In turn, Kira probably knows that she ought to tell him everything Tails said, that she’s been offered the seat on the committee, but she convinces herself that she’s a lawyer first and foremost in this instance. Not a wife. So she just looks at the compost being washed down the drain before she picks up another pot, empties it, then refills it once more. Digging. Saying nothing.

  55 Howls

  Everyone is connected around here, and connected most tightly by the threads we never see. When we remember these days in hindsight we might perhaps note the dark irony in the fact that Ramona, who knew and influenced so many people when she was alive, had, through her funeral, a profound impact on people she never even met. Because everyone in Beartown is there mourning her loss today, so no one is at work, which means that the factory has to call all the employees who live over in Hed to cover the shift. One of them, a young woman who only finished her own shift a few hours earlier, goes in at once. Her mother tells her not to, but the extra money and the Sunday-work supplement are too good to turn down.

  “Especially now, when there’s so much to buy,” the young woman says.

  “Just be careful, don’t wear yourself out, it’s even more important that you look after your body now!” her mother insists, and the young woman rolls her eyes but still promises.

  The machine she’s in charge of today in the factory is old, the shift before hers reported a fault this morning but no one had time to tell her. She’s tired, feels sick, and perhaps her head is a little dizzy. The investigators at the factory will ask thousands of questions about this afterward to try to make it look like it was her own fault. But the truth is that the mechanics couldn’t get here because of the storm, and management didn’t dare risk disrupting production, so they faked the repair form and let the machine run. There should always be two people operating it, but because they’re short of staff today the young woman ends up there on her own. The health and safety officer is already arguing with the factory’s management about so many other things that no one had spared any thought for the fact that the emergency stop button is too far away if you’re on your own and something gets trapped. No one who hears the howl will ever forget it.

  56 Teammates

  After the funeral two hockey players who didn’t attend it are hanging around on the other side of the road. They both wanted to pay their respects to Ramona somehow, but one is shy and the other ashamed, so neither of them managed to persuade themselves to go inside the church. It isn’t until the door opens again and people are coming out that the ashamed player notices the shy player standing twenty yards away and goes over to him.

  “Hello!” Amat says.

  Mumble nods gently in response. His lips move to form a reply but nothing comes out. They stand next to each other with their hands in their pockets, looking at the church.

  “I… couldn’t bring myself to go in. Everyone just wants to ask if I’m going to play hockey again,” Amat says quietly, because with Mumble he suddenly feels he can speak freely.

  Mumble just nods slowly, but the look in his eyes shows that he really does understand, so Amat doesn’t feel too ashamed to ask:

  “Maybe we could train together one day? Like we used to last year? I need to get in shape. I don’t know if Zackell will take me back on the team but I need to find somewhere to play. I… I need to play again, if you get me?”

  Mumble nods. Both because he gets it, and because he really would like to train with Amat again. He used to hate those darting wristers and the skates that could change direction in the air, the shots that seemed to come out of nowhere, but now he misses the challenge. Hockey needs to be difficult.

  “Maybe we could ask the caretaker if we could use the rink one evening, or we could just play on the lake if it freezes soon?” Amat says.

  Mumble’s nods are more eager now. That also counts as a language.

  * * *

  Benji takes the back route around the church with his jacket pulled up over his head, like a cat padding as quickly as it dares to avoid being seen, in the hope that no one will stop him and want to talk about hockey. In the middle of the low rumble of hundreds of mourners’ subdued conversation it’s lucky that he recognizes the sound of size 14 sneakers running, because at least then he has time to brace his knees and dig his heels in to save his back from breaking when Bobo throws himself at him in a hug like a fully grown dog who thinks he’s still a puppy.

  “BENJI! BENJI!!! SHIT I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU WERE HOME! HOW ARE YOU?” the delighted lummox manages to blurt out before they’ve even finished hugging.

  Benji slips nimbly out of his embrace and hushes him at first, then laughs.

