Little Star (11 page)

Jerry didn’t get around to
visiting his parents until the spring. He was actually busy with a little business enterprise.

He had been working in the billiard hall in Norrtälje for a couple of years, cash in hand, stepping in as and when required. One evening when he was in the café washing coffee cups, an old acquaintance came in. Ingemar. They chatted for a while and when Jerry offered him a contraband Russian beer from the secret stash, Ingemar raised his eyebrows. ‘Have you got fags as well?’

Jerry said he hadn’t, and that the Russian beer was really only for regular customers, but he hardly thought Ingemar had turned into the kind of bloke who’d go running to the cops, had he?

‘No, no,’ said Ingemar, opening the beer with his lighter. ‘Quite the reverse. What if I said eighty kronor a carton? Interested?’

‘Are we talking about that Polish crap made from straw and newspaper?’

‘No, no, Marlboro. I don’t honestly know if it’s some kind of pirate factory or what, but they taste the same. Here. Try one.’

Ingemar held out a packet and Jerry examined it. It didn’t have a registration mark or stamp, but apart from that it looked like an ordinary packet of cigarettes. He shook one out and lit it. No difference whatsoever.

Ingemar was a truck driver these days, working mostly in the Baltic states. He had a contact in Estonia who sold cheap cigarettes if you didn’t ask too many questions. He looked around the room;
two of the billiard tables were busy and three people were sitting at a table smoking. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem to shift say fifty cartons a month here. Add on a bit for yourself and you’re laughing.’

Jerry thought it over. A hundred and twenty kronor was a good price for a carton of fags. That would mean a profit of two thousand a month.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it. When can you deliver?’ Ingemar grinned. ‘Right now. I’ve got the car outside.’ Ingemar didn’t have his truck parked outside the billiard hall, just an ordinary car. He looked around and unlocked the boot. Two black plastic sacks took up half the space. He showed Jerry the cartons, bundled in packs of five.

‘Four thou,’ he said. ‘As agreed.’

‘But I haven’t got that kind of money on me, you know that.’ ‘Next time. This will give you a bit of start-up capital.’ They carried the sacks down to the room where the rubbish was stored, and shook hands as they agreed to meet in a month’s time.

That same evening Jerry managed to shift eight cartons, which made it easier to fasten the remainder to the back of his motorbike under cover of darkness and drive home. In future he would ask Ingemar to deliver direct to his door.

He stacked the forty-two cartons in four neat piles in the corner of the living room, then sat down in the armchair and contemplated them, hands folded over his stomach.
So there you go,
he thought.
All of a sudden you’re an entrepreneur.
To show he was taking the whole thing seriously, he emptied his wallet and put Ingemar’s six hundred and forty kronor in an envelope.

He sat there rustling the remaining three hundred and twenty. He usually worked a six-hour shift at the hall, earning fifty kronor an hour. If it went on like this, his hourly rate had suddenly more than doubled.

A hundred kronor. After tax, so to speak. Top job, to say the least. Executive or something.

The fifty cartons disappeared, and the following month Ingemar got his money and delivered the next batch to Jerry’s apartment. It was tempting to expand the operation, but Jerry realised he ought to be careful, selling only to people he trusted. Mustn’t get greedy. That was when things went down the pan.

His role as deputy supplier commanded a modicum of respect from those around him. He could hang out in the billiard hall even when he wasn’t working, and people were more inclined to talk to him than they had been. He bumped into people in town, that kind of thing. The satisfaction he’d been getting from the time he spent with Theres no longer felt so vital.

However, at the beginning of March he packed up his guitar, strapped it to his motorbike and started the bike first kick. He had seriously begun to consider buying a new one, with an electric starter. It was a possibility these days.

The house was still there, looking exactly as it had when he went round four months earlier. But something had changed. It took a while before Jerry was able to put his finger on it, but as he sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Lennart and Laila, picking up a biscuit from the plate, he saw it with sudden clarity.

He was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating biscuits with his parents.

It had just sort of happened, quite naturally. As if it was normal. No suspicion about his visit, no implied criticism and none of the simmering discontent between his parents that could erupt into a caustic remark at any moment. It was just coffee, home-made biscuits and a nice cosy chat. Jerry looked from Lennart to Laila; they were both dunking macaroons in their coffee. ‘What the fuck is going on with you two?’

Laila looked at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

Jerry waved at the table. ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re sitting here like…I don’t know…something out of
Neighbours.
As if everything in the garden was rosy. What’s going on?’

Lennart shrugged his shoulders. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘No, there’s no problem. That’s what’s so bloody spooky. Have you joined a cult or something?’ Jerry just didn’t get it. He gobbled a couple more biscuits, said thank you and went down into the cellar.

The cot was gone, and Theres was sleeping in his old bed these days. She wasn’t wearing a nappy, so presumably she had learned how to use the toilet in the cellar. A home-made cupboard had appeared, with a fretwork front. Jerry could just see a CD player behind the fretwork. Theres was standing in the middle of the floor, not moving a muscle. She was holding a CD in one hand.

She had grown into a very pretty little girl. Her pale blonde hair had begun to curl around her face, framing her enormous blue eyes and making her look like an angel, nothing more or less.

Jerry was very taken with the sight of her, and sat down on the floor in front of her without speaking. Her eyes were fixed on his lips. After perhaps ten seconds, she took a step forward, hit him hard across the mouth and said, ‘Talkie!’

Jerry almost fell over backwards, but managed to support himself with one arm. A reflex action made him give Theres a slap that was hard enough to knock her over. ‘What the fuck are you doing, you little bastard!’

Theres got to her feet, went over to the bed and crawled up onto it. She sat facing the wall, her back to him, and started humming something. Jerry felt at his mouth. No blood.

‘Now then sis,’ he said. ‘We’re not starting all that again, are we?’

Her shoulders hunched and she bent her neck as if she were embarrassed. Jerry’s heart softened and he said to her back, ‘Oh, let’s forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

He crept over to her and realised it wasn’t that she was ashamed. She had simply bent her head so that she could see her reflection in the CD. Jerry reached out to take it. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got there.’

Theres pulled the disc away and
growled.
There was no other word for the sound that rose from her throat. Jerry laughed and withdrew his hand. ‘OK, OK. I won’t take it. I get it. It’s fine, sis.’

He sat quietly beside her for a while, looking at her as she looked at herself. Without turning her head, Theres eventually said, ‘Talkie.’

‘But I am talking. What do you want me to say? Sorry, or what? Are you cross because I haven’t been around? Is that it? OK, I’m sorry.’

‘Tarrie talkie. Singie.’

Jerry frowned. Then he understood. He took out the guitar and played a C. Theres turned and looked at his fingers as he played C again. Her arm shot out. She whacked him on the hand with the CD, and let out a single note.

Jerry controlled himself and didn’t hit back. A red welt was beginning to appear on the back of his right hand. Theres sang the note again, and raised the CD for a fresh attack.

‘OK, OK,’ Jerry said. ‘Calm down. Here you go.’ He played E-major seventh, and the disc was lowered. ‘I forgot. Sorry.’

As he hadn’t got around to writing anything new, Jerry just sat strumming for a while, playing a few appropriate chords as Theres improvised a melody. The tunes that began to emerge sounded at least as good as the one he had laboriously written down in advance.

He muted the strings with his hand and looked around the room. Her meagre little world. The CD player, the bed, the jars of baby food.

Is this it? Is this the way it’s going to be?

He was roused from his pondering by a pain in his right hand. Theres had stabbed at him again.

‘Tarrie talkie!’

Jerry rubbed the back of his hand. ‘For fuck’s sake, do you think I’m a machine or something?’ He knocked on the body of the guitar. ‘The tarrie will talkie when I want it to talkie, OK?’

Theres leaned forward and gently stroked the neck of the guitar, whispering, ‘Tarrie? Tarrie?’ She laid her ear against the strings and for a moment Jerry thought the guitar was going to reply. He too lowered his head towards the fretboard.

From the corner of his eye he just caught sight of the CD heading straight for his cheek, and jerked his head away. The edge of the disc
hit the wood of the guitar and made a small notch. Theres opened her eyes wide and screamed, ‘Tarrie! Poor tarrie!’ She reached out to the guitar as if to comfort it and as tears welled in her eyes, Jerry got to his feet.

‘Listen sis, no offence, but there’s something wrong inside your head. No question.’

What had happened? What kind
of sect had Lennart and Laila joined?

Just the usual one, the two-member sect that diligent married couples are inducted into, if they’re lucky. The sect with the motto:
We only have each other.
Lennart couldn’t say exactly how he had reached this point, but one day he found himself standing in front of the microwave warming pastries as he waited for Laila to get home from Norrtälje. As he watched the pastries slowly spinning around on the plate, he realised that he missed Laila. That he was looking forward to her coming home so they could have a cup of coffee and a warm pastry. That it would be nice.

It might sound simplistic, but if something can be expressed simply, then why not express it simply?

Lennart was beginning to appreciate what he had.

It wasn’t a matter of falling in love with Laila all over again, of forgetting the past and starting afresh. That only happens in the magazines. But he was beginning to look at his life with different eyes. Instead of grinding his teeth over everything he had missed out on, he was actually looking at what he had.

He had his health, a decent house, work he enjoyed and which brought him a certain amount of recognition. A wife who had stuck with him all these years and who had his best interests at heart, in spite of everything. A son who at least wasn’t a drug addict.

And on top of all that he had been chosen as the guardian of the gift down in the cellar. It was impossible to fit the girl into the
usual scheme of things; she was a freak of nature, and a considerable responsibility. But the simple fact of bearing a responsibility can be something that gives meaning to life.

So not a bad life, all in all. Maybe not the stuff of a tribute journal or a framed obituary, but perfectly
acceptable.
Fine. Perfectly OK.

He still couldn’t say that Laila looked good exactly, but sometimes, in a certain light…She had lost at least ten kilos in recent months, and a couple of times when they were lying in bed about to go to sleep, he had been turned on by the warmth of her body, her skin, and they had done what man and wife tend to do. This led to more ease and intimacy, and that meant his opinion of her changed a little more, and so on.

When the girl was five years old, Lennart and Laila were celebrating their wedding anniversary. Yes, celebrating. There was wine with dinner and more wine afterwards, as they sat looking at old photo albums and listening to Abba. Suddenly the girl was standing in the middle of the living room floor. She had come up the stairs from the cellar by herself for the first time. Her eyes swept around the room and did not pause when they reached Lennart and Laila. She sat down on the floor by the fire and started stroking the head of a stone troll she found there.

Lennart and Laila were happy and slightly tipsy. Without even thinking about it they picked the girl up and settled her between them on the sofa. She wouldn’t let go of the stone troll, but clamped it firmly between her thighs so that she could keep running her hand over it.

‘Hole in Your Soul’ faded away, and the introductory piano notes of ‘Thank You for the Music’ floated out across the room.

I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore…

Laila sang along. Even if she couldn’t quite get Agnetha’s clarity—or her high notes—it sounded pretty good. She was accompanied by the girl, who picked up the melody instinctively, adding her own voice
a fraction of a second after Abba’s voices reached her ears.

Lennart got a lump in his throat. When the chorus came around he just couldn’t help joining in too:

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing…

They were singing about the thing that united them. They swayed together on the sofa, and the girl swayed along with them. When the song came to an end amid the sound of crackling, both Lennart and Laila had tears in their eyes, and their heads almost collided as they both leaned down at the same time to kiss the girl on the top of her head.

It was a lovely evening.

The girl had started leaving her room. It was remarkable that it had taken so long, but now the day had come when she wanted to expand her world.

Her development was slow in every other area too, except music. Her toilet training had taken a long time, she was awkward and clumsy when she moved and she had the eating habits of a small child. She still refused to eat anything except jars of baby food, and Lennart had to travel to shopping centres a long way from home to stock up on Semper and Findus without arousing suspicion. She had a tendency to become attached to inanimate objects rather than living things, and her use of language was developing very slowly. She seemed to understand everything that was said to her, but spoke only in sentences of three or four words in which she referred to herself as ‘Little One’.

‘Little One more food.’ ‘Little One have it.’ ‘Away.’ The exception was lyrics. Given the girl’s limited vocabulary, it was astonishing to hear her sitting there singing, in perfectly pronounced English, a song she had heard. ‘Singing’ is perhaps the wrong word. She
reproduced
the song. The day after the wedding anniversary, for example, she wandered around the cellar singing
with Agnetha Fältskog’s particular diction, and she knew almost all the words.

After that evening Lennart relaxed his restrictions, and Laila was allowed to share her taste in music with the girl. Schubert and Beethoven were joined on the CD player by Stikkan Anderson and Peter Himmelstrand.

But the problem Lennart had refused to face was now a fact. They couldn’t let the girl show herself outside the house. One possibility was to lock her in, but that wasn’t really an option. So what were they going to do?

‘Lennart,’ said Laila a couple of days later when they were out in the garden hanging up yet another bird box, ‘we have to accept that it’s over now.’

Lennart was right at the top of the ladder, and dropped the bird box he was hanging up. He clung to the tree and leaned his forehead against the trunk. Then he came down, sat on the third rung and looked Laila in the eye.

‘Can you imagine it?’ he said. ‘Handing her over and never seeing her again?’

Laila thought about it, tried to imagine it. The absence. The cellar empty, the jars of baby food gone, the girl’s voice never to be heard again. No. She didn’t want that.

‘Don’t you think we’d be allowed to adopt her, then? I mean, regardless of how it all started, we’re the ones she’s used to now. They’d have to take that into account, surely.’

‘For a start, I’m not sure they’d be so understanding, and secondly…’ He took Laila’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I mean we know, don’t we? There’s something wrong with her. Seriously wrong. They’d put her in an institution. A place where they wouldn’t even appreciate what we value about her. They’d just see her as…damaged.’

‘But what are we going to do, Lennart? Sooner or later she’s going to walk out of the front door, and then we’ll have even less chance of keeping her. What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know, Laila. I don’t know.’

It was what Laila had said about the front door that gave Lennart the idea. The problem could be expressed very simply: the girl could not be allowed to go out the front door. Their house was quite sheltered and there was very little risk that anyone would see her through the window. The only person who came to visit was Jerry.

However, if she went out through the door, she could carry on up the drive. Out onto the road. Into the forest, into town. To other people who would set in motion the machinery that would take her away from them.

Lennart came up with the solution. He didn’t know if it would work, but it was the only thing he could think of. Without mentioning it to Laila, he made up a story. When it was ready, he told the girl his story.

It went like this: the world was a place populated by big people. People like Lennart, Laila and Jerry. Once upon a time there had been little people as well. People like the girl. Like Little One. But the big people had killed all the little people.

When Lennart saw that the girl didn’t understand the word ‘kill’, he changed it to ‘eaten up’. Like food. The big people had eaten up all the little people.

At that point in the story the girl did something extremely unusual. She asked a question. With her gaze firmly fixed on the wall, she asked him, ‘Why?’

Lennart hadn’t exactly polished his story, and had to come up with an answer very quickly. He said it depended on what was in your head. Almost all people had hatred and hunger in their heads. Then there were people like Lennart, Laila and Jerry who had love in their heads.

The girl tasted the word she had sung so many times, but never actually spoken, ‘Love’.

‘Yes,’ said Lennart. ‘And when you have love in your head, you want to love and take care of the little people, you don’t want to eat them up.’ He carried on telling her about all the big people he had seen
sneaking around the garden, hunting for a little person to eat. Things were so bad that if the girl went outside, she probably wouldn’t even manage to get through one song before a big person grabbed her and ate her up.

The girl looked anxiously over towards the window, and Lennart stroked her back reassuringly.

‘There’s no danger as long as you stay indoors. Do you understand? You have to stay in the house. You mustn’t stand looking out of the window, and you must
never, ever
go out through the big door. Do you understand, Little One?’

The girl had crawled up into the very corner of the bed and was still looking over at the window with an anxious expression. Lennart began to wonder if he had succeeded
too
well with his story. He took her bare feet in his hands and caressed them with his thumb.

‘We’ll protect you, Little One. There’s no need to be afraid. Nothing is going to happen to you.’

When he left the girl’s room a little while later, Lennart forgave himself for his horrible story. Partly because it was necessary, and partly because there was a grain of truth in it. He was convinced that the world out there
would
eat her up, if not quite as brutally as he had suggested.

However much Lennart might have forgiven himself, his story had a powerful effect on the girl. She no longer dared to leave her room, and insisted on the window being covered so that the big people wouldn’t catch sight of her. One day when Laila came into the room, the girl was sitting with a Mora knife she had fetched from the tool cupboard and was making threatening gestures towards the blanket hanging over the window.

Laila didn’t understand what had happened, but from odd words the girl said she began to piece things together, and eventually she pinned Lennart down: What had he actually said?

Lennart told her about his story, but left out the worst bits. In the end Laila agreed not to correct the girl’s view of the world. She didn’t like what Lennart had done, but since she was unable to come up with
a better idea, the girl could go on living with her misconceptions.

Lennart also had his doubts about whether it had been a wise move. The incident with the Mora knife was only the beginning. When Lennart locked it away, she fetched a chisel, a screwdriver, a saw. She placed the tools around her on the bed like an arsenal of weapons at the ready for when the Big People arrived. When Lennart tried to take them away, she let out a single, heart-rending scream.

He had to be a little more cunning. He swapped the most dangerous tools one at a time for less dangerous items. The saw for a hammer, the chisel for a file. They were hardly suitable toys, but the girl never hurt herself. She just wanted the tools as a kind of magic circle, a spell surrounding her as she sat on the bed.

If she moved to the floor, she took the tools with her and arranged them neatly around her. They had become her new friends; she sang to them, whispered to them and patted them. She was never calmer than when she was lying curled up inside her circle with a Mozart adagio on the CD player. Sometimes she would fall asleep like that. After one slip-up, Lennart learned that he must always move the tools with her when he put her to bed, otherwise she woke up screaming.

Time passed, and the girl’s fear moderated to anxiety which in turn moderated to watchfulness. The quantity of tools was reduced. One day when Lennart had left the drill out, he came into the girl’s room to find her sitting with it on her knee, talking quietly to it. From time to time she would press the button and the drill would buzz in response, whereupon the conversation would continue.

It became her new favourite, and Lennart let her keep it, because she allowed him to remove all the rest. It enabled her to move about more as well. She was once again brave enough to set off on small journeys of discovery, but always with the drill in her hand.

Lennart had to smile as he watched her sneaking around the cellar with the tool at the ready, as alert as the sheriff waiting for the black hats to ride into town. She couldn’t sleep unless she was clutching the drill.

The girl had reached the age of seven by the time she showed an interest in the drill’s normal function. Each day she came one step closer to Lennart as he stood at the workbench in the cellar. She didn’t protest when he picked her up and sat her on the bench; instead she clutched the drill to her chest and watched what he was doing.

He had just finished yet another nesting box, and showed it to the girl. She had been staring intently at it while he was working, but looked away when he held it up in front of her. That was normal.

Lennart picked up the new drill he had bought after he let the girl keep the old one. Just for fun he revved the motor a couple of times, pretending that his drill wanted to talk to hers. She wasn’t interested.

He had a size 10 bit in the chuck, and Lennart finished off the box as he usually did. ‘Right, now we’re going to drill the entrance hole. This is where the birds will go in and out. Cheep, cheep. Birds.’

The girl watched as Lennart drilled out the hole, then sat staring at it as if she were waiting for something. When Lennart lifted her down from the bench, she growled and walloped him across the shoulder with her drill. He put her back and she leaned close to the hole, whispering, ‘Cheep, cheep,’ as she continued to stare at it.