Little Star (10 page)

Jerry also noticed the change
in Theres’ behaviour when he came to visit every few weeks, but it wasn’t something that bothered him. Something about the way his sister kept searching gave him the impression she was looking for a way out, a way that did not lead through the door she had now started using as she examined the rest of the cellar. A loophole, so to speak. Such a thing didn’t exist, he knew that better than most. But he let her carry on. They had other fish to fry.

A month or so after their Bowie session he had played her one of his own songs, running through the chord sequences that he had scribbled down on a piece of paper. He had thought the song was some kind of Britpop à la Suede, but when Theres added a melody line, it turned into more of a hybrid between Swedish folk music and the most mournful kind of country. No money, no love, and nowhere to go.

During the winter he withdrew his threat to reveal her existence to the outside world, but in return he insisted on being allowed to spend time alone with her now and again.

As soon as he had a couple of new songs in the bag he came to call. Shut himself in with Theres and hung a blanket over the window to stop Lennart spying on them. Then they got to work.

Without exception, the songs became significantly darker as they passed through the filter of Theres’ voice. Or perhaps ‘darker’ was the wrong word. More serious. At any rate, Jerry was amazed at how
good his songs were when he heard Theres sing them. When he was sitting on his own humming, they just sounded like ordinary songs.

There was no purpose in his writing apart from the fact that it made him feel better. As soon as he sat down with Theres and played an E-major seventh as the first chord—that was their little ritual—and Theres replied in her clear voice, it was as if something poured off him and out of him.

After that, when they started jamming and Theres elevated his simple ideas to genuine music, he was somewhere else for a few minutes, in a better place. Perhaps there was a loophole after all, a way of getting out. If only for a while.

Laila knew there had to
be an end to it.

It had begun the day she came home after visiting the place where Lennart had found the girl. She had begun to search. First of all she had opened the wardrobe where they kept old records, and gone through them. Then she had searched the room where they stored clothes. Over the course of a few days she had opened every single box and drawer containing their old things. Then she started on all the nooks and crannies in the house.

When she finished she started searching in places where she had already looked. She might have been careless the first time. Missed something.

From time to time she came across an old forgotten toy or a souvenir from some holiday. She had stood for a long time, staring at a wooden man from Majorca that produced cigarettes from his mouth when you pressed his hat. She had completely forgotten about him, and tried to convince herself that
this is it.

At the same time she knew it was a lie, and that what she was searching for didn’t exist. And yet she kept on. In between times she went and sat downstairs with the girl, watching as she did the same thing. Laila felt as if she were on the way to crossing a boundary. At any moment she would hear a faint click inside her head, and then she really would be insane.

Things went so far that she began to long for that day. She would no longer have to take responsibility for her behaviour. Like the girl,
she would have a bed, a room and food at set times. Nothing else.

But the exhaustion got there first. She began to spend her time sitting in the armchair in the living room, doing absolutely nothing. She no longer had the strength to search, to do a crossword, or even to think. Sometimes Lennart came and made derogatory remarks about her, but she barely heard him. She felt nothing but a vague sense of shame at what she had become.

One day when Lennart had gone to Stockholm and she had been sitting in the armchair for two hours, she did actually hear something like a
click.
A membrane burst, everything became clear and she made a decision. She sat up in the armchair, her eyes wide open.

She hadn’t searched the garage. No. So now she was going to go into the garage and open a cupboard or pull out a drawer and the first thing she saw would be
it.
Irrespective of what it was, it would be the thing she had been looking for. She made the decision.

An eagerness and a sense of excitement she hadn’t felt for a few months seized her as she hurried across the garden. The garage door was ajar, welcoming her, because Lennart had taken the car out. The sun poured down from a pale July sky. Laila pushed the door open further and stepped into the darkness.

On a bench lay some tools and things to do with the car, and beneath it a cabinet containing three drawers. Laila stood in front of the cabinet, slowly running her hand over the three drawers, like the host of Bingolotto when a lucky winner was about to choose his or her secret prize. What would it be? A holiday in the Maldives or a hundred kilos of coffee?

Laila said eeny, meeny, miny, mo in her head, and her index finger stopped at the middle drawer. She pulled it open.

It couldn’t have been clearer. There was only one thing in the drawer. A brand new nylon rope, ten metres long. Laila took it out and weighed it in her hands.

So. Now she knew what she had to do. It felt right. It felt like a relief.

She lived through the following days as if she were on a high. Each daily task seemed like fun, or at least valuable, because she knew she was carrying it out for the last time. As she sat with the girl she felt sorry for her, searching fruitlessly. Laila’s own search was over.

No more pain in her leg, no more embarrassment over her clumsy body, no more of the constant, nagging feeling that she wasn’t good enough. It would all be over. Soon.

Lennart noticed the change in her and became gentler, almost kind. He was more tolerant than she was used to. But that was still what he was doing: tolerating her. She saw everything so clearly now. It would be a release for Lennart when he no longer had to drag her around with him. Nobody would shed any tears because she was gone. It was just a matter of getting it done.

That was a problem. She wasn’t afraid of dying, but however ridiculous it might sound, she was afraid of hanging herself—because it would hurt, and because it was ugly somehow.

Then again, she wouldn’t actually need to use the rope. The rope was just a guide; the result was the important thing. After a little thought she decided how she wanted to do it, and the only thing that remained was to wait for the right opportunity.

It was almost a month before it came along. At the beginning of August it rained heavily for a week, followed by several days of beautiful hot weather. Perfect conditions for ceps in the forest. Lennart set off to forage, and for once he went on his bike.

Laila made a jokey comment about how it would be interesting to see what he came home with this time. Lennart was very confused when she leaned forward as he got on his bike, kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye.

Before he turned the corner he glanced back over his shoulder. She was waving. Then she went inside and fetched the vacuum cleaner hose.

She felt perfectly calm as she disconnected the hose from the
cleaner and found a roll of packing tape. A tingle of expectation in her chest, that was all.

She didn’t bother saying goodbye to the girl. If there was anyone who couldn’t care less whether she lived or died, it was the girl. They had spent a lot of time together but there had never been any real contact. The girl lived in her own world, and there was no room for anyone else.

What about Jerry? Well yes, Jerry would definitely be upset, and she couldn’t imagine how it would affect his relationship with Lennart. Nor did she care. It had taken quite some time, but she had managed to reach the level of ruthlessness necessary to take her own life.

She closed the garage door and locked it from the inside, then switched on the fluorescent light. She wouldn’t have minded a more flattering light, but there was nothing she could do about that.

The vacuum cleaner hose fitted so perfectly over the exhaust that there was no need for any tape. She pulled the hose around the car and clamped it firmly in the partly-open back window. Then she got into the driver’s seat and closed the door.

So. That’s it then.

The car key was attached to a keyring with a plastic Snoopy on it. In the absence of an alternative, she kissed the little dog on the nose, said goodbye, put the key in the ignition and turned it. The car started.

And the stereo. She had forgotten that some quirk made it impossible to turn off the radio when the ignition was on, so as the exhaust fumes poured in through the window, filling the interior of the car with a fug, she was forced to listen to some stand-up comic telling a story about some hysterically funny incident at a pub in Västerås. Laila closed her eyes and tried to do the same with her ears.

It only took a minute or so before a drowsiness and a slight feeling of nausea overcame her. Her eyelids were a hundred times heavier than usual and located somewhere beyond her body where she was unable to open them. Everything was going exactly as she’d hoped, and oblivion was creeping closer. Far away she heard the comic
finishing his story in that way that tells you it’s time to laugh, then he put a record on. Laila was going to die to the sound of some contemporary pop hit, and it didn’t matter. She heard the measured beat of a trumpet, the sound of a triumphant marching drum, and then a voice she recognised:

Hello, Söderboys, here’s your good old Annie…

Julia Caesar. Belting out ‘Annie from Amerrrica’, which had been a hit for her at the age of eighty-two.

I left my love, I left my ma, I went away

I set sail for the land of the YOO-ESS-AY!

Laila knew what was coming; her body tensed, her eyelids flickered and she clenched her jaw as Julia Caesar went for it: a scream that came from the toes up and made the speakers rattle. ‘YOONIGHTED STATES OF AMERRRICA!’

Laila forced her eyes open. The car was full of poisonous fog, and her muscles had been replaced with lead. From the radio Julia Caesar was still working her improbably powerful old lady’s voice.

Laila coughed. She managed to free her arms, and rubbed her eyes. A lump in her stomach was trying to force its way up into her throat.

What the fuck. What the FUCK.

Julia Caesar. Eighty-two years old. Standing at the microphone singing this absolute nonsense with such enthusiasm, for fuck’s sake. She’d seen her on TV. The grey, wavy hair, the old, heavy body, the arms flung wide and the glint in her eye as she roared out her ridiculous song.

No more. Laila managed to move her numb left arm so that it landed on the door handle. She pulled and the door opened. She hurled herself sideways and slithered out onto the garage floor. As she crawled towards the door the floor was swaying, side to side, and she might well have collapsed if the regular beat of the music hadn’t driven her on.

YOONIGHTED STATES OF AMERRRICA!

She’d forgotten how many verses the song had. She had to get out before it finished. This might be the last verse. But as her fingers went into spasm fumbling with the key, Julia Caesar took pity on her and set off again.

There’s plenty of things in Sweden

Both in the good old days and today

That come from the YOO-ESS-AY!

Laila managed to turn the key, pressed down the handle and fell out into the summer. She lay on her back on the concrete in front of the garage, glowering up at the sky. While waves of nausea flooded her body, she saw the green leaves on the lime tree fluttering against the clear blue as white cotton clouds drifted by.

She heard an eager scrabbling and rustling, then a squirrel came scampering down the trunk; he stopped and listened to the music coming from the garage, then disappeared around the other side of the tree as the song faded out.

Yes, there’s something about old Sweden

That’s certainly more than all right…

Laila had managed to recoup just enough strength to push the garage door with her foot, so that it closed on the further adventures of the comedian. Then she just lay there breathing, breathing.

After ten minutes she was able to sit up. After another ten minutes she managed to go back into the garage and turn off the engine. She pulled the hose off the exhaust pipe and left all the doors open. As she walked over to the house with the hose dangling behind her like a tame snake, something occurred to her.

She had misinterpreted the signs. It wasn’t the last thing she should have gone for. It was the first. The first place she had searched was the wardrobe containing their record collection. Something had told her to look there first. She remembered very clearly that she had actually seen ‘Annie from Amerrrica’ among all the singles and 78s.

She hadn’t given it a thought. But she did now.

In spite of everything, there was a consolation to be found, something that never let her down. Something that was so close to her she hadn’t been able to see it. The music. The songs. The records. Julia Caesar’s song didn’t have a message, but her performance did, and it was very simple:
Don’t give up.

Laila threw the hose into the cleaning cupboard and went to the wardrobe to look for ‘You Are a Spring Breeze in April’ by Svante Thuresson. She would listen to that. Then she would listen to something else.

Towards the end of October
Lennart began to feel that it was becoming unendurable. He had nothing against classic hits from the Swedish charts but for God’s sake—within reason! From morning to night it was Siw Malmkvist, Lasse Lönndahl and Mona Wessman.

Laila might at least have shown some kind of discrimination and worked her way, for example, through Peter Himmelstrand’s many superior compositions, but no. She played whatever she fancied, whatever she happened to find in their extensive record collection. You might get an hour’s relief with Thorstein Bergman, but immediately afterwards Tova Carson would be chirruping away at some clumsily translated German pop. Lennart would sit in the kitchen being lulled into a state of restfulness by ‘Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream’, only to be driven to flight by ‘Skip to My Lou’.

Only one thing stopped him snapping off the arm and hurling the damned record player through the window: Laila was happy. It was a long time since Lennart had had anything against Laila being happy; but it was also a long time since he had had enough love or energy to try to
make
her happy. Now she was taking care of it herself.

It wasn’t really a bubbling happiness, more a constant spiritual smile that meant she would prepare decent meals or do some cleaning, for example—during breaks in the music. So all he could do was grit his teeth as Anita Lindblom took a deep breath and bellowed ‘Thaa-aat’s life’ for the third time that day. It had to be worth it.

In any case, Lennart had started to spend a lot of time down in the cellar, where the pounding beat of Swedish pop could be heard only as a distant changing of the guard. The girl’s musical education ought to be expanded, so Lennart bought a portable CD player and started to play classical music to her.

The very first thing he played was one of his personal favourites: Beethoven’s Spring Sonata in F-major for Violin and Piano. He had decided to start simply with piano and violin sonatas, then move on to string quartets and finally full symphonies. Introduce the instruments one at a time, so to speak.

He would long remember how the girl reacted. She was standing in her cot as usual, sucking on the piece of rope with four knots in it, when Lennart pressed play.

The girl stiffened during the enchanting violin theme and soft piano accompaniment that introduce the first movement. When the roles were reversed and the piano, carefree as a spring brook, repeated the theme, the girl began to sway as she stared into space, her expression halfway between ecstasy and fear.

After forty seconds she frowned as if she sensed that something was about to happen. As the violin built up to the piano’s powerful descent, then emphasised it with a coarser stroke, the girl’s face contracted and she shook her head, her fingers tightly clutching the frame of the cot.

The piece grew calm once more, the violin became gentle and compliant, but the girl listened with suspicion in her face as if she sensed that the harsher elements were still lurking beneath the surface. As the violin became more agitated and the piano grew excited in the background, she began to shake and jerk back and forth in the cot, her face contorting as if she were in pain.

Lennart jumped up and switched off the CD.

‘What is it, Little One?’

The girl wasn’t looking at him, she never did. Instead she fixed her gaze on the CD player as she shook the bars of the cot. Lennart had never seen anyone react to music like that. It was as if the strings
were stroking every nerve ending within her, or a hammer was hitting every single one. The music went right into her.

Lennart switched to one of the cello sonatas. The girl was less agitated by the cello’s softer tone, even when the tempo grew faster. When they reached the short Adagio in the Sonata in A-major, she joined in with the melody for the first time.

After experimenting for a few days, it was clear that it was always the adagio sections that appealed to the girl most. Allegro passages made her anxious, and a scherzo could plunge her into despair. Lennart programmed the CD so that it played only the adagio sections. Then he sat down on the bed and watched, listening, as she added her voice, a third instrument, to the sonatas.

At first he was happy. He felt he was resting within the very genesis of music. Then he went upstairs and at a stroke found himself in the outer reaches of the nadir of Swedish pop music. Well, that was fine. He was in a state of harmony.

But all good things come to an end.

As the days turned to weeks and Beethoven gave way to Schubert and Mozart, Lennart sat in his musical sanctuary staring at his fingers. There was something wrong with them. He tried picking the girl up to feel her weight and warmth, but it didn’t help. He put her back in the cot.

He couldn’t have her on the floor when the music was playing. She would go over to the CD player and start examining it in quite a destructive way. She would beat the speakers with her small fists, or try to pick the whole thing up as if she were trying to shake something out of it.

At first Lennart had interpreted her behaviour as a sign that she didn’t like the music after all, but on the one occasion when he let her continue until she managed to destroy the player, he realised what she was after. She was searching for the music, for where it came from. She wanted to get inside the machine and find what was playing. Since this was impossible to explain to her, Lennart simply bought a new player
and made sure she couldn’t get at it.

After putting the girl back in her cot, Lennart walked around the room studying his fingers. They looked white and shiny to him, like piano keys. He placed them on an invisible keyboard and pretended to play along with the Mozart sonata emerging from the speakers. No. It wasn’t playing he missed, he had played enough. He opened and closed his hands. They felt so strangely
empty.
Something was missing, they needed something to do.

He went out into the cellar and switched on the light above the workbench. Various tools hung neatly from their hooks. Screws, nails and fittings were tidily sorted in compartments on a shelf. He had never been what you might call a handyman, but he liked the tools themselves. They were so definitive. Each tool intended and made for a specific purpose, an extension of the human arm. Lennart picked up the drill and weighed it in his hand. It felt good. When he pressed the button, nothing happened. Run down. He rooted out the charger and inserted the battery. He picked up one or two chisels, tested the weight of the hammer.

What about making something?

Laila had made stuffed cabbage leaves, and the house was blissfully silent. When they had finished eating and Lennart was loading the dishwasher, he said quite casually, ‘I was just wondering if there was anything we needed? Anything I could make?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.’

‘What do you mean by make?’

‘Make. You know, make. Put pieces of wood together so they turn into something. Make.’

‘What do you want to do that for?’

Lennart sighed and rinsed the remains of the sauce from his plate before putting it in the dishwasher. Why had he even bothered to ask? He poured powder into the compartment and slammed the door shut with unnecessary force.

Laila had been following his activities with her chin resting on her hand. As he picked up the dishcloth and began wiping the table, she said, ‘A shoe rack.’

Lennart stopped making circular movements over the wax cloth and visualised their hall floor. There were only four pairs of shoes. They each had a pair of outdoor shoes and a pair of clogs. Their Wellingtons were in the cellar.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I could do that.’

‘Then we could put our wellies there too,’ said Laila.

‘Yes. Good idea.’

He looked at Laila. She had lost a few kilos in recent months. Presumably this had something to do with the fact that he no longer found chocolate wrappers all over the house. She had stopped comfort eating.

It must have been something to do with the light, bouncing off the wax cloth and illuminating her face from a side angle. For a brief moment, Lennart thought Laila was pretty. The distance between his hand and her face was only half a metre, and he watched his hand slowly rise from the table and caress her cheek.

Then he grabbed the dishcloth and scrubbed at a dried-on patch of lingonberry jam with such force that the wax cloth slid to one side. He rinsed out the cloth, draped it over the tap and said, ‘All right, a shoe rack.’

Over the next few weeks Lennart made a shoe rack, two towel rails and a key cupboard. When he couldn’t come up with anything else they needed, he moved on to bird boxes.

Sometimes as he stood there surrounded by the smell of freshly sawn wood, listening to the sound of some Schubert quartet from the girl’s room, he felt perfectly contented. Step by step, everything had moved in the right direction. The sharp, hard edges of his existence had been rounded off with both grade one and two sandpaper, and he could run his hand over life without getting splinters in his fingers.

He put on the ear protectors and started up the jigsaw to cut out
the windows and doors in the facade of a nesting box representing their own house. It was a tricky job that required concentration, and when he switched the saw off and removed the ear protectors five minutes later, sweat was pouring down his forehead.

The silence after the angry buzzing of the saw was pleasant, but wasn’t it a bit
too
quiet? He couldn’t hear any music from the girl’s room, nor any humming. He put down the tools and went to investigate.

The girl had climbed out of her cot. While he was sawing, unable to hear anything, she must have fetched a hammer behind his back, then gone back and started on the CD player. Through a combination of hitting and wrenching she had managed to open up the front of both speakers and rip out the cones. She was now sitting on the floor scratching at them with her fingers, tugging at the wires as she shook her head.

He went over and tried to take the broken pieces off her, but she refused to let them go. She shook them and bit them.

‘Give those to me,’ he said. ‘You might cut yourself.’

The girl stared at him, her eyes narrowed. Then she said, with absolute clarity, ‘Music.’

Lennart was so stunned he gave up the tug-of-war and simply stared at her. It was the first word he had heard her say. He lowered his head to her level and asked, ‘What did you say?’

‘Music,’ the girl repeated, making a noise somewhere between a growl and a whimper as she banged the speaker cone on the floor.

Lennart got down on his knees beside her and said, ‘The music isn’t there.’

The girl stopped banging and looked at him.
Looked
at him. Gazed into his eyes for a few seconds. Lennart took this as an encouragement, and tried to explain more clearly.

‘Music is everywhere,’ he said. ‘Inside you. Inside me. When we sing, when we play.’ He pointed at the ruined CD player. ‘That’s only a machine.’

He had forgotten his resolution not to talk to the girl. It didn’t
matter. Both Laila and Jerry had talked to her, so that project had had it. He pointed at the CD player again. ‘Do you understand? A machine. It’s people who make music.’

He took out the CD, a cheap Naxos edition of Schubert’s Second String Quartet. He pushed his forefinger through the hole and held it up in front of the girl. ‘The music is pressed onto this.’

The girl didn’t react to his words, but she was staring at the CD with big eyes. She tilted her head to one side, wrinkling her nose. Lennart turned the disc around to see what she was looking at. And saw himself.

Of course.

As far as he was aware, the girl had never seen a mirror before. He turned the shiny surface towards her once again and said, ‘That’s you, Little One. That’s you.’

The girl stared at the disc on his finger as if she were under a spell, and whispered, ‘Little One…’ as a trail of saliva dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She crawled closer without breaking eye contact with her reflection. She reached out her hands for the disc and Lennart let her take it. Only then did he notice that she had dropped the piece of rope with the knots in it; it was lying on the floor behind her, chewed and stroked to death. She only had eyes for the CD.

When Lennart lifted her up and put her back in the cot, she clung firmly to the disc with both hands as she gazed down into the silvery pool of light, completely unreachable. But still Lennart rested his head on the frame of the cot and said, ‘But the music isn’t there, Little One. It’s here.’ He placed his forefinger on her heart. ‘And here.’ On her temple.