Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  When Jerry was ready to go, he waved Teresa over to him. She went out into the hallway and Jerry lowered his voice. ‘Theres is a little bit special, as I expect you’ve noticed. If you find some of the things she says a bit strange, just…don’t give it too much thought. You’re not a telltale, are you? You’re not the kind of person who runs around telling everybody everything?’

  Teresa shook her head and Jerry chewed air in his closed mouth as if he were thinking, trying to reach a decision. ‘It’s like this. If Theres tells you anything…you mustn’t tell anyone, you understand? Not your mum, not your dad, not anyone, OK? I’m relying on you.’

  Teresa nodded and said, ‘Yes. I know.’

  The look Jerry gave her was so long and so penetrating that Teresa started to feel uncomfortable. He patted her on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m glad she’s met you.’ Then he left.

  When Teresa went back to the living room, Theres was sitting at the computer. She asked, ‘Do you want to listen to some music?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Teresa, and crashed down on the sofa. She stretched out, free of the stiffness produced by having Jerry’s eyes on her. It would be exciting to find out what kind of music Theres liked.

  She didn’t recognise the songs coming through the computer’s speakers, but from the thin, synthetic sound she guessed it was something from the early eighties. Then again, what did she know. Maybe music was supposed to sound like that these days, she didn’t really keep up. Anyway, she liked the intro, the melody. It came as a bit of a shock when she heard Theres’ voice.

  She couldn’t pick up much of what Theres was singing, it just seemed like disjointed sentences with no connection, mixed with wailing in a lot of places. But it didn’t really matter. The song had her hooked right away. It was catchy, melancholy, beautiful and happy all at the same time, and shivers of pleasure ran up and down Teresa’s spine.

  When the song came to an end Teresa sat up and called out, ‘That was fantastic. It was…brilliant. What song was it?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You know…what’s it called?’

  ‘It’s not called anything.’

  Then Teresa got it. The song was so self-evident and so immediately accessible that she had assumed she’d heard it before. But that wasn’t the case. ‘Did you write it?’

  ‘Jerry wrote it. I’m singing.’

  ‘Yes, I could tell. What’s it about?’

  ‘Nothing. I sing words. Your words are better.’

  Theres turned and clicked on another track. The song began to play, and Teresa closed her eyes and leaned back on the sofa, ready to enjoy the experience again. When she heard Theres’ voice it took her a couple of seconds to realise two things. One: the voice was no longer coming from the speakers, but from Theres herself. Two: she was now singing the words of the poem Teresa had given her.

  Two warm hands grabbed her lungs and wrung them like floor cloths. It was a feeling of happiness so great that it was more like fear. She couldn’t move. Theres modulated her voice and adapted the pauses so that the words flowed perfectly with the melody, as if they had been written together from the start. When the song reached its first crescendo and Theres sang, ‘Fly, fly, fly high one day, fly high for fuck’s sake’, Teresa began to cry.

  Theres pressed the space bar and the music stopped. She looked at Teresa, slumped on the sofa with tears pouring down her cheeks. Then she said, ‘You’re not sad. You’re happy. You’re crying but you’re happy.’

  Teresa nodded and swallowed several times, then wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘Yes. I just thought it was so beautiful. Sorry.’

  ‘Why do you say sorry?’

  ‘Because…I don’t know. Because I said it was beautiful even though I wrote it. But it’s really because your voice is so fantastic.’

  Theres nodded. ‘My voice is fantastic. Your words are good. They go well together.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. But it sounded much better when you sang it.’

  ‘The words were the same. I have a good memory. Jerry says so.’ Theres turned and clicked on a folder. She pointed at the rows of files filling the screen from top to bottom. ‘We’ve made a lot of songs. Can you write words for them?’

  They listened to a number of songs. Only a couple were as immediately appealing as the first one Theres had played, but there were melodies and moods among the other songs that also demanded lyrics. Fragments of sentences popped up in Teresa’s head and she wrote them down in her notebook. She couldn’t really get her head round what she was doing. It was possibly the most fun she had ever had in her whole life.

  When they had listened to all the songs Teresa flopped against the back of the sofa, her brain exhausted. They had been busy for several hours, and towards the end she had started jotting down disjointed words to the melodies she was hearing, as if in a trance. She had always thought she hadn’t got much imagination, but this didn’t feel as if it had anything to do with imagination. She was just writing down what the music said.

  It had started to get dark outside the balcony window, and Teresa gazed blankly at the top of a street lamp which was illuminating individual snowflakes as they fell. Suddenly she sat bolt upright. ‘Shit! Shit, shit, shit!’ She spotted the telephone on the coffee table. ‘I just have to…can I…can I use your phone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Theres. ‘I can’t.’

  The alarm clock next to the telephone was showing half past five. Her train had left ten minutes ago. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the receiver hard against her ear. It was Göran who answered. He sighed deeply when he heard what had happened. Then he offered to get in the car and come pick her up.

  Teresa saw herself sitting next to her father for almost three hours, trying to avoid answering his questions because she didn’t want this day to be questioned and subjected to explanations.

  Theres was standing in front of her watching with interest as Teresa put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked, ‘Could I stay the night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Teresa had to ward off a few questions, but in the end it was decided that she would catch the train at one o’clock on Sunday instead. When she had hung up she was just about to start explaining to Theres that she didn’t want to be a nuisance and so on, but Theres pre-empted her by pointing at the telephone and asking, ‘Can you use that?’

  Teresa had stopped puzzling over all the strange things about Theres, and simply answered, ‘Yes.’

  Theres took a piece of paper out of a drawer, handed it to Teresa and said, ‘Ring this man.’ Teresa read through the letter from Max Hansen, and saw that there was both a mobile number and a landline.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ she asked.

  ‘I want to make a shiny CD. With my voice on it. That you can use as a mirror.’

  ‘He says he just wants to meet you. Discuss things.’

  ‘I will meet him. Tomorrow. You will come with me. Then I’ll make a CD.’

  Teresa read through the letter again. As far as she could work out, it was the kind of letter every girl and boy with artistic ambitions dreamed of receiving. But she noticed it was dated ten days earlier. ‘Have you had a lot of letters like this?’

  ‘I’ve had one letter. That one.’

  Teresa looked at the two short lines of numbers and tried to work out what to say when she had rung one of them. It was all too weird. ‘Are you seriously telling me you’ve never used a phone? You’re joking, right?’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  Teresa pulled herself together and picked up the phone, keyed in the landline number. As it was ringing she glanced through the letter again. Apart from the fulsome words about Theres’ talent, it had a businesslike tone. Teresa straightened up and tried to make herself bigger and more confident than she was. When a voice at the other end said, ‘Max Hansen speaking’, she cleared her throat with a deeper timbre than necessary and said, ‘Good evening. I’m calling on behalf of…Tora Larsson. She has asked me
to tell you that she would like to meet you.’

  There was silence at the other end for a few seconds. Then Max Hansen said, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘No. Tora Larsson would like to meet you tomorrow. In the morning.’ Teresa thought about her one o’clock train and quickly added, ‘At ten o’clock. Tell me where.’

  ‘But this is just completely…why can’t I speak to Tora herself?’

  ‘She doesn’t like using the telephone.’

  ‘Oh, right, she doesn’t like using the telephone. And can you give me one good reason why I should believe any of this?’

  Teresa held the phone up in the air and said to Theres, ‘Sing. Sing something.’

  Without a second’s hesitation Theres started to sing Teresa’s poem. It sounded even more beautiful a cappella, if that were possible. Teresa brought the phone back to her ear and said, ‘Tell me where.’

  She heard papers rustling at the other end, a pen moving across a sheet of paper. Then Max Hansen said, ‘The Diplomat Hotel on Strandvägen—do you…does she know where that is?’

  ‘Yes,’ Teresa lied, trusting in the wonders of the internet.

  ‘Ask for me in reception,’ said Max Hansen. ‘Ten o’clock. I’m looking forward to it. Really.’

  Max Hansen’s voice sounded different now. If it had been deliberately distant at the beginning of the conversation, now it sounded all too close, as if he wanted to crawl out of the telephone and whisper directly into Teresa’s ear. When they had said goodbye, Teresa sank back on the sofa.

  What the fuck have I got into here?

  It was as if she had ended up in the middle of some spy story. The meeting at the hotel, brief messages, cryptic phone calls. She had no control, and didn’t know whether she found that unpleasant or exciting. Once again there was the chance to take a leap, become someone else. Someone who could handle this situation. She would try.

  Theres sat down next to her on the sofa. Teresa told her about the meeting, the time and place, and Theres merely nodded and said nothing.

  They sat there side by side. After a while they both leaned back, almost simultaneously. One of them started the movement and the other completed it. Their shoulders were touching. Teresa could feel the faint warmth of Theres’ body. They just sat there, not moving. The clock ticked on the coffee table.

  Theres felt for Teresa’s hand, and their fingers intertwined; they sat completely still, gazing into the dark rectangle of the TV screen where they could see themselves as two distant figures, sitting in a room far away. There was a faint overlap where their shoulders met, as if their sweatshirts were sewn together.

  When Teresa looked at their hands after a long time, she thought the skin on her fingers was flowing out across the back of Theres’ hand, and that the tips of Theres’ fingers were beginning to melt into her own knuckles in the same way. She stared at their hands and thought it would take a knife, a sharp knife to separate them; there would be a lot of blood.

  ‘Theres?’

  After the long silence the single word was a big bird that flew out of her mouth and thudded around the room, bumping into the walls.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who were Lennart and Laila?’

  ‘I lived there. There was a house. I was in a room. I was hidden.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I made them dead. With different tools.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was scared. I wanted to have them.’

  ‘Did you stop being scared after that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you scared now?’

  ‘No. Are you scared?’

  ‘No.’

  And it was true. Some level of fear had been Teresa’s companion for so long that she had been unable to see it, had accepted that it was as much a part of her life as her own shadow. It was only now that she caught sight of it. As it left her.

  As soon as Max Hansen had ended the call and carefully stored the caller’s number, he rang the Diplomat and booked one of the larger rooms he often used for business.

