Chapter 13 So They Gave Him an Army
So They Gave Him an Army
“Everything has its price, everyone will pay something!” Those were the most frequent words from Ramona’s husband’s mouth when he was alive.
The first thing he asked anyone who had bought anything, regardless of whether it was a new car or a secondhand toaster, was “What did you pay?” And whatever they replied, he would grunt, “They saw you coming! I’d have gotten it for half that!
” Ramona had been so sick of hearing it, but what she would have given to hear it one more time.
He loved her, and he loved hockey and used to say that the center circle of Beartown’s rink was their wedding ring, so he didn’t need one on his finger.
When life was tough, he never said, “It’ll be okay,” he just said, “Soon time for hockey.” If anyone said “It’s summer,” he would correct them and say, “This is preseason.” He rearranged the pages of every calendar so that the year started in September, because that’s when his year started, when Beartown played its first game.
Eleven seasons have passed since he left Ramona. Today a telemarketer is sitting somewhere and dialing a number without really caring whose number it is. “Is that Holger? How are you doing today, Holger?” he says loudly when the call is answered.
“Holger’s been dead eleven years. And he wasn’t feeling particularly brilliant before that, either. What do you want, boy?” Ramona replies, standing at the bar with her second breakfast in her hand.
The caller taps anxiously at his keyboard. “Is that the Bearskin pub?”
“Yes,” Ramona says.
“I see . . . sorry, but Holger is still listed as one of the owners on our files . . .”
“It’s still our pub. It’s just that I’m the one doing all the work these days.”
“Ah, what does it say here . . . ? Is that . . . ‘Ramona’?”
“It is.”
The salesman takes a deep breath and starts again. “Great! How are you doing today, Ramona?”
“Boy, these days there’s technology that can help people like me find out where people like you live.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry?”
“You heard me.”
A short silence follows. Then eventually the salesman clears his throat and for slightly unclear reasons summons up the courage to recite, a little too quickly, “I’m selling subscriptions to our skin care products!
Every month you receive eight different products through the post, but you only keep the ones you want and send the others back free of charge . . .”
“Eight?” Ramona wonders after two large gulps of breakfast.
“Yes!”
“And I’m supposed to have an opinion about that? Tell me, boy, do you honestly think a person has that much skin?”
The salesman doesn’t have a scripted reply to that, so instead he tries, “Right now we have a very attractive off—”
Ramona’s voice is simultaneously apologetic and irritated, as if she’s about to tell him that his cat has been run over but that it was actually something of a nuisance for her because the little bugger jumped out of the way the first two times she tried.
“Boy, the people you call probably have their hands full trying to hold their lives together. Eight different skin care products? People just want to make it through the day.”
The salesman replies in a voice scratchy with cough drops and despair, “Me, too.”
“Have you had breakfast, boy? That’s the most important beer of the day. Probably good for the skin, too, full of vitamins.”
“I’ll give it a try,” the salesman promises.
“You know what, boy? If you’re ever passing Beartown, you can have one on the house.”
“ ‘Beartown’? I didn’t even know there was a place called that.”
Ramona hangs up. “Everything has its price,” Holger said before he left her, and when he was buried the priest said the same thing: “Grief is the price we pay for love, Ramona. A broken heart in exchange for a whole one.” He was a bit drunk at the time, of course, that damn priest. But that didn’t stop him being right.
Everyone pays something, people and communities alike.
There was once a time when every telemarketer had heard of Beartown. “Beartown? You’re the ones with the hockey team, right?”
In the yard below the apartment blocks in the Hollow some children are playing hockey, using a wall as the goal and soda bottles as posts.
Amat is standing at the window of his room watching them.
He used to play with his best friends, Zacharias and Lifa.
It was an easy game back then. A stick each, a tennis ball, two teams.
But they’re sixteen now, almost men. The Hollow has gotten worse, unless they’ve just gotten big enough to see the truth about their surroundings.
If you want to understand the Hollow, you need to know that everyone who lives here regards the rest of Beartown the way the rest of Beartown regards the big cities: “We only exist for them in the form of negative newspaper headlines.”
Lifa once said to Amat: “They love you if you’re good at hockey, but they’ll only say you’re from Beartown when you win.
When you lose, they’ll say you come from the Hollow.
” Lifa hasn’t played hockey for years now; he’s changed, become harder.
He hangs out with his brother’s gang now, does deliveries on his moped carrying a backpack whose contents Amat doesn’t know anything about. They see even less of each other now.
Zacharias spends his nights at home playing computer games and sleeps all day.
His parents are spending the summer with relatives, and Zacharias might as well be living in a different country because he lives his whole life online now.
At the start of the summer Amat would stop at his apartment each day and asked if he wanted to join him for a run, but Zacharias just tried to lure him in to play games and eat toasted sandwiches, so Amat stopped going over to avoid the temptation of spending the summer doing nothing.
Nothing leads to nothing, he knows that much.
So Amat has been training alone, putting weights on his bed and lifting it like a primitive bench press, doing push-ups until he cries, and running along the roads until he throws up.
He goes down to the communal laundry room at night and practices stick handling pucks and balls between glass bottles, faster and faster.
Every other evening, his mom, Fatima, comes home late because she’s helping a friend who’s ill, Amat doesn’t know who.
He doesn’t tell her he misses her, because he doesn’t want to make her feel guilty.
Fatima is the sort of person who looks after everyone who needs her, and her son is big enough to take his place in line.
But this evening he isn’t training. Or sleeping.
The other kids of his age from the Hollow hang out on “the Hill” at night, on the edge of the forest looking out over the old gravel pit.
Amat can see them from the balcony, cooking hot dogs on barbecues and smoking weed, talking about nothing and laughing. Just being . . . teenagers.
Everything has its price. They say you have to spend ten thousand hours practicing to get really good at something, so how many more is it going to cost Amat to get away from here?
He hasn’t even got a team now. After everything he gave up in the spring to stand up and tell the truth about what Kevin did to Maya, he hasn’t got anything left. Even Maya’s father doesn’t give a damn.
Amat pulls on a jersey, leaves the apartment, and heads up toward the Hill.
Most of the teenagers around the fires have known him since he was little, but they still look at him like some captive animal that has just jumped out of its cage.
He stops, embarrassed, and looks down at the ground until someone suddenly laughs and passes him a cigarette whose contents he doesn’t bother to ask about.
“Here, superstar, party time!” the girl who hands it to him says with a grin.
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.”