Little Star

THE GIRL WITH GOLDEN HAIR

In the autumn of 1992 there were rumours of a mushroom glut in the forests; it was said that the warm moist weather of late summer had provoked a burst of chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms. As Lennart Cederström turned off onto the forest track in his Volvo 240, he had a large basket and a couple of plastic bags on the back seat. Just in case.

He had a mix tape of pop hits on the stereo, and Christer Sjögren’s voice was loud and clear in the speakers: Ten thousand red roses I’d like to give you…

Lennart grinned scornfully and joined in with the chorus, imitating Sjögren’s mannered bass vibrato. It sounded excellent. Almost identical; Lennart was probably a better singer than Sjögren. But so what? He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time on too many occasions, seen too many golden opportunities snatched away from under his very nose or heard them zip past behind his back. Gone when he turned around.

Anyway. He would have his mushrooms. Chanterelles, the gold of the forest, and plenty of them. Then back home to blanch them and fill up the freezer, giving him enough for mushrooms on toast and beer every single evening until the Christmas tree was thrown out. Several days of rain had given way to a couple of days of brilliant sunshine, and the conditions were just perfect.

Lennart knew every bend in the forest track, and he screwed up his eyes and gripped the wheel as he sang.

Ten thousand roses in a pretty bouquet…

When he opened his eyes there was something black on the track ahead of him. Sunlight flashed on shining metal, and Lennart only just managed to swerve as it flashed by. A car. Lennart glanced in the rear view mirror to get the registration, but the car was doing at least eighty on the gravel track, sending up clouds of dust in its wake. However, Lennart was pretty sure it was a BMW. A black BMW with tinted windows.

He drove another three hundred metres to the place where he usually parked, switched off the engine and let out a long breath.

What the hell was that?

A BMW out here in the middle of nowhere wasn’t exactly a common sight. A BMW doing eighty along the gravel track leading out of the forest was a unique event. Lennart felt quite excited. He had been a part of something. In the moment when the black object came hurtling towards him, his heart had leapt and then quailed as if anticipating a fatal blow, before opening up and settling down once more. It was an experience.

The only thing that bothered him was that he couldn’t report the driver. He would probably have given the mushroom picking a miss so he could savour going home and calling the police, giving a detailed description of the encounter on a track with a thirty kilometres per hour limit. But without a registration number, it would be pointless.

As Lennart got out of the car and picked up his basket and his bags, the temporary rush gave way to a feeling he’d been bested. Again. The black BMW had won, in some obscure fashion. Perhaps it would have been different if the car had been a beaten-up old Saab, but it was definitely a rich man’s car that had covered his windscreen in dust and forced him into the ditch. Same old thing.

He slammed the car door and tramped off into the forest, head down. Fresh tyre tracks ran along the damp ground in the shade of the trees. Churned-up mud in one place indicated that a car had shot away here, and it wasn’t much of a leap to assume it was the BMW. Lennart gazed at the wide wheel marks as if they might offer him some evidence, or a fresh grievance. When nothing occurred to him he spat in the tracks instead.

Let it go.

He strode off into the forest, inhaling the aroma of warm needles, damp moss, and somewhere beneath everything else…the smell of mushrooms. He couldn’t pin it down to an exact spot, or identify a species, but a faint undertone in the usual scent of the forest told him the rumours were true: there were mushrooms here just waiting to be picked. His gaze swept the ground, searching for a difference in colour or shape. He was a good mushroomer, able to spot from a considerable distance a chanterelle hiding beneath undergrowth and grass. The slightest nuance in the correct shade of yellow, and he swooped like a hawk.

But this time it was a champignon he spotted. Ten metres away from him, a white button sticking up out of the ground. Lennart frowned. He had never come across a champignon around here before; the soil was wrong.

As he came closer, he saw he was right. Not a mushroom; the corner of a plastic bag. Lennart sighed. Sometimes people who were too idle to drive to the tip dumped stuff in the forest. He had once seen a guy hurl a microwave out of his car window. On that occasion he had made a note of the registration number and reported the incident in writing.

He was about to head off along his normal route, searching out the good mushroom places, when he noticed that the plastic bag was moving. He stopped. The bag moved again. It should have been something to do with the wind. That would have been best. But there wasn’t a breath of wind among the tree trunks.

Not good.

He heard a faint rustling noise as the piece of plastic shifted again, and all of a sudden his legs felt heavy. The forest surrounded him, silent and indifferent, and he was all alone in the world with whatever was in the plastic bag. Lennart swallowed, his throat dry, and moved forward a few steps. The bag was motionless now.

Go home. Ignore it.

He didn’t want to see an old dog that had almost but not quite been put out of its misery, or a pile of kittens whose skulls had almost but not quite been smashed. He didn’t want to know about anything like that.

So it wasn’t a sense of responsibility or sympathy that drove him on towards the bit of plastic sticking up from the ground. It was ordinary human or inhuman curiosity. He just had to know, or that waving white flag would torment him until he came back to find out what he had missed.

He grabbed hold of the piece of plastic and instantly recoiled, his hands flying to his mouth. There was something inside the bag, something that had responded to his grip, something that felt like muscles, like flesh. The earth around the bag had recently been disturbed.

A grave. A little grave.

The thought took flight and suddenly Lennart knew exactly what had responded to his hand. Another hand. A very small hand. Lennart edged back to the bag and began to clear away the earth. It didn’t take long; the soil had been thrown carelessly over the bag, probably by someone without any tools, and in ten seconds Lennart had freed the bag and pulled it out of the hole.

The handles were tied together and Lennart ripped at the plastic to let in air, let in life. He managed to tear a hole in the bag, and saw blue skin. A tiny leg, a sunken chest. A girl. A baby girl, just a few days or weeks old. She wasn’t moving. The thin lips were pressed together, as if defying an evil world. Lennart had witnessed the child’s death throes.

He placed his ear to the child’s chest and thought he could hear the faintest echo of a heartbeat. He pinched the child’s nose between his thumb and forefinger, and took a deep breath. He pursed his lips to send a blast of air into the tiny mouth; he didn’t even need to take another breath in order to fill the little lungs once more. The air bubbled out, and the chest was still.

Lennart took another breath and as he sent the second puff down into the lungs, there it was. A shudder went through the tiny body and white foam was coughed up. Then a scream sliced through the silence of the forest and started time ticking once more.

The child screamed and screamed, and its crying sounded like nothing Lennart had ever heard before. It wasn’t broken or plaintive. It was a single, clear, pure note, emerging from that neglected body. Lennart had a good ear, and he didn’t need a tuning fork to tell him that it was an E. An E that rang like a bell and made the leaves quiver and the birds fly up from the trees.

The girl was lying on the passenger seat, wrapped in Lennart’s red Helly Hansen sweater. Lennart was sitting with his hands resting on the wheel, staring at her. He was completely calm, and his body felt as if it had been hollowed out. Clarified.

He had once tried cocaine, towards the end of the ’70s. A fashionable rock band had offered, and he had accepted. One line and that was it, he had never done it again-because it had been fantastic. Too fantastic.

We are always in a certain amount of pain. There is chafing somewhere, and if it isn’t in our body, then it’s in our mind. There’s an itch, all the time. The cocaine took it away. His body became a receptacle made of velvet, and within that receptacle there were only crystal clear thoughts. The mists had lifted, and life was wonderful. Afterwards, realising that striving to regain this feeling could become his life’s work, Lennart refrained from taking cocaine again.

As he sat here now with his hands resting on the wheel, he felt something similar. There was a stillness in him, the forest was glowing with autumn colours, and a great being was holding its breath and waiting for his decision. Lennart slowly reached for the ignition key-His hand! To think that he had a hand with five fingers that he could move as he wished! What a miracle!-started the car, and headed back the way he had come.

On the main road he was overtaken by several cars as he crawled along. The child had no basket or seat, and Lennart drove as if he were transporting a bowl filled to the brim with a priceless liquid. The child felt so fragile, so transient, that the slightest violent movement might hurl it out of existence.

His back was soaked with sweat by the time he turned into the drive ten minutes later, switched off the engine and looked around. Not a soul in sight; he scooped the child up in his arms and jogged up to the house. He reached the porch and discovered that the door was locked as usual. He knocked twice, paused, then knocked twice more.

A cold breeze swept over his damp back, and he clutched the child closer to his body. After ten seconds he heard Laila’s tentative footsteps in the hallway, saw the spy hole darken as she checked him out. Then the door opened. Laila stood there like a massive door stop.

‘Why are you back already, what have you got there-’

Lennart pushed past her and went into the kitchen. The door slammed behind him and Laila shouted, ‘Don’t you go in there with your shoes on, are you out of your mind, you can’t go in the house with your shoes on, Lennart!’

He stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, completely at a loss. He had just wanted to get inside, into the safety of the house. Now he didn’t know where to turn. He made to put the child down on the kitchen table, then changed his mind and held it close as he spun around, searching for inspiration.

Laila came into the kitchen, red in the face. ‘Take your shoes off when you come in, I’ve just finished cleaning up and you-’

‘Shut up.’

Laila’s mouth closed and she recoiled half a step. Lennart loosened his grip on the child and unwrapped the sweater so that the head and a tuft of blonde hair were visible. Laila’s mouth opened again. Gaped.

Lennart raised and lowered the bundle. ‘I found a child. A baby. In the forest.’

There was the faint click of Laila’s tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth and pulling free as she groped for something to say. Eventually she managed to whisper, ‘What have you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything, I found her in the forest. In a hole.’ ‘A hole?’

Lennart explained briefly. Laila stood there motionless, her hands folded over her stomach. Only her head moved, from side to side. When Lennart reached the point where he blew air into the child’s lungs, he broke off. ‘Can you stop shaking your head while I’m telling you this? It’s bloody irritating.’

Laila’s head stopped in mid-movement. She took a hesitant step forward and peered at the child with an expression of restrained horror. The child’s eyes and mouth were tightly screwed up. Laila began to knead her cheeks. ‘What are you going to do?’

The range of baby products had increased significantly since Jerry was little. There were bottles with one teat, two teats, smaller teats, bigger teats. Different sized bottles. Lennart chose three at random and threw them into his trolley.

It was the same with nappies. Jerry had had cloth nappies that you washed, but the ICA hypermarket didn’t seem to have anything like that. Lennart stood before the wall of brightly coloured plastic packs like a Buddhist at a prayer wall. This wasn’t his world. He hadn’t a clue.

He almost did the same as he had with the bottles, but then he noticed that the nappies came in different sizes for different ages. There were only two kinds for newborns, and Lennart chose the more expensive ones. Fortunately there was only one kind of formula; he put two boxes in his trolley.

He had no idea what else he might need.

Dummies? Jerry had had a dummy, and look how that turned out. No dummy, at least for the time being. Lennart spotted a giraffe, or rather a giraffe’s neck and head attached to a ball so it always popped back into an upright position. He put it in the trolley.

Every single time he picked something up and dropped it among the rest of his purchases, he thought how absurd the situation was. These were baby things. Things for a baby. A wriggling, screaming creature where food went in one end and shit came out the other. A creature he had found in the forest…

Once again that sense of unearthly calm came over him. His arms went limp and dangled as his eyes sought out a mirrored dome in the ceiling. He could see little people moving along the aisles, he could see them from God’s perspective and he wanted to reach out and tell them all that they were forgiven. Everything they had done to him in the past was unimportant now.

I forgive you. I like you. I really like you.

‘Excuse me.’

For a moment he thought someone had actually responded to his amnesty. Then he came to and saw a fat, pop-eyed woman pushing past him to get to the baby food.

He grabbed the handle of the trolley and looked around. Two elderly men were standing looking at him. He didn’t know how long he had spent in his state of grace, but it could hardly be more than a few seconds. That was all it took for people to start staring.

Lennart pulled a face and set off towards the checkout. His palms were sweaty, and he suddenly felt as if he were walking oddly. His temples were throbbing, and the gaze of imagined or actual observers seared into his back. People were whispering about the contents of his trolley, suspecting him of all manner of things.

Calm down. Got to take it easy.

He had a special trick when feelings like this came over him, as they sometimes did: he pretended he was Christer Sjögren. The gold discs, the TV shows, the German tours, the whole lot. People were looking at him because he was so horribly famous.

Lennart straightened his back and manoeuvred his trolley a little more carefully. A few more steps towards the checkout and the fantasy was complete: here comes Christer. There was no queue, of course, and as he loaded his shopping onto the belt he smiled at the checkout girl, revealing the charming gap between his front teeth.

He paid with a five-hundred-kronor note, took his change and packed everything into two bags, then carried on through the crowd with confident steps; it wasn’t until he had thrown the bags in the back of the car, got into the driver’s seat and closed the door that he could drop the mask, return to himself and start despising Christer again.

My very own bloody Blue Hawaii.

He found Laila at the kitchen table. The little girl was in her arms, wrapped in one of Jerry’s old baby blankets. Lennart put the bags down on the kitchen floor and Laila looked up at him with the expression that made his stomach tie itself in knots: mouth wide open, eyebrows raised. Helpless and astonished. Which might possibly have worked in those days, but not anymore.

He dug out the box of formula and asked without looking at Laila, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘She hasn’t made a sound,’ said Laila. ‘Not a sound, in all this time.’

Lennart put some water in a pan and placed it on the burner. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I say. She ought to be hungry, or…I don’t know. But something. She ought to say something. Make some kind of noise.’

Lennart put down the measuring scoop and leaned over the child. Its face wore the same concentrated expression as before, as if it were lying there listening intently for something. He prodded the flat nose, and the lips contorted into an expression of discontent.

‘What are you doing?’ Laila asked. Lennart turned back to the stove, poured powder into the water and started whisking. Laila’s voice rose. ‘Did you think she was dead?’

‘I didn’t think anything.’

‘Did you think I’d be sitting here holding a dead baby without noticing, is that what you thought?’

Lennart whisked hard for a moment, then tested the temperature of the milk with his finger. He took it off the heat and grabbed a bottle at random as Laila droned on in the background.

‘You’re unbelievable, that’s what you are. You think you’re the only one who has any idea how things are, but let me tell you, all those years when Jerry was little and you just-’

When Lennart had poured the milk into the bottle and screwed the teat in place, he took a step towards Laila and slapped her across the face with the palm of his hand.

‘Shut your mouth. Don’t talk about Jerry.’

He took the child from her and sat down on a wooden chair on the other side of the table. He crossed his fingers under the blanket, hoping it was the right sort of teat. At this particular moment he didn’t want to have made the wrong choice.

The child’s lips closed around the teat and she began to suck, eagerly drinking down the contents of the bottle. Lennart stole a glance at Laila, who hadn’t noticed his success. She was sitting there rubbing her cheek, silent tears rolling into the creases around her neck. Then she got up and hobbled into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

The child ate almost as silently as she seemed to do everything. All he could hear was quiet snuffles as she breathed in through her nose while her mouth continued to suck away and the level in the bottle fell. When the bottle was almost empty, Lennart heard the faint rustle of foil from the bedroom. He ignored it. He had enough to think about.

With a pop the child let go of the teat and opened its eyes. Something crawled up Lennart’s spine and made him shudder. The child’s eyes were bright blue, enormous in the little face. For a second the pupils dilated, and Lennart felt as he if was staring down into an abyss. Then they contracted in the light and the eyelids closed.

Lennart sat motionless for a long time. The child had looked at him. It had seen him.

When Laila came out of the bedroom, Lennart had placed the child on a towel on the kitchen table. He was turning a nappy this way and that in his hands, trying to work out how to put it on, when Laila took it off him, pushed him out of the way and said, ‘I’ll do it.’

Her breath smelled of chocolate and mint, but Lennart didn’t say anything. He put his hands on his hips, took a step back and carefully watched what Laila did with the flaps and sticky strips. Her left cheek was bright red, striped with the tracks of dried-on, salty tears.

She had been a party girl, a sexy little thing. A pretender to the glittering throne on which Lill-Babs sat, yodelling away. A reviewer had once jokingly called her Little Lill-Babs. Then she and Lennart had teamed up and her career had taken a different direction. These days she weighed ninety-seven kilos and had problems with her legs. The party girl was still there in her face, but you had to look hard to catch a glimpse.

Laila fastened the nappy and wrapped the child in the blanket with blue teddy bears. She fetched a clean towel and made a bed in the big picnic basket, then laid the sleeping child carefully inside it. Lennart stood there watching the whole thing. He was happy. This was going well.

Laila picked up the basket and rocked it gently like a cradle. She looked at Lennart for the first time since she had emerged from the bedroom. ‘What now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What are we going to do now? Where are we going to take her?’

Lennart took the basket off Laila, went into the living room and placed it on the armchair. He bent over the child and stroked its cheek with his forefinger. He heard Laila’s voice behind him. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s against the law, you must know that.’

Lennart turned and held out his arm. Laila backed away slightly, but Lennart turned up his palm, inviting her to take his hand. She moved closer cautiously, as if she expected the outstretched hand to turn into a snake at any moment. Then she placed her hand in his. Lennart led her into the kitchen, sat her down at the table and poured her a cup of coffee.

Laila followed his movements with a watchful expression as he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite her. ‘I’m not angry,’ he said. ‘Quite the reverse.’

Laila nodded and raised the cup to her lips. Her teeth were discoloured with gooey chocolate but Lennart didn’t point this out. Her cheeks wobbled unpleasantly as she swallowed the hot drink. He didn’t say anything about that either. What he said was, ‘Darling.’

Laila’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes?’

‘I didn’t finish telling you the story. What happened in the forest. When I found her.’

Laila placed her hands on the kitchen table, resting one on another. ‘Go on then. Darling.’

Lennart ignored her sarcastic tone. ‘She sang. When I’d dug her out of the hole. She sang.’

‘But she hasn’t made a sound.’

‘Listen to me. I don’t expect you to understand this, because you haven’t got an ear for it, but…’ Lennart raised a hand to forestall the objections he knew would come, because if there was one thing Laila was still proud of, it was her singing voice and her ability to hit a note cleanly. But that wasn’t what it was about in this case.

‘You haven’t got the ear like I have,’ said Lennart. ‘Your voice is better and your pitch is more accurate blah blah blah-all right? Happy?-but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about having the ear.’

Laila was listening again. Despite his delivery, the praise was enough. Her talent had been acknowledged and Lennart was able to go on. ‘You know I have a perfect ear for a note. When I opened the plastic bag and got her out…she sang. First an E. Then a C. And then an A. And I don’t mean cries that sounded like notes, but…sine waves. Perfect. If you had set a meter to measure her A, it would have shown 440 hertz.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘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 cope 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.

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’ and 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 mouth 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.

Agitated by the noise, she limped over to the cellar door and down to the girl’s room as the telephone continued to ring up in the kitchen. It didn’t stop ringing until she had tucked the child in and placed the giraffe next to her. Laila sat for a while, looking at the girl through the bars of the cot. Even when she was asleep there was something concentrated or watchful about her expression. Laila wished she could make it disappear.

Sleep well, little star.

The telephone rang again; it rang seven times before she managed to get back to the kitchen to pick it up. It was Lennart, and he wasn’t happy.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘In the cellar.’

‘Well, you can hear the phone down there, can’t you?’

‘I was feeding her.’

Lennart fell silent. That was obviously the correct answer. His voice was gentler as he asked, ‘So did she take it?’

‘She certainly did. A whole bottle.’

‘And did she fall asleep then?’

‘Yes. Straight away.’

Laila sat down on a chair and closed her eyes. This is a perfectly normal conversation. A man and a woman are talking about a child. It happens all the time. Her body felt so strangely light, as if in the short walk around the garden she had shed twenty kilos.

‘So everything’s all right then?’ asked Lennart.

‘Yes. Everything’s fine.’

Laila could hear a door opening in the background at Lennart’s end. The tone of his voice altered as he said, ‘OK, good. I’ll be a few hours, things are a bit tricky here.’

‘No problem,’ said Laila. A little smile curled around her lips. ‘No problem at all.’

Lennart was very busy that autumn. He had to go into Stockholm at least once a week, and at home he spent a great deal of time at his keyboard. Lizzie Kanger, a singer who had had a minor breakthrough with the Eurovision Song Contest, was about to release a follow-up to her debut album, which had been panned. The record company had asked Lennart to ‘tidy up’ the songs that had already been written.

Lennart wrote new songs, retaining just enough phrases from the old crap for the contracted songwriter to accept the devastation of his original creation.

He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for. At the very first meeting with the record company they had played him a song he had been unable to avoid hearing on the radio all summer:

Summer in the city, nineteen ninety,

Do you remember me?

Some middle manager had switched off the DAT player and said, ‘We were thinking of something along those lines.’

Lennart smiled and nodded, while his mind’s eye conjured a desert with skeletons reaching out, screaming for help.

It would have been a terrible autumn if he hadn’t had the time he spent with the girl to look forward to. Sitting there with her on his knee, her crystal clear voice responding to his practice scales, he felt he was in touch with something bigger. Not just bigger than his wretched keyboard fripperies, but bigger than life itself.

The music. She was the music. The real music.