  He found it difficult to sleep that night. So much was unclear about this Tora. He usually had a better handle on things before a crucial meeting, he would have had the chance to see how the land lay, suss out the situation, soften up the other party if necessary. This time he hadn’t a clue; he hadn’t even managed to speak to the lady in question. Which meant he had no idea how to plan his strategy. The hours of the night crawled by as he went through possible scenarios, parrying objections and considering manoeuvres that would lead to the desired result.

  He was fairly sure that Tora Larsson was a genuine talent who could be a pretty good earner with a little moulding, a few nudges in the right direction. He was lucky to be first on the scene. So far so good. But then there was the other matter. Simply put, he wanted to fuck her. He wanted her signature on his contract and he wanted her body, at least once.

  If Max Hansen took a step to one side and looked at himself objectively, he could see that he was a complete bastard. He wasn’t stupid. But there was nothing he could do. His mouth went dry and his fingers began to itch as soon as he thought about the meeting with that cool little beauty. He had no choice. And he had long ago stopped taking that step to one side, and with a self-loathing that bordered on smugness had concluded: You’re a pig, Max Hansen. That’s your nature, and the only thing you can do is keep screwing around.

  He wanted to screw young girls. Young girls didn’t want anything to do with him in that way, he was under no illusions. But with the right preparation he could create a situation where young girls felt it was necessary to go to bed with him so that their dreams would come true. It was no more complicated than that.

  He thought he had the situation more or less under control when he got up from his tangled sheets at two o’clock and took a sleeping pill. Twenty minutes later he was sleeping peacefully, and was woken by the clock radio at half past seven. He got up, groggy but determined, and began to gather together his paraphernalia.

  At nine-thirty he was ready and waiting in room 214 at the Diplomat Hotel. During the past two years he had met seven wannabe artists here. Two of them had ended up on their backs in the fair-sized double bed, one had given him a half-decent blow job, and one had let him cop a feel before she drew the line. A reasonable success rate.

  But this success rate depended on the fact that the ground had been prepared in advance. He had hinted at opportunities, coaxed half promises from girls who weren’t exactly wet behind the ears, then cashed in. Tora Larsson would be a challenge.

  He didn’t really have any memory of the actual sex, since it had been over-written by the films he had made at the time, then watched over and over again. The number of times he had masturbated while watching himself having sex so far exceeded the number of times he had actually had sex that his real memories were not in his head, but on his DVD shelf.

  The room was a good shape. When he mounted the camera on its stand, the viewfinder showed the generous floor space in front of the bed where the girls would do their little audition. When they had finished, he would zoom in on the bed while pretending to switch off the camera. All he could do then was hope for the best.

  After setting up the camera he got out the champagne and put it in the bucket he had filled with ice from the machine in the corridor. Well, it was actually sparkling wine rather than champagne, the same thing at half the price, but he’d like to see the teenager who could tell the difference, even the experts are hard pushed to do that. Next to the bucket he placed two slender long-stemmed crystal flutes; they were the genuine article, and even came in their own case.

  He took a shower without wetting his hair. He had arranged his hairstyle very carefully that morning: the eight hundred strands in his fringe had cost thirty kronor apiece and they were swept back to achieve just the right kind of tousled look. He snipped off a couple of nasal hairs, smoothed a discreet tinted moisturiser over his face, dabbed on a couple of drops of Lagerfel
d.

  He was forty-seven years old but on a good day, a day like this, he could pass for forty. He might be a pig but he was no dirty old man. Max Hansen looked at himself in mirror and did the usual pep talk, telling himself he looked pretty good, that there was nothing strange about a young girl getting it on with this guy. He winked at himself in the mirror. Here’s looking at you, babe.

  When he was dressed he sat down on the bed and waited, his mind an empty chess board, the pieces not yet set out. This was what it was all about: not taking anything for granted, being flexible. In this case his adaptability stretched to the point where he could accept it if he didn’t even get to first base today. He wanted to go further with this girl, whatever happened.

  At quarter past ten there was a soft tap on the door. Max Hansen wiped his palms on his trousers, smoothed down the bedspread and cast a final glance at himself in the mirror. Then he opened the door.

  A strikingly unattractive girl was standing there. Small, deep-set eyes in a fat face framed by mousy hair plastered shapelessly to her skull. Her plump body was covered by a faded hoodie, and if the concept unsexy needed a material expression, here she was. Max Hansen almost took a step backwards.

  ‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘Are you Max?’

  ‘I am. And who are you?’

  The girl glanced at something just out of sight. Max couldn’t help stepping forward and looking out, and there she was. The apple in the Garden of Eden, and all that. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt under a thin, open jacket, Tora Larsson’s figure was more boyish than it had looked on TV, but the mere outline of the small breasts beneath the cotton fabric was enough to send a warm quiver through his groin. It was almost hard to believe she was old enough to take part in Idol.

  Her face was small, dominated by the lips and two big blue eyes which gazed at a point just to his left, not blinking at all. Max had seen girls who were prettier, more beautiful, more exciting, whatever. But never anything as attractive as Tora Larsson, standing there in the semi-darkness of the corridor with her thin arms by her sides.