Little Star

THE OTHER GIRL

She was born on November 8, 1992, one of the last babies delivered in the maternity unit at Österyd. The unit was in the process of being moved to the central location in Rimsta, and they had already started packing. Only one midwife and a trainee were on duty.

Fortunately it was an easy delivery. Maria Svensson was admitted at 14:42. One hour and twenty minutes later, the child was born. The father, Göran Svensson, waited outside the room as usual. That’s what he had done when their other two children were born, and that’s what he did this time. As he waited he flicked through a few copies of a magazine, Året Runt.

Just after four o’clock the midwife emerged and informed him that he had been blessed with a perfect daughter. Göran abandoned the article on breeding rabbits he had been reading and went in to see his wife.

As he walked into the room he made the mistake of looking around. A number of bloodstained compresses had been tossed aside into a metal dish, and Göran was hit by a wave of nausea before he managed to look away. The combination of a sterile environment and bodily fluids revolted him. That was why he could never be present at a birth.

He pulled himself together and went over to kiss his wife’s sweaty brow. The child was lying on her chest, a wrinkled red lump. It was incomprehensible that it would turn into a person. He ran his finger over the child’s damp head. He knew what was expected of him.

‘Did it go OK?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Maria. ‘But I think I’m going to need a few stitches.’

Göran nodded and looked out of the window. It was almost completely dark outside, wet snowflakes licking the glass. He was a father of three now. Two boys and a girl. He knew Maria had wanted a girl, and it didn’t make any difference to him. So everything had turned out for the best. His eyes followed a trickle of liquid running down the window pane.

A life begins.

A child had been born on this day. His child. The only thing he wished for now was a little more happiness. Sometimes he would pray to God for this very thing: give me a greater capacity to feel happiness. But his prayer was rarely answered.

A miracle had taken place in this room, just a few minutes ago. He knew that. But he couldn’t make himself feel it. The trickle of liquid reached the bottom of the window and Göran turned back to his wife, smiling. What he felt was a faint satisfaction, a certain sense of relief. It was done. It was over for this time.

‘Teresa, then,’ he said. ‘Happy with that?’

Maria nodded. ‘Yes, Teresa.’

It had been decided long ago. Tomas if it was a boy, Teresa if it was a girl. Good names. Reliable names. Arvid, Olof and Teresa. Their little trio. He stroked Maria’s cheek and started to cry without knowing why. Because of the image of the wet snow against the window of a warmly lit room where a child had been born. Because there was a secret he would never be part of.

When the nurse came in to do Maria’s stitches, he left the room.

Teresa was fourteen months old when she started daycare. Lollo, the childminder, had five other children to look after and Teresa was the youngest. It was a problem-free induction. After only four days Maria was able to leave her daughter for the whole day and go back to work full-time at Österyd Pets.

Göran had been forced to start work at the state-run liquor outlet in Rimsta when the Österyd branch closed down. The most noticeable change was that it took him half an hour longer to get to and from work every morning and afternoon, so he was rarely able to pick the children up from the childminder, which he missed.

However, he had managed to negotiate one early shift each week, on a Wednesday, and he usually made sure he at least picked Teresa up. Despite the fact that it was Maria who had most wanted a girl, Teresa turned more to her father, and he couldn’t deny that he felt something special for her.

The boys were lively, as boys ought to be. Teresa was significantly quieter and more secretive, and Göran appreciated that. She was the child who was most like him. Her first word was ‘Daddy’ and her second was ‘no’, stated very firmly: ‘No!’

Do you want this? No!

Can I help you with…? No!

Can Daddy borrow the crayon? No!

She fetched things for herself, she handed things over when she felt like it, but she rarely allowed herself to be influenced by the questions or expectations of others. Göran liked that. She had a will of her own, small as she was.

Sometimes at work he had to bite his tongue to stop himself coming out with the first word that sprang to mind these days.

‘Could you fetch a pallet of beer, Göran?’

‘No!’

…which was not what he said, of course. But he would have liked to.

At this stage Arvid was five and Olof seven. They weren’t particularly interested in their little sister, but they put up with her. Teresa didn’t make much noise except when someone tried to get her to do something she didn’t want to do. Then it was No! and No! again, until she very occasionally had a complete temper tantrum. She had a limit, and when she was pushed beyond that limit, she was horrendous.

Her favourite soft toy was a little green snake they had bought at Kolmården; she called it Bambam. One day when Teresa was eighteen months old, Arvid started teasing her, trying to take the snake off her by pulling its tail.

Teresa clung to the snake’s head and said, ‘Avvi, no!’, but Arvid carried on pulling. Teresa resisted with all her might and ended up tipping over forwards as she clutched the head and screamed, ‘Avvi, no-no!’ Arvid gave the snake a tug and it flew out of Teresa’s hands as she lay on the floor shaking with rage.

Arvid waved the snake in front of her face, but when she didn’t even reach out to try and take it, he got bored and threw it back to her. She cradled the snake in her arms, whispering, ‘Bambam…’ with tears in her voice.

So far, so good. Arvid forgot about his sister and started rummaging around under the bed for a bucket of Lego. But with a grudge-bearing capacity unusual in such a small child, Teresa hauled herself to her feet and toddled over to the shelf by her bed, where she picked up a glass snowdome with an angel inside.

A blizzard whirled up around the angel as Teresa went over to Arvid and waited by his side until he sat up. Then she slammed it against his head. The globe broke and cut open both Teresa’s hand and Arvid’s temple. When Maria heard the screams and came running into the room, she found Arvid lying in a pool of water, blood and bits of plastic, yelling along with Teresa, whose hand was bleeding quite badly.

Arvid’s summary of the incident was, ‘I took her snake and she hit me over the head.’ He omitted the detail that at least a minute had passed between the two events. Perhaps he had forgotten, perhaps he didn’t see it as being of any significance.

By the time Teresa turned four, it was obvious that it was Daddy who mattered. Not that she distanced herself from Maria, but it was Göran she turned to in all essential matters. With the boys, the situation was reversed. For example it was Maria who drove them to football training. No actual decision had ever been taken, it was just the way things were.

Maria wanted to do things, while Göran was perfectly happy to sit quietly with Teresa while she was drawing or pottering about. If she asked a question he answered her, if she wanted help with something he helped her, but without making a fuss about it.

Her favourite activity was making necklaces with plastic beads. Göran had acquired every plastic bead in the toy shop in Rimsta, in every imaginable shape and colour, and had even got the assistant to go down to the storeroom and dig out some boxes they had taken off display. Teresa had an entire shelf stocked with at least sixty little plastic containers into which she had sorted the beads according to a system only she understood. Sometimes she would spend days altering the system.

The beads were threaded onto coloured wool or fishing line, and after patient instruction Teresa had learned to tie the knots herself. It was a constant production line; the only problem was the product.

Maria’s parents had been given theirs. Göran’s parents had been given theirs. Family and friends and relatives of friends had been given theirs. Anyone who might possibly deserve a necklace made of plastic beads had been given one. Or two. Göran’s father was the only one who wore his. Probably to annoy Göran’s mother more than anything.

But it would have taken a family of biblical proportions to generate a demand to meet the supply. Teresa made at least three necklaces a day. Göran had put up lots of tacks above her bed to hang the necklaces on. The wall was now more or less full.

One Wednesday afternoon in the middle of October, Göran picked his daughter up from the childminder as usual. She got out her beads and thread as usual and put them on the kitchen table, and Göran sat opposite her with his usual evening paper. Concentrating hard, Teresa tied a stop-knot at one end of a length of fishing line. Then she made a selection from among her containers, and started threading.

When Göran had finished looking for news about the EU decision on Sweden’s state monopoly on alcohol sales and found nothing but more misery from Hallandsås, he lowered the paper and looked at his daughter. She seemed to have decided on a necklace in red, yellow and blue. Using her fingers as tweezers, she skilfully picked up one bead at a time, threading them onto the line as she breathed audibly through her nose.

‘Sweetheart?’

‘Mm?’

‘Couldn’t you make something other than necklaces with your beads? It’s just that you’ve got such a lot.’

‘I want a lot.’

‘But what for?’

Teresa stopped dead, a bright yellow bead between her fingers. She looked at Göran with a frown. ‘I collect them.’

She held his gaze, as if she were challenging him to question her. His eyes flickered down to the newspaper, open at a picture of some lake somewhere. Pollution. Dead fish. Local population up in arms.

‘Daddy?’ Teresa was studying the yellow bead, her eyes narrowed. ‘Why do things exist?’

‘What do you mean?’

Teresa’s eyebrows moved even closer together, and she looked as if she were in pain. She took a few breaths through her nose as she always did when she was concentrating. Eventually she said, ‘Well, if this bead didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be holding it.’

‘No.’

‘And if I didn’t exist, then nobody would be holding this bead.’

‘No.’

Göran sat there as if he had been hypnotised, staring at the bright yellow dot between his daughter’s fingers. The grey October day outside the window had gone. Only the yellow dot existed, and Göran felt as if something was pressing against his eardrums, like when you’re sinking towards the bottom of the swimming pool.

Teresa shook her head. ‘Why is it like that?’ Her gaze swept over the containers on the table, their multi-coloured contents. ‘I mean, all these beads might not exist and there might not be anybody to make necklaces with them.’

‘But the beads do exist. And so do you. That’s just the way things are.’

Teresa put the yellow bead back in its container and crossed her arms tightly over her chest as she continued to look at the kaleidoscope of coloured dots in front of her. Gently Göran asked, ‘Have you all been talking about this at Lollo’s?’

Teresa shook her head.

‘So what made you think about it, then?’

Teresa didn’t reply, but stared at her array of beads with an expression that could best be described as furious. Göran leaned forward with his chin resting on his hand so that he was closer to her level, and said, ‘There is actually one person who hasn’t had a necklace; do you know who that is?’ Teresa didn’t react, but Göran gave her the answer anyway, ‘It’s me. I’ve never had a necklace.’

Teresa bent her head so that her nose was pointing at the floor, and her voice broke as she said, ‘You can have them all if you want.’

Göran got up from his chair. ‘But sweetheart…’

He knelt down next to his daughter’s chair and she fell into his arms, rested her forehead on his collarbone and wept. Göran stroked her head and said, ‘Sssh…’ but Teresa just carried on weeping.

When Göran said, ‘Couldn’t you make me a necklace? I’d like a yellow one. All yellow,’ she banged her forehead against his collarbone so hard that it hurt both of them, and kept on weeping.

Since Teresa had been born late in the year, she started school before she turned seven. She could already read simple books and add up and take away, so the schoolwork itself wasn’t a problem. At the first parents’ evening Göran and Maria heard a great deal of praise for their daughter, who approached every task with diligence and great seriousness.

Nor did gymnastics or practical subjects pose any difficulties for her. She found it easy to understand instructions, and her fine motor skills were very good. She was always well-behaved.

The teacher closed her file. ‘So…all in all I think we can say things have gone very well indeed. She’s a…serious little girl, Teresa.’

Göran had reached for his jacket and started to put it on, but Maria thought she picked up a change of tone in the teacher’s last remark, and asked her to elaborate. What did she mean, serious?

