Little Star

THE GIRL WITH GOLDEN HAIR

When Jerry looked back on his life, he could clearly distinguish a number of points where it had changed direction, always for the worse. The most extreme change of course had occurred that afternoon in October 2005 when he found his parents massacred on the cellar floor. It was still unclear to what extent the shift this had brought about was positive or negative.

He had sat on the stairs for a long time, considering the situation. Theres continued dissecting Lennart and Laila with the tools she had to hand until he asked her to stop, because the noise was making it difficult to think. When she moved towards him he told her to stay where she was, and Theres flopped down on her bottom in the pool of blood on the floor.

He assumed a lot of people would have panicked, started screaming or throwing up or something along those lines. The scene in front of him was the most disgusting thing you could imagine. But perhaps there was a positive side-effect from watching all those films showing extreme violence after all. He’d seen most things-much worse than what Theres had done, in fact. For example, she wasn’t actually eating his parents.

Or perhaps he was just numb, incapable of taking in the situation on any other level apart from a scene in a film in which he was now required to participate. The problem was that he hadn’t been given a script, and hadn’t a clue what to do.

He realised he would have to phone the police, and went through the information he had assimilated from dozens of films and true crime series. He knew he had an alibi that could be checked, but that this alibi was getting weaker by the minute. He didn’t know how long Lennart and Laila had been dead, but Theres must have been working for quite some time to make such a comprehensive mess of them.

Of course the simplest thing would be to ring the police and explain exactly what had happened. He would probably get into trouble because he had known about Theres’ existence but hadn’t reported it, he might get a year inside, but that would be it. Lennart and Laila would be buried and Theres would end up in the loony bin. End of story.

No. No. That was no good at all. He did not want that to happen. It was the bit about Theres and the loony bin that really stuck in his throat. However crazy she was-and we’re talking seriously crazy here-he didn’t want to see her sitting in some cell picking at her nails for the rest of her life. So he just had think of something, and fast.

After pondering for a while he had a useless plan that was the best he could come up with.

‘Theres?’ he said. The girl didn’t look at him, but she did turn her head in his direction. ‘I think you’d better…’ He broke off, rephrased what he was going to say. ‘Go and change your clothes.’

The girl didn’t react. He didn’t want to go over to her, didn’t want to get too close to the scene of the crime where he might be contaminated, to use the technical term, or leave traces behind. In a louder voice he said, ‘Go to your room. Put on some clean clothes. Now.’

The girl stood up, leaving a trail of blood behind her as she walked through the cellar. Jerry went upstairs and gathered together a sleeping bag, a loaf of bread, a tube of caviar and a torch. He went outside and around the house, then down the cellar steps and in through the other door.

Being careful not to step in any of the bloodstains, he went to Theres’ room and found her sitting on the bed and staring at the wall. She had changed into a clean velour tracksuit but her blonde hair was caked with dried blood and her hands, face and feet were covered in almost-black, coagulated clumps. For the first time since the whole thing had started, Jerry felt his stomach turn over. Seeing the remains of his parents stuck to Theres’ skin was somehow more unpleasant than the sight of their bodies.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going.’

‘Where?’

‘Out. You have to hide.’

Theres shook her head. ‘Not out.’

Jerry closed his eyes. In the midst of the chaos Theres had created, he had managed to forget that she had more problems with her view of the world than the obvious ones. He had to work from her perceptions.

‘The big people are coming,’ he said. ‘They’re coming here. Soon. You have to get away.’

The girl hunched her shoulders as if she was trying to protect herself from a blow. ‘The big people?’

‘Yes. They know you’re here.’

In a single movement the girl got up from the bed and grabbed hold of a small axe that was lying on the floor. It showed signs of recent use. She moved towards Jerry.

‘Stop!’ he said. Theres stopped. ‘What are you thinking of doing with that axe?’

Theres raised and lowered the axe. ‘The big people.’

Jerry moved back a step to make sure he was out of range, and said, ‘OK. OK. I’m going to ask you a question now, and I want an honest answer.’ Jerry snorted at his own stupidity. Had he ever heard Theres lie? No. He didn’t believe she was even capable of lying. And yet it was a question he needed her to answer. He pointed at the axe.

‘Are you intending to hit me with that?’

Theres shook her head.

‘Are you intending to hit me or stab me or…chop me up in any way?’

Another shake of the head. Sussing out the reason why Theres regarded him differently from his parents could wait for a later conversation. Right now all Jerry needed to know was that being around her didn’t mean he was in mortal danger. To be on the safe side, he added, ‘Good. Because if you do anything to me, the big people will come and get you. Straight away. Bang, get it? You are not to touch me, is that clear?’

Theres nodded, and Jerry realised that what he had just said was true, basically. He told Theres to put on some shoes, and made sure he kept his eye on her as they left the room.

When he opened the outside door Theres stood there as if she was glued to the floor, refusing to move and staring out into the darkness with big eyes. Enticing her, exhorting her to move forward didn’t help, so instead he pretended to listen hard, then whispered with simulated fear, ‘Come on, sis! They’re coming, they’re coming! I can hear their machines!’

At last Theres unglued her feet from the floor, and Jerry had to move out of the way as she rushed towards the doorway with the axe firmly clutched to her chest. She carried on up the garden, looking to right and left, adrenaline-fuelled panic in every movement. Jerry made the most of the opportunity and fled towards the forest with her.

Jerry had a childhood memory of an opening among the trees about five hundred metres into the forest, and he managed to find it with the help of the torch. The branches of a huge oak hung down over the glade, and the ground was covered in dry leaves. He pulled out the sleeping bag, unzipped it and showed Theres how to crawl inside. Then he gave her the torch, the bread and the caviar.

‘OK sis,’ he said. ‘You’ve caused a hell of a problem, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to fix this. But you’re to stay here, OK? I’ll come back as soon as I can. Do you understand?’

Theres shook her head violently, and glanced anxiously around the glade where the fir trees stood in dark ranks. ‘Not go.’

‘Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘I have to. Otherwise we’ve had it. If I don’t go… The big people will come and take both of us if I don’t go. I have to go back and fool them. That’s just the way it is.’

Theres wrapped her arms around her knees and curled up into a ball. Jerry crouched down and tried to catch her eye, but without success. He picked up the torch and shone it on her. She was shivering, as if she was terribly cold.

It was always going to end up like this.

What he didn’t understand was why he had regarded the whole situation as normal for such a long time. Why he had got used to the fact that his parents had a girl in the cellar, a girl who was now thirteen years old and didn’t know a thing about the world. Why this had become perfectly natural.

And now he was stuck with the consequences. A trembling girl he was going to have to leave alone in the forest, his parents chopped up into little bits back at home. He could have put a stop to it all long ago. And yet he had to carry on now, because there was nothing else he could do. He got up. Theres grabbed at his trouser leg.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to. They’ll come for us otherwise. Both of us. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He pointed at the sleeping bag. ‘Keep warm.’

Theres mumbled, ‘The big people are dangerous. You’ll be dead.’

Jerry couldn’t help smiling. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll be back.’ He didn’t dare delay any longer, so without any further words of farewell he turned and left Theres in the glade.

Behind him Theres held out the axe, as if she were offering it to him. For protection. But Jerry had already disappeared in the darkness, and for the first time since she was found, the girl was alone in the vast outdoors.

Five minutes after he got back in the house, Jerry called the police. Five minutes which he used for something he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to do. To grieve. With his head drooping he stood motionless in the middle of the hallway as a lump formed in his stomach. He let it grow, tasting its colour and weight.

Without moving a muscle, in the middle of the hallway in his childhood home. All the times he had taken off his shoes in this hallway, the shoes getting bigger and bigger. The aroma of cooking from the kitchen, or bread baking. Happy or sad, coming home from nursery or school. Never again. Never again in this house, never again with his parents.

The lump rose and fell inside him. He gave himself five minutes to take his leave of everything. He stood completely still. He didn’t cry. After five minutes he went to the telephone in the kitchen, rang the emergency number and explained that he had just got home and found his mother and father brutally murdered. He didn’t recognise his own voice.

Then he sat down on a chair in the kitchen. While he waited for the police, he tried to work out how he ought to behave. What he would say wasn’t difficult. He had found them on the floor of the cellar, end of story, he didn’t know anymore. He’d gone into shock and it had been twenty minutes before he called the police.

It was the strange voice he had heard coming out of his mouth that worried him. How should he talk, how should he behave? He calmed himself down with the thought that there was probably no set pattern. Double murders were unlikely to be an everyday occurrence for the Norrtälje police, so they would have nothing to compare with, nothing to make his behaviour appear suspicious.

However, he did get up from his chair and go outside to wait. A normal person wouldn’t want to sit in the house where his parents lay murdered.

