He’s on his own at home when the wind starts whipping the trees and the electricity goes off in the small house his parents rent right on the boundary between the last buildings and the start of the forest. They’ve gone abroad to bring his sister home. Matteo is good at being alone, but he can’t bear to be in a house with no lights, so he gets on his bicycle and sets off. The defiant teenager inside his head doesn’t want to ask for help, at the same time the scared child in his chest hopes that someone will see that he needs looking after. But no one has the time.
A tall, fat man in a suit rushes past him in the other direction. Matteo doesn’t know his real name, only that everyone calls him “Tails,” and that he owns the big supermarket and is one of the richest men in the whole town. The man doesn’t even notice the boy he rushes past, he’s on his way down to the flagpoles outside the ice rink in a panicked attempt to take down the green flags with the bear on them so that they don’t get torn to shreds. That’s the man’s first instinct at a time of danger: save the flags, not people.
As Matteo carries on through Beartown he sees neighbors helping one another empty their yards of loose items, carrying in the sticks and nets that had been standing in every cul-de-sac. The kids around here play with tennis balls on pavement at this time of year, but as soon as the snow comes every other dad will spray water on their yard to make a hockey rink. Matteo has heard plenty of neighbors boast: “in this town we have good friends and bad yards,” because down south people boast about perfect lawns and neat flower beds, whereas here you gain status from having grit-strewn patches of ground and pucks littering the soil when the snow melts. That shows that you’ve used the frozen months for the right things.
Matteo often wonders if he’d be as odd and alone in other places as he is here. If anyone would have talked to him, if he’d have friends, be visible. Where you’re born and who you become there is a lottery, what’s right in one place and wrong in another. In almost all of the world, being obsessed with hockey would make you an outsider, a weirdo, but not here. Here it’s like the weather, all small talk in every social situation is about one or the other. And you can’t escape storms or sport in Beartown.
It gets dark and cold quickly, the snow hasn’t arrived yet but the wind is already eating through flesh and sinew, the boy has no gloves and is losing the feeling in his fingers. He pedals without really knowing where he’s going, takes one hand off the handlebars to get the circulation going again, and he loses concentration for a moment, sees the vehicle too late. It comes so fast and its lights dazzle him. He brakes so hard that his bike skids sideways. The headlights blind him and he waits for the impact, and when it doesn’t come at first he thinks he’s already dead, but at the last moment he somehow manages to shift his weight and throw both himself and his bicycle out of the way. He rolls over, scraping his hands and arms, and lets out a yell, but no one hears him over the wind.
Neither the young woman driving the vehicle nor the midwife sitting beside her see him in the darkness. It’s such a small event, everything happens so fast, but if the bumper had so much as grazed the fourteen-year-old he would have been tossed into the trees with horrific force. If he had ended up unconscious there in the middle of the storm, his lifeless body would probably not have been found for several days, by which time the invisible threads between him and everything that is on its way to happening would have been severed. But now he staggers to his feet, bruised but alive.
This is how small the margins are, between us never having heard of Matteo, and us soon never being able to forget his name.
7 Children
Beartown and Hed are old towns in an even older forest. People say that age brings wisdom, but for most of us that really isn’t true, when we get old we’ve just accumulated more experiences, good and bad. The result is more likely to be cynicism than wisdom. When we’re young we know nothing about all the very worst that can hit us, which is just as well, because otherwise we’d never leave the house.
And we would definitely never let go of those we love.
* * *
“Do you know… where you’re going?” Hannah wonders anxiously.
As a midwife, she wants them to get there quickly, but as a human being who wants to carry on being one, she can’t help wishing that Ana wasn’t driving like someone who’d just stolen the pickup.
The girl doesn’t reply. She’s wearing her dad’s jacket, bright orange and covered with reflectors, with the words “Game accident” on the back. He wears it when he’s tracking animals that have been hit by vehicles, the whole pickup is full of equipment to help you move through the forest in the dark, half of Ana’s childhood has consisted of running after him and the dogs out here. She has always thought she could find her way in a blindfold, and this storm is evidently planning on testing her.
“So… you know where you’re going?” Hannah asks again, and gets no response this time either.
Two tennis balls are rolling around on the floor by the midwife’s feet. She picks one up and smiles tentatively.
“So… how many dogs have you got?”
Still no answer, so she clears her throat and goes on:
“I mean, nobody really plays tennis around here, the only uses I can think of for tennis balls in Hed and Beartown are if you have dogs, if you play land hockey, or if you’re tumble-drying a duvet…”
Ana just peers silently over the steering wheel and drives even faster.
“What sort of dogs are they?” the midwife persists, and then the girl finally sighs:
“You’re the sort who talks when you’re nervous, aren’t you?”
“Yes…,” the midwife admits.
“Me too,” Ana says.
Then she says nothing at all for several minutes. The midwife closes her eyes and holds on tight. She does her best not to speak, but as her heartbeat increases her mouth stops obeying her:
“My husband wants to have dogs! He’s been going on about it ever since we first met. To be honest, I don’t really like animals, but I was thinking that I might surprise him for his birthday and let him buy one he can go hunting with! I’ve even spoken to a breeder! Apparently, you want a good hunting dog to have a clear ‘on and off button,’ so it’s really keen when it’s hunting, but can wind down as soon as it gets home? Is that right? I laughed when I heard that, because I wish the same thing applied to firemen and kids who play hockey…”
The pickup speeds up. Ana glances at her and mutters:
“For someone who doesn’t like dogs, you know a lot about them.”
“Thanks!” the midwife exclaims, and raises her arms in front of her face because she’s convinced they’re going to hit a fallen tree that Ana swerves around at the last moment.
Then the girl grunts:
“That’s one hell of a brave jacket to wear if you’re coming to Beartown. I’m wearing mine so we don’t get run over if we’re standing in the road, and you pick one that’s going to make people aim right at us…”
“What?” the midwife all but shouts before realizing that she’s wearing her eldest son’s jacket, the red one with the Hed Hockey logo on the chest, she grabbed it without thinking when she was on her way out of the house.