The teacher smiled as if to smooth things over. ‘Well, as a teacher I couldn’t wish for a better pupil, but…she doesn’t play.’

‘You mean…she’s not with the other children?’

‘No, no. When they’re given things to do, she has no problem working with others. But, how can I put this, she doesn’t like to use her imagination. Play. Make things up. As I said, she’s…serious. Extremely serious.’

What Göran had accepted long ago, Maria now perceived as a warning bell. Since she herself was a sociable person, she found it difficult to see her daughter as a serious-minded lone wolf. For Maria, loneliness was not to do with inclination or choice; no, loneliness was a failure. She had a number of hobby horses, but the most important was: ‘People are made to be together.’

Göran was not about to contradict her, particularly as he thought she was right, theoretically. He was popular at work as a conscientious and reliable person, but he wished he took greater real pleasure in the company of others.

The work at the liquor outlet suited him down to the ground. A customer came up with their numbered ticket, you exchanged a few words and dealt with their purchase. You might perhaps chat for thirty seconds or so if there weren’t too many people waiting. He looked smart in his green waistcoat and shirt, he was polite and knowledgeable about the stock, he was service minded. He met a lot of people, but in small doses-it was perfect for him.

Maria, on the other hand, was pally with lots of her customers. Practically every day she came home with long stories the customers had told her, and several dog and cat owners had become her friends. She was invited to more parties and weddings and so on than she could ever manage to attend.

Göran would suffer agonies for several days in advance if there was to be some kind of social tasting night at work. If it hadn’t been for his purely professional interest in, for example, new wines from Languedoc, he would probably have declined. As far as he was concerned, it would have been better if they’d just sent small samples by post.

As a consequence, they interpreted the information from the parents’ evening differently. Göran was pleased that things were going so well for Teresa at school, while Maria was worried that things were so difficult for Teresa at school. Every day she started quizzing Teresa about what she had done during break times, who she had played with, who she had talked to. It got to the point where Göran started hoping Teresa would lie, make up some friends and games just to satisfy Maria. But making things up just wasn’t in her nature.

Arvid and Olof were always having friends round. Some of these friends had younger brothers and sisters, and Maria would occasionally ring the parents and explain the situation, begging them to send a small sibling along for Teresa as part of the package. In Göran’s opinion, Teresa handled things as well as she could. She would show the visitor her things, suggest games they might play and try in her own way to make the best of their forced proximity.

His heart swelled a little with pride as he watched his daughter take responsibility for a situation not of her making, and contracted with pain when he saw how badly things went. Teresa would meticulously set out the game and explain the rules while the other child looked anxiously around, wanting to go to the toilet. It would end in silence with a small sibling tugging at its big brother’s sleeve and asking to go home.

In the spring Göran was made manager of his store. Rudolf retired and recommended Göran in glowing terms. He was already in charge of ordering and product selection, and was responsible for much of the contact with suppliers.

He had to go for an interview, and felt it went reasonably well. Later he was told that he had been given the job due to his extensive knowledge, despite some reservations about his suitability for the managerial role itself. He understood perfectly.

From a purely practical point of view it meant an extra twelve thousand kronor a month, more responsibility and longer working days. He was no longer able to finish early on Wednesdays. He and Maria took the bold step of securing a loan to renovate the kitchen, and for the first time in their lives they were able to buy a brand new car.

By May Göran had already begun to wish he could step down from the post he had taken up in March, but once an upward movement has begun, it takes a great deal of determination to break it. Göran did not have that determination. He gritted his teeth and stuck with it, worked harder. His daring decision to carry a wider selection of wines in Tetra-paks was a success, and sales increased.

In June he led a team-building weekend at a conference centre, and when he came home he was so worn out that he slept for fourteen hours.

It pained him that he had less time to spare for Teresa. He did his best to be there for her and the boys when he came home exhausted, but something had slipped away from him and he didn’t have the strength to work out how to get it back.

Teresa had taken over her brothers’ Lego since they lost interest in it. Maria had kept all the instructions, and Teresa spent a lot of time putting together all the different models as she listened to a tape of Allan Edwall reading Winnie-the-Pooh, over and over again.

Sometimes Göran would come in and just sit down in the armchair in her room to watch her, to listen to the clicks as the Lego pieces fitted into one another and Allan Edwall’s dark, gentle voice. He would feel close to her for a while, until he fell asleep.

In the October of Teresa’s second year in school there was to be a fancy dress disco at Hallowe’en. There would be soft drinks and sweets, and prizes for the best costumes. Maria had managed to miss the whole thing, and it wasn’t until she got home at five o’clock that she spotted the piece of paper saying the disco would start at six.

Göran was busy stocktaking and probably wouldn’t be home until late evening, so with every scrap of her positive determination Maria sat Teresa down on a chair in the kitchen and asked her what she wanted to be.

‘I don’t want to be anything,’ Teresa replied.

‘At the fancy dress disco, I mean,’ said Maria. ‘What do you want to dress up as?’

‘I don’t want to dress up.’

‘But we’ve got loads of stuff. You can dress up as anything you like-a ghost or a monster, whatever.’

Teresa shook her head and got up to go to her room. Maria stepped in front of her and made her sit down again.

‘Sweetheart. Everybody else will be dressed up. You don’t want to be the only one who isn’t dressed up, do you?’

‘Yes.’

Maria massaged her temples. It wasn’t because she found this difficult. It was because she found it totally absurd. She couldn’t think of one good reason why a person wouldn’t dress up when they were going to a fancy dress disco. However, she controlled herself and did something she perhaps did all too rarely. She asked a question.

‘OK. Can you tell me why you don’t want to dress up?’

‘I just don’t.’

‘But why? You can dress up as somebody else.’

‘I don’t want to be somebody else.’

‘But it’s fancy dress. If you don’t dress up, you can’t go.’

‘I won’t go, then.’

Teresa’s attitude was as crystal clear as it was untenable. Maria couldn’t accept it. Teresa would end up being odd if she was allowed to follow every whim. Since Teresa wasn’t old enough to have an overview of the consequences of her actions, it really came down to a question of upbringing, of taking responsibility as a parent.

‘Right,’ said Maria. ‘This is what’s going to happen. You are going to the disco and you are going to dress up. The matter is not up for discussion. There’s only one thing I need to know: what do you want to dress up as?’

Teresa looked her mother in the eye and said, ‘A banana.’

If Maria had had a different sense of humour, she might have laughed at her daughter’s obviously defiant answer, then hunted out everything yellow she could lay her hands on. However, she didn’t have that particular sense of humour. Instead she nodded grimly and said, ‘OK. If that’s the way you want it, I’ll decide for you. Stay there.’

It is possible that we inherit certain characteristics from our parents. If this is the case, it was her sense of order that Teresa had inherited from her mother. In the clothes storeroom was a big box labelled ‘Fancy Dress’, since neither Arvid nor Olof had anything against getting dressed up-quite the opposite, in fact. After a few minutes Maria was back in the kitchen with black and red make-up, a black cape and a pair of plastic fangs.

‘You can be a vampire,’ she said. ‘Do you know what a vampire is?’

Teresa nodded, and Maria took this as a sign of approval.

When Göran got home at eight o’clock, Maria asked him to pick Teresa up from the disco. He turned around in the hallway and went mechanically back to the car. This week had almost finished him, and the world felt like a piece of flat stage scenery as he drove towards the school.

Music was pounding from the gym, and a few children in costume were charging around outside the entrance. Göran blinked and rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t do it. He just didn’t have the strength to walk into that pulsating grotto of excited little bodies and well-meaning parents.

He wanted to go home. He knew he couldn’t. With an effort he hauled his soul to its feet from its slumped, sideways position and walked towards the entrance, smiling and nodding at the parents who had been kind enough to organise this inferno.

Multi-coloured lights flashed across the darkened room. Sweets and popcorn were scattered all over the floor, and infants dressed as monsters were running around chasing one another while Markoolio sang that song about heading for the mountains to drink and screw. Göran peered into the darkness, trying to spot his daughter so that he could take her home.

He had to walk around before he found her sitting on a chair by the wall. She had thick black kohl all around her eyes, and her mouth looked oddly swollen. From the corners of her mouth ran painted-on trickles of dried blood. Her hands were resting on her knees.

‘Hi, sweetheart. Shall we go home?’

Teresa looked up. Her eyes shone bright within their frame of black. She got up and Göran held out his hand. She didn’t take it, but followed him out to the car.

It was a relief to close the car door. The sound was muted and they were alone. He glanced at Teresa, sitting in the passenger seat staring straight ahead, and asked, ‘So did you have a good time?’

Teresa didn’t reply. He started the car and pulled out of the school car park. When they were driving along the road, he asked, ‘Did you get any sweets?’

Teresa mumbled something in reply.

‘What did you say?’

Teresa mumbled something again, and Göran turned to look at her. ‘What’s that in your mouth?’

Teresa parted her lips and showed her fangs. A cold shudder ran down Göran’s spine. For a brief moment he thought she looked genuinely horrible. Then he said, ‘I think you could take those out now, sweetheart. So I can hear what you say.’

Teresa removed the teeth and sat there with them in her hand, but she still didn’t say anything. Göran tried again.

‘Did you get any sweets?’ Teresa nodded and the best follow-up Göran’s weary brain could come up with was, ‘Were they nice?’

‘I couldn’t eat them.’

‘Why not?’

Teresa held out the fangs. Göran felt a stab of pain in his chest. A dot of sorrow grew and grew, pressing against his ribs. ‘But sweetheart, you could have taken them out. So you could eat your sweets.’

Teresa shook her head and said nothing more until they had parked on the drive at home. When Göran had switched off the engine and they were sitting in the darkness she said, ‘I told Mum I didn’t want to go. I told her.’

The Svensson family lived in a new house on what had been agricultural land before it was carved up. A narrow strip of conifers and deciduous trees separated them from their nextdoor neighbour. Among the trees were two big rocks, or rather boulders, lying side by side in such a way that a cave a few metres square was formed at their base. The autumn before Teresa turned ten, she had begun to spend more and more of her free time there.

One day at the end of September when Teresa was sitting in her secret room setting out an exhibition of different-coloured autumn leaves, something blocked the light from the entrance. A boy of her own age was standing there.

‘Hi,’ said the boy.

‘Hi,’ said Teresa, glancing up briefly before returning to her leaves. The boy stayed where he was without speaking, and Teresa wished he would go. He didn’t look the way people usually looked. He was wearing a blue shirt, buttoned right up to the neck. Teresa tried to concentrate on the leaves, but it was difficult with someone standing there watching her.

‘How old are you?’ asked the boy.

‘Ten,’ said Teresa. ‘In a month. And a week.’

‘It was my tenth birthday two weeks ago,’ said the boy. ‘I’m seven weeks older than you.’

Teresa shrugged her shoulders. Boys always had to boast. Sorting out the leaves, which had absorbed her completely only a moment ago, suddenly seemed childish. She scraped them into a heap but couldn’t leave while the boy was standing there blocking the opening. He looked around and said with a certain amount of gloom in his voice, ‘I live here now.’

‘Oh, where?’

The boy nodded in the direction of the house on the other side of the trees. ‘There. We moved in yesterday. I think this is our garden. But you can use it if you want.’

‘I don’t think it’s up to you to decide.’

The boy looked down at the ground, took a deep breath and let out the air in a long sigh. Then he shook his head. ‘No. It’s not up to me to decide.’

Teresa didn’t understand what kind of boy this was. At first he had seemed boastful, and now he was standing there looking as if somebody was about to hit him. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Johannes.’

Teresa thought that was quite a safe name. Not like Micke or Kenny. She got up and Johannes moved so that she could get out. They stood facing one another. Johannes swirled the leaves around with his toe. He was wearing a pair of trainers that looked almost new. Teresa said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask what my name is?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Teresa. I live here too. There.’ She pointed at her house. Johannes looked at the house, then carried on poking at the leaves with his foot. Teresa wanted to go home, but in some strange way she felt as if she ought to look after Johannes. There was something about that shirt that looked so uncomfortable. She asked, ‘Shall we do something?’

Johannes nodded without making any suggestions, so Teresa went on, ‘So what shall we do, then? What do you usually do?’

Johannes shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not much.’

‘Do you like board games?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you play Chinese checkers?’

‘Yes. I’m really good at it.’

‘How good?’

‘I usually win.’

‘So do I. When I play my dad.’

‘I usually win when I play my mum.’

Teresa went inside and fetched the game. When she came back Johannes had crawled into the cave and was sitting there waiting for her. She didn’t like him sitting there. That was her place. But she remembered her father saying that those rocks were actually on the neighbour’s property, just as Johannes had said. So she couldn’t really chuck him out. But she could move him.

‘That’s my place,’ she said.

‘So where shall I sit?’

Teresa pointed to the back wall of the cave. ‘There.’

When Johannes got up, Teresa saw that he had been sitting on her pile of leaves. He scooped them up in his arms and tipped them out in his designated place, then gathered them together and patted them down before sitting on them. Teresa was still annoyed with him for moving into her cave, so to tease him she said, ‘Are you frightened of getting your trousers dirty?’

‘Yes.’

The direct answer disarmed her and she couldn’t come up with anything else to say, so she put the board on the ground and sat down opposite Johannes. In silence they picked up the plastic counters and placed them on their spots. Then Johannes said, ‘You can start because you’re the smallest.’

A wave of heat spread over the tips of Teresa’s ears, and she snapped, ‘You can start because it’s my game.’

Johannes shook his head. ‘You can start because you’re a girl.’

Teresa’s ears were positively on fire by now, and she was on the point of getting up and walking out. But then she would have to leave the game behind, so instead she said, ‘You can start because you’re much more stupid than me!’

Johannes looked at her open-mouthed. Then he did something unexpected. He started to giggle. Teresa glared at him. Johannes giggled for a while, then he became totally serious and made his first move. She couldn’t work him out.

Johannes won the first game and Teresa agreed to start the next game, since he had started last time because he was more stupid than her. She lost again. Johannes played in a strange way, as if he were thinking everything out well in advance.

She didn’t really want to play any more, but Johannes said, ‘Just one more time, winner takes all.’

They played one more game and Teresa won, but she had the distinct feeling that Johannes had lost on purpose. It was getting dark, and Teresa gathered up the game. She said, ‘Bye then,’ and left Johannes sitting in the cave.

A few weeks later they were inseparable, and who would have expected anything else? Johannes was a strange boy, but Teresa was old enough to see herself from the outside, and realised she was pretty strange too. She tried to fit in with her classmates as best she could, but it never really worked.

She wasn’t bullied, she wasn’t exactly excluded, but she wasn’t part of it all. She wasn’t there. She knew all the skipping games as well as anyone else and had the courage to swing higher than any girl in her class, but it was all the talk in between. The chatter, the gestures. She just couldn’t do it, and became stiff and odd when she tried to imitate the others. So she gave up.

The only person in the class who actively sought her out was Mimmi, but she wore secondhand clothes and didn’t wash her hair and wasn’t all there, because her mother was a junkie. Teresa rebuffed her kindly. When that didn’t work, she rebuffed her somewhat less kindly.

Johannes was odd in a more normal way. It was as if he had a shell of bad oddness, but if you just scraped away a little bit, a better kind of oddness emerged. Teresa knew he attended the Waldorf school in Rimsta, and that was all she knew. They never talked about school. Jennifer in Teresa’s class said the Waldorf kids were crazy and just made stuff out of clay.

Like Teresa, Johannes liked learning things. He read a lot of books, mostly about war and birds. Sometimes they would talk about something, wonder about something, and the next day Johannes would have looked it up and come back with the answer, telling her for example that only certain female ants became queens, most were soldiers or workers.

They often hung out among the trees and made up various games and competitions. Who could throw pine cones most accurately (Johannes), who could run fastest (Teresa), or who could name the most animals starting with the same letter (usually Johannes). What they didn’t do was play games involving imagination, or anything that might dirty Johannes’ clothes. This meant they spent quite a lot of time talking instead.

Once when Johannes didn’t turn up as usual in the afternoon, Teresa went to his house and rang the doorbell. His mother opened the door. She was small and slender and looked scared. Her eyes were enormous, and twitched as if she wanted to blink but couldn’t. When Teresa asked about Johannes, his mother said he would probably be home any minute-would she like to come in and wait?

No, she wouldn’t. She could see through the doorway that it was dark inside, and it smelled extremely clean. This was such a contrast with her own house that it felt uncomfortable. She went and sat on the garden wall instead.

After no more than ten minutes a black, shiny car turned into the drive. It made almost no sound. The car stopped a few metres from Teresa, the driver’s door opened and a man wearing a suit and tie stepped out. He was short but broad-shouldered, and looked like a cartoon character. His face was so clean and clear that it could have been a drawing.

The man smiled at Teresa, showing his white teeth. Even his smile looked as if it had been drawn. He said, ‘Would you mind not sitting on the wall, please?’ and Teresa jumped down at once. The man took a few steps towards her, held out his hand and said, ‘And you are…?’

Teresa took his hand, which was warm and dry, said, ‘Teresa,’ and before she even realised how it had happened she had bobbed a curtsey, something she never normally did. Her knees just bent by themselves. The man held onto her hand and said, ‘You’re a friend of Johannes, I gather?’

Teresa stole a glance at Johannes, who had got out of the car and was standing by the bonnet looking slightly wary. She nodded. The man let go of her hand and said, ‘Well, in that case I’d better not hold you up. Off you go and play.’

The man turned and walked towards the house, while Teresa and Johannes stood motionless, as if they had been turned to stone. It was only when the front door had closed that Johannes left his place by the bonnet and came over.

‘My father,’ he said in an apologetic tone of voice. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you.’

‘Did you ring the doorbell?’

‘Yes.’

Johannes looked over towards the house and pulled a face. ‘You shouldn’t do that, my mother gets so…don’t do it again.’

‘No. I won’t.’

Johannes hunched his shoulders and gave a long sigh, something he did from time to time that made him seem several years older. Then he said, ‘Shall we do something?’

Something had happened that made Teresa able to say what she said next. It was cold outside and therefore it was a perfectly natural thing to say, it was just that she’d never said it before. She said, ‘We could go back to my house.’

Over the winter they met up mostly at Teresa’s house when they weren’t outdoors. Arvid and Olof teased her at first and said, ‘Kissy kissy’ and ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ but soon gave up when neither Teresa nor Johannes took any notice.

Mostly they played board games. Monopoly, Othello, Battleships and Yahtzee. They tried chess a couple of times, but Johannes was so unbelievably good there was no point. Ten moves, and it was checkmate for Teresa.

‘It’s only because I know what to do,’ Johannes said modestly. ‘Dad taught me. I’d rather play something else.’

When the weather improved they went back to meeting up outdoors, and spending time in the cave. Johannes had started reading the Harry Potter books, and lent the first one to Teresa. She didn’t like it. She couldn’t believe the story. She did feel a bit sorry for the boy who had such a difficult time, but when that giant turned up on his flying motorbike, she stopped reading. Things like that just didn’t happen.

‘But it’s just pretend,’ said Johannes. ‘It’s made up.’

‘But why would you want to read about it?’

‘Because it’s cool.’

‘I don’t think it’s cool at all.’

Johannes got cross and started rummaging around in the box of stones they’d collected. ‘Well, what about that Robinson Crusoe you like so much? That’s made up as well.’

‘It is not!’

‘It is so! That never really happened, I read it in the National Encyclopaedia.’

Back to the National Encyclopaedia. As soon as they needed proof of something, Johannes was there with his National Encyclopaedia. He’d explained that it was a whole lot of thick books with absolutely everything in them. Teresa had begun to wonder if this National Encyclopaedia really existed. At any rate, she’d never seen it.

‘We-ell,’ said Teresa. ‘At least it could have happened. That business with owls bringing the post can’t have happened.’

‘Why not-haven’t you heard of pigeon post?’

‘And flying motorbikes? And magic umbrellas? Are they in your encyclopaedia too?’

Johannes folded his arms tightly across his chest and glowered at the ground. Teresa was extremely pleased with herself. It was usually Johannes who fixed things so that you were left with no possible answer. Now she’d done it. She pulled the box of stones towards her and started arranging them in order of size, humming as she worked.

After a while she heard a strange noise. Like a frog, or the sound you make when you’ve got something stuck in your throat. She looked up and saw that Johannes’ shoulders were moving up and down. Was he laughing? She tried to come up with something caustic to say, but then she realised he was crying, and the corrosion trickled away.

He was crying in his own way. An almost mechanical ‘uh-uh-uh’ was coming out of his mouth as his shoulders kept time, bobbing up and down. He would have looked like someone pretending to cry, very badly, if it hadn’t been for the tears pouring down his cheeks. Teresa didn’t know what to do. She would have liked to say something kind to Johannes, but nothing occurred to her, so she just sat there facing him as he jolted out his grief over something she didn’t understand.

Johannes took a deep breath and wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Then he said, ‘Can we pretend something?’

Teresa’s body felt soft. If it would make Johannes feel better to pretend, then she could certainly give it a go, so she said, ‘Like what?’

‘Can we pretend we’re dead?’

‘How do we do that?’

‘We just lie down. And pretend we don’t exist. Or we can pretend it’s a funeral.’

Johannes lay down and stretched out. For once he didn’t seem to mind about his clothes. Teresa lay down next to him and looked up at the angular ceiling of the cave. They lay like that for a while. Teresa tried to think about nothing and discovered that it wasn’t too difficult.

Eventually Johannes said, ‘Now we’re dead.’

‘Yes,’ said Teresa.

‘We’re lying in a grave together, and everyone has gone home.’

‘How can we talk, then? If we’re dead?’

‘The dead can talk to one another.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘We’re pretending.’

‘OK.’

Teresa looked up at the grey stone ceiling and tried to imagine it was earth. It was impossible. Then she tried to imagine it was a grave like the Vikings had, where they put stones over the corpse. That was easier. She was dead and she was lying beneath a mound of stones. It was rather nice.

‘We are the dead,’ said Johannes.

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody is going to come knocking, nobody is going to ask us to do anything.’

‘No.’

‘Everyone has forgotten us.’

