Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Theres came and stood next to him and said, ‘It’s coming out. Who did it?’

  Jerry gave a start when he saw her. Then he understood. Her knickers and T-shirt were spattered with red, and blood had trickled down her left leg, all the way to the ankle. Theres wasn’t afraid, just puzzled as she stood there staring at her sticky fingers.

  Jerry folded in the poker game, something he’d been intending to do anyway, and logged out of Partypoker. He scratched his head, not knowing where to start. Despite the fact that he had decided what the official version of his relationship with Theres was going to be, this was the first time he actually felt like a single dad.

  ‘Well…’ said Jerry. ‘This is something that happens. It’s going to happen every month. You’re going to bleed like this. From now on.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To be perfectly honest…I don’t have much of an idea. But it’s because you’re growing up. It happens to all girls as they grow up. They bleed for a few days each month.’

  Theres carried on looking at her fingers, her eyes sliding over her stained clothes and striped legs. Then she frowned and asked, ‘What am I?’

  ‘What do you mean? You’re a girl—is that what you mean?’

  ‘More.’

  ‘You’re about thirteen years old, you’re…I don’t know what you are. You’ll have to work that out for yourself.’

  Theres nodded and went back to her room. Jerry stayed where he was for a while, thinking he was completely useless. That was how things were with Theres. She accepted everything you said to her, as long as it wasn’t contradicted by something she’d been told in the past. When he went into her room she was sitting quite happily on the floor looking through a pile of CDs as she bled onto the rug underneath her.

  ‘Sis,’ said Jerry. ‘I have to go and buy a couple of things. You go and have a shower, and then…’ Jerry found a blank sheet of paper, wrote the word ‘menstruation’ on it and gave it to Theres.

  ‘That’s what it’s called. When you bleed like that. Look it up on the net while I’m out. When you’ve had a shower.’

  Jerry pulled on his jacket and hurried out. The problem of Theres and her periods had never even crossed his mind. He had never thought of her as a young woman, or even a girl, really. She was too different to be anything other than simply herself. Neuter. But now it had happened.

  He knew a bit more about the phenomenon than he had told Theres, but not a great deal. During his wild years he had managed to get laid a few times, but he’d never lived with anyone. Never followed a girl’s or a woman’s daily routine. Except Laila’s, of course, and she hadn’t been comfortable talking about that sort of thing.

  Besides which, it was so difficult to explain things to Theres because her view of the world was so fucked up. To put it briefly, she thought people were out to get one another. Jerry agreed with her up to a point—man is a wolf to his fellow man and so on—but her version was more violent and concrete, and above all it was the big people who were after the little people so that they could kill them and exploit them.

  It was true that the twins’ friendliness had caused some confusion in her conviction, and a couple of times she had ventured out onto the balcony to look at the people down below, but her basic attitude was one of deep suspicion. As far as Jerry was concerned that was a perfectly acceptable attitude, but she needed to loosen up a bit if she was going to be able to live among other people.

  In the local shop Jerry read the packets of panty liners and tampons very carefully, but was none the wiser. On top of everything else, the damned things came in different sizes. He had to try and imagine what Theres might be like down there. This evoked a modicum of excitement which made him uncomfortable, and he grabbed a small and a medium of each kind.

  A man of his own age was sitting at the checkout, and as he passed the boxes over the reader, Jerry said, ‘My daughter. It’s her first period.’ The man nodded sympathetically and asked if Jerry was on his own. Yes, he was. And what about Mum? Well, she’d cleared off. To Sundsvall, of all places. Didn’t want anything to do with her daughter. Very sad, that kind of thing. Yes, very sad indeed.

  Jerry was quite pleased with himself as he left the shop. That was all sorted, then. People did have a tendency to stand around gossiping in local shops. The man on the checkout seemed happy to chat, and if anybody asked, Jerry had given a reasonable account of himself and Theres. Job done.

  When he got home, Theres was sitting at the computer with wet hair. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s English,’ said Theres. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Jerry. ‘Shift.’

  Theres got up, and of course she had bled all over her clothes on his desk chair. Jerry took out a box of tampons and a box of panty liners, and gave them to her. ‘Here. These things will stop you bleeding. Well no, they won’t stop you bleeding, but they’re like a kind of bandage. A plaster. Understand?’

  Theres turned the box over and shook her head. Jerry opened the box of tampons and found a number of hard, compressed cotton cylinders and a plastic tube. He sat down in the armchair and read the instructions until he had worked out what to do.

  Why the fuck did girls have periods? What was actually the point? The instructions didn’t contain any answers to that particular question, just the practical matters. His cheeks were on fire as he explained to Theres how to insert the tube then push out the cylinder with the string attached. When she pulled down her knickers to do as he’d told her, he turned away and said, ‘Go and do it in the bathroom.’

  Theres obeyed, and Jerry flopped down in the armchair. He felt dirty. This wasn’t a new experience, but he didn’t want to feel dirty in this particular way. Theres had begun to develop breasts and she was a pretty girl—beautiful, in fact. She was completely in his power, and an entire scenario flickered through his brain for a few seconds until he gritted his teeth and forcibly ejected the unwanted images.

  She was his sister, and he was no fucking incestuous paedophile, end of story! She had that problem girls get, and it was no more complicated than him having a nosebleed once a month, for example. A bit of cotton wool up his nose, and that was that. The fact that he felt so uncomfortable and had to look away didn’t mean he was a psycho with a filthy mind.

  Sorted. When Theres shouted from the bathroom a little while later to say that she couldn’t manage, he went in and helped her to insert the tampon, made sure the string was in the right place, and explained to her that she would have to change it a couple of times a day, and she could bloody well do that herself. Then he washed his hands.

  Perhaps it had something to do with her menstruation and perhaps not, but Theres was changing. From time to time she opened up her shell a little and peered at the outside world. She had started to take a serious interest in the internet, and when Jerry wasn’t using the computer she often sat there clicking through articles on Wikipedia, mainly about different animals.

  One day when Jerry was reading the paper in the living room, Theres asked, ‘What’s this?’

  Jerry looked at the screen and saw that Theres—presumably by following various links—had ended up on a website called poetry.now. There was a poem about cats on the screen.

  ‘It’s poetry,’ said Jerry. ‘Poems. You write like that when it’s a poem, I think. Do you think it’s good?’

  ‘I don’t know. What’s good?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know? It doesn’t seem as if it has to rhyme these days, anyway. Write something yourself, then you can see if anybody says anything.’

  ‘How shall I write?’

  Jerry clicked through to another poem that he thought seemed very disjointed, and appeared to be about not knowing what you want to be. He waved at the screen. ‘You just write like this, kind of. A few sentences here and there. Hang on, we’ll set you up an account.’ Jerry keyed in a made-up name and linked it to her email account. Why had they set up an email account for he
r anyway—who the hell was she going to write to? Oh well, at least it was useful now. ‘All you have to do now is choose a username and press enter, then you can write whatever you want.’

  Jerry went back to his armchair and the evening paper, while Theres sat with her fingers resting motionless on the keys. After a while she asked, ‘What’s my name?’

  ‘Theres. You know that.’

  ‘When did I get Theres?’

  ‘You mean the name?’ Jerry thought about it, and realised he had come up with it years ago, but had used it so often it had become completely natural. He didn’t see any harm in telling her the truth. ‘You got it from me.’

  ‘Who is Theres?’

  ‘Well, you are.’

  ‘Before.’

  Jerry sensed they were approaching the tangled thicket that was Theres’ view of humanity, and he hadn’t the strength to hack his way through right now, so he said, ‘You just have to come up with a username, not your own name. Write Bim or Bom or something,’ whereupon he went back to his newspaper.

  He heard the keys tapping away, and five minutes later Theres said, ‘What do I do?’

  Jerry got up and looked at the screen. Under the username Bim she had actually written a poem:

  where I am no one can be

  inside the brain lies thinking

  porridge is not good

  talk misleads

  the name does not mean me

  the moon is my father

  ‘The moon is my father,’ said Jerry. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘He watches when I’m asleep,’ said Theres. ‘My father.’

  The moon often shone in through her bedroom window at the time when she was going to bed. She might have got the bit about how fathers behave from something she’d read.

  ‘Of course,’ said Jerry. ‘Good poem. Send it.’

  He showed her how to click send. Then she sat with her hands resting on her lap, staring at the screen, until Jerry asked her what she was waiting for.

  ‘Someone to say something,’ she said.

  ‘It might take a while, you know. Check again tomorrow.’

  Theres got up and went out onto the balcony. Jerry watched her as she stood there touching her face, running her fingers over it as she gazed down at the street.

  The following day there was a positive comment about the poem from somebody called Josefin. Jerry showed her how to reply to comments, and how to make comments of her own. When Theres had been clicking away and writing for a while, she asked, ‘Are they people?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The ones who are writing.’

  ‘What else would they be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are they little people?’

  ‘Most of them are, I suppose. Young, anyway.’

  When Jerry had been showing Theres how to use the poetry site, he had noticed that almost all the users were girls between fourteen and twenty, with only the odd boy or older person. Without any planning he seemed to have given Theres an opportunity to take a step closer to the world and people her own age.

  She sat at the computer for several hours, so quiet and with such intense concentration that Jerry didn’t want to interrupt and tell her that he needed to work. When she had read through all the poems on the website, she said, ‘They’re sad.’

  ‘Who? The people who write the poems?’

  ‘Yes. They’re sad. They don’t know what to do. They cry. It’s a shame.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  Theres furrowed her brow in concentration. She looked at the computer, at her hands. Then she got up and went out onto the balcony for a while. When she came in, she asked, ‘Where are they?’

  ‘The girls? All over the place. One might be in the building opposite, another might be in Gothenburg. A long, long way away.’

  Jerry had been sitting in the apartment all day, and twilight was beginning to fall outside. He had a sudden inspiration. ‘Shall we go out and look?’ he said. ‘See if we can spot any of them?’

  Theres stiffened. Then she nodded.

  During the days and weeks that followed, Theres ventured further and further from the apartment. At first she wanted to hide as soon as she caught sight of an adult, but gradually she accepted that the big people’s hunger was at rest on weekdays, and that they were not about to fall on her.

  Children didn’t interest her, because she seemed to think they belonged to a different, non-threatening species. No, it was mostly people of her own age she was searching for. She wanted to see what they were doing, what they looked like, what they were saying. More than once Jerry had to extricate her from embarrassing situations where she was simply sitting and staring at someone, or was very obviously eavesdropping on a conversation.

  She began to speak more like a normal teenager, and Jerry bought her clothes that looked like what her contemporaries were wearing. The only thing he couldn’t sort out was her hair. He tried taking her to the hairdresser, but as soon as the woman picked up the scissors Theres started screaming, and refused to stay in her chair. Nothing could convince her it wasn’t dangerous.

  Apart from her hair, which Jerry trimmed with the kitchen scissors, you could have taken her for just about anybody if it hadn’t been for that constantly distant, evasive look in her eyes. So Jerry wasn’t fooled. He knew that in actual fact he hadn’t a clue what was going on inside her head. Not a clue.

  A more ambitious or restless person than Jerry would probably have got fed up with the way they lived, but as the days slipped into one another and the sun rose and fell over the square in Svedmyra, Jerry discovered that he was quite content with his existence.

  He went back to his childhood home to pick up a few things he wanted to keep, then got a firm in to clear the house. He put it in the hands of an estate agent; the history of the house meant they had to drop the asking price, which was already low, but when the bills were paid and the commission deducted, there was still a couple of hundred thousand left over for Jerry, enough for at least a year or two without any financial worries.

  He played Civilisation and Lord of the Rings online, chatted with other players, checked out films with or without Theres, and went for walks. They spent a few evenings sitting together looking through his VHS tapes of videos from different artists: Bowie, U2, Sinéad O’Connor.

  Theres was particularly taken with Sinéad; over and over again she begged Jerry to rewind the tape so that she could join in with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. After those evenings Jerry rummaged through some of the boxes that hadn’t been unpacked yet and found his old bits of paper with chord sequences scribbled on them, songs they used to sing when Theres was little.

  As winter turned to spring Jerry started playing the guitar again and they worked their way through the songs, adding lyrics that Theres suggested here and there, writing new ones. For fun Jerry bought a microphone so that they could record the songs on Garageband and play about with them afterwards.

  Jerry had no ambitions when it came to music, but it was a sin and a shame that a voice like Theres’ would never reach a wider audience. Despite the fact that they hardly had any lyrics, the songs Theres recorded on Garageband were better than most things Jerry heard on the radio.

  He couldn’t shake off the feeling. That it was all such a fucking…waste.

  You can plan for things, work towards them for years, and yet they never materialise. Or you just happen to be in the right place at the right moment, and everything falls into place. If you want to believe in something like Fate, she’s a capricious character. Sometimes she stands there blocking the doorway you were born to pass through, and sometimes she takes you by the hand and leads you through the minute you poke your nose out. And the stars gaze down and keep their counsel.

  One day at the beginning of May when Jerry came out of the shop, there was a wallet lying on the low wall by the bike stand. He sat down beside it and glanced around, pretending to be catching his breath. None of the people enjoying the spring suns
hine was looking in his direction. He slipped the wallet into his pocket.

  When he got home he investigated his find and was disappointed. He had been hoping for a few hundred-kronor notes, perhaps some interesting cards and a furious owner who would have to spend the whole afternoon ringing around and cancelling them.

  But the wallet belonged to a young girl, sixteen years old according to her ID card, and contained only a few bits of paper with telephone numbers on them, two twenty-kronor notes and a Nordea bank card. Perhaps that would have been the end of the matter—Jerry might even have gone down and put the wallet back, if he hadn’t found a piece of paper in one of the side pockets.

  ‘IDOL 2006’ it said at the top in white letters on a blue background. It was a flyer with the time and place of the auditions for this year’s program. Grand Hotel, May 14.

  Jerry looked at the ID card. Presumably the girl—Angelika Tora Larsson—had dreams of stardom.

  Jerry was still inclined to give the wallet a chance to be reunited with its owner. Then he spotted the small print right at the bottom of the flyer: ‘Minimum age 16 years. Bring ID and completed application form’.

  And Fate stepped aside and opened the door.

  ‘Sis? How would you like to be on that program we saw? You remember, the one where people were singing?’

  Theres was sitting at the computer reading an article about tigers. She nodded without taking her eyes off the screen.

  ‘No, seriously,’ said Jerry. ‘Would you like to do that? There’ll probably be loads of people.’

  ‘You’ll come too.’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. Of course I will. But it would be cool to sing in a place where people could hear just how good you are, wouldn’t it? I mean, it’s kind of a waste just singing in here with me, don’t you think?’

  Theres didn’t answer, and Jerry realised he was actually talking to himself; she had already given him her answer. Jerry held out Angelika’s ID card. ‘What do you think? Does this girl look like you?’