Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  ‘I have tried to ring,’ he said. ‘But perhaps there’s something wrong with your phone.’

  ‘It’s not plugged in,’ said Jerry. ‘I think it’s meant to be like that.’

  Max Hansen asked if he might possibly come in, and Jerry asked what it was about. Max Hansen asked once again if he might possibly come in, and Jerry repeated his question. If you bang your head against a wall, who screams first, you or the wall? Answer: you. So Max Hansen gave up and quietly explained why he was there.

  As Jerry no doubt knew, Tora had recorded a song which had become an enormous hit on the internet. But she had also made another, professional recording, and Max Hansen now wanted to release this version as a single.

  ‘OK,’ said Jerry, beginning to close the door. ‘Best of luck.’

  Max Hansen inserted his foot in the door and Jerry had an unpleasant flashback which didn’t improve his mood.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Max Hansen. ‘We could be talking about big money here. The problem is that no record company is prepared to release the single until I have the documentation to prove that I have the right to act for Tora. Are you her guardian?’

  Max Hansen’s voice had taken on an aggressive tone. It would of course have been no problem to slam the door on his foot and force him to remove it, but talk of big money couldn’t be completely ignored. Jerry had enough to manage for another year or so, but that was it.

  ‘No,’ said Jerry. ‘I’m not her guardian. She hasn’t got a guardian. There can’t be any documentation. What do you suggest?’

  Jerry had opened the door just enough for Max Hansen to lean forward and whisper close to his face, ‘That I fake all the paperwork. That you don’t make a fuss. And then you’ll get the money on the quiet.’

  Jerry thought it over. He had realised that Theres’ non-existence in the system caused insurmountable problems. What the vacuum cleaner salesman was offering was a solution that circumvented all that: money floating down out of the blue without him needing to get dragged into anything.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You do that. But I’ll be keeping an eye on you.’

  Max Hansen removed his foot. ‘You do that. I’ll be in touch.’

  Jerry closed the door with an unpleasant feeling in his body. Someone was walking over his grave. Yes. At some point in the future something was happening that he couldn’t foresee. Max Hansen had been a bit quick with his idea of faking the documentation. But what could Jerry have done? Max Hansen could fake away to his heart’s content, there wasn’t a chance in hell that Jerry would go to the police. His only little trump card was that Max Hansen didn’t know that. At least, he didn’t think so.

  But it didn’t feel good, and when Theres asked him who had been at the door, and he told her it was a vacuum cleaner salesman, he felt a clinking in his breast like thirty pieces of silver.

  Theres spent most of her time at the computer, and when Jerry asked her what she was doing she said that girls liked the song and wrote to her, and she wrote back. Jerry wondered what had happened to Teresa, and was told that she had disappeared. That she didn’t answer messages. Theres didn’t appear to be upset or concerned about this, but as always it was hard to know.

  The day before New Year’s Eve the doorbell rang, and Jerry opened it briskly. He was expecting more wheeling and dealing from Max Hansen and had decided to play the heavy and hope for the best. But out on the landing stood a frightened little girl aged about fifteen who almost fell backwards down the stairs when he flung the door open.

  ‘Hi,’ said the girl, so quietly that it was difficult to hear. ‘Is Theres home?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  The girl gabbled her reply like something that must have been repeated many times, ‘My name’s Linn sorry if I’m disturbing you.’

  Jerry sighed and stepped to one side. ‘Welcome Linn-sorry-if-I’m-disturbing-you. Theres is in there.’

  The girl quickly kicked off her shoes and padded off to Theres’ room. Soon after that the door closed. Jerry stood in the hallway looking at Linn’s tiny red trainers.

  Something told him he was witnessing the birth of a monster. As it turned out, he was absolutely right.

  The family came home early from the mountains when Göran and Maria finally realised that Teresa’s condition wasn’t something that could be cured with painkillers. She wasn’t catatonic, but she wasn’t far from it. She refused to eat anything for two days, and when Göran and Maria asked in despair if there was anything she might fancy, she came out with just two words: ‘Baby food.’

  So they bought baby food. Teresa ate a few spoonfuls when she was fed, drank a little water, then curled up in her bed and stroked the nose of an old cuddly toy until it was threadbare.

  Göran and Maria were ordinary people. It had never occurred to them that one of their children might suffer from problems that came under the heading ‘psychiatric’, and it wasn’t stupidity or negligence that stopped them from contacting the Psychiatric Service for Children and Adolescents. It just wasn’t on their radar.

  For reasons they couldn’t work out, their daughter had suddenly become very, very unhappy. Depressed was a word they could say, but without any real understanding of the concept. Depressed just meant very unhappy. But time heals all wounds, even invisible ones, and a person who is very unhappy will cheer up sooner or later.

  A few days passed, Teresa ate small portions of baby food, drank water and lay in her bed. It was only when she gradually began to talk that they realised they might need some help after all.

  It was Göran who was sitting by her bed trying to get her to drink a little more water when Teresa suddenly said, ‘There’s nothing.’

