Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

‘How do we do that?’

  ‘We just lie down. And pretend we don’t exist. Or we can pretend it’s a funeral.’

  Johannes lay down and stretched out. For once he didn’t seem to mind about his clothes. Teresa lay down next to him and looked up at the angular ceiling of the cave. They lay like that for a while. Teresa tried to think about nothing and discovered that it wasn’t too difficult.

  Eventually Johannes said, ‘Now we’re dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Teresa.

  ‘We’re lying in a grave together, and everyone has gone home.’

  ‘How can we talk, then? If we’re dead?’

  ‘The dead can talk to one another.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘We’re pretending.’

  ‘OK.’

  Teresa looked up at the grey stone ceiling and tried to imagine it was earth. It was impossible. Then she tried to imagine it was a grave like the Vikings had, where they put stones over the corpse. That was easier. She was dead and she was lying beneath a mound of stones. It was rather nice.

  ‘We are the dead,’ said Johannes.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nobody is going to come knocking, nobody is going to ask us to do anything.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everyone has forgotten us.’

  The faint sounds from outside faded away as Teresa drifted into a dense bubble of silence. She had been worried about her lost gym shorts, she had been worried about the darkness under her bed, but now she was no longer worried. It was so simple, being dead. She became completely calm. She might have dropped off to sleep for a moment when she heard Johannes’ voice as if from far away.

  ‘Teresa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When we grow up—shall we get married?’

  ‘Yes. Although I don’t think we can say that now. Not when we’re dead.’

  ‘No. But later. We’ll get married. And then we’ll die at the same time. And lie in a grave together.’

  ‘Yes. Good.’

  In the autumn when Teresa was in Year 5, the class was given the task of writing about their summer. Teresa devoted most of the space available to a description of the family’s trip to Skara Sommarland, although it had only lasted three days and she hadn’t enjoyed herself at all. In the last couple of lines she mentioned that she had also been swimming, cycling, and played board games. The things she had done with Johannes, the things that had taken up most of the rest of the holiday. She didn’t mention his name.

  Of course the rest of the class knew that she and Johannes were friends; it was unavoidable in a small place. But Johannes was nothing to boast about. He wore short-sleeved shirts, beautifully ironed; when he wore shorts he pulled his socks up too high, and he became stiff and awkward as soon as they bumped into other children their own age. The fact that he had a bicycle with twenty-four gears didn’t help at all in the circumstances.

  So she avoided mentioning Johannes. During the summer she had had to put up with a great deal of teasing, not to mention sneering, when she was seen with him. She didn’t want to hear the sniggering or vomiting noises from her classmates if her essay about the summer was read out.

  On one level, therefore, you could say that Teresa’s account of the summer was untruthful. On another level, it wasn’t. She merely avoided mentioning details that might show her in an unfavourable light; remodelled the facts where necessary.

  She knew it was normal and right to visit Skara Sommarland and describe the feeling of her stomach dropping away on the highest water slide, even though she hadn’t been on it. She knew it was OK to complain a bit about how cramped the chalets were, but not to say how tired she was of her father, who never had the energy to join in anything.

  And yet her account was not a lie. She had had a lovely summer holiday, but she didn’t want to write about what had made it so enjoyable. So everything she had written was true, it was just that it had happened in a different way.

  For Christmas that year Johannes was given a Playstation 2, which changed a lot of things. By unspoken agreement they had already abandoned the cave during the summer. Too childish. When the autumn came it was as if they were looking for a new direction, a new way of being together.

  Once the gossip about Teresa and Johannes started to circulate around the village, her brothers started to be nastier to Johannes, which meant that her home was no longer the sanctuary it had been. She didn’t like being in his house; there was something about the atmosphere that made her uncomfortable, almost afraid.

  For a while they did a lot of cycling, riding around the lanes and exploring dilapidated barns and old gravel pits, or visiting the sheep grazing in a field a couple of kilometres away. Sometimes they cycled into Österyd, and it was on one of these excursions that they ended up in the library. Despite the fact that it was a small place, Österyd had a decent library with various sections, secluded reading areas and a couple of chess boards.

  It soon started to get dark earlier and earlier, and for a while they cycled to the library straight after school and played draughts on the chess board, since Johannes wasn’t quite such an expert in that game, or read books and talked quietly.

  Things might well have gone on like that if Johannes hadn’t been given the Playstation for Christmas. By the spring Teresa was forced to spend some time at his house in spite of everything if she wanted to be with him.

  The shiny black leather sofas and the glass table. Johannes’ mother, sneaking in with juice and biscuits. A tough guy by the name of Max Payne, shooting people dead on the TV screen. Johannes’ fingers, flying over the buttons and control sticks. And the cold. It was cold in the house. Teresa had to have a blanket over her as she sat beside Johannes, following his progress through New York’s underworld.

  Johannes bought a game called Tekken 4 and an extra handset. They played against one another. Little Japanese girls and cartoon monsters. Teresa was not without talent; she knew exactly what to do and sometimes won. But she only enjoyed it for a short time. Johannes could carry on for hours.

  When Teresa was leaving, Johannes’ mother would often come rushing in with a hand-held vacuum cleaner to hoover up the biscuit crumbs before Teresa had even got through the door. She would walk the two hundred metres to her own house, and sometimes she felt as if she wanted to cry. But she didn’t cry.

  One day in May, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Teresa was standing in her garden with no idea what to do. Her bike was directly in front of her, leaning against the wall of the garage; the path leading to Johannes’ house was on her left, the drive leading up to the main road was on her right, and her own house was behind her. She didn’t want to go in any of those directions.

  She stood there on the lawn, arms dangling at her sides, and the only directions that held any appeal were up and down. To sink down into the earth, or fly up among the clouds. Both routes were closed to her. She wished she was an animal, she wished she was someone else. She wished she had the ability to pretend.

  She must have stood like that for five minutes, motionless. As she stood there a very clear thought formed in her mind and crystallised into words. She repeated them to herself over and over again.

  I have nowhere to go. I have nowhere to go.

  She swayed on her feet. She considered allowing herself to fall forward with her arms held at her sides to see if the ground would open up. She knew it wouldn’t, so she didn’t do it. Instead she turned her body to the left and forced her legs to move. She left the path to Johannes’ house and went and sat in the cave. She looked at the rough walls, tried to remember when she and Johannes had had their collections of various objects in there. It just made her feel sad.

  I have nowhere to go.

  The words refused to leave her, they went round and round and wouldn’t let her think about anything else. Enveloped in the words she went back to the house, kicked off her shoes in the hallway, went to her room and closed the door behind her. She took out an empty notebook she had bee
n given as a present for her eleventh birthday, and wrote the words right at the top of the first page:

  I have nowhere to go.

  Immediately more words appeared in her mind, and she wrote those down too:

  There is no road.

  She sucked her pen and looked at the words. She was able to think again, and tried to find a sentence that fitted with the other two. In the end she chose:

  And yet I must go.

  She put down the pen and silently read through what she had written. Then she read it out loud.

  I have nowhere to go.

  There is no road.

  And yet I must go.

  It sounded good. It almost sounded like a real poem. Somehow everything seemed easier when she had written it down. As if it wasn’t about her anymore. Or rather it was about her, but in a better way. As if she was part of something big when she stood there not knowing what to do.

  She flicked through the notebook. It was a lovely book, with a leather cover and at least eighty empty, cream-coloured pages. Her stomach flipped as she thought of those pages being filled. With her words, her sentences. After sucking her pen for a while she wrote:

  There must be someone else.

  Then she carried on with that thought until she reached the bottom of the page. She turned over and carried on writing.

  The summer between years 5 and 6 was different from the previous one. Teresa had begun to develop breasts, and tufts of downy hair were visible in Johannes’ armpits. If they cycled to a remote spot to swim they were embarrassed when they had to change in front of one another, and Teresa hated that. It was so unnecessary.

  One day when they were drying off in the sun on a rock by the lake, Teresa wrapped her arms around her legs, drew her knees up to her chin and said, ‘Johannes. Are you in love with me?’

  Johannes opened his eyes wide and looked at her as if she had asked in all seriousness whether he came from Saturn. He answered very firmly: ‘No!’

  ‘Good. Because I’m not in love with you either. So why are things so strange between us?’

  Teresa had been afraid that Johannes would dismiss the question, say that he didn’t know what she meant, but instead his eyes narrowed in concentration. He looked out across the water and shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  Teresa looked at his pale, slender body with its prominent knees and elbows, his sharp chin and high forehead. His full, girlish lips. No. He wasn’t her type of boy. Against her better judgment she thought those hairy, slightly loose-limbed boys were the most attractive.

  She asked, ‘Do you want to kiss me?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But will you do it anyway?’

  Johannes turned to look at her. He scrutinised her face searching for signs that she might be making fun of him, but found none. ‘Why?’

  Teresa shrugged her shoulders. She looked at his soft, rounded lips and felt a tingle in her stomach. She really wasn’t the slightest bit in love with him, but she wanted to know what those lips felt like.

  Johannes gave an embarrassed smile, and he shrugged too. Then he leaned forward and placed his lips on hers. The tingle in Teresa’s stomach grew stronger. Their lips were as dry and warm as the crust on a freshly baked loaf of bread. Then she felt his tongue between her teeth and pulled her head back.

  ‘What are you doing!’

  He couldn’t look her in the eye, and his cheeks flushed deep red. ‘You said you wanted us to kiss.’

  ‘Yes, but not like that.’

  ‘But that’s what you do.’

  ‘When you’re in love, yes, but I mean we’re not in love, are we?’

  Johannes curled up into a ball just as Teresa had done and muttered, ‘Sorry.’

  Teresa also started to blush, but mostly because she realised she had been stupid. She was about to place her hand on Johannes’ shoulder, but gave him a playful punch instead. ‘Doesn’t matter. It was my fault. OK?’

  ‘You said you wanted us to kiss.’

  ‘Listen, can we just forget this now?’

  Johannes looked up from his cocoon. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This whole thing. Can we forget about it now?’

  Presumably Johannes understood what she meant. All of it. The whole boy-girl thing. He said, ‘I suppose so.’

  Teresa rolled her eyes. I suppose so. Oh well. Johannes really wasn’t her type. As if she had a type. Two steps and a jump and she was in the water. She dipped her head beneath the surface and felt rather than heard the muted splash as Johannes followed her.

  In October, Johannes’ father disappeared. One day he came home and said that he had met someone else, that it had been going on for a long time, and that he now intended to start a new life and have a bit of fun at last. He packed two suitcases, got in his car and drove off.

  This was what Johannes told Teresa the following day as they went for a walk to see if the sheep were still there. Johannes walked along with his hands pushed deep in his pockets, staring straight ahead as he talked. When he had finished, Teresa asked, ‘Is it hard?’

  Johannes stopped and looked at his shoes. ‘It would be hard,’ he said, ‘if he came back.’ He looked up and smiled even more unpleasantly than the man in the GB ice cream ads. ‘It would be absolutely fucking fantastic if he could just bloody well stay away. If he never came back.’

  Teresa almost recoiled. It was rare for Johannes to swear; she hadn’t really thought he knew any swear words. Now he’d used two in the same sentence. An almost nasty expression played around his mouth and eyes as something scrolled through his mind.

  The sheep were still there, and Johannes and Teresa walked out into the field, running their fingers through the wool. Johannes was distant, answering Teresa’s questions in monosyllables.

  A wolf had recently been spotted in the area, and as Teresa moved among the woolly bodies she tried to imagine herself as that wolf. The muscles that could bring death, the powerful jaws. The field a bloodbath after she had passed through. All the sweet little sheep lying among their own innards.

  Why do they do that? Why do they kill everything they see?

  Johannes was lost in his own thoughts, Teresa in hers. They parted without deciding when to meet up again.

  Teresa went home and looked up wolves on the internet. They kill because the flight response of the prey triggers the hunting response of the wolf. If all the sheep stood still after the first one had been killed, they’d survive.

  She clicked on the next link, went on reading. Each fact led to fresh questions, and after a couple of hours she knew more about wolves than any other animal. There was something fascinating about the fact that this mythical creature still existed in Sweden, albeit in small numbers. Terrifying. And promising.

  The day before she was due to go back to school after the Christmas holiday, Teresa was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She hated her appearance. Her cheeks were too round and her eyes were too small, she had a slightly upturned nose, and all in all it made her look like a pig.

  She wished someone could tell her what to do. Should she pluck her eyebrows, use a kohl pencil, should she bleach her hair? If someone could guarantee that it would help, she’d do it. But she didn’t think it would help. She’d look like a tarted-up pig instead of just a pig, and that would be worse. She could already hear the taunts.

  But the worst thing was something that had happened over the last few months. Over the waistband of her knickers hung folds of pale, flabby skin. She had started to get fat. The bathroom scales showed fifty-eight kilos, only four kilos more than in September, but they had settled in the wrong places.

  She probably had the largest breasts in the class but instead of showing them off with a push-up bra and tight tops as some of the girls did, she just wanted to hide them, squash them down. All they did was make her feel even more clumsy and disgusting.

  Teresa looked herself in the eye in the mirror and made a decision. She wasn’t going to sit around feeling sor
ry for herself. She was going to do something about it. She found a facial scrub among her mother’s things and rubbed it over her face until the skin was red, then rinsed it off and dried herself. The greasy sheen on her cheeks had disappeared for the moment.

  She dug out her hooded top and jogging pants and put on her trainers. She would take up running. Four days a week, at least. Yes. That would suit her. Running alone along the roads, torturing herself. She would become a wolf, a lone wolf, strong and swift as she raced past people’s homes. The wolf would eat up the pig with a huff and a puff.

  Her cheeks were still burning from the facial scrub and her determination as she ran out from her drive. After two hundred metres the cold air started to make her chest hurt. She gritted her teeth and staggered on.

  When she had covered another two hundred metres the pain in her chest was so bad she wanted to stop, but then she heard a moped chugging along behind her and forced herself to go on; she didn’t want anyone to see her give up.

  The moped caught up with her. In the saddle sat Stefan, who was in Year 8, and behind him Jenny, who was in Teresa’s class. Jenny never missed an opportunity to relay what Stefan said and what Stefan did, just to emphasise the fact that they were very much an item.

  Stefan slowed down and puttered alongside Teresa.

  ‘Faster! Faster!’ he yelled.

  Teresa forced a smile and carried on at the same speed, moving so slowly that Stefan had to use his feet to balance the moped and stop it falling over. Her chest was about to explode.

  Above the chugging of the engine Jenny shouted, ‘Move your backside!’ and leaned over to smack Teresa’s bottom. The shift in weight distribution made the moped wobble, and Teresa had to step onto the verge, where she slipped on the frosty grass. She managed to avoid falling by running down into the ditch.

  The moped accelerated and shot off up the road, Jenny’s white-blonde hair flying out behind her, as clear as the rump of a fleeing deer. Teresa stood panting in the ditch, her hands on her hips. She felt as if she were dying. Her windpipe was constricted, her lungs were aching and she was embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed.