Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  If Maria had had a different sense of humour, she might have laughed at her daughter’s obviously defiant answer, then hunted out everything yellow she could lay her hands on. However, she didn’t have that particular sense of humour. Instead she nodded grimly and said, ‘OK. If that’s the way you want it, I’ll decide for you. Stay there.’

  It is possible that we inherit certain characteristics from our parents. If this is the case, it was her sense of order that Teresa had inherited from her mother. In the clothes storeroom was a big box labelled ‘Fancy Dress’, since neither Arvid nor Olof had anything against getting dressed up—quite the opposite, in fact. After a few minutes Maria was back in the kitchen with black and red make-up, a black cape and a pair of plastic fangs.

  ‘You can be a vampire,’ she said. ‘Do you know what a vampire is?’

  Teresa nodded, and Maria took this as a sign of approval.

  When Göran got home at eight o’clock, Maria asked him to pick Teresa up from the disco. He turned around in the hallway and went mechanically back to the car. This week had almost finished him, and the world felt like a piece of flat stage scenery as he drove towards the school.

  Music was pounding from the gym, and a few children in costume were charging around outside the entrance. Göran blinked and rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t do it. He just didn’t have the strength to walk into that pulsating grotto of excited little bodies and well-meaning parents.

  He wanted to go home. He knew he couldn’t. With an effort he hauled his soul to its feet from its slumped, sideways position and walked towards the entrance, smiling and nodding at the parents who had been kind enough to organise this inferno.

  Multi-coloured lights flashed across the darkened room. Sweets and popcorn were scattered all over the floor, and infants dressed as monsters were running around chasing one another while Markoolio sang that song about heading for the mountains to drink and screw. Göran peered into the darkness, trying to spot his daughter so that he could take her home.

  He had to walk around before he found her sitting on a chair by the wall. She had thick black kohl all around her eyes, and her mouth looked oddly swollen. From the corners of her mouth ran painted-on trickles of dried blood. Her hands were resting on her knees.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart. Shall we go home?’

  Teresa looked up. Her eyes shone bright within their frame of black. She got up and Göran held out his hand. She didn’t take it, but followed him out to the car.

  It was a relief to close the car door. The sound was muted and they were alone. He glanced at Teresa, sitting in the passenger seat staring straight ahead, and asked, ‘So did you have a good time?’

  Teresa didn’t reply. He started the car and pulled out of the school car park. When they were driving along the road, he asked, ‘Did you get any sweets?’

  Teresa mumbled something in reply.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Teresa mumbled something again, and Göran turned to look at her. ‘What’s that in your mouth?’

  Teresa parted her lips and showed her fangs. A cold shudder ran down Göran’s spine. For a brief moment he thought she looked genuinely horrible. Then he said, ‘I think you could take those out now, sweetheart. So I can hear what you say.’

  Teresa removed the teeth and sat there with them in her hand, but she still didn’t say anything. Göran tried again.

  ‘Did you get any sweets?’ Teresa nodded and the best follow-up Göran’s weary brain could come up with was, ‘Were they nice?’

  ‘I couldn’t eat them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Teresa held out the fangs. Göran felt a stab of pain in his chest. A dot of sorrow grew and grew, pressing against his ribs. ‘But sweetheart, you could have taken them out. So you could eat your sweets.’

  Teresa shook her head and said nothing more until they had parked on the drive at home. When Göran had switched off the engine and they were sitting in the darkness she said, ‘I told Mum I didn’t want to go. I told her.’

  The Svensson family lived in a new house on what had been agricultural land before it was carved up. A narrow strip of conifers and deciduous trees separated them from their nextdoor neighbour. Among the trees were two big rocks, or rather boulders, lying side by side in such a way that a cave a few metres square was formed at their base. The autumn before Teresa turned ten, she had begun to spend more and more of her free time there.

  One day at the end of September when Teresa was sitting in her secret room setting out an exhibition of different-coloured autumn leaves, something blocked the light from the entrance. A boy of her own age was standing there.

  ‘Hi,’ said the boy.

  ‘Hi,’ said Teresa, glancing up briefly before returning to her leaves. The boy stayed where he was without speaking, and Teresa wished he would go. He didn’t look the way people usually looked. He was wearing a blue shirt, buttoned right up to the neck. Teresa tried to concentrate on the leaves, but it was difficult with someone standing there watching her.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Ten,’ said Teresa. ‘In a month. And a week.’

  ‘It was my tenth birthday two weeks ago,’ said the boy. ‘I’m seven weeks older than you.’

  Teresa shrugged her shoulders. Boys always had to boast. Sorting out the leaves, which had absorbed her completely only a moment ago, suddenly seemed childish. She scraped them into a heap but couldn’t leave while the boy was standing there blocking the opening. He looked around and said with a certain amount of gloom in his voice, ‘I live here now.’

  ‘Oh, where?’

  The boy nodded in the direction of the house on the other side of the trees. ‘There. We moved in yesterday. I think this is our garden. But you can use it if you want.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s up to you to decide.’

  The boy looked down at the ground, took a deep breath and let out the air in a long sigh. Then he shook his head. ‘No. It’s not up to me to decide.’

  Teresa didn’t understand what kind of boy this was. At first he had seemed boastful, and now he was standing there looking as if somebody was about to hit him. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Johannes.’

  Teresa thought that was quite a safe name. Not like Micke or Kenny. She got up and Johannes moved so that she could get out. They stood facing one another. Johannes swirled the leaves around with his toe. He was wearing a pair of trainers that looked almost new. Teresa said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask what my name is?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Teresa. I live here too. There.’ She pointed at her house. Johannes looked at the house, then carried on poking at the leaves with his foot. Teresa wanted to go home, but in some strange way she felt as if she ought to look after Johannes. There was something about that shirt that looked so uncomfortable. She asked, ‘Shall we do something?’

  Johannes nodded without making any suggestions, so Teresa went on, ‘So what shall we do, then? What do you usually do?’

  Johannes shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not much.’

  ‘Do you like board games?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you play Chinese checkers?’

  ‘Yes. I’m really good at it.’

  ‘How good?’

  ‘I usually win.’

  ‘So do I. When I play my dad.’

  ‘I usually win when I play my mum.’

  Teresa went inside and fetched the game. When she came back Johannes had crawled into the cave and was sitting there waiting for her. She didn’t like him sitting there. That was her place. But she remembered her father saying that those rocks were actually on the neighbour’s property, just as Johannes had said. So she couldn’t really chuck him out. But she could move him.

  ‘That’s my place,’ she said.

  ‘So where shall I sit?’

  Teresa pointed to the back wall of the cave. ‘There.’

  When Johannes got up, Teresa saw that he had been sittin
g on her pile of leaves. He scooped them up in his arms and tipped them out in his designated place, then gathered them together and patted them down before sitting on them. Teresa was still annoyed with him for moving into her cave, so to tease him she said, ‘Are you frightened of getting your trousers dirty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The direct answer disarmed her and she couldn’t come up with anything else to say, so she put the board on the ground and sat down opposite Johannes. In silence they picked up the plastic counters and placed them on their spots. Then Johannes said, ‘You can start because you’re the smallest.’

  A wave of heat spread over the tips of Teresa’s ears, and she snapped, ‘You can start because it’s my game.’

  Johannes shook his head. ‘You can start because you’re a girl.’

  Teresa’s ears were positively on fire by now, and she was on the point of getting up and walking out. But then she would have to leave the game behind, so instead she said, ‘You can start because you’re much more stupid than me!’

  Johannes looked at her open-mouthed. Then he did something unexpected. He started to giggle. Teresa glared at him. Johannes giggled for a while, then he became totally serious and made his first move. She couldn’t work him out.

  Johannes won the first game and Teresa agreed to start the next game, since he had started last time because he was more stupid than her. She lost again. Johannes played in a strange way, as if he were thinking everything out well in advance.

  She didn’t really want to play any more, but Johannes said, ‘Just one more time, winner takes all.’

  They played one more game and Teresa won, but she had the distinct feeling that Johannes had lost on purpose. It was getting dark, and Teresa gathered up the game. She said, ‘Bye then,’ and left Johannes sitting in the cave.

  A few weeks later they were inseparable, and who would have expected anything else? Johannes was a strange boy, but Teresa was old enough to see herself from the outside, and realised she was pretty strange too. She tried to fit in with her classmates as best she could, but it never really worked.

  She wasn’t bullied, she wasn’t exactly excluded, but she wasn’t part of it all. She wasn’t there. She knew all the skipping games as well as anyone else and had the courage to swing higher than any girl in her class, but it was all the talk in between. The chatter, the gestures. She just couldn’t do it, and became stiff and odd when she tried to imitate the others. So she gave up.

  The only person in the class who actively sought her out was Mimmi, but she wore secondhand clothes and didn’t wash her hair and wasn’t all there, because her mother was a junkie. Teresa rebuffed her kindly. When that didn’t work, she rebuffed her somewhat less kindly.

  Johannes was odd in a more normal way. It was as if he had a shell of bad oddness, but if you just scraped away a little bit, a better kind of oddness emerged. Teresa knew he attended the Waldorf school in Rimsta, and that was all she knew. They never talked about school. Jennifer in Teresa’s class said the Waldorf kids were crazy and just made stuff out of clay.

  Like Teresa, Johannes liked learning things. He read a lot of books, mostly about war and birds. Sometimes they would talk about something, wonder about something, and the next day Johannes would have looked it up and come back with the answer, telling her for example that only certain female ants became queens, most were soldiers or workers.

  They often hung out among the trees and made up various games and competitions. Who could throw pine cones most accurately (Johannes), who could run fastest (Teresa), or who could name the most animals starting with the same letter (usually Johannes). What they didn’t do was play games involving imagination, or anything that might dirty Johannes’ clothes. This meant they spent quite a lot of time talking instead.

  Once when Johannes didn’t turn up as usual in the afternoon, Teresa went to his house and rang the doorbell. His mother opened the door. She was small and slender and looked scared. Her eyes were enormous, and twitched as if she wanted to blink but couldn’t. When Teresa asked about Johannes, his mother said he would probably be home any minute—would she like to come in and wait?

  No, she wouldn’t. She could see through the doorway that it was dark inside, and it smelled extremely clean. This was such a contrast with her own house that it felt uncomfortable. She went and sat on the garden wall instead.

  After no more than ten minutes a black, shiny car turned into the drive. It made almost no sound. The car stopped a few metres from Teresa, the driver’s door opened and a man wearing a suit and tie stepped out. He was short but broad-shouldered, and looked like a cartoon character. His face was so clean and clear that it could have been a drawing.

  The man smiled at Teresa, showing his white teeth. Even his smile looked as if it had been drawn. He said, ‘Would you mind not sitting on the wall, please?’ and Teresa jumped down at once. The man took a few steps towards her, held out his hand and said, ‘And you are…?’

  Teresa took his hand, which was warm and dry, said, ‘Teresa,’ and before she even realised how it had happened she had bobbed a curtsey, something she never normally did. Her knees just bent by themselves. The man held onto her hand and said, ‘You’re a friend of Johannes, I gather?’

  Teresa stole a glance at Johannes, who had got out of the car and was standing by the bonnet looking slightly wary. She nodded. The man let go of her hand and said, ‘Well, in that case I’d better not hold you up. Off you go and play.’

  The man turned and walked towards the house, while Teresa and Johannes stood motionless, as if they had been turned to stone. It was only when the front door had closed that Johannes left his place by the bonnet and came over.

  ‘My father,’ he said in an apologetic tone of voice. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Waiting for you.’

  ‘Did you ring the doorbell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Johannes looked over towards the house and pulled a face. ‘You shouldn’t do that, my mother gets so…don’t do it again.’

  ‘No. I won’t.’

  Johannes hunched his shoulders and gave a long sigh, something he did from time to time that made him seem several years older. Then he said, ‘Shall we do something?’

  Something had happened that made Teresa able to say what she said next. It was cold outside and therefore it was a perfectly natural thing to say, it was just that she’d never said it before. She said, ‘We could go back to my house.’

  Over the winter they met up mostly at Teresa’s house when they weren’t outdoors. Arvid and Olof teased her at first and said, ‘Kissy kissy’ and ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ but soon gave up when neither Teresa nor Johannes took any notice.

  Mostly they played board games. Monopoly, Othello, Battleships and Yahtzee. They tried chess a couple of times, but Johannes was so unbelievably good there was no point. Ten moves, and it was checkmate for Teresa.

  ‘It’s only because I know what to do,’ Johannes said modestly. ‘Dad taught me. I’d rather play something else.’

  When the weather improved they went back to meeting up outdoors, and spending time in the cave. Johannes had started reading the Harry Potter books, and lent the first one to Teresa. She didn’t like it. She couldn’t believe the story. She did feel a bit sorry for the boy who had such a difficult time, but when that giant turned up on his flying motorbike, she stopped reading. Things like that just didn’t happen.

  ‘But it’s just pretend,’ said Johannes. ‘It’s made up.’

  ‘But why would you want to read about it?’

  ‘Because it’s cool.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s cool at all.’

  Johannes got cross and started rummaging around in the box of stones they’d collected. ‘Well, what about that Robinson Crusoe you like so much? That’s made up as well.’

  ‘It is not!’

  ‘It is so! That never really happened, I read it in the National Encyclopaedia.’

  Back to the National Encyclopaedia
. As soon as they needed proof of something, Johannes was there with his National Encyclopaedia. He’d explained that it was a whole lot of thick books with absolutely everything in them. Teresa had begun to wonder if this National Encyclopaedia really existed. At any rate, she’d never seen it.

  ‘We-ell,’ said Teresa. ‘At least it could have happened. That business with owls bringing the post can’t have happened.’

  ‘Why not—haven’t you heard of pigeon post?’

  ‘And flying motorbikes? And magic umbrellas? Are they in your encyclopaedia too?’

  Johannes folded his arms tightly across his chest and glowered at the ground. Teresa was extremely pleased with herself. It was usually Johannes who fixed things so that you were left with no possible answer. Now she’d done it. She pulled the box of stones towards her and started arranging them in order of size, humming as she worked.

  After a while she heard a strange noise. Like a frog, or the sound you make when you’ve got something stuck in your throat. She looked up and saw that Johannes’ shoulders were moving up and down. Was he laughing? She tried to come up with something caustic to say, but then she realised he was crying, and the corrosion trickled away.

  He was crying in his own way. An almost mechanical ‘uh-uh-uh’ was coming out of his mouth as his shoulders kept time, bobbing up and down. He would have looked like someone pretending to cry, very badly, if it hadn’t been for the tears pouring down his cheeks. Teresa didn’t know what to do. She would have liked to say something kind to Johannes, but nothing occurred to her, so she just sat there facing him as he jolted out his grief over something she didn’t understand.

  Johannes took a deep breath and wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Then he said, ‘Can we pretend something?’

  Teresa’s body felt soft. If it would make Johannes feel better to pretend, then she could certainly give it a go, so she said, ‘Like what?’

  ‘Can we pretend we’re dead?’