Little Star (35 page)

What does it take to
break a person?

Torturers and interrogators would be able to provide statistics. This many nights without sleep, this many needles, this much water, this voltage of current on this many occasions.

But there is considerable variation in people’s ability to withstand torture. Sometimes one can achieve the desired result simply by showing the instruments and explaining what is to be done with them. Sometimes it takes weeks; one may be forced to restart a heart which has given out from the pain, and even then one may not manage to break the subject down.

However, it is presumably possible to discern some kind of average. This many needles, this many blows to the soles of the feet, before most people are sufficiently destroyed to give up what they once held most dear.

But in everyday life?

After all, even a normal life contains its quota of pain and disappointment. The difference is that these are not mechanically applied, but are mainly to be found on the emotional plane, and are therefore even more unpredictable. Some people seem able to tolerate just about anything, while others fall apart at the least setback. You never know. Something which is devastating to one person can be no more than a shrug of the shoulders to another, who in turn is shattered by something that others perceive as trivial.

On top of all this, the situation can vary from day to day, even
for the same person. It must be hell to be a torturer with only the instruments of everyday life as your resources for finding the breaking point.

Teresa did not fall down dead, nor did she do anything to make that happen. She shuffled her clumsy body along, bought a ticket at the central station, rang home and asked to be picked up in Österyd. Then she sat and stared at the arrival and departure board. She didn’t read anything, she didn’t listen to any music, she didn’t think.

If anyone who didn’t know her had seen her getting on the train, that person would have seen a girl getting on the train. If anyone who knew her had seen her taking her seat, that person would have seen Teresa taking her seat. After all, nothing had really happened from the world’s point of view, except that a girl had given up all hope. Hardly even worth mentioning.

When she arrived in Österyd, she didn’t do a very good job of playing the role of herself. Göran was worried, and asked if she’d taken her tablets. She had taken her tablets. She would always take her tablets. That was what she would do from now on: she would eat, drink, sleep and take her tablets.

When she sat down at the computer in her room, she didn’t weigh up the pros and cons. She simply did it. She knew Theres’ password, and she hacked into her email account. As she suspected there were hundreds of messages from a couple of dozen addresses. Girls who had heard ‘Fly’ and got in touch with Theres, and Theres had replied and invited them to Svedmyra.

The tone of the messages became more reverential as time went on. It was clear that these girls looked up to Theres as an idol in the original meaning of the word. An icon, a focus for prayer.

From a few odd sentences such as, ‘I’d kill my parents too if I only had the nerve’ and ‘I feel as if I grew up in a cellar too’, Teresa realised that Theres had told them. Everything she had shared only with Teresa was now public property. At least for those who worshipped Theres.

Teresa took out the DVD of Max Hansen in the hotel room and sat for a long time, looking at herself in its shiny surface. She would post the film on the net. She had no idea what the consequences would be, but in the end it would probably harm Theres. Create problems for her. Make her into something other than the lovely girl singing the beautiful song that wasn’t even her own.

Teresa slipped the DVD into the computer and double clicked to open it. Click, click. A few more clicks and everything would change for Theres.

Instead she took out the DVD, meticulously scratched it all over with a ballpoint pen, then threw it in the waste paper basket. She took out her mobile and deleted every picture of Theres. She logged into her own email account and deleted all the old messages from Theres. A new one had arrived an hour earlier. She deleted that one without even reading it.

Then she leaned forward on her chair, rubbing her temples as she tried to delete the images of Theres from the hard drive in her brain. It was more difficult, and the effort made her start thinking about Theres. She would have to live with the images. They would probably fade, little by little.

The images did not fade
. Teresa lived through the days and weeks that followed with a Theres-shaped space inside her that just grew and grew. In the end the space was the same shape as her body, and it was empty. The emptiness was nothing new, it was the emptiness that had put her in bed, sent her to the psychiatric unit and given her pills to take.

But even emptiness has its topography, its smell and its taste. This was a different emptiness. It echoed with Theres, and it hurt. Sometimes it felt as if Teresa consisted only of pain and absence, as if they were what kept her upright.

