Little Star (39 page)

However, there was a problem. Tora Larsson would never agree to the project, and he didn’t know what she might do when she found out what he was up to. It was a dilemma, to put it mildly.

With the help of the computer Max started checking the information he had found in the apartment. He soon discovered that no one with Tora’s ID number existed. However, Angelika Tora Larsson did exist, and she had the same number if you altered just one digit.

Max found the really juicy information when he did a search on Lennart and Laila Cederström. He read the articles about the Swedish pop stars who had been brutally murdered, their son Jerry, and the strange room the police had discovered in the cellar. He put this together with what his back knew about Tora’s capacity for violence, and suddenly his dilemma was no longer a dilemma.

He no longer had a problem; it was Tora Larsson who had a problem. He could do exactly what he wanted, and she wouldn’t be able to say a word.

On Monday morning Teresa went
to school. Heads turned to look at her as she got on the bus. She went straight to the back, and sat with her feet in their Doc Martens on the back of the seat in front of her. People looked at her and sniggered. As soon as she looked them in the eye, they looked away.

Eight members of her class had arrived before her. They were standing around waiting for the first lesson to start. One of them was Karl-Axel, the documentary film maker. Teresa was completely calm inside as she met his gaze from some distance away. She walked steadily along the corridor, the boots giving her footsteps weight and power.

When she was a couple of metres away from the group, Karl-Axel grinned and said, ‘Morning
Teresa’,
then grabbed the side of his cheek and pulled it in and out a couple of times so that it made a smacking, slurping noise. A couple of the lads gave a dirty laugh.

Teresa could have sat down right at the end of the bench outside the classroom and ignored the whole thing. Someone would say how disappointing it was that stuffed cabbage leaves weren’t on the lunch menu today, someone else would say they hoped she hadn’t eaten too much for breakfast. Something along those lines. She could have sat there with her eyes firmly fixed on the floor, pretending she couldn’t hear them. But she had thought the situation through, and it just wasn’t an option.

Instead she grinned back at Karl-Axel as if he done something
really clever, then took a step forward and kicked him in the groin. The boots had a reinforced steel toe-cap, and her aim was more or less perfect. Karl-Axel went down as if a stopper had been pulled out, doubled over on the floor and started shaking before he even worked out how to yell. His mouth was opening and closing, and all the colour had left his face. Teresa leaned over him.

‘What are you saying? What is it you’re trying to say,
Karl-Axel?’

Something between a squeak and a whisper emerged from Karl-Axel’s mouth, and Teresa thought she heard him say, ‘Only joking…’ She placed her foot on his cheek, pressed his face down on the floor and turned to the others.

‘Anyone else feel like joking?’

Nobody volunteered, and Teresa removed her foot. The sole had left a pattern on Karl-Axel’s cheek. His body jerked as he pressed his hands to his groin, making inarticulate hissing noises. She looked at him and felt no pleasure. He was just a scared, pathetic little boy, and she actually regretted kicking him quite so hard.

But there was nothing she could do about that. Teresa sat down on the bench and folded her arms, waiting for this minor incident to be over. There would no doubt be more, but she had gone back to her idea about simplicity, and her plans for the day were simple. As soon as someone said or did something derogatory about her, she would kick them. The girls on the shin, the boys on the cock, if possible. That was all.

Several more students arrived, and Karl-Axel was still refusing to get up. Whispered conversations took place as the new arrivals were told what had happened.

Agnes arrived only a minute or so before the lesson was due to begin. By that time Karl-Axel had managed to struggle up into a sitting position, leaning against the lockers. She tilted her head to one side and asked, ‘Why are you sitting there?’

Karl-Axel shook his head, and Patrik said, ‘Teresa kicked him. Between the legs. Really fucking hard.’

Agnes turned to Teresa with the hint of an ambiguous smile on
her lips. At first Teresa thought it was a kind of approval, but when Agnes didn’t sit down next to her as usual, she suspected it was just for want of anything else to do.

Teresa’s plan succeeded beyond all expectation. Everyone in the class avoided her, but nobody said anything else during the course of the day. Not even Jenny managed to come out with a spiteful comment when Teresa was within earshot. She concentrated on her inner wolf, and remained unmoved.

It was only during the lunch break that her defences wobbled. Nobody came to sit by her, but as she sat there with her lunch she could feel the eyes on her, hear the whispers. What was Dirty Teresa going to do with the food? What was Puky Teresa going to stick in her mouth now?

She looked at her plate, on which two pieces of crumbed fish lay next to four potatoes with a few slices of tomato around the edge. A lump rose from her stomach, stuck in her throat and turned to nausea. She could kick anyone who stood in her way, but she couldn’t eat this.

She thought about getting up, going over to the slop bucket, scraping all the food off her plate and leaving the dining room. Everybody laughing behind her back. Oh what fun they would have.

Smoke rose from the plate. The quarry’s flank ripped open, the steaming blood meeting the cold air. She cut a piece of potato and bit through the skin. Her jaws tensed as she chewed through muscle and sinew. The dying twitches of the crumbed fish, then the bite that extinguished all life. The red juice of the tomatoes, running down her throat. Not a scrap would be left for the crows.

When she got up and carried her empty plate over to the counter, the white skeleton she handed over had been scraped clean. A successful hunt, a meal which would keep the body alive for the rest of the day. She had won.

And so it went on. Day after day Teresa went to school in her red boots, fearing nothing and no one. Nor did she feel any longing or
regret. When she met Micke, she nodded to him and he nodded back. There was nothing to say, and she was done with emotions. They had died along with her childhood, spilt in red pools on a cement floor.

She could have grieved, but did not do so because her emotions had been replaced by
perceptions.
Her senses were at full stretch; liberated from her brain’s struggle with itself, Teresa experienced every impression with much greater intensity.

She could walk down corridors and enjoy the murmur of voices behind closed doors, the colours of the cupboards and the walls, the smell of paper, cleaning materials and drying clothes. She could enjoy all the impressions that, taken together, made her a part of the world, someone who was walking around and who was
alive.
Such an obvious fact that she had managed to ignore for fifteen years: she was alive.

Therefore, she did not grieve for what she had lost, but instead rejoiced at what she had gained and what she had become. It was that simple. It may not have showed on the outside, but she was
happy.

On Tuesday evening she spent a while exchanging emails with Theres, making plans for the weekend’s meeting with the other girls. They settled on Sunday at twelve o’clock, but as Jerry was back it couldn’t be in Svedmyra. They could meet outdoors, but where? They would give the matter some thought; nothing was decided.

Teresa surfed various sites on wolves, read some new posts on the forum, and ended up on an auction site where someone was selling a wolf skin. The starting price was six hundred kronor; the auction was due to end in a couple of hours, and so far nobody had put in an offer.

She looked at the photograph of the grey pelt, laid out on an ordinary kitchen table. Once upon a time it had been part of a real wolf, the hunter of the forest. Muscles had worked beneath that fur, it had rubbed up against other coats, loped across the snow and howled beneath the stars. If someone bought it, it might end up on the floor in front of a fire, something soft for the kids to sit on.

Without giving it any further thought, Teresa put in a maximum
bid of one thousand kronor. Five minutes later she went back and raised it to two thousand. That was all the money she had in her account. She had given the bits of paper from the metal cash box to Theres.

She lay down on her bed and read some Ekelöf. The rapport she had felt when she came out of hospital was no longer there, and she caught herself thinking Ekelöf was
weak.
A weakling. A little worm of a writer. But still. She read these lines several times:

The silence of the deep night is great

It is not disturbed by the rustle of the people

eating one another here on the shore

It was the word ‘rustle’ she liked. That was all. A rustling sound as flesh is consumed.

She put down the book and lay with her hands behind her head, missing her MP3 player. She didn’t like the idea that Max Hansen might be sitting wearing her earphones at this very minute, listening to the songs she and Teresa had made together. She didn’t like it at all. It was like knowing there was a pig in the wardrobe, a snout snuffling around among your clean clothes.

Her mobile rang, and when Teresa answered she expected to hear that slimy voice from the depths of the sty, but it was Johannes. After a few introductory phrases he asked how she was, and she said she was absolutely fine.

‘It’s just that I’ve got a feeling you’re…I don’t know, that you’re
not there,
kind of.’

‘I haven’t gone anywhere. I’m here.’

‘So why are you avoiding me, then?’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes, you are. Do you think I haven’t noticed?’

‘What does it matter? You don’t want anything to do with me.’

There was a long sigh at the other end of the phone. Then Johannes said, ‘Teresa, just stop that. You’re my oldest friend. Don’t you remember what we said? That we’d be friends. No matter what.’

Teresa had a strange, rough feeling in her throat, but her voice sounded perfectly normal when she replied, ‘We said a lot of things. When we were little.’

‘Are you thinking about anything in particular?’

‘No.’

Johannes gave a snort, as if he were smiling at some memory. ‘I just thought about that time…when we were lying in the cave, do you remember? When we said we were going to be dead?’

The rough feeling in her throat had begun to take on the form of a lump, and Teresa said, ‘Listen, I’ve got things to do.’

‘OK. But can’t you come over one day, Teresa? It’s such a long time since we had a proper chat. And listen, we can play Tekken! I’ve got a…’

‘Bye Johannes. Bye.’

She ended the call. Then she wrapped her arms tightly around her stomach and leaned forward, then down as far as she could until there was a rushing noise in her head and it started to hurt. She straightened up and it flowed away. Her skull emptied as the blood poured back down her body and her anxiety abated.

She tore a sheet of paper into tiny, tiny pieces which she pushed in her mouth and chewed. When the paper had turned into a soggy ball, she spat it out into the waste paper basket. She was grateful that she was alone. Her defences were weak; if anyone had wanted to harm her, this would have been the perfect opportunity.

It was quarter past eleven, and the auction was over. She checked her messages and found an email from the website telling her she had won. No one else had put in a bid, and the wolf skin was hers for six hundred kronor.

She knew exactly what she was going to do with it, and where she was going to suggest for Sunday’s meeting.

‘He wrote. Max Hansen.’

‘What did he write?’

‘That he knows. About Lennart and Laila. And the room. When I was little. How they ended up dead.’

‘So what’s he going to do, then?’

‘An album. With our songs.’

‘No, I mean what’s he going to do with what he’s found out. About you.’

‘Nothing.’

‘What? Is that what he wrote, that he’s not going to do anything at all?’

‘If I don’t do anything, he won’t do anything. That’s what it said.’

They were sitting right at the back of the number 47 bus from Sergels Torg. A few families with children were sitting towards the front, but the seats closest to them were empty. It was the middle of April, and the streams of tourists heading for Djurgården had not yet got under way. Teresa leaned forward, resting her elbows on the full rucksack at her feet as she tried to think.

It was hardly likely to be in Max Hansen’s interests to reveal what he knew about Theres; it was just an empty threat.

Or was it?

The girl who grew up in a cellar and turned into a cold-blooded murderer. It was just the kind of story people loved. Teresa had never thought about Theres’ story in that way before, but she could see it
now. The newspaper screamers. Day after day. A story that would run and run, and plenty of free advertising for the album. Could Max Hansen be such an evil bastard? Could he?

As the bus crossed the bridge Teresa straightened up and took a deep breath, drumming the heels of her boots on the floor. It was pointless to speculate. She would concentrate on what was happening now.

Twelve girls had said they were coming. The youngest was fourteen, the oldest nineteen. Theres had told her a little bit about each of them, but Teresa found it difficult to separate the monosyllabic accounts and link them to the names. Miranda and Beata and Cecilia and two Annas and so on.

She remembered Miranda from that time in the apartment, and Ronja was the name of a girl Theres said had tried to kill herself three times, once by eating glass. That had stuck in Teresa’s mind, because it was so extreme. Ronja. No doubt her parents had had something else in mind when they chose the name.

They got off outside Skansen. Teresa heaved the rucksack onto her back and headed for the Solliden entrance. Theres didn’t follow her. She was stuck outside the main entrance, gazing up at the sign. When Teresa turned back, Theres asked, ‘Is this Skansen?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘A zoo. And some old buildings, that kind of thing. Why do you ask?’

Theres frowned. ‘I’m going to sing here.’

‘What? Or rather…when? How come?’

‘I don’t understand. Am I going to sing to the animals?’

Teresa looked at the big, ornate letters above the entrance. She knew there were concerts here sometimes, and so of course…

‘Just hang on a minute,’ she said. ‘When are you going to sing here?’

‘In the summer. Max Hansen wrote. Sing Along at Skansen. Good publicity.’

‘You’re
performing at Sing Along at Skansen?’

‘Yes. Otherwise he’ll tell about Lennart and Laila.’ Theres’ tone of voice altered slightly, and Teresa sensed that she was just regurgitating something Max Hansen had written when she went on, ‘Then Jerry will go to prison. I’ll end up in the loony bin with all the other nutters. Why am I going to sing to the animals?’

Teresa took off her rucksack and put it on the ground. Then she sat down on it and asked Theres to sit next to her. She took her hand.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘First of all. You’re not going to sing to the animals. There’ll be people there. Thousands of people. Adults and kids and teenagers. It’s shown on TV. Millions of people watch it. That’s what it’s about, OK? Sing Along at Skansen.’

Theres nodded. Then she shook her head. ‘That’s not good. A lot of people is not good. I know.’

‘No. And secondly. You are not going to end up in a loony bin. And if you do, I’ll be coming with you. We’re both just as screwed up, OK? Whatever happens to you, happens to me. That’s just the way it is. But this business with Max Hansen…I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

‘We’ll have to make him dead.’

Teresa laughed. ‘I should think he’ll be bloody careful around us from now on. But we’ll have to think of something.’

‘Yes. That’s good. Now let go of my hand.’

Teresa didn’t let go. When Theres tried to pull away, she held on more tightly. ‘Why don’t you like it when I take your hand?’

‘You’re not to take my hand. It’s my hand.’

The leap of logic distracted Teresa, and Theres pulled away and stood up. Teresa stayed where she was, looking at her own hands.
Take my hand.
People took things from one another. She was not to take Theres’ hand. Of course.

She hoisted up the rucksack again and went ahead of Theres along Sollidsbacken, outside the railings. On the miniature map she had printed off from the internet the distances had looked quite short, but when they reached the Solliden entrance she realised they had almost
a kilometre still to go. A bus passed on Djurgårdsvägen; presumably the buses went all the way. She would bear that in mind for next time. If there was a next time.

They turned off onto Sirishovsvägen. Teresa looked at her map, and once they had passed the Bellman gate they walked another hundred metres along the wire fence, peering through the netting.

‘They’re not here,’ said Theres.

Teresa looped her fingers through the wire and slowly scanned the terrain. She had imagine a more open area, but the wolf enclosure was a landscape of trees with new leaves, bushes and stones strewn over hillsides. Their natural environment. She knew there should be seven wolves in there, but there was no sign of any of them.

Her gaze stopped at an oddly shaped rock, and she gasped. It was a block of stone, but its strange shape was due to the fact that there was a wolf lying right on top. It was lying completely still, looking in their direction.

‘There,’ she said, pointing it out to Theres. ‘There.’

Theres stood right next to her, pressing her body against the fence so that she could get as close as possible. They were caught in the wolf’s field of vision, and a faint breeze was blowing towards their backs. Presumably the wolf had picked up their scent. Teresa’s stomach flipped over.
Right now you’re thinking about us. What are you thinking? How do you think?

They stood there for a long time, clinging to the fence and looking at the wolf looking back at them. They were together. Then the wolf began to lick the fur on its paws, and left them.

‘Why are you unhappy?’ asked Theres.

Only then did Teresa discover that her eyes were wet, and tears had run down her cheeks.

‘I’m not unhappy,’ she said. ‘I’m happy. Because I’ve arrived.’

They spread blankets on the ground in front of the wolf enclosure. Before Teresa pulled the wolf skin out of her rucksack, she glanced over at the rock. The wolf had left its post, which was a good thing,
because as she placed it in the centre it felt like a kind of blasphemy. As if she were not worthy.

She and Theres sat down on the blankets with their backs to the fence and waited. In the message calling everyone to the meeting, they had explained that Teresa who wrote the lyrics would also be coming. She didn’t feel like Teresa who wrote the lyrics. She was a little lone wolf, and a strange pack was moving closer.

‘Theres?’ she asked. ‘Have you played them all the songs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you told them about yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lennart and Laila and…everything?’

‘Yes. Everything.’

It was as she suspected, and there was really only one question she wanted to ask. She was afraid of the question because she was afraid of the answer, but she asked it anyway.

‘Theres. What is it that makes me different from them?’

‘You came first. You wrote the words.’

‘But otherwise we’re similar?’

‘Yes. Very similar.’

Teresa lowered her head. What had she thought? That she was unique and the only person in the whole world with whom Theres could have contact, the only person who could love Theres? Yes. That’s exactly what she had thought, until she walked into Theres’ apartment and found the pack gathered. Now she had the final confirmation that she had been an idiot.

Very similar.

The first group of seven girls was approaching from the bus stop. There was
one
consolation to be found in Theres’ painful honesty: perhaps the pack wasn’t as alien as she had thought. She watched the seven girls, and even from a distance there was already something she recognised in their movements, the way they walked, as if their footsteps might damage the ground.

Teresa undid her boots, pulled the laces tighter and said, ‘But they
haven’t made anyone dead, have they? None of them?’

‘No.’

‘And do you think they could?’

‘Yes. All of them.’

Teresa looked at the little group who had now reached the fence, and her eyes narrowed. A new plan took its first uncertain steps in her brain. Then she waved and smiled.

All of them.

When the girls came over to say hello, Teresa felt
elevated
in a way she had never experienced before. She was treated with respect, as if she were giving an audience. She couldn’t help it; she enjoyed it. She had never been the focus of so much positive attention.

They praised certain phrasing or individual lines, some said that her lyrics described exactly how they felt themselves, and that they wished they could write like that. After a few comments in that vein Teresa sought refuge in false modesty, and said that it wasn’t really anything special, anyone could have…and so on.

In spite of the fact that the other girls regarded her as an authority, they still spoke the same language. It was a different matter with Theres. They treated her like something made of the finest porcelain, speaking quietly and not daring to touch her. When Theres spoke they listened, their bodies tense with concentration.

What Theres said was nothing remarkable, but of course Teresa knew how it worked. Theres had the ability to say exactly the right thing to the right person, the self-evident truth that that particular person needed, expressed with that elusive, subjugating tone in her voice that made it into more than truth, into The Truth.

After exchanging greetings and chatting for a while, the girls sat down around the wolf skin and immersed themselves in their own thoughts, or ventured some tentative comment.

Teresa hadn’t expected it, but when they were all assembled and she looked around the group—how they sat, the way they moved their hands, how they looked—she concluded that she was probably
the strongest person there. She had nothing to be afraid of.

On the other hand, she was the one who had known Theres the longest, the one sitting by her side. What would she have been without Theres? A little grey mouse, scurrying along by the wall and trying to be invisible. Maybe. Or maybe not. In any case, she looked at the others with tenderness in her eyes. When little Linn started to look as if she might burst into tears, Teresa felt no jealousy as Theres crept over to her and whispered in her ear until she was calm again.

Apart from Ronja, none of these girls would pick up much support in the voting for prom queen. Several of them were a few kilos overweight, like Teresa, and about half had piercings: lips, nose or eyebrows. Beata’s appearance was Asiatic, and she was the only one who seemed to have naturally black hair; both Annas, Linn and Caroline had different-coloured roots.

Only Cecilia was actually fat, and she hid her body in coarse military clothing, but most of the others were dressed in bulky clothes that hid their shape. As for make-up, it covered the entire spectrum—from Melinda, who had birds’ wings drawn in pen at the corners of her eyes, to Erika who wasn’t wearing any make-up at all, and who was so colourless in general that she was almost invisible. Teresa guessed that hardly any of them were joiners: they wouldn’t be members of any club or society.

But Ronja was the exception. She was the oldest in the group at nineteen, and looked like the sporty type: football, probably. She was wearing Adidas trousers and a windbreaker, she was slender and her hair was blonde and straight. A more athletic, socially adept version of Theres. Not the prettiest girl in the class, but a perfectly acceptable candidate to wear the crown. And she was the one who ate glass.

A common denominator united them, and it was probably only Teresa who was aware of it: the
scent
of the girls. They all smelled more or less the same. Hardly any of them used perfume, and those few did so sparingly. But that wasn’t the scent they had in common, it was what lay beneath it. Fear.

It had been Teresa’s own bodily odour for so many years that she
recognised it immediately. She could probably have sniffed her way to each and every one of these girls if they were on the same bus. A bitter, sweetish smell with a hint of flammable liquid. Coca-Cola mixed with petrol.

As the girls shuffled closer to one another and the conversations got going, there was a change in the air around them. The security of the pack made the scent diminish. Their bodies, their skin, ceased to exude fear as the conversations intertwined to form a single, unified melody.

‘…and I can feel the whole thing just falling apart…my mum’s got a new bloke and I don’t like the way he looks at me…they said I couldn’t come even if I paid…he came home in the middle of the night and he had a knife…and even though I try my best in every way…shook my little brother and he ended up with brain damage…have to wear earphones all the time so nobody can hear…and when I’m walking along, it’s as if it’s somebody else walking along…that I was completely worthless, that I had no chance…tried to hide under the bed, which was just so fucking stupid…the music I listen to, my clothes, how I look, everything…that noise, when I hear that noise I know…as if I didn’t exist…little tiny pinpricks all the time…just to walk away, leave it all behind…nobody but me…’

Teresa turned towards the enclosure just in time to see the wolf clambering up onto his rock once more, folding its paws in front of it then looking down on the group of girls with its ears pricked, as if it were listening to their conversations. Teresa turned back to the others and pointed.