Kira almost smiles then, in spite of this hellish summer, because she knows which of her colleagues is about to storm in. Partly because she’s the only other workaholic still in the office just before Midsummer and partly because a door never opens when she passes through it; it throws itself out of her way. Her colleague is over six feet tall and makes enough noise to be the same size in width. She’s the worst loser Kira has ever known, and her standard reply whenever anyone complains about work is “Shut up and send an invoice!” As usual, she starts the conversation in the middle of a sentence, as if it’s Kira’s fault for having the gall not to have been present when it started:
“ . . . and now the pizzeria’s closed, Kira! ‘Closed for the holidays.’ What the hell? What sort of person takes a holiday from a pizzeria? That ought to be classed as a vital public service, like . . . doctors and . . . firemen, and . . . shoe shops! And there I was, thinking I might have sex with the guy behind the counter, he always looks so sad, and the sad ones are always the best in bed! What are you eating? Have you got much left?”
Kira sighs as if she were about to blow out the candles on her very last birthday cake. She holds up the plastic tub containing her lunch. Her colleague pretends to throw up.
“Very mature,” Kira says.
“What is that?” her colleague whimpers.
Kira bursts out laughing. She didn’t mean to, which makes it wonderful, a few seconds of normality. Her colleague has the eating habits of a teenager; she never asks “What’s good?,” just “What do you get the most of?” She reads menus as if they were declarations of war. Kira gestures encouragingly with her fork. “This is called ‘salad.’ It’s a bit like meat, but you don’t have to kill any animals. Here, try it!”
Her colleague flinches. “No way, it smells like something you dragged out of the ass of a corpse.”
“Oh, come on, seriously?” Kira says, disgusted.
“What?” her colleague asks in surprise.
“You’re like a little kid!” Kira says.
“You’re like a little kid! Shut up and send an invoice!” her colleague mutters, then lands on a chair as if she’d been thrown off a rooftop.
Kira is about to say something but gets distracted by the ring of the phone on her desk. She’s expecting it to be Peter, but the voice at the other end exclaims cheerfully, “Is that Kira Andersson? I’m calling from Johansson’s Movers, we’ve got an order in your name for fifty new removal boxes. Is it okay to leave them in your garden?”
Kira doesn’t even hear the end of the sentence. She just sees her colleague open her laptop, read something, and go white. The next moment Kira’s cell phone buzzes.
* * *
Peter gets up from his chair. Most of the politicians on the other side of the table don’t humiliate him by shaking his hand, they just walk out. But one of them stops and says with fake benevolence, “It was impressive, Peter, what you managed to do with the juniors back in the spring. A unique achievement, frankly, our lads from our little town putting up a fight against the big teams. If only they’d . . . won. Then maybe . . . you know.”
Peter knows. All too well. In a sport where Cinderella stories are under threat of extinction, where the big clubs’ hockey schools vacuum up all the talent from the smaller clubs, Beartown managed to get its best and brightest boys to stay and fight for their home team. They made it all the way to the final but had to play that game without their biggest star. So they almost won. And that’s not enough.
Beartown is a hockey town, and kids are raised with the philosophy “The stats never lie.” Either you’re the best or you’re everyone else, and the best don’t make excuses, they find a way to win. With all available means, at any cost. People talk about a “winner’s mentality,” because a winner has something that others lack, a special brain that takes for granted that it was born to be heroic. When a game comes down to the last decisive seconds, the winner bangs his stick down on the ice and yells to his teammates to pass to him, because a winner doesn’t ask for the puck, he demands it. When thousands of spectators stand up and roar, most people become uncertain and back away, but the winner steps up. That’s the sort of mentality we’re talking about. Everyone dreams about being the best, about being the one who fires the final shot in the last crucial moments of the season, but there are desperately few of us who actually dare to take the chance when absolutely everything is at stake. That’s the difference between us.
Just over twenty years ago, Beartown’s A-team could have been the best in the country. All season everyone in town kept repeating the same thing: “Beartown against the rest!” Journalists in the big cities thought Beartown had no chance. Their well-paid opponents underestimated the team, but when they came to Beartown something happened: when their team bus drove mile after mile straight through the forest, when they stepped into a shabby building and were confronted with stands that had been transformed into roaring green walls on all sides, the giants trembled. The rink was a fortress that season; the whole town would march there, the team played with an entire community behind it. No one cared if the big clubs had the money, because this was the home of hockey. “Beartown against the rest.”
But the very last game was an away game, in the capital. In the dying seconds, Peter Andersson got the puck. Deep in the forest lay an entire community that was going to live or die on the actions of his stick, and how tiny are the margins for a sports club at a time like that? The gap between the elite and the rest is immense in hockey: the teams at the top of the league get all the television money and the millions in sponsorship, while those lower down have to learn that “the best team always wins.” So when Peter got the puck it was more than a shot, more than a game; it was a chance for the little town to fell a giant. What a fantastic story that would have been. For one single evening, after all the crap the people in this forest had been through, Beartown finally had a chance to feel that its turn had arrived. It would have been the sort of story that makes everyone love sports: that the biggest and richest don’t always win.
So Peter took the shot. And missed. A town held its breath, and then it couldn’t breathe. The end-of-game buzzer sounded, its opponents won, the following season Beartown tumbled out of the top division and never managed to fight its way back.
Peter moved to the NHL and turned professional but got injured. His career passed as quickly as a dream. Then he came home and against all the odds built up a junior team that became the best in the country. Almost.
The politician in the doorway shrugs. “Winning cures everything, Peter.”
He might as well have said what he meant: “You’re not a winner, Peter. Because winners win. That’s how we know who they are.” Winners always get that last shot right. Winners don’t mix up what’s going on off the ice with what happens on it. Winners don’t ask the police to drag the team’s biggest star off a bus on the way to the biggest game. Winners know that winning cures everything in this community but that a second place doesn’t cure anything.
The politician pats him half-heartedly on the shoulder. “Listen, Peter, maybe you could see this as an opportunity? A chance to try a different job? Get a bit more time with your family!”
Peter feels like telling him to go to hell but instead walks in silence out of the council building. He walks around the building, stops below a staircase, and leans over a flower bed. When he’s sure that none of those bastards can see him standing there alone, he throws up.
His phone rings. It’s Kira. He realizes that the rumor is making the rounds but can’t bring himself to answer. He doesn’t want to hear the disappointment in his wife’s voice and is worried that she’ll hear the sob in his. She calls again and again until he switches his phone off. The problem with living your whole life for a hockey club is that he hasn’t got a damn clue who he is without it. He gets into the car and drives, his fingers clutching the wheel so tightly that blood starts to seep from his torn cuticles.
* * *