She tried out what remedies she could think of. She tried self-harming. Sitting in the old cave where she used to spend time with Johannes, she cut herself with pieces of glass she found in the forest. It gave her a moment’s relief, but after a few days she gave up. It didn’t last.

She tried starving herself, hiding away the food served up at the kitchen table, until she was found out. Then she started sticking her fingers down her throat in the bathroom after she had eaten. That brought no relief either, and she gave up the experiment.

She tried taking more tablets, eating more food, drinking more soft drinks. The soft drinks helped a bit. The moment she put a glass of cold Trocadero to her lips everything felt OK, and went on feeling OK for the first few gulps. She drank more fizzy drinks.

While all this was going on, she kept up with her school work. She
developed the trick of creating a tunnel from her head to the teacher or the book. As long as she managed to keep the tunnel intact, she could maintain her concentration.

At the end of March there was the class party. Not the kind that’s arranged by the school, where the adult gaze damps down the festivities, but a
real
class party. Mimmi’s parents had gone to Egypt for a week and she had the house to herself. Perhaps the party was a kind of revenge; Mimmi would have liked to go with them but she had to stay at home because of her poor grades.

The whole class was invited, along with a few other people, and it didn’t occur to anyone to exclude Teresa. Jenny might have her hangers on, but not everyone thought it was a bad thing that her nose had been rearranged, and despite the fact that Teresa didn’t have anyone she could call a friend, a few people at least had a silent regard for her as the dark point that allows the rest of the picture to shine. She could come to the party.

Teresa went to the party for the same reason she did everything these days. Because she could. Because it was there. Because it made no difference what she did in any case. She might as well sit on a sofa at Mimmi’s house as on a chair in her bedroom.

As she approached the house she heard ‘Toxic’ pulsating through the walls, and through the living room window she could see a couple of Britney clones moving slowly, like water weed in an aquarium. Jenny and Ester. Teresa felt neither unease nor anticipation, but an exhaustion came over her. She just didn’t have the strength.

She put down the plastic bag containing a bottle of Trocadero and two cans of beer and sat down on the steps. ‘Toxic’ was followed by that song by The Ark that everybody thought was going to win Eurovision next weekend. Teresa sat listening, surrounded by cheerful pop songs about angst, then got up to go home. She heard a whistle behind her.

The light was on in the garage and the door was open. Micke was
sitting just inside, waving her over. He had a cardboard box next to him. As Teresa went over, he pointed at her plastic bag. ‘What have you got?’

Teresa showed him her cans of beer and her Trocadero. Micke shook his head and told her to sit down, then took a bottle out of his box, opened it and handed it to her. Teresa looked at the label. Bacardi Breezer with melon.

‘I thought it was only girls who drank this stuff,’ she said.

‘What the fuck do you know about it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Exactly.’

Micke clinked his bottle against hers, and they drank. Teresa thought it was delicious, even nicer than Trocadero. When they had emptied the bottles, Micke said, ‘Okaaay. So are you ready to partaaaay?’

‘No.’

Micke laughed. ‘OK. Let’s have another then.’

He gave her a cigarette, and this time Teresa didn’t even have to make an effort not to cough. The alcopop had smoothed a soft channel in her throat, and the smoke slid down without prickling.

‘You know what, Teresa,’ said Micke. ‘I like you. You’re kind of weird. You’re completely different from…Chip ‘n’ Dale, for example.’

‘Chip ‘n’ Dale?’

‘You know. Jenny and Ester. Chip ‘n’ Dale. With their bunches and all the rest of it. Bling-bling and the whole fucking Christmas tree thing going on.’

Teresa hadn’t thought it could happen; she was so completely unprepared for the laugh that burst out of her that she started coughing as it collided with a swig of alcohol on the way down. Micke thumped her on the back and said, ‘Nice and calm, nice and calm now.’

They finished their cigarettes and emptied their bottles, and the incredible thing was that that was exactly how Teresa felt: nice and calm. Bearing in mind all the different kinds of alcohol Göran had
at home, it was strange that Teresa had never considered it as a drug to ease her troubles. She looked at the bottle in her hand. Strange, bordering on idiotic. This actually
worked.

She didn’t feel drunk, just elated; she couldn’t remember when she had last felt like this. When they got up to go in and join the party, Teresa grabbed hold of Micke’s hand, and he moved away with a grin.

‘Get it together,’ he said. ‘You’re cool aren’t you?’

No, Teresa wasn’t cool. But it didn’t really matter. She stayed a little way behind Micke as they went up the steps and into the party, then they split up. Five minutes later Teresa sneaked into the garage and quickly knocked back another Bacardi Breezer. Then she went inside again.

Johannes was sitting on his own on the sofa, and Teresa flopped down next to him.

‘Hi. Where’s Agnes?’

Johannes folded his arms. ‘She’s coming later. I think.’

‘Why isn’t she here now?’

‘How the fuck should I know? I don’t know what she’s doing.’

‘Of course you do. You’re an item.’

‘And what if we’re not? Are you pissed, by the way?’

‘No.’

‘You sound pissed.’

‘I’m just a little bit happy. Aren’t I allowed to be a little bit happy?’

Johannes shrugged, and Teresa grabbed a handful of cheese puffs out of a bowl, munching them as she sank back on the sofa and looked around the room. With a few exceptions they weren’t too bad after all, the people in her class. She looked at Leo and remembered the time he helped her fix her bicycle chain when it came off. She looked at Mimmi and remembered they’d quite enjoyed doing a Swedish project together. And so on.

For the first time in ages a faint longing stirred inside her. She wanted to
join in,
if only a little bit. Get closer, be part of things, do
what the others did. A part of her knew that she actually didn’t want to and couldn’t anyway, but
right now
that was the way she felt and because it was pleasant, she stayed with the feeling.

‘I sometimes wonder,’ said Johannes, who hadn’t spoken for a while.

‘What?’

‘What would have happened if I hadn’t moved house.’

Teresa waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, she helped him out. ‘You turned into a bit of a dude after that.’

Johannes gave a stiff little smile. ‘Not really. I just did what I had to do to fit in, kind of. Sometimes I think…shit, if only I’d been able to stay there. We had fun sometimes, didn’t we?’

‘Do you really think about this?’

‘Yes. Sometimes.’

Teresa swallowed a lump of soggy cheese puffs. Then she swallowed again and said, ‘Me too.’

They were sitting close together. By this stage Teresa was so familiar with every form of sorrow that she could pick the different kinds with the precision of a car spotter. As soon as they got close, she could identify the model. This was melancholy. Grieving for something that has been and can never be again.

But it was a pleasant sorrow, a Moomintroll sorrow so unlike the one she carried around in her everyday life that she welcomed it like a warm, woolly blanket. There was an ache in her breast, and when Johannes put his arm around her, she leaned her head on his shoulder.

Johannes.

She closed her eyes and gave herself up to her dizziness and her lightly borne melancholy. She was almost happy. There was a flash and she opened her eyes. Karl-Axel had crept up close and taken a picture of them with his mobile. Johannes didn’t seem to care, and Teresa closed her eyes again.

Johannes. If only everything had been different.

That time on the rocks. If she had let him put his tongue in her
mouth, if she hadn’t pushed him away. If he hadn’t moved house, if she hadn’t…perhaps she wouldn’t have got so fat, perhaps she wouldn’t be taking the pills now, perhaps…

‘Hi.’

Teresa opened her eyes again. Agnes was sitting next to her on the sofa. Even though Johannes didn’t take his arm away, Teresa sat up straight as if she had been caught in the middle of some forbidden act. Or thought.

Agnes was looking shyly at Johannes. Teresa couldn’t understand how anyone could resist such a look; she would gladly have sacrificed a finger to look like Agnes for
just one day.

No. Not one day. One week. One month. Her little finger for one month. Not her index finger. Her index finger for one year. Her whole hand for her whole life? Her left hand, in that case.

Johannes touched her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter?’

