Kira Andersson is sitting in her car on her way to the office when her phone rings. She’s feeling stressed for a lot of different reasons. She drops the phone under her seat and swears with a level of anatomical precision that Kira’s husband usually points out would embarrass a gang of drunken sailors. When Kira finally gets hold of the phone it takes the woman at the other end a couple of seconds to recover from the range of expletives.
“Hello?” Kira snaps.
“Yes, sorry, I’m calling from S Express. You emailed to ask for a quote . . . ,” the woman says tentatively.
“From . . . who did you say you were? S Express? No, you must have the wrong number,” Kira says.
“Are you sure? I’ve got the paperwork in front of me here and—” the woman says, but then Kira drops her phone again and launches into a spontaneous description of exactly what sort of genitalia the designer of the phone’s head resembles, and by the time she manages to get hold of it again the woman at the other end has done herself a favor and hung up.
Kira doesn’t think much more about it. She’s expecting a call from her husband, Peter, who’s got a meeting with the regional council about the future of the hockey club today, and her anxiety about the consequences of the meeting is like a band around her stomach being pulled tighter and tighter. When she tosses the phone onto the passenger seat, the background picture of her daughter, Maya, and son, Leo, glows briefly before the screen goes dark.
Kira drives to work, but if she had stopped the car and looked up “S Express” online she would have seen that it’s a moving company. In towns that don’t care that much about their hockey team, that might have looked like a harmless joke, requesting a quote in the name of the Andersson family, but Beartown isn’t that sort of town. In the silence of the forest you don’t have to scream to be threatening.
Kira will figure it out soon enough, of course. She’s a smart woman, and she’s lived here long enough. Beartown is known for many things: dizzyingly beautiful forests, a last area of wilderness in a country where national politicians only want the big cities to grow. It has friendly, humble, hardworking people who love nature and sports, spectators who fill the stands no matter what league the team is playing in, pensioners who paint their faces green when they go to games. Responsible hunters, competent anglers, people as tough as the forest and as unyielding as the ice, neighbors who help anyone in need. Life can be hard, but they grin and say, “It’s supposed to be hard.” Beartown is known for that. But . . . well. The town is also known for other things.
A few years ago an old hockey referee talked to the media about his worst memories from his career. The second, third, and fourth places were occupied by games in the big cities where angry fans had thrown tubs of chewing tobacco, coins, and golf balls onto the ice when they didn’t like a decision. But in first place was a small rink way out in the forest, where the referee had once awarded a power play to the visiting team in the closing minute of a game. They had scored, Beartown had lost, and the referee had glanced up toward the infamous standing area in the arena reserved for “the Pack,” which was always full of men in black jackets singing at deafening volume or bellowing in a terrifying manner. But on that occasion they hadn’t raised their voices. The Pack had just stood there, completely silent.
Kira’s husband, Peter Andersson, general manager of Beartown Ice Hockey, was the first to realize the danger. He raced toward the scorekeeper’s box, and as the buzzer rang out to signal the end of the game, he managed to switch all the lights off. In the darkness the security guards led the referees out and drove them away. No one needed to explain what would have happened otherwise.
That’s why softly spoken threats work here. A call to a moving company is enough, and Kira will understand the reason soon.
* * *
The meeting in the regional council building isn’t yet finished, but a few people in Beartown already know the result.
* * *
There are always flags fluttering outside the council building: the national flag and one bearing the council’s coat of arms. The local politicians can see them from the conference room. It’s a few days before the Midsummer holiday, three weeks after Kevin and his family left town. They changed history when they did that: not the history that was yet to come, but the history that had already happened. But not everyone has realized that yet.
One of the councillors coughs nervously, makes a brave attempt to button his jacket, even though as a rough guess half a dozen Christmas buffets must have passed since that was even theoretically possible, and says, “I’m sorry, Peter, but we’ve decided that the region would be best served if we focus the council’s resources on one hockey team. Not two. We want to focus on . . . Hed Hockey. It would be in everyone’s best interests, yours included, if you could just accept that. Bearing in mind the . . . situation.”
Peter Andersson is sitting on the other side of the table. The realization of how he has been betrayed sends him tumbling into the darkness, and his voice is barely audible when he manages to say, “But we—we just need a bit of help for a few months, until we find more sponsors. The council just has to stand as guarantor for the loan from the bank.”
He falls silent, immediately embarrassed at his own stupidity. Obviously the councillors have already spoken to the bank managers—they’re neighbors, they play golf and hunt elk together. This decision was made long before Peter walked into the room. When the councillors asked him to come, they were careful to stress that this would be an “informal meeting.”
There won’t be any minutes. The chairs in the meeting room are extra narrow, enabling the men with all the power to sit on more than one chair at the same time.
Peter’s phone buzzes. When he opens it, he finds an email telling him that the director of Beartown Ice Hockey Club has resigned. He must have known what was going to happen here and has probably already been offered a job in Hed instead. Peter is going to be left to deal with the blow on his own.
The politicians on the other side of the table squirm uncomfortably. Peter can see what they’re thinking: “Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t plead, don’t beg. Take it like a man.”
* * *
Beartown lies beside a large lake, with a narrow strip of beach along the whole of one side. At this time of year the beach belongs to the town’s teenagers, when it’s so warm that you almost manage to forget that winter in Beartown is nine months long. Among the profusion of beach balls and hormones sits a twelve-year-old boy in sunglasses. His name is Leo Andersson. Not many people on the beach knew that last year, but they all know it now and keep glancing at him as if he were primed to explode. A couple of months ago, Leo’s older sister, Maya, was raped by Kevin, but the police were unable to prove anything, so Kevin got off. The townspeople divided, most of them taking Kevin’s side, and the hate escalated until they tried to drive Leo’s family out of town. They threw stones with the word BITCH painted on them through his sister’s window, they bullied her at school, they called a meeting at the rink and tried to get her and Leo’s dad fired as general manager of Beartown Ice Hockey.