She glued it back together again, and no one in the family dared speak to her until she was finished. Then her husband sat down beside her on the floor, as usual, and whispered: “Don’t be cross with me, I can’t bear it when you’re cross with me.” Her voice felt like it was breaking when she managed to reply: “It wasn’t even your fire, darling, it wasn’t even HERE!” He leaned forward cautiously, she felt his breath on the palms of her hands as he kissed them, then he said: “Any fire is my fire.” How she hated and worshipped the idiot for that. “Your job is to come home. Your only job is to come home,” she reminded him, and he smiled: “I’m here, aren’t I?” She hit him as hard as she could on his shoulder. She’s met so many idiotic men who tell themselves that they’re the sort who would be first into a burning building to rescue other people, but her idiot is the sort of idiot who actually does that. So they have the same argument every time he goes, because every time she gets just as angry with herself for getting so scared. It always ends with her breaking something. It was a vase that time, and today it was her own knuckles. When the storm began and he immediately went to charge his phone so he was ready, she slammed her fist down onto the sink. Now she’s rubbing the bruises and swearing. She wants him to go, but she hates it at the same time, and this is how it comes out.

  He comes into the kitchen, she feels his beard against the back of her neck. He thinks he’s so tough and hard, but really he’s more sensitive than anyone, that’s why he never yells back at her. The storm beats against the window and they both know that the phone will soon ring and he’ll have to leave and then she’ll get angry again. “You need to get worried the day she stops being angry with you, because that will mean she doesn’t love you anymore,” Johnny’s dad told him when they got married. “A long fuse but a lot of powder in that woman, so watch out!” his dad had said with a laugh.

  Hannah may be married to an idiot, but she’s hardly that much better herself, her moods can drive Johnny to the brink of exhaustion, and her chaotic behavior drives him mad. He panics when things aren’t in the right place so he knows where everything is, that goes for the fire engine and his wardrobe and the kitchen drawer, and he married someone who doesn’t even think you need to have fixed sides in bed. Hannah went and lay down on one side one night, then on the other side the next night, and he didn’t even know where to start with his frustration. Who doesn’t have fixed sides in bed? And she walks into the house with her shoes on, and doesn’t rinse the sink after her, and swaps the butter knives and cheese slicers around so that every damn breakfast turns into a treasure hunt. She’s worse than the kids.

  But now, as she reaches up with her hand and runs her fingers through his beard and his hands clasp together on her stomach, none of that matters. They’ve gotten used to each other. She’s accepted that life with a fireman has a rhythm that other people can never understand. For instance, she’s learned to pee in the dark, because the first few times after they moved in together when she turned the light on in the middle of the night, he woke with a start, thinking it was the light at the station alerting them to a call out. He flew out of bed and got dressed and made it all the way out to the car before she caught up with him wearing just her underwear, wondering what the hell he was doing. It took several more confused nights before she accepted that he wasn’t able to stop behaving like that, and realized that deep down she didn’t really want him to either.

  He’s the sort of person who runs toward a fire. No hesitation, no questions, he just runs. People like that are rare, but you know who they are when you see them.

  * * *

  Ana is eighteen years old. She peers out of the window of her dad’s house on the outskirts of Beartown. She’s limping slightly because she recently injured her knee at martial arts training after a boy the same age said something about girls not being able to kick properly. She cracked his ribs with a kick, then kneed him in the head, and even if his head was empty it was still hard, so now she’s limping. She’s always had a lightning-fast body but slow judgment, she’s bad at reading people but good at reading nature. She can see the trees moving outside the window now, she noticed them this morning and knew that the storm was on its way long before most other people. Children of dads who are good hunters eventually learn to feel that sort of thing, and there’s no better hunter around here than her dad. That man has spent so much time in the forest that he often forgets the difference between a hunting radio and a telephone, and says “over” at the end of each sentence when the phone rings at home. So Ana learned to crawl and walk in that forest, it was the only way she could be with him. The forest was her playground and her school, he taught her everything about wild creatures and the invisible forces of the earth and the air. That was his gift of love to her. When she was little he showed her how to track prey, how to shoot, and when she got older he took her along on searches when the council called him after accidents involving game animals, when wounded animals needed to be found and put down. If you live surrounded by forest you learn to protect it, but also how it can protect you. In the end you look forward to the same things as the plants, like spring and warmth, but you also fear the same things: fire, of course, but now, almost even more, the wind. Because the wind can’t be stopped or extinguished, tree trunks and skin don’t stop it, the wind crushes and snaps and kills whatever it wants.

  So Ana could hear the storm in the treetops and sense it in her chest when everything was still calm and quiet out there. She filled all the tubs and buckets with water, fetched the paraffin stove from the cellar and put new batteries in the headlamps, dug out candles and matches. And finally she chopped wood, mechanically and determinedly for several hours, and hauled it into the main room. Now, as the storm reaches Beartown, she closes the windows and doors, noisily does the dishes in the kitchen, and plays her best friend Maya’s songs on the stereo, because her voice calms Ana, and because the sound of Ana doing everyday things calms the dogs. When she was little they used to protect her, but now it’s the other way around. If you ask Maya who Ana is, she’ll reply: “A fighter.” But she doesn’t just say that because Ana can beat the shit out of anyone, but because life has tried to beat the shit out of Ana since she was born, only it never stood a chance. Ana is unbreakable.

  She’s in the last year of high school in Beartown, but she’s been an adult for a long time, the daughters of parents who take refuge in the bottom of bottles grow up faster. When Ana was little her dad taught her to watch the fire in the open hearth, to put more wood on at just the right time, to make sure it never burned out completely. When he has one of his episodes, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, he watches over his drinking in the same way. He never gets mean, never even gets loud, he’s just never properly sober. He’ll sleep through the whole of this storm, snoring in his chair in the living room surrounded by Ana’s martial arts trophies that he’s so proud of, and all the photographs of her as a child, which she has so carefully cut her mother out of. He’s too drunk to hear the phone ring. Ana is washing up, and turns up the volume of the stereo, the dogs are lying at her feet, they don’t hear it either. The telephone rings and rings and rings.

  * * *

  Eventually the doorbell rings instead.

  * * *

  “It’s nothing to worry about, just a bit of wind,” Johnny whispers. Hannah tries to believe that. He’s not going off to fight a fire this time, he and the other firemen are setting out with chain saws to clear a path through the fallen trees so that the other emergency vehicles and responders can get through. He often complains that being a fireman means being a lumberjack ninety percent of the time, but she knows he still takes pride in that. He belongs to this forest.

  She turns around and stretches up on tiptoe and nips him on the cheek with her teeth, and his knees buckle. He’s biggest and strongest pretty much everywhere he goes, but no matter what other people might think, he knows that if the children were on the other side of a fire, she’d be quicker than him. She’s complicated and unruly and argumentative and really not very easy to please, but he loves her most of all for her brutally uncompromising protective instinct. “We help those we can,” she always whispers in his ear after the very worst days, when he’s lost someone at work, or when she has. As a fireman he has to be prepared to see death in every stage of life, but as a midwife she sees it in the very worst moments: the first seconds of life. When she says those words they are both a consolation and a way of reminding them both of their duty. We help if we can, when we can, to the extent that we can. It’s a particular sort of job, but also a particular sort of person.

  Slowly he lets go of her, he never gets used to the fact that a messy troublemaker like her can still turn him upside down. He goes and checks that his phone is charging and she watches him for a long time, she never gets used to the fact that a nagging pedant like him can still, after twenty years, be the sort of person she wants to rip the clothes off of if he so much as looks at her.

  She hears the phone out in the hall. It’s time. She closes her eyes and curses to herself, promises herself that she’s not going to fight with him. He never promises to come home safely, because that would be bad luck. Instead he always says that he loves her, over and over again, and she replies: “Good thing too.” The phone goes on ringing, she thinks he must be in the bathroom seeing as he hasn’t answered it, so she yells his name because the windows are already rattling loudly from the wind. The children are lined up on the stairs to give him a good-bye hug. Tess has her arms around her three younger brothers: Tobias, Ted, Ture. Their dad thinks it’s ridiculous that they all have names that start with the same letter, but when he and their mother first fell in love, he agreed that she could name the children if he could name the dogs. They never got a dog. She’s always been a better negotiator.

  Ture is crying into Tess’s sweater, none of his siblings tell him to stop. They used to cry too when they were little, because you don’t just have one member of the family who’s a fireman, it doesn’t work like that, the whole family is in the fire service. They don’t have the luxury of thinking “it doesn’t happen to us,” they have to know better. So the parents’ agreement is simple: never put themselves in danger at the same time. The children must always have one parent left if the worst were to happen.

  Johnny is standing in the hall, raising his voice to speak into the phone, in the end he’s shouting, but there’s no one there. He thinks he must have pressed the wrong button by mistake so he checks the call log, but no one has called since he rang his mother ten minutes ago. It takes several rings before he realizes that it isn’t his phone ringing, it’s hers. Hannah picks it up, slightly confused, stares at the number, hears her boss’s voice at the other end of the line. Thirty seconds later she starts running.

  * * *

  Do you want to understand people? Really understand them? Then you need to know all the best that we are capable of.

  4 Savages

  Benji will be woken up by a bang. He won’t know where he is when he sits up, his hangover will mess up all sense of scale and he’ll feel too big for the room, as if he’s woken up in a doll’s house. That’s nothing unusual, it’s been going on for a long time, every morning these days he seems to open his eyes surprised that he’s still alive.

  It will be the day after the storm, but he won’t know that yet, he won’t know if he’s forgotten what he was dreaming, or if he’s still dreaming. His long hair will hang down in front of his eyes, every limb, every muscle will be aching, his body still has the hard musculature of a life in and around hockey, but he’s twenty now and hasn’t worn a pair of skates for almost two years. He smokes too much and eats too little. He will try to get out of bed but will stumble onto one knee, the empty bottles of alcohol will roll across the floor among the cigarette papers and lighters and scraps of tinfoil, and his headache will hit him so hard that even with his palms clamped to his ears he won’t be able to tell if the noise is coming from outside or within himself. Then there will be another bang, the walls will shake so hard that he crouches down, afraid that the window above the bed is going to shatter and bury him beneath splinters of glass. And in the corner of the room his phone will be ringing and ringing and ringing.

  Two years ago he left Beartown, and ever since then he has been traveling. He left the place where he had lived his whole life, and took trains and boats and hitchhiked for lifts in trucks until the towns along the way no longer had hockey teams. He has gotten lost on purpose, and has destroyed himself in every way imaginable, but he has also found things he didn’t know he had been longing for. Glances and hands and breath on his neck. Dance floors with no questions. It took chaos to set him free, loneliness to stop him being alone. He hasn’t had a single thought about turning back, going home, home could just as well be a different planet now.

  Is he happy? If you’re asking that, perhaps you don’t understand him at all. Happiness was never what he hoped for.

  He will stand at the window of the small hotel room, hungover and barely awake, looking down on the world outside without being a part of it. Two cars will have collided in the street below, that was the bang that woke him. People screaming. Benji’s ears will ring. Ring, ring, ring, until he eventually realizes that it’s his phone.

  “Hello?” he will manage to say, his voice hoarse from not having been used for many hours, and used far too much before that.

  “It’s me,” his eldest sister will say at the other end, heavy and tired.

  “Adri? What’s happened?”

  She’ll choose her words carefully, he’s too far away for her to be able to hold him the way a sister wants to hold her little brother when she has to say this. He’ll listen in silence, he’s spent his whole life training not to let on whenever something dies inside him.

  “Dead?” he will finally manage to say, and his sister will have to repeat herself, as if he has forgotten parts of the language.

  In the end he will simply whisper “okay,” and the crackle on the line as he breathes out will be the only indication of the little pressure wave as his heart breaks.

  He will end the call and pack his bag. It won’t take long, he’s been traveling light, always ready to leave everything behind.

  “What’s going on? What time is it?” another voice will whisper, from the bed.

  “I have to go,” Benji says, already on his way out through the door, his chest still bare. The large tattoo of a bear on his arm seems paler after months in the sun, and his many scars glow pink against his suntanned skin, the way they do on savages. More on his knuckles than on his face, because he’s better at being savage than most other people.

  “Go where?”

  “Home.”

  The voice will yell something after him, but Benji will already be halfway down the stairs. He could call back and promise to call the man upstairs, but if there’s one thing Benji learned where he grew up, it’s that he can’t be bothered to lie to anyone anymore.

  5 Midwives

  A storm sweeps in across two hockey towns tonight, felling trees and people. Tomorrow a young man and a young woman, he with a bear tattooed on his arm, she with a guitar and a rifle tattooed on hers, will turn homeward to attend a funeral. That’s how everything starts this time. In communities surrounded by wilderness people are connected by invisible threads, but also by sharp hooks, so when one turns too suddenly, it isn’t always just their shirt that someone else loses. Sometimes it rips the heart out of all of us.

  * * *

  Johnny runs through the house in Hed with his wife, up the stairs and into the bedroom, and she tells him the basics as she packs her work bag: a young couple from a farm north of Beartown is expecting their first child, and when her water broke they set off from home for the hospital in Hed, unaware of how violent the storm was going to be. They tried cutting through the small roads over to the east instead of taking the main road, and were in the middle of the forest between the two towns when they swerved to avoid a fallen tree. They didn’t see the next tree fall, and now the car is pinned down somewhere out there. They managed to call the hospital, but there were no ambulances nearby and no one knows if they’d even be able to get through the chaos now that the forest roads are impassable. The best hope for the woman and baby in the car is if a midwife who isn’t on duty tonight and who lives close enough can get herself there, even if she has to walk the last part of the way on foot.

  Johnny stands by the bedroom door, wanting to ask his wife if she’s completely mad, but after twenty years he knows what the answer would be. She turns around so abruptly that her forehead hits his chest, and his arms fold tenderly around her and she disappears into him.