Teresa didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there caught up in thoughts about looks and body parts, but when she came out of them she could feel that something had changed in the atmosphere between Agnes and Johannes, and she was sitting between them like a third wheel. She got up and went into the kitchen.

On the worktop she found half a glass of red wine and knocked it back. She thought it tasted peculiar, as if it had been mixed with spirits.

Her right hand for Johannes. Special offer
—
one kidney, her right hand and twenty kilos of flesh. Shylock. The Merchant of Venice. A pound of flesh. What does that mean?

She went for a wander around the house. People were sitting in groups, and she felt slightly sick when she realised they were just talking lumps of flesh. Jenny was posed unnaturally against a door frame, twisting a strand of hair around her finger as she talked to Albin, whose hand was resting on her hip.

They’re going to fuck. Everybody’s going to go off and fuck.

Teresa’s gaze locked onto Jenny’s hip, and she thought about the set of exclusive chef’s knives she had seen on a magnetic holder in the
kitchen. Shylock. If she sliced away Jenny’s hips, Albin wouldn’t have anything to hold onto.

‘What are you looking at, headcase?’ Jenny hissed at her and Albin adopted a stance that suggested he would defend his fuck if necessary. Teresa pulled a face at them and wobbled into the living room. Agnes and Johannes were snogging the face off each other on the sofa. Teresa hadn’t really thought they were capable of such a thing. Particularly Agnes, who was always so cool when it came to expressions of affection, but now she was half lying on top of Johannes, her tongue slurping away in his mouth as her hand squeezed his inner thigh.

Teresa stood staring at them. Johannes seemed to be having some difficulty keeping control of his hands; a couple of fingers slipped inside the waistband of Agnes’ jeans at the back, but didn’t dare go any further. They were among other people, after all. Instead they rubbed themselves against one another, licking and sucking and enjoying themselves inside their bubble of arousal.

Teresa stared. Alternate streams of hot and cold liquid flooded her body. The stereo was playing that song about dying.

We’re gonna die at the same time, you and I

We’re gonna die-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie…

She tore herself away. She moved through the house as if she were underwater, towards the front door. There was only one thing she wanted. She managed to get down the steps and over to the garage, where she fell to her knees next to the box, took out a bottle of Bacardi Breezer and drank. Relief, for a few seconds. She emptied the bottle in thirty seconds then remained on her knees for a long time, swaying back and forth with her head in her hands.

‘For fuck’s sake, are you pinching my supplies?’

Micke was standing in front of her, a drunken smile playing around his lips. When Teresa opened her mouth to apologise, he waved dismissively and said, ‘It’s cool. What’s mine is yours and all that shit.’ He leaned against the door frame and lit a cigarette. When he offered Teresa the packet, her eyes filled with tears.

‘Micke. You’re so bloody nice. So kind.’

‘Sure I am. You want one or not?’

‘Can’t you fuck me? Now?’

Micke gave a snort. ‘Pull yourself together. You’re pissed.’

‘I’m not pissed. Everybody else is pissed. They’re all pissed and they’re going to fuck.’

Micke was standing directly in front of her. Teresa placed one hand over his crotch, squeezed his cock. Micke waved her hand away half-heartedly, but when she began to rub she could feel him growing hard.

‘For fuck’s sake, Teresa. Pack it in.’

But she didn’t want to pack it in. She wanted to be fucked and snogged like everybody else and she wanted to be close and part of it all. Through the water billowing all around her and making everything blurred, she shuffled forward on her knees. She watched her hands like two alien fish as they undid Micke’s belt and pulled down his zip.

When she took his semi-erect cock in her mouth, Micke groaned out loud. A couple of thrusts in and out and he was completely hard, and there were no more protests. He placed his hand on her head, buried his fingers in her hair and pressed her towards him.

For a little while she enjoyed the unfamiliar feeling. The warm piece of flesh in her mouth, the sounds Micke was making. Then the veil of water was drawn aside, and she saw what she was doing. This wasn’t her. Not here, not like this. She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to stop now, she wanted to go home.