Little Star (31 page)

Teresa didn’t know how much
of her was sitting on the train to Österyd. It felt like less than half. She had left the essential parts in Theres’ safekeeping in Stockholm, and the thing filling the seat on the train was no more than a functioning sack of blood and internal organs.

It was intoxicating and quite unpleasant. She was no longer in control of herself. The fine hairs on her forearms missed Theres’ presence, the warmth of the body by her side. Yes. When she examined her longing, she discovered that was exactly how it looked: she wanted to be next to Theres. They didn’t have to do or say anything, they could just sit next to one another in silence as long as they were together.

She had never experienced anything like it, this purely physical perception of a
lack,
an awareness that something big and important was missing. She wasn’t blind. She realised that there was something significantly wrong with Theres, perhaps she even had some kind of brain damage. She didn’t do anything in the same way as normal people, she didn’t even eat normal food.

But ‘normal’? What was so good about ‘normal’?

The people in Teresa’s class were more or less normal. She didn’t like them. She wasn’t interested in the other girls’ tacky little secrets, she thought the boys were just stupid with their hoodies and their baseball caps, their pimply skin. None of them had
courage.
They walked like cowards and talked like cowards.

She could imagine them all in a deep hole, lined up just as they
would be for a class photo, but with their hands and feet bound. She herself would be standing up at the top next to a huge pile of earth. Then she would throw one shovelful at a time into the hole. It would take many hours, but eventually it would be done. Nothing could be seen, nothing could be heard, and the world would be not one jot poorer.

Ten minutes before the train was due to arrive in Österyd, Teresa started to smile. She gave a big smile, she gave a little smile, she gave a medium-sized smile. Trained up her muscles as she constructed a role for herself.

When Göran picked her up at the station, the rehearsal was over. She was the lonely girl who had found a good friend at last. They had watched films and talked half the night and had a
brilliant
time. The smile and the glow around her were firmly in place, and Göran felt much better when he saw his daughter’s changed mood. Teresa noticed how credible she was, and it wasn’t really difficult because it was all true, on a simple level.

As soon as she got home she checked her emails and found a message from Theres in her Inbox, ‘hi come back soon write more words to the songs’. Four MP3 files without titles were attached. Teresa opened them and found they were four of the melodies she had liked best.

She got to work. After working for a couple of hours she watched the clip of Theres on
Idol
several times, then carried on writing. When she was on her way to bed, she remembered the DVD from Max Hansen’s camera. She took it out of her bag and stood there turning it over in her hands for a long time. Then she put it in an unmarked case and slid it into the CD rack.

The role she had invented for herself could also be used in school. She was less frosty if anyone spoke to her, and on the whole displayed a less pugnacious attitude. Not that anyone actually cared, but the friction lessened slightly.

To be fair, Johannes noticed the change in her, and when he asked she told him the same story she had dished up to Göran, with a little
more detail. Friend in Stockholm, brilliant time and so on. She also let slip that they made music together. Johannes was pleased for her.

As far as her school work went, it was a different story. Her mind was elsewhere. She sat through an entire social studies lesson on the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and literally grasped
not one word
apart from the fact that someone called Jimmy Carter used to grow peanuts. He might have been a president of the USA. That was the sum total of her knowledge after a forty-minute lesson: that Jimmy Carter used to grow peanuts.

The fact was that the following sentence had suddenly come to her:
Fly to the place where wings aren’t needed.
It was an exciting sentence, a good sentence. But clumsy. Impossible to find a rhyme. And what did it mean? That you should go to a place where you would no longer need to run away. Yes, something along those lines.

Fly to the place where you need no wings.
Better. Rhymes with
sings. Go where your heart sings.
No, that was ugly.
Fly high until your heart sings.
Better.

She had scribbled down odd words and sentences on the sheet of paper with
Democrats / Republicans
written at the top. The information about Jimmy Carter and his peanuts had slipped through when she paused for thought, but she hadn’t written it down. Then she started to play with the word
rings.
Rings in the water, on fingers, sitting in a ring. And so on. Then the lesson was over.

On the Saturday she caught the train to Stockholm again. Jerry had agreed to give Maria a call in order to lend credibility to Teresa’s interpretation of the role. He told her
the girls had had a brilliant time together
and confirmed that Teresa was very welcome to stay with them any time, then he went off to see his girlfriend and left the two of them in peace.

They worked on the songs and watched
Dawn of the Dead.
In the evening they rang Max Hansen and arranged to meet at the hotel the following day, in the restaurant.

Then there was something Teresa wanted to do, but she found
it hard to ask. In spite of the fact that it was a completely normal thing between two friends, she felt embarrassed. Perhaps because they weren’t just two friends. She sat there fiddling with her mobile phone, and couldn’t quite bring herself to ask. As if Theres sensed her difficulties, she came straight out with it, ‘What do you want to do?’

‘I’d like to take a photograph of you.’

‘How?’

‘With this.’ Teresa held up her phone, pointed it at Theres, then took a photograph and showed it to Theres on the display. Theres stroked the surface of the phone and asked how it worked. Teresa couldn’t really explain that, of course, but they spent a while taking photographs and looking at the pictures. Theres even took a couple of pictures of Teresa which Teresa secretly deleted, because she thought she was so ugly.

The wound in Max Hansen’s
back had been stitched and was healing well, but the damage to his self-esteem was another matter. The incident in the hotel room had knocked him off balance. He spent four days shut in his apartment drinking heavily, looking through his old films and trying to masturbate, but without success.

He watched only the films featuring the most submissive and obliging girls, the ones who had got on their knees or spread their legs at the first hint. It didn’t help. In the weary movements of their hands, in the passive acceptance of their bodies he seemed to see a threat that finished his erection before it had even started.

Tora Larsson had taken from him his only real pleasure. Drunk almost to the point of unconsciousness, he sat flicking through images of young, naked bodies and felt nothing but fear and a faint masochistic enjoyment of his own fear.

On the fifth day he woke up with a hangover that felt like being buried alive. Instead of a hair of the dog he took two strong painkillers and a long shower. When he had dried himself and put on clean clothes the situation had improved to the point where he merely felt like shit.

One thing was absolutely clear: Tora Larsson was his biggest opportunity for a long time, and he had no intention of messing it up. But she would pay for what she had done to him; she would literally pay, in hard cash.

Towards the afternoon, when he had had a couple of whiskies after
all, just to restore the chemical balance in his body, his new strategy was ready.

This industry was killing him; it was time to pack it in. Tora Larsson would be his final project, and he would put everything he had into making her a success. She didn’t seem to have a clue about anything, and he intended to amend his standard contract so that it gave him the maximum return.

Then people in the industry could say whatever they liked, piss on his hall carpet and encourage everyone to boycott him and whatever the fuck they could think of. He would rake up his money and put all this behind him, head off somewhere with a better climate, wash down his Viagra with cocktails with a little umbrella in them and live life for as long as life was there to be lived.

When Teresa rang him on the Saturday he was as nice as pie. He asked her to pass on his apologies, as far as he was concerned the whole thing was forgiven and forgotten, and now it was a matter of looking to the future. The world was their oyster and Tora was his number one priority.

During the afternoon he made some calls. A studio and producer posed no problems, but as he suspected his good name wasn’t enough to persuade any record company to pay for a demo. However, he eventually managed to strike a deal with Ronny Berhardsson at Zapp Records, which was owned by EMI. They’d known each other for years, and Max Hansen had supplied him with a couple of artists who had at least recouped their production costs.

Ronny said Zapp could cover the cost of studio time, but the rest would have to come out of Max’s own pocket. Ronny had seen
Idol,
and even if he wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as Max, he agreed that the girl had potential. It was worth a shot.

As Max Hansen got ready to leave for the meeting, he was careful not to omit a detail he had forgotten last time. He took Robbie with him.

Robbie was a sun made of metal, a happy face the size of a fivekronor piece surrounded by five stubby points. Max had won it at the
Tivoli theme park in Copenhagen when he was eight years old, on a family visit with both sets of grandparents.

He could no longer remember why he had called the little smiley sun Robert, later shortened to Robbie, but it had accompanied him throughout his life as his lucky charm. The last thing Max did before leaving the apartment was to kiss Robbie on the nose and tuck him in his jacket pocket.

Wish me luck, buddy.

He got to the restaurant fifteen minutes before the agreed time, ordered sashimi and read through the contract he had prepared the previous evening. It gave him the rights to fifty per cent of all Tora’s income from future recordings and appearances. He was hoping that the girl or girls would have so little idea about this sort of thing that fifty-fifty would sound perfectly reasonable.

He would of course need the signature of a parent or guardian, but his intention was to get the project moving first, so that this person would feel obliged to accept his terms if the whole thing was to go ahead. The scheme was not without risk; there was a reason why he’d brought Robbie along.

Max had finished his sashimi and begun to worry that the meeting would be a wash-out when the freak appeared by the entrance to the restaurant. Teresa, that was her name. Max Hansen got up and went to meet her.

Then Tora appeared, and Max had to turn to Robbie’s other particularly useful quality. The sight of that beautiful creature sent a stab of fear through him. He hadn’t thought he would react like this, but a week of brooding darkly on what had happened in the hotel room had got into his bones. He started to shake and pushed his hand into his jacket pocket, clasped his hand around Robbie’s protruding points. The fear in his heart shot down his arm and gathered around the pain in his hand. A seemingly relaxed pose: left hand in his jacket pocket, right hand outstretched, hello there, welcome. They sat down at the table.

Teresa did the talking and Max relaxed a little, loosened his grip
on Robbie. He set out his plan. They would make a demo featuring two songs: a cover of something Tora sang well, plus a new song. He knew several pretty good songwriters and would gather together a few possibilities. At that point he was interrupted.

‘We’ve got songs,’ said the freak.

‘I’m sure you have,’ said Max. ‘But we can look at those later. We need to adopt a completely professional approach at this stage.’

The freak placed a cheap MP3 player with earphones on the table and ordered him to listen. She was rather rude. He extricated his left hand from his pocket, holding it so that the red indentations in his palm wouldn’t show, sighed meaningfully and put the earphones in.

He knew roughly what he was going to hear. Once upon a time it had been cassettes, then CDs, and more recently MP3 files that young wannabes had sent him. They fell into two categories: feeble variations on whatever happened to be current, or mournful ballads accompanied by guitar. By and large.

Teresa pressed play and it took Max Hansen three seconds to realise this was something that had been recorded at home using a music program, without any great finesse. Guitar, bass, percussion and a clumsy synth track. When Theres began to sing he thought he recognised the song, although he couldn’t quite place it.

They say that you will never fly

They say that you’re too young

They say that you must always listen

To all their rules and strictures

But if you have wings you’ll fly…

It was a good song. Actually, it was a
really
good song. The production was crap and the lyrics needed a bit of work, but the melody was immediately appealing and of course Tora sang perfectly. By the time he heard the first chorus, Max Hansen had already decided that he could perhaps save on the cost of a songwriter. This song showed off Tora’s vocal range and potential beautifully.

He had to keep up the pretence. Before the song came to an end he
pulled out the earphones and shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose it might do. It might be OK with decent production. We can probably work with what we’ve got here.’ Max Hansen took out the contract and placed it in front of Tora along with a pen. ‘Right, I need your paw mark on this piece of paper.’ He turned to the last page and pointed to the line at the bottom. ‘Just here.’

Tora looked at the line, then at the pen. Then she said, ‘How do I make a paw mark?’ She turned to Teresa. ‘Can you do it?’

Max forced a smile and slipped his left hand into his jacket pocket, where he rubbed his thumb over Robbie’s face. ‘A signature, I mean. You need to sign here. If I’m going to carry on working with you so that you can make a CD.’

Teresa pushed the contract back across the table. ‘We can’t do that.’ Robbie found his way back into Max’s palm, pressing against the skin until it was almost punctured. Max closed his eyes, concentrated on the pain, and managed to remain calm.

‘Listen, my dear,’ he said to Tora. ‘This is your
chance.
Trust me, I’m going to make you a star, you’re going to earn money and have fans, the whole shooting match. But you have to sign this piece of paper, or that’s the end of it.’

‘I don’t want money,’ said Tora. ‘I want to make a CD.’

‘And you
will
make a…’ Max Hansen broke off. ‘What do you mean, you don’t want money?’

‘She means what she says,’ said Teresa.

After some negotiation it emerged that what Tora wanted was a deal where Max Hansen gave her cash in hand. There was no need for paperwork or registration or the allocation of rights. Max Hansen was to act as if he were her guardian, but without any written proof.

It was risky. Max Hansen would never even have considered it if it hadn’t been for his plan:
take the money and run.
He could cash in bigtime here before it came to light that he had no right to. After all, everyone would just assume the paperwork was in order.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’re agreed,’ as if it was perfectly normal not to have a signed contract between artist and agent.

So Max Hansen put his papers away, forbore from rubbing his hands and explained how things would work over the next few weeks. The biggest fly in the ointment was that Tora refused to do anything unless Teresa came along, which meant he would have to book studio time at the weekends. He hoped the girls’ irritating symbiosis would wear away as time went by; Tora was too talented to drag a troll on a chain along behind her. But for now he would just have to live with it.

All communication was to be via email, and he had no problem with that. He was quite happy to avoid the hassle of trying to explain himself to parents or brothers or whoever.

When they had said goodbye and talk soon, Max sat there for a long time staring straight ahead. Then he took out Robbie and pressed him to his lips, whispering, ‘Well done, buddy.’ When a waiter came to ask if there would be anything else, Max ordered a small bottle of champagne. Well, sparkling wine. The same thing for half the price. That was his theme tune.