So Ana could hear the storm in the treetops and sense it in her chest when everything was still calm and quiet out there. She filled all the tubs and buckets with water, fetched the paraffin stove from the cellar and put new batteries in the headlamps, dug out candles and matches. And finally she chopped wood, mechanically and determinedly for several hours, and hauled it into the main room. Now, as the storm reaches Beartown, she closes the windows and doors, noisily does the dishes in the kitchen, and plays her best friend Maya’s songs on the stereo, because her voice calms Ana, and because the sound of Ana doing everyday things calms the dogs. When she was little they used to protect her, but now it’s the other way around. If you ask Maya who Ana is, she’ll reply: “A fighter.” But she doesn’t just say that because Ana can beat the shit out of anyone, but because life has tried to beat the shit out of Ana since she was born, only it never stood a chance. Ana is unbreakable.
She’s in the last year of high school in Beartown, but she’s been an adult for a long time, the daughters of parents who take refuge in the bottom of bottles grow up faster. When Ana was little her dad taught her to watch the fire in the open hearth, to put more wood on at just the right time, to make sure it never burned out completely. When he has one of his episodes, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, he watches over his drinking in the same way. He never gets mean, never even gets loud, he’s just never properly sober. He’ll sleep through the whole of this storm, snoring in his chair in the living room surrounded by Ana’s martial arts trophies that he’s so proud of, and all the photographs of her as a child, which she has so carefully cut her mother out of. He’s too drunk to hear the phone ring. Ana is washing up, and turns up the volume of the stereo, the dogs are lying at her feet, they don’t hear it either. The telephone rings and rings and rings.
* * *
Eventually the doorbell rings instead.
* * *
“It’s nothing to worry about, just a bit of wind,” Johnny whispers. Hannah tries to believe that. He’s not going off to fight a fire this time, he and the other firemen are setting out with chain saws to clear a path through the fallen trees so that the other emergency vehicles and responders can get through. He often complains that being a fireman means being a lumberjack ninety percent of the time, but she knows he still takes pride in that. He belongs to this forest.
She turns around and stretches up on tiptoe and nips him on the cheek with her teeth, and his knees buckle. He’s biggest and strongest pretty much everywhere he goes, but no matter what other people might think, he knows that if the children were on the other side of a fire, she’d be quicker than him. She’s complicated and unruly and argumentative and really not very easy to please, but he loves her most of all for her brutally uncompromising protective instinct. “We help those we can,” she always whispers in his ear after the very worst days, when he’s lost someone at work, or when she has. As a fireman he has to be prepared to see death in every stage of life, but as a midwife she sees it in the very worst moments: the first seconds of life. When she says those words they are both a consolation and a way of reminding them both of their duty. We help if we can, when we can, to the extent that we can. It’s a particular sort of job, but also a particular sort of person.
Slowly he lets go of her, he never gets used to the fact that a messy troublemaker like her can still turn him upside down. He goes and checks that his phone is charging and she watches him for a long time, she never gets used to the fact that a nagging pedant like him can still, after twenty years, be the sort of person she wants to rip the clothes off of if he so much as looks at her.
She hears the phone out in the hall. It’s time. She closes her eyes and curses to herself, promises herself that she’s not going to fight with him. He never promises to come home safely, because that would be bad luck. Instead he always says that he loves her, over and over again, and she replies: “Good thing too.” The phone goes on ringing, she thinks he must be in the bathroom seeing as he hasn’t answered it, so she yells his name because the windows are already rattling loudly from the wind. The children are lined up on the stairs to give him a good-bye hug. Tess has her arms around her three younger brothers: Tobias, Ted, Ture. Their dad thinks it’s ridiculous that they all have names that start with the same letter, but when he and their mother first fell in love, he agreed that she could name the children if he could name the dogs. They never got a dog. She’s always been a better negotiator.
Ture is crying into Tess’s sweater, none of his siblings tell him to stop. They used to cry too when they were little, because you don’t just have one member of the family who’s a fireman, it doesn’t work like that, the whole family is in the fire service. They don’t have the luxury of thinking “it doesn’t happen to us,” they have to know better. So the parents’ agreement is simple: never put themselves in danger at the same time. The children must always have one parent left if the worst were to happen.
Johnny is standing in the hall, raising his voice to speak into the phone, in the end he’s shouting, but there’s no one there. He thinks he must have pressed the wrong button by mistake so he checks the call log, but no one has called since he rang his mother ten minutes ago. It takes several rings before he realizes that it isn’t his phone ringing, it’s hers. Hannah picks it up, slightly confused, stares at the number, hears her boss’s voice at the other end of the line. Thirty seconds later she starts running.
* * *
Do you want to understand people? Really understand them? Then you need to know all the best that we are capable of.
4 Savages
Benji will be woken up by a bang. He won’t know where he is when he sits up, his hangover will mess up all sense of scale and he’ll feel too big for the room, as if he’s woken up in a doll’s house. That’s nothing unusual, it’s been going on for a long time, every morning these days he seems to open his eyes surprised that he’s still alive.
It will be the day after the storm, but he won’t know that yet, he won’t know if he’s forgotten what he was dreaming, or if he’s still dreaming. His long hair will hang down in front of his eyes, every limb, every muscle will be aching, his body still has the hard musculature of a life in and around hockey, but he’s twenty now and hasn’t worn a pair of skates for almost two years. He smokes too much and eats too little. He will try to get out of bed but will stumble onto one knee, the empty bottles of alcohol will roll across the floor among the cigarette papers and lighters and scraps of tinfoil, and his headache will hit him so hard that even with his palms clamped to his ears he won’t be able to tell if the noise is coming from outside or within himself. Then there will be another bang, the walls will shake so hard that he crouches down, afraid that the window above the bed is going to shatter and bury him beneath splinters of glass. And in the corner of the room his phone will be ringing and ringing and ringing.
Two years ago he left Beartown, and ever since then he has been traveling. He left the place where he had lived his whole life, and took trains and boats and hitchhiked for lifts in trucks until the towns along the way no longer had hockey teams. He has gotten lost on purpose, and has destroyed himself in every way imaginable, but he has also found things he didn’t know he had been longing for. Glances and hands and breath on his neck. Dance floors with no questions. It took chaos to set him free, loneliness to stop him being alone. He hasn’t had a single thought about turning back, going home, home could just as well be a different planet now.