Little Star

YOONIGHTED STATES OF AMERRRICA!

She’d forgotten how many verses the song had. She had to get out before it finished. This might be the last verse. But as her fingers went into spasm fumbling with the key, Julia Caesar took pity on her and set off again.

There’s plenty of things in Sweden

Both in the good old days and today

That come from the YOO-ESS-AY!

Laila managed to turn the key, pressed down the handle and fell out into the summer. She lay on her back on the concrete in front of the garage, glowering up at the sky. While waves of nausea flooded her body, she saw the green leaves on the lime tree fluttering against the clear blue as white cotton clouds drifted by.

She heard an eager scrabbling and rustling, then a squirrel came scampering down the trunk; he stopped and listened to the music coming from the garage, then disappeared around the other side of the tree as the song faded out.

Yes, there’s something about old Sweden

That’s certainly more than all right…

Laila had managed to recoup just enough strength to push the garage door with her foot, so that it closed on the further adventures of the comedian. Then she just lay there breathing, breathing.

After ten minutes she was able to sit up. After another ten minutes she managed to go back into the garage and turn off the engine. She pulled the hose off the exhaust pipe and left all the doors open. As she walked over to the house with the hose dangling behind her like a tame snake, something occurred to her.

She had misinterpreted the signs. It wasn’t the last thing she should have gone for. It was the first. The first place she had searched was the wardrobe containing their record collection. Something had told her to look there first. She remembered very clearly that she had actually seen ‘Annie from Amerrrica’ among all the singles and 78s.

She hadn’t given it a thought. But she did now.

In spite of everything, there was a consolation to be found, something that never let her down. Something that was so close to her she hadn’t been able to see it. The music. The songs. The records. Julia Caesar’s song didn’t have a message, but her performance did, and it was very simple: Don’t give up.

Laila threw the hose into the cleaning cupboard and went to the wardrobe to look for ‘You Are a Spring Breeze in April’ by Svante Thuresson. She would listen to that. Then she would listen to something else.

Towards the end of October Lennart began to feel that it was becoming unendurable. He had nothing against classic hits from the Swedish charts but for God’s sake-within reason! From morning to night it was Siw Malmkvist, Lasse Lönndahl and Mona Wessman.

Laila might at least have shown some kind of discrimination and worked her way, for example, through Peter Himmelstrand’s many superior compositions, but no. She played whatever she fancied, whatever she happened to find in their extensive record collection. You might get an hour’s relief with Thorstein Bergman, but immediately afterwards Tova Carson would be chirruping away at some clumsily translated German pop. Lennart would sit in the kitchen being lulled into a state of restfulness by ‘Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream’, only to be driven to flight by ‘Skip to My Lou’.

Only one thing stopped him snapping off the arm and hurling the damned record player through the window: Laila was happy. It was a long time since Lennart had had anything against Laila being happy; but it was also a long time since he had had enough love or energy to try to make her happy. Now she was taking care of it herself.

It wasn’t really a bubbling happiness, more a constant spiritual smile that meant she would prepare decent meals or do some cleaning, for example-during breaks in the music. So all he could do was grit his teeth as Anita Lindblom took a deep breath and bellowed ‘Thaa-aat’s life’ for the third time that day. It had to be worth it.

In any case, Lennart had started to spend a lot of time down in the cellar, where the pounding beat of Swedish pop could be heard only as a distant changing of the guard. The girl’s musical education ought to be expanded, so Lennart bought a portable CD player and started to play classical music to her.

The very first thing he played was one of his personal favourites: Beethoven’s Spring Sonata in F-major for Violin and Piano. He had decided to start simply with piano and violin sonatas, then move on to string quartets and finally full symphonies. Introduce the instruments one at a time, so to speak.

He would long remember how the girl reacted. She was standing in her cot as usual, sucking on the piece of rope with four knots in it, when Lennart pressed play.

The girl stiffened during the enchanting violin theme and soft piano accompaniment that introduce the first movement. When the roles were reversed and the piano, carefree as a spring brook, repeated the theme, the girl began to sway as she stared into space, her expression halfway between ecstasy and fear.

After forty seconds she frowned as if she sensed that something was about to happen. As the violin built up to the piano’s powerful descent, then emphasised it with a coarser stroke, the girl’s face contracted and she shook her head, her fingers tightly clutching the frame of the cot.

The piece grew calm once more, the violin became gentle and compliant, but the girl listened with suspicion in her face as if she sensed that the harsher elements were still lurking beneath the surface. As the violin became more agitated and the piano grew excited in the background, she began to shake and jerk back and forth in the cot, her face contorting as if she were in pain.

Lennart jumped up and switched off the CD.

‘What is it, Little One?’

The girl wasn’t looking at him, she never did. Instead she fixed her gaze on the CD player as she shook the bars of the cot. Lennart had never seen anyone react to music like that. It was as if the strings were stroking every nerve ending within her, or a hammer was hitting every single one. The music went right into her.

Lennart switched to one of the cello sonatas. The girl was less agitated by the cello’s softer tone, even when the tempo grew faster. When they reached the short Adagio in the Sonata in A-major, she joined in with the melody for the first time.

After experimenting for a few days, it was clear that it was always the adagio sections that appealed to the girl most. Allegro passages made her anxious, and a scherzo could plunge her into despair. Lennart programmed the CD so that it played only the adagio sections. Then he sat down on the bed and watched, listening, as she added her voice, a third instrument, to the sonatas.

At first he was happy. He felt he was resting within the very genesis of music. Then he went upstairs and at a stroke found himself in the outer reaches of the nadir of Swedish pop music. Well, that was fine. He was in a state of harmony.

But all good things come to an end.

As the days turned to weeks and Beethoven gave way to Schubert and Mozart, Lennart sat in his musical sanctuary staring at his fingers. There was something wrong with them. He tried picking the girl up to feel her weight and warmth, but it didn’t help. He put her back in the cot.

He couldn’t have her on the floor when the music was playing. She would go over to the CD player and start examining it in quite a destructive way. She would beat the speakers with her small fists, or try to pick the whole thing up as if she were trying to shake something out of it.

At first Lennart had interpreted her behaviour as a sign that she didn’t like the music after all, but on the one occasion when he let her continue until she managed to destroy the player, he realised what she was after. She was searching for the music, for where it came from. She wanted to get inside the machine and find what was playing. Since this was impossible to explain to her, Lennart simply bought a new player and made sure she couldn’t get at it.

After putting the girl back in her cot, Lennart walked around the room studying his fingers. They looked white and shiny to him, like piano keys. He placed them on an invisible keyboard and pretended to play along with the Mozart sonata emerging from the speakers. No. It wasn’t playing he missed, he had played enough. He opened and closed his hands. They felt so strangely empty. Something was missing, they needed something to do.

He went out into the cellar and switched on the light above the workbench. Various tools hung neatly from their hooks. Screws, nails and fittings were tidily sorted in compartments on a shelf. He had never been what you might call a handyman, but he liked the tools themselves. They were so definitive. Each tool intended and made for a specific purpose, an extension of the human arm. Lennart picked up the drill and weighed it in his hand. It felt good. When he pressed the button, nothing happened. Run down. He rooted out the charger and inserted the battery. He picked up one or two chisels, tested the weight of the hammer.

What about making something?

Laila had made stuffed cabbage leaves, and the house was blissfully silent. When they had finished eating and Lennart was loading the dishwasher, he said quite casually, ‘I was just wondering if there was anything we needed? Anything I could make?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.’

‘What do you mean by make?’

‘Make. You know, make. Put pieces of wood together so they turn into something. Make.’

‘What do you want to do that for?’

Lennart sighed and rinsed the remains of the sauce from his plate before putting it in the dishwasher. Why had he even bothered to ask? He poured powder into the compartment and slammed the door shut with unnecessary force.

Laila had been following his activities with her chin resting on her hand. As he picked up the dishcloth and began wiping the table, she said, ‘A shoe rack.’

Lennart stopped making circular movements over the wax cloth and visualised their hall floor. There were only four pairs of shoes. They each had a pair of outdoor shoes and a pair of clogs. Their Wellingtons were in the cellar.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I could do that.’

‘Then we could put our wellies there too,’ said Laila.

