* * *

  A team of very young kids is training down on the ice. The caretaker goes off to replace some lightbulbs and check the windows and emergency exits before the thirteen-year-olds’ game, and Peter goes with him to help out. When he was general manager he always took pride in not only knowing all about the team, but all about the ice rink as well, what needed to be maintained and oiled, replaced or repaired. In a small hockey club no one has one job, everyone has at least three.

  “Damn…,” Peter says when he goes to take off his jacket and the zipper breaks.

  “Has that jacket shrunk or has your stomach grown?” the caretaker grins.

  “A bit of both,” Peter admits.

  “I’ve got some pliers in the storeroom. I’ll mend it for you. You can’t go around like that, lad,” the caretaker grunts, because even if Peter lives to be eighty he’ll still be a “lad” to this man.

  When they reach the storeroom Amat is standing outside with his skates in his hand. He looks extremely uncomfortable when he catches sight of Peter, and fumbles so much with his hands that he drops one skate.

  “Do they need sharpening?” the caretaker wonders with the special happy voice he reserves for the players he likes best of all.

  “Only if… only if you’ve got time… I don’t need…,” Amat manages to say, there’s so much he wanted to say to Peter when he went around to his house the other day, but when nothing got said it was as if the words took root inside him instead.

  “Just need to mend a jacket first,” the caretaker informs him.

  But Peter bends down and picks the skate up from the floor and says:

  “I can sharpen them, Amat. Come in and tell me how you want them.”

  The three men from different generations stand next to one another amid the spark and spin of the sharpener, squabbling quietly about the angle of the blade. The caretaker points out that they need less sharpening now that Amat has put on twenty pounds, and Peter winks at Amat and says:

  “He just pretends to be smart, he doesn’t actually know how to change the setting on the machine, he’s sharpened every skate exactly the same way for a hundred years.”

  “You could have run your skates through a fistful of grit, you never skated five yards in an entire game anyway…” the caretaker retorts, then goes to look for a better set of pliers.

  Peter and Amat are left by the sharpener and over the grinding sound Peter asks:

  “Are you going to stay and watch the thirteen-year-olds? It feels like only yesterday you were that age. Well, I mean, I know it’s a long time ago but sometimes it just feels like…”

  Amat is staring fixedly at his skates.

  “I know what you mean. Sometimes I feel that way too.”

  Peter runs his fingertip softly along the blades.

  “That’s why the whole town likes watching kids play. There’s nothing but hope at that age.”

  Amat’s voice cracks when he replies:

  “I should have listened to you back in the spring.”

  Peter shakes his head gently.

  “No, no, you were right. You’re a grown man now. I had no right to lecture you about what you ought to do…”

  “If I’d listened to you, I might have been playing in the NHL now,” Amat struggles to say.

  Peter turns to him, obliging him to make eye contact.

  “You’re going to play in the NHL one day. Not because of me or anyone else, but because you’re a damn good hockey player.”

  He hands over the skates. Amat takes them and says toward the floor:

  “I wouldn’t be where I am without you.”

  “Stop that, you have a God-given talent, you had—” Peter protests, but Amat interrupts him quietly but firmly:

  “Talent isn’t enough. Or at least it wouldn’t have been enough for me. You need someone who believes in you too. Not just me… you’ve done the same for Benji and Bobo, and now you’re doing it for Aleksandr as well… we aren’t your kids, but you’ve always made us feel like we are. You’ve always believed in us more than we did ourselves.”

  The caretaker comes back. The door closes. The sharpener squeals. Amat nods awkwardly and mumbles “thanks,” then heads off. Peter stands there, not daring to put his jacket back on now, because there’s no way it’s going to fit around his chest. The caretaker glances at him irritably and grunts:

  “Are you just going to stand there, because I’ve got twenty pairs of skates that need sharpening…”

  So Peter stays for several hours. He hasn’t felt so useful in a very long time.

