Little Star (38 page)

Max Hansen was on a
steep incline. He had lost his grip, and he was sliding. Downwards. It didn’t matter to him, because there was a conscious decision behind it. He was being carried to the bottom of his own free will; he was completing his downhill race in slow motion, as if he were enjoying a skiing holiday. There was pleasure along the way, and he hoped he would be able to brake before the crash came.

The catalyst, the first shove in the back had happened on Christmas Day.

He had dedicated Christmas Eve to drinking and grinding his teeth at Tora Larsson’s stupidity. The record company lost interest in his master tape once they found out about the video clip on MySpace. His cash cow had escaped from her stall, and was offering her udders to anyone who wanted a drink. Free to everyone, come along and have a taste.

There was absolutely nothing he could do. The fact that there was no contract, the gamble that was going to make his fortune, had instead become his misfortune. It had been a calculated risk, but he couldn’t have imagined that it would go down the pan in this particular way, and that bothered him. In his drunken misery he had taken out Robbie and was on the point of hurling him from the balcony, but managed to stop himself.

Before he passed out on the sofa he spent a long time weeping and patting Robbie’s shiny nose, begging for forgiveness for what he had almost done.

On Christmas Day he rang Clara. She was a Danish woman he thought he had pulled at Café Opera a year or so ago. He had hauled out what Danish he could still remember, talked jokingly about their homeland, then taken her back to his place. It had all been just a bit too easy, and when it was all over, it turned out she expected payment. She got her money and Max got her phone number.

In spite of the fact that Clara, at around thirty, was a bit old for him he had used her services a couple of times. Since he wasn’t particularly attracted to her, it had to be a hand job or a blow job, which was cheaper anyway.

This time she made it clear that she would be charging holiday rates, in other words a supplementary fee of five hundred kronor as it was Christmas Day, but there was nothing Max could do. He needed her.

When she arrived at his apartment he had already sunk a couple of whiskies and was feeling sentimental. He tried speaking Danish to her, the childish expressions he remembered, but Clara made it very clear that she just wanted to get this over with. She wanted to get home to her daughter.

So Max took off his clothes and sat down in the armchair. Clara started working on him with her hand. Her practice was not to work with her mouth unless he was wearing a condom. But of course the first task was to get it up so that she had something to put the condom
on.
She kneaded and stroked, and whispered encouragement in Danish.

Not a twitch. Not a tingle. Nothing.

He had never had problems with Clara before. On the contrary. The fact that everything was clearly agreed from the start and that there was no uncertainty about it usually relaxed him; usually, he would get a hard-on as soon as she touched him. Not this time. It was just like when he watched his films. He had lost something after the experience with Tora Larsson. At that moment, as he sat staring at his dormant cock, he realised it would never come back. He was impotent.

Clara sighed and scrabbled at his pubic hair with her fingers. ‘Come on, there’s a good boy, up you get for Clara.’ Max pushed her hand away and threw his head back. There was a faint cracking noise and suddenly he knew what he wanted.

‘Bite me,’ he said. When Clara didn’t react, he pointed to his shoulder. ‘Bite me hard. Here.’

Clara, who presumably wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the scenario, shrugged her shoulders, leaned over him and nipped his shoulder. Max whispered, ‘Harder.’ She bit harder, almost drawing blood, and something soft and pleasant flooded through Max’s body. He told her to bite him in a couple of other places. When she didn’t want to do that any more, he told her to slap him across the face. And again, harder.

His ears were ringing and his penis was still lying there like a trampled snake, but he had the same sense of satisfaction, of peacefulness, as after intercourse. When he paid Clara she said she wasn’t all that keen on this kind of thing, but she had a colleague called Disa who was more of a specialist. She gave Max Disa’s number. Merry Christmas.

After she left, he sat in the armchair and examined his feelings. So this was what it had come to. This was the way of things now. Max closed his eyes and let go of what he had been, or what he thought he had been. Began to slide. There was no point in keeping up a respectable facade or chasing after the status that might lead him to his sexual pleasures. Let go.

Let go.

The following day he went to the address—he had only sent letters there to that point—and had the conversation with Jerry. He was going to salvage what could be salvaged by whatever means were available. As if on cue, Ronny from Zapp Records rang the day before New Year’s Eve; they were still kind of interested, in spite of everything. The huge popularity of the song couldn’t be ignored. A professional recording had its value. Was it Max who owned the rights?

He played the tape. They could draw their own conclusions.

Then things began to happen. The song became a big hit, and the interest in Tesla was huge. Unfortunately Max hadn’t been paid any big advance. The royalties would trickle in, but that was a long way off and Max was in a hurry. He was on thin ice; he had to grab as much as possible before it gave under him.

The record company wanted a whole album, and they were prepared to cough up a decent amount of money in advance. Other companies got in touch, and after several conversations back and forth with Ronny, Zapp were ready to cough up so much they were on the point of haemorrhage. Everything was going Max’s way, and he slithered along on the treacherous ice and threw himself down the ski run and any other metaphor he could think of to describe the basic problem: he didn’t have the songs.

He hadn’t even managed to establish contact with Tora Larsson. He had phoned, he had written, he had emailed both her and the freak without getting any response. He knew they had more songs, but how the hell was he going to get hold of them if they refused even to
answer?

It was so frustrating he thought he was going to lose his mind. One day he sat for a long time, staring at Disa’s telephone number. Clara had told him the woman was a dominatrix; she would bring her gear round and hurt him any way he wanted.

Max tried to picture the scenario. Bound, perhaps. A whip flicking across his back. The pain. He saw himself and his own thoughts, and only then did he realise what he was actually looking for. He fumbled with his arm and felt at the scars on his back, the ones he could reach.

Something decisive had happened to him that day in the hotel room with Tora Larsson. It had been terrible, but when he closed his eyes and stroked the smooth surface of the scars, he realised he missed it. This was what he wanted to experience again.

This is not good. Pull yourself together, Max.

He weighed up his options, and considered them one by one. There was Jerry and the contract and legal procedures, the use of
intermediaries or a straight Tesla copy, letters he could write, phone calls he could make. In the end, Ockham’s Razor won out:
If several possibilities exist, choose the simplest.

He needed Tora Larsson’s music. She didn’t want to give it to him. When you were on the downward slope anyway, the solution was obvious.

He bought a scruffy second-hand Canada Goose jacket, a pair of thermal trousers and a warm hat. Then he started to watch the front door of Tora’s apartment block. This was a tricky exercise, because there wasn’t anywhere to hide, and it would arouse suspicion if people saw him wandering up and down the street for too long.

Ockham again. He bought a six-pack of beer and sat down on a bench a hundred metres from the door. Because he was in full view, he became invisible. An old drunk that nobody wanted to look at. He couldn’t manage more than a few hours a day, but he had Robbie in his pocket: his luck had to be in at some point, for fuck’s sake.

During the course of five mornings he saw neither Jerry nor Tora leave the apartment. What he did see was girls going into the apartment block; sometimes he caught a glimpse of them or Tora up at the window. He came to the conclusion that Jerry wasn’t home.

Sometimes his mobile rang. Girls he had made a half-hearted play for ages ago or more recently, old acquaintances who wanted to check out the situation. Presumably the word was out that he was the man behind Tora Larsson, and he had become someone it might be worth keeping in touch with. He could hear the clink of crockery or the murmur of conversation in the background when they called from restaurants or cafés, the impersonal, obsequious tone in their voices.

He sat on his bench and shivered, held the phone well away from his ear and said Hi and How’s it going and Cool, and he despised every last one of them. They were little pack animals, lemmings gathering kudos as they hurtled towards the abyss, squeaking as they ran.

He raised his can of ice-cold beer to Tora Larsson’s window. He loathed her and he respected her. As he sat here on his bench and she wandered around her apartment, there was a bond between them,
an invisible trail of blood running from his feet to her door, through her letterbox and into her body. A shudder ran down his spine as he thought about it.

Finally, on the sixth day, Tora came out with the freak. Max gripped his beer can with both hands and stared down at the ground as if he was too drunk to look up when they walked past him, just a few metres away. He watched them disappear in the direction of the subway and waited a few minutes before entering the building and taking the lift up to her apartment.

With stiff hands he took Robbie out of his pocket and pressed him to his forehead. Then he tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked. He just stood there for while staring into the wide-open apartment as if he was afraid a trap might suddenly slam shut. He just couldn’t be this lucky.

He steeled himself and slipped into the hallway, closing the door behind him. Quietly he said, ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ No reply and no time to lose. He headed for the computer in the living room and bit his lower lip when he saw that it was switched off. He started it up, whispering, ‘Come on, come on, come on, please…’

His luck was out. He needed a password to get into the system. He tried ‘Tora’ and ‘Tesla’ and a number of other words. Finally he hammered in ‘fuckinghell’, but that particular curse didn’t work either. He shut down the computer and went hunting.

In a bag in the hallway he found what he was looking for. He recognised the cheap MP3 player from his second meeting with Tora. He started to sweat in his thick jacket as he scrolled through the playlists, and under ‘Theres’ he found ‘Fly’ along with another twenty or so songs. He put the earphones in and was able to confirm that he had struck gold.

Theres?

He slipped the MP3 player in his pocket and stood by the door, unsure what to do next. The girls had gone off somewhere on the subway; he was bound to have some time left.

Theres?

This was probably his only chance to find out something about the girl who had come to rule his life. He undid his jacket so that he could cool down, locked the door from the inside and started searching the apartment with fresh eyes.

In the drawer of the bedside table next to what was presumably Jerry’s bed, he found a folder with documents relating to the sale of a house. Jerry had inherited it from his parents, Lennart and Laila Cederström. The estate inventory indicated that they had both passed away on the same date. Max vaguely recognised the name Lennart Cederström, but couldn’t place it. Something to do with music. He stored the name in his memory.

In the desk drawers he found more rubbish, the kind you might expect. Old bills and guarantees, documents from
Idol
and the very first letter he had sent. What struck him as he went through rental agreements and bank statements was that there wasn’t a single document anywhere relating to Tora. Nothing from any school or authority, no mementoes.

Her own room was spartan, like a cell in a refugee hostel. A CD player, a few CDs and Bamse the Bear comics. A bed. On the bedside table lay an ID card. Max picked it up and studied it carefully.

Angelika Tora Larsson. So far, so good. But there was absolutely no chance that the girl in the photograph was the Tora he knew. He held the card up to the light, looked at it side-on. Someone had altered it. The card was battered and scratched, but it was obvious that something had been done to the numbers indicating the date of birth.

Angelika. Tora. Theres.

He wasn’t one jot closer to understanding who the girl calling herself Tora Larsson actually was, but two things he did know. One: there was something very suspect going on here. And two: he ought to be able to use it to his advantage.

He had been in the apartment for over an hour, it was almost eleven o’clock and he decided not to tempt fate any longer. Before he left he checked that everything looked just the same as when he arrived. He closed the door behind him and listened to make sure no
one was coming up the stairs, then hurried down and out into the street. As he headed for the subway he noticed that there were a couple of police cars parked outside the shop, right next to the bench where he would no longer need to sit. He was done here. He had found what he was looking for, and a lot more.

As soon as he got home he poured himself a large celebratory whisky. Then he transferred the songs from the MP3 player to his computer, and sat down to listen to them.

Gold. Pure gold. Five of the songs were definitely in the same class as ‘Fly’, and the rest were perfectly OK. The lyrics weren’t always that brilliant, but he couldn’t think of many Swedish artists who wouldn’t be proud to be associated with this album.

Yes, album. He had already started thinking about it like that. The files that were now on his computer would have to be run through the desk a few times, the production had to be sorted out and they needed to be tidied up a bit, but he had everything he needed for a real smash.