Lennart had always believed that everyone was born with a musical talent. It was simply there. But what happened was that they were force-fed crap from an early age, and they got hooked. In the end they believed that the crap was all there was, that that was how it was supposed to sound. If they heard anything that wasn’t crap, they thought it sounded weird, and switched to another radio station.

The girl was living proof that he was right. Of course, babies were not normally able to express the unspoilt music that existed inside them, but she could. He didn’t want to believe that it was only by chance she had ended up with him. There had to be a purpose.

Another source of relief was that Laila seemed happier than she had been for some considerable time. Occasionally he even heard her humming to herself as she moved around the house. Mostly old pop songs, of course, but he actually like hearing her voice as he sat at his keyboard sweating over yet another three-chord tune he was trying to smarten up by inserting a surprising minor chord, even though it did feel like putting an evening jacket on a pig.

However, every rose has a thorn.

One evening when Lennart had been in the boiler room stoking up the fire for the last time and was on his way to the girl’s room to get her ready for the night, he heard a sound. He stopped by the half-open door to the girl’s room and listened. Very, very faintly he could hear the girl’s voice as she lay in her cot…humming. When Lennart had been standing there for a while he began to pick out a melody he recognised, but was unable to place. Odd words that fitted the melody flickered through his mind.

Glances…something…eyes

Lennart refused to believe his ears. But it was impossible to deny it. The girl was lying there humming ‘Strangers in the Night’. Lennart opened the door and walked in. The humming stopped abruptly.

He picked up the girl and looked into her unfathomable eyes, which never seemed to be looking into his, but at a point far beyond him. He realised what was going on. It wasn’t actually ‘Strangers in the Night’ he had heard, but ‘Tusen och en natt’, Lasse Lönndahl’s saccharine Swedish version of the same song. One of Laila’s favourites.

This is how it happens.

The fact that it was totally unreasonable for a baby to be able to remember and reproduce a tune was something that didn’t even cross Lennart’s mind. The girl had already crossed so many boundaries when it came to music that he had grown used to it, but…

This is how it happens.

Crap has an astonishing ability to find its mark. It doesn’t matter how carefully you try to enclose and protect. The crap seeps in through the gaps, through the cracks you have forgotten to fill. And then it takes over.

Lennart put the girl down on the straw mat, where she began clumsily hitting out at the colourful blocks Laila had put there. Lennart cleared his throat and began to sing quietly, ‘O Värmland, thou art beautiful…’ The girl took no notice of him; she simply carried on hitting the blocks until they were all out of reach.

It was a mild winter, and Laila was able to continue her outdoor excursions with the child well into December. At the beginning of January there was a cold snap with snow, and it was the snow rather than the cold that prevented her from going out when Lennart was away. She didn’t want to leave any tracks.

Lennart had strictly forbidden her from having any contact whatsoever with the child, beyond what was absolutely necessary. She was not allowed to talk, or sing, or make any noise at all. The child was to live in a bubble of silence, apart from the singing practice which Lennart conducted with her. Laila had understood the aim of his project and thought it was completely insane, but since she was able to offer the child small oases of normality, she left him to it.

One afternoon she was sitting watching as the child played, or whatever it was she did. The girl had learned to grip things, and would sit there for ages with the same coloured block, picking it up and dropping it, picking it up and dropping it.

Laila tried to give her one of the soft toys she had brought out of storage. A little fox came bobbing along, ‘Here comes Freddy Fox, sniff sniff sniff…but what’s this he can smell?’

The girl was completely uninterested, and took no notice whatsoever of Freddy, even when he nudged her thigh with his nose. Instead she grabbed hold of her block once again, lifted it up to eye level and looked at it, dropped it, and watched carefully as it fell and rolled away. When it ended up out of reach, she simply waited until Laila handed it back to her. Then she carried on picking it up and dropping it.

The next day when Lennart had shut himself in the studio, Laila called the childcare centre in Norrtälje.

‘Erm, I have a question about…my child. She’s almost six months old and I was just wondering about her behaviour.’

‘How old is she exactly?’

Laila coughed and said, ‘Five months. And three weeks. And I was wondering…she doesn’t really react when…if you try to play with her, that sort of thing. She won’t look, she just…she’s got a block that she picks up and drops. And that’s virtually all she does. Is that normal?’

‘You say she doesn’t react; if you touch her and try to attract her attention, how does she react then?’

‘Not at all. She’s only…how can I put this…she’s only interested in inanimate objects. That’s all she wants to do.’

‘Well, it’s difficult to make any kind of assessment over the telephone, but I would suggest that you bring her in so that we can have a look at her. Have you been here before?’

‘No.’

‘So which centre have you been attending, then?’

Laila’s head was suddenly completely empty, and she said the first thing that came into her mind. ‘Skövde.’

‘Mmm. If I can just take her ID number, we’ll see if we can-’

Laila slammed the phone down as if it had burnt her hand, then she sat and stared at it for thirty seconds before picking it up again. The dial tone. No voice was pursuing her, and she went through the conversation in her mind. The critical point was but.

It’s difficult to make any kind of assessment over the telephone, but I would suggest…

Her fears were not groundless. That but meant something wasn’t as it should be. Besides which, no doubt the staff at the childcare centre were very careful about what they said, so as not to frighten insecure parents.

When Lennart emerged from his home studio, Laila tried to raise the issue with him. Of course she didn’t dare tell him she had made the phone call, so she had only her own vague observations to go on, which got her precisely nowhere. Lennart might possibly agree that the girl was unusually passive, but was that really a cause for complaint?

‘Do you want her to be like Jerry? Getting up five or six times a night because he was lying there bawling his head off?’

It wasn’t Lennart who had got up five or six times a night, but Laila didn’t pursue that detail. Instead she said, ‘I just wish we could get her checked out somehow.’

She saw the muscles in his jaw tense. She was approaching the danger zone. Lennart clasped his hands tightly together as if to prevent himself from doing something with them, and said, ‘Laila. For the last time. If one single person finds out that we’ve got her, they will take her away from us. Stop thinking about all that, there’s no chance. And besides…if it is what you think, if there is something wrong with her, what do you imagine they can do? Are they going to give her drugs? Put her in some kind of clinic? What is it you actually want?’

This final question was entirely rhetorical, and was actually a statement: you are such a stupid bitch. Lennart’s hands were opening and closing, and Laila didn’t say another word.

He had a point, anyway. What did she actually want? Did she want the child to have some kind of medical care? Drugs? No. All she really wanted, when she thought about it, was for someone who knew what they were talking about to look at the girl and tell her everything was all right. Or that it wasn’t all right, but that the problem was called so-and-so, and there was nothing they could do. Just so she knew.

Two weeks later, Lennart went into the city for the final mix of the album. The snow had melted, but the temperature had dropped below freezing again and the garden was covered in ice in places; Laila wouldn’t leave any footprints.

And the girl needed to get out.

The times when Laila dressed the girl for an outing were little special occasions. As she busied herself with the child’s top, trousers, snowsuit and hat she felt a closeness to her that was otherwise missing. As she rolled up the tiny socks and put them on the child’s equally tiny feet, she even allowed herself to formulate the thought: I love you, Little One.

It wasn’t that she was indifferent to the child on a day-to-day basis, but there was never any response to the feelings she expressed. At best the child might explore Laila’s face with her fingers, but she did it in the same way as she did everything else: methodically, almost scientifically. As if she were trying to understand how this particular object worked.

Perhaps that was why the business of dressing the child created a perception of mutual understanding. As Laila gently pushed the slender limbs into the snowsuit and slipped on her mittens, she was treating the girl like an object. Gently handling something that needed to be protected.

She carried the girl to the door and put her down on the step. The ice crunched beneath their feet as Laila held the girl’s hands above her head so that she was half walking, half being carried up the steps.

The garden was covered in ice and lumps of frozen snow. Laila manoeuvred the girl towards the lilac arbour, its branches now bare of leaves. ‘See this, Little One? This is ice.’

They hadn’t got round to giving the girl a name. They had discussed the matter, but since she wasn’t going to be christened and nobody had got in touch to demand a name, they hadn’t come to a decision. Laila had heard Lennart say ‘Little One’ as well when he spoke to the girl on one occasion, and that was as far as they had got.

They sat for a while on the bench in the arbour. Laila gave the girl sticks and dry leaves to examine. Then they went for a little walk. The child’s unsteady legs had difficulty with the conditions underfoot, and the cold made Laila’s knee stiff, so they shuffled along a little bit at a time.

They were perhaps twenty metres from the house when Laila heard the sound of an engine. She had heard it often enough to recognise it. Jerry’s motorbike.

She heaved the child up into her arms and staggered towards the cellar steps. She had managed ten metres when a sharp pain stabbed through her knee. She slipped on a patch of ice and fell forward. As she fell, she managed to twist to the side so that she landed on her shoulder instead of on top of the girl. Her head snapped downwards and hit the ice; everything went dark red before her eyes, and the girl slid out of her arms.

From inside the red veil she could hear the motorbike coming closer, and then the engine was switched off. The side stand clicked down and footsteps approached. A patch of light grew inside the redness and continued to grow until she could see the snow and the ice and the girl’s blue woolly hat once more. Jerry’s biker boots entered her field of vision and stopped.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Mother? And who’s that?’

Lennart was in the car on his way home. He wasn’t dissatisfied, which was unusual. Normally he was more or less furious after a studio session or a meeting in Stockholm. But this time things had gone his way.

A new producer had come on board for the final phase of the album. When Lennart first saw the young lad ambling around the studio in his yellow shades, all hope had drained from his body. But surprise surprise, the new guy liked Lennart’s stuff, called it ‘updated Motown sound’ and ‘a fantastic vintage vibe’. He had picked up two tracks that had been recorded but weren’t going to be included, and Lennart was now down as the composer of three of the tracks on the album. One of Lennart’s songs was actually under consideration as the first single.

So Lennart didn’t even pull a face when he saw Jerry’s motorbike parked outside the house; not so much as a small sigh escaped him. He was temporarily wrapped in a protective cloak. He was a composer, and was above the trials of everyday life.

He and Laila had been married for twenty-five years, and had lived in the same house for almost as long. As soon as he closed the door behind him and began to undo his shoes, he could feel that something was different. Something had altered in the atmosphere of the house, but he didn’t know what it was.

When he walked into the kitchen, he had his answer. Laila was sitting there. And Jerry. And on Jerry’s knee sat the girl. Lennart stood in the doorway and the protective cloak fell around his feet. Laila looked at him with a pleading expression, while Jerry pretended to be unaware of his presence, grabbing the girl under the arms and lifting her above his head while saying, ‘Toot, toot, toot.’

‘Be careful,’ said Lennart. ‘She’s not a toy.’

How much had Laila told him? Lennart waved at her and said, ‘Laila, come here,’ whereupon he turned on his heel and headed for the studio, where they could talk undisturbed. But Laila didn’t follow him.

When he came back into the kitchen, Jerry said, ‘Don’t start, Dad. Sit down.’

Lennart walked over to Jerry and held out his arms for the child. Jerry didn’t hand her over. ‘Sit down, I said.’

‘Give her to me.’

‘No. Sit down.’

Lennart couldn’t believe this was happening. ‘Is this some kind of…hostage situation, or what?’

Jerry laid his cheek against the girl’s. ‘This is my little sister, for fuck’s sake. Well, nearly. Can’t I spend some time with her?’

Lennart perched on the very edge of the chair, ready to leap to his feet if Jerry tried anything. It was many years since Lennart had thought he had the slightest idea what went on inside Jerry’s head. He was afraid of him, as we are afraid of everything unknown and therefore unpredictable.

The girl looked small and fragile as she sat there wrapped in Jerry’s great big arms. All he had to do was squeeze, and she would crack like an egg. It was hard to bear, and Lennart tried to speak the only language he was sure Jerry understood.

‘Jerry,’ he said. ‘You can have five hundred kronor if you give her to me.’

Jerry looked down at the floor, apparently considering the offer. Then he said, ‘Do you think I’m going to hurt her or something? Is that really what you think of me?’

The offer of money had been a mistake. If Jerry realised how much the girl meant to Lennart, the situation could only get worse. So he picked up the newspaper and pretended to be interested in the US air-raids on Iraq without even glancing at the child.

After a while Jerry said, ‘She’s so bloody quiet. I mean, she doesn’t make a sound.’

Lennart carefully folded the paper and rested his hands on it. ‘Jerry. What do you want?’

Jerry got up, still holding the girl in his arms. ‘Nothing in particular. How long were you intending to carry on like this?’ He held the girl out to Lennart, but when Lennart reached up to take her, he pulled her away and gave her to Laila.

Lennart’s fingers itched but he controlled himself. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Keeping her hidden like this. I mean, somebody’s going to find out in the end. Somebody’s bound to say something.’

Lennart managed to keep his tone indifferent as he asked, ‘There’s just one thing puzzling me. How did you find out we had her?’ He glanced at Laila, whose lips were tightly clamped together.

Jerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘Just glanced through the cellar window. And there she was. Anyway. I’ve been thinking.’

Lennart stopped listening. There was something wrong here. Why would Jerry decide to ‘just glance’ through the cellar window? And anyway, could you actually see the cot properly from the window?

Jerry’s hand waved in front of his eyes. ‘Are you listening to me?’

‘No.’

‘A computer. I want a computer.’

‘What for?’

‘You’re always complaining that I’m not interested in anything,’ said Jerry. ‘Well, now I am. Computers. I want a computer. A Mac.’

It had indeed been a hostage situation; it was still a hostage situation even though Jerry had handed over the child.

‘How much,’ Lennart asked. ‘How much does one of those cost?’

‘It’s a Classic I have in mind,’ said Jerry. ‘A Macintosh Classic. Ten thousand kronor, more or less.’

‘And what do I get for that?’

Jerry snorted and punched Lennart on the shoulder. ‘You know what I like about you sometimes, Dad? You cut to the chase. No pissing about.’ Jerry rubbed the back of his neck and thought it over. Then he said, ‘A year. Or six months. Roughly. Something like that.’

‘And then?’

‘And then we’ll see.’

Lennart hid his face in his hands and rested his elbows on the kitchen table. At some point during Jerry’s worst years, Lennart had wished his son dead. Now he was doing it again. But what use was that? He heard Laila’s voice beside him.

‘Well, it’s good if Jerry has an interest. That’s what I think.’

Lennart dug his nails into his scalp and said, ‘Not a word. Not one word.’ Then he raised his head and turned to Jerry. ‘Would you like the home delivery service as well?’

‘Yes, that would be nice. Cool. Thanks.’

Lennart’s throat was so constricted with rage that he could barely manage a whisper. ‘You’re welcome.’

As Jerry moved towards the door, Laila got up and handed the child to Lennart without looking at him. She went over to Jerry, lowered her head and said quietly, ‘Jerry, can’t I come with you?’

Jerry frowned and he looked from Laila to Lennart. Then he seemed to realise what was going on, and said, ‘I couldn’t give a fuck what you two get up to, actually. But let’s put it this way.’ He turned to Lennart. ‘If you so much as touch Mother…you can forget the kid. Got it?’

It wasn’t only Lennart’s throat that was constricted. Every muscle in his body had been twisted into ropes and pulled as tight as possible, until they started to tremble. Jerry took a step towards him. ‘I’m asking you if you’ve got it. You leave Mother alone. One bruise, that’s all it will take. Gone. OK?’

Lennart managed to move his head up and down in a stiff nod. The child moved uneasily in his arms. Jerry stroked the girl’s cheek and said, ‘Toot, toot, toot.’

Then he left. Laila didn’t go with him.

Jerry was named after Jerry Lee Lewis.

For a few years it looked as though he too would go down a musical path, hopefully without the tragic consequences suffered by Jerry Lee. Under Lennart’s supervision he started to practise on a little guitar when he was five years old. By the time he was seven he was already able to move through the basic chords with ease, and produce simple rhythms.

Lennart didn’t quite see himself as a Leopold with a young Wolfgang to raise, but with some decent training Jerry could well become a competent musician, and that would do nicely.

Then came the business of the Swedish charts and ‘Tell Me’.

Laila never revealed that Lennart was responsible for the demolition of her knee. She said she had fallen on a sharp stone and even when she was pressed she never changed her story. She spent ten days in hospital and underwent a series of operations.

When she came home, the atmosphere in the house had changed forever. Lennart showed no regret for what he had done; instead he started to regard Laila as some kind of not-quite-human being and treated her accordingly.

He started to hit her. Not much and not often, just when he felt she had stepped outside her not-quite-human boundaries. Laila had two choices: leave or put up with it.

The years passed and since Laila never did make a decision, it was made for her. Day by day, a new skin was painted onto her body until she became the person Lennart thought she was. Half a person. Cowed.

Jerry did his guitar practice without making any significant progress, but he plodded on. In the emotional chill that pervaded his home he became skinny and introverted, like a child who is cold all the time. The bullying started at junior school. Not much and not often, but enough to make sure he knew his limits, and to keep him well within those limits.

He had just turned twelve when he discovered David Bowie or, more accurately, he discovered ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. And if he played that record until the needle started to wear the grooves away, he played ‘Starman’ until it wore a hole in the vinyl.

He didn’t completely understand the words, but he understood the feeling and the atmosphere, and found the whole thing a great consolation. He also wanted to believe there was someone out there waiting, someone who could put everything right. Not God, but a starman with superpowers.

As the hormones began to kick in among his classmates, the bullying moved up a gear. Humiliating Jerry in front of the girls turned into a sport among the other boys. He went deeper into himself, and clung to his only secret: the fact that he could play the guitar.

‘Space Oddity’ replaced ‘Starman’ as his favourite song. He understood every single word, and identified completely with Major Tom, who decides to cut all ties with life on earth and floats away into infinite space.

Everything could have been different. It’s frightening to think how apparently insignificant events can influence the direction of our lives. If Lennart hadn’t forgotten his wallet, if Tropicos hadn’t been competing for a place in the chart that same Sunday and so on. Something similar happened with Jerry.

His teacher had found out that he could play the guitar. She managed to persuade him to perform in front of the class during Fun Time one Friday. Jerry already knew ‘Space Oddity’ perfectly, but from the Monday onwards he practised until his fingers ached.

On Thursday evening he played and sang to Lennart and Laila. Even though they didn’t like David Bowie, they sat there dumbstruck. They’d had no idea. Both of them had tears in their eyes when he played the final chord. It was perhaps the best hour they’d spent together for several years.

Jerry found it hard to sleep that night. Fantasies that were all too appealing took over his mind. This would be his vindication. Just like in the films. He had the knack of hearing and seeing himself from the outside when he played, and he knew he performed the song brilliantly. Perhaps better than Bowie. His classmates would have no choice but to acknowledge that fact.

When the time came, Jerry took his guitar out of its case; he was perfectly calm. Regardless of what his classmates thought of the song, he would show them. He would show them that he could do something, and do it well. They might carry on treating him badly, but at least he would know that they knew.

He sat down on a chair next to the teacher’s desk with the guitar resting on his knee, and gazed out over the room. Sceptical expressions, scornful smirks. He struck the first chord and began to sing, hitting the first note perfectly.

A crackling sound came from the school’s internal loudspeaker system. Jerry stopped playing as a voice rang out. ‘Good afternoon. This is the Principal speaking. Those pupils who wish to do so may go to the main hall and watch the television; Ingemar Stenmark will be making his second run in five minutes. We will then finish school for the day. Come on Sweden!’

There was the concerted sound of scraping and clattering as twenty-two chairs were pushed back and the whole class rose as one and raced to the hall to watch the Swedish hero celebrate yet another triumph.

In thirty seconds the classroom was empty, leaving Jerry alone with the teacher. She sighed and said, ‘That was a shame, Jerry. But there’ll be other times. Maybe we can do it next Friday instead?’

Jerry nodded and stayed in his seat as the teacher hurried off to join the Stenmark supporters in the hall. He didn’t scream, he didn’t cry, he didn’t set fire to the school. He got up slowly, put his guitar back in its case and gave up.

If the Alpine Skiing World Cup had been another day, if Stenmark had done his run five minutes later, if the Principal hadn’t been in such a good mood…

Everything could have been different.

Jerry didn’t play the following Friday, nor any other Friday. He couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm again. He knew his opportunity had slipped through his fingers. Stenmark won, by the way. As always.

Jerry’s remaining years at junior school were spent in the special limbo reserved for the victim of low-grade bullying. It wasn’t so bad that he refused to go to school, and he wasn’t sufficiently ostracised to let him feel calm when he was there. He simply stuck it out.

He stopped playing the guitar and devoted his time to comics about superheroes, glam rock and model planes. Lennart tried to force him back to music, but Jerry had a strong will, at least when it came to negatives. He flatly refused. He had shoved the guitar under his bed, and there it stayed.

The signs started to announce themselves during his last term in Year 9. Jerry’s body was changing. He grew five centimetres in just a few months, and everything began to bulk up. When school finished it was as if he had been released from a press, and his body blew out in every direction.

He had to eat more just to keep up with this hothouse growth, and became a frequent visitor at the pizzeria on the main square in Norrtälje. It was there he got to know Roy and Elvis. They were two years older than Jerry and had also, improbably enough, been named after music legends. Perhaps that influenced them to let Jerry become one of the gang. Elvis, Roy and Jerry. It sounded good.

In the autumn Jerry started at the grammar school, taking mainly technical subjects. Nobody from his old class was there and he was able to make a fresh start. He was a fairly big lad with something sly in his expression; it was probably best not to mess with him.

In October Roy and Elvis initiated him into their speciality: burgling holiday houses. They would head off on their mopeds to isolated cottages with feeble locks and ransack them for anything of value, mostly garden equipment and household items that Roy sold for next to nothing to a guy he knew in Stockholm.

Sometimes they found booze, and Jerry was happy to join in with the celebration after a successful outing. Roy had his own cottage with a TV and video player, where they could drink their haul undisturbed while enjoying films like The Driller Killer, Maniac, and I Spit on Your Grave. At first the graphic violence made Jerry feel slightly ill, but that soon passed.

He wasn’t sick in the head. He didn’t feel the slightest desire to do those kind of things, and he thought the debate about moral harm that was raging just then was ridiculous. But somehow the films captured how it felt. Once he had got used to it, he felt nothing but a great sense of calm as he watched Leatherface hang the girl up on the meat hook. It was right, somehow. That was how it was. Life and everything.

His final grades in Year 9 had been less than impressive, and he had only just got into grammar school. Things were going better now. Not despite but because of his leisure activities, he felt contented with life. His homework might possibly have suffered, but on the other hand he was able to concentrate when he was in school, because he didn’t have to be on his guard all the time.

He finished the year with a much better grade than anyone could have hoped for. Lennart and Laila rewarded him with a computer, a ZX81 which absorbed a great deal of his attention in the weeks after he left school. A charming little story, all in all.

Everything could have been different.

At the beginning of July he met Roy and Elvis at the pizza place as usual. Elvis was a bit agitated. A friend of a friend had been to Amsterdam and brought back a decent lump of hash; he had given Elvis a little taster.

Well, you have to try these things. Later in the evening they sat down behind a tree in the local park and, with a fair amount of difficulty, rolled a joint; they passed it around, then did it again.

Jerry thought it was fantastic. He had heard that hash made you feel heavy and dull, but he felt completely on top of the world. It might possibly be a little bit more difficult to move his body than usual, but his mind! He could see everything so clearly, he knew exactly what was what.

Arms slung around each other, they strolled off towards Love Point where people usually gathered in the evenings. They were invincible, they were the Three Musketeers, they were the entire bloody history of rock and roll in one package.

There was some kind of party going on, a gang of people about their own age sitting around a bonfire. Someone was strumming away on a guitar. In walked Los Rockers making one hell of a racket! There was no messing about, people just had to make some room for them. Roy grabbed a bottle of wine to share with his compadres.

Jerry couldn’t take his eyes off the guitar. It woke something in him. His fingers began to grope in thin air, remembering the wood, the strings, the frets. He could still do it. The guitar was longing for his fingers to release the music hidden inside it…

Someone spoke. A voice was tapping away at his consciousness, saying his name. With difficulty he dragged himself out of the guitar’s hypnotic power, turned his head towards the voice and said, ‘What?’

Two metres away sat Mats, known as Mats the Love Machine ever since he started driving around a couple of years earlier on a souped-up moped with an imitation leopard’s tail dangling from the antenna. He had once pissed on Jerry in the showers. Among other things.

Mats leaned forward and said, ‘I’m talking to you: wanna play, fat boy?’

It happened so fast. Everything had been moving in slow motion for a while and now somebody had pressed fast forward. Before Jerry had time to think, he had grabbed a lump of wood that was sticking out of the fire, walked over to Mats and smashed him across the face with the burning end.

Mats fell backwards with a scream and Jerry looked at the cooling, pointed piece of wood in his hand. He looked at Mats, writhing on the ground with his hands over his face. His mind started working again, his thoughts crystal clear. He could see exactly what the situation was. Mats was in fact a vampire. Simple as that.

Which meant there was only one thing for it. He grabbed the glowing stake with both hands and drove it into Mats’ chest. Sparks flew, there was a hissing sound, and by the time Elvis and Roy got hold of Jerry, Mats had already started coughing up blood like the vampire he was. Or had been.

Events that had taken perhaps fifteen seconds would define Jerry’s life for a long time to come. It involved police and lawyers, social services and youth services. Mats survived; he got away with the loss of an eye, a few shattered ribs and slight damage to one lung.

But something had gone wrong inside Jerry’s head during the cannabis rush, and it refused to go back to normal. In that moment of clarity when he realised he had to free the world from a repulsive blood-sucker, an insight had taken root in his mind and refused to let go when the rush subsided.

There was a truth in what he had seen.

During a meeting with the family therapist, Laila explained what had really happened to her knee. The therapist regarded this as a possible breakthrough and a chance to move on, but for Jerry it merely provided further confirmation of what he already knew: the world was evil, people were evil, and there was no point in even trying.

When all the investigations and analyses were over, Jerry had slipped so far behind in his schoolwork that he couldn’t go back. Didn’t want to anyway. During his absence Elvis had passed his driving test, which opened up all kinds of new possibilities.

Freed from the burden of normality, Jerry let go of any semblance of ambition. The three of them moved on from summer cottages to bigger houses, and robbed a couple of petrol stations before they got caught. Jerry got a year in a youth offenders’ institution, which only served to reinforce his view of the world.

When he came out, they started again. An old man was at home in one of the houses, and they knocked him down. When he started screaming abuse at them, they kicked him a few times until he shut his mouth. This played on Jerry’s conscience for a time, but it passed. He was becoming hardened.

One day when he was shaving, he caught sight of himself and looked carefully. He examined his feelings, and realised he had crossed an important line. He could kill someone without it breaking him. If necessary. That was definitely progress.

His mother and father carried on with the usual shit, and he took no notice whatsoever. They didn’t want him at home anymore, but he thought it worked very well; he liked having his room as a sort of hole to crawl back into from time to time. He didn’t listen to a word they said in any case.

When Jerry was twenty, Elvis went out cruising in Norrtälje, high as a kite. He lost control of his Chevy on the hill leading down to the harbour, drove straight into the water and drowned. Nothing was the same after that.

The steam went out of Roy and Jerry. They felt obliged to burgle a couple of houses, and talked about trying some post offices, but it never happened. It was no fun anymore. They drifted apart, and since Jerry was spending more time at home, he was able to hear Lennart and Laila talking. When they organised an apartment for him through social services, he moved out.

He had a few bits and pieces stashed away which he sold so that he could buy a motorbike. He got a few dead-end jobs, but never stayed more than a couple of weeks. He built up a reasonable collection of splatter films on VHS.

That’s how it was, and perhaps it couldn’t have been any different.

In the spring the year after Lennart had found the girl, something very unusual happened. Laila received an offer. A group calling themselves DDT wanted Laila as their featured singer on a dance track. At first Laila thought it was a joke, and in a way she was right. The idea was to do a Swedish version of The KLF’s monster hit ‘Justified and Ancient’, with Laila as Sweden’s answer to Tammy Wynette, singing a couple of verses to a heavy dance beat.

Laila found out later that both Lill-Babs and Siw Malmkvist had been approached and turned it down. Perhaps other legendary Swedish chart-toppers had been asked too, before they ended up with the somewhat less legendary Laila.

She had no reputation to lose and no image to maintain, so she said yes. Anything to get out of the house.

The atmosphere had soured even more since the incident with Jerry. Lennart hardly spoke to her anymore, but at least he didn’t hit her. It wasn’t clear what Jerry had meant when he said Lennart could ‘forget the kid’ if his instructions weren’t followed, but the threat certainly worked. Jerry got his computer and Laila was left in peace.

But it was as if a musty blanket had settled on things. The air in the rooms felt stale and close. Laila thought that a visitor who stepped through the door would only need one sniff to know: There’s something bad here. Something sick.

But nobody came, apart from Jerry who called in from time to time to ‘check things out’. Sometimes he insisted on holding the child, bouncing it up and down on his knee and saying, ‘Toot, toot.’ On these occasions Lennart stood there with clenched fists, waiting until Jerry had finished so he could carry the girl back down to the cellar.

Perhaps Laila experienced the child’s shut-in existence as her own; sometimes she had to go out into the garden just to breathe. So she welcomed the chance to go into Stockholm and pretend to be a singer again, if only for a while.

The track was called ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’, and they explained to Laila that she would be singing a deliberate parody of The KLF’s nonsense. She had no idea what it was about. ‘We’re walking on water underground, we’re setting fire to the four words. Lead. Check. Bearing capacity zero’ and so on.

Her voice held, the producer was happy, and Laila caught the bus back to Norrtälje without really understanding what she had done. But it had been fun. A new environment where everybody had been nice to her; that was a novelty for a start.

In April the girl’s first tooth came through. Otherwise it was as if her development had come to a standstill. She made no attempt to crawl or shuffle along. She wasn’t interested in hiding games, or peep-bo. She didn’t imitate actions or movements; the only thing she reciprocated was sound: notes and melodies.

Sometimes Lennart took her out into the garden at night. On the odd occasion Laila was allowed to do it she would take the opportunity to whisper and talk to the girl as much as she could. She got nothing back-not a sound.

At the end of May, ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’ by DDT featuring Laila was released, and nothing happened. At first. Then something did happen, and then something else happened. In June it entered the Tracks chart, and climbed to number seven. People starting calling, wanting to interview Laila. She was given very specific instructions from DDT’s record company on what to say about the lyrics. That was what she said.

The attention made Lennart nervous, but there was no need for him to worry. In a few weeks it was over. However, it did lead to a call from an agency wanting to book Lennart and Laila for a few gigs. Lennart decided they would try one as an experiment, in Norrtälje in August. It was a motor show for vintage car enthusiasts, a mixture of a family day out and a meeting for boy racers.

‘So what are we going to do with the girl?’ asked Laila.

‘Well, it’s only in Norrtälje. She’ll be OK on her own for a couple of hours. It won’t be a problem.’

It was a hot afternoon in the middle of July. They were sitting at the table outside drinking coffee. Perhaps it was the unexpected success or the fact that she had been able to get out and about a bit that gave Laila courage. A very simple question had been grinding away in her head for several months. Now she put it into words.

‘Lennart. What’s going to happen with the girl?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you must have thought about it. What’s going to happen in the future. She’s growing. She’ll be walking soon. What are we going to do with her?’

It was as if a veil came down over Lennart’s eyes and he moved a long way away, even though he was still sitting at the table fingering his coffee cup.

‘She’s not going to be part of all that,’ he said. ‘She’s not going to be destroyed.’

‘No. But…from a purely practical point of view? How’s it going to work?’

Lennart folded his arms and looked at Laila as if from a great distance.

‘I’m not going to say this again. So listen carefully. We are going to keep her here. We are not going to let her out. We are going to train her so that she adapts to that way of life. She won’t be unhappy, because she won’t have seen anything else.’

‘But why, Lennart? Why?’

With exaggerated care, Lennart raised the cup to his lips, took a sip of the lukewarm coffee and placed the cup back on the saucer without making a sound.

‘I do not want to hear these questions again. I will answer you now. But never again. Is that clear?’

Laila nodded. Even Lennart’s voice had changed, as if a different version of him was speaking through his mouth. A person made from a heavier material, from his solid core. There was something compelling about the voice, and Laila sat there motionless, her eyes fixed on Lennart’s lips as he said:

‘Because she is not an ordinary child. She will never be an ordinary child. Or an ordinary person. She is white. Completely white. The only thing the world will do to her is to destroy her. I know this. I have seen inside her. People might regard it as a bad thing, keeping a child shut in. But it’s the best thing for her. I’m sure of that. She is pure music. The world is a dissonance. She would go under. Instantly.’

‘So it’s for her sake? Are you sure?’

Lennart returned to the table. As if everything was pared away at once, his expression was suddenly fragile and hesitant. A lonely child in the forest. Laila couldn’t remember when she had last seen that look, and it stabbed her in the heart.

Lennart said, ‘And for mine. If she disappeared…I’d kill myself. She is the last. The last chance. There is nothing after her.’

They sat motionless. The needle in Laila’s heart twisted around and around. A sparrow landed on the table, pecking at a few cake crumbs. Afterwards Laila would realise that they had been standing at a crossroads, and that a decision had been made. In silence, like all important decisions.

His parents hadn’t said a word about the gig, but Jerry had seen the posters. He had been thinking of going to the motor show to meet up with some old friends but when he saw that Lennart and Laila would be playing, he changed his mind. There was something else he would much rather do.

The gig was due to start at two o’clock. At half past one Jerry jumped on his motorbike and rode over to the house. He reckoned that his parents would need a good half hour for the sound check and at least that to pack up and drive home, so he had a couple of hours on his own in the house. He calculated that they wouldn’t have taken the kid with them.

The front door was no problem; he could have opened it with a credit card in his sleep, but he’d taken a screwdriver with him just to be on the safe side. It took him ten seconds to push back the old-fashioned catch and step into the hallway. Without taking off his boots he clattered down the cellar steps, shouting, ‘Toot, toot!’

He gave a start when he walked into his old room. The child was standing upright in the cot with her hands resting on the frame, staring straight at him. There was something horrible about the way that kid looked at you, as if it could see straight through everything. But it was still just a kid in a red babygro with its nappy bulging out at the back. Not exactly something to be scared of.

Jerry had understood completely what this kid meant to his father. Forty times more than he himself had ever meant. It was quite upsetting. He didn’t get it. What was so special about this little bastard that just stood there staring?

When Jerry seized the child under the arms and lifted it out of the cot, it just hung there limply; it didn’t even kick its legs. Jerry poked it tentatively in the stomach and said, ‘Toot, toot.’ Not a smile, not even the hint of a frown. Jerry poked harder, really pushed this time. Nothing. It was as if he didn’t exist, as if nothing he did or said could make an impression.

Playing hard to get, are you, you little bastard?

He laid the child down on the spare bed and pinched its arm, pinched hard. The soft baby skin was squeezed together and he could feel his fingers touching through the fabric and the skin. When nothing happened he moved on to the thighs, both thighs. Hard pinches that would have had any seven-year-old screaming the place down. The kid simply carried on staring straight through him without making a sound. Jerry had had enough. He was going to get some kind of fucking reaction.

He gave the child a resounding smack across the face. Smack. The little head jerked to the side and the cheek began to redden. But still not a peep out of her. Sweat broke out on Jerry’s hairline, and a black lamp began to glow in his chest.

OK, maybe the little bastard was deaf and dumb and fuck knows what else, but it must surely have the capacity to feel pain? There ought to be tears, a grimace, something. Jerry’s inability to make any impression on the child made him furious. He was going to get some kind of response.

He picked up the child, holding her at arm’s length, and took a step away from the bed. ‘If I drop you on the floor, you should bloody well feel that, shouldn’t you? Don’t you think?’ He brought the child closer and said it again, so that it would understand. ‘Do you hear me? I’m going to drop you on the floor.’

He never found out if he would have done it or not. As he uttered the last word, the child’s hand shot out with reptilian speed and grabbed hold of his lower lip. Its fingers burrowed in, the little nails scraping against his gums. Then it pulled.

It hurt so much that tears sprang to Jerry’s eyes. Whatever his intention may have been, the pain made him drop the child. It clung to his lip for less than a second, just long enough to tear it away from the gum slightly, blood seeping into his mouth.

The child fell onto the cement floor and landed on its bottom, where it lay looking up at Jerry as he pressed his hands to his mouth, whimpering. On the bedside table there was a sippy cup in the shape of an elephant, its ears forming the handles. Jerry took off the lid and spat. Blood and saliva mingled with the milk. He sat there spitting for a while until the worst had passed. Then he tore off a piece of a paper towel, rolled it up and pushed it under his lip like an upside-down plug of tobacco.

The kid was still lying on its back, looking at him. Jerry crouched down beside it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem. So now we know.’

He picked up the girl, taking care to keep his face out of reach of her hands, and carefully placed her back in the cot. She was utterly calm; the only thing that had changed was that she now had a small amount of blood on the tips of the fingers on her left hand.

Jerry perched on the edge of the spare bed, his elbows resting on his knees. He looked carefully at her. Despite the fact that his lip was hurting, he couldn’t hold back a big smile. He was positively beaming. Suddenly he grabbed hold of the bars and rattled the cot, shaking her to and fro.

‘Fuck, sis!’ he said. ‘Sis! Bloody hell!’

The child didn’t respond, but there was no denying it: he had a sister, sort of. He liked the little bastard. She was completely crazy. Nobody was going to mess with her. She was invincible, his sister.

Jerry was in the mood for a celebration, so he clattered back up the stairs and found a bottle of whisky and a glass, then went back down to the cellar, perched on the edge of the bed, half-filled his glass and clinked it against the bars of the cot.

‘Cheers, sis!’

He took a big gulp and pulled a face as the alcohol penetrated through the paper towel and touched the wound. He spat the plug out onto the floor and rinsed his mouth clean with more whisky. Then he rested his chin on his hand and looked thoughtfully at the girl.

‘Do you know what your name is?’ he said. ‘Theres, that’s what. Like that Baader-Meinhof chick. Theres.’ It was crystal clear, he could hear it as he uttered the name. ‘Theres. That’s it.’

He topped up his glass. The child pulled herself up into a sitting position, then to her feet. She was standing as she had been when he came into the room.

‘What is it?’ Jerry asked. ‘Do you want to taste?’

He picked up a cloth and dipped it in the glass, then held out the damp corner to Theres, who didn’t open her mouth. He pushed the edge of the cloth against her lips. ‘This is what they used to do in the old days, you know. Open wide.’

Theres opened her mouth, and Jerry pushed the corner of the flannel in. The girl sucked at it, then lay down. She carried on sucking away at the cloth, never taking her eyes off Jerry.

‘Cheers,’ he said, emptying the glass.

After ten minutes and another glass, Jerry started to get restless. He looked around the room for something to do. A sudden inspiration made him look under the bed, and lo and behold!

He got down on his knees and pulled out the guitar case. It was covered in a layer of dust, and the lock had begun to rust after several damp winters, but there it was. He opened the case and took out the guitar, weighing it in his hands.

It’s so bloody small.

When he thought back to his days as a guitarist, he remembered the guitar as a great big thing on his lap; his fingers had trouble stretching to the right frets. Now it was a toy in his hands, and he had no problem whatsoever getting his hand around the neck.

He tried an E minor, and it sounded bloody awful. He struck an experimental chord and started turning the tuner on the E-string-to begin with. There was something odd about the acoustics in the room. When he plucked the string it sounded like a double note. He let the note fade away, and put his ear to the soundboard. The resonance sounded purer. He plucked the string again, leaning his head towards the body. He didn’t have Lennart’s ear; he could only hear notes in relation to one another, but surely the resonance sounded purer than the note itself?

Some kind of damage from the damp.

He straightened up so that he could reach the tuners, and saw that Theres had pulled herself up in the cot. He plucked the E-string again. This time he could hear where the purer note was coming from.

No, no, no.

Just for fun he tuned the E-string to the sound Theres was making, and moved on to the B-string. When he tuned that one to the sound she made, he was able to hear that the interval was absolutely perfect. He did the same thing with G, and so on. Tuning a guitar had never been so quick. He couldn’t have done it better with an electronic tuner.

He took a swig straight out of the whisky bottle and looked at Theres, who was still standing up in her cot, her cheek bright red and her face expressionless.

‘You’re quite a piece of work, aren’t you? So what do you think about this, then?’

He tried a C. Not the note, but the chord. C, E and G. Theres’ clear voice responded; it was hard to tell where the guitar ended and she began. Jerry allowed the chord to die away. Her voice lingered for a couple of seconds before it too fell silent. Jerry took another swig from the bottle and nodded to himself.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s rock.’ He stamped his foot to set the beat, struck C again and launched into the first line of ‘Space Oddity’.

Beside him the girl joined in with pure, wordless notes. When he changed chords it took a second before she switched to the new note. Just as well. He would have been seriously spooked if she’d known the song on top of everything else. But she didn’t. So he played it to her, with her. Then he moved on to ‘Ashes to Ashes’ so she could hear the whole story.

When Jerry had sung the last lines a few times with Theres, it was as if he woke from an enchantment. He looked around the room and realised there would be a hell of a fuss when his parents got home.

He put back the whisky and shoved the boozy cloth out of sight, gathered up the blood-stained plugs of paper and poured the contents of the cup down the sink in the laundry room. Finally he put the guitar back in its case. The room looked the same as it had when he arrived.

Theres was standing in her cot, looking at him. He leaned down and sniffed at her mouth: nothing. Almost a pity, really. It would have given Lennart and Laila something to think about if the kid had been standing there reeking of Famous Grouse when they got home.

‘OK, sis. See ya.’

He left. After ten seconds he came back and took the guitar.

The gig wasn’t quite the success the promoters had hoped for, but nor was it a fiasco. The majority of the audience consisted of fairly overweight men in denim jackets and women wearing too much make-up, all about the same age as Lennart and Laila. Only a small number of young people had turned up to see the singer behind ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’, which was just as well, because they didn’t actually have permission to use the sampling on that song.

Lennart had programmed the synthesiser as best he could, but the audience got fairly watered down versions of their old hits or attempted hits. Not unexpectedly, they got the best response to ‘Summer Rain’. Four drunks in leather waistcoats stood right at the front with their arms around each other and joined in the chorus, and the applause at the end was almost enough for an encore. But not quite.

A few people came up to talk to them, and a man with his gut protruding like a weapon under his T-shirt asked Laila for an autograph. Where would he like it? On his belly, of course. This turned into a bit of a trend, and another five men were inspired to ask for autographs on their bellies. Laila’s strokes with the felt-tip became broader and broader, while Lennart stood next to her pretending to smile.

Then a shy, dried-up little man came over and expressed his admiration for the first and only record by The Others, and the whole thing turned into a very pleasant experience for Lennart too.

No, it wasn’t a success, but Lennart and Laila still felt quite contented as they gathered up their cables and microphones and packed up the synth. There were people out there who remembered them. Not something they could build a comeback on, but a small consolation, if nothing else.

They had been away from home for at least half an hour longer than expected and the way Lennart drove, he would have lost his licence if he’d been caught by a speed trap. Without bothering to unpack the car he ran inside and down to the cellar to make sure everything was all right.

The child was lying motionless on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Lennart stood and looked at her for a few seconds, waiting for her to blink. When she didn’t, he hurried over and grabbed her hand between the bars. The child wrinkled her nose. Lennart breathed a sigh of relief and pressed his lips against the little hand. Then he saw that there was blood on the fingertips.

He picked up the girl and changed her nappy, inspecting her body to see if she had scratched herself. He couldn’t find anything except a few bruises on her thighs, and thought she must have bitten her tongue, or perhaps a new tooth had come through.

When he got back upstairs, the telephone rang. He got there ahead of Laila as she came hobbling in from the living room, and picked up the receiver.

‘Lennart speaking.’

‘Hi, it’s Jerry.’

‘Oh?’

Lennart quickly ran through in his mind what Jerry could possibly want now, and steeled himself. After a few seconds of silence on the other end, he said, ‘So did you want something?’

‘No. Just wanted to check if you were at home. Bye.’

The connection was broken and Lennart stood there with the phone in his hand, eyebrows raised. Laila looked at him anxiously.

‘What did he want?’

Lennart replaced the receiver and shook his head. ‘To check if we were at home. That’s a new one.’

Two mud-smeared Indians slit open a man’s stomach and ripped out his intestines to feast on them as Jerry slumped on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. He pressed stop; he couldn’t even be bothered to fast forward to the bit where they hung the girl up on hooks through her breasts. He shuffled over to the video and ejected Cannibal Ferox before replacing it in the Italian cannibal section of the bookshelf.

He took out Eaten Alive and put it back, looked at the covers of Cannibal Holocaust and Man from Deep River, but he just wasn’t in the mood. He’d seen every single film at least ten times, some more than twenty. He glanced at the jewel in his collection, the incomplete Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, which had at least made his stomach tingle the first few times he had seen it, but no.

A hole gaped inside him. He took a bottle of Russian beer out of the fridge, knocked the cap off on the edge of the sink and poured half of it down his throat to see if it helped. Not even slightly.

He went out onto the balcony and lit another cigarette, watching a few children with towels slung over their shoulders as they made their way home from a swimming excursion to Vigelsjö. Tanned, cheerful, slender, not a care in the world. Jerry sank down onto a stool and sighed; he took a deep drag and thought about how he was feeling.

A hole? Was it really a hole?

No, he was familiar with that feeling. An empty space that appeared, that you had to hurl things into, food, booze, films, excitement, until the echo stopped. This was different. This was as if something had appeared. Fear. It was white and shaped like a sphere, about the same size as a handball. It travelled around his body, unsettling him.

He wandered around the apartment and stopped at the guitar case, leaning against the wall in the hallway. Why the fuck had he brought the guitar home? The last thing he needed was a reminder of his fucking childhood. He stood there in front of the guitar, his head tilted to one side. In the distance, like a whisper through the water pipes, he heard the girl’s voice. Theres’ voice. Crystal clear, perfect.

He shuddered and carried the case into the living room, then took out the guitar. It had gone out of tune on the ride home, and it took four times as long to retune it without Theres and her voice next to him. When it sounded OK he tried a C7 just to see if his fingers still remembered. They did.

He messed about for a while, and at first his index finger wouldn’t stretch to the barre chords, but soon that was fine too. Jerry rocked his upper body and got through Clapton’s riff to ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ without any problem, then carried on strumming as he hummed the lyrics to himself.

Time passed, and without noticing how it had happened he was sitting there playing a sequence of chords he didn’t recognise. He looked at his fingers, moving across the neck of the guitar by themselves, and went through the sequence again. It sounded good.

But what’s the tune, for fuck’s sake?

One more time, slower. He could hear echoes of both Bowie and The Doors, for God’s sake; he sensed a melody behind the chords, but still couldn’t place it. The Who? No. After running through the whole thing a couple of times more, he accepted the truth: the tune didn’t exist. He’d just made it up.

He wrote down the sequence of chords on the back of an envelope. Verse, chorus. It needed a bridge of some kind. Jerry hummed the verse and tried out a few different things until he found a fully functioning transition, which he changed up before the final chorus. Not perfect, but it would have to do. Something he could work on.

Jerry leaned back on the sofa and exhaled. It had started to get dark outside the window. He looked at the guitar, at the envelope covered in scribbled chords and crossings out. He scratched the back of his neck.

So what was all that about?

At least three hours had passed since he took the guitar out of its case. No, not passed. Flown. His scalp was sticky with sweat and there was hardly any feeling in the fingertips of his left hand, which were red and swollen. It would soon pass, he knew that. A few days’ practice, and the skin would harden.

Lennart turned down the handful of gigs they were offered during the autumn, and Laila wasn’t exactly sorry. She had felt clumsy and rusty standing there on-stage at the motor show, and although she had enjoyed the attention, she wasn’t dreaming of travelling all over the country signing autographs on the bellies of drunks. But what was her dream? Did she actually have one?

The Lizzie Kanger album which Lennart had worked on sold fairly well, and they got by on the royalties from that and the other projects Lennart had been involved in over the years. In theory, they could sit at home twiddling their thumbs while the money trickled in, just fast enough to cover the necessities. The house was paid for, and they had no major outgoings. Everything was set up for a slow, painless stroll down the road we all follow until the light’s turned out.

Laila had been quite happy about that, and Lennart seemed to be grimly reconciled to the prospect. Until he found the child. Laila couldn’t understand Lennart’s febrile energy in relation to the child but in this as in most other things she just let him get on with it, because that was the easiest thing to do.

During the autumn and winter Lennart received more offers involving composition. Lizzie Kanger’s little burst of success had sent ripples out across the water, and there was no lack of optimistic singers, both male and female, who wanted a similar pebble dropped into the stagnant pool of their career. A song, or just a catchy chorus-got anything up your sleeve, Lennart?

Lennart shut himself in the studio and plinked out phrases, adding bombastic synth riffs so that not even the tone deaf could fail to grasp the potential in the demos he sent out.

The girl had moved on to solids, and it was usually Laila who fed her-jars of baby food she gobbled with a surprisingly healthy appetite. And yet however much she ate, she remained unusually thin for a baby, which was puzzling, given how little exercise she had. Laila wished she had that metabolism.

As the autumn progressed the girl began to walk, but still she didn’t say a word. The only sound that came out of her as she walked around the room was a low, soporific humming-melodies Laila had never heard. Sometimes Laila fell asleep as she sat on the spare bed watching her.

At some point the girl had found a piece of rope about twenty centimetres long with four knots in it, and she never let go of it. She chewed it, she stroked it, she rubbed it against her cheek and she clutched it in her hand when she was asleep.

As the weeks passed, the girl began to use her newly acquired ability to walk in a way that made Laila uneasy, although she didn’t know why. The girl was searching. That was the only word for it.

With the piece of rope in her hand she moved around the room looking behind the cupboard, under the bed. She pulled out the drawers in the desk and closed them again. She took the cuddly toys she never bothered with out of their basket, looked in the basket. Then she went back to the desk, opened the drawers, looked under the bed and so on and so on, humming all the time.

That was all she did, by and large. Sometimes she would sit down on the floor and stroke the knots in her piece of rope, but after a while she was on her feet again, looking behind the cupboard. When Laila was feeding her, the girl’s eyes never met hers. She continued to gaze around the room, as if she were still searching even when she wasn’t on the move.

Laila would sit on the bed following the girl’s progress around the room as a quiet horror began to whisper inside her. The longer she sat there watching the girl’s purposeful search, the more convinced she became that there really was something to search for, and that the girl would find it any moment now. She couldn’t imagine what it might be, and she wondered if the girl knew.

Winter dragged itself along. Dark afternoons and rain hammering on the cellar windows. By early spring, Laila had long given up trying to talk to the girl. Lennart’s dictum had firmed of its own accord into law. The girl didn’t speak, she hummed, and she didn’t stop humming if someone spoke, even for a fraction of a second. In the end it seemed pointless to try. And after all, she hummed so beautifully.

Laila had started to leave the door of the girl’s room open while she was sitting down there. It made no difference. When the girl got to the door she stopped as if an invisible barrier prevented her from continuing out into the rest of the cellar.

To give herself something to do, Laila had taken up knitting again. She had been sitting on the bed for an hour or so working on a new hat for the girl when something changed in the energy of the room.

Laila lowered her needles. The girl was standing with the tips of her toes pressed against the threshold, looking out into the cellar. Then she reached out through the door with one arm, as if to check that there really was a space on the other side. She took one step. Laila held her breath as the girl moved the other foot, then stood with her heels pressed against the other side of the threshold. The girl’s head turned from left to right.

The humming faltered for a moment, as if she were hesitating. Then it changed character. A new melody, a new key. Laila’s vision blurred, and she realised she was crying. Through her tears she saw the girl take an infinitely slow step back, saw the other foot follow until she was standing inside the room once more. She stood there motionless for a few seconds as the melody changed. Then she turned and walked back into the room, where she carried on searching as if nothing had happened.

What do you dream of, Laila? Do you have a dream?

Something had happened. Something had opened up inside Laila and pierced her torpor. She fumbled for the aperture and tried to see what lay behind. She couldn’t see a thing.

Laila gathered up her knitting and fled from the room.

She had thought she was just going out for a drive. As if it were something perfectly natural. These days it was always Lennart who drove, because of her bad knee. But here she was, out on the road in the middle of the day, doing a hundred and ten on the twisting road to Rimbo.

It was only when she turned onto the forest track that she realised this was where she had been heading all the time. She stopped at the car park where the path leading into the forest began, and switched off the engine.

This was where Lennart had found the girl eighteen months ago. Laila got out of the car, pulling her coat around her to keep out the bitterly cold drizzle. The sky was overcast, and although it was midday it was gloomy among the trees. She took a couple of tentative steps and quelled the urge to shout. What would she be shouting for? What was she actually looking for? She was looking for the place. Then she would know.

Lennart’s description hadn’t been exact, but as far as Laila understood, it had been close to the track. She walked slowly across the damp tufts of grass and rotting leaves, searching for something that looked different. A chilly wind suffused with rain whistled between the tree trunks, making her shudder. Something white flickered on the periphery of her vision.

A broken branch was sticking out from the trunk of a pine tree, a fragment of a plastic bag hanging from it. Laila’s gaze roamed over the ground. A couple of metres from the pine tree she spotted a hollow in the earth; a few leaves and twigs had blown into it. Laila pulled off the piece of plastic and lowered herself carefully next to the hollow until she was able to flop down into a sitting position. She scraped away the leaves and twigs.

Traces of earth that had been dug up were still visible around the hole. Laila squeezed the piece of plastic in her hand, released it, squeezed again. She examined it and found nothing but white plastic. She felt around in the hollow with her hand. Nothing.

This was where the girl came from. This was where she had lain. In this bag, in this hole. No other tracks led to this place, none led away from it. This was where it began.

What do you dream of, Laila?

She sat there for a long time with her hand in the hole, moving it back and forth as if she were searching for the remains of a residual warmth. Then she slumped, lowering her head. Icy drops of rain dripped down the back of her neck as she caressed the wet earth and whispered:

‘Help me, Little One. Help me.’

Jerry also noticed the change in Theres’ behaviour when he came to visit every few weeks, but it wasn’t something that bothered him. Something about the way his sister kept searching gave him the impression she was looking for a way out, a way that did not lead through the door she had now started using as she examined the rest of the cellar. A loophole, so to speak. Such a thing didn’t exist, he knew that better than most. But he let her carry on. They had other fish to fry.

A month or so after their Bowie session he had played her one of his own songs, running through the chord sequences that he had scribbled down on a piece of paper. He had thought the song was some kind of Britpop à la Suede, but when Theres added a melody line, it turned into more of a hybrid between Swedish folk music and the most mournful kind of country. No money, no love, and nowhere to go.

During the winter he withdrew his threat to reveal her existence to the outside world, but in return he insisted on being allowed to spend time alone with her now and again.

As soon as he had a couple of new songs in the bag he came to call. Shut himself in with Theres and hung a blanket over the window to stop Lennart spying on them. Then they got to work.

Without exception, the songs became significantly darker as they passed through the filter of Theres’ voice. Or perhaps ‘darker’ was the wrong word. More serious. At any rate, Jerry was amazed at how good his songs were when he heard Theres sing them. When he was sitting on his own humming, they just sounded like ordinary songs.

There was no purpose in his writing apart from the fact that it made him feel better. As soon as he sat down with Theres and played an E-major seventh as the first chord-that was their little ritual-and Theres replied in her clear voice, it was as if something poured off him and out of him.

After that, when they started jamming and Theres elevated his simple ideas to genuine music, he was somewhere else for a few minutes, in a better place. Perhaps there was a loophole after all, a way of getting out. If only for a while.

Laila knew there had to be an end to it.

It had begun the day she came home after visiting the place where Lennart had found the girl. She had begun to search. First of all she had opened the wardrobe where they kept old records, and gone through them. Then she had searched the room where they stored clothes. Over the course of a few days she had opened every single box and drawer containing their old things. Then she started on all the nooks and crannies in the house.

When she finished she started searching in places where she had already looked. She might have been careless the first time. Missed something.

From time to time she came across an old forgotten toy or a souvenir from some holiday. She had stood for a long time, staring at a wooden man from Majorca that produced cigarettes from his mouth when you pressed his hat. She had completely forgotten about him, and tried to convince herself that this is it.

At the same time she knew it was a lie, and that what she was searching for didn’t exist. And yet she kept on. In between times she went and sat downstairs with the girl, watching as she did the same thing. Laila felt as if she were on the way to crossing a boundary. At any moment she would hear a faint click inside her head, and then she really would be insane.

Things went so far that she began to long for that day. She would no longer have to take responsibility for her behaviour. Like the girl, she would have a bed, a room and food at set times. Nothing else.

But the exhaustion got there first. She began to spend her time sitting in the armchair in the living room, doing absolutely nothing. She no longer had the strength to search, to do a crossword, or even to think. Sometimes Lennart came and made derogatory remarks about her, but she barely heard him. She felt nothing but a vague sense of shame at what she had become.

One day when Lennart had gone to Stockholm and she had been sitting in the armchair for two hours, she did actually hear something like a click. A membrane burst, everything became clear and she made a decision. She sat up in the armchair, her eyes wide open.

She hadn’t searched the garage. No. So now she was going to go into the garage and open a cupboard or pull out a drawer and the first thing she saw would be it. Irrespective of what it was, it would be the thing she had been looking for. She made the decision.

An eagerness and a sense of excitement she hadn’t felt for a few months seized her as she hurried across the garden. The garage door was ajar, welcoming her, because Lennart had taken the car out. The sun poured down from a pale July sky. Laila pushed the door open further and stepped into the darkness.

On a bench lay some tools and things to do with the car, and beneath it a cabinet containing three drawers. Laila stood in front of the cabinet, slowly running her hand over the three drawers, like the host of Bingolotto when a lucky winner was about to choose his or her secret prize. What would it be? A holiday in the Maldives or a hundred kilos of coffee?

Laila said eeny, meeny, miny, mo in her head, and her index finger stopped at the middle drawer. She pulled it open.

It couldn’t have been clearer. There was only one thing in the drawer. A brand new nylon rope, ten metres long. Laila took it out and weighed it in her hands.

So. Now she knew what she had to do. It felt right. It felt like a relief.

She lived through the following days as if she were on a high. Each daily task seemed like fun, or at least valuable, because she knew she was carrying it out for the last time. As she sat with the girl she felt sorry for her, searching fruitlessly. Laila’s own search was over.

No more pain in her leg, no more embarrassment over her clumsy body, no more of the constant, nagging feeling that she wasn’t good enough. It would all be over. Soon.

Lennart noticed the change in her and became gentler, almost kind. He was more tolerant than she was used to. But that was still what he was doing: tolerating her. She saw everything so clearly now. It would be a release for Lennart when he no longer had to drag her around with him. Nobody would shed any tears because she was gone. It was just a matter of getting it done.

That was a problem. She wasn’t afraid of dying, but however ridiculous it might sound, she was afraid of hanging herself-because it would hurt, and because it was ugly somehow.

Then again, she wouldn’t actually need to use the rope. The rope was just a guide; the result was the important thing. After a little thought she decided how she wanted to do it, and the only thing that remained was to wait for the right opportunity.

It was almost a month before it came along. At the beginning of August it rained heavily for a week, followed by several days of beautiful hot weather. Perfect conditions for ceps in the forest. Lennart set off to forage, and for once he went on his bike.

Laila made a jokey comment about how it would be interesting to see what he came home with this time. Lennart was very confused when she leaned forward as he got on his bike, kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye.

Before he turned the corner he glanced back over his shoulder. She was waving. Then she went inside and fetched the vacuum cleaner hose.

She felt perfectly calm as she disconnected the hose from the cleaner and found a roll of packing tape. A tingle of expectation in her chest, that was all.

She didn’t bother saying goodbye to the girl. If there was anyone who couldn’t care less whether she lived or died, it was the girl. They had spent a lot of time together but there had never been any real contact. The girl lived in her own world, and there was no room for anyone else.

What about Jerry? Well yes, Jerry would definitely be upset, and she couldn’t imagine how it would affect his relationship with Lennart. Nor did she care. It had taken quite some time, but she had managed to reach the level of ruthlessness necessary to take her own life.

She closed the garage door and locked it from the inside, then switched on the fluorescent light. She wouldn’t have minded a more flattering light, but there was nothing she could do about that.

The vacuum cleaner hose fitted so perfectly over the exhaust that there was no need for any tape. She pulled the hose around the car and clamped it firmly in the partly-open back window. Then she got into the driver’s seat and closed the door.

So. That’s it then.

The car key was attached to a keyring with a plastic Snoopy on it. In the absence of an alternative, she kissed the little dog on the nose, said goodbye, put the key in the ignition and turned it. The car started.

And the stereo. She had forgotten that some quirk made it impossible to turn off the radio when the ignition was on, so as the exhaust fumes poured in through the window, filling the interior of the car with a fug, she was forced to listen to some stand-up comic telling a story about some hysterically funny incident at a pub in Västerås. Laila closed her eyes and tried to do the same with her ears.

It only took a minute or so before a drowsiness and a slight feeling of nausea overcame her. Her eyelids were a hundred times heavier than usual and located somewhere beyond her body where she was unable to open them. Everything was going exactly as she’d hoped, and oblivion was creeping closer. Far away she heard the comic finishing his story in that way that tells you it’s time to laugh, then he put a record on. Laila was going to die to the sound of some contemporary pop hit, and it didn’t matter. She heard the measured beat of a trumpet, the sound of a triumphant marching drum, and then a voice she recognised:

Hello, Söderboys, here’s your good old Annie…

Julia Caesar. Belting out ‘Annie from Amerrrica’, which had been a hit for her at the age of eighty-two.

I left my love, I left my ma, I went away

I set sail for the land of the YOO-ESS-AY!

Laila knew what was coming; her body tensed, her eyelids flickered and she clenched her jaw as Julia Caesar went for it: a scream that came from the toes up and made the speakers rattle. ‘YOONIGHTED STATES OF AMERRRICA!’

Laila forced her eyes open. The car was full of poisonous fog, and her muscles had been replaced with lead. From the radio Julia Caesar was still working her improbably powerful old lady’s voice.

Laila coughed. She managed to free her arms, and rubbed her eyes. A lump in her stomach was trying to force its way up into her throat.

What the fuck. What the FUCK.

Julia Caesar. Eighty-two years old. Standing at the microphone singing this absolute nonsense with such enthusiasm, for fuck’s sake. She’d seen her on TV. The grey, wavy hair, the old, heavy body, the arms flung wide and the glint in her eye as she roared out her ridiculous song.

No more. Laila managed to move her numb left arm so that it landed on the door handle. She pulled and the door opened. She hurled herself sideways and slithered out onto the garage floor. As she crawled towards the door the floor was swaying, side to side, and she might well have collapsed if the regular beat of the music hadn’t driven her on.