Little Star Read online

  After ten minutes the passenger door opened. Laila got in and sat down. She had tidied her hair. They sat next to one another in silence for a while. Lennart carried on rocking back and forth, but had stopped whimpering. Eventually Laila said, ‘Can’t you hit me or something?’

  Lennart shook his head, and a sob escaped from his lips. Laila placed a hand on his knee. ‘Please? Can’t you just slap me a couple of times? It’s OK.’

  It was an ordinary Wednesday night and people were starting to leave the car park. Cheerful revellers strolled by. Someone spotted Laila in the car and waved. She waved back. Lennart glared at her hand, resting on his knee, then pushed it away. ‘Has this happened before?’

  ‘What do you mean? With Roland?’

  An icy stalactite detached itself in the area between Lennart’s chest and throat, tumbled down through the empty space in the centre of his body and shattered in his stomach. Something in her tone.

  ‘With others?’

  Laila folded her hands in her lap and sat in silence, watching a lone woman tottering along on too-high heels. Then she sighed and said, ‘So don’t you want to hit me, then?’

  Lennart started the car.

  The next three days were almost unbearable. They couldn’t talk, so they kept busy. Lennart did little chores in the garden and Laila went running. Jerry went from one to the other, trying to lighten the atmosphere by telling Bellman stories, but all he got in response were sorrowful smiles.

  Running was Laila’s way of keeping fit, keeping slim and supple ‘for you and the audience’, as she had once said. The day after the gig Lennart was oiling the garden furniture as Laila passed him, wearing her blue windbreaker. He put the brush down and followed her with his gaze. The trousers and jacket were unnecessarily tight, and her long blonde hair was caught up in a pony-tail that bounced up and down on her back as she jogged along the village road.

  He knew what this was all about. She was on her way to an assignation of some sort. A man was waiting for her in the bushes somewhere. In a little while she would meet him there and then they would be at it like rabbits. Or perhaps she just enjoyed running along in her tight clothes, making sure men were looking at her. Or perhaps it was both. She got them to look at her, then she ran into their houses and let them screw her, one after the other.

  The oil splashed everywhere as Lennart slapped it onto the garden table with his brush. Back and forth, back and forth. In and out, in and out. The pictures flickered and excited, constricting his lungs and making it hard to breathe. He was going mad. That’s the kind of thing people say, but it really did feel like that. His consciousness was standing on the threshold of a dark room. Inside there was oblivion, silence and—right in the corner—a little music box that played ‘Auld Lang Syne’. He would sit in the darkness and turn the handle around and around, until he fell asleep forever.

  But he kept oiling the table and when he finished the table he started on the chairs and when he finished the chairs Laila came home, red and sweaty from all the big cocks she had been riding. While she was stretching he secretly looked over her running clothes, searching for damp or dried-in stains. They were there if he wanted to see them, but he didn’t want to see them, so instead he looked at the half-rotten porch step and decided to build a new one.

  Sunday. The Swedish chart countdown.

  Lennart woke up with butterflies in his stomach, which was a welcome change from the demons that had been tearing at his guts for the past few days. As he got out of bed he felt only ordinary honest-to-goodness nervousness. This was the day when The Others would step into the limelight. This was the day when he and Laila should have been sitting here holding hands, waiting expectantly for eleven o’clock when the countdown began.

  That wasn’t going to happen, so instead he set to work ripping up the old porch step. He struggled and wrenched with the crowbar until five to eleven, when Laila came out with the small battery-operated radio and sat down at the table next to him.

  Apart from the utterly silent drive home from Eskilstuna, this was the first time since the incident that they had even sat near each other. Jerry was at a friend’s birthday party, so there was no chance of him disturbing the moment. Lennart kept on working, while Laila sat with her hands on her knees, watching him. They heard the familiar theme tune, and a drop of sweat dripped from Lennart’s armpit and ran down his side.

  ‘Fingers crossed,’ said Laila.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Lennart, attacking some nails so rusty the heads came off when he applied the crowbar.

  ‘It’s a wonderful song,’ said Laila. ‘I might not have told you properly, but it’s a fantastic song.’

  ‘Right,’ said Lennart.

  He couldn’t help himself; Laila’s words of praise did mean something to him after all. He couldn’t quite see how they were going to move on, but at least they were sitting here waiting for their song. That had to mean something.

  A couple of songs that were bubbling under were mentioned, then the presenter went through the chart. Number ten, nine, eight, seven, six. Lasse Berghagen, Hootenanny Singers and so on. Same old stuff. Lennart had heard them all dozens of times. Then it came. His heart started pounding wildly as he heard Kent Finell say, ‘And at number five we have this week’s only new entry…’

  Lennart held his breath. The birds fell silent in the trees. The bees sat motionless on their flowers, waiting.

  ‘“A Summer Without You” by Tropicos!’

  The usual four notes that sounded just like any other song. Laila said, ‘What a shame!’ but Lennart didn’t hear her. He stared at a rotten plank of wood and felt something inside him take on the same consistency as it shrivelled and died. Somewhere in the space outside him someone was singing:

  What do sunshine and warmth mean to me

  When I know this will be a summer without you.

  Roland. It was Roland who was singing. Tropicos. Number five. Highest new entry. Would keep on climbing. The Others. Nothing. Hadn’t made the chart. No fresh start. It was sinking in.

  Without you, what’s a summer without you…

  The world wasn’t ready. All he could do was accept that fact. A calmness bordering on physical numbness came over Lennart. He glanced at Laila. Her eyes were closed as she listened to Roland’s voice. The hint of a smile played on her lips.

  She’s listening to his voice and thinking about his cock.

  Laila opened her eyes and blinked. But it was too late. He had seen. Suddenly he felt his arm jerk. The crowbar swung in a wide arc and landed on Laila’s knee. She gasped and opened her mouth to scream.

  It had just happened, he had had no control over the movement; he didn’t feel he could be blamed for it at all. But then something changed. With Laila’s squeal of pain and surprise, Lennart stood up and raised the crowbar again. This time he knew exactly what he was doing. This time he took aim.

  He slammed the flat end of the crowbar down again, full force, on the same knee. There was a moist crunching sound and, as Lennart lowered the crowbar, blood began to trickle down Laila’s shin and every scrap of colour left her face. She tried to get up, but her leg gave way beneath her and she collapsed at his feet, holding up her hands to defend herself and whispering, ‘Please, please, no, no…’

  Lennart looked at the bleeding knee; a considerable quantity of blood had gathered under the skin, and only a thin trickle was escaping where the skin had broken. He spun the crowbar around half a turn and brought it down once more with the sharp end.

  This time things went well. The knee burst like a balloon filled with water, and the kneecap splintered to one side to release a cascade of blood, splashing all over Lennart’s legs, the garden table, the demolished porch step.

  Perhaps it was just as well that Laila stopped screaming and fainted at that point, otherwise Lennart might well have continued with the other knee. He had in fact realised what he was doing. He was putting an end to Laila’s running. An end to staying slim ‘for you and the audience’ a
nd all those men waiting in the bushes.

  In order to make completely sure, he ought to smash the other knee as well. But as Lennart stood there looking down at his wife’s inert body, the kneecap that was no more than a mass of cartilage, splintered bone and blood, he decided that was probably enough.

  He would be proved right.

  The room in the cellar had grown warmer and had reached a pleasant temperature, but the air was still damp, and the window up at ground level was covered in condensation. The girl was lying in her basket, gazing at the ceiling with big eyes. Lennart turned back the blankets and picked her up. She didn’t make a sound, didn’t react to the change in any way.

  He held the giraffe before her eyes, moving it back and forth. She followed it for a second, then went on staring straight ahead. Presumably she wasn’t blind. Lennart clicked his fingers loudly right next to her ear and her forehead wrinkled a fraction. Not deaf either. But she was so curiously…closed off.

  What’s happened to her?

  He felt the girl was a little older than he had first thought, perhaps two months old. In two months a person can experience enough to instinctively formulate a strategy for survival. Perhaps the girl’s strategy had been to make herself invisible. Not to be seen, not to be heard, not to make any demands.

  Clearly the strategy hadn’t worked. She had been dumped in the forest, and she would be lying there still if Lennart hadn’t happened to be passing. He held her gently, looked into her bottomless eyes and talked to her.

  ‘You’re safe now, Little One. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ll look after you, Little One. When I heard you singing, it was as if…as if there was a chance. For me too. I’ve done bad things, you see, Little One. Things I regret, things I wish I could undo. And yet I keep on doing them. Out of habit. Things have just turned out that way. Can’t you sing for me, Little One? Can’t you sing for me like you did before?’

  Lennart cleared his throat and sang an A. The note bounced off the room’s bare cement walls, and he could hear for himself that it wasn’t absolutely pure. In the same way that you can’t just pick up a pen and draw the picture you have in your head—unless you have a talent for that kind of thing—his voice couldn’t produce the perfect pitch he could hear inside his head. But it was close enough.

  The girl’s mouth opened and Lennart held the note, moving so that his mouth was aligned with hers, sending his own imperfect note into her as he looked into her eyes. She began to tremble in his hands. No, not tremble. Vibrate. Something happened to the sound inside the room, and his note sounded different. He was running out of breath, and it was only when his own note began to fade out that he realised what had happened. The girl had responded with an A an octave lower. It ought to be impossible for a small child to produce such a low note, and the sound was slightly alarming. The girl was using her body like a sound box; she was like a purring cat, emitting a pure note in a register which should have been inaccessible to her.

  When Lennart fell silent so did the girl, and her body stopped vibrating. He held her close and kissed her cheek as tears welled in his eyes. He whispered in her ear, ‘I almost thought I’d imagined the whole thing, Little One. Now I know different. Are you hungry?’

  He held her in front of him again. There was nothing in her face to indicate a desire for anything. He squeezed her chest tentatively. He just couldn’t understand how she had been able to produce such a low note. The closest he could come up with was a purring cat, using its entire body as a sound box. But cats don’t purr in sine waves.

  You are a gift. You have been given to me.

  Lennart checked the girl’s nappy, put her back down and tucked her in. Then he went off to the storeroom to dig out Jerry’s old cot.

  For the first few days after Lennart came home with the baby, Laila waited for the knock on the door, the phone call, the uniformed men forcing their way into the house and asking questions before carting her off to a cell, possibly a padded one.

  After a week she began to relax. On the few occasions when someone did ring, she still picked up the receiver cautiously, as if she were afraid of what was on the other end, but she was gradually beginning to accept that nobody was coming for the child.

  Lennart spent a lot of time down in the cellar and, even though Laila was glad he had less energy to spare for stomping around in a bad mood, it still gnawed at her. She was constantly aware of the child’s presence, and kept wondering what Lennart was actually doing. He had never been particularly fond of children.

  Despite the fact that it hurt her knee—these days more metal parts than organic tissue—she made her way down the cellar steps now and again to see how the child was getting on. Lennart received her politely, while his body language made it clear that she was disturbing them.

  She wasn’t allowed to speak in the room. If she sat down, Lennart would place his forefinger on his lips and shush her as soon as she tried to say something. His explanation was that this time the child was not to be ‘talked to pieces’.

  Sometimes when she opened the door leading to the cellar she heard notes. Scales. Every time she just stood there, dumbstruck. Lennart’s tenor blending with another, higher voice, as clear as water, tinkling like glass. The child’s voice. She had never heard anything like it, never heard tell of anything like it.

  But still. Still.

