Little Star Read online

  ‘I don’t mean anything. That’s just the way it was. She sang. And I’ve never heard anything like it. Not the hint of a slide or a grating sound. It was like hearing…an angel. I can still hear it.’

  ‘What are you trying to say, Lennart?’

  ‘That I can’t give her away. It’s impossible.’

  The coffee was finished. The child was asleep. Laila was limping around the kitchen with a wooden ladle in her hand, waving it in the air as if she were trying to scoop up fresh arguments. Lennart was sitting with his head resting in his hands; he had stopped listening.

  ‘There’s no way we can look after a child,’ said Laila. ‘How would that work, the way our life is? I for one have no desire to start that business all over again, sleepless nights and being tied down all the time. When we’ve finally managed…’ The ladle stopped weaving about and made a hesitant sideways movement. Laila didn’t want to say it, but as she thought it was an argument that might hit home with Lennart, she said it anyway, ‘…when we’ve finally managed to get Jerry out of the house. Are we going to go through all that again? And besides Lennart, forgive me for saying this, but I don’t think there’s a cat in hell’s chance they’d let us adopt. For a start, we’re too old…’

  ‘Laila.’

  ‘And you can bet your life they’ve got information about Jerry, which means they’re bound to ask…’

  Lennart slammed the palm of his hand down on the table, hard. The ladle stopped dead and the words dried up.

  ‘There’s no question of adoption,’ said Lennart. ‘I have no intention of giving her up. Nobody will know we’ve got her. For those very reasons you’ve so eloquently expressed.’

  Laila dropped the ladle. It bounced once, then lay there between them. Laila looked at Lennart, then at the ladle. When he made no move to pick it up, she squatted clumsily and took it in her arms as if it were the child they were discussing.

  ‘You’ve lost your mind, Lennart,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve completely lost your mind.’

  Lennart shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the way it is. You’re just going to have to get used to the idea.’

  Laila’s mouth opened and closed. The ladle whisked around as if to disperse a horde of invisible demons. Just as she was on the point of uttering one of the sentences that were sticking in her throat, there was a knock on the door.

  Lennart shot up from the table, shoved Laila out of the way and went into the living room, where he picked up the basket that held the sleeping child. The knock on the door was instantly recognisable. Jerry just happened to be passing.

  With the basket in his hand Lennart went up to Laila and held up a rigid forefinger right in front of her nose. ‘Not one word, do you hear me? Not a word.’

  Laila’s wide open eyes squinted a fraction as she shook her head. Lennart grabbed the baby things and threw them in the cupboard where they kept the cleaning stuff, then hurried over to the cellar steps. As he closed the door behind him he could hear Laila’s limping footsteps in the hallway.

  He crept down the stairs and tried to stop the basket tipping too much; he didn’t want the child to wake up. He went past the boiler room and the utility room and opened the door of the guest room, Jerry’s old room.

  A wave of chilly dampness hit him. The guest room had not accommodated a single guest since Jerry moved out, and the only visitor to the room was Lennart himself, when he came down here once every six months to air it. There was a faint smell of mould from the bedding.

  He put the basket down on the bed and switched on the radiator. The pipes gurgled as the hot water came gushing in. He sat for a moment with his hand on the radiator until he could feel it warming up; there was no need to bleed it. Then he tucked another blanket around the child.

  The little face was still sunk in what he hoped was a deep sleep, and he refrained from stroking its cheek.

  Sleep, little miracle, sleep.

  He didn’t dare leave Laila alone with Jerry; he hadn’t the slightest faith in her ability to hold her tongue if Jerry asked some tricky question, so with fear in his heart he closed the door of the guest room, hoping that the child wouldn’t wake up and start yelling or…singing. The notes he had heard would slice through anything.

  Jerry was sitting at the kitchen table, shovelling down sandwiches. Laila sat opposite him, twisting her fingers around each other. When Jerry caught sight of Lennart he saluted and said, ‘Hello there, Captain.’

  Lennart walked over and closed the fridge door. A considerable proportion of the contents had been laid out on the table so that Jerry had a choice of fillings for his sandwich. He took a bite of one containing liver pâté, cheese and gherkins, nodded in Laila’s direction and said, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with Mother? She looks completely out of it.’

  Lennart couldn’t bring himself to answer. Jerry licked gherkin juice off his stiff, chubby fingers. Once upon a time they had been slender and flexible, moving over the strings of a guitar like a bird’s wings. Without looking at Jerry, Lennart said, ‘We’re a bit busy.’

  Jerry grinned and started making a fresh sandwich. ‘Busy with what? You two are never busy.’

  A tube of fish paste was lying on the table in front of Lennart. Jerry had squeezed it in the middle, and Lennart began pointedly rolling up the bottom of the tube, pushing the paste towards the top. A slight headache had begun to burn around his temples.

  Jerry polished off his sandwich in four bites, leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head and gazed around the kitchen. ‘So. You’re a bit busy.’

  Lennart took out his wallet. ‘Do you need money?’

  Jerry adopted an expression that indicated this was a completely new idea, and looked over at Laila. He noticed something and tilted his head. ‘What’s happened to your cheek, Mother? Did he hit you?’

  Laila shook her head, but in such an unconvincing way that she might as well have said yes. Jerry nodded and scratched his stubble. Lennart stood there holding out his open wallet. The glowing points on either side of his head made contact and sent a thread of pain burning through his skull.

  With a sudden jolt Jerry half-rose from the chair, heading towards Lennart, who instinctively recoiled. Jerry completed the movement at a more measured pace, and before Lennart had time to react the wallet was in Jerry’s hands.

  Jerry hummed to himself as he opened the notes compartment, seizing three hundred kronor between his thumb and forefinger with a vestige of his childhood dexterity before tossing the wallet back to Lennart. He said, ‘That’ll cost you, you know.’ He went over to Laila and stroked her hair. ‘This is my darling mother, after all. You can’t just do whatever you like.’

  His hand stopped on Laila’s shoulder. As if he were expressing real tenderness, he grabbed Laila’s hand and squeezed it. She took what she could get. Lennart watched, utterly revolted. How had these two monsters ended up as his family? Two fat self-pitying blobs who stuck to him like glue, dragging him down; how did that happen?

  Jerry withdrew his hand and took a step towards Lennart, whose body automatically jerked backwards. Even if most of Jerry’s hundred-kilo bulk came from kebabs rather than weights, he was still considerably stronger than Lennart, and he knew how to handle himself. No doubt about that.

  ‘Jerry.’

  Laila’s voice was weak, pleading. The mother standing beside her disobedient son, saying don’t do that to the frogs, darling and not lifting a finger. But Jerry stopped and said, ‘Yes, Mother?’

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘So?’ Jerry turned to Laila and her eyes sought Lennart’s. He shook his head briefly and angrily, leaving Laila trapped between a rock and a hard place. In her confusion she fell back on her usual escape route. Her body went limp and she stared down at the table, mumbling, ‘I’m in so much pain, everything hurts.’

  It was unlikely to have been Laila’s intention, but the effect was exactly what Lennart had been hoping for: Jerry sighed and shook his head. He couldn’t c
ope with hearing his mother going on and on about her stiff joints, the rheumatic twinges in her neck and the entire medical lexicon of side-effects from drugs she wasn’t even taking. He lumbered out of the kitchen and Lennart’s heart almost stopped when Jerry’s shirt brushed over the giraffe’s head on the worktop; Lennart had forgotten to hide it.

  The giraffe rocked back and forth as Jerry went into the hallway and pulled on his biker boots. Lennart moved forward slightly so that his body was hiding the toy. Jerry looked up with a sarcastic smile.

  ‘Coming to say goodbye? It’s been a while.’

  ‘Bye then, Jerry.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I will be back, you know.’

  Jerry slammed the door behind him. Lennart waited ten seconds, then hurried over and locked it. He heard Jerry’s motorbike start up, then fade into the distance. He massaged his temples, rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he went back into the kitchen.

  Laila was sitting exactly as he had left her, slumped at the table, picking at her blouse like a little girl. A stray sunbeam found its way in through the window and touched her hair; it shone for a brief moment with a golden glow. Against all expectation Lennart was gripped by a sudden tenderness. He saw her loneliness. Their loneliness.

  Quietly he sat opposite her and took her hand across the table. A few seconds passed. The house was still after the natural disaster that was Jerry. But there had been another time. Another life. Lennart allowed himself to rest in his memories for a moment, thinking about how everything could have been different.

  Laila straightened up a fraction. ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Nothing. Just that we…maybe there’s a chance.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something.’

  Laila withdrew her hand and started rubbing at a button on her blouse. ‘Lennart. Whatever you say, we cannot keep that child. I’m going to ring social services, and we’ll see what they have to say. What we need to do.’

  Lennart put his head in his hands. Without raising his voice he said, ‘Laila. If you so much as touch that telephone, I will kill you.’

  Laila’s lips twitched. ‘You’ve said that before.’

  ‘I meant it then. And I mean it now. If you’d…carried on with what you were doing, I would have done the same thing as I will do now if you make a call or speak to anyone. I will go down into the cellar and I will fetch the axe. Then I will come up here and hit you on the head with it until you are dead. I don’t care what happens after that. It doesn’t matter.’

  The words flowed from his mouth like pearls. He was perfectly calm, utterly lucid, and he meant every word he said. It was a wonderful feeling, and his headache disappeared as if someone had pressed a button. The gauntlet had been thrown down, everything that needed saying had been said and there was nothing to add.

  Life could begin again. Possibly.

  Lennart and Laila.

  It wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven.

  Perhaps some of you might remember ‘Summer Rain’ from 1969. It managed to get to number five in the Swedish chart, and it’s probably on one of those compilation albums you can pick up in the supermarket for next to nothing.

  When they first got together in 1965, and also started to work together musically, they simply called themselves Lennart & Laila, until they changed their name in 1972. They had a couple more songs that just nudged the bottom of the charts, enough to get them quite a few gigs, but they never really took off.

  Then they got a new manager. He was twenty years younger than his predecessor, and the first piece of advice he gave them was to change their name. The old one sounded like a hokey downmarket version of Ike and Tina Turner, and the business of listing names had gone as far as it could go with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. No; now it was all about something short and clever.

  And so from 1972 onwards, Lennart and Laila went by the name of The Others. Lennart liked the feeling of coming from the outside, coming up from below, that was inherent in the name. Laila hated it and thought it was stupid. They didn’t play the kind of music it suggested: they were more like The Lindberg Sisters than The Who, and they had no plans to smash up their acoustic guitars on stage.

  But The Others it was, and it suited Lennart perfectly, because he wanted a fresh start. He had written a few songs that broke out of the old straitjacket with harmonies that put them somewhere between the Swedish chart stuff and ‘Top of the Pops’. Something new—and what could signal a new direction more clearly than a new name? He shrugged off Lennart & Laila like an old raincoat and settled down to write their debut album.

  By the spring of 1973, the album had been recorded and pressed. When Lennart held the first copy in his hands, he felt prouder than ever before. It was the first record he had made where he was happy with every one of the tracks.

  The first single was ‘Tell Me’, a subtle hybrid of the classic Swedish dance band sound—saxophone, three chords—mixed with Beatles-style sections in a minor key, and a bridge that was almost like a folk song. It was a sure-fire Swedish chart hit, but so much more at the same time. Something for everyone.

  At the beginning of May it was played on the radio for the first time, along with three other songs tipped to make the Swedish chart the following week: Thorleifs, Streaplers, Tropicos. And The Others. Lennart shed a few tears. It wasn’t until he heard the song on the radio that he realised how good it really was.

  A couple of days later he and Laila had a gig booked. The promoter had asked them to used their old name, because that was what people were familiar with. Lennart had no objections; he saw it as a farewell to old times. From Sunday onwards they would be singing a new song, in more ways than one.