  * * *

  The ice rink has already started to fill with people when Amat emerges from the storeroom. The crowd makes him nervous so he doesn’t stay to watch the game. In the parking lot he sees Mumble, with his bag over his shoulder and the same tense expression when faced with the crowd. It’s started to snow again.

  “Mumble! Do you want to go somewhere and play? We can see if the lake’s frozen?” Amat calls, and of course Mumble nods.

  * * *

  Matteo stands among the trees some distance away and watches them go.

  83 Provocations

  It’s Thursday afternoon and the house in Hed is vibrating from bodies moving up and down the creaking staircase. Ted is packing his bag because he has a game today against Beartown’s thirteen-year-olds. Tobias is still suspended from his team, so for once he’s going to go along and watch Ted, because their games have usually clashed for the past few years. Tess is dropping Ture off with the neighbors. Obviously Ture is furious about this, but even if no one knows yet just how bad things are going to be today, this morning Johnny just felt instinctively that their youngest son shouldn’t come to the ice rink with them. Johnny and Hannah are both trying to hold back their emotions as well as they can, with varying degrees of success. The accident at the factory hit them hard, they haven’t even had time to talk about it properly with each other, maybe they’ve even been avoiding that. Johnny helped cut the young woman free from the machine and Hannah looked after her at the hospital. Now Hannah is emotional and Johnny is sensitive. She expresses her feelings, he holds his in. She lets off steam, he’s likely to explode.

  “I’ll go and pack the van,” he says, even though there’s nothing to pack, he just goes out and sits in the driver’s seat with Springsteen on low volume.

  Hannah lets him go, then heads toward Ted’s room. The thirteen-year-old is already wearing his red training jersey, and as usual has been ready to leave earlier than anyone else. Unlike Tobias, the fifteen-year-old, who as usual has only just woken up and is still trying to locate a pair of socks that match. Hannah is helping him, muttering without thinking:

  “Are these your socks? They look like Dad’s! How big are your feet? It feels like only yesterday that I had to tie your laces every time you were going to skate…”

  “It’s been, like, ten years since you tied our laces, Mom,” Tobias and Ted say with a grin at the same time.

  “No, it was five minutes ago! Last week, at the very most!” their mother retorts defiantly.

  It isn’t you who’ve grown, it’s just that the rest of my world has shrunk around you, she thinks, hugging her boys. Now she only has one child left who needs help tying his skates, and even Ture hardly lets her do that anymore. It’s a terrible thing to have taken away from you, because that moment when one of your children goes out onto the ice, when they take their very first step during training or in a game, for the whole of their lives that has been one of the very few moments when she has felt like a good mother. Like a mother who knows what’s going on. Just for a moment. Now they do everything themselves just like she always wanted when they were little and annoying, and now she wants to have it all back again because now they’re big and independent.

  Ted and Tobias argue about what music they want to listen to all the way to Beartown. Tess puts Springsteen on just to annoy them, but of course Johnny thinks it’s for him and grins smugly until they emerge from the forest and see the line of traffic heading to the ice rink.

  “Shit, that’s a lot of people! What’s happening?” Tobias exclaims.

  “Are all these people here to watch OUR game?” Ted gasps.

  Johnny and Hannah sit in silence, gazing warily across the parking lot from side to side through the crowd. There are small groups of men in black jackets standing here and there, naturally they don’t usually go to the thirteen-year-olds’ games but things are different today. The violence that is coming becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Pack has heard all the rumors that men from Hed are coming here to fight, so they think they have to defend their boys in Beartown, so the men in Hed think in turn that now they have to come here to protect their own boys. And then no provocation is needed. This hatred is proceeding of its own volition.

  This is never going to end well, Hannah thinks, but says instead:

  “It’ll be great to have such a good atmosphere for the game, won’t it? Look how many people from Hed are here, it’ll be almost like a home game!”

  “This IS a home game,” Johnny grunts unhappily.

