No one confronts Benji at school. Who would dare? But every day his phone fills up with text messages from unidentifiable numbers, and every time he opens his locker, people have stuck notes in the gap around the door. All the usual words, the same old threats, he soon gets used to it. He becomes very good at pretending nothing’s going on, and those who wish him ill take this to mean that he has it too easy. That he’s not being punished hard enough, not suffering enough, so they need to think of something else.
William Lyt comes to school one day wearing a T-shirt with a target on the front. It’s so small and discreet that only Benji notices it. The note that was pinned to the door of the cabin that morning when everyone had just found out the truth had the same target on it, drawn as the letter “A” in the word “FAG.” Benji tore the note off at once and destroyed it, it never appeared anywhere online, so he knows that the person who left it there is the only person who knows what it looked like.
William Lyt wants him to know who it was. He wants Benji to remember the knife. Winning a game of hockey isn’t enough.
Benji looks him in the eye. They’re standing a few feet apart in a corridor on an ordinary day in a long winter term, and all the other students are blithely milling past between classes, on their way to the cafeteria. It’s a moment that exists only for the two boys: one from a red team, one from a green, a bull and a bear. Sooner or later one of them will end up crushing the other.
The teams in the league play each other twice per season, one home game, one away game. Beartown Ice Hockey will win the rest of its games up until then, and Hed Hockey will win all of its. The schedule is counting down inexorably to the return fixture, this time in Beartown’s ice rink.
* * *
All sports are fairy tales, that’s why we lose ourselves in them. So of course there’s only one way for this one to end.
* * *
Maya is skipping school, but she has carefully picked a day when she has hardly any classes. Even when she breaks the rules, she does so responsibly. She gets onto the bus and travels for a long time, to a town beyond reasonable commuting distance. Then she goes into a large brick building with a letter in her hand and at the reception asks for a lawyer. When she walks into her mom’s office, her mom knocks her coffee over in surprise.
“Darling! What are you doing here?”
Maya hasn’t been to Kira’s office since she was little, but she used to love going there. Other children would get bored with their parents’ workplaces, but Maya liked seeing her mom concentrating on something. Seeing her passion. It taught the daughter that there are some adults who have jobs they really care about and aren’t only doing for the money. That work can be a blessing.
She looks worried when she puts the letter down on her mom’s desk, worried about making her parent feel abandoned. “It’s from a . . . music school. I applied . . . it was just . . . I just wanted to know if I was good enough. I sent them a video of me playing my own songs and . . .”
The mother looks at her daughter’s letter. Just seeing the letterhead is enough to make her start to sniff. Kira studied hard when she was growing up so that she would be accepted into a highly academic school; she dreamed of studying law even though no one in her family had ever been to university. She wanted rules and frameworks, security and a career ladder. She wanted the same thing for her children: a life where you know what to expect, free from disappointment. But daughters are never the same as their mothers, so Maya has fallen in love with the freest, least regulated subject she can think of: music.
“You got in. Of course you got in.” Kira sniffs, so proud that she can’t even stand up.
Maya sobs, “I can start in January. I know it’s a really long way away, and I’ll have to borrow money, I understand if you don’t want—”
Kira just stares at her. “Don’t want? Of course I . . . darling . . . I’ve never been happier for you!”
They embrace, and Maya says, “I want to do this just for me, Mom. Something just for me. Do you understand?”
* * *
Kira understands. Better than anyone.
* * *
The next day she gets to the office earlier than everyone else. When her colleague arrives at work, she finds Kira sitting in her chair. Her colleague raises her eyebrows, and Kira lowers hers. “Don’t you ever tell me I’ve given up again! All I ever do is not give up!”
* * *
Her colleague grins and whispers, “Shut up and send an invoice!” The two of them hand in their notice that morning. Then in the afternoon they sign a contract for the premises they’ve been dreaming about and set up their own company.
* * *
People in Beartown have never been the sort to demonstrate on the streets. They don’t go on marches, their opinions are conveyed by other means. That can be hard for outsiders to understand, but very little happens by chance in this community. Even if something looks like a coincidence, it usually isn’t.
* * *
Beartown Ice Hockey plays a few home games at the start of the season with the standing area of the rink intact, and Peter can’t help hoping, possibly naively, that his excuse that there’s no one prepared to demolish it has been accepted. But the factory’s new owner eventually sends an unambiguous email: “If the club doesn’t take firm action to get rid of the hooligans known as ‘the Pack,’ we will have no option but to cancel our sponsorship contract.”
So when the crowd arrives for one home game at the start of the winter, there are security guards standing in front of double layers of tape cordoning off the standing area.
* * *
Everyone has to make difficult choices this year. Peter chooses one path, for the survival of the club. So the Pack chooses its response, for its own survival.
* * *
Peter is sitting at the back of the stands, waiting for them to start shouting at him. He’s half expecting someone to rush up and punch him. But no one so much as looks in his direction. The rink is sold out, but there are no banners, no signs. Everyone behaves as if this were just a perfectly normal game.
The things that happen when this town chooses a side are so small that you could miss them even if you were standing right in front of them. The majority of the hockey crowd here are ordinary, decent people who would never condone violence; a lot of them moan about the Pack in the privacy of their own homes, about how “thugs” are giving the club a bad name and scaring off players and investors alike. But choosing sides in a conflict is rarely about who you’re standing alongside and almost always about who you’re standing against. This community may have its own internal arguments, but it always stands united against outsiders.
If a rich company wants to buy the factory and gain power over our jobs, we can’t stop it, but if they think they can buy our club and control our way of life, they’ve picked the wrong town to fight with. The Pack may symbolize violence to a lot of people, but to the neighbors who received help clearing fallen trees in their yards and were then offered a pint in the Bearskin afterward, they symbolize other things, too. To them the Pack is a small group of people who refuse to take any crap, who don’t change to suit the demands of power and money and politics. They have their shortcomings, they make mistakes, but it’s hard for anyone in Beartown not to sympathize with them, especially in times like these.
* * *
It isn’t completely right. But it isn’t completely wrong, either. It just is.
* * *
It takes Peter a long time to notice the black jackets; they’re sitting spread out around the hall, in different parts of the seated area. Obviously he had been expecting that, but there are considerably more of them than ever before. Several hundred. Only when Peter looks at them carefully does he realize why: it isn’t just the Pack. There are pensioners, factory workers, cashiers from the supermarket, employees of the housing association. It’s not a march, it’s not a noisy demonstration, and if Peter had asked, they would have pretended not to understand. “What
do you mean? No, no, it’s just a coincidence!” Peter doesn’t have any proof, of course, because the jackets are different makes, different fabrics. But they’re all the same color. And there are very few coincidences in Beartown.
* * *
No one was surprised when he cordoned off the stand today, because someone saw to it that the news reached the right people in advance. He knows who. The only people Peter was obliged to tell in advance were the club’s board members. He needed their approval to bring in extra security. Peter made his choice, and Ramona responded. He gave her a place on the board so she would make decisions she believes to be in the best interests of the club. Now he has to take the consequences.
* * *
In the intermission between the first and second periods, a young man stands up among the seats on the far side. He’s well dressed, neatly turned out, doesn’t look like a violent person. If anyone nearby had been asked, naturally they would have replied, “Him? No, I don’t know him. What did you say his name was? Teemu Rinnius? Never heard of him!”
He walks calmly and collectedly down to the front of the stand, walks along behind the boards, then turns up toward the cordoned-off standing area. There are two security guards there, but they make no attempt to stop him. Teemu climbs through the cordon and walks casually across the stand, even stopping in the middle of it to tie his shoelace. He glances across the ice, seeking out Peter Andersson in the sea of people. Then he crosses the standing area, walks down the other side, and goes off to buy coffee, as if nothing has happened, even though everyone knows: Teemu has just told Peter that this is his stand and he can reclaim it whenever he likes.
A few minutes later the chanting begins, at first only in the seated area on the far side of the rink; then, as if on command, some men a few rows below Peter start to shout as well. Then it comes from the right and left of him, too. No one looks Peter in the eye, but the men in black jackets are chanting just for him: “We’re everywhere! We’re everywhere! We’re everywhere! Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough! Because we’re everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, we’re everywhere!”
They chant it ten times. Then they stand up and switch to, “We’ll stand tall if you stand tall!” Then they stand completely silent, disciplined, and focused to show how quiet the rink is then. And how much everyone would miss the Pack’s support if it disappeared.
Then, as if at an inaudible signal, they start to chant again, and this time the whole rink joins in. Old and young, black jackets, white shirts, green T-shirts: “We are the bears, we are the bears, we are the bears, THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!”
Beartown Ice Hockey win the game 7–1. The chanting from the stands is deafening, the crowd forms a green wall on both sides of the ice. There’s a roaring sense of unity in the hall at that moment. Us against everyone. Beartown against the rest.
* * *
Peter has never felt more lonely.
* * *
The following morning, there’s an interview in the newspaper with the local politician Richard Theo. The reporter asks him what he thinks about Beartown Ice Hockey’s decision to get rid of the standing area, and Theo replies, “Beartown Ice Hockey is the people’s club. It doesn’t belong to an elite, to the establishment, it belongs to the ordinary, decent, hardworking people of this town. I’m going to do all I can to persuade the general manager that the standing area ought to be kept. Our supporters make a huge contribution to the atmosphere at games. It’s the people’s club!”
A couple of hours later, Peter receives another email from the factory’s owners. They’ve changed their minds. Suddenly they have “been persuaded of the great value of the standing area to the local community.” That’s how Peter finds out that he was being deceived all along, the whole time.
* * *
That evening he sits alone in his kitchen at home, waiting for the sound of a key in the lock. It never comes. Kira stays at work late into the night. By the time she gets home, he’s fallen asleep on the sofa. She covers him with a blanket. On the table stand a bottle of wine and two glasses.
44
Storm and Longing
It’s far too late in the evening for there to be any lights on in the rink, but Elisabeth Zackell is still firing pucks when Bobo arrives. He didn’t know she’d be there when he set off from home, but he was hoping. He read Harry Potter and got his brother and sister off to sleep, he did the washing and cleaning. Then he packed his things and came down here. It was instinctive. He can’t sleep, his brain won’t stop thinking, and he knows only one place where everything falls silent.
“Can you teach me to skate?” he calls to Zackell.
She turns toward him. She’s never seen a young man in greater need of an escape from reality.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“The first time we met, you asked why no one had ever taught me to skate!”
It’s more of a plea than a statement. Zackell leans thoughtfully on her stick. “Why do you like hockey?”
Bobo chews his bottom lip. “Because it’s . . . fun?”
“That’s not a good enough answer,” she says.
He breathes heavily. Tries again. “I . . . I know who I am when I’m playing hockey. I know what’s expected of me. Everything else is just . . . so hard. But hockey is . . . it’s just . . . I know who I am here . . .”
Zackell taps her stick on the ice, evidently not entirely dissatisfied. “Okay. I suppose I’d better teach you to skate, then.”
Bobo steps onto the ice and skates toward her, then stops and asks, “Why do you like hockey?”
She shrugs. “My dad liked hockey. I liked my dad.”
Bobo frowns. “So why did he like hockey?”
“He used to say hockey is a symphony orchestra. He liked classical music. Sturm und Drang.”
“Is that a band?” Bobo asks, and Zackell laughs out loud for once.
“It means ‘storm and longing.’ My dad used to play me the same pieces of music, over and over again, and he would say, ‘It’s every emotion, all at the same time, Elisabeth, can you hear? Sturm und Drang!’ He felt the same about hockey. Sturm und Drang. The whole time.”
Bobo considers this for a while. Then he asks, “So why do you stand here at night firing pucks?”
She smiles. “Because it’s fun.”
* * *
Then she teaches him how to skate. After a few hours Bobo asks if she thinks he could be a properly good hockey player one day. She shakes her head and replies, “No. But you could be a decent coach, if you can figure out how to be useful to the team.”
* * *
Bobo lies awake for the rest of the night thinking about this. At practice the next day he walks straight out of the locker room, skates across the ice as fast as he can, and bodychecks Benjamin Ovich as hard as he can. Confused, Benji gets up and stares at him. “What the . . . ?”
Bobo doesn’t answer, he just hits Benji’s legs with his stick. The rest of the team just look on in amazement, unable to figure out how to react. Bobo’s lost his mom, that might make anyone a bit crazy, but they all know Benji won’t tolerate being hit again.
“Bobo, stop it,” Amat says gently, but Bobo hits Benji again.
No one has time to stop Benji. Bobo is one of the heaviest players in the team, but Benji sends him flying into the boards, throws his gloves down, and flies at him with his fists clenched.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK EVERYONE ELSE IS GOING TO DO?” Bobo yells.
Benji stops in surprise. “What?”
“What do you think everyone else is going to do? Every team we meet is going to try to provoke you, they want you to fight! They want you to take a penalty!”
Benji stares at Bobo, along with the rest of the team. Amat mumbles, “He’s got a point, Benji. People are going to shout worse and worse things until they find something that works. You mustn’t react. Not you and not Vidar. You’re both too important to the team.”
Benji is breathing furiously through
his nose. But in the end he calms down and helps Bobo up. “Okay. Keep trying, then.”
* * *
At every practice from then on, Bobo tries to find more and more creative ways to provoke both Benji and Vidar. Sometimes he succeeds and comes home with black eyes even though they both know that’s precisely what he’s trying to make them do. It turns out that this is Bobo’s unique talent in life: teasing people beyond their endurance.
* * *
When Benji opens his locker one morning, there are notes at the bottom, as usual. But one of them is different. Just one word: “Thanks.” The next day there’s another one, in different handwriting, saying “I told my sister I’m bisexual yesterday.” A few days later there’s a third note, again in different handwriting, which says, “I haven’t told anyone else, but when I do I’m not going to say I’m gay, I’m going to say I’m like you!” Then someone sends him an anonymous text: “Everyones talking about u they c u as a symbol I hope u know how important u are to all of us who darent say anything!!!!”
Just a few small notes and messages. Just words. Just anonymous voices who want him to know what he means now.
Benji throws them into the same garbage can as all the other notes. Because he doesn’t know which feels worst, the threats or the love. The loathing or the expectations. The hate or the responsibility.
* * *
He receives another sort of text message, too. They always start the same way: “Hi! Don’t know if I’ve got the right number, are you the homosexual hockey player? I’m a journalist, I’d like to interview . . .” One morning Benji and his sisters go down to the lake, drill a hole in the ice, and drop his phone through it. Then they drill some holes farther away and fish and drink beer and keep quiet for the rest of the day.
Us Against You Page 37