  “Seriously, Bobo, have you done anything except eat since I left?”

  “Have you been eating at all? Wasn’t there any food in Asia or something?” Bobo grins, so happy that he’s skipping about on tiptoe until he can no longer resist throwing himself into another hug.

  “I’ve missed you too,” Benji sighs. Maybe it sounds sarcastic, but it’s true.

  There’s a special sort of love that you can’t get from your mates, only from teammates.

  * * *

  “Amat! Mumble! Look who’s here!”

  Bobo’s voice carries high above the crowd when he catches sight of his two teammates on the other side of the road and immediately starts dragging Benji over there. Benji, Amat, and Mumble unite in directing a shared “Shhh!” at him, seeing as the last thing any of them wants is to attract attention, and the last thing you ought to do if you don’t want to attract attention is be in Bobo’s company.

  “Bloody hell, Bobo, do you want a megaphone? I don’t think all the dead heard you!” Benji sighs, and Bobo looks at him the way you do when you don’t understand a word of what’s being said but are still just as delighted.

  “Maybe we could… go somewhere else?” Amat suggests when he sees people in the churchyard starting to glance curiously in their direction.

  Benji nods quickly, just as keen to get away from there, so they start walking, and it only takes a few hundred yards for everything to feel the same as normal. Four guys of roughly the same age talking about hockey. Benji nods toward Amat’s stomach and asks if he’s “been training hard lately?” Amat smiles and says, “It’s complicated,” then asks if Benji has been doing any training, and Benji says: “You know me. I get into shape by resting.” All four of them laugh and then Bobo gets a text message and then two more, and when Benji and Amat start teasing him that maybe he’s got a girlfriend now, they aren’t prepared for the fact that that’s exactly what he’s gone and done.

  Tess texts that her parents aren’t home, if Bobo wants to see her. “We need to come up with a plan that keeps my brothers busy,” she says, so Bobo turns to Amat, Benji, and Mumble and asks, with the biggest, most naive eyes in the entire forest:

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  * * *

  What teammates could say no to that?

  * * *

  When Bobo says he’s going to get “some wheels,” Benji, Amat, and Mumble are expecting something normal, so when he returns to pick them up they can barely contain themselves.

  “What’s that? A… campervan?” Amat wonders, looking from one end of the ridiculously long vehicle to the other. It looks about a hundred years old.

  Bobo nods happily.

  “Yes! I got it from Dad! He got it from his hunting team. They all thought it was a write-off, but I’ve been fixing it up, one bit at a time.”

  “One bit at a time? You’ve got quite a lot of ‘bits’ left, haven’t you?” Benji smiles as he gets in.

  The campervan is so rusty and buckled that he and Amat entertain themselves for the whole trip finding things that are actually in one piece. For a very short while they think that the door to the glove compartment is intact, but a moment later Benji is sitting with both it and half the dashboard in his lap.

  “Your dad didn’t have anything a bit more stable to give you? Like a skateboard with three wheels or something?” Benji grins.

  “Seriously, Bobo, did you do something bad to your dad? Is he angry with you?” Amat laughs, then tells Benji and Mumble about the time Bobo drank some of Hog’s vodka, and had heard that you should top it up with water afterward so it didn’t show. It was all fine until Bobo put the bottle back in the freezer where Hog kept it, and the following morning he had to explain to his dad how vodka was able to freeze solid.

  Everyone laughs except Bobo, he looks so deep in thought that in the end Benji has to ask something you hardly ever want to know the answer to:

  “What are you thinking about, Bobo?”

  Bobo gives him an honest reply, because he can’t do otherwise:

  “I was thinking how crazy freezers are. Just think, if you put a piece of meat with a best-before-date of tomorrow in the freezer, then leave it for a month, then when you take it out it’s still okay to eat! It’s like you’ve stopped time! Freezers are time machines!”

  Benji’s eyebrows disappear beneath his hair.

  “Out of all the things you could be thinking about… that’s the sort of thing you go and pick?”

  “Don’t you? I don’t understand why everyone isn’t thinking about things like that the whole time!” Bobo replies, very seriously.

  Benji and Amat laugh, Mumble stays quiet, not because he doesn’t appreciate the humor, but because he’s the only one thinking about where they’re going. Bobo is in love, Amat probably hasn’t realized how serious the conflict between the towns is, and Benji, of course, is the same as always: not afraid of anyone. But Mumble is weighed down with anxiety, because they’re heading straight toward Hed and he knows what’s going to happen when these guys show themselves there.

  * * *

  There’s going to be trouble.

  57 Different hells

  Johnny and Hannah are having one of those rare moments when they both finish work at almost the same time. They really ought to buy a lottery ticket every time that happens. He picks her up at the hospital, they kiss in the car like two teenagers, and Hannah laughs out loud at how silly he is when he tries to go further. She tells him to take her home first, like a damn grown-up, but then the van won’t start and then it’s lucky for him that she loves him so much, because otherwise he’d have heard a few things considerably worse than “silly.”

  He gets out to check what might be wrong, and only then does he notice that he’s got four missed calls on his phone. In just a few minutes? Just as he raises it to his ear to call the station, he hears the car door open and Hannah’s voice calling:

  “Darling? They’ve just called me! I have to go back in!”

  “Johnny? We need you at work!” a voice yells at the same time from the fireman’s phone.

  Johnny sighs. As does Hannah. They smile at each other across the hood of the van. At least they got a few minutes together, like silly teenagers. That’s something.

  * * *

  Then they run.

  * * *

  The production floor at the factory in Beartown has always been political dynamite. It can determine the outcome of an entire council election. Two years ago one local politician, Richard Theo, ran a campaign based, at least on the surface, on unemployment, but it was really intended to implant the words “Beartown jobs for Beartown people” in people’s consciousness. Obviously that was when the factory in Beartown was short of jobs, now there’s more like a shortage of workers, but a good slogan is hard to shift. The staff who come from Hed are still prone to suspect favoritism every time a management position or a better shift is given to someone from Beartown rather than one of them. Under those circumstances, it’s even easier to interpret what happens to the young woman today as something other than an accident.

  The young woman is from Hed, the woman who normally works that machine is from Beartown. She’s on maternity leave at the moment, but her replacement is also from Beartown, so he was at Ramona’s funeral. So the young woman from Hed was a replacement for a replacement, and the machine has been reported as faulty but cleared by a stressed manager, who by coincidence also happens to come from Beartown.

  Richard Theo’s words are easy to remember then. Beartown jobs. Beartown people.

  When the machine seizes up, the young woman doesn’t know why. She calls for help from her workmates to clear the blockage, but none of them has time. She’s worried about messing up her own productivity figures in the factory’s new digital monitoring system if she waits too long. So she tries to sort it out on her own. The machine splutters, then starts up again when she isn’t expecting it, and in one horrible breath she’s sucked in under iron and cog wheels and hears bones being crushed. Only then, when her lungs finally find some air, do the screams make their way out of her. It feels like they’re never going to stop.

  * * *

  Afterward we’ll talk more about the trouble than about the accident, more about what the men did afterward than about what happened to the young woman. The fire brigade has to cut her out of the machine, she’s almost unconscious with pain but her injuries don’t appear to be life-threatening. It isn’t until her brothers, who also work at the factory, manage to force their way through the crowd to Johnny that he realizes why Hannah was called back into the hospital again.

  “She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant!” the brothers are howling hysterically.

  The ambulance doesn’t stop for anything along the way, the fire engine right behind it, followed by the brothers’ car, the sirens sweep deafeningly through the forest. When they thunder into Hed the entire community stops.

  “Out of the way! OUT OF THE WAY! MAKE SPACE!” Hannah yells as she rushes out of the hospital entrance and clears a path for the paramedics from the ambulance. Johnny has to throw himself out of the fire engine and literally grab hold of the brothers to stop them getting in the way.

  When the stretcher bearing the young woman is wheeled in and all the staff rush after it, there’s a patch of blood left on the pavement. The brothers are left standing there, staring at it impotently. At roughly the same time two young men roll into the parking lot in a small car. They’re hardly more than boys, with naive expressions and facial hair that wouldn’t hold up against a decent towel, and they have no idea what’s happened. They don’t even work at the hospital but on a building site right next to it, but they’re playing music that’s a bit too happy, and they have a little bear in a green hockey sweater hanging from the rearview mirror. That’s enough. The brothers take this as a provocation, they need one desperately, anything at all.

  The fight breaks out so quickly that not even Johnny has time to throw himself between them. Before the other firemen get there, the two young construction workers from Beartown are lying on the ground beside their car, battered and terrified. The firemen pick them up and brush them down, but it’s too late to calm them down, they jump into their car and drive away from there in panic, and on the way to Beartown they call their friends and tell them what the brothers did. A couple of their friends work at the factory. A short while later, one of the brothers’ girlfriends has her car vandalized in the parking lot there. She has a small Hed Hockey sticker in the rear windshield.

  * * *

  Things always happen quickly when everything goes to hell.

  * * *

  The world never feels bigger than when you’re holding the smallest person. You never feel more incompetent than when you realize that you’re suddenly someone’s parent and that no one is planning on stopping you. “Me?” you blurt out when the midwife says you can go home: “But I’ve got no idea what I’m doing! You’re going to let me look after a human being?”

  If you’re a parent, you probably remember how you carried your first child at the start. How carefully you drove home. How incomprehensible everything was when you sat motionless in the dark to make absolutely certain that that tiny, wrinkled creature was still breathing. A minuscule rib cage rising and falling, and every so often a little whimper from the horizon of dreams, or just a whistling sigh that had you performing lonely little pirouettes on tiptoe around the crib. The way your heart reflexively grabbed hold of your lungs when five tiny fingers took hold of one of yours and didn’t let go.

  Being a midwife is strange, because if you do your job perfectly you have to start again almost immediately, waving off one family and welcoming another at once, without ever getting to know anyone. Perhaps that’s the deepest injustice of the job: that the children and mothers who take the longest time and who you really get to know are the tragedies.

  What was it Hannah said to Ana in the forest a few days ago? “You have to make the most of the happy endings whenever you get the chance.” Hannah hopes that she does this herself, that her soul has bathed in tears of joy and the breaths of newborns enough times, because otherwise she doesn’t know how she’s going to get through today.

  There are two women lying in beds at opposite ends of the hospital. One gave birth in the forest during the storm and will soon be able to take her little son, Vidar, home to their little house in Beartown. The house he’ll remember as his childhood home, the lawn he played on, the little roads he learned to ride a bike on. His snowball fights, his hockey games, his first broken heart, and his first great love. His whole life. The other woman will be flown to a larger hospital where she will need operations for several broken bones, and when she does eventually come home to her little house in Hed, it will be without the child she was expecting. The carriage her partner thought was way too expensive but which she thought she could pay off with the extra money for working a Sunday shift is sitting in the hall of their home and she will crumble in despair. In a few weeks her partner will find the box containing the crib in the storeroom, the one she kept nagging at him to put together, and he’ll sob so hard that it feels like his ribs will break. For the rest of their lives they will always walk past the display windows of the sports shop and think that there’s one bicycle too many in there. A pair of skates too many. A hundred thousand adventures and trees to climb and puddles to jump in too many. A million uneaten ice creams. They will never be woken too early on holiday mornings, never whisper-shout “Quiet!” when they’re talking on the phone, never put small gloves on the radiator. The greatest fear, the tiniest human being, will never be theirs.