  So they left Jerry, who was seven years old at the time, with Laila’s parents and drove the tour bus down to the park in Eskilstuna. It wasn’t a major gig, just the two of them, Tropicos, and some local talent called Bert-Görans.

  They had played with Tropicos on a couple of occasions in the past, and knew both Roland, the lead singer, and the rest of the lads in the band. There was a fair amount of back-slapping and congratulation aimed in Lennart’s direction, because they all listened to the Swedish top twenty. Lennart managed to force out something positive about Tropicos’ latest song, ‘A Summer Without You’, even though it sounded exactly the same as everything else. They didn’t even write their own songs.

  The evening went without a hitch. Lennart & Laila were even given the final spot, which meant that they had one up on Tropicos, so to speak, and they performed with considerable verve. Laila sang better than ever, perhaps because she knew it was a kind of swan song. Lennart had explained that they would never play these songs again, so as Laila tugged at the heartstrings with the final notes of ‘Summer Rain’ which ended their set, several members of the audience had tears in their eyes, and the applause was unusually enthusiastic.

  Lennart had considered finishing off by mentioning that they would be called The Others from now on, and ‘don’t forget to listen in on Sunday’, but in light of the applause it just seemed petty. He allowed Laila to have her swan song in peace.

  Afterwards they had a few beers and a bit of a party. Lennart got talking to Göran, the guitarist with Bert-Görans, who also had greater musical ambitions than the rigid chart formula usually allowed. He expressed great admiration for Lennart’s skilful interweaving of listener-friendly dance band tunes with what he called, ‘more continental elements’. He was convinced this was the way forward, and they raised a glass to Lennart’s future success.

  When Lennart went to buy the next round, he couldn’t find his wallet. He asked Göran to wait and hurried back to the other room, purring like a cat inside. He couldn’t help it, there was something special about being praised by someone who actually knew what they were talking about. And Göran had proved himself to be a pretty good guitarist, so surely it was just possible that…

  Lennart opened the door and his life was kicked in a
completely different direction. He was looking Laila straight in the face as she stood there, bent over a table, her fingers spread wide. Behind her was Roland with his trousers around his ankles and his face turned up towards the ceiling as if he were suffering some kind of cramp.

  Lennart had obviously disturbed them at a critical moment, because when Laila caught sight of him and launched herself across the table in a reflexive door-closing motion, Roland groaned as he was wrenched out of her. He grabbed hold of his cock, but couldn’t manage to stop the ejaculation; the semen spurted, arching across the room to land on a make-up mirror. Lennart watched the sticky fluid work its way down towards a jar of fake tan which presumably belonged to Roland.

  He looked at Laila. The fingers with the bright red nails still clutched the table, and a couple of strands of her hair had stuck to her cheeks. He looked at Roland and Roland looked…tired. As if he just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. His hand was still holding his stiff cock. It was bigger than Lennart’s. Much bigger.

  As Lennart slammed the door shut, all he could see in his mind’s eye was Roland’s cock. It followed him along the corridor, out into the car park, into the car. He switched on the windscreen wipers as if he were seeking some physical help to erase the image, but the cock forced its way through, violating him. It was that big.

  He had never seen an erect penis other than his own. He had thought he was pretty much OK. Now he knew this wasn’t the case. He tried to think what it might feel like to have a…a pole like that thrust inside you. It was difficult to imagine that it would be a pleasant experience, but Laila’s face, in the brief second it took her to switch from enjoyment to terror, had told a different story. He had never seen that expression on her face. He didn’t have the necessary tool to evoke it.

  The wipers squeaked against the dry windscreen, and Lennart switched them off. The cock had gone, replaced by Laila’s face. So pretty. So bloody pretty and so desirable. So ugly in its contorted ecstasy. He felt as if he were being ripped in two. He wanted to start the car and drive somewhere, lie down in a ditch with a bottle of whisky and die. Instead he just sat there, his arms locked around his stomach, rocking, and whimpering like a puppy.