  It should have been, anyway. It should have been played in Hed’s ice rink this weekend if the roof hadn’t collapsed. Now it’s been moved here, on a Thursday because there was no other slot available, and someone in Beartown has obviously taken care to put Beartown’s name first on the list of the day’s games outside the entrance. As if this were a home game for them.

  “Perhaps that isn’t so very important, darling,” Hannah says pointedly, and he sullenly stops talking.

  They follow the other cars past the flagpoles with huge green flags flying at the top. The smart new roof of the ice rink is covered with snow, sparkling in the sunlight. All the parking spaces close to the rink are occupied by expensive SUVs owned by hockey dads who all look the same. They all have Beartown Hockey stickers in the rear windows. Johnny drives the van past them. The chassis clatters, Springsteen is roaring, and a short distance away a gang of teenagers are yelling: “WE ARE THE BEARS! WE ARE THE BEARS! WE ARE THE BEARS! THE BEARS FROM BEEEEARTOWN!” Somewhere else a group of children in Hed respond: “HED! HED! HED!” To which a chorus of boos from all corners of the parking lot is crowned by the teenagers: “HED BITCHES! HED BITCHES! HED BITCHES!”

  “Lovely Beartown with their lovely, lovely ‘values,’ ” Johnny rumbles quietly and Hannah can’t be bothered to tell him to be quiet.

  Tobias and Ted jump out of the car and without a word Tobias takes his younger brother’s bag and carries it for him, so he won’t get stuck in the crowd with it if there’s any trouble. They see Ted’s coach and the rest of the team close to the entrance to the rink and head in that direction, with Hannah’s words echoing in their ears:

  “Concentrate on the hockey now! Don’t start any trouble! Do you hear me?”

  Tess is standing by her side, glancing a little way past the entrance. Hannah looks at her, looks at the entrance, then sighs:

  “Can you see Bobo, then?”

  Tess nods happily. “Can I…?”

  Her mother nods.

  “Okay, okay, you can go. But stay close to him! If there’s any trouble, you can at least make sure he’s the one who gets hit. He’s a big enough target, anyway…”

  Tess runs off, as carefree as if she were at a fairground, which, to be fair, this almost feels like now. She’s laughing so happily that Hannah almost relaxes, because apart from a few overexcited chants she has to admit that people seem to be in a pretty good mood: anticipation in the air, children with heavy bags, open car trunks with bags of pastries and flasks of coffee. The towns have borne such hatred toward each other this past week, but now that they’re here it’s as if they’re all rubbing their hands in the cold and remembering the warmth of the sport instead. They hug old friends they haven’t seen since spring, a whole long summer has passed when everyone drifted away to campsites and holiday cottages, but now real life is beginning again. Now everyday life will be governed by drop-offs and pickups once more, and every evening hundreds of families will have something to talk about again, because if all these children didn’t play hockey their parents would never have this much space in their lives. How many more years of this will Hannah herself have, at best? Soon it will be over. Soon they’ll be grown-up. Mothers have no armor to get them through life because they give every last bit to their children, by the end of their teenage years there isn’t even any skin left, so every feeling of loss cuts right into her flesh now.

  “I’m going to get a hot dog, are you staying here?” Johnny says, completely untroubled beside her, and she can’t help wishing that lightning would strike him just then, not fatally, but almost.

  “A hot dog? Now?” Hannah snorts, but she shouldn’t be surprised, her husband is a living waste dump, she’s spent half her life trying to “hide” cheap chocolate at the top of the drawers where he can find it easily when he’s been drinking beer, so that he doesn’t carry on his drunken search until he finds the expensive chocolate that she’s hidden lower down.

  She sees the families of two of Ted’s teammates a little way away and walks over to them. Johnny walks over to get a hot dog. That’s how quickly the whole family gets split up in the crowd.

