“Now who’s being silly?” Her mother smiles.

  “Seriously? All the boys here are so immature!” Tess insists, and at that moment a shout from Tobias’s bedroom fills the house because Ture and Ted have run upstairs and woken him up with water pistols. Tess shrugs her shoulders at her mother as if to say “prove me wrong!,” but Hannah doesn’t notice because she’s staring out of the window.

  “What the…?” she begins.

  “WHAT THE HELL???” Johnny fills in from the yard.

  Out on the road their van is approaching, at speed. Hannah and Tess make it outside onto the steps just as it skids to a halt by the fence and a crazy eighteen-year-old jumps out.

  “ANA!” Hannah exclaims with such delight that Tess is taken aback.

  “What the hell?” Johnny wonders once more.

  Hannah wraps her arms around the strange girl and introduces her.

  “This is Ana! Who helped me in the forest during the storm!”

  Johnny’s face softens.

  “Damn. I know your dad. How’s he doing?”

  Ana doesn’t answer, just tosses the keys to the van to him.

  “I thought I might as well drive this thing back here seeing as our yard isn’t exactly a parking lot. I checked the engine this morning, and you should probably take it to a garage to get…”

  “OKAY! THANKS!” Johnny interrupts, so affronted that Hannah bursts out laughing.

  “Come inside, Ana! Would you like coffee?”

  But Ana glances at Tess and sees the wariness in the daughter’s eyes, that sort of girl doesn’t like girls like Ana, so she replies curtly:

  “No, I have to get home to the dogs.”

  “We can… drive you home. Wait here and I’ll just get the boys,” Johnny says, politely but still a little insulted.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll run back,” Ana says.

  “Run?! To Beartown?” he repeats.

  “It’s hardly that far. Anyway, I need to exercise my knee, I injured it,” she nods.

  “What happened to your knee?” Hannah asks.

  “I hit it.”

  “On what?”

  “A boy’s forehead.”

  “You did what?” Johnny exclaims.

  “He was being a real dick, so he deserved it!” Ana says defensively.

  Hannah laughs again and hugs her once more, and insists that she come back and have dinner with them one evening. Ana gives a halfhearted promise and glances at Tess again, she’s a year younger and has white trousers and hair that looks like cartoon hair. Ana’s wearing a pair of jeans so torn that they’re barely pants anymore, and she hasn’t showered in two days. She feels like a tramp visiting a castle. So she turns and runs away.

  * * *

  Hannah looks after her for a long time and Tess looks at her mother for a long time. That’s the sort of daughter she should have had, Tess thinks.

  * * *

  Bobo knocks on the door of Zackell’s house. The A-team coach opens the door in a cloud of cigar smoke wearing a dressing gown so filthy that it doesn’t even sway when she moves. Three different screens in her kitchen are showing three different hockey games, and the table is covered with notepads. Bobo has never met anyone who knows more about this sport and less about the individuals who play it than her. When she appointed him her assistant coach she was completely open about why she needed him: “People stuff, talking to people, all that sort of thing.” She’s only interested in hockey stuff.

  “Amat called me this morning. I went running with him in the forest. I think he wants to come and train again…,” Bobo begins.

  “How much does he weigh?” Zackell asks unsentimentally.

  “Too much,” Bobo admits.

  “Did he throw up?”

  “Like a drain.”

  She nods, smokes her cigar, and suddenly looks surprised.

  “And?”

  “And…?” Bobo wonders.

  “Was there anything else?” she asks.

  “No, no, I don’t think so, I just…”

  “Well, then! I heard that all the teams from Hed are going to be training in our rink, so I want you to reschedule our training session last this evening.”

  “Last? The guys on the team won’t be happy about having to train so late…,” Bobo begins, but then he realizes that that’s precisely what she wants. One of the first things she asks new players on the team is: “Do you want to have fun or do you want to win hockey games?”

  “See you this evening!” Zackell says, and starts to close the door.

  Bobo splutters:

  “Maybe you could call Amat? He’s ashamed! Maybe he’s afraid to make the call himself, I…”

  Zackell looks like the question makes no sense.

  “Call him?”

  “Look, I know that you don’t believe in motivating players, you’ve explained that, that we all have to want to do it ourselves. What was that thing about mules? You can lead a mule to water but you can’t force it to drink? I get that! But Amat is… I mean, he’s Amat! All he needs is a bit of encouragement… so maybe you could…?”

  Zackell smokes in silence as if she’s waiting for him to go on. Bobo’s mouth is open but empty. So, with the stress on “we,” Zackell explains as patiently as she can:

  “WE don’t train players. WE train a team. Amat doesn’t have to prove that he can play hockey, he has to prove that he isn’t stupid. Because we can win with mediocre intelligent players, but we can never win with brilliant stupid players. Because intelligent players sometimes do stupid things, but stupid players never do intelligent things.”

  “I…,” Bobo groans, because he gets a headache when she talks like this.

  “Anyone can learn to be an idiot, but an idiot can never learn anything at all,” Zackell summarizes in a rare attempt to be a bit peda-gogical.

  “Amat isn’t an idiot,” Bobo says, wounded.

  Zackell taps the ash from the cigar into the pocket of her dressing gown, if it had been remotely clean it would have caught light but it’s so stained and grimy that it’s flameproof. So she says:

  “That remains to be seen. First we need to find out what sort of mule he is.”

  Then she closes the door without saying good-bye. She probably doesn’t even realize that that’s impolite.

  * * *

  It takes Johnny twelve attempts to get the van started. He mutters that Ana must have done something to it. The children all put their bags inside, even Tobias is ready in the end, and they set off to Beartown. Johnny sulks all the way because his seat isn’t set the way he likes it, and because Ana has changed the settings on the radio.

  “Please, Dad, do we have to listen to this old man’s music?” Tess asks when he finally finds the right station.

  She’s sitting in the front, of course, to stop Tobias and Ted fighting for the right to sit there.

  “Don’t you dare insult Springsteen, he’s the only thing left in my life that doesn’t moan at me,” her dad grunts.

  Tess sighs.

  “You’re such a drama queen.”

  Her dad turns the volume up.

  “Bruce understands me.”

  Tess rolls her eyes and turns toward the backseat.

  “Did you finish your essay for English, Ted?”

  “Mmm,” Ted mumbles.

  “Can I read it, then?”

  He digs the laptop out of his hockey bag. They share one laptop to do homework in the stands at the rink while they wait for each other’s training sessions to end.

  “Can you maybe… correct the grammar and all that?” he asks.

  “You need to learn how to do that yourself,” his big sister retorts, but of course she’s going to correct his grammar.

  As they approach the boundary to Beartown their dad clears his throat, and Ted and Tobias and Tess, like good elder siblings, all start laughing and joking and even singing to distract Ture, to stop him looking out of the window and wondering what’s been written on the town sign.

  * * *

  Elisabeth Zackell lights another cigar in her kitchen, eats some boiled potatoes straight from the pan, and watches hockey on three screens. When people praise her abilities as a coach, they often talk about her strategic and analytical skills, but her greatest talent is actually that she is very rarely surprised. That’s because she interprets information as it is, not as what she wants it to be. She’s seen too many other coaches give a player too many chances, or not give a player any chances at all, based on what they think could happen. Those same coaches talk about “instinct” and “gut feeling,” but the only gut feeling Zackell worries about is diarrhea. She keeps everything to do with hockey in her head. That’s why she’s able to drop players from the team even though they’re fine individuals, she doesn’t even have to consider whether they’re good hockey players, the only thing that matters to her is whether they’re the right hockey player.

  People call her “cynical,” but she doesn’t understand how anyone could win hockey games any other way. Are you supposed to just wish for victory? Talk your way to victory with just and persuasive arguments? She’s convinced that most seasons are decided before they even start, winning teams are based upon team selection, not by a coach standing at the bench yelling his way to a stroke. Back in the spring, when Beartown was at its very best, reporters suddenly started calling the club a “talent factory” and Zackell a “genius.” She thinks they should make their minds up: Surely it’s either the result of talent or her? Besides, what has she actually done? She didn’t turn Amat into a star, she just let him play. She didn’t teach him to be better, she just put him in situations where he made fewer mistakes. People in the town say she likes to “test” her players, that she subjects them to “psychological experiments,” but obviously that isn’t true. She just tries to find out what kind of mules she’s dealing with so she knows which ones she can give up all hope on right away.

  So after Bobo came to her house and told her about Amat, she’s spent the day in her kitchen smoking and making notes in front of her screens. Maybe she doesn’t have as many feelings as other people, but she doesn’t lack empathy, she understands that Bobo’s big heart wants the best for all the players, and especially Amat. But when it comes down to it, it isn’t a coach’s job to nurture individuals, no matter how many brochures and beautifully formulated “declarations of values” a club can present to the media. A coach’s job is to win hockey games. Results aren’t measured in feelings but in tables. So on one screen Zackell plays Amat’s games from last season, and on the other two she runs other players’ games for other teams, as a comparison. She used to do this to understand their opponents and try to work out which players might be a problem for Amat to play against. Now she’s doing it because she’s looking for someone who could replace him.

  Perhaps that’s cynical, perhaps even lacking in emotion, but she’s just interpreting all the information she has available: Bobo is one of Amat’s best friends, and no one believes in his friends as much as Bobo. If even he thinks Amat is so brittle that he needs an encouraging phone call from his coach in order to want to play hockey rather than sit at home and drink, then it’s already too late. Zackell knows Bobo came here to give his friend a last chance, but instead he actually took it away from him.

  * * *

  No one ever tells you when you become a parent that it’s a trap, a trick question, a cruel joke: you’re never enough, and you can never win.

  Johnny stops the van outside the ice rink in Beartown. His phone is ringing the whole time, his colleagues are waiting in the forest, yet he’s still thinking about going inside with his children. His daughter notices.

  “It’s okay, Dad. It’s just stupid kids who defaced that sign. We’ll be fine. I’ll keep an eye on Toby and make sure he doesn’t get into any trouble.”

  “Are you sure? It doesn’t feel… I mean, I could come in for a bit…,” her dad begins.

  Tobias and Ted drag their bags out of the back of the van. They were born two years apart to the same parents, but they could easily be different species. Johnny is worried about demanding too much from one, and too little from the other. He was at one of Ted’s games in the spring and as usual had to be told to sit down a hundred times. Ted didn’t play his best, although he was still the best player on the ice, he just wasn’t as good as he could be. “It’s all the shouting,” Tess eventually pointed out. As usual, Johnny misunderstood and glared at the opposing team’s parents, and said: “Yes, I know, they shout a lot, but Ted needs to get used to that and perform well in spite of it!” Tess sighed quietly and then told the truth: “Dad, their shouting doesn’t affect him at all. Yours does.” Johnny couldn’t look her in the eye, he just stood there in the stands with his hands pressed so hard into his pockets that he made holes in them, before he muttered: “I shout just as much at Toby, it’s nothing to…” Tess shook her head honestly and replied in a low voice: “No. You know you don’t.”

  Johnny remained seated for the rest of the game. It was true, after all. He shouts at Ted more because he can see the thirteen-year-old’s potential, and he shouts less at Toby because he can see that he’s already reached his.

  “It’s okay, Dad, I promise!” Tess repeats now.

  She helps Ture out of his seat belt. The youngest boy laughs, excited at the prospect of seeing his friends. He looks cute and gentle, but he’s a tornado. The last time Johnny lost his temper when Ture did something naughty and Hannah asked why he was so frustrated, Johnny just blurted out in despair: “Because he’s our FOURTH kid and I ought to be GOOD at it by now!” Hannah couldn’t stop laughing at that, then she kissed him and said: “Darling, the day you think you’re a good dad is the day you’re a terrible dad.” Johnny gets cross whenever he thinks about that. What did that even mean? He wasn’t prepared for Ture, he thought he was done, he still insists that they ought to have named him “Surprise.” When he told Bengt at work, Bengt smiled the way only a man with adult children can smile and told Johnny not to worry, as long as the children were still alive and had relatively clean underwear on, he was a good enough dad. That’s easy to say, harder to feel.

  Tess lifts Ture out of the van, closes the door, then leans in through the driver’s window and kisses her dad on the cheek.

  “You can’t watch us every second of our lives. We’ll be fine. The boys’ coach is here and there are loads of grown-ups in there. Just go, and be careful out in the forest!”

  “Don’t worry about me!” he says, affronted.

  “Just be careful, Dad, okay? Bruce Springsteen needs you alive so SOMEONE listens to him.”

  He laughs. He feels guiltiest of all about her, he never feels good enough for any of the children, but most of all for his daughter. He hasn’t been able to help with her homework since she was nine years old, and now she’s in high school and dreaming of studying law at university, and that’s an alien world for him. So when she tells him about cities she wants to move to and study in he defends himself with ridiculous feelings: Why does she want to move? Isn’t Hed good enough? Has her childhood been so bloody awful that all she wants is to get away from here? What if she picks the wrong college? What if it’s his fault? What if she’d had different parents? More like her? Would she have done better then? Gotten further? Been happier? What about Tobias and Ted and Ture? Has Johnny shouted too much? Has he shouted too little? Has he done all he can?

  “Go now, Dad,” Tess whispers.

  Her dad pulls himself together.

  “I’ll pick you up as early as I can. Keep an eye on Tobias to make sure he isn’t, you know, too much like… me.”

  His daughter smiles and promises. He doesn’t care about the blaring horns behind him, he waits in the parking lot until his children have gone inside before driving off.

  * * *

  One simple, painful truth for all teenagers is that their lives are rarely defined by what they do, what really matters is what they almost do.

  There’s snow on the ground when Amat sets out from home. It’s almost winter, almost dark, and he almost rings Zackell a thousand times. He almost manages to silence the voices in his head. He walks from the Hollow almost all the way to the ice rink, but stops a couple of hundred yards away from the parking lot. It’s full of children being dropped off for training by their parents, bouncing out of their cars and laughing and joking with their friends. Amat recognizes a lot of them, he’s seen them cheering with delight behind the Plexiglas every time he scored for the A-team. He knows that a lot of them still pretend to be him when they’re playing outside in the street, because they only remember him the way he was when he was at his best, as the superstar, the idol. But now? If he goes onto the ice today and fails, who is he then? Just one more guy who almost became something, almost won the league with Beartown back in the spring, almost got drafted to the NHL. He almost calls Bobo. He almost walks across the parking lot. He almost goes in and asks Zackell if he can be on the team again. The majority of teenagers don’t know that their lives are determined by that one small word, but it echoes inside Amat the whole way home. “Almost almost almost.” He doesn’t want anything but solitude, but the voices in his head never shut up: “You were overrated. A fraud. Everyone knows. You might as well go home and get drunk again. Then you won’t have to feel any of this. Stop trying. Stop failing. Stop feeling pain.”

  Back in the apartment he finds one last bottle of drink, unopened, at the back of his wardrobe. He goes up into the forest, he doesn’t run, he sits in the clearing with the view of the ice rink with the bottle in his lap. The rest of his life will begin with him almost opening it or almost not.

  38 Radicalizations

  The bags of recycling clink when Ana lifts them, even though she’s tried to tuck milk cartons in between, but she can’t get through enough milk to provide insulation to hide the evidence of her dad’s drinking right now, not even if she poured the milk straight down the drain. She opens the front door and goes into the yard, Maya is coming along the road with her guitar case over her shoulder, and the childhood friends catch sight of each other at the same time. One of the very, very best things Maya likes about Ana is that she never bothers to say hello.