Amat tries to hold back the tears. Bobo has already moved his things into the A-team locker room. No one remains silent when Amat steps in this time, no one even looks up or gets out of the way, they just carry on talking as if everything is the same as usual. As if he belongs there. His old place is free, Aleksandr is sitting in the place where the guy who made the joke about Lev used to sit back in the spring, because that guy doesn’t play here anymore. Whether that was because of the joke or because he just wasn’t good enough for the A-team is something Amat will never know.

  He takes his clothes off, aware of everyone glancing at him, and walks alone to the shower room. No one follows him. He stands alone under the warm water with his sore muscles and even more sore ego.

  When he comes out again there’s a knife on the bench. His teammates have all picked their own names off their training tops. No one says a word, they just throw the names in the bin and go and shower, one by one, until Amat is left alone with the sound of his own breathing on the bench in the corner. That’s how he came to lose a game and win back a locker room.

  * * *

  The A-team’s training sessions don’t usually get much of a crowd, but today the stands are strewn with familiar faces. Maya and Peter are sitting there eating their chocolate balls, the caretaker is keeping them company, and after a while the former coach of the A-team, Sune, appears with his dog. Halfway through the session they hear light steps on the stairs and a whisper:

  “Sit in front of me! I don’t want him to see me!”

  It’s Fatima. She’s been longing to see Amat train again but is terrified that he’ll catch sight of her and feel the pressure. That she might somehow break the magic. Peter and Sune laugh that she’s going to end up being one of those superstitious mothers who collect more bizarre rituals they have to perform on game days than their sons.

  “Soon you’ll be sitting here with incense and talking about driving out evil spirits if he doesn’t score enough goals…” Sune grins.

  He can say whatever he likes, of course, because she’s not listening. Her boy is playing hockey down there, nothing else exists then. Maya is sitting in front of her, and when Amat scores Fatima grabs her shoulder so hard that she feels embarrassed. Maya laughs and assures her that it doesn’t matter, but then she turns and catches sight of something, and that makes her squeeze Fatima’s hand a little too hard instead: the door to the ice rink opens and a lone figure creeps in and sits down in the far corner.

  “Speaking of evil spirits…” The caretaker smiles when he sees that it’s Benji.

  Sune and Peter turn around as if their own child has come home. Neither of them manages to say a word, so Sune’s dog’s enthusiastic barking will have to suffice for them all. Zackell is standing down by the bench and she sees him too, she isn’t big on emotions because she isn’t big on people, but she still hasn’t let anyone play with the number 16 since he left. She’ll save that number on every team she ever coaches, because deep down she’ll never stop hoping that precisely this will happen: out of nowhere, the door will open and he walks into the ice rink as though nothing’s happened. She’ll coach far greater talents, quicker and more technically skilled, but she will never have a team where she wouldn’t have swapped any of them for that long-haired idiot. He meets her gaze on the other side of the ice and gives a curt nod, she nods back. That’s all. Benji is scared that if he goes closer she might ask if he wants to play hockey again, and he can’t bear the idea of disappointing her, so he keeps his distance. Zackell isn’t big on regretting things, but she’ll regret not going over to him at once and saying that she’s missed him. Just like she will always regret never saying that to Ramona.

  The training session continues, the players on the ice are too busy to see what’s going on in the stands, so Benji sits right at the top in the shadows and just listens to the noises. The slice of the skates, the echoes, the panting. Bang bang bang. He left Amat’s bag outside the rink a good while ago, and made fun of him for being so nervous, but now, of course, it was Benji’s turn to stand outside in the cold, shaking so much that it took half the training session before he could bring himself to open the door and step over all the ghosts of his past. One of them gets up now and walks slowly around the ice and sits down next to him without asking for permission, then tucks her arm under his and rests her cheek on his shoulder.

  “Maya Andersson at hockey training? That new guy Bobo was talking about must be seriously hot!” Benji exclaims and she hits his arm as hard as she can and laughs.

  “You’re such a muppet, the whole lot of you are such muppets!”

  Benji just grins and nods toward the ice.

  “Is that him there?”

  Maya snaps:

  “Yes. His name’s Aleksandr but Zackell just calls him ‘Big City’ because they’re such stupid muppets that I can’t stand it!”

  Benji frowns.

  “He IS pretty damn hot, Maya…”

  “I knooooow…,” she sighs resignedly.

  He bursts out laughing. She has chocolate balls in her pocket and he’s been smoking weed all day so he devours them, one bite per ball.

  “Good to see that you haven’t changed entirely, at least.” She smiles.

  Benji closes his eyes quickly and opens them slowly. He looks up at the roof as if he’s trying to see right through it.

  “Is it weird for you, coming home? It’s been seriously weird for me. Just this rink, it feels cramped now, but when we were young it was… enormous.”

  “Yes. It’s all weird. I don’t even feel at home in my own house anymore. I don’t even say ‘going home’ when I come here…,” she admits.

  He says nothing for a long time. Then he asks:

  “Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if Kevin hadn’t existed?”

  She whispers, as shocked by the question as she is by the speed of her reply:

  “All the time. Do you?”

  His chin moves in the world’s smallest nod.

