Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  When Jerry was twenty, Elvis went out cruising in Norrtälje, high as a kite. He lost control of his Chevy on the hill leading down to the harbour, drove straight into the water and drowned. Nothing was the same after that.

  The steam went out of Roy and Jerry. They felt obliged to burgle a couple of houses, and talked about trying some post offices, but it never happened. It was no fun anymore. They drifted apart, and since Jerry was spending more time at home, he was able to hear Lennart and Laila talking. When they organised an apartment for him through social services, he moved out.

  He had a few bits and pieces stashed away which he sold so that he could buy a motorbike. He got a few dead-end jobs, but never stayed more than a couple of weeks. He built up a reasonable collection of splatter films on VHS.

  That’s how it was, and perhaps it couldn’t have been any different.

  In the spring the year after Lennart had found the girl, something very unusual happened. Laila received an offer. A group calling themselves DDT wanted Laila as their featured singer on a dance track. At first Laila thought it was a joke, and in a way she was right. The idea was to do a Swedish version of The KLF’s monster hit ‘Justified and Ancient’, with Laila as Sweden’s answer to Tammy Wynette, singing a couple of verses to a heavy dance beat.

  Laila found out later that both Lill-Babs and Siw Malmkvist had been approached and turned it down. Perhaps other legendary Swedish chart-toppers had been asked too, before they ended up with the somewhat less legendary Laila.

  She had no reputation to lose and no image to maintain, so she said yes. Anything to get out of the house.

  The atmosphere had soured even more since the incident with Jerry. Lennart hardly spoke to her anymore, but at least he didn’t hit her. It wasn’t clear what Jerry had meant when he said Lennart could ‘forget the kid’ if his instructions weren’t followed, but the threat certainly worked. Jerry got his computer and Laila was left in peace.

  But it was as if a musty blanket had settled on things. The air in the rooms felt stale and close. Laila thought that a visitor who stepped through the door would only need one sniff to know: There’s something bad here. Something sick.

  But nobody came, apart from Jerry who called in from time to time to ‘check things out’. Sometimes he insisted on holding the child, bouncing it up and down on his knee and saying, ‘Toot, toot.’ On these occasions Lennart stood there with clenched fists, waiting until Jerry had finished so he could carry the girl back down to the cellar.

  Perhaps Laila experienced the child’s shut-in existence as her own; sometimes she had to go out into the garden just to breathe. So she welcomed the chance to go into Stockholm and pretend to be a singer again, if only for a while.

  The track was called ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’, and they explained to Laila that she would be singing a deliberate parody of The KLF’s nonsense. She had no idea what it was about. ‘We’re walking on water underground, we’re setting fire to the four words. Lead. Check. Bearing capacity zero’ and so on.

  Her voice held, the producer was happy, and Laila caught the bus back to Norrtälje without really understanding what she had done. But it had been fun. A new environment where everybody had been nice to her; that was a novelty for a start.

  In April the girl’s first tooth came through. Otherwise it was as if her development had come to a standstill. She made no attempt to crawl or shuffle along. She wasn’t interested in hiding games, or peep-bo. She didn’t imitate actions or movements; the only thing she reciprocated was sound: notes and melodies.

  Sometimes Lennart took her out into the garden at night. On the odd occasion Laila was allowed to do it she would take the opportunity to whisper and talk to the girl as much as she could. She got nothing back—not a sound.

  At the end of May, ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’ by DDT featuring Laila was released, and nothing happened. At first. Then something did happen, and then something else happened. In June it entered the Tracks chart, and climbed to number seven. People starting calling, wanting to interview Laila. She was given very specific instructions from DDT’s record company on what to say about the lyrics. That was what she said.

  The attention made Lennart nervous, but there was no need for him to worry. In a few weeks it was over. However, it did lead to a call from an agency wanting to book Lennart and Laila for a few gigs. Lennart decided they would try one as an experiment, in Norrtälje in August. It was a motor show for vintage car enthusiasts, a mixture of a family day out and a meeting for boy racers.

  ‘So what are we going to do with the girl?’ asked Laila.

  ‘Well, it’s only in Norrtälje. She’ll be OK on her own for a couple of hours. It won’t be a problem.’

  It was a hot afternoon in the middle of July. They were sitting at the table outside drinking coffee. Perhaps it was the unexpected success or the fact that she had been able to get out and about a bit that gave Laila courage. A very simple question had been grinding away in her head for several months. Now she put it into words.

  ‘Lennart. What’s going to happen with the girl?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you must have thought about it. What’s going to happen in the future. She’s growing. She’ll be walking soon. What are we going to do with her?’

  It was as if a veil came down over Lennart’s eyes and he moved a long way away, even though he was still sitting at the table fingering his coffee cup.

  ‘She’s not going to be part of all that,’ he said. ‘She’s not going to be destroyed.’

  ‘No. But…from a purely practical point of view? How’s it going to work?’

  Lennart folded his arms and looked at Laila as if from a great distance.

  ‘I’m not going to say this again. So listen carefully. We are going to keep her here. We are not going to let her out. We are going to train her so that she adapts to that way of life. She won’t be unhappy, because she won’t have seen anything else.’

  ‘But why, Lennart? Why?’

  With exaggerated care, Lennart raised the cup to his lips, took a sip of the lukewarm coffee and placed the cup back on the saucer without making a sound.

  ‘I do not want to hear these questions again. I will answer you now. But never again. Is that clear?’

  Laila nodded. Even Lennart’s voice had changed, as if a different version of him was speaking through his mouth. A person made from a heavier material, from his solid core. There was something compelling about the voice, and Laila sat there motionless, her eyes fixed on Lennart’s lips as he said:

  ‘Because she is not an ordinary child. She will never be an ordinary child. Or an ordinary person. She is white. Completely white. The only thing the world will do to her is to destroy her. I know this. I have seen inside her. People might regard it as a bad thing, keeping a child shut in. But it’s the best thing for her. I’m sure of that. She is pure music. The world is a dissonance. She would go under. Instantly.’

  ‘So it’s for her sake? Are you sure?’

  Lennart returned to the table. As if everything was pared away at once, his expression was suddenly fragile and hesitant. A lonely child in the forest. Laila couldn’t remember when she had last seen that look, and it stabbed her in the heart.

  Lennart said, ‘And for mine. If she disappeared…I’d kill myself. She is the last. The last chance. There is nothing after her.’

  They sat motionless. The needle in Laila’s heart twisted around and around. A sparrow landed on the table, pecking at a few cake crumbs. Afterwards Laila would realise that they had been standing at a crossroads, and that a decision had been made. In silence, like all important decisions.

  His parents hadn’t said a word about the gig, but Jerry had seen the posters. He had been thinking of going to the motor show to meet up with some old friends but when he saw that Lennart and Laila would be playing, he changed his mind. There was something else he would much rather do.

  The gig was due to start at two o’clock. At half past one
Jerry jumped on his motorbike and rode over to the house. He reckoned that his parents would need a good half hour for the sound check and at least that to pack up and drive home, so he had a couple of hours on his own in the house. He calculated that they wouldn’t have taken the kid with them.

  The front door was no problem; he could have opened it with a credit card in his sleep, but he’d taken a screwdriver with him just to be on the safe side. It took him ten seconds to push back the old-fashioned catch and step into the hallway. Without taking off his boots he clattered down the cellar steps, shouting, ‘Toot, toot!’

  He gave a start when he walked into his old room. The child was standing upright in the cot with her hands resting on the frame, staring straight at him. There was something horrible about the way that kid looked at you, as if it could see straight through everything. But it was still just a kid in a red babygro with its nappy bulging out at the back. Not exactly something to be scared of.

  Jerry had understood completely what this kid meant to his father. Forty times more than he himself had ever meant. It was quite upsetting. He didn’t get it. What was so special about this little bastard that just stood there staring?

  When Jerry seized the child under the arms and lifted it out of the cot, it just hung there limply; it didn’t even kick its legs. Jerry poked it tentatively in the stomach and said, ‘Toot, toot.’ Not a smile, not even the hint of a frown. Jerry poked harder, really pushed this time. Nothing. It was as if he didn’t exist, as if nothing he did or said could make an impression.

  Playing hard to get, are you, you little bastard?

  He laid the child down on the spare bed and pinched its arm, pinched hard. The soft baby skin was squeezed together and he could feel his fingers touching through the fabric and the skin. When nothing happened he moved on to the thighs, both thighs. Hard pinches that would have had any seven-year-old screaming the place down. The kid simply carried on staring straight through him without making a sound. Jerry had had enough. He was going to get some kind of fucking reaction.

  He gave the child a resounding smack across the face. Smack. The little head jerked to the side and the cheek began to redden. But still not a peep out of her. Sweat broke out on Jerry’s hairline, and a black lamp began to glow in his chest.

  OK, maybe the little bastard was deaf and dumb and fuck knows what else, but it must surely have the capacity to feel pain? There ought to be tears, a grimace, something. Jerry’s inability to make any impression on the child made him furious. He was going to get some kind of response.

  He picked up the child, holding her at arm’s length, and took a step away from the bed. ‘If I drop you on the floor, you should bloody well feel that, shouldn’t you? Don’t you think?’ He brought the child closer and said it again, so that it would understand. ‘Do you hear me? I’m going to drop you on the floor.’

  He never found out if he would have done it or not. As he uttered the last word, the child’s hand shot out with reptilian speed and grabbed hold of his lower lip. Its fingers burrowed in, the little nails scraping against his gums. Then it pulled.

  It hurt so much that tears sprang to Jerry’s eyes. Whatever his intention may have been, the pain made him drop the child. It clung to his lip for less than a second, just long enough to tear it away from the gum slightly, blood seeping into his mouth.

  The child fell onto the cement floor and landed on its bottom, where it lay looking up at Jerry as he pressed his hands to his mouth, whimpering. On the bedside table there was a sippy cup in the shape of an elephant, its ears forming the handles. Jerry took off the lid and spat. Blood and saliva mingled with the milk. He sat there spitting for a while until the worst had passed. Then he tore off a piece of a paper towel, rolled it up and pushed it under his lip like an upside-down plug of tobacco.

  The kid was still lying on its back, looking at him. Jerry crouched down beside it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem. So now we know.’

  He picked up the girl, taking care to keep his face out of reach of her hands, and carefully placed her back in the cot. She was utterly calm; the only thing that had changed was that she now had a small amount of blood on the tips of the fingers on her left hand.

  Jerry perched on the edge of the spare bed, his elbows resting on his knees. He looked carefully at her. Despite the fact that his lip was hurting, he couldn’t hold back a big smile. He was positively beaming. Suddenly he grabbed hold of the bars and rattled the cot, shaking her to and fro.

  ‘Fuck, sis!’ he said. ‘Sis! Bloody hell!’

  The child didn’t respond, but there was no denying it: he had a sister, sort of. He liked the little bastard. She was completely crazy. Nobody was going to mess with her. She was invincible, his sister.

  Jerry was in the mood for a celebration, so he clattered back up the stairs and found a bottle of whisky and a glass, then went back down to the cellar, perched on the edge of the bed, half-filled his glass and clinked it against the bars of the cot.

  ‘Cheers, sis!’

  He took a big gulp and pulled a face as the alcohol penetrated through the paper towel and touched the wound. He spat the plug out onto the floor and rinsed his mouth clean with more whisky. Then he rested his chin on his hand and looked thoughtfully at the girl.

  ‘Do you know what your name is?’ he said. ‘Theres, that’s what. Like that Baader-Meinhof chick. Theres.’ It was crystal clear, he could hear it as he uttered the name. ‘Theres. That’s it.’

  He topped up his glass. The child pulled herself up into a sitting position, then to her feet. She was standing as she had been when he came into the room.

  ‘What is it?’ Jerry asked. ‘Do you want to taste?’

  He picked up a cloth and dipped it in the glass, then held out the damp corner to Theres, who didn’t open her mouth. He pushed the edge of the cloth against her lips. ‘This is what they used to do in the old days, you know. Open wide.’

  Theres opened her mouth, and Jerry pushed the corner of the flannel in. The girl sucked at it, then lay down. She carried on sucking away at the cloth, never taking her eyes off Jerry.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, emptying the glass.

  After ten minutes and another glass, Jerry started to get restless. He looked around the room for something to do. A sudden inspiration made him look under the bed, and lo and behold!

  He got down on his knees and pulled out the guitar case. It was covered in a layer of dust, and the lock had begun to rust after several damp winters, but there it was. He opened the case and took out the guitar, weighing it in his hands.

  It’s so bloody small.

  When he thought back to his days as a guitarist, he remembered the guitar as a great big thing on his lap; his fingers had trouble stretching to the right frets. Now it was a toy in his hands, and he had no problem whatsoever getting his hand around the neck.

  He tried an E minor, and it sounded bloody awful. He struck an experimental chord and started turning the tuner on the E-string—to begin with. There was something odd about the acoustics in the room. When he plucked the string it sounded like a double note. He let the note fade away, and put his ear to the soundboard. The resonance sounded purer. He plucked the string again, leaning his head towards the body. He didn’t have Lennart’s ear; he could only hear notes in relation to one another, but surely the resonance sounded purer than the note itself?

  Some kind of damage from the damp.

  He straightened up so that he could reach the tuners, and saw that Theres had pulled herself up in the cot. He plucked the E-string again. This time he could hear where the purer note was coming from.

  No, no, no.

  Just for fun he tuned the E-string to the sound Theres was making, and moved on to the B-string. When he tuned that one to the sound she made, he was able to hear that the interval was absolutely perfect. He did the same thing with G, and so on. Tuning a guitar had never been so quick. He couldn’t have done it better with an electronic tuner.

  He took a swig straigh
t out of the whisky bottle and looked at Theres, who was still standing up in her cot, her cheek bright red and her face expressionless.

  ‘You’re quite a piece of work, aren’t you? So what do you think about this, then?’

  He tried a C. Not the note, but the chord. C, E and G. Theres’ clear voice responded; it was hard to tell where the guitar ended and she began. Jerry allowed the chord to die away. Her voice lingered for a couple of seconds before it too fell silent. Jerry took another swig from the bottle and nodded to himself.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s rock.’ He stamped his foot to set the beat, struck C again and launched into the first line of ‘Space Oddity’.

  Beside him the girl joined in with pure, wordless notes. When he changed chords it took a second before she switched to the new note. Just as well. He would have been seriously spooked if she’d known the song on top of everything else. But she didn’t. So he played it to her, with her. Then he moved on to ‘Ashes to Ashes’ so she could hear the whole story.

  When Jerry had sung the last lines a few times with Theres, it was as if he woke from an enchantment. He looked around the room and realised there would be a hell of a fuss when his parents got home.

  He put back the whisky and shoved the boozy cloth out of sight, gathered up the blood-stained plugs of paper and poured the contents of the cup down the sink in the laundry room. Finally he put the guitar back in its case. The room looked the same as it had when he arrived.

  Theres was standing in her cot, looking at him. He leaned down and sniffed at her mouth: nothing. Almost a pity, really. It would have given Lennart and Laila something to think about if the kid had been standing there reeking of Famous Grouse when they got home.

  ‘OK, sis. See ya.’

  He left. After ten seconds he came back and took the guitar.

  The gig wasn’t quite the success the promoters had hoped for, but nor was it a fiasco. The majority of the audience consisted of fairly overweight men in denim jackets and women wearing too much make-up, all about the same age as Lennart and Laila. Only a small number of young people had turned up to see the singer behind ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’, which was just as well, because they didn’t actually have permission to use the sampling on that song.