They talked on the subway and they talked on the bus to Djurgården. Whispering, because there were a lot more people now than when they had come out here the first time. Their conclusion was that they would say yes to Max Hansen. Whether Theres would actually turn up on the day was another matter. Teresa certainly had no intention of being Max Hansen’s mouthpiece and trying to persuade her.
As usual they had turned up a while before the others, and as they approached the place near the wolf enclosure they could see three men sitting there. On previous occasions other people had got there before them, and the entire group would then use the simple and effective method of staring at the intruders until they moved away.
The men were in their twenties, and had no blankets, beer or musical equipment with them, so Teresa presumed it wouldn’t be too long before they left. For the time being she and Theres spread the blankets out a little further up, sat down and carried on talking.
Three shadows fell over their spot. They had been so absorbed in their conversation that they hadn’t noticed the three men coming over. As soon as Teresa looked up at them she could see that something was wrong, in spite of the fact that the light was behind them, and immediately afterwards came the scent, clear and unmistakable: threat.
All three men were standing with their hands in the pockets of baggy tracksuit tops, and they had arranged themselves so that Theres and Teresa were trapped between them and the fence.
The one in the middle crouched down. Beneath his thin trousers Teresa could see the contours of pumped-up leg muscles; his upper arms were as thick as her thighs.
‘Hi,’ he said, nodding at Theres. ‘You’re Tesla, aren’t you?’
Theres, who appeared completely unmoved by the attitude of the men, nodded and came out with her usual response, ‘We. I sing. Teresa writes the words.’
‘Yeah, right.’ said the man. ‘Because you’re such a pretty girl.’ He nudged Teresa’s shoulder, as if she were something in his way. ‘Why would you bother with a bag of spanners like her otherwise?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Theres.
‘No. It does look that way, like you don’t really get it.’
‘What do you want?’ said Teresa. ‘Get lost. We haven’t done anything to you.’
The man pointed at Teresa. ‘You. Shut the fuck up. It’s her I’m talking to.’ He gestured to one of the other men, who came and crouched down next to Teresa, while the first man went over to Theres.
The man who was now so close to Teresa that she could smell the mouthwash on his breath held up his big hands, showing her the weapons at his disposal. He looked less than intelligent, bordering on mentally challenged, and Teresa had no doubt that he did exactly as he was told. Out of the corner of her eye she could see some of the other girls approaching, but they were some distance away.
‘You sing well,’ said the first man, towering over Theres. He pointed into Skansen. ‘And you’re going to sing here in a couple of weeks, aren’t you?’ When Theres didn’t reply, he said it again, but with greater emphasis. ‘Aren’t you?’
When the men first came over Teresa had quickly considered the possibility that they had something to do with Max Hansen, then dismissed the idea as being too over the top. But it was actually true. He had found himself some muscle to carry out what his written threats had failed to achieve.
When Theres still didn’t reply, the man grabbed her under the arms and lifted her with no effort, pinning her up against the fence with her face on a level with his, her feet dangling several centimetres off the ground. Teresa tried to get up, but her gorilla placed his heavy hands on her shoulders, pressing her down while snorting as if he were calming a horse. The girls had broken into a run, but they were still at least a hundred metres away.
The first man pulled Theres closer, then thrust her back against the fence, making the wire netting rattle. ‘Aren’t you?’ Theres drew back her lips, exposing her gums, and the man laughed. ‘Growl as much as you want—are you going to do as you’re told, or what? I need an answer!’
He shook Theres so that her head banged against the fence. Tears of rage scalded Teresa’s eyes as she scratched the gorilla’s arms: she was making no more impression than a swarm of midges. She would have kicked, screamed, fought to the very last drop of blood, and she couldn’t even get to her feet. It was unbearable.
‘Yes!’ she yelled. ‘Yes! She’ll be there! Leave her alone! Let go of her!’
