Little Star (47 page)

Mother says I was a
dancer before I could walk

Robert Segerwall has earned his place in the VIP seats after thirty years’ hard labour in the service of entertainment at Swedish Television. He is one of the people the camera lingers on when the singing starts. He is wearing a loose beige linen jacket, and gives the impression of both relaxation and upright character. He was actually in the running to take over when Lasse gave up. He is not bitter, he loves his free summers.

When the first blow strikes his arm, for a moment he is angry that someone has ruined his jacket. Then comes the pain, and the blood. When his wife of twenty-five years starts screaming at his side, he realises that the danger is real.

He turns to his attacker, but has no time to do anything before a slash across his throat monopolises his attention. The blows that come after this are irrelevant.

She says I began to sing long before I could talk

Everyone knows that when Linda Larsson does something, she does it properly. That’s why she claimed her spot at the Solliden stage at ten o’clock this morning. If she’s going to Sing Along at Skansen, then she’s going for the full experience. She has eaten the picnic she brought with her, she has watched the rehearsals. She is planning to write about it all in her blog, and has been making a few notes.

When she hears the angry buzzing behind her, she thinks it is an unusually large wasp. She also knows that the best thing to do in that case is to sit perfectly still. Not to start waving her arms about. She looks down at her notepad and wonders whether to write something about the wasp.

Then comes the sting in the back of her neck. The pain is indescribable. Her fingers spread and are suddenly ice cold. She opens her mouth to scream, but something is blocking her windpipe. Blood spurts over her notepad and her hand flies up to her throat where it is penetrated halfway by a rapidly rotating drill bit. Then the drill is torn out and she just has time to grasp what has happened before she loses consciousness.

And I’ve often wondered, how did it all start?

Despite the fact that they haven’t got to the bit where the audience joins in, Isailo Jovanovic can’t help singing along. This is the third time he has been to Sing Along at Skansen and, however integrated he might feel after seventeen years in Sweden, he just doesn’t know the
songs.
Every year it’s Evert Taube—and you don’t hear those songs much in Belgrade. But Abba, that’s different. When he was a teenager Isailo and his friends used to swap tapes; Isailo had his first kiss to the sound of ‘Fernando’.

He knows he has a decent tenor voice, and even though the people around him are not singing, he joins in with the girl up on the stage. He has never heard anyone sing like that, and it is a pleasure to hear his voice blending with hers.

He can hear the distant sound of people screaming, and assumes that the girl is some kind of idol. This isn’t important to him as he enjoys the way her voice interweaves with his.

In the middle of his joyous singing he receives a blow to his jaw, a terrible blow on his chin. Something breaks in his lower jaw and he is hurled to the ground. In a couple of seconds his mouth is full of blood and fragments of tooth. He doesn’t understand. This is not the Sweden he knows.

Then he sees the hammer being raised, and holds up his hands in self-defence. His head is ringing and he is unable to focus. A blurred figure takes a step to one side, then comes an annihilating blow right on the top of his head.

Who found out that nothing can capture a heart like a melody can?

Johan Lejonhjärta is in seventh heaven. He came to Sing Along at Skansen for one thing, and one thing only, and that thing has happened. Ola Salo touched him. Johan has adored Ola Salo from the very start, and Ola was one of the reasons why he dared to come out of the closet eight years ago, leaving Kisa and moving to Stockholm.

When Ola fluttered past the sea of spectators as he sang ‘The Worrying Kind’, Johan stretched out his hand. And Ola didn’t just touch his hand. He took it for a moment and looked Johan in the eye as he sang ‘Be good for goodness sake’. The words and the touch burned into Johan.

He knows it’s ridiculous. He is thirty-two years old, and thinks he has been touched by a divine being. He has photographed his hand with his mobile, he has turned the words ‘be good for goodness sake’ over and over in his head like the words of a guru, a guideline for life. He knows it’s ridiculous and he couldn’t care less and he gives himself up to his happiness.

When he hears the screams around him they are filtered through his own experience, and he interprets them as screams of happiness and excitement. He loves Abba too, and the girl up there is a wonderful singer, but that’s not important right now.

He works as a carpenter and recognises the sound behind him for exactly what it is. A drill. And yet he does not link the sound with the agonising pain in his back, because it is just too far-fetched. Only when the second blow comes does he realise that the rev count of the drill is slowing down at the same time as he feels a quivering pain through his skeleton.

When he turns around the drill is pushed into his chest, and he
coughs up blood as one lung is punctured. The drill is pulled out and he opens his mouth to stammer out a plea, a prayer. For a fraction of a second he can see the rotating spiral before it becomes blurred and disappears into his eye.

Well, whoever it was, I’m a fan

Elsie Karlsson has seen them come and go. She was here back in Egon Kjerrman’s day, but she’d go for Bosse Larsson if she had to choose. There was nothing wrong with Lasse, nor this new chap, but Bosse Larsson knew how to spread a sense of
wellbeing
like no one else. Things weren’t so over the top in those days.

You can usually get a seat if you arrive about two, but today there must be something particularly popular on, so Elsie has had to sit on her wheeled walker. To tell the truth, she wishes the show would end, because she’s really tired. You might think one of these young people would offer her their seat, but times have changed.

This is a nice tune, and the girl who is singing is very good. As far as Elsie can remember the girl wasn’t there for the rehearsals, which is unheard of. Or perhaps Elsie has forgotten. That happens more and more often these days.

Some kind of commotion over by the seating attracts her attention. A few people have got up and are running away. Odd. Things are usually very orderly and controlled once the broadcast has begun, people hardly dare cross their legs. But now people are running around and screaming in a quite unprecedented way.

She doesn’t understand what has happened until she is lying on her back and hears her hip bone crack. The wheeled walker has been pulled from underneath her. It hurts so much that the grinding of her jaws leaves her false teeth askew inside her mouth. Her glasses must have fallen off, because she can hardly see.

A thin figure is leaning over her with something in its hand. Elsie believes that people are intrinsically good, and assumes that this is someone who is going to help her, that whatever the figure is holding in its hand is something that can save her. Then comes the blow
directly to her forehead, and everything goes black.

Inside her head, in some corner which is still conscious, she hears a sound like an angry insect. It is coming closer.

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

At first Lena Forsman thought it was a bad idea. Going to Sing Along at Skansen on a first date. It felt like a family thing, not something for two people who met on the internet. But it’s gone well, really well.

There was so much to talk about as they fumbled their way towards an understanding of one another, and so far Peter seems to be a real gem. Self-confident without being arrogant, funny without being stupid. Not bad looking, well dressed, and as for the thinning hair, she actually thought it was sexy. On him anyway.

He had bought her raspberries from one of the girls who went around selling them before the live broadcast, and when ‘Some Day I’ll Come Sailing Home’ started up, he put his arm around her shoulders and half-jokingly swayed along in time. The arm had stayed there as a little girl came on stage and sang that fantastic Abba song.

The mixing desk hides the middle of the stage from where they are standing, and since she can’t see anyway, and since the girl is singing so beautifully, Lena closes her eyes and gives herself up to the pleasure of the friendly arm around her shoulders, the warm summer evening and the special moments life can still bring, moments like this.

She hears hysterical screams and smiles at the memory of herself when she was like that, when she was fourteen years old and went to see Abba at Gröna Lund; she almost fainted when Annifrid looked her in the eye for that fraction of a second, and she screamed until her throat hurt.

Suddenly Peter’s grip tightens around her shoulders. He is squeezing so hard that she gasps and opens her eyes, just as his hand is torn away from her. She sees him fall at her feet, clutching his head. He begins to twitch and shake, and her first thought is:
Is he having an epileptic fit?

Then she sees that blood is beginning to seep from beneath his right hand. She doesn’t understand what has happened, but leans over him and says, ‘Peter? Peter? What’s the matter?’