  Perhaps he should have been pleased that she was talking at long last so they could work out what was wrong, but what she said wasn’t exactly something to celebrate.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘There’s…there’s everything. Everything exists.’

  ‘Not for me.’

  Göran’s eyes darted around the room as if he were searching for something to hold up as real, as evidence. He fastened on a bowl of yellow plastic beads, and a distant memory drifted up like a mist, struggling to find a solid form, and failing. Something about yellow beads and existing. Something about Teresa and another, better time. Teresa mumbled something and Göran leaned closer. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I have to go to the other side.’

  ‘What other side?’

  ‘Where you become dead and are given life.’

  Three hours later Göran and Maria were sitting with Teresa between them in a room at the psychiatric service centre in Rimsta. Teresa’s temporary descent into leaden misery was one thing, but her talk about dying crossed a line. They couldn’t ignore that.

  Göran and Maria’s ideas about psychiatric care were somewhat exaggerated. They had expected a lot of white, and silence. White coats, white rooms, closed doors; so they were positively stunned when the person who greeted them was a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman in street clothes. She showed them into a room which looked considerably less sterile than a normal doctor’s surgery.

  A long conversation followed, during which Göran and Maria described the period leading up to Teresa’s present condition as best they could, and explained what had finally made them contact the psychiatric service. Teresa didn’t say a word.

  Eventually the doctor turned to her and asked, ‘How do you feel? Are your parents right to think you want to take your own life?’

  Teresa slowly shook her head without saying anything. When the doctor had waited a while and was on the point of asking a follow-up question, Teresa said, ‘I have no life. It’s empty. I can’t take it. No one can take it.’

  The doctor stood up and went over to Göran and Maria. ‘Would you mind waiting outside for a while so that I can have a little chat with Teresa on her own?’

  Ten minutes later they were called back in. The doctor was sitting next to Teresa with one hand resting o
n the arm of her chair as if establishing some kind of ownership. When Göran and Maria had sat down she said, ‘I think we’re going to let Teresa stay here for a couple of days, then we’ll see how we get on.’

  ‘But what’s the matter with her?’ asked Maria.

  ‘It’s a little early to say, but I think it would be helpful if we could talk a little more with Teresa.’

  While they were waiting Göran had read through some of the information leaflets in the other room, including one on suicidal tendencies in young people. He was therefore able to ask, ‘Will you be keeping her under observation?’

  The doctor smiled. ‘We will, yes. You can feel completely reassured.’

  But they didn’t feel reassured. As Göran and Maria were driving home to fetch some things for Teresa, Maria launched into a long and mildly hysterical monologue, the key point of which was what they had done wrong.

  Göran, who had got some idea from the information leaflets, tried to reassure her that depression was often a purely medical condition, a chemical imbalance for which no one could be blamed, but Maria didn’t want to hear that. She went through the last few months with a fine-tooth comb, and reached the obvious conclusion: it was those trips to Stockholm. What had she actually been doing there?

  Göran, on the other hand, maintained that Teresa had been much happier since she started spending time with Theres, but to no avail. The trips to Stockholm were the element in Teresa’s life that had changed, and in some way they were at the root of the problem.

  As Maria packed a bag with clothes, books and her MP3 player in Teresa’s room, Göran stood looking at the bowl of yellow beads. When he picked one up and held it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, his left hand found its way up to his collarbone. And he remembered.

  If I didn’t exist, then nobody would be holding this bead.

  Picking her up from the childminder. The afternoons at the kitchen table. All those necklaces made from plastic beads. Where did they go?

  There’s nothing.

  Göran’s stomach contracted and he began to cry. Maria asked him to stop.

  Teresa was taken into care. People were taking care of her. They passed like shadows outside the window of her eyes. Sometimes their voices reached her, sometimes food was pushed into her mouth and she swallowed it. Right at the back of her consciousness sat a very small Teresa who was perfectly aware of what was happening, but her clarity of mind did not reach the big body. She vegetated. She waited.

  From time to time there were periods when her brain worked as it should. She would think, she would feel. It was the emptiness that was the problem. She couldn’t remember how it had felt not to be empty, to have a wall of flesh and blood to protect her from the world. It no longer existed.

  Her situation could be described as a state of constant fear, overshadowing everything. She was afraid of moving, afraid of eating, afraid of speaking. The fear came from the emptiness, from being utterly defenceless. If she reached out a hand it might crack like an eggshell when it touched the world. She kept still.

  After a few days of fruitless discussions, they started to give her pills. Small, oval pills with a groove in the middle. The days and the weeks flowed together, and she didn’t know how much time had passed when a glimmer of light began to seep into her immense darkness. She remembered the feeling of a fire blanket being thrown over her. Now she could see a tiny gap. The voices around her became clearer, the contours more defined.

  For a few days she simply lay, sat or stood looking out through that gap, registering what was happening around her and taking it in. She was neither happy nor sad, but there was no doubt that she was alive.

  Eventually she opened the gap a little wider and stepped out. She wasn’t exactly a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but she was transformed. She was Teresa the empty one, but she wore her shell and pretended that she was alive in a way that convinced even her. Sometimes she even thought it was real.