The faint sounds from outside faded away as Teresa drifted into a dense bubble of silence. She had been worried about her lost gym shorts, she had been worried about the darkness under her bed, but now she was no longer worried. It was so simple, being dead. She became completely calm. She might have dropped off to sleep for a moment when she heard Johannes’ voice as if from far away.

‘Teresa?’

‘Yes.’

‘When we grow up-shall we get married?’

‘Yes. Although I don’t think we can say that now. Not when we’re dead.’

‘No. But later. We’ll get married. And then we’ll die at the same time. And lie in a grave together.’

‘Yes. Good.’

In the autumn when Teresa was in Year 5, the class was given the task of writing about their summer. Teresa devoted most of the space available to a description of the family’s trip to Skara Sommarland, although it had only lasted three days and she hadn’t enjoyed herself at all. In the last couple of lines she mentioned that she had also been swimming, cycling, and played board games. The things she had done with Johannes, the things that had taken up most of the rest of the holiday. She didn’t mention his name.

Of course the rest of the class knew that she and Johannes were friends; it was unavoidable in a small place. But Johannes was nothing to boast about. He wore short-sleeved shirts, beautifully ironed; when he wore shorts he pulled his socks up too high, and he became stiff and awkward as soon as they bumped into other children their own age. The fact that he had a bicycle with twenty-four gears didn’t help at all in the circumstances.

So she avoided mentioning Johannes. During the summer she had had to put up with a great deal of teasing, not to mention sneering, when she was seen with him. She didn’t want to hear the sniggering or vomiting noises from her classmates if her essay about the summer was read out.

On one level, therefore, you could say that Teresa’s account of the summer was untruthful. On another level, it wasn’t. She merely avoided mentioning details that might show her in an unfavourable light; remodelled the facts where necessary.

She knew it was normal and right to visit Skara Sommarland and describe the feeling of her stomach dropping away on the highest water slide, even though she hadn’t been on it. She knew it was OK to complain a bit about how cramped the chalets were, but not to say how tired she was of her father, who never had the energy to join in anything.

And yet her account was not a lie. She had had a lovely summer holiday, but she didn’t want to write about what had made it so enjoyable. So everything she had written was true, it was just that it had happened in a different way.

For Christmas that year Johannes was given a Playstation 2, which changed a lot of things. By unspoken agreement they had already abandoned the cave during the summer. Too childish. When the autumn came it was as if they were looking for a new direction, a new way of being together.

Once the gossip about Teresa and Johannes started to circulate around the village, her brothers started to be nastier to Johannes, which meant that her home was no longer the sanctuary it had been. She didn’t like being in his house; there was something about the atmosphere that made her uncomfortable, almost afraid.

For a while they did a lot of cycling, riding around the lanes and exploring dilapidated barns and old gravel pits, or visiting the sheep grazing in a field a couple of kilometres away. Sometimes they cycled into Österyd, and it was on one of these excursions that they ended up in the library. Despite the fact that it was a small place, Österyd had a decent library with various sections, secluded reading areas and a couple of chess boards.

It soon started to get dark earlier and earlier, and for a while they cycled to the library straight after school and played draughts on the chess board, since Johannes wasn’t quite such an expert in that game, or read books and talked quietly.

Things might well have gone on like that if Johannes hadn’t been given the Playstation for Christmas. By the spring Teresa was forced to spend some time at his house in spite of everything if she wanted to be with him.

The shiny black leather sofas and the glass table. Johannes’ mother, sneaking in with juice and biscuits. A tough guy by the name of Max Payne, shooting people dead on the TV screen. Johannes’ fingers, flying over the buttons and control sticks. And the cold. It was cold in the house. Teresa had to have a blanket over her as she sat beside Johannes, following his progress through New York’s underworld.

Johannes bought a game called Tekken 4 and an extra handset. They played against one another. Little Japanese girls and cartoon monsters. Teresa was not without talent; she knew exactly what to do and sometimes won. But she only enjoyed it for a short time. Johannes could carry on for hours.

When Teresa was leaving, Johannes’ mother would often come rushing in with a hand-held vacuum cleaner to hoover up the biscuit crumbs before Teresa had even got through the door. She would walk the two hundred metres to her own house, and sometimes she felt as if she wanted to cry. But she didn’t cry.

One day in May, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Teresa was standing in her garden with no idea what to do. Her bike was directly in front of her, leaning against the wall of the garage; the path leading to Johannes’ house was on her left, the drive leading up to the main road was on her right, and her own house was behind her. She didn’t want to go in any of those directions.

She stood there on the lawn, arms dangling at her sides, and the only directions that held any appeal were up and down. To sink down into the earth, or fly up among the clouds. Both routes were closed to her. She wished she was an animal, she wished she was someone else. She wished she had the ability to pretend.

She must have stood like that for five minutes, motionless. As she stood there a very clear thought formed in her mind and crystallised into words. She repeated them to herself over and over again.

I have nowhere to go. I have nowhere to go.

She swayed on her feet. She considered allowing herself to fall forward with her arms held at her sides to see if the ground would open up. She knew it wouldn’t, so she didn’t do it. Instead she turned her body to the left and forced her legs to move. She left the path to Johannes’ house and went and sat in the cave. She looked at the rough walls, tried to remember when she and Johannes had had their collections of various objects in there. It just made her feel sad.

I have nowhere to go.

The words refused to leave her, they went round and round and wouldn’t let her think about anything else. Enveloped in the words she went back to the house, kicked off her shoes in the hallway, went to her room and closed the door behind her. She took out an empty notebook she had been given as a present for her eleventh birthday, and wrote the words right at the top of the first page:

I have nowhere to go.

Immediately more words appeared in her mind, and she wrote those down too:

There is no road.

She sucked her pen and looked at the words. She was able to think again, and tried to find a sentence that fitted with the other two. In the end she chose:

And yet I must go.

She put down the pen and silently read through what she had written. Then she read it out loud.

I have nowhere to go.

There is no road.

And yet I must go.

It sounded good. It almost sounded like a real poem. Somehow everything seemed easier when she had written it down. As if it wasn’t about her anymore. Or rather it was about her, but in a better way. As if she was part of something big when she stood there not knowing what to do.

She flicked through the notebook. It was a lovely book, with a leather cover and at least eighty empty, cream-coloured pages. Her stomach flipped as she thought of those pages being filled. With her words, her sentences. After sucking her pen for a while she wrote:

There must be someone else.

Then she carried on with that thought until she reached the bottom of the page. She turned over and carried on writing.

The summer between years 5 and 6 was different from the previous one. Teresa had begun to develop breasts, and tufts of downy hair were visible in Johannes’ armpits. If they cycled to a remote spot to swim they were embarrassed when they had to change in front of one another, and Teresa hated that. It was so unnecessary.

One day when they were drying off in the sun on a rock by the lake, Teresa wrapped her arms around her legs, drew her knees up to her chin and said, ‘Johannes. Are you in love with me?’

Johannes opened his eyes wide and looked at her as if she had asked in all seriousness whether he came from Saturn. He answered very firmly: ‘No!’

‘Good. Because I’m not in love with you either. So why are things so strange between us?’

Teresa had been afraid that Johannes would dismiss the question, say that he didn’t know what she meant, but instead his eyes narrowed in concentration. He looked out across the water and shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

Teresa looked at his pale, slender body with its prominent knees and elbows, his sharp chin and high forehead. His full, girlish lips. No. He wasn’t her type of boy. Against her better judgment she thought those hairy, slightly loose-limbed boys were the most attractive.

She asked, ‘Do you want to kiss me?’

‘Not really.’

‘But will you do it anyway?’

Johannes turned to look at her. He scrutinised her face searching for signs that she might be making fun of him, but found none. ‘Why?’

Teresa shrugged her shoulders. She looked at his soft, rounded lips and felt a tingle in her stomach. She really wasn’t the slightest bit in love with him, but she wanted to know what those lips felt like.

Johannes gave an embarrassed smile, and he shrugged too. Then he leaned forward and placed his lips on hers. The tingle in Teresa’s stomach grew stronger. Their lips were as dry and warm as the crust on a freshly baked loaf of bread. Then she felt his tongue between her teeth and pulled her head back.

‘What are you doing!’

He couldn’t look her in the eye, and his cheeks flushed deep red. ‘You said you wanted us to kiss.’

‘Yes, but not like that.’

‘But that’s what you do.’

‘When you’re in love, yes, but I mean we’re not in love, are we?’

Johannes curled up into a ball just as Teresa had done and muttered, ‘Sorry.’

Teresa also started to blush, but mostly because she realised she had been stupid. She was about to place her hand on Johannes’ shoulder, but gave him a playful punch instead. ‘Doesn’t matter. It was my fault. OK?’

‘You said you wanted us to kiss.’

‘Listen, can we just forget this now?’

Johannes looked up from his cocoon. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This whole thing. Can we forget about it now?’

Presumably Johannes understood what she meant. All of it. The whole boy-girl thing. He said, ‘I suppose so.’

Teresa rolled her eyes. I suppose so. Oh well. Johannes really wasn’t her type. As if she had a type. Two steps and a jump and she was in the water. She dipped her head beneath the surface and felt rather than heard the muted splash as Johannes followed her.

In October, Johannes’ father disappeared. One day he came home and said that he had met someone else, that it had been going on for a long time, and that he now intended to start a new life and have a bit of fun at last. He packed two suitcases, got in his car and drove off.

This was what Johannes told Teresa the following day as they went for a walk to see if the sheep were still there. Johannes walked along with his hands pushed deep in his pockets, staring straight ahead as he talked. When he had finished, Teresa asked, ‘Is it hard?’

Johannes stopped and looked at his shoes. ‘It would be hard,’ he said, ‘if he came back.’ He looked up and smiled even more unpleasantly than the man in the GB ice cream ads. ‘It would be absolutely fucking fantastic if he could just bloody well stay away. If he never came back.’

Teresa almost recoiled. It was rare for Johannes to swear; she hadn’t really thought he knew any swear words. Now he’d used two in the same sentence. An almost nasty expression played around his mouth and eyes as something scrolled through his mind.

The sheep were still there, and Johannes and Teresa walked out into the field, running their fingers through the wool. Johannes was distant, answering Teresa’s questions in monosyllables.

A wolf had recently been spotted in the area, and as Teresa moved among the woolly bodies she tried to imagine herself as that wolf. The muscles that could bring death, the powerful jaws. The field a bloodbath after she had passed through. All the sweet little sheep lying among their own innards.

Why do they do that? Why do they kill everything they see?

Johannes was lost in his own thoughts, Teresa in hers. They parted without deciding when to meet up again.

Teresa went home and looked up wolves on the internet. They kill because the flight response of the prey triggers the hunting response of the wolf. If all the sheep stood still after the first one had been killed, they’d survive.

She clicked on the next link, went on reading. Each fact led to fresh questions, and after a couple of hours she knew more about wolves than any other animal. There was something fascinating about the fact that this mythical creature still existed in Sweden, albeit in small numbers. Terrifying. And promising.

The day before she was due to go back to school after the Christmas holiday, Teresa was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She hated her appearance. Her cheeks were too round and her eyes were too small, she had a slightly upturned nose, and all in all it made her look like a pig.

She wished someone could tell her what to do. Should she pluck her eyebrows, use a kohl pencil, should she bleach her hair? If someone could guarantee that it would help, she’d do it. But she didn’t think it would help. She’d look like a tarted-up pig instead of just a pig, and that would be worse. She could already hear the taunts.

But the worst thing was something that had happened over the last few months. Over the waistband of her knickers hung folds of pale, flabby skin. She had started to get fat. The bathroom scales showed fifty-eight kilos, only four kilos more than in September, but they had settled in the wrong places.

She probably had the largest breasts in the class but instead of showing them off with a push-up bra and tight tops as some of the girls did, she just wanted to hide them, squash them down. All they did was make her feel even more clumsy and disgusting.

Teresa looked herself in the eye in the mirror and made a decision. She wasn’t going to sit around feeling sorry for herself. She was going to do something about it. She found a facial scrub among her mother’s things and rubbed it over her face until the skin was red, then rinsed it off and dried herself. The greasy sheen on her cheeks had disappeared for the moment.

She dug out her hooded top and jogging pants and put on her trainers. She would take up running. Four days a week, at least. Yes. That would suit her. Running alone along the roads, torturing herself. She would become a wolf, a lone wolf, strong and swift as she raced past people’s homes. The wolf would eat up the pig with a huff and a puff.

Her cheeks were still burning from the facial scrub and her determination as she ran out from her drive. After two hundred metres the cold air started to make her chest hurt. She gritted her teeth and staggered on.

When she had covered another two hundred metres the pain in her chest was so bad she wanted to stop, but then she heard a moped chugging along behind her and forced herself to go on; she didn’t want anyone to see her give up.

The moped caught up with her. In the saddle sat Stefan, who was in Year 8, and behind him Jenny, who was in Teresa’s class. Jenny never missed an opportunity to relay what Stefan said and what Stefan did, just to emphasise the fact that they were very much an item.

Stefan slowed down and puttered alongside Teresa.

‘Faster! Faster!’ he yelled.

Teresa forced a smile and carried on at the same speed, moving so slowly that Stefan had to use his feet to balance the moped and stop it falling over. Her chest was about to explode.

Above the chugging of the engine Jenny shouted, ‘Move your backside!’ and leaned over to smack Teresa’s bottom. The shift in weight distribution made the moped wobble, and Teresa had to step onto the verge, where she slipped on the frosty grass. She managed to avoid falling by running down into the ditch.

The moped accelerated and shot off up the road, Jenny’s white-blonde hair flying out behind her, as clear as the rump of a fleeing deer. Teresa stood panting in the ditch, her hands on her hips. She felt as if she were dying. Her windpipe was constricted, her lungs were aching and she was embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed.

After catching her breath for a couple of minutes she went back the way she had come. As she sat in the hallway taking off her trainers, Göran came down the stairs.

‘Hi sweetheart. What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Have you been out jogging?’

‘No.’

Teresa walked past him and went into the kitchen, where she took three cinnamon buns out of the freezer and put them in the microwave. Göran lingered in the doorway. He cleared his throat a couple of times as if he were gathering himself, then asked, ‘How are things?’

Teresa stared at the buns, slowly rotating in the microwave. ‘Fine.’

‘Fine? I don’t think you look as if things are fine.’

‘No. Well. They are.’

Teresa mixed a glass of O’Boy chocolate milk and when the microwave pinged she took out the three buns, put them on a plate, pushed past Göran, placed the glass and the plate on the coffee table in the living room and switched on the television. The Discovery Channel was showing a documentary about elephants.

Göran came and sat down next to her. Since he had stepped down from his managerial role and become an ordinary assistant again, the dark rings under his eyes had faded and he had become more available as a father. The problem was that nobody was interested in his availability anymore. Teresa couldn’t say exactly when it had happened, but at some point she had stopped talking to her father about anything important.

But still. When they had been sitting there for a while, and had learned that elephants can express emotions in a similar way to humans, and that they drink approximately two hundred litres of water a day, there was a kind of quiet companionship between them. Teresa ate her buns and drank her O’Boy. It felt good.

She turned to her father to start a conversation in spite of everything by asking how things were with him. But Göran had fallen asleep. He was lying there with his mouth half-open, gurgling as he breathed. When a drop of saliva appeared at the corner of his mouth, Teresa turned away and concentrated on the elephants.

The program had moved on to explaining how elephants had been used as executioners and killing machines in large parts of Asia. Crushing heads, crunching bones with their trunks. Human emotions. Yeah, right.

In February a For Sale sign appeared by the roadside, and it was pointing to Johannes’ house. Teresa hadn’t seen much of him lately, and the sign came as a surprise to her. She hadn’t been round to his house since his father moved out, but when she saw the sign she went over and rang the bell.

Johannes opened the door. When he saw her his face lit up and he gave her a quick hug. ‘Teresa! Good to see you! Come in!’

She only had to take one step into the hallway to see how much the house had changed. Shoes and boots that used to be arranged on a shoe rack as if they were standing to attention were now lying around all over the place. When she took off her jacket she could feel that the house was several degrees warmer than it used to be.

In the living room Johannes’ games were strewn all over the coffee table with a half-empty packet of crisps next to them. Johannes slumped down on the sofa and offered her the packet; Teresa took a couple of crisps and sat down on the armchair.

Johannes spotted a box and grinned. ‘Shall we have a game of Tekken? Just for fun?’

Teresa shrugged her shoulders and Johannes slithered off the sofa to insert the game. Only now, seeing Johannes in this altered environment, did Teresa notice how much he had changed. His clothes hung loosely, his movements were casual and his smile had been freed from a pressure that said there was nothing to smile about. He just smiled.

‘Where’s your mum?’ she asked.

‘Some Spanish course, I think. Or dancing, I don’t know.’

Teresa tried to picture this. It was almost impossible. But if she needed final proof, she got it when her gaze fell on the hand-held vacuum cleaner that Johannes’ mother had used so assiduously in the past. It was covered in a thin layer of dust.

Johannes chucked her a handset and she manoeuvred adroitly through the menus and chose Kuma, the bear in the red T-shirt. To her surprise Johannes chose Lee Chaolan, who resembled a well-groomed male model more than anything. He used to go for Julia Chang, the woman with the unbreakable glasses.

As the intro began to play, Teresa pressed pause.

‘Johannes,’ she said. ‘Are you moving house?’

Johannes pushed back his hair, which he had allowed to grow. ‘Yes. Dad’s frittered away his money somehow, and now he wants half the house.’

‘What do you mean, half the house?’

‘Mum has to buy him out if we want to stay here, and she can’t do that.’

‘So where are you going to live?’

‘Dunno. In an apartment, maybe. In Österyd. I mean, I’ll be starting Year 7 there anyway, so…what about you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Where will you be going to high school?’

‘Österyd, I suppose.’

‘Great. We’ll see each other there, then. Maybe we’ll be in the same class.’

‘Yes…’

Teresa didn’t want to be in the same class as Johannes, and his nonchalant attitude almost made her want to cry. She wished she could go somewhere far, far away where no one knew her, and start all over again. With…yes, with Johannes. But it was too soon for that. And it was already too late.

‘Teresa?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are we playing, or what?’

She pressed the start button and the fight began. Kuma lumbered into the arena. Lee made his moves. Suddenly Teresa felt it was absolutely essential for her to win. With a frenzy that was unusual for her, her fingers flew over the buttons as she tried to achieve the combos she could still remember.

But it was no use. Without disturbing one hair in his perfectly groomed fringe, Lee threw Kuma around all over the place, kicked him and beat him until he lay flat out in his red T-shirt, with his nose pointing skywards.

Teresa’s cheeks burned and she just wanted to scream. This was totally unreal. In reality the bear would have torn the model to pieces, ripped his head from his body. The floor would have been covered in blood.

Johannes moved house in the middle of May. Teresa stood in the window of the box room on the second floor munching on a piece of crispbread with peanut butter as she watched the last removal van disappear down the drive. A fly was dancing against the glass, and the gritty paste in Teresa’s mouth became difficult to swallow. Then it was over. Somewhere in the house Maria was shouting for Teresa to come and try on her graduation dress.

The dress that had fitted perfectly in the middle of May didn’t fit quite so well in the middle of June. Teresa stood right at the back along with the rest of Year 6, miming the words to the traditional songs, Den blomstertid nu kommer and Barfotavisan. She saw the youngest children racing around or hopping impatiently on the spot. The summer was almost here.

Arvid and Olof had their end-of-year assemblies later in the week and Göran had to work, so Teresa’s family was represented by Maria, along with Göran’s parents Ingrid and Johan. There wasn’t much conversation afterwards as they sat on a blanket behind the football field having their picnic. Johan sat fingering the necklace made of plastic beads which he still wore, and Ingrid handed over a gift voucher for five hundred kronor.

It was a beautiful day, perfect for the end of the school year. Wispy clouds drifted across a picture postcard blue sky, and children’s laughter rang out in the warm air. Teresa sat cross-legged on the blanket and realised she was really happy. When Ingrid placed a hand on her knee and said, ‘Just think, you’ve got the whole glorious summer ahead of you,’ she answered in all honesty, ‘Yes, it’ll be lovely.’

She would never fully understand what happened the following day.

She and Johannes had agreed over the phone that she would come over to his new apartment. When she stepped out into the garden at ten o’clock in the morning, she was filled with something light and happy. It was another lovely day, and it would be nice to cycle the four kilometres to Österyd. The seventy days of the summer holiday lay before her like empty, brightly coloured boxes, just waiting to be filled.

She had been given a new bike for her twelfth birthday just over six months earlier. Three gears-she didn’t want any more than that. She checked that the tyres were well pumped up before she jumped on and set off along the gravel track.

The stones crunched beneath the wheels and the breeze fanned her face as she sped along. She had to cycle a kilometre along the gravel track before she came out on the main road leading to Österyd. When a bird chirruped in a tree close by, she clearly formulated the thought: I am a child on the first day of my summer holiday. I am cycling along a fine gravel track.

She looked up and saw the track snaking away between the fields. She stopped pedalling and just coasted along. I am a child and the summer holiday has just…

Something changed.

At first she thought it was a storm cloud that had drifted over and blocked the sun, the feeling was so strong. But the sky was virtually cloudless, and the sun was pouring down its light over the world.

So how come she suddenly thought the gravel track stretching out ahead of her disappeared into darkness in the distance? After all, she knew this stretch very well. Two hundred metres along the flat, then up a hill, then the field where the sheep were, then a gentle slope down to the main road. But that wasn’t what she could see now. She could see a track leading towards the great unknown, surrounded by vast expanses upon which her feet had never walked.

She had thought that the world consisted of a number of different places, and the roads between them. That was all that existed, her little planet. It was as if she had been swimming around in a little creek, and now she had suddenly been dropped in the middle of the sea, with no land in sight in any direction. She couldn’t get her breath, she gripped the handlebars tightly and braked. She rubbed her eyes.

There’s something wrong with my eyes. I can’t see properly.

She got off her bike and looked back in the direction she had come from. The track snaked off in the same way and disappeared behind a grove of elder trees. She no longer believed that her house was at the end of the track. Everything had been erased or was being erased behind her, and the contours were blurred.

Fear clutched at her heart. She was a small person cast out into the universe, and she knew nothing about anything.

Stop it. What are you doing?

The fear ebbed slightly. Perhaps she could talk herself round. She tried. It worked to a certain extent, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling that everything behind her had been erased. She hauled herself back onto her bike and cycled home. The house was still there.

She rang Johannes and told him she’d had a puncture. The experience remained in her body. It wasn’t that she was afraid of leaving her own garden, it was just that she did so less and less often.

One Saturday Johannes came over to her house on his bike, although they hadn’t made any arrangements. He was wearing a pair of crumpled shorts that reached down to his knees, and a yellow T-shirt that emphasised his tan. Teresa felt almost shy as they hugged.

He had been to Majorca for a week with his mother, he explained as Teresa got out crispbread and peanut butter. His mother had met some guy who lived in Norrköping, and she had gone off to spend the weekend with him, so Johannes was as free as a bird. Maybe he could stay over?

Teresa wasn’t prepared for this disruption of her normal routine, so she replied evasively that she would have to check with her parents. As they sat opposite one another at the kitchen table, she felt for the first time that she didn’t know what to say to Johannes. It was as if he came from another world. The world outside her garden.

The situation was saved by Olof who came in to make himself a sandwich; after a while he and Johannes were deep in a discussion about Runescape. When Olof went to the toilet, Johannes asked, ‘Do you fancy going for a swim?’

‘I haven’t got a swimsuit.’

‘Well, we can always go skinny dipping.’

Teresa would gladly have given every last krona of her savings to avoid what happened next: a blush began to spread across her whole face, and she stared down at the floor. She heard Johannes snort.

‘Oh, come on. We sorted all that out, didn’t we?’

‘Well yes, but…’

That kiss. Teresa had thought Johannes wouldn’t remember it, but obviously he did, and that made her even more embarrassed. She wanted to slither out of her skin and dissolve into a puddle. Just to have something to do, she took out another piece of crispbread. The knife scraped loudly as she spread the peanut butter right to the very edges with exaggerated care. She took a bite and the crunch was deafening. Johannes looked at her and she looked out of the window.

When Olof came back and asked Johannes if he fancied a game of Runescape, Johannes glanced at Teresa and she shrugged. They sat down at the computer in the living room and Teresa watched as they took it in turns to kill off monsters and evil wizards.

She never got around to asking Maria and Göran if Johannes could stay over. He had dinner with them, chatting mainly with Arvid and Olof. After dinner he went out and got on his bike. Teresa followed him to say goodbye.

When he had rung the bell and set off, it was as if something occurred to him. He swung around and pulled up next to Teresa, his feet on the ground to balance the bike.

‘Teresa?’

‘What?’

‘We are friends, aren’t we? Even if things are a bit different, sort of.’

‘What do you mean?’

Johannes swirled his foot around in the gravel in a way that she remembered from when he was little.

‘Just…I don’t know. I mean, things aren’t the same anymore. But we can still be friends, can’t we?’

‘Is that what you want?’

Johannes frowned and considered the question. Then he looked Teresa in the eye and said very seriously, ‘Yes. That’s what I want.’

‘Then we’re friends.’

‘But is that what you want?’

‘Yes. That’s what I want.’

Johannes nodded several times. Then he gave a big smile and said, ‘Good,’ leaned forward and kissed Teresa on the cheek. He pushed down the pedals and disappeared down the drive, waving over his shoulder.

Teresa stood there with her arms dangling and watched him disappear along the gravel track. She saw the track dissolve in that same mist, she saw Johannes cycling along the track. In a minute he would be swallowed up by it, and there was nothing she could do.

Normally the members of the family lived in separate little worlds, but that summer they surrounded Teresa more closely. At first she thought it was because Johannes had moved away. Or perhaps it was his absence that made her notice her family’s presence.

Whatever the reason, Arvid and Olof started to ask if she wanted to join in when they were playing computer games. Maria tried to get her to come along when it was time to go shopping, and Göran was usually available for a game of cards. She began to suspect there had been a secret family meeting, and a decision had been made: everybody must play with Teresa.

At first she accepted it. She played and surfed the net with Olof and Arvid, she helped Maria in the kitchen and she played Cheat and Old Maid with Göran until they knew each other’s strategies so well they had to double and triple bluff to get anywhere.

But after a couple of weeks she began to feel there was something rather strained in their efforts, as if they were staff at a summer camp she was visiting.

One morning when she was standing in front of the mirror pulling her cheeks back to see what she would look like if she was Chinese and not fat, she saw something else instead. She let go of her cheeks and examined her face.

She had brown hair and thick, brown eyebrows. Her nose was small and slightly upturned, her lips were thin. The rest of the family also had brown hair and brown eyes, but in a lighter shade. They had fuller lips, and their noses were straighter and more slender than Teresa’s. She couldn’t see any resemblance between them.

It struck her with absolute certainty: I’m adopted.

The thought didn’t upset her; quite the reverse. It explained a great deal. She didn’t belong, it was that simple.

Something inside her told her it wasn’t true. She had seen the announcement of her birth that had appeared in the newspaper, she had seen her christening photo. Something else told her these things were fake. Her heart told her this, stubbornly pounding the new message into her blood: you don’t belong here.

In the middle of July, Arvid and Olof were going to a football camp. Maria and Göran had taken the opportunity to book a weekend away with Silja Line, along with Teresa. Now Teresa said she didn’t want to go. They tried to persuade her, but behind their pleading she thought she could hear an undertone of relief. The idea of getting away from the changeling for a couple of days. She thought they deserved it. They were nice people really, both of them. She had realised this now she didn’t belong to them anymore.

They left her with a supply of ready-cooked meals, and Maria wrote completely unnecessary little notes for her about how various things worked, but Teresa just let her carry on. Eventually they got in the car and drove off, waving furiously to Teresa as she stood on the porch. She went inside and closed the door behind her.

Silence.

And silence.

She crept through the hallway. Silence.

It wasn’t the first time she had been home alone, but the silence took on a completely different weight when she knew she was going to be on her own for forty hours. Göran and Maria would be home the following evening. The thought that the house was now hers was exciting and a little bit frightening. She could do whatever she wanted without the risk of anyone coming home and catching her.

She had no plans. The only thing she had thought about, or rather heard in her mind, was this very silence. The fact that every sound in the house would come from her. She tried not to make any noise at all as she padded into the kitchen.

Humming and buzzing. The fridge, humming quietly; the flies buzzing hysterically as they banged against the kitchen window. Teresa stopped and stared at them. There must have been ten flies dancing across the window pane, hurling their bodies against the hard glass in their quest for a gap, a way out. All Teresa had to do was lift the catch and open the window.

But the flies belonged to her now, just as everything in the house belonged to her. She folded her arms and looked at her flies. Then she sat down on a chair and looked at her flies. Waited. Sometimes a fly left the window and took a turn around the kitchen, but it was soon back, banging against the glass.

The fridge gave a rattle and stopped humming. The flies carried on buzzing. The faint thuds as they gathered themselves and made another onslaught on the glass, a fleeting higher note from one individual fly, like a disappointed question before it once again fell back into the collective note that filled Teresa’s head.

She sat there as if she were nailed to the chair, her auditory perception hypnotised by the humming and buzzing, just as the TV screen’s white hiss can draw the eye if you’re not careful. She was erased and recreated.

With a sudden movement she got up from the chair and went to the bathroom to fetch her mother’s hairspray. She found a box of matches in a kitchen drawer. She carefully folded the curtains back from the window until she had two clear rectangles of glass with the helpless little bodies flying around.

She struck a match and held it in front of hairspray’s nozzle, pressed the button. A cone of fire spurted towards the window, sweeping across the flies. She took her finger off the button. Four flies dropped onto the windowsill, their wings seared off. She pulled up her chair and sat down to study them.

One of the flies had lost only one wing and was spinning around on the spot like a propeller; it managed to get to the edge and fell on the floor. Teresa stamped on it. Of the remaining three, two were walking around like clumsy beetles, and one was lying on its back waving its legs in the air. Teresa pressed her thumb down on that one until it stopped waving its legs. When she had finished looking at the other two, she squashed them with the matchbox.

Two more sprays, and she had cleared the window. She rearranged the curtains and swept the corpses into her hand, threw them in the bin. Then she made herself a peanut butter sandwich. As she was eating, another fly appeared and started banging against the window. She left it alone.

She felt quite still inside, apart from a slight feeling of shame in her stomach which was not dissimilar to vertigo. She quite liked it. It was something to hold onto.

As she was putting the hairspray back she caught sight of her mother’s make-up. She made an attempt. Mascara and kohl around her eyes, concealer on the pimples on her cheeks, pink lipstick. She had no idea what to do with blusher, so she finished off by teasing up her hair with spray.

It looked bloody awful. The concealer, which should have brought about a straightforward improvement, was the wrong shade and showed up as dark patches on her pale skin. Apart from that, she looked like an ugly girl with colour on her face. She quickly got undressed and took a shower, scrubbing her face with soap several times.

She pressed the shower head against her pubes. It felt quite nice. She tried rubbing herself with her index finger, but felt nothing. She had watched Sex and the City a few times and realised it was possible to do things to yourself. But it didn’t work for her. Maybe she was doing it wrong.

She squatted down and rested her head in her hands as the warm water flowed over her back. She tried to cry. Only dry sobs emerged. She visualised how sorry for herself she was, and had almost succeeded when she decided she’d had enough, and turned the thermostat until the water was ice-cold. She let the cold water pour over her until her face was stiff and her skin covered in goose-pimples. Then she turned off the shower, dried herself and got dressed.

When she came out of the bathroom the house was just as silent, but her chilled body now felt like a crystal in the silence, an element of clarity in the still fuzziness. She went and sat at the computer, launched Google and typed in ‘poems’.

The result surprised her. It had just been an idea, because her head felt so clean and pure. She would read poems. But the top results were pages where people who weren’t poets had posted stuff they had written. She opened a page called poetry.now.

She read one poem, then another. She found a girl called Andrea, fifteen years old, whose poems she liked; she did a search using her name and found several more examples of her work. They were called ‘Loneliness’, ‘Is it just me?’ and ‘Black angel’.

Teresa read on, open-mouthed. She could have written those poems. They were about her. Andrea was a couple of years older than her and lived in Västerås, and yet they were almost exactly the same. She clicked on another page and discovered Malin from Stockholm, sixteen years old, who had written a poem called ‘The Bubble’, in which she described how she lived inside a bubble whose walls were impossible to break down.

That was exactly how it was. Teresa felt the same, but hadn’t found those particular words. Nobody else could see the bubble, but she was shut inside it all the time. Malin had put it into words.

Teresa scrolled down and saw that some people had left comments about the poem, saying it was really good and well written and that they felt the same. A shiver ran through Teresa’s body and she felt as if she had a fever. She clicked on the box that said ‘leave a comment’ and was asked to log in.

She got up and walked around the living room, then went into Göran and Maria’s bedroom, where she lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Then she rolled herself in the duvet and curled up, whimpering like a puppy.

I’m too small.

Almost everyone writing on poetry.now was a girl. The youngest she had found was Matilda, fourteen years old. Teresa thought her poem, ‘Tears’, was childish. And she was twelve, almost thirteen. She tossed and turned in the bed until she started sweating and relaxed. All these other girls who were older than her but felt the same, where were they? What did they look like?

She got out of bed and a feeling of restlessness she couldn’t pin down drove her all over the house. When she got to the bathroom she picked up the hairspray. The box of matches was still on the kitchen table. Five flies had appeared since she was last here. She brought them all down with one circular spraying movement. She looked at them as they crawled around on the windowsill.

In her mother’s sewing box she found a pack of pins. She nailed the flies to the windowsill, one by one. They remained alive, waving their little legs. The feeling of shame in her stomach grew until she could almost see it, touch it. A sticky, orange jellyfish floating just beneath her ribcage.

She took a deep breath and tried to get rid of the jellyfish. It didn’t go away, but it shrank. She took another deep breath. The jellyfish disappeared. She looked at the skewered flies.

That’s how simple it is, she thought. It isn’t you who makes the decisions. It’s me.

She fetched a small wooden chopping board and transferred the flies. One of them who had tiny bits of wing still attached to its body buzzed feebly when she picked it up, impaled on the pin, but fell silent when it was secured to its new base. She took the board into the living room and placed it next to the computer.

She spent a while sorting out an email address, which was a requirement for creating an account at poetry.now. When the registration page for Hotmail asked for her date of birth, she made herself three years older than she was, just to be on the safe side. She gave the same date when she registered with poetry.now.

From time to time she looked at the flies. They were all still alive. She would have liked to know what kind of food she could give them so they would stay alive. But who knows what flies eat?

Using her grandfather’s surname and her own middle name, she became Josefin Lindström from Rimsta, fifteen years old. She was in.

She couldn’t get to sleep that night. After tossing and turning for a couple of hours, she got up and put on her dressing gown. The house felt even more silent and mysterious with the darkness outside the window. She crept cautiously down the stairs.

As she approached the living room, she started to feel afraid. She had the feeling there was a creature in there. A huge, insect-like creature with slime dripping from its jaws, just waiting to grab her. She took a deep breath, and another. Then she switched on the light.

Nothing. The chopping board was where she had left it, next to the computer. She padded over and looked. All the flies had stopped moving. She pulled out a pin and removed the fly. It was dead. It had suffered during its final hours of life, but now it was dead.

Teresa stuck the pin in her arm. A drop of blood welled up. She licked it off. Then she went and fetched a small cushion and lay down on the floor with the cushion under her head. She closed her eyes and pretended she was dead.

After a few minutes she had fallen asleep.

Österyd usually had two classes in each year group at high school level, and the policy was to move children on from juniors to high school. Many children came in at that stage from village schools, and the aim was to break up the structure so that the new arrivals would find it easier to fit in.

Teresa’s class was joined by a strikingly pretty girl from Synninge called Agnes; Mikael, who from day one looked and behaved like a fight just waiting to happen, plus a number of others with less outstanding characteristics. Johannes ended up in the parallel class.

Everyone checked each other out, testing the waters, and Teresa did her best not to draw attention to herself in any way. After a few weeks she had established herself in the role of the quiet girl who minded her own business, but without appearing to be some kind of idiot who needed to be taught a lesson.

She carried on using Arvid and Olof’s computer when it was available, and on her thirteenth birthday she was allowed to take it over when her brothers bought a new one with a more powerful processor. The first thing she did with the computer that now belonged to her was to set a password. When she was asked to type in her password twice, she chose gravel pit for no real reason.

When she logged on to poetry.now, she found a new poem written by a thirteen-year-old girl called Bim. Nothing good could come of a name like that, but to Teresa’s surprise she really liked the poem, which was called ‘Evil’:

where I am no one can be

inside the brain lies thinking

porridge is not good

talk misleads

the name does not mean me

the moon is my father

It was incomprehensible in a way that appealed to Teresa. Concrete and vaguely unpleasant. Entirely to her taste. Besides which it was nice to find someone of her own age who wrote like that.

Under the guise of her alter ego Josefin she wrote a comment praising the poem, and said she hoped Bim would write more. When she had sent the comment it occurred to her that Bim could have done exactly the same as her, but the opposite way round. She might be a much older girl, or even a boy.

She scrolled through several new poems without finding anything else she liked. Then she did what she hadn’t dared to do while the computer didn’t belong to her. She opened a blank Word document so that she could write a contribution of her own for poetry.now. Not one of the old poems in her exercise book, but something completely new. Something current.

The cursor flashed, exhorting her to key in the first word. She sat with her fingers resting on the keys. Nothing came to her. She wrote ‘I am sitting here’ and deleted it immediately. She wrote ‘talk misleads’ and stared at the two words for a long time. Then she deleted them.

She went and lay on her bed, buried her face in the pillow, folded the sides of the pillow over her ears and pressed hard. Everything was suddenly dark and silent, and patterns made of golden threads danced on the inside of her eyelids. The threads turned and twisted to form the word ‘everyone’. Suddenly a whole sentence was flashing at her.

Everyone is actually called something else.

She lay there breathing heavily, waiting for more. Nothing came, so with her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat she sat down at the computer and wrote, ‘Everyone is actually called something else.’

She didn’t understand what it meant, but it was true. Not only on the poetry forum, but everywhere. Inside every person there is another person. She wrote that down too. With a sudden burst of daring she put down the two words from Bim and added to them. Then she rounded it off with a final line.

She pushed back her chair and looked at the words she had written.

Everyone is actually called something else

Inside every person there is another person

Talk misleads and behind the words are other words

We can be seen only when it is dark

We can be heard only when there is silence

Before she had time to change her mind, she copied the poem into ‘make a contribution’ on poetry.now. She didn’t know whether the poem was any good, but it looked like a real poem, and what she had written was true.

She sat with her fingers on the keys and there was absolute silence inside her head. Nothing more came.

How do you actually do this?

The following day she went straight to the library after school. There were three shelves of poetry, comprising perhaps two hundred books. She had no idea where to start. Under ‘new arrivals’ was a book called Pitbull Terrier. It had a red cover showing a black monster dog, and was written by somebody called Kristian Lundberg. Teresa took it off the shelf and read the first lines of the first poem:

Poems about

the month of April are all banal

We spit on poems like that

Poems like that are as predictable as death

Teresa sat down in an armchair and carried on reading. She hadn’t thought poems in books could look like this. There was a lot she didn’t understand, of course, but there were almost no difficult words and a lot of the pictures were very easy to get her head around. She particularly liked ‘the tide of death is rising’.

After an hour she had read the whole book, and had a slight headache. She looked along the shelf and found two more collections by Kristian Lundberg. After glancing around she pushed them into her school bag along with Pitbull Terrier and cycled home.

When she logged onto poetry.now she saw that someone had left a comment about her poem. Bim.

‘good poem i am also other though i hear when there is sound write about porridge’

Teresa read these few words over and over again. ‘i am also other’ could mean that Bim, like Teresa, was a different person from the one she was pretending to be on the forum. Or perhaps the whole thing meant something else, just like her own poem.

There was, however, no doubt about one thing: those first two words. It was the first positive comment anyone had made about something she had written.

When she had finished staring at Bim’s words, she noticed that it actually said ‘Comments (2)’ below the poem. She scrolled down and found another reaction, this time from Caroline, aged seventeen. It said, ‘A completely incomprehensible poem about nothing. Get a life.’

Teresa stopped breathing. Her eyes prickled and the tears began to well. She clamped her hands together. Then she got up, fetched a hand towel and rubbed her eyes so hard that her eyelids swelled up. She scrunched up the towel and breathed into it, slowly and deeply.

She sat down at the computer again, went into Hotmail and got herself a new address, then created a new account at poetry.now. This time she was Sara from Stockholm, eighteen years old. She searched for Caroline, and found that she had written a number of poems. Most were about unhappiness in love. Boys who had betrayed her. The comments were very positive. Sara from Stockholm was of a different opinion. She said, ‘I have read several of your poems about unhappiness in love and it seems to me that you don’t really deserve anything else. You are a vile, self-obsessed person no one could ever love.’

She could hardly breathe as she pressed send. Then she lay down on her bed and took out one of the poetry collections she had stolen from the library. It was called He Who Does Not Speak Is Dead.

It seemed to be completely unopened. Nobody had read it before her.

The following day Teresa became acquainted with the term ‘troll’. She had thought no one would react to Sara’s comments. She was wrong. Caroline seemed to have a lot of fans on poetry.now, and eight people had commented on her comment, a couple of them at some length.

Every single comment, whether long or short, made it clear that Sara was a very bad person who had no feelings-you come up with something better, then. And so on. In two of the replies she was called a ‘troll’, and realised it was some kind of term. She looked it up and found that ‘troll’ came from trolling: dragging a baited hook through a shoal of fish and waiting for them to bite. Translated to internet forums: posting unpleasant or stupid comments just to get a reaction. A person who does this is a troll.

Teresa crossed her arms tightly over her chest and looked out of the window. She felt happy and peaceful. Lots of girls had read what she’d written and felt compelled to express their point of view. Because she was a troll.

I am a troll.

It suited her perfectly. She lived in the world of humans even though she had been swapped in her cradle, and really belonged to the dark, wild forest. A troll.

During the winter and the spring she was a regular visitor to the library, reading her way methodically through the poetry section. When she got home, trolling took up a considerable amount of her time. She created several different aliases on various forums. She was Jeanette, aged fourteen and Linda, twenty-two. On a forum dealing with anorexia and bulimia she was My, aged seventeen, and received over thirty-five replies to her contribution in which she stated that all anorexics should be force fed and then have their mouths taped shut so they couldn’t run off and throw up.

By chance she ended up on a forum for people who enjoyed renovating old houses. For this she created Johan, twenty-eight, who absolutely loved vandalising, even burning down, houses like that. On a site for those who considered themselves environmentally friendly Tomas, forty-two, wrote about how much he adored his 4x4, and campaigned for a reduction in the tax on petrol.

But she tended to stick to forums like Lunarstorm, where young girls discussed their problems. Their indignant little comments would make her shudder with pleasure, and as time went by she discovered an even more effective weapon than cynicism, namely irony.

On a forum about animal rights, containing despairing accounts of cruelty towards the dear little furry creatures, Elvira, fifteen, wrote about an experiment in Japan where they had poked out the eyes of eight hundred baby rabbits just to see if it affected their hearing, then set fire to them to see if the little blind screaming bunnies could find their way out of a labyrinth. Elvira got over forty replies, quivering with rage over the cruelty of man.

The only exception was the wolves. On a forum where the rights of wolves were discussed, her alias Josefin maintained a more reasonable tone, and put forward Teresa’s own views. She needed at least one place where she could be herself, or almost herself.

Trolling gave her a key insight: you don’t need much energy to provoke a powerful reaction, as long as you use that energy in the right way. Something as simple as a broken plastic fork stuck in the lock of a classroom door could lead to a circus lasting at least half an hour, involving the caretaker, a locksmith, teachers and relocated lessons, and it only took five seconds to do.

How long did it take to put a drawing pin on a chair, and how much chaos did that cause? It was just like on the internet: all it took was a few clicks, a few words in the right place and in seconds there were twenty people busy expending far more time and energy on responding than it had taken her to write the comment in the first place.

Teresa might not have looked like much to the rest of the world, but through her alter egos and her well-planned little tricks she, the troll, took up more of other people’s time and thoughts than pretty Agnes, for example, could ever hope to do.

Everybody loved Agnes, and Teresa just couldn’t work her out. She was so bloody nice. All the pretty girls Teresa had known had been full of themselves, stupid, and obsessed with their appearance. Not Agnes. She was nice to everybody, worked hard in school and didn’t seem to care at all about how she looked.

If she had her hair in plaits she looked cute, if she wore it loose she looked pretty, and if she tied a scarf around her head she was as beautiful as a movie star, but without seeming to notice. Teresa ought to have hated Agnes, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

One afternoon when Teresa was standing by the poetry section in the library flicking through some newly arrived collections, she heard a discreet ‘Hi’ behind her. She turned around and was met by a breath of fresh air mixed with the scent of flowers, emanating from Agnes.

Teresa said, ‘Hi,’ and felt a blush spread over her cheeks. As if she were about to sit an exam and hadn’t done a stroke of work. She stood there like a lump, saying nothing. Agnes seemed uncomfortable too, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Then she pointed to the shelf behind Teresa. ‘I was just going to…’

Teresa moved to one side and surreptitiously watched Agnes, who was glancing over the thin spines of the books. When she was apparently unable to find what she was looking for, she began to move slowly along the rows, reading every single title.

‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’ asked Teresa.

‘Yes,’ said Agnes. ‘It said on the computer that they had several books by Kristian Lundberg, but I can’t find them.’

‘Do you read Kristian Lundberg?’

‘Why?’

‘No, I just…nothing.’

‘Do you?’

‘I might have read the odd thing.’

Agnes carried on peering at the section where the books should have been, and pulled out a volume of Kristina Lugn’s collected poems instead. She flicked aimlessly through it and said, ‘It was Mum who said I ought to look at that Lundberg guy. But I don’t know, I mean he’s not much fun, is he?’

‘No, well, not like Kristina Lugn anyway.’

Agnes shook her head and smiled the smile that could probably bring down trees. ‘I think she’s good, because her poems are like really really sad and really really funny at the same time.’

All Teresa could come up with was, ‘Right.’ She didn’t understand what somebody like Agnes could get out of Kristina Lugn’s splenetic humour. But she crouched down and pulled out Close to the Eye, Anders Bodegård’s translation of poems by Wislawa Szymborska. She held it out to Agnes and said, ‘Try this. It’s quite funny too.’

Agnes opened the book at random and started to read a poem. It took Teresa a few seconds to realise she was standing there holding her breath. She exhaled silently and slowly as she contemplated Agnes, whose plaits lay on either side of the book, framing the picture and creating an image that could have been used in advertising to promote literacy.

Agnes giggled, closed the book and looked at the front and the back. ‘She won the Nobel Prize, didn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

Agnes gazed at the shelves full of poetry, and sighed. ‘Do you read a lot?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘I don’t really know where to start.’

Teresa pointed at the book in Agnes’ hand. ‘Start with that one, then.’

Now it was just the two of them, Teresa was beginning to suspect that Agnes wasn’t quite so clever as she appeared to be in school. Agnes probably needed clear directives and the chance to go over things if her intelligence was going to shine.

Agnes fingered the Szymborska book, mumbled, ‘Cool, thanks,’ and went over to the issue desk. Teresa pretended to be reading Kristina Lugn, but secretly watched Agnes as she handed over the book Teresa had recommended, then got it back. Teresa had the unusual sense of being on home ground. She had read at least forty of the books on the shelves behind her, and they carried her like a silent cheer squad.

She could easily have made a fool of Agnes, with the home crowd behind her, but she hadn’t done it.

The encounter in the library didn’t make Teresa and Agnes friends-far from it. But it created a kind of secret mutual understanding. A week before the summer holidays Agnes told Teresa during the lunch break that she had now read everything by Szymborska. She wondered if Teresa had listened to Bright Eyes? Teresa said she hadn’t, and the next day Agnes brought in a CD of Lifted that she’d burned.

That was all it was. And perhaps that’s all there could be with Agnes. Even though she was popular, there was a kind of remoteness about her, a sense of distance between her and those around her which had nothing to do with superciliousness. It was as if she arrived in every moment three seconds after it had happened, and you never saw her sitting whispering with another girl, their heads close together. She wasn’t really there. It was impossible to say whether this was down to absent-mindedness, insecurity or something else. Teresa often found herself secretly studying Agnes. It didn’t make her any the wiser.

To Teresa’s amazement, not only did she like Bright Eyes-or Conor Oberst, as she discovered he was actually called-she thought he was absolutely brilliant. That fragile voice and those dark, well-written lyrics.

For the first time in her life she bought a CD, even though she already had the copy Agnes had burned for her. Bright Eyes was the first artist she thought deserved that respect. He became her constant companion during the long summer holiday.

It must have happened during the summer. At any rate it was a done deal when Teresa started Year 8 in the autumn. Agnes and Johannes were an item. She didn’t know how it had happened, but she saw them kissing in the playground before they went off to their respective classes for registration.

The sight created such a storm inside her that her analytical ability went haywire. She couldn’t work out how she felt, or why. Therefore she took the picture of the two of them, screwed it up and tried to toss it into a dark corner right at the back of her head where she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

It didn’t go too well. That same evening she was lying on her bed listening to Bright Eyes. The song said it was the first day of his life, that he was glad he hadn’t died before he met someone, and Teresa felt hot tears of fury spring to her eyes.

She plugged the MP3 player into her computer and deleted every single Bright Eyes track. Then she deleted the entire playlist. Unfortunately she had also bought every one of his CDs. She gathered them up, went down to the cellar and placed them on the chopping block. Only then did she realise how ridiculous her behaviour was, and lowered the axe.

I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.

Bright Eyes was not Agnes’ property. He couldn’t be, since Agnes probably didn’t understand a single word of the lyrics. What could those lines of alienation, of nonchalant despair, possibly mean to Agnes? Nothing. They were just cool words. Cool words to listen to with Johannes, curled up together in Agnes’ bed…

Teresa put down the axe, went up to her room and replaced the CDs in the rack.

She sat down at the computer. On the Friends discussion forum for victims of bullying she wrote a long contribution in defence of school massacres. Which weapons could be used in Sweden, where it was so difficult to get hold of firearms. She was expecting lots of replies.

Unfortunately her contribution was removed before anyone had time to respond, so instead she used a different alias and wrote a real tear-jerker about the terrible bullying she had been subjected to, notes with horrible things written on them stapled to her body. They didn’t dare remove that, and she got lots and lots of sympathy which didn’t touch her at all.

As the autumn swept in with falling leaves and chilly afternoons, it was clear that Agnes and Johannes were serious about their relationship. Teresa had never thought otherwise.

They were always together at break and lunchtime, and had to put up with a certain amount of envious teasing, which they ignored completely. After a while the scornful comments dried up, and soon the two of them were an institution, a fact that simply had to be accepted.

Teresa remained neutral. Johannes said hello to her in the corridor and sometimes they chatted for a while, with or without Agnes. Eventually Teresa found she had done the same as everyone else, at least on one level: she had accepted the situation. It was kind of completely natural for those two to be together. You only had to look at them to see that it was as if they were made for each other.

On another level it made you want to throw up. But then again, that was a different story.

It eventually got to the point where an outside observer might regard Johannes, Agnes and Teresa as a little trio. Not in the way that Johannes and Agnes were a couple, but Teresa was the third person who was seen around them, who talked to them more than anyone else.

In her loneliness Teresa came up with ideas like poking herself in the eye with a hand blender or banging her head against a wall until it split open.

At the end of September, something happened that was to change a lot of things.

Teresa’s family were all caught up in different activities and interests; they often ate at different times, all living in a world of their own under the same roof. There was only one thing that brought them all together, and that was Idol. Arvid and Olof started watching first, and one by one the rest of the family were drawn into the talent show’s enchanted circle.

Perhaps it was a subconscious emergency measure. Without Idol the family would probably never have sat down together, could maybe even have been described as dysfunctional, in need of help. But now there was Idol, and in the absence of anything else it had turned into a little family occasion, with tasty snacks and lively conversation of a kind that never happened in their everyday existence.

It was on Idol that Teresa saw Tora for the first time. Tora Larsson from Stockholm. Even her audition was an unusual story. Boys and girls would come in and sing like broken cement mixers, then be absolutely furious with the judges when they didn’t get any further. Or they sang well, and were ecstatic when they found out they’d got through.

Tora was different. Small and thin, with long blonde hair, she walked into the studio and fixed her eyes on a point above the judges’ heads. She said. ‘My name is Tora Larsson. I am going to sing.’

The judges laughed indulgently and one of them said, ‘And are you going to sing something special for us?’

Tora shook her head, and the judges pulled faces as if they felt sorry for a very small child. ‘So what’s the name of the song you’re going to sing?’

‘I don’t know.’

The judges looked at each other and seemed to be on the point of asking someone to come and remove the girl. Then she began to sing. Teresa recognised the song, but couldn’t place it.

A thousand and one nights I lay alone,

Alone and dreaming

Dreaming of a friend

A friend like you…

The usual thing was for the optimistic contestants to sing a contemporary song, hoping that a little of the stardust from the original artists would rub off on them. Not Tora. Unless Teresa was very much mistaken, this song was way past its sell-by date.

But the voice, the voice. And the way she sang. Teresa sat motionless on the sofa, and it was as if that voice went straight through her breastbone. Tora Larsson didn’t make any gestures, didn’t try to play any kind of part. She simply sang, and it moved Teresa even though she didn’t understand why. Even the judges sat there lit up like candles for the minute or so she was singing. Then the voice fell silent, and they came to and looked at each other.

‘You’re definitely through,’ said one of them. ‘You have a voice like…I don’t know how to describe it. If certain artists could kill for that voice, we’d have a bloodbath here. You’re through, one hundred per cent. But you must learn to engage with the audience.’

Tora nodded briefly and walked towards the door. Not the slightest expression of joy, not a word of thanks. She didn’t even look the judges in the eye. One of them clearly still felt the need to justify their existence, and before Tora opened the door he called out: ‘And next time try to choose a song that’s more of a challenge. A more difficult song.’

Tora half-turned, and Teresa just managed to catch a glimpse of a totally alien expression on her face. A hint of a grimace, suggesting that she had just been stabbed in the back and was about to unsheathe her claws. Then she turned away and walked out.

The family on the sofa started arguing; they were all agreed that the girl had a fantastic voice, but she hadn’t given much in the way of a performance, blah blah blah. Teresa didn’t listen and didn’t join in. Tora had done the most brilliant audition she had ever seen on Idol, because she didn’t seem to give a toss about any of it, even though she was clearly the best. That was the way to do it. Teresa had already chosen her winner.

On the way up to her room that night she was humming to herself:

Alone and dreaming

Dreaming of a friend

A friend like you…