Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  After catching her breath for a couple of minutes she went back the way she had come. As she sat in the hallway taking off her trainers, Göran came down the stairs.

  ‘Hi sweetheart. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Have you been out jogging?’

  ‘No.’

  Teresa walked past him and went into the kitchen, where she took three cinnamon buns out of the freezer and put them in the microwave. Göran lingered in the doorway. He cleared his throat a couple of times as if he were gathering himself, then asked, ‘How are things?’

  Teresa stared at the buns, slowly rotating in the microwave. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine? I don’t think you look as if things are fine.’

  ‘No. Well. They are.’

  Teresa mixed a glass of O’Boy chocolate milk and when the microwave pinged she took out the three buns, put them on a plate, pushed past Göran, placed the glass and the plate on the coffee table in the living room and switched on the television. The Discovery Channel was showing a documentary about elephants.

  Göran came and sat down next to her. Since he had stepped down from his managerial role and become an ordinary assistant again, the dark rings under his eyes had faded and he had become more available as a father. The problem was that nobody was interested in his availability anymore. Teresa couldn’t say exactly when it had happened, but at some point she had stopped talking to her father about anything important.

  But still. When they had been sitting there for a while, and had learned that elephants can express emotions in a similar way to humans, and that they drink approximately two hundred litres of water a day, there was a kind of quiet companionship between them. Teresa ate her buns and drank her O’Boy. It felt good.

  She turned to her father to start a conversation in spite of everything by asking how things were with him. But Göran had fallen asleep. He was lying there with his mouth half-open, gurgling as he breathed. When a drop of saliva appeared at the corner of his mouth, Teresa turned away and concentrated on the elephants.

  The program had moved on to explaining how elephants had been used as executioners and killing machines in large parts of Asia. Crushing heads, crunching bones with their trunks. Human emotions. Yeah, right.

  In February a For Sale sign appeared by the roadside, and it was pointing to Johannes’ house. Teresa hadn’t seen much of him lately, and the sign came as a surprise to her. She hadn’t been round to his house since his father moved out, but when she saw the sign she went over and rang the bell.

  Johannes opened the door. When he saw her his face lit up and he gave her a quick hug. ‘Teresa! Good to see you! Come in!’

  She only had to take one step into the hallway to see how much the house had changed. Shoes and boots that used to be arranged on a shoe rack as if they were standing to attention were now lying around all over the place. When she took off her jacket she could feel that the house was several degrees warmer than it used to be.

  In the living room Johannes’ games were strewn all over the coffee table with a half-empty packet of crisps next to them. Johannes slumped down on the sofa and offered her the packet; Teresa took a couple of crisps and sat down on the armchair.

  Johannes spotted a box and grinned. ‘Shall we have a game of Tekken? Just for fun?’

  Teresa shrugged her shoulders and Johannes slithered off the sofa to insert the game. Only now, seeing Johannes in this altered environment, did Teresa notice how much he had changed. His clothes hung loosely, his movements were casual and his smile had been freed from a pressure that said there was nothing to smile about. He just smiled.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’ she asked.

  ‘Some Spanish course, I think. Or dancing, I don’t know.’

  Teresa tried to picture this. It was almost impossible. But if she needed final proof, she got it when her gaze fell on the hand-held vacuum cleaner that Johannes’ mother had used so assiduously in the past. It was covered in a thin layer of dust.

  Johannes chucked her a handset and she manoeuvred adroitly through the menus and chose Kuma, the bear in the red T-shirt. To her surprise Johannes chose Lee Chaolan, who resembled a well-groomed male model more than anything. He used to go for Julia Chang, the woman with the unbreakable glasses.

  As the intro began to play, Teresa pressed pause.

  ‘Johannes,’ she said. ‘Are you moving house?’

  Johannes pushed back his hair, which he had allowed to grow. ‘Yes. Dad’s frittered away his money somehow, and now he wants half the house.’

  ‘What do you mean, half the house?’

  ‘Mum has to buy him out if we want to stay here, and she can’t do that.’

  ‘So where are you going to live?’

  ‘Dunno. In an apartment, maybe. In Österyd. I mean, I’ll be starting Year 7 there anyway, so…what about you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Where will you be going to high school?’

  ‘Österyd, I suppose.’

  ‘Great. We’ll see each other there, then. Maybe we’ll be in the same class.’

  ‘Yes…’

  Teresa didn’t want to be in the same class as Johannes, and his nonchalant attitude almost made her want to cry. She wished she could go somewhere far, far away where no one knew her, and start all over again. With…yes, with Johannes. But it was too soon for that. And it was already too late.

  ‘Teresa?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are we playing, or what?’

  She pressed the start button and the fight began. Kuma lumbered into the arena. Lee made his moves. Suddenly Teresa felt it was absolutely essential for her to win. With a frenzy that was unusual for her, her fingers flew over the buttons as she tried to achieve the combos she could still remember.

  But it was no use. Without disturbing one hair in his perfectly groomed fringe, Lee threw Kuma around all over the place, kicked him and beat him until he lay flat out in his red T-shirt, with his nose pointing skywards.

  Teresa’s cheeks burned and she just wanted to scream. This was totally unreal. In reality the bear would have torn the model to pieces, ripped his head from his body. The floor would have been covered in blood.

  Johannes moved house in the middle of May. Teresa stood in the window of the box room on the second floor munching on a piece of crispbread with peanut butter as she watched the last removal van disappear down the drive. A fly was dancing against the glass, and the gritty paste in Teresa’s mouth became difficult to swallow. Then it was over. Somewhere in the house Maria was shouting for Teresa to come and try on her graduation dress.

  The dress that had fitted perfectly in the middle of May didn’t fit quite so well in the middle of June. Teresa stood right at the back along with the rest of Year 6, miming the words to the traditional songs, Den blomstertid nu kommer and Barfotavisan. She saw the youngest children racing around or hopping impatiently on the spot. The summer was almost here.

  Arvid and Olof had their end-of-year assemblies later in the week and Göran had to work, so Teresa’s family was represented by Maria, along with Göran’s parents Ingrid and Johan. There wasn’t much conversation afterwards as they sat on a blanket behind the football field having their picnic. Johan sat fingering the necklace made of plastic beads which he still wore, and Ingrid handed over a gift voucher for five hundred kronor.

  It was a beautiful day, perfect for the end of the school year. Wispy clouds drifted across a picture postcard blue sky, and children’s laughter rang out in the warm air. Teresa sat cross-legged on the blanket and realised she was really happy. When Ingrid placed a hand on her knee and said, ‘Just think, you’ve got the whole glorious summer ahead of you,’ she answered in all honesty, ‘Yes, it’ll be lovely.’

  She would never fully understand what happened the following day.

  She and Johannes had agreed over the phone that she would come over to his new apartment. When she stepped out into the garden at ten o’clock in the morning
, she was filled with something light and happy. It was another lovely day, and it would be nice to cycle the four kilometres to Österyd. The seventy days of the summer holiday lay before her like empty, brightly coloured boxes, just waiting to be filled.

  She had been given a new bike for her twelfth birthday just over six months earlier. Three gears—she didn’t want any more than that. She checked that the tyres were well pumped up before she jumped on and set off along the gravel track.

  The stones crunched beneath the wheels and the breeze fanned her face as she sped along. She had to cycle a kilometre along the gravel track before she came out on the main road leading to Österyd. When a bird chirruped in a tree close by, she clearly formulated the thought: I am a child on the first day of my summer holiday. I am cycling along a fine gravel track.

  She looked up and saw the track snaking away between the fields. She stopped pedalling and just coasted along. I am a child and the summer holiday has just…

  Something changed.

  At first she thought it was a storm cloud that had drifted over and blocked the sun, the feeling was so strong. But the sky was virtually cloudless, and the sun was pouring down its light over the world.

  So how come she suddenly thought the gravel track stretching out ahead of her disappeared into darkness in the distance? After all, she knew this stretch very well. Two hundred metres along the flat, then up a hill, then the field where the sheep were, then a gentle slope down to the main road. But that wasn’t what she could see now. She could see a track leading towards the great unknown, surrounded by vast expanses upon which her feet had never walked.

  She had thought that the world consisted of a number of different places, and the roads between them. That was all that existed, her little planet. It was as if she had been swimming around in a little creek, and now she had suddenly been dropped in the middle of the sea, with no land in sight in any direction. She couldn’t get her breath, she gripped the handlebars tightly and braked. She rubbed her eyes.

  There’s something wrong with my eyes. I can’t see properly.

  She got off her bike and looked back in the direction she had come from. The track snaked off in the same way and disappeared behind a grove of elder trees. She no longer believed that her house was at the end of the track. Everything had been erased or was being erased behind her, and the contours were blurred.

  Fear clutched at her heart. She was a small person cast out into the universe, and she knew nothing about anything.

  Stop it. What are you doing?

  The fear ebbed slightly. Perhaps she could talk herself round. She tried. It worked to a certain extent, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling that everything behind her had been erased. She hauled herself back onto her bike and cycled home. The house was still there.

  She rang Johannes and told him she’d had a puncture. The experience remained in her body. It wasn’t that she was afraid of leaving her own garden, it was just that she did so less and less often.

  One Saturday Johannes came over to her house on his bike, although they hadn’t made any arrangements. He was wearing a pair of crumpled shorts that reached down to his knees, and a yellow T-shirt that emphasised his tan. Teresa felt almost shy as they hugged.

  He had been to Majorca for a week with his mother, he explained as Teresa got out crispbread and peanut butter. His mother had met some guy who lived in Norrköping, and she had gone off to spend the weekend with him, so Johannes was as free as a bird. Maybe he could stay over?

  Teresa wasn’t prepared for this disruption of her normal routine, so she replied evasively that she would have to check with her parents. As they sat opposite one another at the kitchen table, she felt for the first time that she didn’t know what to say to Johannes. It was as if he came from another world. The world outside her garden.

  The situation was saved by Olof who came in to make himself a sandwich; after a while he and Johannes were deep in a discussion about Runescape. When Olof went to the toilet, Johannes asked, ‘Do you fancy going for a swim?’

  ‘I haven’t got a swimsuit.’

  ‘Well, we can always go skinny dipping.’

  Teresa would gladly have given every last krona of her savings to avoid what happened next: a blush began to spread across her whole face, and she stared down at the floor. She heard Johannes snort.

  ‘Oh, come on. We sorted all that out, didn’t we?’

  ‘Well yes, but…’

  That kiss. Teresa had thought Johannes wouldn’t remember it, but obviously he did, and that made her even more embarrassed. She wanted to slither out of her skin and dissolve into a puddle. Just to have something to do, she took out another piece of crispbread. The knife scraped loudly as she spread the peanut butter right to the very edges with exaggerated care. She took a bite and the crunch was deafening. Johannes looked at her and she looked out of the window.

  When Olof came back and asked Johannes if he fancied a game of Runescape, Johannes glanced at Teresa and she shrugged. They sat down at the computer in the living room and Teresa watched as they took it in turns to kill off monsters and evil wizards.

  She never got around to asking Maria and Göran if Johannes could stay over. He had dinner with them, chatting mainly with Arvid and Olof. After dinner he went out and got on his bike. Teresa followed him to say goodbye.

  When he had rung the bell and set off, it was as if something occurred to him. He swung around and pulled up next to Teresa, his feet on the ground to balance the bike.

  ‘Teresa?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We are friends, aren’t we? Even if things are a bit different, sort of.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Johannes swirled his foot around in the gravel in a way that she remembered from when he was little.

  ‘Just…I don’t know. I mean, things aren’t the same anymore. But we can still be friends, can’t we?’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  Johannes frowned and considered the question. Then he looked Teresa in the eye and said very seriously, ‘Yes. That’s what I want.’

  ‘Then we’re friends.’

  ‘But is that what you want?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I want.’

  Johannes nodded several times. Then he gave a big smile and said, ‘Good,’ leaned forward and kissed Teresa on the cheek. He pushed down the pedals and disappeared down the drive, waving over his shoulder.

  Teresa stood there with her arms dangling and watched him disappear along the gravel track. She saw the track dissolve in that same mist, she saw Johannes cycling along the track. In a minute he would be swallowed up by it, and there was nothing she could do.

  Normally the members of the family lived in separate little worlds, but that summer they surrounded Teresa more closely. At first she thought it was because Johannes had moved away. Or perhaps it was his absence that made her notice her family’s presence.

  Whatever the reason, Arvid and Olof started to ask if she wanted to join in when they were playing computer games. Maria tried to get her to come along when it was time to go shopping, and Göran was usually available for a game of cards. She began to suspect there had been a secret family meeting, and a decision had been made: everybody must play with Teresa.

  At first she accepted it. She played and surfed the net with Olof and Arvid, she helped Maria in the kitchen and she played Cheat and Old Maid with Göran until they knew each other’s strategies so well they had to double and triple bluff to get anywhere.

  But after a couple of weeks she began to feel there was something rather strained in their efforts, as if they were staff at a summer camp she was visiting.

  One morning when she was standing in front of the mirror pulling her cheeks back to see what she would look like if she was Chinese and not fat, she saw something else instead. She let go of her cheeks and examined her face.

  She had brown hair and thick, brown eyebrows. Her nose was small and slightly upturned, her lips were thin. The res
t of the family also had brown hair and brown eyes, but in a lighter shade. They had fuller lips, and their noses were straighter and more slender than Teresa’s. She couldn’t see any resemblance between them.

  It struck her with absolute certainty: I’m adopted.

  The thought didn’t upset her; quite the reverse. It explained a great deal. She didn’t belong, it was that simple.

  Something inside her told her it wasn’t true. She had seen the announcement of her birth that had appeared in the newspaper, she had seen her christening photo. Something else told her these things were fake. Her heart told her this, stubbornly pounding the new message into her blood: you don’t belong here.

  In the middle of July, Arvid and Olof were going to a football camp. Maria and Göran had taken the opportunity to book a weekend away with Silja Line, along with Teresa. Now Teresa said she didn’t want to go. They tried to persuade her, but behind their pleading she thought she could hear an undertone of relief. The idea of getting away from the changeling for a couple of days. She thought they deserved it. They were nice people really, both of them. She had realised this now she didn’t belong to them anymore.

  They left her with a supply of ready-cooked meals, and Maria wrote completely unnecessary little notes for her about how various things worked, but Teresa just let her carry on. Eventually they got in the car and drove off, waving furiously to Teresa as she stood on the porch. She went inside and closed the door behind her.

  Silence.

  And silence.

  She crept through the hallway. Silence.

  It wasn’t the first time she had been home alone, but the silence took on a completely different weight when she knew she was going to be on her own for forty hours. Göran and Maria would be home the following evening. The thought that the house was now hers was exciting and a little bit frightening. She could do whatever she wanted without the risk of anyone coming home and catching her.