  “Do you think you’d still have been living here then?”

  After an eternity of reflection she replies:

  “Yes. I’d probably have gone on being a naive and happy little girl. I’d have gone to parties and drunk disgusting shots and gossiped at school about who had slept with who. I’d have sat up all night listening to Ana bang on about how sexy that Benji was…”

  “I’m still sexy!” Benji interrupts firmly.

  “Yeah, yeah, you bastard, you are. But you knowing it makes you a bit uglier.” She smiles.

  He appears to hesitate before he asks:

  “Then what? Once you graduated from high school in Beartown? Would you have stayed then? If it hadn’t been for Kevin?”

  She considers this carefully.

  “Yes… maybe? Maybe I’d have gotten together with some crazy hockey guy and had a little house with a little yard and two children and a cat called Simba and a dog called Molly…”

  “I love that you’ve given names to your future pets but not your future children,” Benji grins.

  “For the time being I’m far more keen on pets,” she grins back.

  “Are you happy, then? In that little house?”

  “Yes. Yes, I probably am. But I write really bad songs.”

  He laughs.

  “I’d have lived there with you if your husband left you.”

  “If my husband left me it would probably have been because you’d slept with him, you bastard.”

  “True,” he concedes.

  “I’m proud of you,” she whispers into his sweater.

  “I’m proud of you too,” he replies into her hair.

  Someone yelps breathlessly a few rows below them.

  “What about me? Isn’t anyone proud of me? You’re shit friends, the pair of you, you’re the pits! Can you believe that I had to use the stalker app I installed on your phone to figure out that you were here?”

  Ana clambers cheerfully over the seats up toward them. Maya has nine missed calls on her phone, she realizes with embarrassment.

  “Hang on… you installed a stalker app on my phone? So you can see where I am? What for?” she blurts out in accusation, and Ana throws her arms out in a gesture of complete incomprehension:

  “Because of situations exactly like THIS!”

  70 Players

  Once all the other A-team players have showered and gone home, Amat, Mumble, and Big City are left sitting alone in the locker room. They’re almost ready to leave when Amat plucks up the courage to ask:

  “Do you want to do some extra training early tomorrow morning, Mumble? Like we used to… just come here and practice a few shots… I can ask the caretaker to open up for us.”

  Mumble nods enthusiastically. Big City raises an eyebrow and wonders tentatively:

  “Can I join in?”

  Amat nods happily. Then he stands beside his bag for a few seconds before summoning up the courage once again to suggest:

  “Unless you want to maybe do it… now?”

  It isn’t even a discussion. They take off all their clothes and get changed into their training gear again. Out in the stands the little crowd has started to move toward the door, but when the players show up again they all turn back: the caretaker, Fatima, Sune, Peter, Benji, Maya, and Ana. The ice rink ought to be shut up and dark by this time, but no one is going to suggest that now. Amat takes a turn and fires a puck into the right of Mumble’s goal, and the rattle of the net lifts every soul in the rink, and when he laughs and cheers it’s the first time Fatima has heard her child happy in months.

  “Laughter in an ice rink, so the world hasn’t totally gone to hell yet, that it hasn’t…,” the caretaker mutters, then wanders off to his storeroom to be alone with his feelings.

  Sune laughs and his dog licks his face. Peter has never felt like he’s come home as much as he does right then. In the stands on the other side of the ice sit Benji, Maya, and Ana. Amat stops below them and calls mockingly to Big City:

  “Hey! Have you met Benjamin Ovich? He’s a legend in this town! He actually used to be pretty good at hockey! Not as good as YOU, of course, but he was perfectly OKAY…”

  Benji resists as long as he can. Longer than anyone would believe. But then he curses and stands up, muttering:

  “Get me a pair of fucking skates so I can break that idiot’s legs…”

  Maya and Ana laugh so hard that it sings around the ice rink’s roof, Amat too, but Big City stands next to him and whispers:

  “He meant you, right? He meant he was going to break YOUR legs, right?”

  Benji storms into the caretaker’s storeroom and comes back out on a pair of skates. The caretaker has spent a lifetime in this rink and has seen more than most people can imagine, but he can’t remember a better moment than this. Zackell and Bobo are up in the office to plan the next training session, but when they hear the noise and cheering from down on the ice they go back out into the stands. Bobo sees Benji and looks like a Labrador that’s just heard keys jangling in a door, Zackell nods, apparently unmoved, and says:

  “I can finish up in the office. You go and play with your friends.”

  Bobo stumbles euphorically down the stands but Zackell doesn’t go back to the office. She stands and watches as Benji chases Amat across the ice and Amat bounces away and laughs and Bobo pulls on a pair of skates and throws himself into the fray and one of the very best things of all happens: almost-adults forgetting that they’re adults.

  They split into teams: Benji, Bobo, and Mumble on one side, Amat and Big City on the other. That’s uneven so they shout up to Peter in the stands and nag him until he goes down to fetch a pair of skates. Maya can hardly believe her eyes, but her dad comes out onto the ice and actually seems to be… having fun.

  Big City finds Amat with passes where no passes ought to be able to get through. It looks like luck every time. Amat lands the puck in the net and as he skates past Bobo on the way back he pants:

  “Did you see that pass? Poor Hed in that first game. Poor, poor Hed. That guy can read my mind…”

  Big City actually only makes one mistake: he draws the puck away and darts past Benji, and Benji loses his balance and everyone laughs. After that he isn’t allowed an inch of ice without Benji being there like some furious badger.

  “Did you really have to laugh? He’s going to kill me!” Big City whispers to Peter when he stops close to the goal, but Peter just chuckles:

  “No, no, don’t worry, Benji isn’t going to kill you here. Far too many witnesses. You’ll just ‘disappear’ suddenly when we least expect it. There’s a lot of forest around here, you know, you can bury anything out there!”

  Big City stares at him as if he’s really, really trying to figure out if the local sense of humor is that stupid, or if Peter is actually serious. Behind him Benji is chasing Amat from one end of the rink to the other, and by the time they reach the far end they’re both red in the face from exertion. Bobo skates over to see if they’re okay, but just as he’s about to suggest that they take a short break Benji’s body folds over and he throws up all the chocolate balls he’s eaten across the goal line and Bobo’s skates.

  “OH MY GOD… BLOODY HELL… FOR CHRIST’S S— NO! NO! EURGH, I STOOD IN IT!” Bobo yells in panic and tries to jump out of the pool, with the predictable result that he slips and lands with a thump with his ass in the middle of the mess.

  No one in the rink can breathe properly for several minutes, the laughter must have reached all the way to Hed. Fatima comes running over with a bucket and some rags but Amat skates over to the boards and stops her, takes the cleaning things from her, and goes out to clean up himself. Benji feels so guilty that he almost hits him.

  “I’ve cleaned up after worse pigs than you,” Amat grins.

  “Not much worse!” Bobo points out in disgust, and when he sees how the vomit has frozen to the ice he almost throws up too.

  “Is it the smell, Bobo, is it upsetting you?” Amat teases, and he and Benji laugh until their throats are hoarse.

  Bobo’s huge frame is racked with retching and Benji has to crouch down because his ribs are hurting so much from laughing. Bobo, incredibly indignant, is leaning against the boards and swearing blind to Amat that he’s going to make Zackell reconsider her team selection and that makes Benji shriek with laughter, begging Bobo to stop talking because he can’t take any more.

  For Bobo’s sake they move across to the other end of the ice, mark out a smaller area with caps and water bottles as goalposts. Then they play again, the way they used to play on the lake when they were younger: at full pelt without rules. Uncomplicated and simple. Us against you.

  Amat will remember this evening as the start of something. Bobo as the end of something. For Peter it feels like belonging to something again, for Mumble it feels like belonging to something for the very first time. For Big City it’s like getting a second chance to be a little kid and fall head-over-heels in love with hockey again. How it feels for Benji nobody knows, this is the last time they see him play.

  * * *

  One day Maya will write about this evening, her notepad soaked with tears:

  I remember that evening a while ago

  One of the last we knew before the blow

  For one night we finally got to see

  The man we dreamed you’d always be

  Your body a blur

  Your heart at ease

  You were all you wanted to be

  Happy and safe and free

  Where you are now my friend? I cannot know

  But I remember that evening a lifetime ago

  71 Murderers

  All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked. In the end everything is either a revolt against the adults we encountered or an attempt to copy them. That’s why someone who hated their own childhood often has greater empathy than someone who loved theirs. Because someone who had a hard time dreamed of other realities, but someone who had it easy can hardly imagine that things could be any different. We take happiness so easily for granted if we’ve had it from the start.

  Perhaps that’s why it’s so incredibly hard to explain what hockey is to someone who really doesn’t get it. Because hockey is something we’ve always had, or haven’t had at all. If you don’t fall in love with it in time, you’ll have gotten so big that you imagine that it’s a sport. You have to have been a child the first time your body played and your heart relaxed to know that it’s just a game. And if you’re lucky, really lucky, it never stops being just that.

  Snowflakes the size of oven gloves are falling on Beartown and the laughter inside the ice rink can be heard all the way out to the parking lot. It probably sounds either perfectly logical or completely mad, depending on who you are, but in some places a game can save an entire childhood. If you’re always in the middle of it you don’t feel any anxiety, any fear, because there’s no room for those. All the game contains is eager cries and breathless laughter, and when all your friends are teammates you’re never really alone. You don’t fall asleep at night, you collapse, and your parents have to carefully peel your hockey jersey off you in bed. The next morning you wake up ravenous, you bolt your breakfast down, and you rush outside, because there are already kids playing out in the street. There’s always a new game, always one final goal that decides everything. If you love a game, really love it, you remember almost nothing else of your younger years. All your happiest moments were when you had a stick in your hand, shoulder to shoulder with your best friends, a few square yards between two goals were the whole planet and we were the best in the world. The very finest thing you can give a child is somewhere to belong. The biggest thing you can have is being part of something.

  That’s why it hurts to be a different child. The one whose name no one remembers when they look back at school photographs because that child was never part of anyone else’s childhood except their own. It’s so cold being outside other people that you freeze to death all by your-self.