Little Star (3 page)

When Laila came out of
the bedroom, Lennart had placed the child on a towel on the kitchen table. He was turning a nappy this way and that in his hands, trying to work out how to put it on, when Laila took it off him, pushed him out of the way and said, ‘I’ll do it.’

Her breath smelled of chocolate and mint, but Lennart didn’t say anything. He put his hands on his hips, took a step back and carefully watched what Laila did with the flaps and sticky strips. Her left cheek was bright red, striped with the tracks of dried-on, salty tears.

She had been a party girl, a sexy little thing. A pretender to the glittering throne on which Lill-Babs sat, yodelling away. A reviewer had once jokingly called her Little Lill-Babs. Then she and Lennart had teamed up and her career had taken a different direction. These days she weighed ninety-seven kilos and had problems with her legs. The party girl was still there in her face, but you had to look hard to catch a glimpse.

Laila fastened the nappy and wrapped the child in the blanket with blue teddy bears. She fetched a clean towel and made a bed in the big picnic basket, then laid the sleeping child carefully inside it. Lennart stood there watching the whole thing. He was happy. This was going well.

Laila picked up the basket and rocked it gently like a cradle. She looked at Lennart for the first time since she had emerged from the bedroom. ‘What now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What are we going to do now? Where are we going to take her?’

Lennart took the basket off Laila, went into the living room and placed it on the armchair. He bent over the child and stroked its cheek with his forefinger. He heard Laila’s voice behind him. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s against the law, you must know that.’

Lennart turned and held out his arm. Laila backed away slightly, but Lennart turned up his palm, inviting her to take his hand. She moved closer cautiously, as if she expected the outstretched hand to turn into a snake at any moment. Then she placed her hand in his. Lennart led her into the kitchen, sat her down at the table and poured her a cup of coffee.

Laila followed his movements with a watchful expression as he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite her. ‘I’m not angry,’ he said. ‘Quite the reverse.’

Laila nodded and raised the cup to her lips. Her teeth were discoloured with gooey chocolate but Lennart didn’t point this out. Her cheeks wobbled unpleasantly as she swallowed the hot drink. He didn’t say anything about that either. What he said was, ‘Darling.’

Laila’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes?’

‘I didn’t finish telling you the story. What happened in the forest. When I found her.’

Laila placed her hands on the kitchen table, resting one on another. ‘Go on then.
Darling.’

Lennart ignored her sarcastic tone. ‘She sang. When I’d dug her out of the hole. She sang.’

‘But she hasn’t made a sound.’

‘Listen to me. I don’t expect you to understand this, because you haven’t got an ear for it, but…’ Lennart raised a hand to forestall the objections he knew would come, because if there was one thing Laila was still proud of, it was her singing voice and her ability to hit a note cleanly. But that wasn’t what it was about in this case.

‘You haven’t got the
ear
like I have,’ said Lennart. ‘Your voice
is better and your pitch is more accurate blah blah blah—all right? Happy?—but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about having the
ear.’

Laila was listening again. Despite his delivery, the praise was enough. Her talent had been acknowledged and Lennart was able to go on. ‘You know I have a perfect ear for a note. When I opened the plastic bag and got her out…she sang. First an E. Then a C. And then an A. And I don’t mean cries that sounded like notes, but…
sine waves.
Perfect. If you had set a meter to measure her A, it would have shown 440 hertz.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t mean anything. That’s just the way it was. She sang. And I’ve never heard anything like it. Not the hint of a slide or a grating sound. It was like hearing…an angel. I can still hear it.’

‘What are you trying to say, Lennart?’

‘That I can’t give her away. It’s impossible.’

The coffee was finished
. The child was asleep. Laila was limping around the kitchen with a wooden ladle in her hand, waving it in the air as if she were trying to scoop up fresh arguments. Lennart was sitting with his head resting in his hands; he had stopped listening.

‘There’s no way we can look after a child,’ said Laila. ‘How would that work, the way our life is? I for one have no desire to start that business all over again, sleepless nights and being tied down all the time. When we’ve finally managed…’ The ladle stopped weaving about and made a hesitant sideways movement. Laila didn’t want to say it, but as she thought it was an argument that might hit home with Lennart, she said it anyway, ‘…when we’ve finally managed to get Jerry out of the house. Are we going to go through all that again? And besides Lennart, forgive me for saying this, but I don’t think there’s a cat in hell’s chance they’d let us adopt. For a start, we’re too old…’

‘Laila.’