  84 Lawyers

  The entire Andersson family ends up in the ice rink this afternoon, but none of them can really explain why. Maya and Ana stop by the house to eat bread, Big City is there fetching his things, because he’s moving permanently into the summer cottage that used to be a campervan. He slept there on his own last night, Benji has moved to his sister’s house for reasons Big City hasn’t quite understood yet, but Big City himself was so happy there among the trees down by the water that he decided to stay.

  “Are you going to watch the game today?” Maya wonders innocently when they bump into each other in the kitchen.

  “What game?” Big City asks.

  “Hed’s thirteen-year-olds are playing Beartown’s.”

  “Thirteen-year-olds? Is that a big thing here?” he wonders in sur-prise.

  “It’s Beartown against Hed. That makes everything a big deal here,” Maya replies.

  “Are… you going?” he asks.

  “We are NOW!” Ana declares.

  They persuade Leo to go too, he pretends he’s doing it reluctantly, on the way he shares a cigarette with Maya and Ana and he’s never felt more grown-up. When they get to the ice rink Maya sends their mother a text message:

  We’re going to watch the game. Come along?

  Kira is sitting in her office with her colleague buried in documents, and texts back in surprise:

  The thirteen-year-olds? Didn’t think you were interested in that?

  She receives the reply:

  Who cares who’s playing, Mom, come and hang out.

  Good luck resisting that if you’re the mother of teenagers.

  * * *

  Johnny doesn’t want a hot dog, he just saw the hot dog stand from the road when he turned into the parking lot and recognized the guy standing behind it. A thin young man with a scrappy beard. Johnny saw him at the scrapyard, he’s one of Lev’s guys. There are four middle-aged men in green jackets standing around him, one of them far too close to his face, arguing loudly. One of them grabs the hot dog stand angrily, Lev’s guy resists but doesn’t fight back even if he looks like he could. He’s outnumbered and outclassed by the green jackets, even if the men are overweight and have the same desperate hairstyle fighting against rapidly receding hairlines.

  Johnny unzips his own jacket as he approaches, then stops a couple of yards away and clears his throat:

  “Is there a problem here?”

  The men in green jackets turn around in a rage that quickly fades. That’s partly because of Johnny’s size, of course, but also the T-shirt with the logo of the fire brigade they can see beneath his open jacket. Not that the men respect firemen, these sort of men don’t respect anything, but they know that if you fight with one fireman, you fight with all of them. Johnny might be on his own here, but he might as well have been a whole gang.

  “Selling hot dogs isn’t allowed here!” one of the men eventually exclaims, sounding tougher than he probably is.

  “Not allowed? Selling hot dogs? Are you serious?” Johnny laughs.

  “The boys’ team is selling hot dogs in the cafeteria inside the ice rink! This bastard’s standing out here selling them at half the price! How are our lads going to sell anything in there?”

  Lev’s guy turns to Johnny and says with barely suppressed fury:

  “Is this not a free country? A free town?”

  “Well it certainly isn’t YOUR goddamn town, so maybe you can just piss off back to wherever you came from? Anyway, what sort of meat’s in those hot dogs? Rats and bats?” one of the men snarls.

  Johnny just looks at him so hard that he shrinks, the way men with big mouths and small fists always do. One of the other men takes his friend by the arm and mutters an apology to Johnny:

  “That was… sorry… let’s not allow this to get out of hand now. Our boys in there are just trying to sell hot dogs and earn a bit of money for their team’s kitty. The parents are just upset…”

  Johnny snorts and nods toward Lev’s guy.

  “Upset about what? Do you think you own this parking lot, then? The council owns this parking lot! He’s just as much a part of the local community as you are!”

  “Okay, okay, sorry…,” the man says, holding his hands up.

  “Don’t apologize to me, you idiot! Apologize to him!” Johnny snaps, nodding toward Lev’s guy again.

  The men look at him as if he can’t possibly be serious. Then one of them grabs hold of the others and mutters: