His shoulders sink.
“No.”
“Then it isn’t a better job for me. I have a job. Don’t worry about me.”
His eyes flash.
“So who is, Mom? Look around! Who’s going to take care of us when your back can’t take anymore?”
“I will. Just like I always have,” she promises.
He tries to press the business card into her hand but she refuses. He cries: “You’re nothing if you’re alone in this world, Mom!”
She doesn’t answer. Just sits beside him until he starts to cry. He sobs:
“It’s too hard, Mom. You don’t understand how much I . . . I can’t . . .”
Fatima removes her hands from his. Stands up. Backs away. And says sternly: “I don’t know what you know. But whatever it is, there’s clearly someone out there who’s terrified that you’re going to reveal it. And let me tell you something, my darling boy: I don’t need any men. I don’t need a man to drive me in a big car to the rink each morning, and I don’t need a man to give me a new job that I don’t want. I don’t need a man to pay my bills, and I don’t need a man to tell me what I can think and feel and believe. I only need one man: my son. And you’re not alone. You’ve never been alone. You just need to be better at choosing the company you keep.”
*
She leaves him. Closes the door behind her. Doesn’t take the business card.
*
Maggan Lyt is still on her feet, too proud to back down now. She turns to the board and demands: “I think we should have an open vote.”
The club’s president addresses the whole meeting:
“Well, I feel obliged to point out that according to the statutes, it is within the rights of anyone here to demand a secret ballot . . .”
He realizes too late that this is precisely what Maggan is after. She turns to the room and asks: “I see. Is there anyone in here who isn’t prepared to stand by their opinion? Who can’t look the rest of us in the eye and say what they think? By all means, stand up and ask to be allowed to vote anonymously!”
No one moves. Peter turns and leaves. He could have stayed to defend himself, but he chooses not to.
*
Amat puts his headphones in his ears. Walks through his own neighborhood, and the rest of the town. Passes his whole childhood, a whole life. There will always be people who won’t understand his decision. Who will call him weak or dishonest or disloyal. They are probably people who live secure lives, who are surrounded by people who share their own opinions and only talk to people who reinforce their own worldview. It’s easy for them to judge him—it’s always easier to lecture other people about morality when you’ve never had to answer for anything yourself.
He goes to the rink. Joins his teammates. He may have left his war-torn country before he could talk, but he has never stopped being a refugee. Hockey is the only thing that has ever made him feel like part of a group. Normal. Good at something.
William Lyt slaps him on the back. Amat looks him in the eye.
*
Ramona is standing in the hallway, waiting for Peter. Leaning on a stick, smelling of whisky. It’s the first time in a decade that he’s seen her more than five paces outside the Bearskin. She grunts at him.
“They’ll feel ashamed, in the end. One day they’ll remember that when the word of a boy was set against that of a girl, they believed the boy blindly. And then they’ll feel ashamed.”
Peter pats her on the shoulder.
“No one’s asking . . . no one . . . You don’t have to get involved in this just for my family’s sake, Ramona,” he whispers.
“And you can fuck off if you’re going to tell me what I can and can’t do, boy.”
He nods, kisses her cheek, and leaves. He’s reached his car by the time she opens the door to the cafeteria with her stick. One of the men on the board, dressed in a suit, is just loosening his tie and says, possibly as a joke, possibly not: “How on earth could it have happened anyway? Has anyone asked themselves that? Have you seen the jeans those young women wear these days? Tight as snakeskin! They can hardly take them off themselves, so what chance would a teenage boy have if she didn’t want him to? Eh?”
He laughs at his own wit, a few others join in, but the bang when the door flies open silences the whole room as everyone turns around. Ramona is standing there, drunk and furious, pointing at him with her stick: “Really, little Lennart? That’s what you’re wondering? Shall we have a bet—your annual salary, perhaps?—that I could get that whole suit off you against your will without a single bugger in here doing a damn thing about it?”
She slams her stick down in drunken rage on the back of a chair, making the perfectly innocent man sitting on it gasp for breath and clutch his chest. Ramona shakes her stick at them all.
“This isn’t my town. You’re not my town. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
One man stands up and shouts:
“Shut up, Ramona! You don’t know anything about this!”
Three men in black jackets step silently out of the shadows by the wall, one of them takes several strides across the room, stops in front of the man, and says: “If you tell her to shut up again, I’ll shut you up. For good.”
*
Amat stands outside the rink, looking his teammates in the eyes. Then he takes a deep breath, turns away from them, and starts walking. His first step is hesitant, the second more confident. He hears Lyt start shouting behind him, but carries on into the rink, not bothering to close the door behind him. He walks past the ice, up the stairs, into the cafeteria, forcing his way between the rows of chairs, stops in front of the board, and looks each and every man and woman in there in the eye. A man named Erdahl first of all, and longest of all.
“My name is Amat. I saw what Kevin did to Maya. I was drunk, I’m in love with her, and I’m telling you that straight so that you lying bastards don’t have to say it behind my back when I walk out of here. Kevin Erdahl raped Maya Andersson. I’m going to go to the police tomorrow, and they’ll say I’m not a reliable witness. But I’m going to tell you everything now, everything that Kevin did, everything that I saw. And you won’t ever forget it. You know that my eyes work better than anyone else’s in here. Because that’s the first thing you learn on the Beartown Ice Hockey Club, isn’t it? ‘You can’t teach that way of seeing. That’s something you’re born with.’?”
*
Then he tells them. Every detail. Everything that was in Kevin’s room. The posters on the wall, the exact arrangement of trophies on the shelves, the scratches on the floor, the color of the bedclothes, the blood on the boy’s hand, the terror on the girl’s face, the muffled screams, stifled beneath a heavy palm, the bruises, the violence, the incomprehensible, hideous, unforgiveable nature of it all. He tells them everything. And no one in the room will ever forget it.