She’s sweet. So is the smoke. Amat closes his eyes and drifts away, and when she takes hold of his hand he thinks that maybe he could stay here after all. Everything else can go to hell: hockey, the club, the demands, the pressure. He’s going to let himself be normal, just for one night. Smoke until he sabotages himself and fades away into the night air.
He finds himself holding a beer, doesn’t know where it came from. Then when another hand comes out of nowhere and knocks his arm so hard that he drops both the beer and the joint, Amat yells, “What the hell?” and turns instinctively to shove the idiot in the chest.
* * *
Lifa, his childhood friend, is big now. His chest doesn’t budge an inch. Instead he grabs hold of Amat’s jersey and throws him roughly down the slope.
* * *
Tails, the tall, thickset supermarket owner who’s almost always in a better mood than a Labrador under a water sprinkler, just sits there in shock as Peter tells him the whole story. They’re sitting in Tails’s office at the back of the shop, full of files containing Beartown Ice Hockey Club’s accounts. Tails is the club’s last big sponsor and is spending all his time trying to figure out how long he can keep the club alive without the help of the council.
“I don’t get it . . . why would Richard Theo want you to take a stand against . . .”
He stands up and closes the door before he finishes his sentence in a whisper: “ . . . the Pack?”
Peter rubs the dark rings under his eyes. “The factory’s new owners want to sponsor a ‘family sport.’ That looks better in the media. They’ve told Theo that they want to get rid of ‘hooliganism.’ And after that business with the ax in the councillor’s car, well . . .”
“But how’s that going to work?” Tails asks.
Peter closes his eyes in exhaustion. “I have to say in a press conference that the club is getting rid of the standing area.”
“The Pack aren’t the only people who use that . . .”
“I know. But everyone in the Pack uses it. Richard Theo doesn’t care what happens, he’s just bothered about how it looks.”
Tails’s eyes open wide. “He’s a smart bastard, that Theo. Everyone knows the Pack voted to let you stay on at the meeting in the spring. So if you distance yourself from them in the paper it will be . . . more effective.”
“And Richard Theo gets everything he wants: the factory, jobs, the hockey club. He can take the credit for everything and won’t be blamed for anything. Not even the Pack will hate him, they’ll just hate me. And we’ll be giving him everything he needs to win the next council elections.”
“You can’t do it, Peter. The Pack will . . . you know what they’re like . . . there are some crazy bastards in that gang, and hockey’s the only thing some of them have got!” Tails says.
He knows because a few members of the Pack work in his warehouse. They work hard, and they make sure everyone else on their shift does, too, and if there’s ever a break-in at the store, Tails never has to call a security firm, because it gets taken care of. In return, Tails arranges their shifts so they never have to take holiday in order to go to Beartown Ice Hockey’s away games, but if the police show up a week later their names still appear on the rota, at precisely the time when the police are trying to prove that they were involved in “hooligan-related violence.” “Hooligans? There are no hooligans working here,” their employer exclaims uncomprehendingly. “Pack? What Pack?”
Peter wrings his hands. “What’s the alternative, Tails? Richard Theo only cares about power, so putting the fate of the club in his hands and those of a bunch of utterly unknown investors is madness. But being realistic, if we don’t, the club will be dead anyway in three months.”
“I can sell another store or take out a loan on this one,” Tail suggests.
Peter puts a heavy hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I can’t ask you to do that, Tails, you’ve already done more than enough for the club.”
Tails looks insulted. “The club? The club’s you and me.”
Peter’s stern face cracks into a gentle smile. “You sound like Sune, the way he used to go on when we were little: ‘We are the club,’?” he says, imitating the old coach.
Tails and Peter used to hate summer when they were children, because the hockey rink was closed. They became best friends in an empty parking lot, along with Hog and a few others, children who didn’t care about swimming in the lake or playing war games in the forest. They used to play hockey on the tarmac with battered old sticks and a tennis ball until it got dark, then drag themselves home with scraped knees and ten World Championship wins in their hearts. They’re sitting in that very same parking lot now, because that’s where Tails built his first supermarket. He puts his hand on an old team photograph on the wall and says to Peter, “I wouldn’t be doing it for the club, you idiot, I’d be doing it for you. When we won silver twenty years ago and you got the puck at the end of the game to take the last shot, do you remember who made that pass?”
Does he remember? Everyone remembers. Tails made the pass, Peter missed the net. Tails may feel that they won silver, but Peter just thinks they lost gold. It was his fault. But Tails wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and says quietly, “If I had a hundred chances to do it again, I’d pass the puck to you every time, Peter. I’d sell all my stores for you. That’s what you do when you have a star in the team: you trust him. You give him the puck.”
Peter stares at the floor. “Where can a man find friends as loyal as you, Tails?”
Tails flushes with pride. “On the ice. Only on the ice.”
* * *
An ancient man shuffles into the Bearskin alone. Ramona has never seen him without the other four of the five “uncles.” He looks as though he’s aged half a lifetime, as if the years have hit him all at once.
“Have they been here?” he wonders, meaning the friends he’s spent every day with for as long as anyone can remember.
Ramona shakes her head and asks, “Have you tried phoning them?”
The old man looks miserable. “I haven’t got their numbers.”
Year after year, day after day, the five uncles have either been in the stands to watch hockey or here in the Bearskin pub to talk about hockey. They’ve all used the same calendar, where each year starts in September. Why would they need one another’s phone numbers?
The old man stands for a while at the bar, lost. Then he goes home. He and his friends: five men who sat in a bar every day to talk about sports. They’re not about to become five men who sit in a bar every day and just drink.
* * *
The youngsters around the fires have fallen silent. In a very short space of time Lifa has grown from a nobody to the sort of person nobody here messes with. He doesn’t even have to raise his voice.
“Anyone who gives Amat another beer or cigarette will never enjoy another barbecue here. Understood?”
Farther down the slope Amat coughs as he gets to his knees. Zacharias is standing a short way behind him with melted cheese on his shirt. When Lifa came around to his apartment a short while ago, saying he’d heard that Amat was up on the hill, Zacharias tried to persuade Lifa to come inside and have a toasted sandwich instead, but Lifa just stared at him until Zacharias grabbed a pair of pants and decided to keep his mouth shut.
“I’m partying, Lifa! Mind your own business!” Amat manages to say.
Lifa raises his fist but doesn’t use it. He just walks disappointedly toward the apartment blocks. Zacharias helps Amat to his feet and mutters, “This isn’t like you, Amat . . .”
“What do you mean, ‘like me’? There isn’t a ‘me’! I haven’t even got a team to play for!”
Amat is aware how pathetic he sounds. Lifa comes back up the hill, trailing a group of kids with sticks in their hands. Lifa prods one of the kids on the shoulder. “Tell him who you are when you’re playing!”
The boy clears his throat shyly and looks though his bangs at Amat when he says, “I’m . . . you.”