Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

There’s a constant threat of violence hidden just beneath the surface of a certain type of person in this town that Peter never noticed when he was growing up, but which struck him all the more plainly after he came home from Canada. Neither hockey nor school nor the economy ever managed to find a way out for these people, and they emanate a silent fury.

The twentysomething men at the Bearskin have become the most conservative people in town: they don’t want a modern Beartown, because they know that a modern Beartown won’t want them.

“The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

“No one ever said life was going to be easy.” Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.

There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.

The boy’s fingertips trace the worn lettering of the name on the stone. On this day fifteen years ago, early one March morning, Alan got out his hunting rifle before his family woke up. Then he took everything that hurt him and went straight out into the forest. It doesn’t matter how many times you explain it to a child. No one loses a parent that way without knowing that all the other grownups are lying when they say, “It wasn’t your fault.”

People feel pain. And it shrinks their souls.

“Success is never a coincidence. Luck can give you money, but never success,”

She’s very keen on justice and equality, Lyt’s mother, so long as they’re based on her precise interpretation of those words. Almost all the parents are like that.

What feels comfortable for the parents isn’t what’s best for the child, she’s convinced of that, and Kevin has grown strong because they’ve allowed him to.

But Kevin’s mother will always remember what she sees through the rear window that Saturday, and how her son looks as he stands in the parking lot. On the biggest day of his life he is the loneliest boy on earth.

Pride in a team can come from a variety of causes. Pride in a place, or a community, or just a single person. We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger.

No matter how much she tries, she will never be anything more than Peter’s other half in this town. She assumes that all adults occasionally wonder about another life, one they could be living instead of the one they’ve got. How often they do so probably depends on how happy they are.

There’s a thin line between living and surviving, but there’s one positive side effect of being both romantic and very competitive: you never give up.

He knows what they say about him, how they talk about his successes, but he also knows how quickly they’d turn against him next year if the A-team doesn’t reach the same heights.

At the start she only stayed indoors because she could still hear his laughter in here, his voice, and the way he used to swear when he stubbed his toe on the low step behind the bar. A whole life together in this building, and he still couldn’t figure out where that damn step was. But isolating yourself happens faster than you might think: the days blur together when you live more on the inside than outside, and the years continued to pass by on the other side of the street while she desperately tried to make everything inside the Bearskin and the apartment above it carry on exactly as it was when he died. She was frightened she would forget him if she went out into the world, that she might go to the supermarket and come home to find that his laughter was no longer there.

Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.

People say she’s gone mad, because that’s what people who know nothing about loneliness call it.

It’s a peculiar sort of angst, the one he lives with, knowing that you had the greatest moment in your life at the age of seventeen.

He wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

Bobo is the largest player on the team, but when he sits down he is the smallest player on the bench.

points toward their opponents’ bench. Amat nods hesitantly. David doesn’t break eye contact. “Do you want to be something, Amat? Do you really want to show this whole town that you can be something? Now’s your chance to show them.”

they nod briefly to each other, number nine and number eighty-one. Amat is one of them now. It doesn’t matter how many people up in the stands actually realize that.

Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all. But what the hell else is life made of?

How long will the town remember this? Only forever.

All those hours in the office, all the arguments, the sleepless nights and angst-ridden mornings, they’re all worth it now, every last one of them.

was only when he had to watch a game from the stands for the first time that he realized how close adrenaline is to panic. What rouses the body to battle and achievement are the same instincts that instill mortal dread in the brain.

“You must be the only teenager in the world who gets told off by his mom for cleaning too much.” Amat hands him a grown man’s shirt. “One of the sponsors left this.” It smells of alcohol. Peter slowly shakes his head. “Look… Amat… I…” Words fail him. All that comes out is: “I think you should go out into the parking lot. You’ve never gone out of this rink after a match like this. I think you should, it’s quite an experience, one not many people get to have. You can walk through that door as… a winner.”

It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.

Zacharias will never ask Amat if he forgot about him or simply didn’t care. But one of them goes, and one stays behind. And nothing will ever be quite the same again.

He isn’t tied to anything, he just doesn’t care. Kevin is terrified of loneliness, but Benji embraces it as a natural state. All through their childhood Kevin has been scared that one day he’ll wake up and discover that the other superhero is gone. That this friendship never meant anything to him. Benji’s blood is different from other people’s. He disappears into the forest on the road down toward the lake, and Kevin can’t help thinking that Benji is the only truly free individual he knows.

That’s the last time they see each other in their childhood. That ends tonight.

No matter how hard she sandpapers herself, how small she makes herself, she’s never going to fit in here.

Katia has never been to their father’s grave, not once, but she thinks of him sometimes, and how it must have felt to be so unhappy and not be able to tell anyone. It’s a terrible thing to have to keep a big secret from the people you love.

With each passing year, as Benji has grown older, Katia has wished him a different life. In a different place, another time, maybe he would have been a different boy. Milder, more secure. But not in Beartown. Here he is burdened with too much that no one sees, and here he has hockey. The team, the guys, Kevin. They mean everything to him, so he is everything they want him to be. And that’s a terrible thing. Having to keep a secret from those you love.

They will ask her about the alcohol and marijuana. They won’t ask about the bottomless terror that will never leave her. About this room with its record-player and posters, from which she will never really escape again. One blouse-button somewhere on the floor, and a sense of panic that will be with her forever. She sobs noiselessly beneath his body, and screams silently behind his hand.

For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

The year is halfway into March, but the snow still embraces her feet as she marches along the side of the road in the darkness. Her tears are hot when they leave her eyelids but already frozen by the time they fall from her chin. “You can’t live in this town; you can only survive it,” as her mom says. Never has that been more true than tonight.

She does what she has done a thousand times in her childhood when the house stank of alcohol and her parents were screaming at each other. She sleeps with the animals. Because the animals have never done her any harm.

As she’s gotten older she’s come to realize that the admonitions “don’t go out on the ice alone” and “don’t go into the forest on your own” are almost designed to promote team sports. Every child in Beartown grows up with the constant warning that the threat of death is ever-present if you’re alone.

There are thousands of ways to die in Beartown. Especially on the inside.

Laughing. That’s what they will remember about this day, and they will hate themselves for it. The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart. The second before the crash, the ice cream at the gas station just before the accident, the last swim on holiday before we came home and received the diagnosis.

“Could I have done anything differently? Why did I just go around being happy? If only I’d known what was going to happen, could I have stopped it?”

“It would NEVER even occur, occur… occur to me! Drugs in school are no good. I keep my drugs in my body.

At that moment she understands why the team follows his lead. The same reason why the girls fall for him. When he looks you right in the eyes and says something, no matter what crap he may have done immediately before, you believe him.

Ana is walking to school alone. Holding her phone in her hand like a weapon. Maya’s number on the screen, her finger on the button, but she doesn’t call. The most important promise they made was never to leave each other, not because of safety but because the promise made them equals. They’ve never been equals in any other way.

If Ana left Maya alone in the wilderness Maya would die. But what she didn’t realize when she left Maya alone at a party was that it amounted to the same thing.

In a few years’ time she’ll read an old newspaper article about research showing that the part of the brain that registers physical pain is the same part that registers jealousy. And then Ana will understand why she hurt so badly.

Benji stands outside trying hard not to prove to the whole world that there is nothing in his life that he isn’t destructive enough to have a go at wrecking. He really does try.

“That one,” Benji says, pointing at one without hesitation. “Why?” Now it’s the boy’s turn to pat the old man on the shoulder. “Because he’s a challenge.”