Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  For the rest of the day he might as well have been on the moon. Or Mars, if you prefer. Gravity had lost its power over him; he weighed twenty kilos at the most. Several times he took out the tissue with Paris’ number on it, just to make sure it was still there. After unfolding it and folding it up again so many times, he thought the numbers were starting to look blurred, so he wrote them down on a piece of paper which he put in his wallet. Then he wrote them on another piece of paper which he put in his pocket.

  He had never—never!—had anything like this happen to him; someone had…what was it called? Made advances to him. Never. He would invite her out to dinner. Where would he take her? No idea. He never ate in restaurants. He would have to…

  That’s where Jerry’s head was at.

  There were no further incidents with Theres during the course of the day, which was just as well because Jerry wasn’t really there. Twenty kilos of his body mass, perhaps. The rest was floating somewhere out in space.

  Theres got through that week and went out the following week with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. It was Jerry who won Idol. A couple of days after she had given him her number, he called Paris. He had checked the restaurant pages in the newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and suggested Dragon House, a buffet restaurant near Hornstull. All you can eat and so on.

  They met up, they both ate enormous amounts of Thai and Chinese food, drank plenty of beer. Jerry found out that Paris was forty-two years old and had come to Sweden five years earlier when the father of her son, who was now nine, had got a job here. They had gone their separate ways three years ago, after the man started seeing a Swedish woman he was working with.

  Paris had done all kinds of jobs both in the USA and in Sweden, and among other things had worked as a make-up artist on a local TV station in Miami. Hence her knowledge. She regarded herself as a survivor, and was absolutely categorical when it came to judging people and events. This was bad, that was good, he was an idiot, he was a sweetheart.

  Jerry seemed to have the good fortune to fall into the sweetheart category, since he got a long hug before they parted. When he asked if he could ring her again, Paris said that she expected nothing else, honey.

  The day Max Hansen’s letter plopped through the letterbox, Jerry was standing on the balcony smoking as he devoted himself to detailed dreams involving going to bed with Paris. They had seen each other several times, he had been allowed to kiss her, and her lips had been a foretaste. He imagined it would be like falling into a feather bed. Allowing himself to be enveloped by her huge breasts, her round arms, burrowing down in her skin. Disappearing.

  His fantasies had become so delicious that he felt caught out when Theres came out onto the balcony. His hands moved instinctively to hide his groin, even though there was nothing to hide but his thoughts.

  Theres tilted her head to one side.

  ‘Why are you embarrassed?’

  ‘I’m not, I’m just having a smoke.’

  Theres held out a piece of paper. ‘Somebody says I’m good. Somebody wants to talk to me. You have to read it and tell me if it’s all right.’

  Jerry took Max Hansen’s letter into the living room, sat down in the armchair and read it twice. He couldn’t decide if it was empty words or a genuine opportunity. He might have been a little bit impressed by the mention of Stormfront, but at the end of the day it wasn’t about that.

  Jerry put down the letter and looked at Theres, who was sitting on the sofa with her hands folded on her lap like a patient saint.

  ‘It’s an agent,’ he said. ‘Somebody who wants to work with you.’

  ‘What do you mean, work?’

  ‘Sing. Fix things so that you can do that as a job. Sing. Make a CD, perhaps.’

  Theres looked over at the CD rack on the wall. ‘Am I going to sing on a CD?’

  ‘Yes, maybe. Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jerry picked up the letter again, turning it this way and that as if he could suss out its weight and import through his feelings. This Max Hansen seemed to be genuinely interested in Theres, and the fact was their money wouldn’t last forever.

  After all, this was what he had fantasised about long ago. The chance of squeezing a bit of ready cash out of the force of nature that was Theres. Now the chance had come along, he wasn’t so sure. A lot of polluted water had passed under the bridge since then. He folded up the letter, put it in the top drawer of the desk and said, ‘We’ll see.’

  Somewhere inside he knew he would open that drawer again, that a new ball had appeared at the top of the slope, and that it would probably start to roll, with or without his co-operation.

  Max Hansen, he thought. Take a chance?

  At the beginning of November, Teresa was sitting on her bed with an empty sports bag next to her. She knew she ought to put something in the bag, but she didn’t know what. Her train was leaving in an hour, and she had gone up to her room to pack. She glared at the empty bag.

  Two days earlier Theres had emailed and asked if she could come over to Stockholm for a visit at the weekend. After a certain amount of difficulty Teresa had managed to book a train ticket on the internet, and had then presented her parents with a fait accompli. She was going to Stockholm on Saturday, could someone give her a lift to the station?

  She was going to visit a friend. A girl. In Stockholm. Yes, she was absolutely sure it wasn’t some dirty old man. They had met on the net and now they wanted to meet IRL. In real life. Yes, she would come home the same night and yes, she had checked on Google maps and knew exactly where she was going and how to get there. Svedmyra.

  She didn’t want to tell them it was the same girl they had all seen on Idol. Perhaps because they would think she was lying, perhaps they wouldn’t believe her. Perhaps because she would be revealing something she wanted to keep secret.

  Her parents knew how lonely she was, and presumably that was why they agreed. She gave them Theres’ address and telephone number and promised to ring when she got there.

  So far so good.

  It was when she got round to trying to pack a bag that the whole thing ground to a halt. She had never travelled alone on the train before. You were supposed to have a bag when you were travelling, weren’t you? But what was she supposed to put in it? What did she need?

  Who am I?

  That was another way of putting it. What did she want to take with her to Theres, what did she want to show, who did she want to be? She sat on her bed, staring at the empty bag, and she thought it was mocking her. The bag was her. Empty. Nothing. She had nothing to bring.

  She went into the bathroom, did her best with some make-up and thought the result looked OK. She had learned to apply blusher so that her face looked less chubby from certain angles. She fluffed up her hair with a little mousse to create some air around her forehead. Kohl, eye shadow.

  When she had finished Göran shouted from downstairs that they would have to go if they were going to catch the train. Without thinking, Teresa chucked in her map, her mobile and her MP3 player, her notebook and her black velour tracksuit. The tracksuit went in mostly because she needed something to fill up the bag.

  On the way to the station, Göran asked more questions about the girl she was going to see, and Teresa told him the truth: that they had met on a forum about wolves, that they were the same age, and that she lived in Svedmyra. She lied or stretched the truth when it came to everything else.

  Göran waited until the train came in, then gave Teresa a hug which she couldn’t bring herself to return. When she was settled and the train was starting to pull out, Göran waved. She waved back without enthusiasm, and saw him turn away and head back to the car.

  It only took a couple of minutes for the journey to sink its claws into her. She was travelling. She was sitting alone on a train going somewhere she had never been before. Between two points she was a passenger, a person who was on their way. A person who was free. She caught sight of her reflection in the window, and didn’t recognise
herself.

  Who’s that sitting there? Who can it be?

  She took out her notebook and a pen, then sat there sucking the pen and occasionally glancing at herself in the glass. She would have loved to be the exciting stranger, sitting on the train and writing, but nothing came to her. Not a word. Her imagination had always been feeble, and now it had fainted dead away.

  She wrote, ‘I am sitting on a train…’ but that was it. She wrote it again. And again. When she had been sitting there for ten minutes and filled two pages with the same six words, she looked at herself. The stranger.

  Enough!

  She shoved the notebook back in her bag and went to the toilet. She leaned against the washbasin for a long time, examining herself in the mirror. Then she wet her face, squirted liquid soap in her hands and washed herself thoroughly, scrubbing off every scrap of make-up. Then she wet her hair to flatten it down at the front, and dried herself with paper towels until her hair lay flat and shapeless.

  She got undressed, pulled the black sweatshirt and the black velour tracksuit bottoms out of her bag and put them on. When she looked at the result in the mirror she was able to confirm that she looked bloody awful.

  This is me.

  When she sat down again the face looking back at her from the other side of the glass was familiar. That ugly cow had been right there with her all through her life, and now she was coming with her to Stockholm. Teresa opened her notebook and wrote:

  Those who have wings fly

  Those who have teeth bite

  You have wings you have teeth

  Make sure something happens

  Use your hands, grip!

  Use your teeth, bite!

  Use your wings, fly!

  Fly, fly, fly high one day

  Fly high for fuck’s sake

  The streams of people at T-Centralen, the central subway station, terrified her. As she was going down the stairs from the platform she literally felt as if the waters were closing over her head. That she had a river in front of her, and she was at risk of drowning. Because she didn’t even know which direction she was supposed to go in, she stepped into the river and allowed herself to be swept along until she reached the barriers leading to the tracks.

  She handed over some money at a window and said, ‘Svedmyra.’ She was given three coupons and she asked where she should go, then she joined a new stream. She clung to her bag, feeling anxious all the time. There were too many people and she was too alone and too small.

  Things were a bit better once she had boarded the train, checked that it was going to Svedmyra and found an empty seat. She could settle down, she had her place. But there were still too many people. Mostly adults with expressionless faces, surrounding her on all sides. At any moment an arm might reach out or someone might start talking to her, wanting something from her.

  People kept trooping on and off, and by the time they reached Svedmyra the carriage was almost empty. Teresa stepped onto the platform and unfolded her map. She had made a cross by Theres’ address, just like a treasure map.

  There was a light covering of snow on the street, and she shivered in her thin sweatshirt. She pretended that she was a black hole: she wasn’t actually moving—instead, the building where Theres lived was being drawn towards her, about to be sucked into her.

  She found the right street and the right door was brought towards her. She kept the game going until she was standing in the lift pressing the button for the top floor, and then she had to stop. She suddenly felt nervous, and only her chilled skin stopped her from breaking out in a sweat.

  Fly high for fuck’s sake…

  The lift carried her upwards.

  It said ‘Cederström’ on the door, as Theres had told her it would. Teresa rang the bell and tried to arrange her face in a suitable expression, but couldn’t come up with one and decided not to bother.

  She didn’t know what she had expected. Theres had written that she lived with ‘Jerry’, but hadn’t explained who this Jerry was. The man who opened the door looked like the men who usually sat on the benches in the park, apart from the fact that the check shirt he was wearing looked brand new.

  ‘Hi,’ said Teresa. ‘Does Theres live here?’

  The man looked her up and down and glanced out onto the landing. Then he stepped to one side and said, ‘Come in. You look cold.’

  ‘I’ve got a jacket.’

  ‘Right. You could have fooled me.’ He gestured towards the interior of the apartment. ‘She’s in there.’

  Teresa took off her shoes and walked through the hallway, keeping a firm grip on the strap of her bag. There was still a risk that the whole thing was a con. That the man who answered the door had sent the emails, and that something terrible would happen to her at any minute. She’d heard about that kind of thing.

  When there was no one in the living room her heart started pounding. She listened, waiting for the bang as the front door slammed shut. It didn’t come. The door to another room was open, and she saw Theres, sitting on a bed with her hands resting on her lap.

  Everything simply fell away. The crowds of people that had frightened her, the anxiety about getting the wrong train, doing the wrong thing. The cold out on the streets, the brief fear of the man in the shirt. Gone. She had reached the cross on the map, she had reached Theres. She wasn’t surprised that Theres didn’t get up and come to meet her. Instead Teresa walked into the room, dropped her bag by the door and said, ‘I’m here now.’

  ‘Good,’ said Theres, placing one hand on the bed beside her. ‘Sit here.’

  Teresa sat down next to her. In her head she had tried out and rejected a number of opening remarks, tried to visualise what she would say and do if their meeting went like this or that. This particular possibility hadn’t occurred to her. That they would just sit next to each other without saying anything.

  A minute or so passed, and Teresa began to warm up and relax. After the chaos of the journey it was really good just to sit still, not thinking. She registered that the room was bare, almost Spartan. No posters on the walls, no little ornaments tastefully or less than tastefully displayed. Only a bookshelf containing children’s books, a CD player and a CD rack. Her own bag, thrown down by the door, looked like an intrusion.

  ‘I wrote a poem,’ said Teresa. ‘On the train. Do you want to read it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Teresa pulled her bag over. She opened her notebook and read through the poem one more time. Then she tore it out and gave it to Theres. ‘Here. I think it’s for you.’

  Theres sat with the sheet of paper in front of her for a long time. Teresa glanced sideways at her and saw her eyes moving down the lines; when they reached the bottom, they went back to the top and started again. And again. Teresa squirmed, and in the end she couldn’t bear it any longer, ‘Do you like it?’

  Theres lowered the paper. Without looking at Teresa, she said, ‘It’s about people being wolves. And birds. I think that’s good. But there are ugly words too. Can you have ugly words in poems?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. If it feels right.’

  Theres read the poem once more. Then she said, ‘It does feel right. Because the person is angry. Because they’re not a wolf. Or a bird.’ For the first time she looked Teresa in the eye. ‘It’s the best poem I’ve ever read.’

  Teresa’s cheeks flushed red. It was almost unbearable to meet the gaze of someone who had just said something like that, and the muscles in the back of her neck were shouting at her to turn her head away. But her eyes were steadfast and kept her head in place. In Theres’ big, clear blue eyes there was not a hint of irony or expectation or any other emotion that aimed to provoke a reaction from Teresa. The only thing her eyes said was: You have written the best poem I have ever read. There you are. I am looking at you. That was why Teresa was able to maintain the contact, and after a few seconds it felt completely natural.

  Theres pointed at Teresa’s notebook and said, ‘Have you written any more?’

 
‘No. Just that one.’

  ‘Can you write more?’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  ‘When you write I want to read them.’

  Teresa nodded. Suddenly she didn’t want to sit here any longer. She wanted to go home to her room and write poems, to fill the whole notebook. Then she would come back and just sit here and look at Theres while she read her poems. That was what she wanted. That was how she wanted things to be.

  Jerry appeared in the doorway. ‘So there you are. Everything OK?’ Theres and Teresa nodded in unison and Jerry gave a snort. ‘You look like…I don’t know what you look like.’

  ‘Laurel and Hardy?’ suggested Teresa.

  A grin spread across Jerry’s face and he pointed at Teresa, waggling his finger. Then he stepped into the room and held out his hand. ‘My name’s Jerry. Hi.’

  Teresa took his hand. ‘Hi. Teresa. Are you…Theres’ dad?’

  Jerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Kind of?’

  ‘Yes. Kind of.’

  ‘He’s my brother,’ said Theres. ‘He hid me when Lennart and Laila got dead.’

  Jerry folded his arms and looked at Theres with a somewhat anguished expression. Then he sighed deeply and seemed to give up. He cleared his throat, but his voice was still thick when he said, ‘Would you like some juice? Or something? Biscuits?’

  Teresa went to the toilet and used her mobile to ring home and tell them everything was fine. Then she sat in the living room and drank raspberry juice and ate a couple of chocolate brownies that were so old they were leathery. Jerry drank coffee and Theres ate apricot puree with a teaspoon out of a baby food jar. Teresa thought the whole thing was very uncomfortable. It felt as if Jerry was studying her and Theres all the time, as if he was trying to work something out. He was an unusual adult, and she liked him in a way, but she still wanted him to go away.

  When they had finished eating and drinking, her prayers were answered. Jerry slapped his thighs and said, ‘Right, girls, I have to go out for a while. And you seem to be getting on fine, so…I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back, but you’ll be OK, won’t you?’