“Are you okay?” she asks her brothers.

  They nod. Ture is frightened, Tobias is angry, but Ted is just staring at the giant in admiration.

  “I recognize you! Your name is Bobo, isn’t it?”

  The giant blushes because he probably thinks his achievements as a hockey player have made him famous all the way to Hed.

  “Yes, erm…”

  “You know Amat, don’t you? Is he here?” Ted interrupts, so enthusiastic that he’s bouncing up and down.

  The giant squirms so uncomfortably that Tess feels sorry for him. He glances at her and says:

  “No, well, I don’t really know, I don’t think Amat is coming today. And the A-team has changed their training time, so we won’t be training until late this evening…”

  “Can we stay and watch?” Ted wants to know.

  “Are you stupid? Stay here till THIS EVENING to watch BEAR-TOWN?” Tobias exclaims.

  Tess looks at Bobo apologetically.

  “Thanks for your help out there. My brothers are grateful too, but sadly they’re not intelligent enough to express it. But you… you rescued us.”

  The giant blushes so quickly and so deeply that he has to get down on his knees in front of Ture so he doesn’t have to look Tess in the eye, because he’s afraid his face might actually burn up then.

  “Are you okay? There were a few stupid people out there, but I’m going to throw them out, okay? Not everyone in Beartown is like that, I promise we’ve got plenty of nice people in the rink who will look after you, so there’s no need to be afraid, okay?” he asks the boy.

  “The stupid ones can go to hell!” Ture replies instantly and gives Bobo a high five.

  “TURE!” Tess exclaims, and Bobo can’t stop laughing.

  He gets to his feet and glances at her, then says:

  “I’ve got a younger brother and sister.”

  “It shows,” she says with equal measures of admiration and criti-cism.

  He scratches his stubble absentmindedly. He’s three years older than Tess but feels younger, he’s never seen eyes like hers, she looks at him as if she could just as easily start to laugh or scold him. Bobo’s voice fails him when he opens his mouth:

  “If… look, if Amat shows up, I promise I’ll fetch your brother so he can meet him. And if you, I mean, any of you, need anything, just shout for me, I won’t be far away, unless I’m in the cafeteria or something, but I… well, I’ll still be…,” he stammers.

  “You’re… quite easy to find? Seeing as you’re five yards tall and seven yards wide?” Tobias suggests in a gently mocking tone which earns him a kick on the shin from his sister.

  “Thanks again! Really!” she says.

  Bobo smiles and nods, looking down at his shoes.

  “I’m sorry some people are stupid here. But we… we’re not all like that,” he promises.

  “Nor are we,” she replies.

  They both feel like liars.

  There are still a lot of people out in the hall, but during the hours that follow, everyone calms down, first the youngsters and then their parents. The age groups from the respective clubs share time on the ice: Ted trains with his team in one half while Beartown’s boys use the other half. Then Ture trains with the other seven-year-olds, and finally Tobias trains with the fifteen-year-olds. After them it’s the turn of the figure skaters. The last thing Tess says to Tobias before she heads toward the ice is:

  “Take Ted and Ture and wait in the locker room, and don’t get into any trouble! We’ll be going home as soon as my training session’s over!”

  A few minutes later Bobo is buying an ice cream in the cafeteria when someone comes in and yells:

  “A massive fight’s broken out down there, Bobo! It was that crazy bitch who started it!”

  * * *

  Everything happens so fast.

  * * *

  So many different stories will be told about what happened in the ice rink that day, and none of them will be the whole truth. In Beartown, for instance, a lot of people will leave out the bit about four siblings arriving at the rink and Ture getting a bottle top thrown at his head, and someone else yelling “HED BITCHES” at Tess. She grabbed hold of Ture to stop him getting trampled, and tried to grab Tobias to stop him fighting, and only just managed to get hold of them both, but it didn’t help because the corridor was full of other teenagers from Hed. Some of them started to hum a tune, and soon all the others joined in. When this story is told in Hed, a striking number of people will omit the fact that the tune was the one Hed supporters used when they sang their “Beartown: Rapists!” song two years ago when the truth about Kevin had just come out and the hatred between the clubs was at its worst.

  A lot of people in Hed will also “forget” to mention that there were candles in the corridor outside the locker rooms, beneath a photograph of Ramona, and that—a couple of hours after the first scuffle by the entrance—a boy from Hed kicked them over. In return, many people in Beartown skip over the bit where the mother of a boy on the Beartown’s boys’ team had already grabbed hold of a seventeen-year-old figure skater from Hed just as she was about to lead her little girls onto the ice, because the mother claimed it wasn’t their turn. In Hed people will laugh and say she picked the wrong seventeen-year-old to act tough against, because her name is Tess and she’s Johnny and Hannah’s daughter, she may have a longer fuse than her brothers but there’s still a hell of a lot of powder packed inside her. In Beartown people will pretend to be appalled and claim that this Tess shoved the mother. In Hed people will say the mother grabbed hold of her first, that Tess merely pulled herself free and the mother lost her balance and fell on her backside. In Beartown people will say that Tess’s fifteen-year-old brother came storming out of the locker room at the same time and kicked over all the candles beneath Ramona’s picture. In Hed people will claim that he had just heard that someone had attacked his sister and rushed out to defend her, and that he didn’t even see the candles.

  * * *

  It is often said that history is written by the winners, but there are no winners here.

  * * *

  When Bobo hears what’s happening he rushes down from the cafeteria and clears the corridor of wildly flailing fifteen-year-olds, trying as well as he can to throw the green ones one way and the red ones the other, but they aren’t the people he’s most worried about. After the first tussle in the rink today someone made a phone call and a short while later a handful of black jackets turned up and took up position in the stands at one end of the rink. Only the youngest members of the Pack have appeared so far, the runners, but Bobo knows the older and more dangerous members are only a text message away. If Teemu and his closest associates show up in the middle of all this, Bobo isn’t confident that everyone in the ice rink will leave it on their feet.

  “Come on, we’d better go,” he says quickly to Tess, and she can see in his eyes that he isn’t frightened for himself.

  “Toby! Ted! Ture!” she calls at once to her brothers, and pulls them with her through the rink and out into the parking lot, and sends her dad a text at the same time: Training finished early. Can you pick us up right away?

  She knows better than to say that there’s been trouble, she did that once when she was at a birthday party when she was twelve, and he turned up with six other firemen and looked like he was going to kill any boy who so much as looked at her. Breathless, she turns to Bobo, he looks embarrassed, as if all this was his fault. She almost starts laughing.

  “I… I like the fact that you broke things up. That you didn’t hit anyone,” she says.

  “I’m not much good at fighting. I’m just big,” Bobo smiles shyly.

  “Good. I don’t like people who are good at fighting,” she says.

  Bobo doesn’t know where to look, so he spins almost all the way around to avoid having to look her in the eye. Instead he catches sight of Tobias, who has a serious black eye, so Bobo hands him his ice cream to hold against the swelling. It probably says quite a lot about Bobo that he was able to break up the fight in there without dropping his ice cream. It also says quite a lot about him that someone who likes ice cream as much as he does is prepared to give one away to Tess’s younger brother.

  “How’s your eye?” he asks.

  “Fine,” Tobias mutters, still raging.

  “What about your knuckles?” Bobo asks with a trace of a smile that vanishes instantly when Tess glares at him.

  “They hurt like hell,” Tobias grins weakly.

  “I told you not to get into any trouble!” Tess hisses.

  “YOU were the one who got into trouble, I just came out to help YOU!” Tobias snaps back.

  Ted just stands there completely silent, glancing over at the entrance to the rink. All the other kids from Hed are streaming out into the parking lot. The entrance is full of green-clad kids shouting “HED BITCHES!” and worse. It’s clear that they’d like to come over to Tobias and finish what they started, but not while Bobo is standing here.

  “You should go back inside now,” Tess says when she sees the van coming, Johnny is driving as if he’d just stolen it.

  “Are you sure? I can…,” Bobo begins.

  “Believe me: I’m not worried about anything happening to us when Dad arrives. I’m worried about what Dad would do inside the rink if we don’t get him away from here right away,” Tess replies.

  She’s right. It takes all her powers of persuasion and all Ture’s frightened glances to stop her dad grabbing the first weapon he can find and taking on everyone who attacked his kids. He weighs three times as much as Tess but she still manages to hold him back.

  She can see it so clearly in his eyes, that thing that some men have, that inability to see other people as people when he’s angry, so she persuades him by summoning the only thing she knows is stronger than his violence. His instinct to protect.

  “Dad! DAD! LISTEN!!! We need to get all the kids from Hed home, we need to get everyone away from here before anything else happens, do you hear me? You need to take care of ALL the kids here!”

  Johnny’s shoulders finally sink. He looks around at all the frightened, confused youngsters in red tops, standing in groups in the parking lot. There are a handful of adults there too, coaches and a few parents, but they look almost as frightened as the children. Johnny glances over at the entrance to the rink. A Beartown guy of around twenty is standing in the middle of it, he has a round, kind face and a build so solid that it looks as if he’s single-handedly holding back all the green-clad idiots inside. Johnny takes out his phone and calls all his colleagues, and not long after that car after car from Hed comes screeching in from the forest.

  Everything could have gotten completely out of hand from that point, but before any of the men in the cars had time to jump out and think about causing more trouble, Tess and Johnny have shepherded the kids from Hed into all the backseats and forced them to drive away again. They soon empty the parking lot. Johnny and his children wait until last before they follow the others. Tess puts Springsteen on the stereo and puts her hand on her dad’s arm. In the rearview mirror she sees Bobo, still blocking the doorway to the rink, not a single person has managed to get out past him. But not even he can stop them making phone calls.

  Johnny, Tess, and the boys are silent all the way to the boundary between Beartown and the forest. There was hardly time for it to get light today before it gets dark again, the days are shrinking fast now, yet still the figures are clearly visible in the gloom. Beside the signs on either side of the road stand a dozen men in black jackets, all masked apart from Teemu. He stares into the van as it passes. Johnny has never spoken to him, but of course he knows who he is, everyone in Hed knows, he’s the person they warn their children about whenever there’s a local sports match. And now Teemu knows who Johnny is too.

  As the vehicle rolls into the forest one of the men next to Teemu throws a glass bottle, which shatters against the rear door, a final parting gift. The noise makes the other three siblings jump, and Ture starts to cry, but Tobias doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.

  “Didn’t I say? Everyone there hates us!” he merely declares.

  Then he leans his head back and closes his eyes. Two minutes later he’s snoring. Their mother always says this is Tobias’s real talent in life: that he can fall asleep anywhere, at any time. Just like his dad.

  42 Goalkeepers

  Tails is on the phone to the politicians on the council when he hears about the fight down at the ice rink. He hurries over there but by the time he arrives the rink is almost empty. Everyone from Hed has gone home and the trouble seemed to end as abruptly as it began. A few dads of boys on Beartown’s youngest team are still drifting about, telling one another what they’d do if “any of them” dared to show their faces here again, but as usual it isn’t the men who talk who you need to be afraid of here. The caretaker throws them out when it’s almost time for the A-team’s training session, they’ll have to go home and act tough to shadows instead. Tails takes a nervous turn around the rink without really knowing what he’s looking for, then he sits down at the top of the stands and watches the A-team’s training, and thinks, thinks, thinks. The rings under his eyes look like someone’s spilled a fizzy drink on a suede jacket, he’s normally good at concealing his anxiety but today he’s so bad at it that the caretaker suffers an attack of sympathy and goes up and gives him a paper cup full of really bad coffee, and says:

  “Cheer up, Bambi! You look like someone stole your butter and rammed your money up your ass. This is hardly the first time there’s been a fight in this rink, is it?”

  Tails loosens his tie so that his thick neck can settle in more comfortable folds.

  “No, no. But it’s different now. There’s more at risk.”

  “Oh, so those rumors are true for once? It’s a badly kept secret, that one. So the politicians are going to try to merge the two clubs again?”

  Tails doesn’t even try to deny it, there’s no longer any point.

  “It isn’t a merger of two clubs, it’s the closure of one. Either Hed or Beartown.”

  “Can’t be us, surely? When they haven’t even got a rink over there?”

  “No. More than anything, we have sponsors and a much better team,” Tails nods, but without much conviction.

  “But…?” the caretaker prompts.

  Tails groans.

  “But there are politicians involved, and they don’t know their ass from their elbow! They used to complain that we didn’t have any money, and now that we’ve GOT money they’re moaning about ‘hooliganism.’ They’re worried that if we’re allowed to take over all Hed’s resources, there’ll be trouble between the supporters. So they’ve employed an advertising agency and have come up with an idea to shut down BOTH clubs and start a NEW club here in Beartown, with a new name!”

  The caretaker almost spits out his coffee.

  “So… no Hed Hockey and no Beartown Hockey? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “What do you think I said? I’ve sat in a million meetings with those numbskulls over in the council building to make them see sense and save this club, and I’ve PROMISED them that there won’t be any more violence! And what do I hear today? That there’s a riot going on in here and that Teemu and his bloody peasants’ army have been standing in the forest throwing bottles at cars with families in them! How am I supposed to explain that? Well?”

  The caretaker says nothing for a long time. Then he exclaims with a laugh:

  “Are you expecting ME to answer that?”

  No, of course Tails isn’t. He’s just trying to think, and sometimes that works better if he can talk at the same time, so he raises the cup and says:

  “This isn’t your headache. Thanks for the coffee. It was terrible, as usual. How’s the team looking?”

  The caretaker rocks his head from side to side and mutters:

  “Without Amat? Well, Zackell better find a replacement for him, or else we’ll be glad we’ve got a good goalie, because he’s going to have his work cut out for him!”

  Tails glances down at the ice and agrees. If they had a star on this team last season apart from Amat, it had to be the nineteen-year-old between the posts, the guy whose name half the town barely knows because they’re so used to calling him “Mumble.” If he didn’t like the nickname, no one would have known, of course, but he doesn’t seem to have anything against it. His silence and talent have helped make it easier for the Beartown fans to like him, which is no mean feat considering that the goalkeeper he replaced was Vidar, who grew up in the standing area of the rink with his brother, Teemu. It’s an even bigger achievement when you consider that Mumble is from Hed. He had to swap teams when Vidar died in the car accident, Hed didn’t think he was good enough back then, but now they would have swapped half their A-team to have him back. Nothing gives Tails a stronger feeling of schadenfreude than thinking about how badly mistaken they were about that, there are always men who are utterly certain that they can tell which children will grow up to be the best players, but this sport can still shock us when it wants to.

  “Yes, any team with him on goal stands a chance. He’s got a winner’s head!” Tails nods.

  The caretaker inserts a portion of chewing tobacco in his cheek so large that it’s hard to believe there was enough room for it in the tub.

  “Yes, I’ve seen my fair share of odd guys stand on goal here over the years, but damn me if this one might not take the prize. Never says a word, not even when they win, doesn’t even seem happy. It’s like he just plays with a great big… darkness inside him.”

  “All the best players have that,” Tails replies, as if it was obvious.