On a chair in his kitchen sits a father, and all around him his friends and business partners are talking, but he no longer hears the words. He knows he occupies his position in this town, his status among this group of men, purely because of his money. None of these men play golf with poor guys, and he’s been poor. All his life he has strived for perfection, not out of vanity, but as a survival strategy. He has never been given anything for free, he’s never cut himself any slack, the way men who are born rich can. He’s convinced that’s the reason for his success: the fact that he’s been prepared to work harder and fight more ruthlessly than everyone else. And continuing to hunt perfection in all things means never being satisfied, never resting on your laurels. You can’t live that sort of life half the time, your work and private life become the same thing. Everything in his life has become a reflection of him as a person. Even his son. Any crack in the fa?ade could lead to an avalanche.
He may have wanted to talk to Kevin when he picked him up from the police station, but every word came out as a roar. A man who takes great pride from the fact that he never loses his temper, never raises his voice, screaming so loudly that the car shook. He may have wanted to scream about what had happened, but it was easier to scream about why:
“HOW THE HELL COULD YOU LET YOURSELF GET DRUNK A WEEK BEFORE THE FINAL?”
It’s easier to talk about a cause rather than a problem. For a dad who works with numbers, mathematics provides a more bearable explanatory model: if only X hadn’t existed, Y would never have happened. If Kevin hadn’t had a party despite promising his parents that he wouldn’t, if he hadn’t gotten drunk, if he hadn’t take a girl up to his room, then they wouldn’t have had to deal with this problem.
But now the father has no choice. He can’t afford to let anyone tell lies about his son; he can’t accept the idea of anyone attacking his family. When the police became involved, when they dragged Kevin off the bus in front of the whole town, when the reporters from the local paper started to call, that was when things passed the point where there could have been a peaceful solution. Now it’s too late. The father has a business that consists of his name, and if that name gets sullied, it could destroy the entire life of the family. So he can’t let them win, he can’t even let them exist. It’s not enough merely to hurt them. He has to hunt them down with every weapon he can find.
There’s no right or wrong in this house anymore, just survival.
*
David and Kevin are still sitting on the bed when Kevin’s father opens the door. He stands in front of them, tired and pale, and explains in a very controlled voice:
“I understand that you only want to think about hockey right now, but if you want there even to be an A-team to coach and play in next season, you need to listen very carefully now. Either the two of you stay at the club, or Peter Andersson does. There’s no middle way. His daughter is lying, and there may be a thousand reasons for that. Maybe she had sex because she’s in love and when she discovered that her feelings weren’t reciprocated, she invented the story about rape. Maybe her dad found out and got angry, so she lied to protect herself, because she wants to go on being Daddy’s innocent little girl. Who knows? Fifteen-year-old girls aren’t rational.”
David looks down at the floor. He can remember when Kevin was receiving offers from all the big teams but chose not to go, because he didn’t want to leave Benji and his home, because he was scared. It was David who persuaded Kevin’s dad to let him stay in Beartown. He promised that the boy would develop just as well here, would get to play on the A-team early, and would achieve even greater things once he did turn professional. His dad agreed because David was going to be A-team coach, and because the decision simultaneously made his company even more popular in the district. Kevin was a Beartown kid, his dad a Beartown man, and that looked good. His dad has invested a lot of money in that image. So now he points at Kevin and sternly says:
“This isn’t a game anymore. Peter Andersson waited a week before going to the police, because he wanted the police to drag you off that bus. He wanted everyone to see that. So either he forces us out of this club, or we force him out. Together. There are no other options.”
David says nothing. He’s thinking about his job. His team. All those hours. And one single memory refuses to leave him: he saw Peter in the parking lot when the police came to the bus. He saw him standing there waiting. Kevin’s dad is right. Peter wanted to see it happen.
Kevin lifts his head and snot and tears drip onto the floor when he says:
“Someone needs to talk to Amat. He . . . I didn’t do anything . . . you know I didn’t do anything . . . but maybe Amat thinks . . . He came into the room and saw us . . . She just got SCARED, okay? She rushed out, but maybe Amat thinks . . . you know.”
David doesn’t look up, because he doesn’t want to see the way the father is looking at the son.
38
There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.
*
Amat is walking along, half on the edge of the road and half in the ditch. He’s wet and cold and his brain went numb long before his feet. He’s halfway between Hed and Beartown when an old Saab drives past and stops ten yards ahead of him. It waits for him as he walks slowly toward it. There are two men in their late twenties or early thirties sitting in the front seats. Black jackets, wary eyes. He knows who they are. He doesn’t know which is more dangerous: looking them in the eye or avoiding doing so.
A few months ago the local paper interviewed a player from a team that was due to play Beartown’s A-team. The player came from the south—he didn’t know any better—so when the reporter asked if he was frightened by the violent reputation of the Pack, the passionate supporters up in Beartown, he said he certainly wasn’t frightened of “a few forest gangsters from a dying town.”
When the team’s bus was driving through the forest the next day, they found the road in front of them blocked by a couple of vans. Out of the trees stepped thirty or forty masked men in black jackets, armed with tree branches. They stood there for ten minutes, let the team on board prepare themselves for the moment when the door was smashed in and the bus invaded, but nothing happened. Suddenly the forest swallowed the men up again, the vans reversed out of the way, and the bus was allowed through.
The player who had talked to the paper turned to an older player and gasped: “Why didn’t they do anything?” The older player replied: “They were just introducing themselves. They want you to think about what they could do when the bus is going back the other way.”
Beartown lost the match, but the player who had talked to the paper played his worst ever match. When he got back to his own town, someone had already been there and smashed the windows of his car, filled it with branches and leaves, and set fire to it.
“You’re Amat, right?” the man in the driver’s seat asks.
Amat nods. The driver nods toward the back door.
“Want a lift?”
Amat doesn’t know if it’s more dangerous to say yes or no. But in the end he shakes his head. The men don’t look insulted, the driver even smiles when he says:
“Nice to have a bit of a walk, yeah? We get it.”
He puts the car in gear, slowly releases the clutch, but before it starts to move he leans out of the window and adds: