“You’re the only good person I know,” his sister used to say as she ruffled his hair.

  She was the only person who talked to him. No one at school did, and his parents spent so much time talking to God that they didn’t even speak to each other anymore. His sister and Matteo were their miracles, their mother had had four miscarriages and had prayed to God for a healthy child, and then she had her daughter. A few years later Matteo arrived. Their mom was so frightened of losing them that she didn’t even dare feel happy. Heaven had demonstrated its power to her, and after that she spent her whole life in irreconcilable fear that it might take everything back at any moment. She repeated the same thing time after time to her son:

  “You must grow up to be a great man of God. Not a sinner! A man of God!”

  Matteo never disagreed, but one night when they were alone his sister snapped:

  “You know Mom’s mentally ill, don’t you?”

  Matteo had never been angrier than he was then, but not really at his sister. Most of all he was angry with his dad, who did nothing to help his mother, and who was just silent. He went to work, came home, ate dinner, read books, went to bed. Silence, nothing but silence.

  “You know I’ve got to get away from here, don’t you? I need to live, Matteo!” his sister whispered the night she left Beartown.

  She promised she was going to be rich one day, and would come back and fetch him. He waited. Now she’s on her way home, but not to fetch him, and once again he’s mostly angry with his dad. If his dad had just been a different sort of dad, everything would have been different. If he had been a powerful man, a rich man, a hockey man. Then Matteo’s sister would also have gotten help, then people would have believed her, stood on her side. Then she would have been alive.

  * * *

  Men of God can’t save anyone. Not here.

  29 Hockey guys

  Amat runs out into the forest, as far away as he can, but it doesn’t make any difference. He never ends up alone.

  In hockey everyone loves talking about players’ heads: you need to have a “winning mind-set,” a “strong head.” If you play hockey as a child you will be told that you need to be “mentally strong,” but very little about what that actually means. You will hear a lot about injuries and pain, but nothing about the sort of pain that doesn’t show up in X-rays. You will learn all about how the different parts of the body function except the part that controls everything else.

  Amat runs deeper and deeper into the forest, but he still can’t escape the voices inside his head:

  “Sure, he’s good, but isn’t he too small?”

  “What about his frame of mind? You can never know about that. After all, he isn’t… well, you know… he doesn’t exactly come from a hockey family.”

  “But he’s got good hands! And he’s faster than Kevin!”

  “Maybe, but Kevin’s got a strong head. He’s got a winning mind-set.”

  Amat heard them everywhere, at the ice rink and in the supermarket and at school, and he knew perfectly well what “hockey family” was code for. They liked it when he scored goals for their team, but they wished he looked like all the other hockey guys, lived in the same smart residential area, laughed at the same jokes. They wished he was Kevin, they only let him be Amat as long as he was winning. So that’s what he did. Win, win, win.

  By New Year’s Beartown was top of the league and Hed was bottom. Throughout the whole of Amat’s childhood Hed had been better, richer, bigger, and more powerful, but he became the embodiment of the change. His shoulders ached every morning, at first from the exertion of training, later from the weight of expectation. The caretaker let him into the rink every morning but Amat spent less and less time on the ice and more and more in the gym. He knew everyone said he was too small for the NHL, so he battled with the barbells until he could hardly walk home, thinking the whole time of all the other clichés he had heard from coaches and general managers and other old men: “We don’t judge competitions at the start but at the finishing line! Attitude beats class! Desire beats talent!”

  One night he was so exhausted when he left the rink that as he stepped through the snowdrifts he slipped and fell in the darkness. His wrist didn’t hurt much at first, but the more he trained, the more it swelled up. He didn’t say anything to anyone. No NHL club drafts an injured player. He has to play, has to win, he can’t disappoint everyone now. Not just the old men in the supermarket, but all his friends in the Hollow, the ones who made him promise to buy them fancy watches when he turned pro. Without them he wouldn’t be here. One summer a few years ago they took turns running up the hill behind the apartment blocks with him, so he wouldn’t give up. His dreams became their dreams. He needs to repay that. Needs to repay his mom. His coach. The town. Everyone.

  In one game he scored three goals but retreated from one tackle. In the locker room the other players joked:

  “You know they tackle harder in the NHL, right, princess?”

  When he came out of the shower there was a box of tampons by his locker. It was only a joke, of course, but that’s how it always starts.

  In the next match Amat took another blow to his wrist. The pain was so intense that it became claustrophobic, he took painkillers but they didn’t even take the edge off it, so that evening he went to see a girl he knew in the Hollow whose brother sold strong liquor. When she came back with a bottle she said:

  “If I tell my brother it’s for you, you’ll get it for nothing. He loves you! He keeps going on about how someone from the Hollow’s going to the NHL!”

  Amat shook his head. She added, more seriously:

  “My brother says all the rich people in town are trying to exploit you. They only care about you because you can make money for them. Don’t let anyone blow you out, okay?”

  “Okay,” Amat promised.

  “Don’t say okay if you don’t mean it!” she snapped.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Amat smiled sadly, and she smiled back sadly, and said something he hadn’t been able to forget:

  “You know all the little kids in the Hollow look at you and think that if you can be someone, then so can they? So don’t fuck that up, okay? Be someone!”

  She said it to pick him up, she couldn’t know that it only weighed him down even more. It wasn’t a pep talk, it was another rock in his backpack. Amat went home and drank away the pain in his wrist so he could sleep, and hid the half-empty bottle in the hockey bag in his wardrobe so his mother wouldn’t find it, and within two weeks it was harder for him to hide the empty bottles than the full ones.

  He doesn’t remember exactly when the phone started ringing. At first it was just one or two agents, then suddenly it felt like there was a new voice every time. They told him he could get drafted. “Could” became “would,” which soon became “must.” Amat hadn’t been to ice hockey academy, he hadn’t been scouted by a bigger club, but he had the raw talent. They said he was a Cinderella story. “You came from nowhere, but you can go all the way!” Shall. Must. The agents told him to sign a contract with them, not to worry about anything, “just leave it all to us.” Amat had met men like that before. When Kevin was the town’s big star and Amat knew the truth about the rape, Kevin’s dad showed up in his flashy car and tried to buy his silence. The men calling now sounded like him, a year ago they didn’t even know who Amat was, but now he was suddenly a salable asset. He looked up their names on the internet and found hundreds of rumors about dodgy activities: agents signing contracts with kids before they were even teenagers, other agents who gave junior coaches in small clubs well-paid jobs out of the blue if they agreed to bring certain players to their agencies, parents being given paybacks in secret. All the men on the phone sounded the same when they assured him that all of that only applied to other agents, never them, so how was Amat supposed to know who was reliable and who was full of crap?

  Soon he had to take his skates out of his hockey bag to make space for more empty bottles. His wrist hurt in the evening, his head hurt in the morning, and in the end he stopped answering the phone altogether.

  The local paper wrote about his chances in the NHL draft, the locker room changed, the jokes became serious. If he lost the puck or missed a shot, there was mockery. It wasn’t enough for him to be best in games anymore, he needed to be invincible. The voices in his head yelled: “You’re a fake, you’ve just been lucky, you’ve just been up against bad defenders.”

  The ice became quicksand, and the harder he struggled the slower he became. Late one evening when he had been training alone in the gym and his top was black with sweat, the caretaker came in and apologized for having to lock up and go home. He apologized. “I’m proud of you,” the old man said when they parted in the parking lot. To him it was just a kind thing to say, but to Amat it was another hundred tons of rock in his backpack.

  Spring came, the snow melted, and every inch of pavement that appeared was a day closer to the draft in June. Amat had nightmares, sometimes he woke up to find himself having a nosebleed, he started to get migraines. What if they discovered he’d lied about his injury? He scored two goals in games when he should have scored three, one when he should have scored two, eventually none at all. Everyone felt qualified to give him advice, every bastard knew what he ought to do. In the newspaper Beartown Hockey was described as a “talent factory” and Amat as a “home-grown product.” One day his mother came home from the supermarket and said that Tails, who owned it, had said to her, “You need to tell Amat that even if he gets drafted, he should demand to be allowed to play a couple more seasons for Beartown! That would be in his best interests! He can stay here, Fatima, so that he develops, tell him that!” She looked almost frightened when she passed on the message.

  “He talked about you like you were a… a product in the shop… as if you had a barcode.”

  Amat lay in bed with his laptop that night and saw somewhere on the internet that someone had said that if he got drafted, Beartown would get three hundred thousand dollars from the NHL. Three hundred thousand DOLLARS. But he also read: “After the draft, the NHL club, in agreement with the player’s agent, often lets the player have one or more seasons in a lower league so that he can develop before he gets taken across to North America.” That was why Tails said that, Beartown wanted the money for Amat but they also wanted him to carry on winning for them. His mom was right. He was just a barcode.

  * * *

  The train stops and a group of boys aged around fifteen get on. Maya comes back from the bathroom and stares at them a little too long, and blushes when she realizes that. The man opposite raises an eyebrow over his annual reports when she sits down.

  “Do you know them? I can move if you’d like to sit…”

  “No, no, I don’t know them. I just know thousands of guys exactly like them. You know, hockey guys…”

  “How do you know they’re hockey guys?”

  “Are you kidding? The same sneakers, the same track suits, the same back-to-front caps. The same confused expression because they’ve all taken too many pucks to the head. You can recognize hockey guys anywhere…”

  The man chuckles. Then he asks, as if he’s just thinking out loud and there isn’t a deeper meaning to the question:

  “So is your dad like that as well? A hockey guy?”

  He sees her eyelashes flutter, very briefly. Her smile becomes less genuine and more of a defense mechanism.

  “He probably used to be. But he’s old now.”

  “So now he’s a… hockey old man?” The man smiles back.

  She shakes her head, almost as if she feels guilty.

  “No, no, he’s finished with hockey. He just works with Mom now.”

  The man nods as he looks down at the annual accounts. He glances at the boys a little farther away. They’re already so big, so loud, so used to being physically privileged: everywhere belongs to them.

  “Can I ask a question that might sound stupid?”

