Little Star (45 page)

Many spent the night crying
. Their senses were open wounds, their perceptions too powerful. They consoled and held one another, shared sleeping bags or lay caressing each other’s faces without speaking.

But in spite of the tears and the need for comfort, the underlying feeling was one of
happiness.
A different kind of happiness. A happiness so great, so piercing, that it had something of grief in it. Because it couldn’t last forever, it was far too intense for that. They could keep it alive together through the closeness of their bodies and their shared experience, but at some point it must fade and die. So: the grief.

It was yet another sleepless night, and before dawn they went out under cover of darkness to clean up. A group of them carried Max Hansen’s plastic-wrapped body down to the grave and threw it in along with his clothes, then filled the hole with earth and stones before carefully replacing the turf and stamping it down. Within a couple of weeks the turf would have grown into the surrounding grass. The others tidied up the garage, washed all the tools and scrubbed the work benches.

When dawn came and they had restored everything to its original state, they gathered on the jetty to watch the sun rise. Linn still had tears in her eyes, but not for the reason the others thought. When they had allowed the first rays of the sun to warm their faces for a while, Linn folded her arms, turned to Teresa and said, ‘Next time
I
want to use the drill.’

It was perhaps not quite the last thing Teresa had expected,
but almost. Linn’s little face looked so sulky that Teresa burst out laughing, and soon several of the girls were laughing. Linn looked around, her expression furious.

‘What are you laughing at? I got practically
nothing
!’

The laughter quickly died down and there was silence as they looked at each other. They no longer needed to talk as much in order to communicate, and it appeared that several of them had been thinking along the same lines as Linn.

Next time. There was going to be a next time.

At about twelve o’clock the shuttle service to the bus stop began. Theres had had a long conversation with Anna L, and Anna said she did want to be involved in the future, but that she would need the others’ help. She would get it; that was the whole point of being a pack rather than fourteen girls. They gathered around her, they held her and shared their strength with her. Ronja offered to drive her car to Mörby so that she could travel on the bus with the others.

This turned out to be a valuable experience, because it was only on the bus that the experience finally seemed to settle within her, as they took up the whole of the back of the bus together and Anna found herself in a familiar environment, but no longer defenceless and afraid. No, she was sitting here now with
her family
—who had been buried and risen again, the hungry sharp-toothed ones, her sisters in the pack who would defend her. Then at last happiness came to her.

‘You all kind of
belong
to me, don’t you? And I belong to you. We’re together in this. Seriously together. We can do anything at all, and we’ll never let each other down, will we.’

It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, and Anna took a deep breath and flung her arms wide, as if she had only just fully risen from the grave.

They parted company at different places along the way, having decided to meet again the following Sunday in the usual place. Teresa went on to Svedmyra with Theres. In spite of the fact that they were
alone for the first time in over twenty-four hours, they didn’t say much, didn’t discuss what had happened or the others’ reactions. It wasn’t possible, because the others no longer were
the others.
It was not possible to talk about them as if they weren’t there.

They went their separate ways at the front door of Theres’ apartment block. As Teresa turned to head back towards the subway station, Theres said, ‘It was good.’

‘Yes,’ said Teresa. ‘It was very good.’

On the subway and then on the train home, there was just one word going round and round in Teresa’s head, jerking and bumping about like a fish in a bowl that was far too small.

Urd. Urd. Urd.

Voices under the ground. On one level she knew that it was an image created by her oxygen-starved brain as she lay buried. On another it was real and true. Urd had come to her, lain down behind her and then put on her thin skin like a close-fitting suit. Urd was no longer merely her name. Urd was her.

Teresa woke up in her
own bed at six o’clock on Monday morning feeling like a calf about to be turned out to pasture. The barn door had been opened after the long winter, and before her lay green meadows, flowers and the bright summer. There was a word for it:
joyfulness.
As she stood at her window wide awake, gazing out over the garden, she felt full of joy, and her whole body, not just her legs, was full of energy.

When the household began to wake up an hour later she lay down on her bed and pretended to be half-dead. She rubbed her eyes hard for a long time to make them look terrible, and when Maria came in Teresa explained that she felt awful and just couldn’t get up, couldn’t do anything. This was accepted with a sigh and a shrug, and Teresa was left in peace.

It was like that poem by Bob Hansson she had read a year or so earlier. The man who phones work and explains that he can’t come in. Why not? Is he ill? No, he’s far too healthy, but he might be in the following day if he feels worse.

She lay in bed impatiently waiting for the others to go off to work or to see friends so that she could be alone. When the house was finally empty, she got up. The first thing she did was to go down to the kitchen and pour herself a glass of water.

She sat for a long time looking at the clear liquid in the glass, enjoying the play of the surface and the spectrum of colours on the tablecloth when she tilted the glass and allowed the light to break up.
Then she raised the glass to her lips.

A shudder ran through her body as the water slipped into her mouth. It was smooth and cool and crept over her tongue and palate like a caress. And they say water doesn’t taste of anything! It tasted of earth and iron and grass. Saltiness and sweetness in thin layers, the taste of depth and eternity. When she swallowed it was like receiving a gift, being able to taste something so delicious. And she still had plenty left in her glass.

It took her five minutes to finish the water, and when she went out into the garden afterwards she was so overwhelmed with the happiness bubbling up from the impressions flooding into her body that she had to sit down on the steps for a while. She closed her eyes, put her hands over her ears and concentrated only on the scents, the scents of early summer.

To think that people can walk around on this earth and not be aware of what is around them. What a waste. They might just as well be robots, soulless automata moving between work, the bank, the shop and the TV until their batteries run down.

Teresa had been just the same, but that person now lay crumpled in a grave. She was a goddess, and perceived things with the senses of a goddess. She was Urd, the primitive one.

And so her day passed. She wandered through the trees, gently running her hands over leaves and stones; she walked like Eve through Paradise, knowing that everything was hers, and everything was good.

She woke up feeling happy on Tuesday as well, and another day passed in a state of joyful awareness that might have burst her chest open if she hadn’t divided it into manageable parts, one or two senses at a time. Towards evening it slowly began to slip away from her.

She could hear the voices of her parents and her brothers again. Of course they were no longer her parents or her brothers: her family was thirteen people who were not present. But she knew what they were called, these people sitting around the dinner table with her.

Their inane babble about trivialities was a grating distraction and the food did not taste as good as it had done the previous day, when she had eaten very little and had had to conceal how much she was enjoying each bite of potato—the poor appetite fitted nicely with the impression of illness she wanted to maintain.

Tuesday evening was different. She pretended to feel weak and exhausted, closed her eyes and tried to recapture the feeling. It was there, but much fainter. She excused herself and went up to her room.

When she woke up on Wednesday another little bit had disappeared, and by Thursday morning she was being honest when she said she didn’t feel well. She told herself her senses were still stronger, but she was beginning to feel pretty much like an ordinary person. And that felt like an illness compared with the way things had been at the beginning of the week.

Friday and Saturday were the direct opposite of Monday and Tuesday. She felt ill, as if she was constantly quivering inside, but she had to pretend to the family that she was feeling much better so they wouldn’t stop her going to Stockholm on Sunday. It was stressful and difficult, and she collapsed at night into uneasy sleep filled with nightmares.

They would have had to bind her hand and foot to stop her going. She would have run away, hitch-hiked, caught the train without a ticket if necessary, but it was simpler if the others believed she was feeling OK. So at night she lay there tossing and turning, and during the day she walked around with arms folded or fists clenched in her pockets to hide her shaking hands, and all the time she smiled, smiled, smiled and spoke nicely.

Only when she was sitting on the train on Sunday was she able, at last, to drop the act. She slumped in her seat, flowing like jelly over the rough upholstery. When an elderly lady leaned forward to ask if she was all right, she went and shut herself in the toilet.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked every bit as sick as she had pretended to be on Monday: cold sweat, pallor; lank, greasy hair. She splashed her face a few times with cold water, dried herself
with paper towels, then sat on the toilet and breathed deeply until some of the weight inside her chest disappeared.

She looked at her hands and forced them to stop shaking. Soon everything would be better. Soon she would be with her pack.

Just being with Theres on
the subway, then the bus, made Teresa feel better; by the time they were lying on the blankets outside the wolf enclosure, her body was able to soak up the warmth of the sun. The shivering that had gripped her over the last few days diminished, and she was able to talk without having to control the shake in her voice. She could do it. With Theres beside her, she could do it.

She lay on her stomach gazing into the enclosure, but couldn’t see any of the wolves. She took her piece of wolf skin out of her pocket, waved it around and stroked it like a talisman.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Theres.

‘I want them to come. The wolves.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to see them.’

There was silence for a while, then Theres said, ‘Here they come.’

Teresa peered among the tree trunks and rocks, but there was no sign of any grey shape. When she turned to Theres to ask her where they were, she saw that Theres was looking over towards the far end of the fence, where the rest of the girls were approaching in a group.

‘I thought you meant the wolves,’ said Teresa.

‘We are the wolves. That’s what you said.’

Yes. That’s what she’d said. But the pack creeping along the narrow track was no more wolf-like than she was right now. They came and sat down, shuffling close to each other on the blankets with Theres at the centre. An inaudible whimper hung in the air along
with a scent indistinguishable, to Teresa, from her own. The scent of exhaustion and nagging pain.

It turned out that the others had felt much the same over the course of the week. To begin with, a joyous, crackling proximity to life that felt indestructible, as if it would last forever, then the slow change to fever and despair as the feeling dissolved.

Like Teresa, the others found consolation in the group, relief in simply being close to one another, but the voices echoing between them were weak;
empty
in a ghostly way.

‘…I thought that now, at long last…and then when it disappeared, I saw myself…I mean, you’re like,
nothing…
I haven’t done anything, I’m never going to do anything…as if I was invisible…nobody’s going to remember me…everything will disappear…it’s as if you’re too small to be heard…when it disappeared, all I had left was empty hands…’

This went on for a good five minutes, a low whimpering made verbal, until Theres yelled, ‘Quiet!’

The voices broke off abruptly. Theres was holding both hands up in front of her, the palms facing outwards as if she was stopping a runaway train, and she shouted again, ‘Quiet! Quiet!’

If they could have pricked up their ears, they would have done so now. They were sitting in a huddle around Theres, who straightened up and looked from one to the other. They were focussed on her lips, waiting for a few words that could free them. A suggestion, an order, a telling-off. Anything.

When Theres opened her mouth, they were so intently anticipating some pithy, vital truth that it took them a couple of seconds to realise that she was
singing.

I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore

If I tell a joke, you’ve probably heard it before

But I have a talent, a wonderful thing

’cause everyone listens when I start to sing

I’m so grateful and proud

All I want is to sing it out loud…

By the time she had got that far most of them had recognised the song, and even if they didn’t know the words to the verse, they knew the chorus. Theres’ pure, clear voice, so perfectly pitched, resonated through their bodies like a giant tuning fork, guiding them to the right note as they joined in.

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing…

Theres sang the song all the way through, the others helped out in the choruses, and the music was like morphine. The pain in their bodies eased, flowed out through the notes, and as long as the song went on there was nothing to fear. In the silence after the final words died away, they heard distant applause. People walking their dogs had stopped in various places and one of them shouted, ‘Yay! Sing Along at Skansen!’ before moving on.

Theres pointed towards Skansen and said, ‘That’s what I’m going to sing. There. The day after tomorrow. You will all come. Then it will be over. It will be good.’ She got up and went over to the fence, leaned against the wire and let out a low growl, trying to entice the wolves without success.

‘What do you mean, over?’ said Caroline. ‘What does she mean, it’ll be over? I don’t understand what she’s talking about.’

Teresa looked towards Skansen, imagining the Solliden stage somewhere far beyond the trees, just as she had seen it on TV. The crowds, the singers, the camera cranes and ‘Stockholm in My Heart’. The wall of young girls, just like them and very different from them, pressed against the barriers right at the front as they sang along. Theres standing on the stage. The rest of them in the audience. Among all those people.

‘Ronja?’ said Teresa. ‘Do you remember asking me where we were actually going, what we were going to
do?’

Ronja nodded and shrugged her shoulders. ‘We’ve done stuff.’

‘No,’ said Teresa. ‘We haven’t done anything. We have only prepared ourselves.’ She glanced at the sign on the wolf enclosure:
Do not feed the animals,
then waved her hand towards it, towards Skansen. ‘But we are going to do something. We are going to feel good forever. And no bastard is ever going to forget
us.’