Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  By chance she ended up on a forum for people who enjoyed renovating old houses. For this she created Johan, twenty-eight, who absolutely loved vandalising, even burning down, houses like that. On a site for those who considered themselves environmentally friendly Tomas, forty-two, wrote about how much he adored his 4x4, and campaigned for a reduction in the tax on petrol.

  But she tended to stick to forums like Lunarstorm, where young girls discussed their problems. Their indignant little comments would make her shudder with pleasure, and as time went by she discovered an even more effective weapon than cynicism, namely irony.

  On a forum about animal rights, containing despairing accounts of cruelty towards the dear little furry creatures, Elvira, fifteen, wrote about an experiment in Japan where they had poked out the eyes of eight hundred baby rabbits just to see if it affected their hearing, then set fire to them to see if the little blind screaming bunnies could find their way out of a labyrinth. Elvira got over forty replies, quivering with rage over the cruelty of man.

  The only exception was the wolves. On a forum where the rights of wolves were discussed, her alias Josefin maintained a more reasonable tone, and put forward Teresa’s own views. She needed at least one place where she could be herself, or almost herself.

  Trolling gave her a key insight: you don’t need much energy to provoke a powerful reaction, as long as you use that energy in the right way. Something as simple as a broken plastic fork stuck in the lock of a classroom door could lead to a circus lasting at least half an hour, involving the caretaker, a locksmith, teachers and relocated lessons, and it only took five seconds to do.

  How long did it take to put a drawing pin on a chair, and how much chaos did that cause? It was just like on the internet: all it took was a few clicks, a few words in the right place and in seconds there were twenty people busy expending far more time and energy on responding than it had taken her to write the comment in the first place.

  Teresa might not have looked like much to the rest of the world, but through her alter egos and her well-planned little tricks she, the troll, took up more of other people’s time and thoughts than pretty Agnes, for example, could ever hope to do.

  Everybody loved Agnes, and Teresa just couldn’t work her out. She was so bloody nice. All the pretty girls Teresa had known had been full of themselves, stupid, and obsessed with their appearance. Not Agnes. She was nice to everybody, worked hard in school and didn’t seem to care at all about how she looked.

  If she had her hair in plaits she looked cute, if she wore it loose she looked pretty, and if she tied a scarf around her head she was as beautiful as a movie star, but without seeming to notice. Teresa ought to have hated Agnes, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  One afternoon when Teresa was standing by the poetry section in the library flicking through some newly arrived collections, she heard a discreet ‘Hi’ behind her. She turned around and was met by a breath of fresh air mixed with the scent of flowers, emanating from Agnes.

  Teresa said, ‘Hi,’ and felt a blush spread over her cheeks. As if she were about to sit an exam and hadn’t done a stroke of work. She stood there like a lump, saying nothing. Agnes seemed uncomfortable too, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Then she pointed to the shelf behind Teresa. ‘I was just going to…’

  Teresa moved to one side and surreptitiously watched Agnes, who was glancing over the thin spines of the books. When she was apparently unable to find what she was looking for, she began to move slowly along the rows, reading every single title.

  ‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’ asked Teresa.

  ‘Yes,’ said Agnes. ‘It said on the computer that they had several books by Kristian Lundberg, but I can’t find them.’

  ‘Do you read Kristian Lundberg?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No, I just…nothing.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I might have read the odd thing.’

  Agnes carried on peering at the section where the books should have been, and pulled out a volume of Kristina Lugn’s collected poems instead. She flicked aimlessly through it and said, ‘It was Mum who said I ought to look at that Lundberg guy. But I don’t know, I mean he’s not much fun, is he?’

  ‘No, well, not like Kristina Lugn anyway.’

  Agnes shook her head and smiled the smile that could probably bring down trees. ‘I think she’s good, because her poems are like really really sad and really really funny at the same time.’

  All Teresa could come up with was, ‘Right.’ She didn’t understand what somebody like Agnes could get out of Kristina Lugn’s splenetic humour. But she crouched down and pulled out Close to the Eye, Anders Bodegård’s translation of poems by Wislawa Szymborska. She held it out to Agnes and said, ‘Try this. It’s quite funny too.’

  Agnes opened the book at random and started to read a poem. It took Teresa a few seconds to realise she was standing there holding her breath. She exhaled silently and slowly as she contemplated Agnes, whose plaits lay on either side of the book, framing the picture and creating an image that could have been used in advertising to promote literacy.

  Agnes giggled, closed the book and looked at the front and the back. ‘She won the Nobel Prize, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Agnes gazed at the shelves full of poetry, and sighed. ‘Do you read a lot?’

  ‘Quite a lot.’

  ‘I don’t really know where to start.’

  Teresa pointed at the book in Agnes’ hand. ‘Start with that one, then.’

  Now it was just the two of them, Teresa was beginning to suspect that Agnes wasn’t quite so clever as she appeared to be in school. Agnes probably needed clear directives and the chance to go over things if her intelligence was going to shine.

  Agnes fingered the Szymborska book, mumbled, ‘Cool, thanks,’ and went over to the issue desk. Teresa pretended to be reading Kristina Lugn, but secretly watched Agnes as she handed over the book Teresa had recommended, then got it back. Teresa had the unusual sense of being on home ground. She had read at least forty of the books on the shelves behind her, and they carried her like a silent cheer squad.

  She could easily have made a fool of Agnes, with the home crowd behind her, but she hadn’t done it.

  The encounter in the library didn’t make Teresa and Agnes friends—far from it. But it created a kind of secret mutual understanding. A week before the summer holidays Agnes told Teresa during the lunch break that she had now read everything by Szymborska. She wondered if Teresa had listened to Bright Eyes? Teresa said she hadn’t, and the next day Agnes brought in a CD of Lifted that she’d burned.

  That was all it was. And perhaps that’s all there could be with Agnes. Even though she was popular, there was a kind of remoteness about her, a sense of distance between her and those around her which had nothing to do with superciliousness. It was as if she arrived in every moment three seconds after it had happened, and you never saw her sitting whispering with another girl, their heads close together. She wasn’t really there. It was impossible to say whether this was down to absent-mindedness, insecurity or something else. Teresa often found herself secretly studying Agnes. It didn’t make her any the wiser.

  To Teresa’s amazement, not only did she like Bright Eyes—or Conor Oberst, as she discovered he was actually called—she thought he was absolutely brilliant. That fragile voice and those dark, well-written lyrics.

  For the first time in her life she bought a CD, even though she already had the copy Agnes had burned for her. Bright Eyes was the first artist she thought deserved that respect. He became her constant companion during the long summer holiday.

  It must have happened during the summer. At any rate it was a done deal when Teresa started Year 8 in the autumn. Agnes and Johannes were an item. She didn’t know how it had happened, but she saw them kissing in the playground before they went off to their respective classes for registration.

  The sight created such
a storm inside her that her analytical ability went haywire. She couldn’t work out how she felt, or why. Therefore she took the picture of the two of them, screwed it up and tried to toss it into a dark corner right at the back of her head where she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

  It didn’t go too well. That same evening she was lying on her bed listening to Bright Eyes. The song said it was the first day of his life, that he was glad he hadn’t died before he met someone, and Teresa felt hot tears of fury spring to her eyes.

  She plugged the MP3 player into her computer and deleted every single Bright Eyes track. Then she deleted the entire playlist. Unfortunately she had also bought every one of his CDs. She gathered them up, went down to the cellar and placed them on the chopping block. Only then did she realise how ridiculous her behaviour was, and lowered the axe.

  I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.

  Bright Eyes was not Agnes’ property. He couldn’t be, since Agnes probably didn’t understand a single word of the lyrics. What could those lines of alienation, of nonchalant despair, possibly mean to Agnes? Nothing. They were just cool words. Cool words to listen to with Johannes, curled up together in Agnes’ bed…

  Teresa put down the axe, went up to her room and replaced the CDs in the rack.

  She sat down at the computer. On the Friends discussion forum for victims of bullying she wrote a long contribution in defence of school massacres. Which weapons could be used in Sweden, where it was so difficult to get hold of firearms. She was expecting lots of replies.

  Unfortunately her contribution was removed before anyone had time to respond, so instead she used a different alias and wrote a real tear-jerker about the terrible bullying she had been subjected to, notes with horrible things written on them stapled to her body. They didn’t dare remove that, and she got lots and lots of sympathy which didn’t touch her at all.

  As the autumn swept in with falling leaves and chilly afternoons, it was clear that Agnes and Johannes were serious about their relationship. Teresa had never thought otherwise.

  They were always together at break and lunchtime, and had to put up with a certain amount of envious teasing, which they ignored completely. After a while the scornful comments dried up, and soon the two of them were an institution, a fact that simply had to be accepted.

  Teresa remained neutral. Johannes said hello to her in the corridor and sometimes they chatted for a while, with or without Agnes. Eventually Teresa found she had done the same as everyone else, at least on one level: she had accepted the situation. It was kind of completely natural for those two to be together. You only had to look at them to see that it was as if they were made for each other.

  On another level it made you want to throw up. But then again, that was a different story.

  It eventually got to the point where an outside observer might regard Johannes, Agnes and Teresa as a little trio. Not in the way that Johannes and Agnes were a couple, but Teresa was the third person who was seen around them, who talked to them more than anyone else.

  In her loneliness Teresa came up with ideas like poking herself in the eye with a hand blender or banging her head against a wall until it split open.

  At the end of September, something happened that was to change a lot of things.

  Teresa’s family were all caught up in different activities and interests; they often ate at different times, all living in a world of their own under the same roof. There was only one thing that brought them all together, and that was Idol. Arvid and Olof started watching first, and one by one the rest of the family were drawn into the talent show’s enchanted circle.

  Perhaps it was a subconscious emergency measure. Without Idol the family would probably never have sat down together, could maybe even have been described as dysfunctional, in need of help. But now there was Idol, and in the absence of anything else it had turned into a little family occasion, with tasty snacks and lively conversation of a kind that never happened in their everyday existence.

  It was on Idol that Teresa saw Tora for the first time. Tora Larsson from Stockholm. Even her audition was an unusual story. Boys and girls would come in and sing like broken cement mixers, then be absolutely furious with the judges when they didn’t get any further. Or they sang well, and were ecstatic when they found out they’d got through.

  Tora was different. Small and thin, with long blonde hair, she walked into the studio and fixed her eyes on a point above the judges’ heads. She said. ‘My name is Tora Larsson. I am going to sing.’

  The judges laughed indulgently and one of them said, ‘And are you going to sing something special for us?’

  Tora shook her head, and the judges pulled faces as if they felt sorry for a very small child. ‘So what’s the name of the song you’re going to sing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The judges looked at each other and seemed to be on the point of asking someone to come and remove the girl. Then she began to sing. Teresa recognised the song, but couldn’t place it.

  A thousand and one nights I lay alone,

  Alone and dreaming

  Dreaming of a friend

  A friend like you…

  The usual thing was for the optimistic contestants to sing a contemporary song, hoping that a little of the stardust from the original artists would rub off on them. Not Tora. Unless Teresa was very much mistaken, this song was way past its sell-by date.

  But the voice, the voice. And the way she sang. Teresa sat motionless on the sofa, and it was as if that voice went straight through her breastbone. Tora Larsson didn’t make any gestures, didn’t try to play any kind of part. She simply sang, and it moved Teresa even though she didn’t understand why. Even the judges sat there lit up like candles for the minute or so she was singing. Then the voice fell silent, and they came to and looked at each other.

  ‘You’re definitely through,’ said one of them. ‘You have a voice like…I don’t know how to describe it. If certain artists could kill for that voice, we’d have a bloodbath here. You’re through, one hundred per cent. But you must learn to engage with the audience.’

  Tora nodded briefly and walked towards the door. Not the slightest expression of joy, not a word of thanks. She didn’t even look the judges in the eye. One of them clearly still felt the need to justify their existence, and before Tora opened the door he called out: ‘And next time try to choose a song that’s more of a challenge. A more difficult song.’

  Tora half-turned, and Teresa just managed to catch a glimpse of a totally alien expression on her face. A hint of a grimace, suggesting that she had just been stabbed in the back and was about to unsheathe her claws. Then she turned away and walked out.

  The family on the sofa started arguing; they were all agreed that the girl had a fantastic voice, but she hadn’t given much in the way of a performance, blah blah blah. Teresa didn’t listen and didn’t join in. Tora had done the most brilliant audition she had ever seen on Idol, because she didn’t seem to give a toss about any of it, even though she was clearly the best. That was the way to do it. Teresa had already chosen her winner.

  On the way up to her room that night she was humming to herself:

  Alone and dreaming

  Dreaming of a friend

  A friend like you…

  THE GIRL WITH GOLDEN HAIR

  When Jerry looked back on his life, he could clearly distinguish a number of points where it had changed direction, always for the worse. The most extreme change of course had occurred that afternoon in October 2005 when he found his parents massacred on the cellar floor. It was still unclear to what extent the shift this had brought about was positive or negative.

  He had sat on the stairs for a long time, considering the situation. Theres continued dissecting Lennart and Laila with the tools she had to hand until he asked her to stop, because the noise was making it difficult to think. When she moved towards him he told her to stay where she was, and Theres flopped down on her bottom in the pool of blood on the floor
.

  He assumed a lot of people would have panicked, started screaming or throwing up or something along those lines. The scene in front of him was the most disgusting thing you could imagine. But perhaps there was a positive side-effect from watching all those films showing extreme violence after all. He’d seen most things—much worse than what Theres had done, in fact. For example, she wasn’t actually eating his parents.

  Or perhaps he was just numb, incapable of taking in the situation on any other level apart from a scene in a film in which he was now required to participate. The problem was that he hadn’t been given a script, and hadn’t a clue what to do.

  He realised he would have to phone the police, and went through the information he had assimilated from dozens of films and true crime series. He knew he had an alibi that could be checked, but that this alibi was getting weaker by the minute. He didn’t know how long Lennart and Laila had been dead, but Theres must have been working for quite some time to make such a comprehensive mess of them.

  Of course the simplest thing would be to ring the police and explain exactly what had happened. He would probably get into trouble because he had known about Theres’ existence but hadn’t reported it, he might get a year inside, but that would be it. Lennart and Laila would be buried and Theres would end up in the loony bin. End of story.