Little Star (12 page)

A feeling of sorrow plummeted through Lennart’s stomach. He decided to make an exception.

Early next morning he took the girl out into the hallway. When he opened the front door, her eyes widened. She struggled to free herself from his grip, and filled her lungs with air ready to scream. Lennart just had time to say, ‘Ssh! SSH! They can hear us!’

The girl’s mouth snapped shut and her little body began to shake as Lennart cautiously opened the door and pretended to peer out into the garden. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Careful. Not a sound.’

He bundled the girl out through the door, but had to pick her up in order to get her to the nearest tree where there was a nesting box. Her body was clenched, as hard as ice.

It was a May morning, and the birdsong was cascading through
the shrubs and trees. Lennart lifted the girl’s head towards the box, which was exactly the same as the one he had made the previous evening.

Suddenly her mouth opened and she relaxed in his arms. A robin emerged from the hole and sat there for a moment looking around with rapid, jerky movements before it flew away. The girl followed it with her eyes and a dribble of saliva ran down her chin.

Lennart had no idea how she might interpret what she had just seen. Did she think drilling holes made the birds appear, or disappear, or did she in fact understand perfectly?

He put her down on the ground and said, ‘The birds live in there, they fly around—’

But he had hardly begun the sentence before she raced back to the house and slammed the front door behind her.

By February 2000 greed had
got its claws into Jerry after all, and it was all Apple’s fault. The Power Mac G4 with the 500 MHz processor was finally due for release after the initial hassle with Motorola, and was going to cost around thirty thousand kronor. So far, so good. He had the money, he’d started to save a year ago when he picked up the first rumours.

But then there was Cinema Display. Along with the release of the new G4 there was to be a 22-inch flat screen with the best definition and the slickest design ever. And that would cost around thirty thousand as well.

The dumpy iMac on Jerry’s computer desk suddenly felt like something from the stone age. He’d started messing around with Cubase 4 for writing songs, but it was so slow. He wanted to upgrade to 4.1, he wanted to run it through the 500 processor and he wanted to see it on that big, flat screen.

It became an obsession. Jerry imagined that when he had that silver chassis standing underneath his desk and that stylish screen with its transparent frame sitting on top, everything would be
perfect.
There would be nothing more to strive for. He longed for that computer as a believer longs for redemption. When it was his, when it was all in place, he would feel a peace and purity that would wipe every trace of dirt from his life.

But to achieve this state of bliss some fancy footwork would be required. He had to sell more cigarettes. He had already doubled his
order with Ingemar in December, and in January he took one hundred and fifty cartons, and also put the price up by ten kronor from the previous month.

The demand from his regular customers couldn’t meet Jerry’s supply, however gallantly they puffed away. Mats, who ran the billiard hall, had discovered Jerry’s activities, and he now dealt from home. He asked his regulars to spread the word among their connections that there were cheap fags available at Jerry’s address.

The connections duly turned up, and soon their connections came as well. By February Jerry had managed to scrape together twelve thousand kronor in addition to the thirty thousand he already had, and placed another big order with Ingemar.

A week or so later he had a visitor at the billiard hall. A guy of his own age came in—shaved head, tribal tattoo snaking up his neck beneath the biker jacket—and leaned on the bar. He looked Jerry in the eye and informed him that his business activities would cease immediately.

Jerry pretended he didn’t understand; he wondered aloud what the visitor’s problem with the billiard hall was, and explained that he wasn’t actually the owner. If he wanted it shut down, he would have to speak to Mats. The guy didn’t even crack a smile; he just said that Jerry had been warned, and if he carried on, things could get very nasty.

Jerry’s hands were shaking slightly when the man left, but he wasn’t really scared. He’d heard about a gang who had got together in the offenders’ institution in Norrtälje; they called themselves Bröderna Djup after the singing group, which was an incredibly stupid name for a criminal organisation, and was one reason why Jerry didn’t take the threat seriously. Besides which, there was nothing to suggest that this guy really did belong to some kind of gang. He was probably a free agent like Jerry himself, but with a slightly harder attitude.

Jerry was a bit more careful about checking the spy hole in the door before he opened it, but he kept on selling his cigarettes. No
slap-head pumped up on steroids was going to come between him and his Cinema Display, his heart’s desire.

He had only fifty cartons left of the latest delivery when his life was once again kicked in a new direction. One evening at the beginning of March, the doorbell rang. Jerry got up from the infinitely slow download of a web manual on creating homepages and went to look through the spy hole.

Outside stood a friend of a friend whose name he didn’t know, but who had bought from him a couple of times before. He opened the door. As soon as he saw the expression on the man’s face close up, he realised something was wrong. From behind his back the man produced a long metal shoehorn and despite the fact that Jerry didn’t understand what the danger actually was, he moved to shut the door. Too late. The shoehorn had been shoved into the opening and it was impossible to close the door.

Then he heard running footsteps on the stairs, and seconds later they were in. The man with the shoehorn whispered, ‘Sorry, no choice,’ and took off.

There were three of them: the guy who had been in the billiard hall and two more who at first glance were barely distinguishable from him. Same shaved heads, same jackets.

They took the sacks of cigarettes. They forced Jerry to show them where he kept his money, and took that as well. Then they took Jerry. Calmly and politely they led him down the stairs to a waiting car. Jerry was numb with fear, and it didn’t even occur to him to scream. Half-slumped in their arms he noticed they had a Volvo 740. A real hick’s car. However, the reason for it soon became apparent. The car was equipped with a tow bar.

They drove Jerry down to the gravelled car park next to the Lommar swimming pool. Beneath the sign that announced
Sweden’s second-longest water slide,
they threw him on the ground and handcuffed his feet together. Then they ran a chain from the handcuffs to the tow bar. When they put on ‘We Live in the Country’ by Bröderna Djup at full volume, Jerry shat himself.

The guy from the billiard hall wrinkled his nose as he became aware of the smell. He pointed at Jerry’s soiled backside and said, ‘I take it that means you get it now.’ He waved his hand in a circular movement over the dark, deserted car park. ‘I warned you, fat boy. We’re going for a little drive. There’s going to be blood and shit all over the gravel, but look on the bright side. You’re bound to lose a few kilos.’

From inside the car, Bröderna Djup were squealing and grunting as they imitated all the animals they were going to buy when they had sold their possessions. Jerry wept and whispered, ‘Please, please, no. You can have anything you want.’

The guy smirked. ‘Like what? You’ve got fuck all. We’ve just taken everything.’

Jerry was about to vomit with fear, and tried to form his lips around the words that would promise them all his savings, all his…everything. Before he had the chance, the guy taped his mouth shut and said, ‘We don’t want to wake the neighbours, now do we?’ Then he got in the car and revved the engine, dousing Jerry in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

He was dragged across the gravel and his shirt ripped, baring his back to the sharp stones. He plunged into a vortex of imagining the skin, the muscles being ripped from his body until his naked skeleton was screaming against the ground. He wanted to lose consciousness, he wanted to die quickly, he wanted…

He didn’t even notice when the car stopped, ten metres from where it had started. All three of them climbed out, stood around him and pissed on him. Then they unhooked him from the tow bar. He heard a voice in his ear, ‘Next time it’ll be the full treatment, OK?’

Doors slammed shut and gravel sprayed over his face as the car shot away. He lay there staring up at the night sky and the bright winter stars. His back was burning, and he was breathing heavily and unevenly through his nose.

It took ten minutes before he managed to get up and rip the tape
from his mouth. His feet were still fastened together, and he stank of piss and shit. Shuffling and hopping, he made his way towards the lights and the apartment blocks, barely noticing when he fell and cut his cheek open on a sharp stone. Something inside him had broken beyond repair.

When Jerry hadn’t been in
touch for a month, Laila began to get worried. Although there had been periods before when they went for months without hearing from him, they usually spoke every couple of weeks or so. But Jerry didn’t ring, and when Laila rang him there was no reply.

She might have investigated the matter more closely, she might even have broken the taboo and gone to visit Jerry—if she hadn’t had a new project that took up so much of her time and her attention.

She had started teaching the girl to read.

She still couldn’t imagine what the future might look like. The girl was around eight years old now, she would probably be nine soon, and what was going to happen when she got older? When she reached puberty, when she became a teenager, when she became…an adult? Would she and Lennart be sitting here as pensioners with a grown woman in the cellar, a woman who had never set foot outside the door?

It didn’t bear thinking about, so Laila took one day at a time. She had created a compensatory fantasy in which the girl was a refugee threatened with deportation, and that was why they were keeping her hidden. She had read about such cases in the local newspaper, and the fantasy fitted in well with the unpleasant story Lennart had served up to the girl. A hostile world was out to get her, and if she showed herself she would be sent away, perhaps even killed. Like Anne Frank. It made Laila feel much better.

Since the girl was disinclined to speak, it was no easy matter to teach her the alphabet, to get her to repeat and imitate the sounds that corresponded with the letters. To begin with it was downright impossible. For example, Laila wrote ‘A’ on a piece of paper and said the letter out loud. The girl wouldn’t look at the paper, didn’t make a sound.

Laila tried with other letters, other ways of writing them or illustrating them. She drew pictures of objects the girl would recognise, wrote their names in big letters, said them out loud. The girl showed no interest whatsoever; she simply sat there playing with her drill, or arranging nails in dead straight lines without even acknowledging Laila’s existence.

When Laila eventually came up with the solution, she could have kicked herself for her stupidity. It was just so obvious. She
sang
the letters. The girl imitated her. Laila held the piece of paper with the letter on it in front of her face so that the girl wouldn’t look away, and sang ‘Aaa’ as if the letter itself was singing. When she swiftly lowered the paper she could see that the girl had looked, before her eyes slid away. She carried on with the rest of the vowels in the same way.

It took several weeks, but eventually it happened. The girl began to associate the symbol with the sound. When Laila held up the piece of paper with U on it on front of her face, there was silence for a little while as the girl waited for the note. When it didn’t come she supplied it herself, a humming but perfectly clear ‘Uuuu…’

Lennart was in the middle of one of his studio periods again, but listened to Laila’s stories of the girl’s progress and made encouraging comments and suggestions. For example, when Laila explained that she was having a problem with the consonants, he suggested that she should use lyrics the girl already knew, isolating individual words and getting the girl to sing them.

Laila decided on the Swedish version of ‘Strangers in the Night’ by Lasse Lönndahl, as Lasse had a tendency to extend the vowels, but still enunciated the consonants clearly, which made it easier to sing individual words.

Tusen och en natt, låg jag allena

Drömmande och matt…

Laila began with the word ‘en’, extending the word as she held the piece of paper with the word on it in front of her. ‘Eeennn…eeennn…’ She had to repeat it over and over again, and go through the song many times with sudden interruptions and much scribbling on the paper, but eventually the girl was singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak.

As they approached the summer, Laila could hold up a piece of paper with the word
‘tusen’
or
‘natt’
on it, and the girl would sing what was written there.

Laila had rung and rung, she had even gone to Jerry’s apartment, struggled up the stairs and rung the bell. No one had opened the door, but when Laila peered through the letterbox she could see that there was no post or junk mail on the floor. Jerry was still around somewhere. She had shouted through the letterbox, but there was no response.

And then one day in early June, there he was standing on the porch steps. Laila hardly recognised him; it was a stranger she invited to sit down at the kitchen table. When Lennart emerged from the studio he reacted the same way, and seemed on the point of asking who he was.

If Laila had lost maybe ten kilos by watching what she ate since the winter, Jerry had lost three times as much in less time. There were bags under his eyes, and a few grey hairs had come in at his temples. A badly healed scar ran across his right cheek. The air of self-evident authority with which he had commanded a room was gone. He had begun to look like Lennart.

They sat in silence for a while. Then Laila asked, ‘What’s happened to you, love?’

A shadow of his former ironic smile passed over Jerry’s lips. ‘You might well ask. I’m on a disability pension, for a start.’

‘A disability pension? But you’re only thirty-three!’

Jerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘I managed to convince them.’

‘Of what?’

‘That I can’t work. That I’m finished. That I can’t be around people.’

Laila reached across the table to stroke Jerry’s arm, but he moved it away. She said, ‘But why, love?’

Jerry scratched the scar, pale beneath the stubble, looked her in the eye and said, ‘Because I hate them. Because I can’t cope with seeing them. Because I’m scared of them. Will that do?’

Jerry got up from the table and when Laila tried to stop him, he pulled away from her. He picked up the guitar he had left in the hallway and went down to the cellar.