Little Star (5 page)

It had just happened, he had had no control over the movement; he didn’t feel he could be blamed for it at all. But then something changed. With Laila’s squeal of pain and surprise, Lennart stood up and raised the crowbar again. This time he knew exactly what he was doing. This time he took aim.

He slammed the flat end of the crowbar down again, full force, on the same knee. There was a moist crunching sound and, as Lennart lowered the crowbar, blood began to trickle down Laila’s shin and every scrap of colour left her face. She tried to get up, but her leg gave way beneath her and she collapsed at his feet, holding up her hands to defend herself and whispering, ‘Please, please, no, no…’

Lennart looked at the bleeding knee; a considerable quantity of blood had gathered under the skin, and only a thin trickle was escaping where the skin had broken. He spun the crowbar around half a turn and brought it down once more with the sharp end.

This time things went well. The knee burst like a balloon filled with water, and the kneecap splintered to one side to release a cascade of blood, splashing all over Lennart’s legs, the garden table, the demolished porch step.

Perhaps it was just as well that Laila stopped screaming and fainted at that point, otherwise Lennart might well have continued with the other knee. He had in fact realised what he was doing. He was putting an end to Laila’s running. An end to staying slim ‘for you and the audience’ and all those men waiting in the bushes.

In order to make completely sure, he ought to smash the other knee as well. But as Lennart stood there looking down at his wife’s inert body, the kneecap that was no more than a mass of cartilage, splintered bone and blood, he decided that was probably enough.

He would be proved right.

The room in the cellar
had grown warmer and had reached a pleasant temperature, but the air was still damp, and the window up at ground level was covered in condensation. The girl was lying in her basket, gazing at the ceiling with big eyes. Lennart turned back the blankets and picked her up. She didn’t make a sound, didn’t react to the change in any way.

He held the giraffe before her eyes, moving it back and forth. She followed it for a second, then went on staring straight ahead. Presumably she wasn’t blind. Lennart clicked his fingers loudly right next to her ear and her forehead wrinkled a fraction. Not deaf either. But she was so curiously…closed off.

What’s happened to her?

He felt the girl was a little older than he had first thought, perhaps two months old. In two months a person can experience enough to instinctively formulate a strategy for survival. Perhaps the girl’s strategy had been to make herself invisible. Not to be seen, not to be heard, not to make any demands.

Clearly the strategy hadn’t worked. She had been dumped in the forest, and she would be lying there still if Lennart hadn’t happened to be passing. He held her gently, looked into her bottomless eyes and talked to her.

‘You’re safe now, Little One. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ll look after you, Little One. When I heard you singing, it was as if…as if there was a chance. For me too. I’ve done bad things, you see, Little
One. Things I regret, things I wish I could undo. And yet I keep on doing them. Out of habit. Things have just turned out that way. Can’t you sing for me, Little One? Can’t you sing for me like you did before?’

Lennart cleared his throat and sang an A. The note bounced off the room’s bare cement walls, and he could hear for himself that it wasn’t absolutely pure. In the same way that you can’t just pick up a pen and draw the picture you have in your head—unless you have a talent for that kind of thing—his voice couldn’t produce the perfect pitch he could hear inside his head. But it was close enough.

The girl’s mouth opened and Lennart held the note, moving so that his mouth was aligned with hers, sending his own imperfect note into her as he looked into her eyes. She began to tremble in his hands. No, not tremble. Vibrate. Something happened to the sound inside the room, and his note sounded different. He was running out of breath, and it was only when his own note began to fade out that he realised what had happened. The girl had responded with an A an octave lower. It ought to be impossible for a small child to produce such a low note, and the sound was slightly alarming. The girl was using her body like a sound box; she was like a purring cat, emitting a pure note in a register which should have been inaccessible to her.

When Lennart fell silent so did the girl, and her body stopped vibrating. He held her close and kissed her cheek as tears welled in his eyes. He whispered in her ear, ‘I almost thought I’d imagined the whole thing, Little One. Now I know different. Are you hungry?’

He held her in front of him again. There was nothing in her face to indicate a desire for anything. He squeezed her chest tentatively. He just couldn’t understand how she had been able to produce such a low note. The closest he could come up with was a purring cat, using its entire body as a sound box. But cats don’t purr in sine waves.

You are a gift. You have been given to me.

Lennart checked the girl’s nappy, put her back down and tucked her in. Then he went off to the storeroom to dig out Jerry’s old cot.

For the first few days
after Lennart came home with the baby, Laila waited for the knock on the door, the phone call, the uniformed men forcing their way into the house and asking questions before carting her off to a cell, possibly a padded one.

After a week she began to relax. On the few occasions when someone did ring, she still picked up the receiver cautiously, as if she were afraid of what was on the other end, but she was gradually beginning to accept that nobody was coming for the child.

Lennart spent a lot of time down in the cellar and, even though Laila was glad he had less energy to spare for stomping around in a bad mood, it still gnawed at her. She was constantly aware of the child’s presence, and kept wondering what Lennart was actually doing. He had never been particularly fond of children.

Despite the fact that it hurt her knee—these days more metal parts than organic tissue—she made her way down the cellar steps now and again to see how the child was getting on. Lennart received her politely, while his body language made it clear that she was disturbing them.

She wasn’t allowed to speak in the room. If she sat down, Lennart would place his forefinger on his lips and shush her as soon as she tried to say something. His explanation was that this time the child was not to be ‘talked to pieces’.

Sometimes when she opened the door leading to the cellar she heard notes. Scales. Every time she just stood there, dumbstruck.
Lennart’s tenor blending with another, higher voice, as clear as water, tinkling like glass. The child’s voice. She had never heard anything like it, never heard
tell
of anything like it.

But still. Still.

It was a
child
they were dealing with here. A child shouldn’t be lying in a cellar with scale exercises as its only source of stimulation.

Lennart still had quite a lot of work as a songwriter, and sometimes his presence was required in the studio when songs were being recorded. Such an occasion arose ten days after the child had ended up in their care.

Lennart usually thought it was fun to travel into Stockholm, to re-enter for a while the world that should have been his, but this time he was reluctant to go.

‘You go,’ said Laila. ‘I’ll take care of the girl.’

‘I don’t doubt that. The question is
how
you’ll take care of her.’

Lennart was pacing around the kitchen with his leather jacket over his arm, the leather jacket that was reserved for trips of this kind; it was presumably intended as some kind of armour. Or else he needed to look tough, and found the jacket helped.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll talk. Talk and talk. I know you.’

‘I’m not going to talk.’

‘What are you going to do, then?’

Laila took the jacket and held it up so Lennart could put it on. ‘I’m going to feed her and change her nappy and make sure she’s all right.’

When Lennart had gone, Laila wandered around the house for a while doing little jobs, because she wanted to be certain he hadn’t forgotten anything and wasn’t coming back. After twenty minutes she opened the cellar door and went down the steps.

The girl was lying in Jerry’s cot looking at a mobile of brightly coloured plastic animals. She was too pale and too thin. Too lifeless. No pink roses in her cheeks, no seeking, questing movements with her hands.

‘Poor little soul,’ said Laila. ‘You don’t have much fun, do you?’ She picked the girl up and limped over to the storeroom. On the bottom shelf she found the box of winter clothes. She pulled out Jerry’s first snowsuit and felt a lump in her throat as she dressed the child. A woolly hat with ear flaps completed the outfit.

‘There we are, you poor little soul. Don’t you look lovely now?’

She was snivelling as she made her way over to the cellar door and unlocked it. The little bundle in her arms brought back memories. Lennart could say what he liked, but she had loved Jerry. She had loved having a child to take care of, someone who needed her protection, someone who couldn’t manage on their own. Perhaps it wasn’t the best or most adult motivation, but she had done the best she could.

She opened the door and stepped out at the bottom of a flight of cement steps, taking in a deep breath of the chilly autumn air. The girl screwed up her face, and she opened her mouth as if to taste this new air. It seemed as if she were breathing a little more deeply. Laila crept up a few steps and peered out across the lawn.

Pull yourself together, Laila. You’re crazy.

Their garden was secluded, and even if someone
did
catch a glimpse of the child or heard a cry, what did it matter? It wasn’t as if the child had been kidnapped. It wasn’t being hunted all over Sweden, she had checked the papers. Nothing about a missing baby. If Laila Cederström walked around her garden with a baby in her arms, people’s natural reaction would be to come up with a reasonable explanation, not to hurl themselves at the nearest telephone.

Laila took the steps one at a time and went over to the lilac arbour in the furthest corner of the garden, then sat down on the bench with the child on her knee. It had been a wet, mild autumn, and the lilac leaves hadn’t even begun to curl, let alone drop. They were sitting in a protective three-quarter circle of greenery, and Laila was able to relax.

Then she took the girl for a short walk around the sheltered parts of the garden, showing her the herb garden, the gooseberry bushes and the apples—yellow Astrakhans ripe for the picking. The girl’s
expression grew more lively the longer they stayed out, and her cheeks began to acquire a healthy pink glow.

When it started to drizzle, they went back to the house. Laila made up a bottle of formula and settled down in the armchair with the girl on her lap. The child slurped down the milk in just a few minutes, then fell asleep in Laila’s arms.

Laila walked around the house with her for a while, just for the sheer pleasure of carrying the warm, relaxed little body. Then the telephone rang. Instinctively Laila clutched the child more closely. She looked at the telephone. It wasn’t looking at her. It couldn’t see her. She loosened her grip and the telephone rang again.

Agitated by the noise, she limped over to the cellar door and down to the girl’s room as the telephone continued to ring up in the kitchen. It didn’t stop ringing until she had tucked the child in and placed the giraffe next to her. Laila sat for a while, looking at the girl through the bars of the cot. Even when she was asleep there was something concentrated or watchful about her expression. Laila wished she could make it disappear.

Sleep well, little star.

The telephone rang again; it rang seven times before she managed to get back to the kitchen to pick it up. It was Lennart, and he wasn’t happy.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘In the cellar.’

‘Well, you can hear the phone down there, can’t you?’

‘I was feeding her.’

Lennart fell silent. That was obviously the correct answer. His voice was gentler as he asked, ‘So did she take it?’

‘She certainly did. A whole bottle.’

‘And did she fall asleep then?’

‘Yes. Straight away.’

Laila sat down on a chair and closed her eyes.
This is a perfectly normal conversation. A man and a woman are talking about a child. It happens all the time.
Her body felt so strangely light, as if in the
short walk around the garden she had shed twenty kilos.

‘So everything’s all right then?’ asked Lennart.

‘Yes. Everything’s fine.’

Laila could hear a door opening in the background at Lennart’s end. The tone of his voice altered as he said, ‘OK, good. I’ll be a few hours, things are a bit tricky here.’

‘No problem,’ said Laila. A little smile curled around her lips. ‘No problem at all.’

Lennart was very busy that
autumn. He had to go into Stockholm at least once a week, and at home he spent a great deal of time at his keyboard. Lizzie Kanger, a singer who had had a minor breakthrough with the Eurovision Song Contest, was about to release a follow-up to her debut album, which had been panned. The record company had asked Lennart to ‘tidy up’ the songs that had already been written.

Lennart wrote new songs, retaining just enough phrases from the old crap for the contracted songwriter to accept the devastation of his original creation.

He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for. At the very first meeting with the record company they had played him a song he had been unable to avoid hearing on the radio all summer:

Summer in the city, nineteen ninety,

Do you remember me?

Some middle manager had switched off the DAT player and said, ‘We were thinking of something along those lines.’

Lennart smiled and nodded, while his mind’s eye conjured a desert with skeletons reaching out, screaming for help.

It would have been a terrible autumn if he hadn’t had the time he spent with the girl to look forward to. Sitting there with her on his knee, her crystal clear voice responding to his practice scales, he felt he was
in touch with something bigger. Not just bigger than his wretched keyboard fripperies, but bigger than life itself.

The music. She was
the music.
The real music.

Lennart had always believed that everyone was born with a musical talent. It was simply there. But what happened was that they were force-fed crap from an early age, and they got hooked. In the end they believed that the crap was all there was, that that was how it was supposed to sound. If they heard anything that wasn’t crap, they thought it sounded weird, and switched to another radio station.

The girl was living proof that he was right. Of course, babies were not normally able to express the unspoilt music that existed inside them, but she could. He didn’t want to believe that it was only by chance she had ended up with him. There had to be a purpose.

Another source of relief was that Laila seemed happier than she had been for some considerable time. Occasionally he even heard her humming to herself as she moved around the house. Mostly old pop songs, of course, but he actually like hearing her voice as he sat at his keyboard sweating over yet another three-chord tune he was trying to smarten up by inserting a surprising minor chord, even though it did feel like putting an evening jacket on a pig.

However, every rose has a thorn.

One evening when Lennart had been in the boiler room stoking up the fire for the last time and was on his way to the girl’s room to get her ready for the night, he heard a sound. He stopped by the half-open door to the girl’s room and listened. Very, very faintly he could hear the girl’s voice as she lay in her cot…humming. When Lennart had been standing there for a while he began to pick out a melody he recognised, but was unable to place. Odd words that fitted the melody flickered through his mind.

Glances…something…eyes

Lennart refused to believe his ears. But it was impossible to deny it. The girl was lying there humming ‘Strangers in the Night’. Lennart opened the door and walked in. The humming stopped abruptly.

He picked up the girl and looked into her unfathomable eyes,
which never seemed to be looking into his, but at a point far beyond him. He realised what was going on. It wasn’t actually ‘Strangers in the Night’ he had heard, but ‘Tusen och en natt’, Lasse Lönndahl’s saccharine Swedish version of the same song. One of Laila’s favourites.

This is how it happens.

The fact that it was totally unreasonable for a baby to be able to remember and reproduce a tune was something that didn’t even cross Lennart’s mind. The girl had already crossed so many boundaries when it came to music that he had grown used to it, but…

This is how it happens.

Crap has an astonishing ability to find its mark. It doesn’t matter how carefully you try to enclose and protect. The crap seeps in through the gaps, through the cracks you have forgotten to fill. And then it takes over.

Lennart put the girl down on the straw mat, where she began clumsily hitting out at the colourful blocks Laila had put there. Lennart cleared his throat and began to sing quietly, ‘O Värmland, thou art beautiful…’ The girl took no notice of him; she simply carried on hitting the blocks until they were all out of reach.