“I love you, I love you so damn much, you stupid idiot,” she whispers.

  “Good thing too,” he replies.

  “There are extra blankets in the loft, and the flashlights are…”

  “I know, don’t worry about us, but you really need to… I mean, you can’t…,” he begins, and when she buries her head in his sweater she can feel that he’s shaking.

  “Don’t be angry with me, darling. I’m the angry one, you need to be the sensible one,” she mutters into his rib cage.

  “You have to take someone with you. Someone who knows the forest, darling, it’s going to be dark and…”

  “You can’t come with me. You know that. Never both on the same plane, never out in a storm together, the children need…”

  “I know, I KNOW,” he whispers disconsolately, he’s never felt so powerless, and that’s a terrible thing for a fireman to experience.

  His silly superstitions always stop her saying “come back safe” when he goes out on a call, so she usually thinks of something banal that he needs to do the next day, so that he has to promise to be home for that: “Don’t forget that you’re going to the dump tomorrow” or “We’re having lunch at your mom’s at twelve o’clock.” It’s become their secret little ritual.

  So he doesn’t say “come home safe” now. He doesn’t even tell her not to go, because he knows what he would have replied to that. He may be strong, but not even he can stop the wind blowing. She can deliver babies, she’s the one who’s needed now. We help if we can, when we can, to the extent that we can. As they leave the bedroom he just takes hold of her arm, he wants to say something banal and everyday, so that she remembers that there’s a tomorrow, and all he can think of is:

  “I’m going to have sex with you tomorrow!”

  She bursts out laughing, in his face, right at him.

  “There’s something seriously wrong with you.”

  “Just be absolutely clear about the fact that I’m going to have sex with you tomorrow!”

  He has tears in his eyes, she does too, they hear the force of the wind outside and know better than to imagine that they’re immortal.

  “Do you know anyone who can help me find my way in that part of the forest?” she asks, trying to control her voice.

  “Yes, I know someone, I’ll call and say you’re on your way,” he replies, and writes down the address even though his hand is shaking.

  She takes the van and sets out, into the night and into a storm that’s snapping tree trunks and killing people at will. She doesn’t promise to come home safe. He stands at the kitchen window with the children.

  * * *

  It’s the dogs that eventually react to the fact there’s someone at the front door, maybe it’s more instinct than the doorbell that makes them start to bark. Ana goes warily out into the hall and peers through the window. Who the hell is out in this weather? There’s a lone woman standing on the steps, the hood of her raincoat pulled up, her thin frame bent double by the wind.

  “IS YOUR DAD HOME?” the woman yells when Ana forces the door open, the whole forest is roaring, as if they were standing inside a jar being kicked around by giants.

  The woman’s van is parked on the grass a few yards away, rocking in the wind. What a stupid vehicle to set out in during a storm, if you absolutely have to set out anywhere during a storm, Ana thinks. And the woman is wearing a red coat, has she driven all the way from Hed? Maybe she isn’t actually real? Ana is so busy thinking that she barely reacts when the woman steps closer and yells once more:

  “A car’s got stuck in the forest, and my husband says that if there’s anyone who can get me to it in this weather, it’s your dad!”

  She spits the words out, Ana just blinks, still confused.

  “Look… what? I mean, you know, why is a car even out in the forest at a time like this?”

  “The woman in the car is having a BABY! Is your dad home or NOT?” the woman snaps impatiently, taking a step into the hall.

  Ana tries to stop her, but the woman doesn’t have time to see the panic in her eyes. The empty beer cans and vodka bottles are lined up on the draining board, the daughter has carefully rinsed them so they won’t smell in the recycling bin and she won’t have to feel ashamed in front of the neighbors. Her dad’s arms are hanging listlessly by the sides of the armchair in the living room, but his abused lungs are making his chest rise and fall with the breaths of an addict. The midwife is stressed and her heart is in her throat, so when it plummets to the pit of her stomach the drop is more extreme than she was prepared for.

  “I… I understand. Sorry… sorry for disturbing you,” she mutters to Ana in embarrassment and turns sharply toward the door, then hurries out to the yard and back into the van.

  Ana doesn’t hesitate for a moment before she rushes after her. She bangs on the window. The woman opens it warily.

  “Where are you going?” Ana cries.

  “I need to get to the woman in the forest!” the woman shouts as she tries to start the engine, but the damn rust bucket merely splutters.

  “Are you mad or something? Do you know how dangerous that is in this weather?”

  “SHE’S HAVING A BABY AND I’M A MIDWIFE!” the woman yells back in a sudden flash of rage, slamming her hands down on the stone-dead dashboard of the van.

  In hindsight Ana won’t be able to pinpoint exactly what happens inside her at that moment. Maybe it was something poetic, the sort of thing people say in films, that they felt themselves “called by a higher purpose.” But it’s probably mostly the fact that the woman looks crazy in exactly the same way that everyone always says Ana looks crazy.

  She runs into the house, feeds the dogs, and turns up the volume of their favorite song by Maya, then comes back with the keys to a rusty pickup in her hand, and a jacket that’s far too big flapping behind her like a cape in the wind.

  “WE CAN TAKE DAD’S TRUCK!”

  “I CAN’T TAKE YOU WITH ME!” the woman shouts.

  “YOUR CAR IS SHIT!”

  “YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT?” the woman yells.

  “YOU’LL BE A HELL OF A LOT SAFER IF I’M WITH YOU!”

  The woman stares at the crazy eighteen-year-old. This isn’t the sort of situation they teach you about when you’re training to be a midwife. In the end she sighs resignedly, grabs her bag, and follows the girl to her dad’s pickup.

  “MY NAME IS HANNAH!” she yells.

  “ANA!” Ana bellows.

  It’s kind of fitting that their names are so similar, because Hannah will have plenty of occasions when she alternately swears and laughs at how much this crazy teenager reminds her of herself. They clamber into the front seats and struggle to close the doors properly as the wind peppers the chassis like hailstones. Then Ana sees the rifle on the backseat. She turns beetroot-red with shame, snatches it up, and runs back inside the house. When she comes back she says, without making eye contact:

  “He sometimes leaves the rifle in the pickup when he’s… you know. I must have yelled at him a million times about that.”

  The midwife nods uncomfortably.

  “Your dad and my husband met during the forest fires a few years ago. I think they called your dad because he knows the forest. They’ve been hunting together a few times since then. I think your dad might be the only person from Beartown my husband respects.”

  It’s a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood, she feels that her-self.

  “Dad’s easy to like, he just doesn’t always like himself that much,” Ana says with a bluntness that makes the midwife’s stomach clench.

  “Maybe you should stay at home with him, Ana?”

  “What for? He’s drunk. He won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  “My husband told me I should only trust your dad if I have to go out into the forest, no one else, and I’m not comfortable with the idea of you…”

  Ana snorts.

  “Your husband’s stupid if he thinks that old men are the only people who know their way around the forest!”

  The midwife smiles resignedly.

  “If you think that’s the only reason my husband is stupid, you don’t know many men…”

  She’s been telling Johnny all year to take the van to a proper garage, but he just keeps muttering that all firemen can mend their own cars. She’s tried pointing out that in actual fact, all firemen THINK they can mend their own cars. Being married is easy, she usually thinks. You just pick an argument you’re really good at, then repeat it at least once a week for all eternity.

  “So where’s this woman who’s having a baby?” Ana asks impatiently.

  The midwife hesitates, sighs, then pulls out a map. She took the main road from Hed to Beartown, but hers was the last vehicle that got through, she saw trees fall across the roadway behind her. She ought to have felt scared, but adrenaline stopped her. She points at the map:

  “They’re out here somewhere. See? They didn’t take the main road, they tried to take a shortcut along the old forest roads, but most of those are probably blocked now. Is it even possible to get out there?”

  “Let’s find out,” Ana replies.

  Hannah clears her throat.

  “Sorry to ask, but are you even old enough to have a driver’s license?”

  “Yes! I mean, yes, I’m old enough!” Ana says evasively, and puts her foot down.

  “But you… you have got a driver’s license?” the midwife asks, slightly anxiously, as Ana skids out onto the road.

  “Well, no, not exactly. But Dad’s taught me to drive. He’s often a bit drunk, so he needs someone to drive him around.”

  That doesn’t exactly calm the midwife’s nerves. It really doesn’t.

  6 Superheroes

  Matteo is only fourteen years old. He isn’t important to this story, not yet. He’s just the sort of character who passes by in the background, one of the many thousands of faces that make up the inhabitants of a community. No one pays him any attention as he cycles around Beartown at the start of the storm, not just because everyone is busy trying to get indoors, but because Matteo simply isn’t the sort of person anyone notices. If invisibility is a superpower, it was never the one he dreamed of. He would have preferred superhuman strength instead, so he could protect his family. Or the ability to change the past, to save his big sister. But he isn’t a superhero, he’s just as powerless in the face of his existence as the town he lives in is in the face of nature.

  He’s on his own at home when the wind starts whipping the trees and the electricity goes off in the small house his parents rent right on the boundary between the last buildings and the start of the forest. They’ve gone abroad to bring his sister home. Matteo is good at being alone, but he can’t bear to be in a house with no lights, so he gets on his bicycle and sets off. The defiant teenager inside his head doesn’t want to ask for help, at the same time the scared child in his chest hopes that someone will see that he needs looking after. But no one has the time.

  A tall, fat man in a suit rushes past him in the other direction. Matteo doesn’t know his real name, only that everyone calls him “Tails,” and that he owns the big supermarket and is one of the richest men in the whole town. The man doesn’t even notice the boy he rushes past, he’s on his way down to the flagpoles outside the ice rink in a panicked attempt to take down the green flags with the bear on them so that they don’t get torn to shreds. That’s the man’s first instinct at a time of danger: save the flags, not people.

  As Matteo carries on through Beartown he sees neighbors helping one another empty their yards of loose items, carrying in the sticks and nets that had been standing in every cul-de-sac. The kids around here play with tennis balls on pavement at this time of year, but as soon as the snow comes every other dad will spray water on their yard to make a hockey rink. Matteo has heard plenty of neighbors boast: “in this town we have good friends and bad yards,” because down south people boast about perfect lawns and neat flower beds, whereas here you gain status from having grit-strewn patches of ground and pucks littering the soil when the snow melts. That shows that you’ve used the frozen months for the right things.