  “Sure,” Maya nods.

  “Do you think all hockey guys look the same to make it harder for someone who’s different to break into the group? Or do you think they look the same because they’re afraid of being different themselves?”

  Maya says nothing for so long that the man starts to worry that he’s gone too far, that she’s seen through him. Perhaps it was too obviously a journalist’s question. But just as he’s about to dismiss it with a little joke she looks out through the window and replies:

  “Everyone involved in hockey talks about ‘fighting.’ They learn it as children: ‘Get in there and fight.’ And that kind of sticks around in their brains, so when they get older they still behave as though they’re under attack. They’re still aggressive, as if they’re trying… to overcompensate.”

  “Overcompensate for what?” the man asks.

  Maya meets his gaze.

  “Have you ever been to a hockey game? Have you sat close to the ice and seen how fast it moves? How hard the collisions are? The injuries they get? If the opponents can see that a player is afraid, they go for him ten times as hard. So they learn to look like they aren’t afraid of anything. Like…”

  She falls silent. The man fills in, tentatively:

  “Warriors?”

  “Yes. More or less.”

  “Perhaps that’s why they want to look the same off the ice as well. To remind themselves and everyone else that they’re an army?”

  The girl lowers her gaze and smiles vaguely.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’m just talking nonsense.”

  The man is worried he’s pushed her too hard, so he changes focus by asking if she can help him get his suitcase down from the rack. He has his medication there, he says, breathing heavily to remind her that he’s just a harmless old man. It works.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “I’ve just been alive too long,” the old man grunts.

  “You sound like Ramona,” she smiles sadly.

  “Who’s that?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know.

  “The person whose funeral it is.”

  “Oh, your dad’s friend? Was she interested in hockey too?”

  “Interested? Obsessed! She was even on the committee of the club at the end.”

  “Really? So she worked with your dad?”

  “No. He stopped being general manager the same year she was elected onto the committee. But he probably saw her more after that than he did before, Mom says he used to stop off at the Bearskin most days on his way home from the office. He probably missed having someone to talk hockey with, no one in Mom’s office cares about sports…”

  Maya laughs. So does the man opposite her. He excuses himself and makes his way to the bathroom, limping more than he needs to. Once he’s closed the door he writes in his notebook:

  “Through Ramona, Peter still had influence in the club, even after officially stepping down as general manager.”

  Further down he writes: “When Maya talks about hockey guys as warriors, I think about the soldier I interviewed in Afghanistan, who said his greatest fear wasn’t death, the worst thing would be not being allowed to be a soldier anymore. His worst fear was being excluded. What is a soldier without an army?”

  He taps his pen thoughtfully against the notebook for a long time before he writes at the bottom of the page:

  “What is a man in Beartown without his hockey club?”

  * * *

  One day, early in the spring, the local paper wrote that the police had conducted drug raids on the other side of the yard that Amat and Fatima can see from their kitchen window. When Amat bought more drink from the girl that evening, she told him they’d taken her brother. “When the central heating doesn’t work and we call the housing association, it takes six months before they send anyone, but if you sell two grams of hash the cops show up with dogs within five minutes,” she says, quivering with equal measures of despair and rage.

  The following evening Peter Andersson was sitting in the kitchen with his mom when Amat got home. He evidently hadn’t come of his own volition, Amat realized that Tails and the other sponsors had sent him because they thought he could “talk some sense” into Amat. As if Amat owed him everything as well. Peter was “concerned,” he said. Staring at the floor, Amat promised that there was no need for him to be. “Peter thinks you should talk to one of the agents who called, one he knows…,” his mother said, but what did she know? What had Peter said to her? Had he made her feel guilty because Peter used to get hold of equipment for Amat when he was younger? So was Amat expected to pay his debt now or something? “Okay, I’ll think about it,” Amat promised tersely, just to stop his mother feeling sad.

  It could have stopped there, but when Peter was about to leave, he said quietly so Amat’s mother wouldn’t hear: “I can smell the alcohol on you, Amat, I only want to help…” It wasn’t Peter’s fault, everything just hit Amat all at once then. He looked Peter in the eye and snapped: “How many other people in the Hollow are you trying to help? Do you help anyone who isn’t good at hockey? Stop lying! You just want to profit from me like all the others!” He stared into Peter’s eyes when he ran out of air. The former general manager walked slowly out through the door and Amat slammed it behind him. That evening he asked the girl in the Hollow if she could get hold of anything apart from alcohol. She came back with pills. He slept the whole night through and had less pain in his wrist when he woke up.

  * * *

  The guys on the train are engaged in some sort of contest, showing each other things on their phones and howling at private jokes. Everything is a contest for them, Maya knows, because Beartown is full of men who used to be that sort of fifteen-year-old and never really stopped. As adults they just compete to see who has the biggest house, the newest car, the most expensive hunting and fishing equipment, or whose son is best on the boys’ team. Ana used to say that all hockey guys really only play for their dad, to live up to his expectations or to prove that he was wrong, to make him proud or to tease the shit out of him. Perhaps she understood them because she had all those dads rolled into one and the same man at home herself.