEN them… but ever since we were children, people have always said: ‘Look! Here comes Allan with the two assholes!’ ”

  Hannah has heard it before, but she still laughs, not with Johnny but at him.

  “Good, isn’t it?” he giggles, so joyously that it’s infectious.

  “Just GO!” she sighs, and the air turns into laughter on its way out.

  So at last he leaves, taking all the other firemen with him, and their laughter lingers long after they are gone. They’re like brothers, it drives Hannah mad but also makes her jealous, the fact that they have a whole extra family. Most of them have been friends since they were kids, and if you have friends like that you never really need to grow up. They went to school together and played hockey together and now they fish and hunt and talk about cars they can’t fix and women they don’t understand and compete at bench press and are colleagues and dads and firemen together. A group.

  “Are you coming out for a smoke?” a nurse asks as she hurries past, obviously a joke because she knows Hannah gave it up years ago.

  “If I ever start again, I promise I’ll come with you!” Hannah smiles.

  She slips into the gossip swamp instead, or the “staffroom” as some people still call it. As usual, she just has time to get herself a cup of coffee but has no time to drink it before someone calls her out again, but she’s there long enough to hear the others talking. About hockey, of course, but what else? There was a different tone to it today. This is a mixed workplace, half the staff live in Beartown, half in Hed, everyone has learned to skirt around sports, the way people presumably do with religion or politics in other places around the world. But today the Beartown half of the staff are missing, so today a lot of people are saying what they really feel.

  It starts with a complaint about Hed’s youth team having to train in Beartown. Then someone says there’s a rumor that the council aren’t going to rebuild Hed’s ice rink at all. Then someone else says she’s heard that the politicians have a secret plan to merge the two clubs, now that they have an opportunity to do it.

  “Which one are they going to close down?” someone wonders.

  “Which one do you think? The one with the least money!” someone else exclaims.

  “So where does Beartown’s money come from, then? Wasn’t it the council that paid to have their rink renovated? Are we in Hed supposed to pay taxes to support THEIR club?”

  Hannah waits silently by the coffee machine, she knows where this discussion is going, it’s been going on forever but has gotten worse recently. Hannah wishes she didn’t agree with them, that she could be the voice of reason here, but the truth is that she’s merely silent. Because she gets it. The hospital is always weighed down by rumors of more cutbacks, maybe complete closure, so if the council even threatens to remove the hockey club it would probably be best for all concerned if they stop clearing the road to Beartown altogether. And maybe build a wall instead.

  Hannah is a hypocrite, of course, she knows that. Wouldn’t all the taxpayers’ money that’s been sunk into Hed Hockey over the years have done more good here at the hospital? Obviously. But when her own children are on the ice nothing else exists, the world fades away, and what would she sacrifice for that? Stupid question. What wouldn’t she sacrifice? Besides, the taxpayers’ money from ice hockey would never end up at the hospital instead, it never does, it would have gone to wind farms or some political inquiry into how to teach badgers to express their feelings through watercolors or some other nonsense. At least hockey gives some sort of return. Something for the whole town, old and young, to be passionate about and unite around: the fact that everyone hates Beartown. Naturally there are people in Hed who don’t like hockey, but that’s regarded almost as a sexual perversion here: what you do in the comfort of your own home is up to you, but please just keep it to yourself.

  Someone in the staffroom has a brother-in-law who’s talked about “Beartown Business Park,” she hears.

  “They’re trying to keep it secret, but they’re offering every business in Hed offices there now! And then what’s going to be left here?”

  “Did you see that the hockey association has changed the A-team’s match schedule because of the storm? They’re not sure if teams from the south will be able to get here, so guess who we’re playing first? Beartown!”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “What an opportunity, though! They can hardly close down a winning club, so if we WIN that one, then…”

  “It won’t be enough just to win against a shit club like that! We need to CRUSH them!”

  “It’ll be war!”

  “Hope that asshole Amat doesn’t play, then…”

  “What if he managed to break his leg? Maybe he could have an accident?”

  They laugh as if that was funny, and so it goes on. Hannah doesn’t have time to listen to more, someone calls her name and she leaves her coffee untouched on the counter and runs out. She has time to hope that her idiot sons won’t hear all the rumors before they’re due to train over in Beartown tomorrow, because then there would no doubt be the usual trouble. Above all, she hopes that Johnny, the biggest idiot of them all, doesn’t hear the rumors.

  * * *

  But of course it’s already too late for that.

  27 Dads

  The train from the capital drills its way slowly northward, stopping at station after station after station in communities that could all have been Beartown or Hed, this country is full of them. Most of the names appear and are forgotten just as quickly, but a few have clung to the national consciousness thanks to some local speciality: a cake, a music festival, a water park, perhaps a prison. Or a hockey team. Anything that makes people say, “Ah, you’re the ones who have…” when you tell them where you were born. Anything that puts a place on the map.

  As the train moves north, the worse the damage from the storm is, and the denser the forest, the more obvious the destruction. At one station a few hours into the interior, whose name everyone has forgotten before the train has even rolled past the sign, an old man climbs aboard. No one pays him any attention apart from the eighteen-year-old girl in the seat opposite his, she immediately stands up politely and helps him lift his suitcase up into the luggage rack without him even having to ask.

  “Thank you, young lady, thank you very much, very much indeed!” he says, like a relic from a black-and-white matinee.

  Her smile makes her look younger than she is. The way he uses his umbrella as a walking stick does the opposite for him.

  “Just say when you’re getting off and I’ll help you get it down,” Maya smiles considerately.

  “Thank you, that would be kind of you. The train probably won’t be going all the way now after the storm, so I’ll most likely have to get off at the same station as you and catch the bus from there…”

  She stiffens and he sees that he’s scared her, so he gives an explanatory nod toward her woolly hat:

  “The bear from Beartown, I recognize that. I assume that’s where you’re going?”

  Maya breathes out, a little too quickly, embarrassed at her paranoia.

  “Yes, yes, of course… it’s my dad’s. I don’t usually wear it. I just thought I would now that I’m going… home. Colder up there.”

  Her face breaks into an embarrassed smile. The man nods understandingly.

  “One gets more patriotic about where one is from the farther away from home one is.”

  She runs her fingertips over the hat.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true. I just didn’t think it applied to me.”