Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Laila had been following his activities with her chin resting on her hand. As he picked up the dishcloth and began wiping the table, she said, ‘A shoe rack.’

  Lennart stopped making circular movements over the wax cloth and visualised their hall floor. There were only four pairs of shoes. They each had a pair of outdoor shoes and a pair of clogs. Their Wellingtons were in the cellar.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I could do that.’

  ‘Then we could put our wellies there too,’ said Laila.

  ‘Yes. Good idea.’

  He looked at Laila. She had lost a few kilos in recent months. Presumably this had something to do with the fact that he no longer found chocolate wrappers all over the house. She had stopped comfort eating.

  It must have been something to do with the light, bouncing off the wax cloth and illuminating her face from a side angle. For a brief moment, Lennart thought Laila was pretty. The distance between his hand and her face was only half a metre, and he watched his hand slowly rise from the table and caress her cheek.

  Then he grabbed the dishcloth and scrubbed at a dried-on patch of lingonberry jam with such force that the wax cloth slid to one side. He rinsed out the cloth, draped it over the tap and said, ‘All right, a shoe rack.’

  Over the next few weeks Lennart made a shoe rack, two towel rails and a key cupboard. When he couldn’t come up with anything else they needed, he moved on to bird boxes.

  Sometimes as he stood there surrounded by the smell of freshly sawn wood, listening to the sound of some Schubert quartet from the girl’s room, he felt perfectly contented. Step by step, everything had moved in the right direction. The sharp, hard edges of his existence had been rounded off with both grade one and two sandpaper, and he could run his hand over life without getting splinters in his fingers.

  He put on the ear protectors and started up the jigsaw to cut out the windows and doors in the facade of a nesting box representing their own house. It was a tricky job that required concentration, and when he switched the saw off and removed the ear protectors five minutes later, sweat was pouring down his forehead.

  The silence after the angry buzzing of the saw was pleasant, but wasn’t it a bit too quiet? He couldn’t hear any music from the girl’s room, nor any humming. He put down the tools and went to investigate.

  The girl had climbed out of her cot. While he was sawing, unable to hear anything, she must have fetched a hammer behind his back, then gone back and started on the CD player. Through a combination of hitting and wrenching she had managed to open up the front of both speakers and rip out the cones. She was now sitting on the floor scratching at them with her fingers, tugging at the wires as she shook her head.

  He went over and tried to take the broken pieces off her, but she refused to let them go. She shook them and bit them.

  ‘Give those to me,’ he said. ‘You might cut yourself.’

  The girl stared at him, her eyes narrowed. Then she said, with absolute clarity, ‘Music.’

  Lennart was so stunned he gave up the tug-of-war and simply stared at her. It was the first word he had heard her say. He lowered his head to her level and asked, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Music,’ the girl repeated, making a noise somewhere between a growl and a whimper as she banged the speaker cone on the floor.

  Lennart got down on his knees beside her and said, ‘The music isn’t there.’

  The girl stopped banging and looked at him. Looked at him. Gazed into his eyes for a few seconds. Lennart took this as an encouragement, and tried to explain more clearly.

  ‘Music is everywhere,’ he said. ‘Inside you. Inside me. When we sing, when we play.’ He pointed at the ruined CD player. ‘That’s only a machine.’

  He had forgotten his resolution not to talk to the girl. It didn’t matter. Both Laila and Jerry had talked to her, so that project had had it. He pointed at the CD player again. ‘Do you understand? A machine. It’s people who make music.’

  He took out the CD, a cheap Naxos edition of Schubert’s Second String Quartet. He pushed his forefinger through the hole and held it up in front of the girl. ‘The music is pressed onto this.’

  The girl didn’t react to his words, but she was staring at the CD with big eyes. She tilted her head to one side, wrinkling her nose. Lennart turned the disc around to see what she was looking at. And saw himself.

  Of course.

  As far as he was aware, the girl had never seen a mirror before. He turned the shiny surface towards her once again and said, ‘That’s you, Little One. That’s you.’

  The girl stared at the disc on his finger as if she were under a spell, and whispered, ‘Little One…’ as a trail of saliva dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She crawled closer without breaking eye contact with her reflection. She reached out her hands for the disc and Lennart let her take it. Only then did he notice that she had dropped the piece of rope with the knots in it; it was lying on the floor behind her, chewed and stroked to death. She only had eyes for the CD.

  When Lennart lifted her up and put her back in the cot, she clung firmly to the disc with both hands as she gazed down into the silvery pool of light, completely unreachable. But still Lennart rested his head on the frame of the cot and said, ‘But the music isn’t there, Little One. It’s here.’ He placed his forefinger on her heart. ‘And here.’ On her temple.

  Jerry didn’t get around to visiting his parents until the spring. He was actually busy with a little business enterprise.

  He had been working in the billiard hall in Norrtälje for a couple of years, cash in hand, stepping in as and when required. One evening when he was in the café washing coffee cups, an old acquaintance came in. Ingemar. They chatted for a while and when Jerry offered him a contraband Russian beer from the secret stash, Ingemar raised his eyebrows. ‘Have you got fags as well?’

  Jerry said he hadn’t, and that the Russian beer was really only for regular customers, but he hardly thought Ingemar had turned into the kind of bloke who’d go running to the cops, had he?

  ‘No, no,’ said Ingemar, opening the beer with his lighter. ‘Quite the reverse. What if I said eighty kronor a carton? Interested?’

  ‘Are we talking about that Polish crap made from straw and newspaper?’

  ‘No, no, Marlboro. I don’t honestly know if it’s some kind of pirate factory or what, but they taste the same. Here. Try one.’

  Ingemar held out a packet and Jerry examined it. It didn’t have a registration mark or stamp, but apart from that it looked like an ordinary packet of cigarettes. He shook one out and lit it. No difference whatsoever.

  Ingemar was a truck driver these days, working mostly in the Baltic states. He had a contact in Estonia who sold cheap cigarettes if you didn’t ask too many questions. He looked around the room; two of the billiard tables were busy and three people were sitting at a table smoking. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem to shift say fifty cartons a month here. Add on a bit for yourself and you’re laughing.’

  Jerry thought it over. A hundred and twenty kronor was a good price for a carton of fags. That would mean a profit of two thousand a month.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it. When can you deliver?’ Ingemar grinned. ‘Right now. I’ve got the car outside.’ Ingemar didn’t have his truck parked outside the billiard hall, just an ordinary car. He looked around and unlocked the boot. Two black plastic sacks took up half the space. He showed Jerry the cartons, bundled in packs of five.

  ‘Four thou,’ he said. ‘As agreed.’

  ‘But I haven’t got that kind of money on me, you know that.’ ‘Next time. This will give you a bit of start-up capital.’ They carried the sacks down to the room where the rubbish was stored, and shook hands as they agreed to meet in a month’s time.

  That same evening Jerry managed to shift eight cartons, which made it easier to fasten the remainder to the back of his motorbike under cover of darkness and drive home. In future he would ask Ingemar to deliver direct to his door.

&nbs
p; He stacked the forty-two cartons in four neat piles in the corner of the living room, then sat down in the armchair and contemplated them, hands folded over his stomach. So there you go, he thought. All of a sudden you’re an entrepreneur. To show he was taking the whole thing seriously, he emptied his wallet and put Ingemar’s six hundred and forty kronor in an envelope.

  He sat there rustling the remaining three hundred and twenty. He usually worked a six-hour shift at the hall, earning fifty kronor an hour. If it went on like this, his hourly rate had suddenly more than doubled.

  A hundred kronor. After tax, so to speak. Top job, to say the least. Executive or something.

  The fifty cartons disappeared, and the following month Ingemar got his money and delivered the next batch to Jerry’s apartment. It was tempting to expand the operation, but Jerry realised he ought to be careful, selling only to people he trusted. Mustn’t get greedy. That was when things went down the pan.

  His role as deputy supplier commanded a modicum of respect from those around him. He could hang out in the billiard hall even when he wasn’t working, and people were more inclined to talk to him than they had been. He bumped into people in town, that kind of thing. The satisfaction he’d been getting from the time he spent with Theres no longer felt so vital.

  However, at the beginning of March he packed up his guitar, strapped it to his motorbike and started the bike first kick. He had seriously begun to consider buying a new one, with an electric starter. It was a possibility these days.

  The house was still there, looking exactly as it had when he went round four months earlier. But something had changed. It took a while before Jerry was able to put his finger on it, but as he sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Lennart and Laila, picking up a biscuit from the plate, he saw it with sudden clarity.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating biscuits with his parents.

  It had just sort of happened, quite naturally. As if it was normal. No suspicion about his visit, no implied criticism and none of the simmering discontent between his parents that could erupt into a caustic remark at any moment. It was just coffee, home-made biscuits and a nice cosy chat. Jerry looked from Lennart to Laila; they were both dunking macaroons in their coffee. ‘What the fuck is going on with you two?’

  Laila looked at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Jerry waved at the table. ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re sitting here like…I don’t know…something out of Neighbours. As if everything in the garden was rosy. What’s going on?’

  Lennart shrugged his shoulders. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, there’s no problem. That’s what’s so bloody spooky. Have you joined a cult or something?’ Jerry just didn’t get it. He gobbled a couple more biscuits, said thank you and went down into the cellar.

  The cot was gone, and Theres was sleeping in his old bed these days. She wasn’t wearing a nappy, so presumably she had learned how to use the toilet in the cellar. A home-made cupboard had appeared, with a fretwork front. Jerry could just see a CD player behind the fretwork. Theres was standing in the middle of the floor, not moving a muscle. She was holding a CD in one hand.

  She had grown into a very pretty little girl. Her pale blonde hair had begun to curl around her face, framing her enormous blue eyes and making her look like an angel, nothing more or less.

  Jerry was very taken with the sight of her, and sat down on the floor in front of her without speaking. Her eyes were fixed on his lips. After perhaps ten seconds, she took a step forward, hit him hard across the mouth and said, ‘Talkie!’

  Jerry almost fell over backwards, but managed to support himself with one arm. A reflex action made him give Theres a slap that was hard enough to knock her over. ‘What the fuck are you doing, you little bastard!’

  Theres got to her feet, went over to the bed and crawled up onto it. She sat facing the wall, her back to him, and started humming something. Jerry felt at his mouth. No blood.

  ‘Now then sis,’ he said. ‘We’re not starting all that again, are we?’

  Her shoulders hunched and she bent her neck as if she were embarrassed. Jerry’s heart softened and he said to her back, ‘Oh, let’s forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

  He crept over to her and realised it wasn’t that she was ashamed. She had simply bent her head so that she could see her reflection in the CD. Jerry reached out to take it. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got there.’

  Theres pulled the disc away and growled. There was no other word for the sound that rose from her throat. Jerry laughed and withdrew his hand. ‘OK, OK. I won’t take it. I get it. It’s fine, sis.’

  He sat quietly beside her for a while, looking at her as she looked at herself. Without turning her head, Theres eventually said, ‘Talkie.’

  ‘But I am talking. What do you want me to say? Sorry, or what? Are you cross because I haven’t been around? Is that it? OK, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tarrie talkie. Singie.’

  Jerry frowned. Then he understood. He took out the guitar and played a C. Theres turned and looked at his fingers as he played C again. Her arm shot out. She whacked him on the hand with the CD, and let out a single note.

  Jerry controlled himself and didn’t hit back. A red welt was beginning to appear on the back of his right hand. Theres sang the note again, and raised the CD for a fresh attack.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Jerry said. ‘Calm down. Here you go.’ He played E-major seventh, and the disc was lowered. ‘I forgot. Sorry.’

  As he hadn’t got around to writing anything new, Jerry just sat strumming for a while, playing a few appropriate chords as Theres improvised a melody. The tunes that began to emerge sounded at least as good as the one he had laboriously written down in advance.

  He muted the strings with his hand and looked around the room. Her meagre little world. The CD player, the bed, the jars of baby food.

  Is this it? Is this the way it’s going to be?

  He was roused from his pondering by a pain in his right hand. Theres had stabbed at him again.

  ‘Tarrie talkie!’

  Jerry rubbed the back of his hand. ‘For fuck’s sake, do you think I’m a machine or something?’ He knocked on the body of the guitar. ‘The tarrie will talkie when I want it to talkie, OK?’

  Theres leaned forward and gently stroked the neck of the guitar, whispering, ‘Tarrie? Tarrie?’ She laid her ear against the strings and for a moment Jerry thought the guitar was going to reply. He too lowered his head towards the fretboard.

  From the corner of his eye he just caught sight of the CD heading straight for his cheek, and jerked his head away. The edge of the disc hit the wood of the guitar and made a small notch. Theres opened her eyes wide and screamed, ‘Tarrie! Poor tarrie!’ She reached out to the guitar as if to comfort it and as tears welled in her eyes, Jerry got to his feet.

  ‘Listen sis, no offence, but there’s something wrong inside your head. No question.’

  What had happened? What kind of sect had Lennart and Laila joined?

  Just the usual one, the two-member sect that diligent married couples are inducted into, if they’re lucky. The sect with the motto: We only have each other. Lennart couldn’t say exactly how he had reached this point, but one day he found himself standing in front of the microwave warming pastries as he waited for Laila to get home from Norrtälje. As he watched the pastries slowly spinning around on the plate, he realised that he missed Laila. That he was looking forward to her coming home so they could have a cup of coffee and a warm pastry. That it would be nice.

  It might sound simplistic, but if something can be expressed simply, then why not express it simply?

  Lennart was beginning to appreciate what he had.

  It wasn’t a matter of falling in love with Laila all over again, of forgetting the past and starting afresh. That only happens in the magazines. But he was beginning to look at his life with different eyes. Instead of grinding his teeth over everything he had missed out on, he was
actually looking at what he had.

  He had his health, a decent house, work he enjoyed and which brought him a certain amount of recognition. A wife who had stuck with him all these years and who had his best interests at heart, in spite of everything. A son who at least wasn’t a drug addict.

  And on top of all that he had been chosen as the guardian of the gift down in the cellar. It was impossible to fit the girl into the usual scheme of things; she was a freak of nature, and a considerable responsibility. But the simple fact of bearing a responsibility can be something that gives meaning to life.

  So not a bad life, all in all. Maybe not the stuff of a tribute journal or a framed obituary, but perfectly acceptable. Fine. Perfectly OK.

  He still couldn’t say that Laila looked good exactly, but sometimes, in a certain light…She had lost at least ten kilos in recent months, and a couple of times when they were lying in bed about to go to sleep, he had been turned on by the warmth of her body, her skin, and they had done what man and wife tend to do. This led to more ease and intimacy, and that meant his opinion of her changed a little more, and so on.

  When the girl was five years old, Lennart and Laila were celebrating their wedding anniversary. Yes, celebrating. There was wine with dinner and more wine afterwards, as they sat looking at old photo albums and listening to Abba. Suddenly the girl was standing in the middle of the living room floor. She had come up the stairs from the cellar by herself for the first time. Her eyes swept around the room and did not pause when they reached Lennart and Laila. She sat down on the floor by the fire and started stroking the head of a stone troll she found there.

  Lennart and Laila were happy and slightly tipsy. Without even thinking about it they picked the girl up and settled her between them on the sofa. She wouldn’t let go of the stone troll, but clamped it firmly between her thighs so that she could keep running her hand over it.