His eyes are staring at a point immediately behind her. They widen and he opens his mouth to say something. The next moment a blow to the back of her neck brings her down, and she falls onto his body. She just has time to catch the aroma of Old Spice before another blow extinguishes all perception.

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing

Ronnie Ahlberg doesn’t know what the hell to do. He is in charge of the camera ten metres to the left of the stage, and from his metre-high wooden podium he has a good overview. What he is seeing is not what happened during rehearsals. Through his headset he has just been told to run pictures of the audience in the seated area, but what is happening down there isn’t exactly ideal material. People are out of their seats and running, and there seems to be some kind of mass exodus going on.

Still, his job is not to look for reasons, but to find camera angles. Since the audience in the seated area has decided to depart from the script for some reason, he turns the camera towards the standing area behind the barriers, where the kids are still behaving as they should, holding their mobiles up in the air to film the show and waving banners with ‘TESLA RULES’ and ‘TESLA GIRLS JAKOBSBERG’.

He hears a voice in his ear. Abrahamsson, the picture editor, sounds almost on the verge of tears in the outside broadcast truck. ‘What’s going on out there, Ronnie? Half our monitors are fucking useless.’

Ronnie’s camera is about to go the same way. The kids have started behaving oddly too, and the ‘TESLA RULES’ banner ends up on the ground just as the crowd at his feet begins to move away from the barrier. He is just thinking of angling his camera up towards the stage and the girl who is singing, because at least she’s standing still, when a powerful blow to his knee makes his legs give way beneath him.

He tries to stop himself from falling by grabbing hold of one of the levers on the camera, but a blow to the other knee sends him tumbling from the platform, executing an involuntary stage dive backwards into the sea of running people.

His face, arms and hands are trampled underfoot as he hears a high-pitched whining noise—it sounds like a camera flash charging—coming closer to his ear.

Who can live without it? I ask in all honesty, what would life be?

No, Sing Along at Skansen is not Kalle Bäckström’s scene, he was quite clear on that point after enduring a song by The Ark, some old farts’ song, and now that kid who was on MySpace. He only came because Emmy was supposed to be here. And now he can’t get hold of her!

He has spent the last ten minutes standing next to the portable toilets fifty metres behind the back row of seats, texting. He asked Emmy where she is, and she told him she was down the front. Whereabouts down the front, he asked her, and now he’s waiting for the reply.

OK, OK. If necessary he’s going to push his way through the crowd just so he can stand next to her and rub himself up against her. She’s the prettiest girl in the class, and when she said, ‘Are you coming to Skansen on Tuesday?’, he might have misinterpreted it slightly. As if it was a date. But she was here with three girlfriends, and he hasn’t even managed to find her yet.

He is standing there staring at his phone, using the power of the mind to try and make a reply from her appear, when he realises something is going on. People are screaming and waving their arms in the air down at the front, and one or two are running past him. He lowers his mobile and stands on tiptoe so that he can see better.

The crowd in front of him is
expanding.
The entire audience begins to swell towards him as if it was escaping from a pressure cooker. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. He is standing on the slope leading down from Solliden, right in the middle of the valve
itself, and the boiling mass of people is cascading towards him.

He can’t understand what is going on, and stands there with his mouth open as the wave approaches. When it is just a few metres away he finally comes to his senses, hurls himself into one of the toilets and locks the door. Thousands of footsteps in headlong flight thunder past outside the door, and the toilet shakes as bodies fall from the horde and crash into the thin plastic walls.

He sits down on the seat and carries on texting, searching for Emmy, but there is no reply.

Without a song or a dance, what are we?

‘Event Security’ it says on the back of Joel Carlsson’s red T-shirt. That’s the name of the company he works for, and that has been his job description for the last ten years. Event security. A friend at the gym put him in touch with them, and he’s stayed because he enjoys his job. Particularly when it comes to Sing Along at Skansen.

Rock concerts can be hard work: overheated venues, loud music and kids getting crushed and passing out. At sports events there are the drunks and hooligans to deal with. Sing Along is like a holiday by comparison, and within the company this particular job is allocated as a reward for long and loyal service.