“Asshole!” her dad repeats.

  “So what do you think?” she wonders.

  “About which part of it?”

  “Should I write about his car?”

  “Of course. It’s news.”

  She drums her fingers thoughtfully against her temples.

  “So what do you make of Tails?”

  Her dad folds his hands on his stomach.

  “I think he’s in a bind. I don’t think he’s used to losing. And assholes like him can turn dangerous then. But you’ve kicked the hornets’ nest now, so we’ll see what comes out…”

  “You were the one who told me to kick it!”

  “What do you listen to me for? I’m crazy!”

  She bursts out laughing. So does he.

  “How much is missing from the accounts?” she asks.

  He pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and gestures to his piles of paper.

  “Loads! There’s nothing obvious unless you look really closely, they’ve covered their tracks pretty well, but… just from what I’ve uncovered so far, I’d say that Beartown Hockey has spent several hundred thousand in the past two years whose origins no one can quite explain. The factory signed up as a sponsor, of course, but I’ve checked their bank transfers and they’re much lower than the accounts claim. So the money’s coming in, but it’s coming from somewhere else. Do you follow?”

  “You think it’s black market money?”

  “Well, I think it’s seriously bloody gray! Some of this looks like money laundering, several people on the committee of the council’s property company have also been on the committee of Beartown Hockey, and now they’re doing business together. There’s a consultancy firm over in that pile as well, it’s owned by a local construction company that does business with the council, and they’ve spontaneously transferred money to Beartown Hockey in a way that looks seriously murky. I need to dig deeper into all of that… but take a look at this… I think this is the REALLY big deal: Have you heard about this ‘training facility’?”

  “What training facility?”

  “Yes, that’s what I was wondering! The council bought it from Beartown Hockey a couple of years ago, I’ve got hold of an email that an official at the council sent to the club about it, but I can’t find any other information about the purchase. All the documentation is gone.”

  The frown on the editor in chief’s brow deepens.

  “Money laundering… corruption… if just half of what you’re saying is true, the club could be demoted by the hockey federation, it might even face bankruptcy…”

  Her dad looks at her very seriously.

  “Kid, if this is true, people are going to end up in prison. Peter Andersson, first and foremost, because his name is on all the documents. And by some massive bloody coincidence, he just happens to be childhood friends with that Tails? How much smoke do you need before you believe there’s a fire? Eh?”

  She leans back in her chair and stares up at the ceiling. Then she mutters:

  “We need to dig deeper.”

  Her dad does something very, very unusual at this. He hesitates.

  “First I have to ask, kid… are you sure you’re doing this for the right reasons?”

  “YOU’RE asking me that?”

  He nods slowly. He hasn’t had a drink since he arrived, and sobriety is gnawing away at him, but he’s made up his mind that he needs to give her everything he’s got, one last time.

  “You’re not like me. You can’t just switch off your conscience. So if you’re only doing this because you want to win, let it be. Because if I dig into this, Peter and Tails are first in line to get covered in shit, and I thought you said you like them?”

  Her voice cracks so badly that she feels embarrassed, she can hear how she sounds like a young child clenching her fists after a soccer match when she blurts out:

  “I do! I… do. Sure, they’ve done a lot of good for sports, for the town… but what does sports matter if there’s no justice? What’s a community? If they’ve built this club on lies and dodgy deals, then it’s all… it’s… it’s CHEATING, Dad! And if we let them get away with it, what does that make us?”

  46 Servants

  There’s no justice. None that applies to everyone, anyway, at least not here, Matteo learned that early in life.

  He’s fourteen now, and his sister always told him that this age was the worst, that people were at their worst then, she said he just had to survive these years. But of course she was the one who didn’t do that. She said he could be anything he wanted to be, but he can’t now. Because he wants to be happy.

  He used to love drawing, so in the past few days he’s tried to draw her, but he can no longer remember her inconsistencies, he can only see her as if she were made of porcelain. Hair carved out of wood, eyes like a doll’s. He draws her as if someone were describing her to him.

  His parents arrive home late in the evening before the funeral, they don’t say anything, just come in as if they’d only been to church or the supermarket. His sister is lying in a box on the chest of drawers in the hall. He sneaks out and picks it up carefully, but it’s too light, there can’t be room for her in there. She was big, with a laugh that could fill hallways, a sense of humor that could lift the roofs off buildings. His mother calls from the kitchen and Matteo almost drops the box.

  “Don’t you want to call one of your school friends and go out for a bike ride, Matteo?”

  Matteo swallows and it feels like he has lumps of ice in his lungs. His sister always used to say that their mother lived in a fantasy world, that she was like one of those funny photographs where you stand behind a board and stick your head through a hole so that your face ends up on a cartoon character of a lion or a fat old lady. “That’s what life is like for her, she just sticks our heads onto whatever she dreams that we are,” his sister said, and it used to make Matteo so angry. Not at his sister, but at the injustice. He’s never had a friend, he’s never called a single classmate, his mother has just seen other children riding their bikes out in the street and assumes that’s the sort of thing he does too.

  “Yes, Mom,” he calls.

  It’s snowing outside, and icy cold in here, because from time to time she gets it into her head that the air is stale and throws all the windows wide open for several days. As if she were airing out everything that’s wrong. She’s standing in the kitchen baking, the way she always does when she doesn’t want to look at anyone, his dad is sitting in another room with his books, because he lives in a different sort of fantasy, one where he can just switch off and not have to feel anything at all. “You say we have to be God’s servants, but that’s just another word for slaves!” Matteo’s sister once yelled at them, and that upset their mother so much that her whole body just shook and she clapped her hands over her ears and screamed. Matteo spent the whole night hugging her and the following morning his sister apologized to him. That night she whispered: “They never speak out about anything to anyone, Matteo. Not their bosses, not people in the church, not God! They just back down and obey and accept that we have to live like this! All the damn rules and prohibitions and never having any money, is that how you want to live? Don’t you want more than this?” Matteo didn’t know what to say to that, he’d never considered the possibility that there might be alternatives, but he understood why his sister started drinking, because it was a way to escape being here. Not long after that their mother found alcohol and skimpy underwear in her room, and that was the first time Matteo heard the word “whore” inside the house. Their mother prayed for her daughter’s soul every night, loudly so she would hear, so her daughter stopped coming home. Matteo was too young to understand everything that happened in those last few months, all the things she was subjected to, but after she disappeared abroad he went and shut himself away in her wardrobe, breathing her in until he fell asleep. When he woke up tucked away in the far corner, he scratched his cheek on something sharp on the floor, the corner of her diary. That was how he found out about everything. That’s why he knows that even though she might have died in another country, and the police said it was because of the drugs, that isn’t actually true. She was murdered here in Beartown. The people here killed her. Her heart broke into so many splinters that they were spread across the whole world.

  Now her parents aren’t even going to have her buried in the church they attend, the one that’s several hours away, they’re going to get it done in the church here in Beartown, the one they’ve always turned their noses up at. That way they won’t have to tell anyone in their own church that their daughter died of an overdose abroad, they can just pretend that she’s still alive, traveling around somewhere out there, still sending postcards.

  Matteo has hidden her diary in the same place where he hides his computer, behind the broken tumble-dryer in the basement, he’s only read it once but he remembers every word, every exclamation mark, every bubble in the paper left by the tears she cried as she was writing it: “No one believes me, because if you fuck one guy here, you owe them all a fuck! fucking democracy, Beartown style! only virgins can get raped here!! why would the police believe me when even my own mother doesn’t?? whore whore whore whore I’m just a whore whore whore to her and all the others so I can’t be raped because you can’t rape a whore!! not here.”

  It’s been two and a half years since she packed her bag and lied about the church she was going to, and just disappeared. She actually left Beartown shortly after Maya Andersson was raped by Kevin Erdahl, but not even when the whole town was suddenly talking about sexual violence every second of every day did Matteo hear his own parents mention a single word about it. For a short while he wondered if they were ashamed, if they regretted not believing their daughter, but that passed when he saw what happened to Maya. She got her justice, her retribution, her revenge, didn’t she? It didn’t take that much, did it? No. Not much at all. It only took one witness, that Amat, who eventually plucked up the courage to say what had happened in a town where that meant he was immediately beaten up and assaulted by the rapist’s friends. It only took the whole Andersson family sticking together when the entire town turned against them. It only took Maya going to the hospital and undergoing all sorts of terrible tests, and her filing a complaint with the police that just led to humiliating speculation that she’d taken drugs, and maybe she’d been sending out ambiguous signals, and did she actually understand that this could actually ruin Kevin’s career?! It only took hundreds of anonymous comments online saying that she was obviously lying and just wanted attention and that everyone knew she was the one who fancied Kevin and not the other way around, and that she was too drunk to be raped anyway, and that she was just a whore who deserved to get raped and that someone ought to murder her. That was all it took! It only took Maya’s father almost losing his job and the whole hockey club almost going bankrupt. It only took evidence and witnesses and money and powerful friends and a trial. And after all that, after ALL THAT, Kevin still wasn’t convicted! His family just moved away and then everyone pretended nothing had happened, and somehow that was supposed to be seen as justice. One tiny little ounce of retribution, that’s what Maya had to make do with, and all that took was every-thing.

  * * *

  Absolutely everything.

  * * *

  So what chance would Matteo’s sister have had? None at all. Matteo didn’t understand why she left home until he found her diary, now he wishes he’d never found it, that he didn’t have to live in her darkness. He had hoped so desperately that she could be free far away, but now he knows that the guys in this town had already created a prison, they left chains inside her that she could never escape. Matteo is only fourteen, but his parents are servants, they will never avenge her, so he’ll have to do that now.

  He takes a small pen from his schoolbag and draws carefully, carefully, a small butterfly on the box she’s lying in. Then he goes out and rides his bicycle in the snow, under the streetlamps, when his mother sees him through the window he waves, and she waves back.

  47 Warriors

  Sunday arrives. Ramona’s funeral doesn’t honor her memory at all. She expressly told these bastards while she was alive that they could feed the pigs or fertilize the flowers with her when she was done with this earthly life, as long as they didn’t make a fuss and invite a load more bastards who would just have to stand there pretending to be sad. No one listened to her, as usual. The whole town attends the funeral.

  * * *

  Benji is woken early by Adri. The dogs get their food first, then the humans, they eat in silence standing at the kitchen counter. Benji barely manages to eat anything, his body isn’t used to waking up at dawn, that’s usually bedtime. Adri forces coffee into him and lays out his only suit. It barely stretched across his shoulders and chest when he left Beartown two years ago, but now it’s too big for him. Adri has polished their father’s old smart shoes and left them in the hall, she gives him a white tie that she bought specially, and Benji can’t be bothered to protest. A white tie is only for family members at funerals, but Adri doesn’t care what Benji thinks about that, or anything else for that matter. He wasn’t even asked where he wanted to stay when he arrived home, his sisters just decided for him. He ended up with Adri because Katia only has a small apartment and Gaby doesn’t have room now that their mother isn’t well and has moved in with her. The idea of Benji living on his own isn’t even discussed, he can travel right around the world as many times as he likes, but if you have three older sisters you’re never an adult.

  When daylight creeps above the treetops Gaby and Katia arrive, with their mother in the backseat, and Adri and Benji squeeze in next to her. Their mother spends the whole journey brushing Benji’s hair, against his will, and the sisters laugh so hard that the car rocks. That boy can bear a lot of pain, but horses are usually groomed more gently than he is now.

  * * *

  Time is unreliable when it comes to those we love. When they leave us it feels like a lifetime, as if they’ve become strangers, but the first morning after they come back it feels like they’ve never been gone. The problem for Benji is that there are so many people who are about to catch sight of him for the first time now. So many people whose reactions he can’t predict.

  There are only a few people at the church when he arrives at the churchyard with his mother and sisters. His mother takes a dozen foil-wrapped bowls out of the trunk, because no matter where she’s going she always has food with her. She and his sisters walk toward the gates and do what they always do: find something to help with. For a few moments they forget Benji, forget the looks that everyone else gives him, forget what he used to be in this town, and what he became. So he’s left standing by the car without really knowing what to do, aware of everyone walking past him sneaking glances and whispering. His sweaty palms search desperately for something to occupy them, but he can barely light a cigarette. He suddenly wishes he’d never come home. Christ, he isn’t ready for this. He sees men in black jackets over by the gate, Spider and a few of the others, Teemu’s closest men. They’re standing there to make sure no one who shouldn’t be there attends the funeral, and Benji doesn’t know if he’s one of them or one of the others, he used to be better at not letting other people see his insecurity, but those pounds aren’t the only things he’s lost in the years he’s been away. The cigarette goes out between his fingers. “Isn’t that Benji?” one little kid whispers to another a short distance away. “God, he’s so thin, has he got AIDS or something?” the other one whispers back, and they giggle hysterically. A grown-up shushes them angrily and both kids throw their arms out and hiss: “What? He is the gay one, isn’t he? YOU said…”

  Benji doesn’t wait to hear the rest, he turns and walks off in the other direction, slipping on the thin covering of snow in his dad’s best shoes. He doesn’t know where he’s going, just someplace where there aren’t any people. The words “are you looking for something or running away from something?” echo in his head. A bartender on the other side of the world asked him that early on in his travels, and he didn’t know what to say, so he said: “Both.” He almost fell in love with that bartender, he almost fell in love with so many men over so many nights, but when the sun went up he always found himself looking for his clothes on the floor, looking for a way out. He met a woman as well, she was a diving instructor who found him asleep on a jetty one morning, he couldn’t quite place her faltering English accent but they became good friends. Such good friends that one night, after he had spent a very long time trying to stare holes in the bottom of bottles, she smiled and said, in Swedish: “You’re so easy to fall unhappily in love with, because you don’t fall in love, you’re just unhappy.” It was the first time in several months Benji had heard his own language, it turned out that the woman grew up just three hundred miles from Beartown, practically around the corner. “Why didn’t you say you were from home?” he asked. “Because then you’d never have talked to me, because you don’t want to think about home at all,” she replied. It was true. They spent all night talking in the language he had almost forgotten, she joined in with the songs the cover band was playing up on the stage, and Benji was drunk enough to close his eyes and believe he was back in the forest again, not by the sea. It wasn’t the first time he felt homesick, just the first time he admitted it. The woman made him promise to stay with her for a while, and Benji promised, but he was soon packing his bag—it got easier and easier every time—and moved on. In another town he met a handsome young man who had a battered old boat, and they lived out on the water for weeks on end, but as soon as the man managed to get Benji to say something about himself Benji was lost to him too. On their last night together Benji lay on his back on the deck under the stars, as high as a kite, and told him how ice hockey felt. How it really felt.