  She carried on taking the medication, which she had discovered was called Fontex and was the same as Prozac, and went for counselling. She could remember the old Teresa now, the way she had been, and that was the role she played. Once again she did it so convincingly that she sometimes believed it herself.

  At the end of February, almost two months after she had been admitted, she was allowed to go home. In the back seat of the car she sat and looked at her hands. They were her hands. They were attached to her body, and they belonged to her. She understood that now.

  Two weeks before she was discharged, her class teacher had come to visit and brought her some school books, and Teresa had worked hard. The school work itself was no problem; the reading and the mathematical problems flowed straight into her mind and were dealt with rapidly, since they were no longer disturbed by the skeins of expectation and anxiety which are part of flesh and blood human beings. In two weeks she covered everything she had missed, and more besides.

  When she went back to school the others kept a certain distance, which she regarded as completely natural. Jenny, who was about to undergo yet another operation to straighten her nose, spat out, ‘Oh look, the local headcase. Home from the loony bin, are you?’ but fell silent when Teresa looked at her.

  Johannes and Agnes had been to visit her the day after the teacher came, and they made no attempt to avoid her in school. During one break time Teresa told them a little bit about life in the psychiatric unit and the difficulties that arose on a ward where any object that could be adapted for suicide had been removed. Amusing anecdotes.

  She watched them as she talked, and a voice inside her head said: They’re so lovely. I like them so much. It was true, and at the same time it wasn’t true, because she needed to say it to herself, trying to establish a fact that she knew ought to be there, but that she just couldn’t feel.

  It was easier with Micke.

  A couple of days after she came back, as she was ambling around the playground during break, she saw him standing smoking outside the gym equipment storeroom. She went over and took the cigarette he offered her, took a couple of careful drags and managed not to cough.

  ‘How are you?’ asked Micke. ‘I mean, are you a real psycho now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose I am. I have to take pills.’

  ‘My mother takes pills. Loads of them. She sometimes flips out completely if she forgets to take them.’

  ‘What do you mean, she flips out?’

  ‘Well, once she went completely…she started yelling that there was a pig hiding in the oven.’

  ‘An ordinary pig?’

  ‘No, a cooked one. Although it was still alive and it was going to jump out and bite her.’ Micke looked at Teresa. ‘But that’s not the same as what you’ve got, is it?’

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe it could be if I work on it.’

  Micke laughed out loud and Teresa felt…not happy, but totally unpressured. Micke didn’t make any demands. Even Agnes and Johannes felt like a threat. They expected a certain kind of behaviour from her, she had to conform. Micke, on the other hand, seemed to have a more relaxed attitude towards her since she became a psycho. That was something.

  It took three days after she had been discharged before she felt able to go near the computer. During the long period in the unit she had been weaned off it. As she looked at the big metal box, the screen and the keyboard, she thought she was looking at a source of infection. If she pressed the power button, the sickness would come pouring out.

  But Theres. Theres.

  Teresa took a deep breath, sat down at her desk and opened the lid of Pandora’s box, logged into her email account. Tons of spam had come in during her absence, and in amongst all the rubbish were five, no six, messages from Theres. The last one was dated six weeks ago.

  She opened them and read them. Each message was only one or two lines long, and apart from the first two, they were all short questions. Why didn’t she write, why didn’t she reply. In the last line of the last message T
heres stated simply, ‘i’m not writing any more’. The rest was spam.

  A feeling of sorrow began to rise up inside Teresa, but was stopped before it became painful. Sometimes she thought she could see the medication working in her body. What she saw was a chainsaw; the blade shot out and sheared off the top and bottom of her emotional register. The crown and the roots. Leaving her with a bare trunk to drag around.

  She read the last message again, and clicked on reply. Then she wrote:

  I’ve been ill. I was in hospital. I didn’t have a computer.

  I couldn’t write.

  I’m back home now. I miss you. Can I come over at the weekend?

  She sent the message, then sat on her bed and read through Ekelöf’s ‘Voices Under the Earth’ three times. She understood every single word.

  I long to move from the black square to the white.

  I long to move from the red strand to the blue.

  She flicked back and forth through the paperback edition of his collected poems. She hadn’t had it with her in the unit, because she had never really got Ekelöf. Now she found that almost every poem spoke to her, and that he had suddenly become her favourite poet. Gunnar Ekelöf. He knew.

  This creature, Nameless

  comes to life in a closed room

  With no other opening but the gap

  through which he is forced to emerge

  Now he is on the move

  is empty in

  a fulfilled world

  Amazed, she read on and found other poems that struck a chord, other descriptions of things with which she was already familiar. It was almost difficult to put the book aside while she checked her messages. Yes. Theres had replied.

  good that you’re home come here soon

  Joy gathered itself, ready to make a huge leap in her breast. Then the chainsaw was there, slicing through her happiness as it fled, so that it fell down between her ribs and landed as a mutilated little stump of pleasure. But pleasure nonetheless.