‘Yes. Good idea.’

He looked at Laila. She had lost a few kilos in recent months. Presumably this had something to do with the fact that he no longer found chocolate wrappers all over the house. She had stopped comfort eating.

It must have been something to do with the light, bouncing off the wax cloth and illuminating her face from a side angle. For a brief moment, Lennart thought Laila was pretty. The distance between his hand and her face was only half a metre, and he watched his hand slowly rise from the table and caress her cheek.

Then he grabbed the dishcloth and scrubbed at a dried-on patch of lingonberry jam with such force that the wax cloth slid to one side. He rinsed out the cloth, draped it over the tap and said, ‘All right, a shoe rack.’

Over the next few weeks Lennart made a shoe rack, two towel rails and a key cupboard. When he couldn’t come up with anything else they needed, he moved on to bird boxes.

Sometimes as he stood there surrounded by the smell of freshly sawn wood, listening to the sound of some Schubert quartet from the girl’s room, he felt perfectly contented. Step by step, everything had moved in the right direction. The sharp, hard edges of his existence had been rounded off with both grade one and two sandpaper, and he could run his hand over life without getting splinters in his fingers.

He put on the ear protectors and started up the jigsaw to cut out the windows and doors in the facade of a nesting box representing their own house. It was a tricky job that required concentration, and when he switched the saw off and removed the ear protectors five minutes later, sweat was pouring down his forehead.

The silence after the angry buzzing of the saw was pleasant, but wasn’t it a bit too quiet? He couldn’t hear any music from the girl’s room, nor any humming. He put down the tools and went to investigate.

The girl had climbed out of her cot. While he was sawing, unable to hear anything, she must have fetched a hammer behind his back, then gone back and started on the CD player. Through a combination of hitting and wrenching she had managed to open up the front of both speakers and rip out the cones. She was now sitting on the floor scratching at them with her fingers, tugging at the wires as she shook her head.

He went over and tried to take the broken pieces off her, but she refused to let them go. She shook them and bit them.

‘Give those to me,’ he said. ‘You might cut yourself.’

The girl stared at him, her eyes narrowed. Then she said, with absolute clarity, ‘Music.’

Lennart was so stunned he gave up the tug-of-war and simply stared at her. It was the first word he had heard her say. He lowered his head to her level and asked, ‘What did you say?’

‘Music,’ the girl repeated, making a noise somewhere between a growl and a whimper as she banged the speaker cone on the floor.

Lennart got down on his knees beside her and said, ‘The music isn’t there.’

The girl stopped banging and looked at him. Looked at him. Gazed into his eyes for a few seconds. Lennart took this as an encouragement, and tried to explain more clearly.

‘Music is everywhere,’ he said. ‘Inside you. Inside me. When we sing, when we play.’ He pointed at the ruined CD player. ‘That’s only a machine.’

He had forgotten his resolution not to talk to the girl. It didn’t matter. Both Laila and Jerry had talked to her, so that project had had it. He pointed at the CD player again. ‘Do you understand? A machine. It’s people who make music.’

He took out the CD, a cheap Naxos edition of Schubert’s Second String Quartet. He pushed his forefinger through the hole and held it up in front of the girl. ‘The music is pressed onto this.’

The girl didn’t react to his words, but she was staring at the CD with big eyes. She tilted her head to one side, wrinkling her nose. Lennart turned the disc around to see what she was looking at. And saw himself.

Of course.

As far as he was aware, the girl had never seen a mirror before. He turned the shiny surface towards her once again and said, ‘That’s you, Little One. That’s you.’

The girl stared at the disc on his finger as if she were under a spell, and whispered, ‘Little One…’ as a trail of saliva dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She crawled closer without breaking eye contact with her reflection. She reached out her hands for the disc and Lennart let her take it. Only then did he notice that she had dropped the piece of rope with the knots in it; it was lying on the floor behind her, chewed and stroked to death. She only had eyes for the CD.

When Lennart lifted her up and put her back in the cot, she clung firmly to the disc with both hands as she gazed down into the silvery pool of light, completely unreachable. But still Lennart rested his head on the frame of the cot and said, ‘But the music isn’t there, Little One. It’s here.’ He placed his forefinger on her heart. ‘And here.’ On her temple.

Jerry didn’t get around to visiting his parents until the spring. He was actually busy with a little business enterprise.

He had been working in the billiard hall in Norrtälje for a couple of years, cash in hand, stepping in as and when required. One evening when he was in the café washing coffee cups, an old acquaintance came in. Ingemar. They chatted for a while and when Jerry offered him a contraband Russian beer from the secret stash, Ingemar raised his eyebrows. ‘Have you got fags as well?’

Jerry said he hadn’t, and that the Russian beer was really only for regular customers, but he hardly thought Ingemar had turned into the kind of bloke who’d go running to the cops, had he?

‘No, no,’ said Ingemar, opening the beer with his lighter. ‘Quite the reverse. What if I said eighty kronor a carton? Interested?’

‘Are we talking about that Polish crap made from straw and newspaper?’

‘No, no, Marlboro. I don’t honestly know if it’s some kind of pirate factory or what, but they taste the same. Here. Try one.’

Ingemar held out a packet and Jerry examined it. It didn’t have a registration mark or stamp, but apart from that it looked like an ordinary packet of cigarettes. He shook one out and lit it. No difference whatsoever.

Ingemar was a truck driver these days, working mostly in the Baltic states. He had a contact in Estonia who sold cheap cigarettes if you didn’t ask too many questions. He looked around the room; two of the billiard tables were busy and three people were sitting at a table smoking. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem to shift say fifty cartons a month here. Add on a bit for yourself and you’re laughing.’

Jerry thought it over. A hundred and twenty kronor was a good price for a carton of fags. That would mean a profit of two thousand a month.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it. When can you deliver?’ Ingemar grinned. ‘Right now. I’ve got the car outside.’ Ingemar didn’t have his truck parked outside the billiard hall, just an ordinary car. He looked around and unlocked the boot. Two black plastic sacks took up half the space. He showed Jerry the cartons, bundled in packs of five.

‘Four thou,’ he said. ‘As agreed.’

‘But I haven’t got that kind of money on me, you know that.’ ‘Next time. This will give you a bit of start-up capital.’ They carried the sacks down to the room where the rubbish was stored, and shook hands as they agreed to meet in a month’s time.

That same evening Jerry managed to shift eight cartons, which made it easier to fasten the remainder to the back of his motorbike under cover of darkness and drive home. In future he would ask Ingemar to deliver direct to his door.

He stacked the forty-two cartons in four neat piles in the corner of the living room, then sat down in the armchair and contemplated them, hands folded over his stomach. So there you go, he thought. All of a sudden you’re an entrepreneur. To show he was taking the whole thing seriously, he emptied his wallet and put Ingemar’s six hundred and forty kronor in an envelope.

He sat there rustling the remaining three hundred and twenty. He usually worked a six-hour shift at the hall, earning fifty kronor an hour. If it went on like this, his hourly rate had suddenly more than doubled.

A hundred kronor. After tax, so to speak. Top job, to say the least. Executive or something.

The fifty cartons disappeared, and the following month Ingemar got his money and delivered the next batch to Jerry’s apartment. It was tempting to expand the operation, but Jerry realised he ought to be careful, selling only to people he trusted. Mustn’t get greedy. That was when things went down the pan.

His role as deputy supplier commanded a modicum of respect from those around him. He could hang out in the billiard hall even when he wasn’t working, and people were more inclined to talk to him than they had been. He bumped into people in town, that kind of thing. The satisfaction he’d been getting from the time he spent with Theres no longer felt so vital.

However, at the beginning of March he packed up his guitar, strapped it to his motorbike and started the bike first kick. He had seriously begun to consider buying a new one, with an electric starter. It was a possibility these days.

The house was still there, looking exactly as it had when he went round four months earlier. But something had changed. It took a while before Jerry was able to put his finger on it, but as he sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Lennart and Laila, picking up a biscuit from the plate, he saw it with sudden clarity.

He was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating biscuits with his parents.

It had just sort of happened, quite naturally. As if it was normal. No suspicion about his visit, no implied criticism and none of the simmering discontent between his parents that could erupt into a caustic remark at any moment. It was just coffee, home-made biscuits and a nice cosy chat. Jerry looked from Lennart to Laila; they were both dunking macaroons in their coffee. ‘What the fuck is going on with you two?’

Laila looked at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

Jerry waved at the table. ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re sitting here like…I don’t know…something out of Neighbours. As if everything in the garden was rosy. What’s going on?’

Lennart shrugged his shoulders. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘No, there’s no problem. That’s what’s so bloody spooky. Have you joined a cult or something?’ Jerry just didn’t get it. He gobbled a couple more biscuits, said thank you and went down into the cellar.

The cot was gone, and Theres was sleeping in his old bed these days. She wasn’t wearing a nappy, so presumably she had learned how to use the toilet in the cellar. A home-made cupboard had appeared, with a fretwork front. Jerry could just see a CD player behind the fretwork. Theres was standing in the middle of the floor, not moving a muscle. She was holding a CD in one hand.

She had grown into a very pretty little girl. Her pale blonde hair had begun to curl around her face, framing her enormous blue eyes and making her look like an angel, nothing more or less.

Jerry was very taken with the sight of her, and sat down on the floor in front of her without speaking. Her eyes were fixed on his lips. After perhaps ten seconds, she took a step forward, hit him hard across the mouth and said, ‘Talkie!’

Jerry almost fell over backwards, but managed to support himself with one arm. A reflex action made him give Theres a slap that was hard enough to knock her over. ‘What the fuck are you doing, you little bastard!’

Theres got to her feet, went over to the bed and crawled up onto it. She sat facing the wall, her back to him, and started humming something. Jerry felt at his mouth. No blood.

‘Now then sis,’ he said. ‘We’re not starting all that again, are we?’

Her shoulders hunched and she bent her neck as if she were embarrassed. Jerry’s heart softened and he said to her back, ‘Oh, let’s forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

He crept over to her and realised it wasn’t that she was ashamed. She had simply bent her head so that she could see her reflection in the CD. Jerry reached out to take it. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got there.’

Theres pulled the disc away and growled. There was no other word for the sound that rose from her throat. Jerry laughed and withdrew his hand. ‘OK, OK. I won’t take it. I get it. It’s fine, sis.’

He sat quietly beside her for a while, looking at her as she looked at herself. Without turning her head, Theres eventually said, ‘Talkie.’

‘But I am talking. What do you want me to say? Sorry, or what? Are you cross because I haven’t been around? Is that it? OK, I’m sorry.’

‘Tarrie talkie. Singie.’

Jerry frowned. Then he understood. He took out the guitar and played a C. Theres turned and looked at his fingers as he played C again. Her arm shot out. She whacked him on the hand with the CD, and let out a single note.

Jerry controlled himself and didn’t hit back. A red welt was beginning to appear on the back of his right hand. Theres sang the note again, and raised the CD for a fresh attack.

‘OK, OK,’ Jerry said. ‘Calm down. Here you go.’ He played E-major seventh, and the disc was lowered. ‘I forgot. Sorry.’

As he hadn’t got around to writing anything new, Jerry just sat strumming for a while, playing a few appropriate chords as Theres improvised a melody. The tunes that began to emerge sounded at least as good as the one he had laboriously written down in advance.

He muted the strings with his hand and looked around the room. Her meagre little world. The CD player, the bed, the jars of baby food.

Is this it? Is this the way it’s going to be?

He was roused from his pondering by a pain in his right hand. Theres had stabbed at him again.

‘Tarrie talkie!’

Jerry rubbed the back of his hand. ‘For fuck’s sake, do you think I’m a machine or something?’ He knocked on the body of the guitar. ‘The tarrie will talkie when I want it to talkie, OK?’

Theres leaned forward and gently stroked the neck of the guitar, whispering, ‘Tarrie? Tarrie?’ She laid her ear against the strings and for a moment Jerry thought the guitar was going to reply. He too lowered his head towards the fretboard.

From the corner of his eye he just caught sight of the CD heading straight for his cheek, and jerked his head away. The edge of the disc hit the wood of the guitar and made a small notch. Theres opened her eyes wide and screamed, ‘Tarrie! Poor tarrie!’ She reached out to the guitar as if to comfort it and as tears welled in her eyes, Jerry got to his feet.

‘Listen sis, no offence, but there’s something wrong inside your head. No question.’

What had happened? What kind of sect had Lennart and Laila joined?

Just the usual one, the two-member sect that diligent married couples are inducted into, if they’re lucky. The sect with the motto: We only have each other. Lennart couldn’t say exactly how he had reached this point, but one day he found himself standing in front of the microwave warming pastries as he waited for Laila to get home from Norrtälje. As he watched the pastries slowly spinning around on the plate, he realised that he missed Laila. That he was looking forward to her coming home so they could have a cup of coffee and a warm pastry. That it would be nice.

It might sound simplistic, but if something can be expressed simply, then why not express it simply?

Lennart was beginning to appreciate what he had.

It wasn’t a matter of falling in love with Laila all over again, of forgetting the past and starting afresh. That only happens in the magazines. But he was beginning to look at his life with different eyes. Instead of grinding his teeth over everything he had missed out on, he was actually looking at what he had.

He had his health, a decent house, work he enjoyed and which brought him a certain amount of recognition. A wife who had stuck with him all these years and who had his best interests at heart, in spite of everything. A son who at least wasn’t a drug addict.

And on top of all that he had been chosen as the guardian of the gift down in the cellar. It was impossible to fit the girl into the usual scheme of things; she was a freak of nature, and a considerable responsibility. But the simple fact of bearing a responsibility can be something that gives meaning to life.

So not a bad life, all in all. Maybe not the stuff of a tribute journal or a framed obituary, but perfectly acceptable. Fine. Perfectly OK.

He still couldn’t say that Laila looked good exactly, but sometimes, in a certain light…She had lost at least ten kilos in recent months, and a couple of times when they were lying in bed about to go to sleep, he had been turned on by the warmth of her body, her skin, and they had done what man and wife tend to do. This led to more ease and intimacy, and that meant his opinion of her changed a little more, and so on.

When the girl was five years old, Lennart and Laila were celebrating their wedding anniversary. Yes, celebrating. There was wine with dinner and more wine afterwards, as they sat looking at old photo albums and listening to Abba. Suddenly the girl was standing in the middle of the living room floor. She had come up the stairs from the cellar by herself for the first time. Her eyes swept around the room and did not pause when they reached Lennart and Laila. She sat down on the floor by the fire and started stroking the head of a stone troll she found there.

Lennart and Laila were happy and slightly tipsy. Without even thinking about it they picked the girl up and settled her between them on the sofa. She wouldn’t let go of the stone troll, but clamped it firmly between her thighs so that she could keep running her hand over it.

‘Hole in Your Soul’ faded away, and the introductory piano notes of ‘Thank You for the Music’ floated out across the room.

I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore…

Laila sang along. Even if she couldn’t quite get Agnetha’s clarity-or her high notes-it sounded pretty good. She was accompanied by the girl, who picked up the melody instinctively, adding her own voice a fraction of a second after Abba’s voices reached her ears.

Lennart got a lump in his throat. When the chorus came around he just couldn’t help joining in too:

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

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing…

They were singing about the thing that united them. They swayed together on the sofa, and the girl swayed along with them. When the song came to an end amid the sound of crackling, both Lennart and Laila had tears in their eyes, and their heads almost collided as they both leaned down at the same time to kiss the girl on the top of her head.

It was a lovely evening.

The girl had started leaving her room. It was remarkable that it had taken so long, but now the day had come when she wanted to expand her world.

Her development was slow in every other area too, except music. Her toilet training had taken a long time, she was awkward and clumsy when she moved and she had the eating habits of a small child. She still refused to eat anything except jars of baby food, and Lennart had to travel to shopping centres a long way from home to stock up on Semper and Findus without arousing suspicion. She had a tendency to become attached to inanimate objects rather than living things, and her use of language was developing very slowly. She seemed to understand everything that was said to her, but spoke only in sentences of three or four words in which she referred to herself as ‘Little One’.

‘Little One more food.’ ‘Little One have it.’ ‘Away.’ The exception was lyrics. Given the girl’s limited vocabulary, it was astonishing to hear her sitting there singing, in perfectly pronounced English, a song she had heard. ‘Singing’ is perhaps the wrong word. She reproduced the song. The day after the wedding anniversary, for example, she wandered around the cellar singing with Agnetha Fältskog’s particular diction, and she knew almost all the words.

After that evening Lennart relaxed his restrictions, and Laila was allowed to share her taste in music with the girl. Schubert and Beethoven were joined on the CD player by Stikkan Anderson and Peter Himmelstrand.

But the problem Lennart had refused to face was now a fact. They couldn’t let the girl show herself outside the house. One possibility was to lock her in, but that wasn’t really an option. So what were they going to do?

‘Lennart,’ said Laila a couple of days later when they were out in the garden hanging up yet another bird box, ‘we have to accept that it’s over now.’

Lennart was right at the top of the ladder, and dropped the bird box he was hanging up. He clung to the tree and leaned his forehead against the trunk. Then he came down, sat on the third rung and looked Laila in the eye.

‘Can you imagine it?’ he said. ‘Handing her over and never seeing her again?’

Laila thought about it, tried to imagine it. The absence. The cellar empty, the jars of baby food gone, the girl’s voice never to be heard again. No. She didn’t want that.

‘Don’t you think we’d be allowed to adopt her, then? I mean, regardless of how it all started, we’re the ones she’s used to now. They’d have to take that into account, surely.’

‘For a start, I’m not sure they’d be so understanding, and secondly…’ He took Laila’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I mean we know, don’t we? There’s something wrong with her. Seriously wrong. They’d put her in an institution. A place where they wouldn’t even appreciate what we value about her. They’d just see her as…damaged.’

‘But what are we going to do, Lennart? Sooner or later she’s going to walk out of the front door, and then we’ll have even less chance of keeping her. What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know, Laila. I don’t know.’

It was what Laila had said about the front door that gave Lennart the idea. The problem could be expressed very simply: the girl could not be allowed to go out the front door. Their house was quite sheltered and there was very little risk that anyone would see her through the window. The only person who came to visit was Jerry.

However, if she went out through the door, she could carry on up the drive. Out onto the road. Into the forest, into town. To other people who would set in motion the machinery that would take her away from them.

Lennart came up with the solution. He didn’t know if it would work, but it was the only thing he could think of. Without mentioning it to Laila, he made up a story. When it was ready, he told the girl his story.

It went like this: the world was a place populated by big people. People like Lennart, Laila and Jerry. Once upon a time there had been little people as well. People like the girl. Like Little One. But the big people had killed all the little people.

When Lennart saw that the girl didn’t understand the word ‘kill’, he changed it to ‘eaten up’. Like food. The big people had eaten up all the little people.

At that point in the story the girl did something extremely unusual. She asked a question. With her gaze firmly fixed on the wall, she asked him, ‘Why?’

Lennart hadn’t exactly polished his story, and had to come up with an answer very quickly. He said it depended on what was in your head. Almost all people had hatred and hunger in their heads. Then there were people like Lennart, Laila and Jerry who had love in their heads.

The girl tasted the word she had sung so many times, but never actually spoken, ‘Love’.

‘Yes,’ said Lennart. ‘And when you have love in your head, you want to love and take care of the little people, you don’t want to eat them up.’ He carried on telling her about all the big people he had seen sneaking around the garden, hunting for a little person to eat. Things were so bad that if the girl went outside, she probably wouldn’t even manage to get through one song before a big person grabbed her and ate her up.

The girl looked anxiously over towards the window, and Lennart stroked her back reassuringly.

‘There’s no danger as long as you stay indoors. Do you understand? You have to stay in the house. You mustn’t stand looking out of the window, and you must never, ever go out through the big door. Do you understand, Little One?’

The girl had crawled up into the very corner of the bed and was still looking over at the window with an anxious expression. Lennart began to wonder if he had succeeded too well with his story. He took her bare feet in his hands and caressed them with his thumb.

‘We’ll protect you, Little One. There’s no need to be afraid. Nothing is going to happen to you.’

When he left the girl’s room a little while later, Lennart forgave himself for his horrible story. Partly because it was necessary, and partly because there was a grain of truth in it. He was convinced that the world out there would eat her up, if not quite as brutally as he had suggested.

However much Lennart might have forgiven himself, his story had a powerful effect on the girl. She no longer dared to leave her room, and insisted on the window being covered so that the big people wouldn’t catch sight of her. One day when Laila came into the room, the girl was sitting with a Mora knife she had fetched from the tool cupboard and was making threatening gestures towards the blanket hanging over the window.

Laila didn’t understand what had happened, but from odd words the girl said she began to piece things together, and eventually she pinned Lennart down: What had he actually said?

Lennart told her about his story, but left out the worst bits. In the end Laila agreed not to correct the girl’s view of the world. She didn’t like what Lennart had done, but since she was unable to come up with a better idea, the girl could go on living with her misconceptions.

Lennart also had his doubts about whether it had been a wise move. The incident with the Mora knife was only the beginning. When Lennart locked it away, she fetched a chisel, a screwdriver, a saw. She placed the tools around her on the bed like an arsenal of weapons at the ready for when the Big People arrived. When Lennart tried to take them away, she let out a single, heart-rending scream.

He had to be a little more cunning. He swapped the most dangerous tools one at a time for less dangerous items. The saw for a hammer, the chisel for a file. They were hardly suitable toys, but the girl never hurt herself. She just wanted the tools as a kind of magic circle, a spell surrounding her as she sat on the bed.

If she moved to the floor, she took the tools with her and arranged them neatly around her. They had become her new friends; she sang to them, whispered to them and patted them. She was never calmer than when she was lying curled up inside her circle with a Mozart adagio on the CD player. Sometimes she would fall asleep like that. After one slip-up, Lennart learned that he must always move the tools with her when he put her to bed, otherwise she woke up screaming.

Time passed, and the girl’s fear moderated to anxiety which in turn moderated to watchfulness. The quantity of tools was reduced. One day when Lennart had left the drill out, he came into the girl’s room to find her sitting with it on her knee, talking quietly to it. From time to time she would press the button and the drill would buzz in response, whereupon the conversation would continue.

It became her new favourite, and Lennart let her keep it, because she allowed him to remove all the rest. It enabled her to move about more as well. She was once again brave enough to set off on small journeys of discovery, but always with the drill in her hand.

Lennart had to smile as he watched her sneaking around the cellar with the tool at the ready, as alert as the sheriff waiting for the black hats to ride into town. She couldn’t sleep unless she was clutching the drill.

The girl had reached the age of seven by the time she showed an interest in the drill’s normal function. Each day she came one step closer to Lennart as he stood at the workbench in the cellar. She didn’t protest when he picked her up and sat her on the bench; instead she clutched the drill to her chest and watched what he was doing.

He had just finished yet another nesting box, and showed it to the girl. She had been staring intently at it while he was working, but looked away when he held it up in front of her. That was normal.

Lennart picked up the new drill he had bought after he let the girl keep the old one. Just for fun he revved the motor a couple of times, pretending that his drill wanted to talk to hers. She wasn’t interested.

He had a size 10 bit in the chuck, and Lennart finished off the box as he usually did. ‘Right, now we’re going to drill the entrance hole. This is where the birds will go in and out. Cheep, cheep. Birds.’

The girl watched as Lennart drilled out the hole, then sat staring at it as if she were waiting for something. When Lennart lifted her down from the bench, she growled and walloped him across the shoulder with her drill. He put her back and she leaned close to the hole, whispering, ‘Cheep, cheep,’ as she continued to stare at it.

A feeling of sorrow plummeted through Lennart’s stomach. He decided to make an exception.

Early next morning he took the girl out into the hallway. When he opened the front door, her eyes widened. She struggled to free herself from his grip, and filled her lungs with air ready to scream. Lennart just had time to say, ‘Ssh! SSH! They can hear us!’

The girl’s mouth snapped shut and her little body began to shake as Lennart cautiously opened the door and pretended to peer out into the garden. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Careful. Not a sound.’

He bundled the girl out through the door, but had to pick her up in order to get her to the nearest tree where there was a nesting box. Her body was clenched, as hard as ice.

It was a May morning, and the birdsong was cascading through the shrubs and trees. Lennart lifted the girl’s head towards the box, which was exactly the same as the one he had made the previous evening.

Suddenly her mouth opened and she relaxed in his arms. A robin emerged from the hole and sat there for a moment looking around with rapid, jerky movements before it flew away. The girl followed it with her eyes and a dribble of saliva ran down her chin.

Lennart had no idea how she might interpret what she had just seen. Did she think drilling holes made the birds appear, or disappear, or did she in fact understand perfectly?

He put her down on the ground and said, ‘The birds live in there, they fly around-’

But he had hardly begun the sentence before she raced back to the house and slammed the front door behind her.

By February 2000 greed had got its claws into Jerry after all, and it was all Apple’s fault. The Power Mac G4 with the 500 MHz processor was finally due for release after the initial hassle with Motorola, and was going to cost around thirty thousand kronor. So far, so good. He had the money, he’d started to save a year ago when he picked up the first rumours.

But then there was Cinema Display. Along with the release of the new G4 there was to be a 22-inch flat screen with the best definition and the slickest design ever. And that would cost around thirty thousand as well.

The dumpy iMac on Jerry’s computer desk suddenly felt like something from the stone age. He’d started messing around with Cubase 4 for writing songs, but it was so slow. He wanted to upgrade to 4.1, he wanted to run it through the 500 processor and he wanted to see it on that big, flat screen.

It became an obsession. Jerry imagined that when he had that silver chassis standing underneath his desk and that stylish screen with its transparent frame sitting on top, everything would be perfect. There would be nothing more to strive for. He longed for that computer as a believer longs for redemption. When it was his, when it was all in place, he would feel a peace and purity that would wipe every trace of dirt from his life.

But to achieve this state of bliss some fancy footwork would be required. He had to sell more cigarettes. He had already doubled his order with Ingemar in December, and in January he took one hundred and fifty cartons, and also put the price up by ten kronor from the previous month.

The demand from his regular customers couldn’t meet Jerry’s supply, however gallantly they puffed away. Mats, who ran the billiard hall, had discovered Jerry’s activities, and he now dealt from home. He asked his regulars to spread the word among their connections that there were cheap fags available at Jerry’s address.

The connections duly turned up, and soon their connections came as well. By February Jerry had managed to scrape together twelve thousand kronor in addition to the thirty thousand he already had, and placed another big order with Ingemar.

A week or so later he had a visitor at the billiard hall. A guy of his own age came in-shaved head, tribal tattoo snaking up his neck beneath the biker jacket-and leaned on the bar. He looked Jerry in the eye and informed him that his business activities would cease immediately.

Jerry pretended he didn’t understand; he wondered aloud what the visitor’s problem with the billiard hall was, and explained that he wasn’t actually the owner. If he wanted it shut down, he would have to speak to Mats. The guy didn’t even crack a smile; he just said that Jerry had been warned, and if he carried on, things could get very nasty.

Jerry’s hands were shaking slightly when the man left, but he wasn’t really scared. He’d heard about a gang who had got together in the offenders’ institution in Norrtälje; they called themselves Bröderna Djup after the singing group, which was an incredibly stupid name for a criminal organisation, and was one reason why Jerry didn’t take the threat seriously. Besides which, there was nothing to suggest that this guy really did belong to some kind of gang. He was probably a free agent like Jerry himself, but with a slightly harder attitude.

Jerry was a bit more careful about checking the spy hole in the door before he opened it, but he kept on selling his cigarettes. No slap-head pumped up on steroids was going to come between him and his Cinema Display, his heart’s desire.

He had only fifty cartons left of the latest delivery when his life was once again kicked in a new direction. One evening at the beginning of March, the doorbell rang. Jerry got up from the infinitely slow download of a web manual on creating homepages and went to look through the spy hole.

Outside stood a friend of a friend whose name he didn’t know, but who had bought from him a couple of times before. He opened the door. As soon as he saw the expression on the man’s face close up, he realised something was wrong. From behind his back the man produced a long metal shoehorn and despite the fact that Jerry didn’t understand what the danger actually was, he moved to shut the door. Too late. The shoehorn had been shoved into the opening and it was impossible to close the door.

Then he heard running footsteps on the stairs, and seconds later they were in. The man with the shoehorn whispered, ‘Sorry, no choice,’ and took off.

There were three of them: the guy who had been in the billiard hall and two more who at first glance were barely distinguishable from him. Same shaved heads, same jackets.

They took the sacks of cigarettes. They forced Jerry to show them where he kept his money, and took that as well. Then they took Jerry. Calmly and politely they led him down the stairs to a waiting car. Jerry was numb with fear, and it didn’t even occur to him to scream. Half-slumped in their arms he noticed they had a Volvo 740. A real hick’s car. However, the reason for it soon became apparent. The car was equipped with a tow bar.

They drove Jerry down to the gravelled car park next to the Lommar swimming pool. Beneath the sign that announced Sweden’s second-longest water slide, they threw him on the ground and handcuffed his feet together. Then they ran a chain from the handcuffs to the tow bar. When they put on ‘We Live in the Country’ by Bröderna Djup at full volume, Jerry shat himself.

The guy from the billiard hall wrinkled his nose as he became aware of the smell. He pointed at Jerry’s soiled backside and said, ‘I take it that means you get it now.’ He waved his hand in a circular movement over the dark, deserted car park. ‘I warned you, fat boy. We’re going for a little drive. There’s going to be blood and shit all over the gravel, but look on the bright side. You’re bound to lose a few kilos.’

From inside the car, Bröderna Djup were squealing and grunting as they imitated all the animals they were going to buy when they had sold their possessions. Jerry wept and whispered, ‘Please, please, no. You can have anything you want.’

The guy smirked. ‘Like what? You’ve got fuck all. We’ve just taken everything.’

Jerry was about to vomit with fear, and tried to form his lips around the words that would promise them all his savings, all his…everything. Before he had the chance, the guy taped his mouth shut and said, ‘We don’t want to wake the neighbours, now do we?’ Then he got in the car and revved the engine, dousing Jerry in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

He was dragged across the gravel and his shirt ripped, baring his back to the sharp stones. He plunged into a vortex of imagining the skin, the muscles being ripped from his body until his naked skeleton was screaming against the ground. He wanted to lose consciousness, he wanted to die quickly, he wanted…

He didn’t even notice when the car stopped, ten metres from where it had started. All three of them climbed out, stood around him and pissed on him. Then they unhooked him from the tow bar. He heard a voice in his ear, ‘Next time it’ll be the full treatment, OK?’

Doors slammed shut and gravel sprayed over his face as the car shot away. He lay there staring up at the night sky and the bright winter stars. His back was burning, and he was breathing heavily and unevenly through his nose.

It took ten minutes before he managed to get up and rip the tape from his mouth. His feet were still fastened together, and he stank of piss and shit. Shuffling and hopping, he made his way towards the lights and the apartment blocks, barely noticing when he fell and cut his cheek open on a sharp stone. Something inside him had broken beyond repair.

When Jerry hadn’t been in touch for a month, Laila began to get worried. Although there had been periods before when they went for months without hearing from him, they usually spoke every couple of weeks or so. But Jerry didn’t ring, and when Laila rang him there was no reply.

She might have investigated the matter more closely, she might even have broken the taboo and gone to visit Jerry-if she hadn’t had a new project that took up so much of her time and her attention.

She had started teaching the girl to read.

She still couldn’t imagine what the future might look like. The girl was around eight years old now, she would probably be nine soon, and what was going to happen when she got older? When she reached puberty, when she became a teenager, when she became…an adult? Would she and Lennart be sitting here as pensioners with a grown woman in the cellar, a woman who had never set foot outside the door?

It didn’t bear thinking about, so Laila took one day at a time. She had created a compensatory fantasy in which the girl was a refugee threatened with deportation, and that was why they were keeping her hidden. She had read about such cases in the local newspaper, and the fantasy fitted in well with the unpleasant story Lennart had served up to the girl. A hostile world was out to get her, and if she showed herself she would be sent away, perhaps even killed. Like Anne Frank. It made Laila feel much better.

Since the girl was disinclined to speak, it was no easy matter to teach her the alphabet, to get her to repeat and imitate the sounds that corresponded with the letters. To begin with it was downright impossible. For example, Laila wrote ‘A’ on a piece of paper and said the letter out loud. The girl wouldn’t look at the paper, didn’t make a sound.

Laila tried with other letters, other ways of writing them or illustrating them. She drew pictures of objects the girl would recognise, wrote their names in big letters, said them out loud. The girl showed no interest whatsoever; she simply sat there playing with her drill, or arranging nails in dead straight lines without even acknowledging Laila’s existence.

When Laila eventually came up with the solution, she could have kicked herself for her stupidity. It was just so obvious. She sang the letters. The girl imitated her. Laila held the piece of paper with the letter on it in front of her face so that the girl wouldn’t look away, and sang ‘Aaa’ as if the letter itself was singing. When she swiftly lowered the paper she could see that the girl had looked, before her eyes slid away. She carried on with the rest of the vowels in the same way.

It took several weeks, but eventually it happened. The girl began to associate the symbol with the sound. When Laila held up the piece of paper with U on it on front of her face, there was silence for a little while as the girl waited for the note. When it didn’t come she supplied it herself, a humming but perfectly clear ‘Uuuu…’

Lennart was in the middle of one of his studio periods again, but listened to Laila’s stories of the girl’s progress and made encouraging comments and suggestions. For example, when Laila explained that she was having a problem with the consonants, he suggested that she should use lyrics the girl already knew, isolating individual words and getting the girl to sing them.

Laila decided on the Swedish version of ‘Strangers in the Night’ by Lasse Lönndahl, as Lasse had a tendency to extend the vowels, but still enunciated the consonants clearly, which made it easier to sing individual words.

Tusen och en natt, låg jag allena

Drömmande och matt…

Laila began with the word ‘en’, extending the word as she held the piece of paper with the word on it in front of her. ‘Eeennn…eeennn…’ She had to repeat it over and over again, and go through the song many times with sudden interruptions and much scribbling on the paper, but eventually the girl was singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak.

As they approached the summer, Laila could hold up a piece of paper with the word ‘tusen’ or ‘natt’ on it, and the girl would sing what was written there.

Laila had rung and rung, she had even gone to Jerry’s apartment, struggled up the stairs and rung the bell. No one had opened the door, but when Laila peered through the letterbox she could see that there was no post or junk mail on the floor. Jerry was still around somewhere. She had shouted through the letterbox, but there was no response.

And then one day in early June, there he was standing on the porch steps. Laila hardly recognised him; it was a stranger she invited to sit down at the kitchen table. When Lennart emerged from the studio he reacted the same way, and seemed on the point of asking who he was.

If Laila had lost maybe ten kilos by watching what she ate since the winter, Jerry had lost three times as much in less time. There were bags under his eyes, and a few grey hairs had come in at his temples. A badly healed scar ran across his right cheek. The air of self-evident authority with which he had commanded a room was gone. He had begun to look like Lennart.

They sat in silence for a while. Then Laila asked, ‘What’s happened to you, love?’

A shadow of his former ironic smile passed over Jerry’s lips. ‘You might well ask. I’m on a disability pension, for a start.’

‘A disability pension? But you’re only thirty-three!’

Jerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘I managed to convince them.’

‘Of what?’

‘That I can’t work. That I’m finished. That I can’t be around people.’

Laila reached across the table to stroke Jerry’s arm, but he moved it away. She said, ‘But why, love?’

Jerry scratched the scar, pale beneath the stubble, looked her in the eye and said, ‘Because I hate them. Because I can’t cope with seeing them. Because I’m scared of them. Will that do?’

Jerry got up from the table and when Laila tried to stop him, he pulled away from her. He picked up the guitar he had left in the hallway and went down to the cellar.

It was a kind of homecoming. When he caught the familiar smell of wood, smoke, soap powder and general cellar aroma, it took him straight back to his childhood. He felt like an empty shell; he accepted the sensory awareness gratefully because it made him feel as if he contained something after all.

He had thought things would go all right with Lennart and Laila, but he could hardly bear to look at them either. Behind every face was another face, behind every sentence uttered, dark motives lurked. Yes, he had paranoid delusions. He’d even got a piece of paper to prove it.

The girl was waiting for him in the dimly lit room. Straight back, arms down by her sides and a drill in her hand. Jerry sat down on the bed and opened the guitar case.

‘Hi there, sis. Did you miss me?’

The girl didn’t reply. Jerry relaxed slightly. He played E-major seventh, and the girl picked up the note. A few more chords, an improvised sequence and the girl sang a melody. Jerry breathed a long sigh. The girl was standing in the darkness over by the CD player; he could only see her outline.

‘Bloody hell, sis,’ he said. ‘At least I can hang out with you.’

He put down the guitar and went over to the window to remove the blanket. When he lifted one corner, the girl whacked him on the thigh with the drill and screamed, ‘No!’

Jerry jerked backwards and let go of the blanket, which fell down. ‘What the fuck are you doing-’

He broke off. The girl was curled up in the corner, holding the drill in front of her as she peered up at the window. Jerry crouched down in front of her. ‘What’s the matter? You’re crazier than me, for fuck’s sake. Are you scared of the window?’

‘Big,’ said the girl. ‘Dangerous outside. Want to eat up Little One.’

‘What are you talking about? Are there big people out there who want to eat you up?’

‘Yes.’

Jerry nodded. ‘You’re not wrong there, sis. That’s the right attitude to have. I only wish I’d realised it earlier. So why do they want to do that, then?’

‘Hate in head.’

Jerry had an idea of what was going on here. He had been wondering how the hell Lennart and Laila were going to keep the girl indoors. Evidently they had come up with a solution.

‘So what about me, then? Why don’t I want to eat you up?’

‘Love in head.’

‘Love in…Are you saying I love you, kind of?’

The girl didn’t reply. A shadow flickered across the wall as, out in the garden, Lennart or Laila walked past. The girl jumped and curled up in a tighter ball. When Jerry hung the blanket up again, she relaxed and said, ‘Play. Sing.’

They jammed for a while. Jerry played songs in a minor key, and the girl made them even gloomier with her clear, flowing loops, transforming them from simple melodies into a lament on the whole of life and the human race. For a good fifteen minutes Jerry didn’t feel afraid at all. He could have gone on much longer if his increasingly robust efforts hadn’t broken one of the guitar strings.

His back was covered in sweat as he put the guitar back in its case and clicked the lock shut. ‘You know what?’ he said, without looking at Theres. ‘However fucking crazy you might be, you’re right. If I love anyone, it’s you.’

After that, Jerry’s visits became more regular again. It grieved Laila that he couldn’t really be bothered with her and Lennart anymore, but she took solace from the fact that spending time with the girl seemed to be doing Jerry good. The dark cloud that hung over him had always dispersed a little when he came up from the cellar.

Laila carried on teaching the girl. In time she was able to read words in both upper and lower case letters that had nothing to do with a song, although she did read with a strange, musical diction. It was time for the next step: teaching the girl to make the letters herself. To write.

This turned out to be an even harder labyrinth to negotiate. The girl could hold a pen, but flatly refused to draw the letters Laila wrote on a pad. When Laila tried to guide her hand, the girl growled or yelled out some swear word she had presumably picked up from Jerry. It might have been funny hearing her scream ‘Bloody hell!’ or ‘For fuck’s sake!’ if the words hadn’t been spewed out with such aggression, frequently accompanied by a blow as Laila tried to hold onto her hand. Laila abandoned that approach.

She tried drawing the letters with crayons, she tried letting the girl scratch them with the nails she had grown so fond of lately, but nothing worked. The nineteen steps leading down to the cellar seemed more and more depressing as the winter drew in, and her leg started to ache even more. She was not getting through; and Lennart didn’t have any helpful suggestions.

The girl’s new interest was hammering nails into pieces of wood. She would keep at it until there was no more space, and the piece of wood split from the amount of nails crammed into it. As Christmas approached Lennart taught her to crack nuts with the hammer: that too became an obsession.

And that was literally how the problem was cracked as well. One afternoon Laila was watching the girl as she sat on the floor, filled with grim concentration, smashing nuts on a chopping board. The arm moving up and down, the carefully judged blow, the monotonous motion. Tock, tock, tock.

An idea came into her head, and after all there was nothing to lose. In the store cupboard Laila found Lennart’s old portable Halda typewriter. She carried it in and placed it on the floor next to the chopping board. The girl looked at it for a while from different angles, then raised the hammer to deliver a blow, but Laila managed to snatch the machine away just in time.

Although it would turn out to be a good idea, it took almost a year before Laila’s efforts really came to fruition. Every key was a new obstacle to surmount, but by the time the girl was ten years old she had learned every sound that corresponded with a symbol that corresponded with a key, and she began to put together simple words.

Jerry’s visits tended to cause backsliding. The girl withdrew and didn’t want to do the exercises, but Laila was patient and didn’t mention it to Lennart. If the girl could bring Jerry a bit of happiness, it was worth the delay.

Besides which, Laila didn’t really know why she was doing this. What pleasure would the girl gain from being able to read and write? Would she ever participate in a society that required these skills?

Sometimes Laila grew tired of the tough, tedious, drawn-out project. Then she would put on a record, Bibi Johns or Mona Wessman, and sing for a while with the girl. It felt like a kind of togetherness, and gave her new strength to carry on.

Jerry didn’t like leaving his apartment, and conducted most of his contact with the outside world via the internet. His pension didn’t cover much more than food, rent and his internet connection. In the autumn of 2001 he came across something called Partypoker. Jerry was a moderately good player and began betting quite carefully, winning as much as he lost.

Six months later the number of players had increased significantly thanks to a couple of spots on cable TV and some articles in the press. New players started up who weren’t particularly good, and he found he could bring home a small profit. Not huge sums, but welcome additions to his meagre allocation from the state.

One evening he got into a game with a guy who called himself Bizznizz, and who played like an idiot. Jerry thought it had to be a ploy to drive up the stakes. However, he carried on. After a couple of hours it seemed to him to be perfectly obvious when the guy was bluffing and when he was seriously betting on his hand. By that stage Jerry had won just over a hundred dollars.

In the next hand Jerry held three tens, refusing to drop out as the stakes were pushed up, and in the end only he and Bizznizz were left in, with the pot at nine hundred dollars. Jerry thought the guy might be bluffing on a putative full house, but at the same time he realised with a sinking feeling that this could well be the hand Bizznizz had been laying the groundwork for. And yet Jerry still couldn’t drop out.

He raised with his last three hundred; despair clutched his heart with its cold fingers as Bizznizz declined to fold, and went for the showdown. It was three weeks until pension day, and Jerry would have nothing left to live on.

He didn’t understand what he was seeing when the other guy’s cards came up. There was a moment of disconnect as his eyes flicked between the open cards and Bizznizz’s cards. It looked as if the idiot only had a pair of threes!

Only when the money came rattling into his account did he realise it wasn’t a misunderstanding. The idiot had sat there bluffing with a low pair, and then been stupid enough to go for the showdown! Jerry had won something in the region of five thousand kronor from Mr Bizznizz.

He didn’t play any more that night. The game had given him an important insight. There were any number of total idiots out there playing on the net. Idiots with money. All he had to do was find them, and make sure he ended up at the same table.

Jerry began by methodically scanning every website, blog and discussion forum that had anything to do with poker. He gathered information. After a couple of weeks he had a fairly clear picture of the kind of people who played on the net, at least in Sweden. It was true that most used different aliases and usernames when they played and when they were in a discussion, but some were so attached to their names that they couldn’t help using them even when money was involved.

Jerry’s stroke of genius was to start secretly reading forums for people who were likely to have a knack for earning money quickly and easily. Stockbrokers and the IT crowd. He even looked at some of the forums on Dagens Industri, the Swedish equivalent of the Financial Times. A discussion page for property owners in Danderyd proved useless; he combed through page after page on renovations and cheap tradesmen without finding what he was looking for, but a page for owners of Abyssinians-a fashionable and expensive breed of cat-turned out to be pure gold.

He was actually looking for any mention of internet poker. Someone who had recently come into money, for example, had entered the forum to ask for advice on their newly acquired Abyssinian. The cat was so lively, shredding the Svenskt Tenn designer curtains-what could he do? The cat owner might get into conversation with another owner, and poker would be mentioned in passing.

That was the key: in passing. These nouveau riche types thought it was fun to mention in passing how much they had spent on a bottle of wine or a suit, or the fact that they had just thrown away thirty thousand in a game of online poker the other night in spite of the fact that they were such bad players, ha ha, but not to worry, they were sitting on a hundred and twenty thousand IBM B-portfolio options, say no more.

That kind of comment. Made in passing.

It was a time-consuming and tedious task. Often Jerry would find a perfect candidate, but then never see that person on the poker site. Either he was no longer playing, or he was using a different handle.

But he compiled a list, and as time went by one of these rich or slightly less rich idiots would turn up at the table. Then it was time to join the game.

There was no ideology behind it. No Robin Hood fantasies on Jerry’s part. On the contrary. Since the opportunities to skin rich people were so rare, he also gathered information on ordinary players, gambling addicts and poor people. The main thing was that they played badly.

To tell the truth, it gave him even more satisfaction to fleece someone he knew to have problems. He found Wheelsonfire on a forum for caravan owners, complaining that he couldn’t afford a new fridge for his caravan-did anyone know where he could find a second-hand one? The fact that he was a bad poker player was mentioned in a different context.

When Wheelsonfire popped up on Partypoker and Jerry managed to take four thousand off him, he felt a deep, sincere and malicious pleasure. No new fridge for you, wanker. You can sit there roasting on your campsite while your food rots.

His fear of other people and his unease around them grew neither better nor worse. But his contempt increased. As did his income. A year or so after he had begun playing and gathering information, he was bringing in eight to ten thousand a month, as a general rule, money that the tax office hadn’t yet realised they should be enquiring about.

He sat there in his little apartment in Norrtälje, dipping his virtual fingers in the global river of money. He played for five or six hours a day, and regardless of whether he won or lost, he was never gripped by greed. It didn’t matter to him. The important thing was that he had a little power base where he could sit and let his lash whistle across the backs of all those world-wide idiots. He could flog them hard and almost hear them whimper. Sometimes he even felt something that resembled happiness.

When the girl was about twelve years old, she became listless. Nothing seemed to reach her anymore. Day in and day out she sat on her bed staring at the wall, doing nothing. She didn’t sing, she didn’t talk, she barely moved, and she had to be fed baby food from the jar with a spoon; that was still the only thing she would eat.

It became quite frightening after a while, and Lennart and Laila began to have serious discussions about whether they should give her up and let the professionals take care of her. Drive somewhere no one knew them and just leave her at a hospital, then drive away without saying anything. But it felt too cold, too terrible not to know what might become of her. So they waited.

After all, everything seemed to have gone so well. The girl had learned to write using the typewriter, she could form whole words and sentences. She spent a long time typing out every single word from an old copy of the local paper. Articles, adverts, the speech bubbles in the cartoon strips, the TV guide. It took her almost four months to type out the entire newspaper onto sixty pages of A4.

It was when this project was almost finished that something happened. Laila saw the first sign when she went down to the cellar one morning and found the girl staring into the washing machine; she closed the door, then looked inside the tumble drier. Then the laundry basket.

‘What are you looking for?’ Laila asked, but as usual the girl ignored her.

Another day Laila stood silently by the workshop door watching the girl opening drawers and looking in cupboards just as she had done when she was little, just as Laila had done.

The girl had grown to be beautiful with her curly golden hair, and there was something deeply upsetting about seeing this lovely creature wandering around and around like a swan in a cramped cage, searching for something that didn’t exist. The dark, gloomy cellar, the rattling as she pulled out yet another drawer of random tools, while her golden hair cascaded over her shoulders.

Laila tapped on the door frame with the crutch she had started to use to help her get down the stairs, and the girl immediately stopped searching, went to her room and sat on the bed. Laila sat down beside her.

‘Little One? What is it you want?’

The girl didn’t answer.

A week or so later, Laila had gone down to the cellar one evening to get a pair of gloves from the storeroom. She stood in the doorway of the girl’s room, watching her as she slept. With her hair spread over the pillow, her arms resting straight down by her sides, she looked like a very beautiful corpse. Laila shuddered.

Then she caught sight of the typewriter. There was a blank piece of paper in it, a pale glow in the reflection of the cellar light. No. Not blank. There was something written on it. After checking that the girl really was asleep, Laila went into the room and carefully pulled out the sheet of paper.

The girl’s writing ability also seemed to have deteriorated. There was just one line, without any punctuation. It was the first thing Laila had seen that the girl had come up with for herself. It said:

‘Where love how love colour feels how it is where’

Laila read the line several times, then her gaze slid over to the bed. The girl’s eyes were open, shining faintly as she lay there looking at Laila. She sat down on the edge of the bed with the piece of paper in her hand.

‘Love,’ she said. ‘Is it love you’re searching for, Little One?’

But the girl had closed her eyes again, and didn’t answer.

One morning in the middle of October, when Lennart was in the garage putting the winter tyres on the car, Laila sat in the living room feeling despondent and restless at the same time. She tried playing a Lill-Babs song to cheer herself up, but it didn’t help.

There was a knot of anxiety in her stomach, an ominous feeling. She walked up and down the room, leaning on her crutch, but the feeling wouldn’t go. As if something had happened just now, something she ought to know about. Suddenly she got the idea it was something to do with the girl. As she limped towards the cellar, she became more and more convinced that she was right. Their poor foundling had taken the step from apathy to the final separation that is death.

She felt she should hurry. Perhaps it wasn’t too late.

She didn’t ground the crutch properly on the fifth step, and it slid away when she put her weight on it. She fell head first down the stairs, and when her head met the edge between the wall and the staircase, she heard rather than felt something crack in the back of her neck.

Steps. She could hear footsteps. Back and forth. Light, tiptoeing steps. Her entire back was a blue flame of pain, and she couldn’t move her head, couldn’t feel her fingers. She opened her eyes. The girl was standing next to her.

‘Little One,’ Laila wheezed. ‘Little One, help me. I think I’ve…had it.’

The girl looked her in the eye. Studied her. Looked her in the eye. Never before had the girl looked her in the eye for so long. She leaned down and looked even deeper, as if she were searching for something in or behind Laila’s eyes. The girl’s eyes enveloped Laila like two dark blue wells, and for a brief moment the pain disappeared.

In her confusion Laila thought: She can heal. She can make me whole. She’s an angel.

Laila opened her trembling lips, ‘I’m here. Help me.’

The girl straightened up and said, ‘Can’t see it. Can’t see it.’

A shape that shouldn’t have been there flickered on the edge of Laila’s field of vision. A hammer. The girl was holding a hammer in her hand. Laila tried to scream. She could only manage a whimper.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘What are you going to do what are you-’

‘Quiet,’ said the girl. ‘Open look.’

Then she struck Laila’s temple with the hammer. Once, twice, three times. Laila was no longer able to feel anything, her sight went and she was blind. Her hearing seemed to be drifting around the room, however, and she could hear the girl grunt in annoyance, footsteps walking away.

Laila no longer had any idea what was up or down, she was floating in a vacuum and only her hearing was keeping her alive, a fine thread that had come to breaking point.

She heard a clinking sound as the girl put something down on the floor. Her hearing guessed that it was nails, perhaps five of them. Then she felt something. A sharp point against her skin, someone took a deep breath and the last thing her hearing perceived was a harsh metallic clang and a crunching, cracking sound as her skull split open beneath the point of the nail.

Then there was silence as the process of opening up the skull continued.

One hour later Lennart came down to the cellar. He didn’t even have time to scream.

In some ways Jerry was lucky that day, because he unconsciously established an alibi for himself. The wide-ranging police investigation that was to follow would probably have focused more closely on Jerry if he hadn’t decided on that particular day that he’d had enough of sitting around indoors, and spent several hours at the bowling alley.

He didn’t know anybody there, he just sat at a table and drank several cups of coffee, ate a couple of sandwiches and read the papers, distractedly watching the semi-useless players as they went after their strikes and spares. After that he went to the Co-op Forum store and spent half an hour hanging out in the media department, where he bought a few DVDs. At the cheap supermarket he stocked up, out of habit, on cans of ravioli and instant noodles. An impulse led him to Jysk, where he wandered around for a while and eventually bought a new pillow.

He couldn’t have arranged things better if it had been planned. A whole day when his activities could be confirmed by the staff in the bowling alley, checkout assistants and his printed receipts. This would actually end up being the police’s only grounds for suspicion: the fact that his alibi was almost too watertight for a recluse like Jerry. But they couldn’t really arrest him for that.

He went home and had a beer, then rang Lennart and Laila. No one answered, but it was possible to trace the call later, extending his documented afternoon activities by a further half hour. By that stage the bodies of his parents had grown so cold since the morning that he couldn’t possibly have been the perpetrator.

He then had his final unplanned stroke of genius. He got on his motorbike and went to visit his sister.

There was some suspicion that he knew about body temperature, knew they had to be reported dead before too long had elapsed if the time of death were to be fixed within the period for which he had an alibi.

Needless to say, no such thoughts were in Jerry’s mind as he drove out to his parents’ house through the darkness. There were no thoughts in his mind at all. It was good to be out on the bike. The forward movement of his body replaced the circular movement of his thoughts, going round and round inside his head.

He drove right up to the porch steps, noticing that the light wasn’t on in the kitchen. However, he could just see a glimmer of light behind the blanket at the cellar window. He went up the steps and knocked. No one came. He tried the handle, and found that the door wasn’t locked.

‘Hello?’ he shouted as he walked into the hallway, but there was no answer. ‘Anyone home?’

He hung his leather jacket on Lennart’s homemade coat rack, which in his opinion was a bit kitsch, and took a stroll around the house. He couldn’t understand it. Since the occasion many years ago when he and Theres had checked out Bowie, he didn’t think his parents had ever left her alone.

Have they taken her with them?

But the garage door was shut, which meant the car was still inside. Without giving the matter any more thought, he went and turned on the cellar stair light. He stopped with his hand on the switch and listened. The door was ajar, and he could hear some kind of motor coming from down below. He pulled the door open.

He managed five steps before he collapsed on the stairs, before his brain registered what his eyes were seeing. His windpipe contracted and it was impossible to breathe.

Lennart and Laila, what ought to be Lennart and Laila judging by their clothes, were lying next to one another at the bottom of the staircase. The whole floor was covered in blood. Strewn around in the blood were a number of different tools. Hammers, saws, chisels.

Their heads were mush. Pieces of skull with short or long clumps of hair still attached lay scattered all over the floor, lumps of brain matter were stuck to the walls, and all that was left above Lennart’s shoulders was a piece of spine sticking up with a grubby bit of skull still attached. The rest of his head lay crushed and spread all over the floor and the walls.

Theres was kneeling in the blood next to what remained of Laila’s head, which was slightly more than in the case of Lennart. In her hand she held her drill; the battery was so run down that the bit was hardly rotating at all. With the last scrap of power left in the machine she was busy boring her way in behind Laila’s ear. A little pearl earring in Laila’s earlobe vibrated as the drill laboriously worked its way through the bone. Theres struggled and tugged, changed the direction of the drill and managed to pull it out, wiped the blood from her eyes and reached for the saw.

Jerry was on the point of passing out through lack of oxygen, and he managed to draw a panting breath. Theres turned her head in the direction of the sound, looked at his feet. A strange calm descended over Jerry. He was not afraid, and even though what he was seeing was obviously horrific, it was just like a picture, something to register: what I am seeing is horrific.

Somewhere deep inside he had sensed that things would end up like this, one way or another. That it would all end badly. Now it had happened, and even if it couldn’t have been any worse, at least it had happened. There was nothing to add. This was just how the world was. Nothing new, even if the details were disgusting.

‘Theres,’ he said, his voice almost steady. ‘Sis. What the fuck have you done? Why have you done this?’

Theres lowered the saw and her eyes slid from Laila to Lennart, over the bits of their heads strewn all around her.

‘Love,’ she said. ‘Not there.’