The man who was holding Theres nodded. ‘I want to hear it from you, little girl. I’m asking you nicely—now are you going to do what you’ve been asked to do?’
The two Annas, Miranda, Cecilia and Ronja had arrived. The third man walked towards them, his arms raised. ‘OK, OK. Let’s just stay here girls, nice and calm now.’
Ronja aimed a kick at his kneecap, but he kept his balance, grabbed hold of her and threw her down on the grass. The other four stood irresolute, staring at Theres who nodded and said, ‘Yes. I’ll sing.’ Two seconds later her teeth had closed on her attacker’s eyebrow.
His roar brought everything to a stop. His friends, completely paralysed, followed what was happening over by the fence with their mouths agape. The man spun around as if he were dancing with Theres, at the same time trying to push her away. When he succeeded it was at the expense of a few grams of body weight. Theres spat something out of her mouth and blood poured down into the man’s eye as he held her at arm’s length.
He bellowed like an injured animal, and hurled Theres at the fence with all his strength. She bounced against the wire and fell head first on the ground. As the man gathered himself to deliver a kick to her stomach, the one who had been holding on to Teresa shouted, ‘We weren’t supposed to hurt her!’
The man came to his senses, pressed one hand to his injured eyebrow and contented himself with tipping Theres over onto her back with the toe of his shoe, whereupon he grabbed hold of her crotch with his other hand and hissed, ‘You need to be bloody careful from now on. I might come back and play with you again one of these days!’
Then they left. They were followed by curses and empty threats, mainly from Ronja and Teresa, but they left. All the girls gathered around Theres, whose lip had split. Her mouth was smeared with a mixture of blood and saliva, and no matter how she struggled, a billowing mass of arms and hands covered her, stroking and wiping and supporting. Only when she put her arms over her head and shouted, ‘Stop touching me!’ were the helpful limbs withdrawn, and the girls stood with their hands empty, not knowing what to do with them.
‘Fuck!’ said Ronja. ‘Fucking hell, fuck fuck fuck! There were more of us!’
She ripped off a low-hanging branch and started whipping the tree trunk as curses poured from her lips and her body jerked as if she were having a fit. Teresa thought she might flip into real hysteria, but after a minute or so she threw down the branch, hit herself on the head with clenched fists a few times, then lowered her hands and exhaled.
The rest of the girls had arrived, and they all stood around with their heads lowered during Ronja’s outburst, some of them stroking their piece of wolf skin as if to console something within themselves, to apologise. When Ronja came and sat down on the blanket, her hands still shaking, Teresa said, ‘OK?’
Several times they had discussed spending a whole weekend together, and now it had become absolutely essential. They could talk and identify themselves with wolves as much as they liked, but when it really mattered they had not acted as a pack, but had splintered into individual, frightened little people. It could not be allowed to happen again.
Beata’s parents had a little place in the forest outside Åkersberga. They wouldn’t be going out there until July, and Beata knew where the key was. The problem was that it was a good five kilometres from the nearest bus stop. However, it turned out that both Anna L and Ronja had passed their driving test, and that Anna actually had a car.
None of the others had thought of themselves as the kind of group where someone had a
driver’s licence, but when it turned out to be the case, a heady feeling of liberation quickly took hold. They had a place to be, they had a way of getting there. Together they had resources and opportunities which they lacked when they were alone.
Teresa was sitting as close to Theres as possible without touching her while the others made plans for the coming weekend. Times, food, sleeping bags and so on. Theres seemed unmoved by the incident with the men, and only her swollen lower lip bore witness to the fact that something had happened. She didn’t join in the discussion until the question of food came up. The girls were discussing pasta and yoghurt when Theres said, ‘I don’t eat that kind of food.’
As usual, the slightest utterance from Theres brought all conversation to a halt. Everyone turned to her, some with an embarrassed expression as if they were ashamed of having forgotten about her for a few minutes.
Cecilia asked, ‘So…what do you eat, then?’
‘Stuff in jars. It’s called Semper. And Nestlé.’
‘You mean like…baby food? Why do you eat baby food?’
‘I’m little.’
‘We’ll sort it,’ said Teresa. ‘No problem.’
There was a brief silence as the group digested this new information. Then Linn looked around and stated with unusual firmness, ‘In that case, we’ll all eat the same thing.’
Some laughed with relief at this elegant way of slicing through a knotty problem, and the planning took another direction. What flavours, what size jars, how many, and who could do the shopping?
By the time they parted, everything was decided. The following Friday afternoon they would take the subway, the Roslagen line, then the number 621 bus to Grandalsvägen in Åkersberga. Then Anna L would run a shuttle service in her car to transport them to the cottage next to Lake Trastsjön. They would bring sleeping bags and bedrolls, they were going to eat baby food for two days and they were going to become a real pack.
The other girls waved as they headed for the bus stop, leaving Theres and Teresa sitting on the blankets. Teresa went for a little walk, found the lump of flesh Theres had bitten out of the man’s eyebrow, and ground it into the soil with the sole of her boot. Then she sat down again.
‘Will it be OK?’ she asked. ‘Next weekend?’
‘Yes,’ said Theres. ‘It’s good. They will stop being afraid. Like you.’
Teresa had to wait for a long time before Theres turned to look at the wolf enclosure, and couldn’t see what she was doing. She quickly leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
Everyone is actually called something else.
On the Tuesday evening before school broke up, Teresa stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying to find her other name. She had grown up as Teresa, heard people say it to her thousands of times. But was that really her name?
She had thought about it before, but it had come back to her when Johannes rang a couple of hours earlier. Once again he maintained that she was behaving very strangely, that he could tell something was wrong, and couldn’t they meet? He had used the name Teresa over and over again until Teresa felt as if the person he was talking to was a complete stranger. It was no longer her. However, she put the phone down with a horrible feeling that he was right. That she had lost herself, gone astray. Or rather: that this Teresa he was talking to had lost herself. But was she actually Teresa any more? Was that her name?
Those were her thoughts as she stood in front of the mirror, studying her face and searching for a clue. She thought her eyes had hardened, literally. As if the eyeball was no longer a jelly-like lump filled with fluid, but was made of glass, hard and impenetrable.
‘You are weird,’ she said to herself. ‘You are hard. You are weird. And hard.’
She liked the words. She wanted to be those words, wanted them to fit her like her boots, to wrap themselves tightly around her like her boots and become her.
‘My words. Weird. Hard. Words. Hard. Weird.’
Urd. Urd.
Her body said yes, in spite of the fact that she didn’t remember. Where had she heard the word before? Was it a name? She went to the computer and opened Wikipedia.
Urd. The original and possibly the only goddess of fate in Norse mythology. One of the three Norns. With her sisters she would spin and cut the threads of life, and her name came from the Icelandic word for unlucky fate.
Everyone is actually called something else. I am called Urd.
This wasn’t something she intended to tell other people, and she wasn’t going to try to get them to use it. But within herself she would know. Just as the boots fitted themselves to her feet and enabled her to walk firmly and steadily, so the name would anchor her inside, and would consume all her uncertainty.
‘Urd!’
On Wednesday she got through the end-of-term celebrations with her eyes wide open, and yet firmly closed. The summer dresses and chirruping voices, the off-key singing, the odd tear at the thought of saying goodbye for the summer—none of it had anything to do with her.
It had nothing to do with Urd, and she did not see it. Her thoughts were with the pack.
On Friday afternoon Teresa went over to Svedmyra to collect Theres. Some of the others joined them on the subway, and more of the girls were waiting at the bus stop. By the time they got on the 621 only Malin and Cecilia were missing.
After they had exchanged a few texts, everything went according to plan. Anna L came and picked them up a few at a time. Her little car was so rusty it was almost impossible to talk while they were travelling, because there were holes in both the silencer and the floor. Anna yelled that she had bought it on the internet for three thousand.
What Teresa had imagined when Beata said her parents had a little place in the forest couldn’t have been further removed from reality. The house, tucked in among fir trees, might once have been a cottage but it had been renovated and extended so many times that it was more like a mansion—albeit an oddly proportioned and over-decorated one. The closest neighbour was half a kilometre away, and on the slope leading down to the lake all the trees had been felled and the stumps removed to create a lake view thirty metres wide, leading down to a jetty.
While Ronja took the car to pick up Malin and Cecilia, who had come on the next bus, the others went exploring with Beata. An old garage had been converted into a workshop with two carpentry benches, and Beata explained that her father spent most of his time there in the summer. Hence the over-the-top ornate carving on the outside of the house. Her father could devote an entire week to making a spectacularly ugly frieze just to avoid spending time with her mother.
When they came out of the workshop Teresa spotted a half-rotten door that seemed to have been thrown away on a slope, and to be disappearing gradually into the ground. She went over and saw that although there was moss growing around the rusty handle, it actually was a door, because it was surrounded by a frame.
‘The root cellar,’ said Beata. ‘Spooky.’
Theres had come over, and when Teresa started to tug at the handle, she helped. They had to struggle to rip out the grass that had taken root in the rotting wood, but eventually they managed to open the door and a chilly breath of earth, iron and decay came at them from underground. Without any hesitation Theres walked down three steps and disappeared in the darkness.
‘Theres?’ shouted Teresa. ‘What are you doing?’
There was no reply, so Teresa swallowed and went down the steps through an opening that was so low she had to crouch. The temperature dropped by several degrees, and when she had got through the opening and her eyes had begun to grow accustomed to the gloom, she saw that she was in a surprisingly large room. She could stand up straight, and each wall was at least two metres away.
From the darkest corner she heard Theres say, ‘This is good.’
Teresa took a step in the direction of the voice, and eventually she was able to make out Theres, sitting on a low wooden box with her back to the wall. The box was
rectangular; Teresa sat down next to her, looking over towards the opening and the world outside, which suddenly seemed far away.
‘What do you mean, good?’ she asked.
‘You know.’
They could hear the voices of the others in the other world as one by one they descended into the cold, musty room. As soon as they were in they started speaking in whispers. Sofie had a small LED on her keyring, and swept the blue light slowly around the space.
The stone walls were damp and a few rotting tools lay in a heap in the corner nearest the door, their iron parts rusting. The earth floor had been flattened and here and there some kind of white sprouts were sticking up, which Teresa found disgusting. Apart from that, she thought the room was…good. Very good.
When Sofie shone the light on the box Theres was sitting on, Teresa noticed that the entire front was covered in faded red letters that said, WARNING! EXPLOSIVE MATERIAL! Her stomach flipped and she asked Beata, ‘Is there dynamite or something in here?’
‘No,’ said Beata, ‘unfortunately. It used to have potatoes in it. Ages ago. Before that, I don’t know.’
Teresa wrinkled her nose. A minor disappointment. Not that she had any definite plans, but the very thought of having explosives at her disposal was appealing. Miranda seemed to share her feelings because she said, ‘Shit, that’s a shame. Just imagine if we’d had some dynamite.’
There was silence for a while, and they stood together in the darkness surrounded by the smell of mould, each thinking privately of the use they could make of something that could blow everything to kingdom come. Then they heard Ronja’s voice from up above.
‘Hey, where is everybody?’
A minute or so later, Ronja, Malin and Cecilia were down in the cellar as well. They had all arrived. Teresa closed her eyes, feeling the presence of the others’ bodies around her, the breathing and the small noises, the beat of their pulses and the shared scent that drove the musty smell away. She took a deep breath through her nose and straightened her back. Theres said, ‘Close the door.’
Little Star Page 42