‘And you can bet your life they’ve got information about Jerry, which means they’re bound to ask…’

Lennart slammed the palm of his hand down on the table, hard. The ladle stopped dead and the words dried up.

‘There’s no question of adoption,’ said Lennart. ‘I have no intention of giving her up. Nobody will know we’ve got her. For those very reasons you’ve so eloquently expressed.’

Laila dropped the ladle. It bounced once, then lay there between them. Laila looked at Lennart, then at the ladle. When he made no
move to pick it up, she squatted clumsily and took it in her arms as if it were the child they were discussing.

‘You’ve lost your mind, Lennart,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve completely lost your mind.’

Lennart shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the way it is. You’re just going to have to get used to the idea.’

Laila’s mouth opened and closed. The ladle whisked around as if to disperse a horde of invisible demons. Just as she was on the point of uttering one of the sentences that were sticking in her throat, there was a knock on the door.

Lennart shot up from the table, shoved Laila out of the way and went into the living room, where he picked up the basket that held the sleeping child. The knock on the door was instantly recognisable. Jerry
just happened to be passing.

With the basket in his hand Lennart went up to Laila and held up a rigid forefinger right in front of her nose. ‘Not one word, do you hear me? Not a word.’

Laila’s wide open eyes squinted a fraction as she shook her head. Lennart grabbed the baby things and threw them in the cupboard where they kept the cleaning stuff, then hurried over to the cellar steps. As he closed the door behind him he could hear Laila’s limping footsteps in the hallway.

He crept down the stairs and tried to stop the basket tipping too much; he didn’t want the child to wake up. He went past the boiler room and the utility room and opened the door of the guest room, Jerry’s old room.

A wave of chilly dampness hit him. The guest room had not accommodated a single guest since Jerry moved out, and the only visitor to the room was Lennart himself, when he came down here once every six months to air it. There was a faint smell of mould from the bedding.

He put the basket down on the bed and switched on the radiator. The pipes gurgled as the hot water came gushing in. He sat for a moment with his hand on the radiator until he could feel it warming
up; there was no need to bleed it. Then he tucked another blanket around the child.

The little face was still sunk in what he hoped was a deep sleep, and he refrained from stroking its cheek.

Sleep, little miracle, sleep.

He didn’t dare leave Laila alone with Jerry; he hadn’t the slightest faith in her ability to hold her tongue if Jerry asked some tricky question, so with fear in his heart he closed the door of the guest room, hoping that the child wouldn’t wake up and start yelling or…singing. The notes he had heard would slice through anything.

Jerry was sitting at the kitchen table, shovelling down sandwiches. Laila sat opposite him, twisting her fingers around each other. When Jerry caught sight of Lennart he saluted and said, ‘Hello there, Captain.’

Lennart walked over and closed the fridge door. A considerable proportion of the contents had been laid out on the table so that Jerry had a choice of fillings for his sandwich. He took a bite of one containing liver pâté, cheese and gherkins, nodded in Laila’s direction and said, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with Mother? She looks completely out of it.’

Lennart couldn’t bring himself to answer. Jerry licked gherkin juice off his stiff, chubby fingers. Once upon a time they had been slender and flexible, moving over the strings of a guitar like a bird’s wings. Without looking at Jerry, Lennart said, ‘We’re a bit busy.’

Jerry grinned and started making a fresh sandwich. ‘Busy with what? You two are never busy.’

A tube of fish paste was lying on the table in front of Lennart. Jerry had squeezed it in the middle, and Lennart began pointedly rolling up the bottom of the tube, pushing the paste towards the top. A slight headache had begun to burn around his temples.

Jerry polished off his sandwich in four bites, leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head and gazed around the kitchen. ‘So. You’re a bit busy.’

Lennart took out his wallet. ‘Do you need money?’

Jerry adopted an expression that indicated this was a completely new idea, and looked over at Laila. He noticed something and tilted his head. ‘What’s happened to your cheek, Mother? Did he hit you?’

Laila shook her head, but in such an unconvincing way that she might as well have said yes. Jerry nodded and scratched his stubble. Lennart stood there holding out his open wallet. The glowing points on either side of his head made contact and sent a thread of pain burning through his skull.

With a sudden jolt Jerry half-rose from the chair, heading towards Lennart, who instinctively recoiled. Jerry completed the movement at a more measured pace, and before Lennart had time to react the wallet was in Jerry’s hands.

Jerry hummed to himself as he opened the notes compartment, seizing three hundred kronor between his thumb and forefinger with a vestige of his childhood dexterity before tossing the wallet back to Lennart. He said, ‘That’ll cost you, you know.’ He went over to Laila and stroked her hair. ‘This is my darling mother, after all. You can’t just do whatever you like.’

His hand stopped on Laila’s shoulder. As if he were expressing real tenderness, he grabbed Laila’s hand and squeezed it. She took what she could get. Lennart watched, utterly revolted. How had these two monsters ended up as his family? Two fat self-pitying blobs who stuck to him like glue, dragging him down; how did that happen?

Jerry withdrew his hand and took a step towards Lennart, whose body automatically jerked backwards. Even if most of Jerry’s hundred-kilo bulk came from kebabs rather than weights, he was still considerably stronger than Lennart, and he knew how to handle himself. No doubt about that.

‘Jerry.’

Laila’s voice was weak, pleading. The mother standing beside her disobedient son, saying
don’t do that to the frogs, darling
and not lifting a finger. But Jerry stopped and said, ‘Yes, Mother?’

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘So?’ Jerry turned to Laila and her eyes sought Lennart’s. He shook his head briefly and angrily, leaving Laila trapped between a rock and a hard place. In her confusion she fell back on her usual escape route. Her body went limp and she stared down at the table, mumbling, ‘I’m in so much pain, everything hurts.’

It was unlikely to have been Laila’s intention, but the effect was exactly what Lennart had been hoping for: Jerry sighed and shook his head. He couldn’t cope with hearing his mother going on and on about her stiff joints, the rheumatic twinges in her neck and the entire medical lexicon of side-effects from drugs she wasn’t even taking. He lumbered out of the kitchen and Lennart’s heart almost stopped when Jerry’s shirt brushed over the giraffe’s head on the worktop; Lennart had forgotten to hide it.

The giraffe rocked back and forth as Jerry went into the hallway and pulled on his biker boots. Lennart moved forward slightly so that his body was hiding the toy. Jerry looked up with a sarcastic smile.

‘Coming to say goodbye? It’s been a while.’

‘Bye then, Jerry.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I will be back, you know.’

Jerry slammed the door behind him. Lennart waited ten seconds, then hurried over and locked it. He heard Jerry’s motorbike start up, then fade into the distance. He massaged his temples, rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he went back into the kitchen.

Laila was sitting exactly as he had left her, slumped at the table, picking at her blouse like a little girl. A stray sunbeam found its way in through the window and touched her hair; it shone for a brief moment with a golden glow. Against all expectation Lennart was gripped by a sudden tenderness. He saw her loneliness. Their loneliness.

Quietly he sat opposite her and took her hand across the table. A few seconds passed. The house was still after the natural disaster that was Jerry. But there had been another time. Another life. Lennart allowed himself to rest in his memories for a moment, thinking about how everything could have been different.

Laila straightened up a fraction. ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Nothing. Just that we…maybe there’s a chance.’

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know. Something.’

Laila withdrew her hand and started rubbing at a button on her blouse. ‘Lennart. Whatever you say, we cannot keep that child. I’m going to ring social services, and we’ll see what they have to say. What we need to do.’

Lennart put his head in his hands. Without raising his voice he said, ‘Laila. If you so much as touch that telephone, I will kill you.’

Laila’s lips twitched. ‘You’ve said that before.’

‘I meant it then. And I mean it now. If you’d…carried on with what you were doing, I would have done the same thing as I will do now if you make a call or speak to anyone. I will go down into the cellar and I will fetch the axe. Then I will come up here and hit you on the head with it until you are dead. I don’t care what happens after that. It doesn’t matter.’

The words flowed from his mouth like pearls. He was perfectly calm, utterly lucid, and he meant every word he said. It was a wonderful feeling, and his headache disappeared as if someone had pressed a button. The gauntlet had been thrown down, everything that needed saying had been said and there was nothing to add.

Life could begin again. Possibly.