  It was a child they were dealing with here. A child shouldn’t be lying in a cellar with scale exercises as its only source of stimulation.

  Lennart still had quite a lot of work as a songwriter, and sometimes his presence was required in the studio when songs were being recorded. Such an occasion arose ten days after the child had ended up in their care.

  Lennart usually thought it was fun to travel into Stockholm, to re-enter for a while the world that should have been his, but this time he was reluctant to go.

  ‘You go,’ said Laila. ‘I’ll take care of the girl.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that. The question is how you’ll take care of her.’

  Lennart was pacing around the kitchen with his leather jacket over his arm, the leather jacket that was reserved for trips of this kind; it was presumably intended as some kind of armour. Or else he needed to look tough, and found the jacket helped.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ll talk. Talk and talk. I know you.’

  ‘I’m not going to talk.’

  ‘What are you going to do, then?’

  Laila took the jacket and held it up so Lennart could put it on. ‘I’m going to feed her and change her nappy and make sure she’s all right.’

  When Lennart had gone, Laila wandered around the house for a while doing little jobs, because she wanted to be certain he hadn’t forgotten anything and wasn’t coming back. After twenty minutes she opened the cellar door and went down the steps.

  The girl was lying in Jerry’s cot looking at a mobile of brightly coloured plastic animals. She was too pale and too thin. Too lifeless. No pink roses in her cheeks, no seeking, questing movements with her hands.

  ‘Poor little soul,’ said Laila. ‘You don’t have much fun, do you?’ She picked the girl up and limped over to the storeroom. On the bottom shelf she found the box of winter clothes. She pulled out Jerry’s first snowsuit and felt a lump in her throat as she dressed the child. A woolly hat with ear flaps completed the outfit.

  ‘There we are, you poor little soul. Don’t you look lovely now?’

  She was snivelling as she made her way over to the cellar door and unlocked it. The little bundle in her arms brought back memories. Lennart could say what he liked, but she had loved Jerry. She had loved having a child to take care of, someone who needed her protection, someone who couldn’t manage on their own. Perhaps it wasn’t the best or most adult motivation, but she had done the best she could.

  She opened the door and stepped out at the bottom of a flight of cement steps, taking in a deep breath of the chilly autumn air. The girl screwed up her face, and she opened her mout
h as if to taste this new air. It seemed as if she were breathing a little more deeply. Laila crept up a few steps and peered out across the lawn.

  Pull yourself together, Laila. You’re crazy.

  Their garden was secluded, and even if someone did catch a glimpse of the child or heard a cry, what did it matter? It wasn’t as if the child had been kidnapped. It wasn’t being hunted all over Sweden, she had checked the papers. Nothing about a missing baby. If Laila Cederström walked around her garden with a baby in her arms, people’s natural reaction would be to come up with a reasonable explanation, not to hurl themselves at the nearest telephone.

  Laila took the steps one at a time and went over to the lilac arbour in the furthest corner of the garden, then sat down on the bench with the child on her knee. It had been a wet, mild autumn, and the lilac leaves hadn’t even begun to curl, let alone drop. They were sitting in a protective three-quarter circle of greenery, and Laila was able to relax.

  Then she took the girl for a short walk around the sheltered parts of the garden, showing her the herb garden, the gooseberry bushes and the apples—yellow Astrakhans ripe for the picking. The girl’s expression grew more lively the longer they stayed out, and her cheeks began to acquire a healthy pink glow.

  When it started to drizzle, they went back to the house. Laila made up a bottle of formula and settled down in the armchair with the girl on her lap. The child slurped down the milk in just a few minutes, then fell asleep in Laila’s arms.

  Laila walked around the house with her for a while, just for the sheer pleasure of carrying the warm, relaxed little body. Then the telephone rang. Instinctively Laila clutched the child more closely. She looked at the telephone. It wasn’t looking at her. It couldn’t see her. She loosened her grip and the telephone rang again.