  Matteo often wonders if he’d be as odd and alone in other places as he is here. If anyone would have talked to him, if he’d have friends, be visible. Where you’re born and who you become there is a lottery, what’s right in one place and wrong in another. In almost all of the world, being obsessed with hockey would make you an outsider, a weirdo, but not here. Here it’s like the weather, all small talk in every social situation is about one or the other. And you can’t escape storms or sport in Beartown.

  It gets dark and cold quickly, the snow hasn’t arrived yet but the wind is already eating through flesh and sinew, the boy has no gloves and is losing the feeling in his fingers. He pedals without really knowing where he’s going, takes one hand off the handlebars to get the circulation going again, and he loses concentration for a moment, sees the vehicle too late. It comes so fast and its lights dazzle him. He brakes so hard that his bike skids sideways. The headlights blind him and he waits for the impact, and when it doesn’t come at first he thinks he’s already dead, but at the last moment he somehow manages to shift his weight and throw both himself and his bicycle out of the way. He rolls over, scraping his hands and arms, and lets out a yell, but no one hears him over the wind.

  Neither the young woman driving the vehicle nor the midwife sitting beside her see him in the darkness. It’s such a small event, everything happens so fast, but if the bumper had so much as grazed the fourteen-year-old he would have been tossed into the trees with horrific force. If he had ended up unconscious there in the middle of the storm, his lifeless body would probably not have been found for several days, by which time the invisible threads between him and everything that is on its way to happening would have been severed. But now he staggers to his feet, bruised but alive.

  This is how small the margins are, between us never having heard of Matteo, and us soon never being able to forget his name.

  7 Children

  Beartown and Hed are old towns in an even older forest. People say that age brings wisdom, but for most of us that really isn’t true, when we get old we’ve just accumulated more experiences, good and bad. The result is more likely to be cynicism than wisdom. When we’re young we know nothing about all the very worst that can hit us, which is just as well, because otherwise we’d never leave the house.

  And we would definitely never let go of those we love.

  * * *

  “Do you know… where you’re going?” Hannah wonders anxiously.

  As a midwife, she wants them to get there quickly, but as a human being who wants to carry on being one, she can’t help wishing that Ana wasn’t driving like someone who’d just stolen the pickup.

  The girl doesn’t reply. She’s wearing her dad’s jacket, bright orange and covered with reflectors, with the words “Game accident” on the back. He wears it when he’s tracking animals that have been hit by vehicles, the whole pickup is full of equipment to help you move through the forest in the dark, half of Ana’s childhood has consisted of running after him and the dogs out here. She has always thought she could find her way in a blindfold, and this storm is evidently planning on testing her.

  “So… you know where you’re going?” Hannah asks again, and gets no response this time either.

  Two tennis balls are rolling around on the floor by the midwife’s feet. She picks one up and smiles tentatively.

  “So… how many dogs have you got?”

  Still no answer, so she clears her throat and goes on:

  “I mean, nobody really plays tennis around here, the only uses I can think of for tennis balls in Hed and Beartown are if you have dogs, if you play land hockey, or if you’re tumble-drying a duvet…”

  Ana just peers silently over the steering wheel and drives even faster.

  “What sort of dogs are they?” the midwife persists, and then the girl finally sighs:

  “You’re the sort who talks when you’re nervous, aren’t you?”

  “Yes…,” the midwife admits.

  “Me too,” Ana says.

  Then she says nothing at all for several minutes. The midwife closes her eyes and holds on tight. She does her best not to speak, but as her heartbeat increases her mouth stops obeying her:

  “My husband wants to have dogs! He’s been going on about it ever since we first met. To be honest, I don’t really like animals, but I was thinking that I might surprise him for his birthday and let him buy one he can go hunting with! I’ve even spoken to a breeder! Apparently, you want a good hunting dog to have a clear ‘on and off button,’ so it’s really keen when it’s hunting, but can wind down as soon as it gets home? Is that right? I laughed when I heard that, because I wish the same thing applied to firemen and kids who play hockey…”

  The pickup speeds up. Ana glances at her and mutters:

  “For someone who doesn’t like dogs, you know a lot about them.”

  “Thanks!” the midwife exclaims, and raises her arms in front of her face because she’s convinced they’re going to hit a fallen tree that Ana swerves around at the last moment.

  Then the girl grunts:

  “That’s one hell of a brave jacket to wear if you’re coming to Beartown. I’m wearing mine so we don’t get run over if we’re standing in the road, and you pick one that’s going to make people aim right at us…”

  “What?” the midwife all but shouts before realizing that she’s wearing her eldest son’s jacket, the red one with the Hed Hockey logo on the chest, she grabbed it without thinking when she was on her way out of the house.

  Tobias has grown out of it now, but it’s still too big for her. Life goes so quickly.

  “Piece of shit team,” Ana declares so firmly that Hannah suddenly flares up: