Little Star

EPILOGUE

Mother says I was a dancer before I could walk

Robert Segerwall has earned his place in the VIP seats after thirty years’ hard labour in the service of entertainment at Swedish Television. He is one of the people the camera lingers on when the singing starts. He is wearing a loose beige linen jacket, and gives the impression of both relaxation and upright character. He was actually in the running to take over when Lasse gave up. He is not bitter, he loves his free summers.

When the first blow strikes his arm, for a moment he is angry that someone has ruined his jacket. Then comes the pain, and the blood. When his wife of twenty-five years starts screaming at his side, he realises that the danger is real.

He turns to his attacker, but has no time to do anything before a slash across his throat monopolises his attention. The blows that come after this are irrelevant.

She says I began to sing long before I could talk

Everyone knows that when Linda Larsson does something, she does it properly. That’s why she claimed her spot at the Solliden stage at ten o’clock this morning. If she’s going to Sing Along at Skansen, then she’s going for the full experience. She has eaten the picnic she brought with her, she has watched the rehearsals. She is planning to write about it all in her blog, and has been making a few notes.

When she hears the angry buzzing behind her, she thinks it is an unusually large wasp. She also knows that the best thing to do in that case is to sit perfectly still. Not to start waving her arms about. She looks down at her notepad and wonders whether to write something about the wasp.

Then comes the sting in the back of her neck. The pain is indescribable. Her fingers spread and are suddenly ice cold. She opens her mouth to scream, but something is blocking her windpipe. Blood spurts over her notepad and her hand flies up to her throat where it is penetrated halfway by a rapidly rotating drill bit. Then the drill is torn out and she just has time to grasp what has happened before she loses consciousness.

And I’ve often wondered, how did it all start?

Despite the fact that they haven’t got to the bit where the audience joins in, Isailo Jovanovic can’t help singing along. This is the third time he has been to Sing Along at Skansen and, however integrated he might feel after seventeen years in Sweden, he just doesn’t know the songs. Every year it’s Evert Taube-and you don’t hear those songs much in Belgrade. But Abba, that’s different. When he was a teenager Isailo and his friends used to swap tapes; Isailo had his first kiss to the sound of ‘Fernando’.

He knows he has a decent tenor voice, and even though the people around him are not singing, he joins in with the girl up on the stage. He has never heard anyone sing like that, and it is a pleasure to hear his voice blending with hers.

He can hear the distant sound of people screaming, and assumes that the girl is some kind of idol. This isn’t important to him as he enjoys the way her voice interweaves with his.

In the middle of his joyous singing he receives a blow to his jaw, a terrible blow on his chin. Something breaks in his lower jaw and he is hurled to the ground. In a couple of seconds his mouth is full of blood and fragments of tooth. He doesn’t understand. This is not the Sweden he knows.

Then he sees the hammer being raised, and holds up his hands in self-defence. His head is ringing and he is unable to focus. A blurred figure takes a step to one side, then comes an annihilating blow right on the top of his head.

Who found out that nothing can capture a heart like a melody can?

Johan Lejonhjärta is in seventh heaven. He came to Sing Along at Skansen for one thing, and one thing only, and that thing has happened. Ola Salo touched him. Johan has adored Ola Salo from the very start, and Ola was one of the reasons why he dared to come out of the closet eight years ago, leaving Kisa and moving to Stockholm.

When Ola fluttered past the sea of spectators as he sang ‘The Worrying Kind’, Johan stretched out his hand. And Ola didn’t just touch his hand. He took it for a moment and looked Johan in the eye as he sang ‘Be good for goodness sake’. The words and the touch burned into Johan.

He knows it’s ridiculous. He is thirty-two years old, and thinks he has been touched by a divine being. He has photographed his hand with his mobile, he has turned the words ‘be good for goodness sake’ over and over in his head like the words of a guru, a guideline for life. He knows it’s ridiculous and he couldn’t care less and he gives himself up to his happiness.

When he hears the screams around him they are filtered through his own experience, and he interprets them as screams of happiness and excitement. He loves Abba too, and the girl up there is a wonderful singer, but that’s not important right now.

He works as a carpenter and recognises the sound behind him for exactly what it is. A drill. And yet he does not link the sound with the agonising pain in his back, because it is just too far-fetched. Only when the second blow comes does he realise that the rev count of the drill is slowing down at the same time as he feels a quivering pain through his skeleton.

When he turns around the drill is pushed into his chest, and he coughs up blood as one lung is punctured. The drill is pulled out and he opens his mouth to stammer out a plea, a prayer. For a fraction of a second he can see the rotating spiral before it becomes blurred and disappears into his eye.

Well, whoever it was, I’m a fan

Elsie Karlsson has seen them come and go. She was here back in Egon Kjerrman’s day, but she’d go for Bosse Larsson if she had to choose. There was nothing wrong with Lasse, nor this new chap, but Bosse Larsson knew how to spread a sense of wellbeing like no one else. Things weren’t so over the top in those days.

You can usually get a seat if you arrive about two, but today there must be something particularly popular on, so Elsie has had to sit on her wheeled walker. To tell the truth, she wishes the show would end, because she’s really tired. You might think one of these young people would offer her their seat, but times have changed.

This is a nice tune, and the girl who is singing is very good. As far as Elsie can remember the girl wasn’t there for the rehearsals, which is unheard of. Or perhaps Elsie has forgotten. That happens more and more often these days.

Some kind of commotion over by the seating attracts her attention. A few people have got up and are running away. Odd. Things are usually very orderly and controlled once the broadcast has begun, people hardly dare cross their legs. But now people are running around and screaming in a quite unprecedented way.

She doesn’t understand what has happened until she is lying on her back and hears her hip bone crack. The wheeled walker has been pulled from underneath her. It hurts so much that the grinding of her jaws leaves her false teeth askew inside her mouth. Her glasses must have fallen off, because she can hardly see.

A thin figure is leaning over her with something in its hand. Elsie believes that people are intrinsically good, and assumes that this is someone who is going to help her, that whatever the figure is holding in its hand is something that can save her. Then comes the blow directly to her forehead, and everything goes black.

Inside her head, in some corner which is still conscious, she hears a sound like an angry insect. It is coming closer.

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

At first Lena Forsman thought it was a bad idea. Going to Sing Along at Skansen on a first date. It felt like a family thing, not something for two people who met on the internet. But it’s gone well, really well.

There was so much to talk about as they fumbled their way towards an understanding of one another, and so far Peter seems to be a real gem. Self-confident without being arrogant, funny without being stupid. Not bad looking, well dressed, and as for the thinning hair, she actually thought it was sexy. On him anyway.

He had bought her raspberries from one of the girls who went around selling them before the live broadcast, and when ‘Some Day I’ll Come Sailing Home’ started up, he put his arm around her shoulders and half-jokingly swayed along in time. The arm had stayed there as a little girl came on stage and sang that fantastic Abba song.

The mixing desk hides the middle of the stage from where they are standing, and since she can’t see anyway, and since the girl is singing so beautifully, Lena closes her eyes and gives herself up to the pleasure of the friendly arm around her shoulders, the warm summer evening and the special moments life can still bring, moments like this.

She hears hysterical screams and smiles at the memory of herself when she was like that, when she was fourteen years old and went to see Abba at Gröna Lund; she almost fainted when Annifrid looked her in the eye for that fraction of a second, and she screamed until her throat hurt.

Suddenly Peter’s grip tightens around her shoulders. He is squeezing so hard that she gasps and opens her eyes, just as his hand is torn away from her. She sees him fall at her feet, clutching his head. He begins to twitch and shake, and her first thought is: Is he having an epileptic fit?

Then she sees that blood is beginning to seep from beneath his right hand. She doesn’t understand what has happened, but leans over him and says, ‘Peter? Peter? What’s the matter?’

His eyes are staring at a point immediately behind her. They widen and he opens his mouth to say something. The next moment a blow to the back of her neck brings her down, and she falls onto his body. She just has time to catch the aroma of Old Spice before another blow extinguishes all perception.

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing

Ronnie Ahlberg doesn’t know what the hell to do. He is in charge of the camera ten metres to the left of the stage, and from his metre-high wooden podium he has a good overview. What he is seeing is not what happened during rehearsals. Through his headset he has just been told to run pictures of the audience in the seated area, but what is happening down there isn’t exactly ideal material. People are out of their seats and running, and there seems to be some kind of mass exodus going on.

Still, his job is not to look for reasons, but to find camera angles. Since the audience in the seated area has decided to depart from the script for some reason, he turns the camera towards the standing area behind the barriers, where the kids are still behaving as they should, holding their mobiles up in the air to film the show and waving banners with ‘TESLA RULES’ and ‘TESLA GIRLS JAKOBSBERG’.

He hears a voice in his ear. Abrahamsson, the picture editor, sounds almost on the verge of tears in the outside broadcast truck. ‘What’s going on out there, Ronnie? Half our monitors are fucking useless.’

Ronnie’s camera is about to go the same way. The kids have started behaving oddly too, and the ‘TESLA RULES’ banner ends up on the ground just as the crowd at his feet begins to move away from the barrier. He is just thinking of angling his camera up towards the stage and the girl who is singing, because at least she’s standing still, when a powerful blow to his knee makes his legs give way beneath him.

He tries to stop himself from falling by grabbing hold of one of the levers on the camera, but a blow to the other knee sends him tumbling from the platform, executing an involuntary stage dive backwards into the sea of running people.

His face, arms and hands are trampled underfoot as he hears a high-pitched whining noise-it sounds like a camera flash charging-coming closer to his ear.

Who can live without it? I ask in all honesty, what would life be?

No, Sing Along at Skansen is not Kalle Bäckström’s scene, he was quite clear on that point after enduring a song by The Ark, some old farts’ song, and now that kid who was on MySpace. He only came because Emmy was supposed to be here. And now he can’t get hold of her!

He has spent the last ten minutes standing next to the portable toilets fifty metres behind the back row of seats, texting. He asked Emmy where she is, and she told him she was down the front. Whereabouts down the front, he asked her, and now he’s waiting for the reply.

OK, OK. If necessary he’s going to push his way through the crowd just so he can stand next to her and rub himself up against her. She’s the prettiest girl in the class, and when she said, ‘Are you coming to Skansen on Tuesday?’, he might have misinterpreted it slightly. As if it was a date. But she was here with three girlfriends, and he hasn’t even managed to find her yet.

He is standing there staring at his phone, using the power of the mind to try and make a reply from her appear, when he realises something is going on. People are screaming and waving their arms in the air down at the front, and one or two are running past him. He lowers his mobile and stands on tiptoe so that he can see better.

The crowd in front of him is expanding. The entire audience begins to swell towards him as if it was escaping from a pressure cooker. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. He is standing on the slope leading down from Solliden, right in the middle of the valve itself, and the boiling mass of people is cascading towards him.

He can’t understand what is going on, and stands there with his mouth open as the wave approaches. When it is just a few metres away he finally comes to his senses, hurls himself into one of the toilets and locks the door. Thousands of footsteps in headlong flight thunder past outside the door, and the toilet shakes as bodies fall from the horde and crash into the thin plastic walls.

He sits down on the seat and carries on texting, searching for Emmy, but there is no reply.

Without a song or a dance, what are we?

‘Event Security’ it says on the back of Joel Carlsson’s red T-shirt. That’s the name of the company he works for, and that has been his job description for the last ten years. Event security. A friend at the gym put him in touch with them, and he’s stayed because he enjoys his job. Particularly when it comes to Sing Along at Skansen.

Rock concerts can be hard work: overheated venues, loud music and kids getting crushed and passing out. At sports events there are the drunks and hooligans to deal with. Sing Along is like a holiday by comparison, and within the company this particular job is allocated as a reward for long and loyal service.

Walking around spraying water on teenage girls who have got a bit sweaty, but who mostly just laugh and think it’s cool, telling people who are already pretty calm to calm down just a little bit more and stop trying to move forward. It’s very rare that Joel has to take a hard line or remove anybody.

But tonight there’s something wrong. When that Tesla walked on stage and started singing, you could have heard a pin drop in the audience at first. What a voice! People stood there with their mouths just hanging open, like they were bewitched. Joel took the opportunity to have a bit of a breather, drink some water and do some stretches while he enjoyed the song himself.

Then he hears the scream. It comes from somewhere in the seated area, oddly enough. He is dazzled by the lighting rig as he scans the audience and sees that some people have got to their feet. In the middle of the live broadcast, for fuck’s sake! He waves angrily at them to sit down, but they take no notice. Instead more people stand up, and he hears more screams.

Inappropriate noises and inappropriate movement. His job, among other things, is to prevent exactly this, and he looks around to see if he can pinpoint the source of the problem.

Something is going on behind one of the close-up cameras, over by the VIP seats. If there is anywhere he would expect things to be perfectly calm, it’s in that area. A-list or B-list celebrities sitting like lighted candles, just waiting for the camera to focus on them. But now there are screams and movement and the place is full of people getting up and running.

Joel scuttles along below the stage where the little girl is still standing and singing, in spite of the fact that the music has stopped. When he reaches the VIP seats the entire area closest to the stage is already empty, apart from two people. Joel catches sight of something on the ground, and stops dead.

Fucking hell.

Robert Segerwall, that old guy who used to be big on TV, is lying in a pool of what must be blood, and blood is still pouring out of a wound or a hole in his temple. Joel is about to hurl himself towards Segerwall, but then realises he can do more good elsewhere.

Prioritise, Joel. Prioritise.

What he at first took to be a quarrel is a struggle for life and death. He recognises Robert Segerwall’s wife, but not the young girl she is fighting with. Or whatever you would call it. The older woman is tearing at the air, trying to scratch the girl’s face, but Joel can see that this is a battle she is going to lose. In one hand the girl has a long knife, in the other a drill.

Joel doesn’t get there in time. Just as he takes his first stride towards them, the hand holding the knife shoots out. Joel couldn’t have done it better during his training with the elite Coastal Rangers. The blade slices across the woman’s neck and she staggers backwards, her hands pressed to her throat.

At last she seems to realise that flight is the only possibility. As she is trapped between the young girl and Joel, who is moving forward, she wobbles up the steps leading to the stage, blood gushing down over her chest.

Prioritise.

He has to stop this girl before she does anything else. He reaches her in two rapid strides and twists the knife out of her hand. She gets in one blow to his head with the drill before he knocks it out of her hand. He locks her arms behind her back, yelling, ‘What the fuck are you doing, are you insane?’

The girl relaxes in his grasp and says calmly, ‘I am not insane. I am sane. I am perfectly sane.’

So I say thank you for the music, for giving it to me.

As Eva Segerwall takes the last step onto the stage, there is unfortunately nothing left within her to let her know that her dream has finally come true.

It is twenty-three years since she set aside her ambitions as a singer to support her husband in his TV career. But oh, what dreams she had! To hear Bosse Larsson say her name one day, to tread the boards here in Solliden beneath the birch trees, to stand on this very stage!

And now she is standing here, incapable of savouring it. Her life is pouring out through her throat, splashing around her feet as she staggers towards the angelic figure standing behind the microphone, still singing.

For a second their eyes meet, and Eva becomes even more afraid than she already was. There is no help to be found there. The big blue eyes gaze at her without sympathy, they do not even seem to notice the cascades of blood covering her light summer dress. She coughs up more blood and totters, on legs which are about to give way, towards the left, past the stage entrance, past the empty seats where the orchestra were sitting, past the flower arrangements and out onto the jetty.

And there she sees an escape route at last. Through misty eyes she sees the waters of Mälarviken glittering far below. She throws herself in that direction but hits an invisible wall, falls backwards and just lies there, gives up.

I’ve been so lucky

I am the girl with golden hair

I want to sing it out to everybody

What a joy! What a life! What a chance!

The orchestra had stopped playing long ago; Theres stood alone on the Solliden stage and sang the final verses a cappella, even though there was no longer anyone listening. Down below her feet there was utter chaos.

Thirty or so people lay dead or dying on the seats and on the ground. A woman had managed to escape onto the stage with blood pouring from her throat and had run into the Perspex screen protecting the stage from the wind coming off Mälarviken. She was just lying there in a heap on the jetty, over by the standing area. Theres put the microphone back in its stand, went over to the woman and drank her.

Some members of the group had been grabbed by security guards or other adults, some had been knocked over and trampled underfoot as the audience panicked and fled, some were still standing or crouching next to their latest victim, sucking up their life.

Theres went right to the end of the jetty, threw back her head and howled. For a moment everything stopped as the heart-rending sound froze the summer evening to solid ice. Then the other girls answered. Bloody faces looked up and teeth were bared, the girls who had been caught filled their lungs with air, and Linn, who was lying next to the barrier with a broken leg, dragged herself into a sitting position and joined in.

The same howl rose from fourteen throats, a rising and falling note with a single message.

We exist. Be afraid of us.

Then more guards arrived, more capable hands to help drag away and render harmless the wild animals that had insinuated themselves in among human habitation.

Teresa had managed to get to the side of the stage, and as the other girls were running away or being captured, she called Theres over. Together they ran towards the wolf enclosure. They passed groups of people standing, sitting or lying at what they judged to be a safe distance from the danger. Moans and weeping from both children and adults filled the air.

Teresa saw a man with his arms around two people who were presumably his wife and son, and a thought struck her. A detail they had never mentioned when they were planning for this day.

‘Jerry?’ she asked. ‘Is he here?’

Without slowing down Theres replied, ‘I told him he wasn’t allowed to come.’

Presumably he had seen it on TV, presumably he knew by this stage what had happened. But he hadn’t been here, there was no risk that he was one of the dead. In some way that was a relief.

They ran, and the people allowed them to pass. A young voice yelled, ‘She’s the one who was singing!’ but that was all they knew. Theres and Teresa ran side by side until they reached the enclosure.

Before the show began, when everyone was gathered in Solliden, Teresa had used the bolt cutters to make a hole about the size of a door in the fence, so that their grey sisters and brothers would have the opportunity to join in.

None of them had taken that opportunity, but as if the wolves had sensed the atmosphere of the hunt that pervaded the area, several of them had emerged from their lairs and hiding places and were now warily circling the area near the breach, baring their teeth and growling. Teresa looked at them and shook her head.

‘They didn’t come to us.’

Theres stood with her neck extended, watching the shaggy figures that were watching her. Then it happened. At first Teresa couldn’t work out what was tickling the back of her hand. When she looked down she saw that it was Theres’ fingers, fumbling for hers. She grabbed Theres’ hand and held it tightly. They stood for a long time, side by side in front of the door, squeezing each other’s hands.

Then Theres said, ‘In that case, we will go to them.’