Would they?

He knew nothing, and could only hope that whoever was on their way knew nothing either.

As he had expected he immediately became the prime suspect and was taken into custody. He was interrogated in minute detail over what had happened when he found his mother and father, and what he had done during the course of the day.

He had hoped he would be released after a few hours, but that didn’t happen. The bodies had to be removed and the forensic pathologists had to do their job, and the information he had given had to be checked. Jerry spent the night on a bunk bed in a cell, where grief over his parents and anxiety over Theres kept him wide awake.

In the middle of the night he was brought up for further questioning with regard to the fact that they had found traces of someone living in the cellar. Clothes, jars of baby food, spoons with comparatively recent remains of food on them. What did he know about this? He knew nothing. He didn’t visit his parents all that often, and had no idea what they got up to.

Since he had been expecting these questions, and suspected there would be fingerprints, he admitted that he had been in his old room a few times. But he hadn’t seen any signs of anyone else living there, not a thing. This was something new to him, a complete bloody mystery, in fact. Who did they think had been living there?

He was taken back to his cell to pick more foam out of his mattress, and towards morning he was released without a world of explanation. He was asked to stay in the Norrtälje area.

After a bus ride and a short hitch-hike he was back in the garden. There was no sign of activity from the outside, but blue and white tape was fastened across the front door. Jerry looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was following him. It felt as if someone was, but it might just as easily be a ghost created by his exhausted brain.

He didn’t dare to believe he had got off so lightly. Presumably the police had checked his alibi and gathered evidence that made him an unlikely murderer, but he had so much valuable information that he kind of thought it ought to show. That they’d be back to drag it out of him.

He got on his motorbike and started the engine. As he rode out onto the gravel track that would take him to the glade from the opposite direction, he decided that, with the greatest respect, he didn’t give a damn about any of it. They would just have to carry on as best they could. The only thing that mattered now was Theres.

Why this was the case he had no idea. He hated people. The police officers who had questioned him during the night had been arseholes to a man, and his only pleasure had been in comprehensively fooling them. He wasn’t really mourning his parents, but his childhood. He no longer had any friends. But Theres.

Theres?

No. He couldn’t get his head round it. It was just something he had to do. She was kind of the only person he didn’t feel the slightest scrap of hatred or contempt for. Perhaps it was that simple.

He propped the motorbike against a tree in the forest, waited for five minutes to be on the safe side, just to make sure no one was following him. Then he set off.

It took him over half an hour to find the glade because he was coming from the wrong direction, and when he did find it he was met by the very thing he had feared: nothing. The glade was empty. Only the dry leaves, scattered over the ground or blown into piles. He rubbed his eyes.

What the fuck happens now?

The forest was not large. Sooner or later Theres would reach a track, someone would see her, someone would…it was impossible to work through all the links in the chain. Just one cold fact remained. They were fucked, big time.

Jerry looked around and caught sight of something blue on the edge of the forest. The unopened tube of Kalles Caviar had been thrown a couple of metres in among the trees. Next to it lay the bag containing the sliced loaf, also unopened. Only the sleeping bag and the torch were missing. Perhaps she had taken them with her.

Before long the shit would really hit the fan. But for the time being he was here in this silent glade in the middle of the forest, where no bastard had any questions or accusations to throw at him. He took the bread and the tube of caviar and sat down on the ground in the middle of the glade, squeezed a generous amount of caviar on a slice of bread, slapped another slice on top and tucked in.

He closed his eyes and chewed. His body felt doughy after a night in the cells, and the sticky mess he was swallowing didn’t help. He dreamed of just sitting there, disintegrating, rotting away and turning into the formless mass he felt like. Becoming one with nature in the silent stillness.

Then came the hiccup. He had swallowed too quickly.

He hiccupped and hiccupped, and couldn’t stop. Then came the sobs, competing with the hiccups to make his body jerk as he sat there. So much for his quiet absorption into the earth. He put his head between his knees. Suddenly he threw caution to the winds, flung his head back and yelled, ‘THERES! THEERRREESS!’

The bellow stopped both the sobbing and the hiccupping. Without any real hope he listened for an answer. None came. However, there was a rustling sound among the leaves a couple of metres from where he was sitting. His mouth hanging open, he saw a hand shoot up out of the ground. The only thing his tired brain could come up with was the poster for some zombie film, and his instinctive reaction was to shuffle backwards half a metre.

Then his brain made the right connections and he crawled forward to help Theres out. She wasn’t just covered in leaves. With the help of the axe she had hacked away and dug herself a hole, crawled into it wrapped in the sleeping bag, then scooped earth and leaves over her until she was invisible.

Jerry dug away a considerable amount of earth with his hands until his sister lay exposed in her blue cocoon. He wondered what she would have done if he’d been kept in custody for a week. Would she just have stayed in her hole? Maybe she would. He unzipped the sleeping bag and helped her to crawl out. She was still clutching the axe.

‘You’re just too fucking much, you are,’ he said.

Theres looked around carefully, examining the trees as if they might attack her at any moment, and asked, ‘Big people gone?’

‘Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘They’ve gone now. All gone.’

During the next few weeks Jerry was constantly afraid that the apartment would be searched. He didn’t know how the police operated in cases like these, but in the TV series he’d seen, house searches happened all the time. If the police knocked on the door and wanted to search the place, they were fucked. There was nowhere to hide Theres.

But nobody knocked on the door; nobody rang the bell. The only thing that happened was that Jerry was called in for questioning again. When he got home Theres was still there, and the apartment appeared to be untouched. Perhaps it wasn’t like the TV after all.

Many people that Jerry had never seen before came to Lennart and Laila’s funeral, drawn no doubt by curiosity thanks to all the articles in the press. ‘Bestial murder of Swedish chart toppers.’ Lennart and Laila should have seen the headlines. In spite of everything, they had ended their career as chart toppers.

It was only when the funeral was over that Jerry began to come down to earth, gather his thoughts and try to look clearly at the situation. Up to that point his mind had been constantly fixed on the murder, and he had gone to the computer several times a day to Google news and comments relating to his parents.

Theres didn’t make much noise. When he tried to ask her why she had done what she had done, she refused to talk about it, but it did seem as if she realised that what she had done had hurt Jerry; perhaps she was even ashamed of herself.

Jerry had no idea what actually went on inside her head, and he was scared of her. He put away every knife, tool and sharp object in a locked cupboard. At night he made up a bed for her on the sofa in the living room and double deadlocked the front door so she couldn’t get out. Then he locked the door of his own room. He still found it difficult to drop off because he was afraid she would manage to get in while he was asleep and vulnerable. She was his sister, and she was a total stranger.

She never made any demands; in fact, she rarely spoke at all. She spent most of her time sitting at the desk, aimlessly tapping the computer keyboard or simply staring at the wall. It would probably have been more trouble looking after a hamster. More trouble, but less worry. A hamster didn’t have the ability to turn into a wild lion with no warning.

Theres caused him practical problems in only one respect, and that was her food. She refused to eat anything other than jars of baby food. That would have been fine, except that every single person in Norrtälje seemed to know the man whose parents had been murdered. It might have been his imagination, but Jerry had the feeling people were looking at him everywhere he went.

He didn’t dare go into the local supermarkets and put twenty jars of baby food through the checkout. Someone might start to put two and two together. He tried to solve the problem by buying a couple of jars here and there, but Theres got through at least ten jars a day, and it was too time-consuming to spread his purchases like that.

He considered buying in bulk over the internet, but gave up on that idea. His name had been mentioned all over the place, and a hundred jars of baby food on his account, a box with his name on the address label might also raise eyebrows somewhere.

He tried to get Theres to eat something different, he tried to explain the problem to her, but that did no good. When he stopped buying baby food to see what would happen, she stopped eating. He thought hunger would eventually make her see sense, but after four days she hadn’t eaten anything, and it was starting to show in her face. He was forced to capitulate and set off on a long expedition to stock up on pureed chicken casserole and meatballs.

At some point in the middle of all this, Jerry began to seriously despair. The locked doors, the difficult shopping expeditions, the constant fear. The way Theres had come to dominate his existence without saying or doing anything. Why the hell had he got into all this?

He realised he was going to have to hand her over sooner or later. A great big anonymous basket on the steps of the youth psychiatric service. Then he would be free to live his own life again. Without fear or anxiety.

But for the time being, the food problem had to be solved. Jerry took the only course of action he could think of and rang Ingemar. They hadn’t been in touch since Jerry had explained that he was finished with the cigarette business after the incident with Bröderna Djup. When Jerry asked if he was still in a position to get hold of just about anything, Ingemar was up for it straight away.

‘As long as we’re not talking about drugs…shoot. What do you need?’

‘Baby food. Can you get hold of baby food?’

It was a point of honour to Ingemar that he never asked about the goods he supplied, but from the silence that followed Jerry’s question, it was clear that his principles were being severely tested. However, the only thing he eventually said was: ‘You mean that stuff in jars? Stewed meat, that kind of crap?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how many do you want?’

‘A hundred, maybe.’

‘Jars? I’m not exactly going to make a fortune on this, you know.’

‘I’m offering you the retail price. Eleven kronor a jar.’

‘Twelve?’

And so it was agreed. When Jerry hung up, he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He had made a decision. When the hundred jars were gone, he would hand over Theres. It was a nice even number and it felt right. Another two weeks, approximately.

Ingemar turned up with the jars and Jerry paid him. When Ingemar asked if he would be needing any more, Jerry said no. Then he carried in the two boxes himself. The labels on the jars were in some kind of East European language, and each one contained something that was presumably meat stew. Theres didn’t seem to care, she shovelled down the contents with the same joyless single-mindedness she always displayed when she was eating.

Since the keyboard was one of the few things that seemed to interest her, Jerry had started teaching her to use the internet, and that evening they had something resembling a pleasant interlude together as they sat side by side at the computer, and Jerry demonstrated how to get onto different sites and forums, how to set up an email account and so on. Perhaps it was because he had set a definite end date for their relationship that he felt more relaxed.

During the night Theres became ill. As Jerry lay there trying to get to sleep, he heard a long drawn-out whimpering from the living room. He hesitated before getting up and unlocking the bedroom door, as always alert to any changes in Theres that might suggest a shift in her mood.

He didn’t need to worry. Theres was hardly in a state to harm anyone. The room stank, and when Jerry switched on the light he saw Theres flat out on the sofa, her face greenish-white. She had thrown up all over the floor, and one hand was waving feebly.

‘What the fuck, sis…’

Jerry fetched cloths and a mop, cleaned the floor and gave Theres a bucket to throw up in. As he headed back to his room, Theres whimpered behind his back. He stopped, sighed, and sat down in the armchair. When he had been sitting there for a while, something struck him.

He picked up one of the jars of baby food, unscrewed the lid and sniffed at the contents. He wrinkled his nose. Not that baby food normally smelled good, but surely it shouldn’t smell like this, for fuck’s sake? Behind the smell of stale meat there was an undertone of…acetone. Something suffocating, fermented. He turned the jar around to look for the sell-by date, but it had been rubbed out until it was illegible.

Theres was writhing as her stomach contracted with cramp, emitting a damp croaking noise. Sweat poured down her face and a trickle of dark green bile seeped out between her lips and stuck to her chin. Her head drooped helplessly over the edge of the sofa.

Jerry ran into the kitchen and fetched a towel and a bowl of water. He wiped Theres’ face, dabbing her forehead with the cool water. Her skin was hot and her eyes shone like marbles. She was shivering, and a new kind of fear nudged its way into Jerry’s body.

‘Listen, sis, you can’t be this sick. You just can’t, you hear me?’

He couldn’t take her to hospital. She had no patient number or ID card or anything, and he might as well go straight to the police station and turn himself in. Of course he could just dump her there, but then again someone might see him, and in any case he couldn’t put her on the back of his motorbike in this fucking state and how was he supposed to…

Theres’ transparent gaze fixed on his and she whispered, ‘Jerry…’ before her body contracted in a series of fresh cramps, twisting the damp sheets around her thin legs. Jerry stroked her head and said, ‘It’ll be OK, sis, it’ll be OK. You’ve just got a bit of a bad stomach, nothing serious.’ Presumably he was trying to convince himself.

He fetched her a drink of water. Five minutes later she brought it back up. He changed her bedclothes, which were soaked through and stinking. Two hours later they were just as wet. He got her to swallow an Ibuprofen tablet, which came straight back up. He chewed his nails until his fingertips hurt, and didn’t know what to do.

Towards six o’clock the dawn began to breathe on the windows and found an exhausted Jerry slumped in the armchair next to Theres, staring blankly at her skinny body as it lay on the sofa curled up into a question mark. Her breathing was jerky and shallow and her voice was so weak Jerry could barely hear her when she said, ‘Little One bad. Made them dead. Mum and Dad. Little One soon dead now. That’s good.’

Jerry sat up and rubbed his eyes with the damp hand towel he had changed several times during the night. He leaned closer to Theres. ‘Don’t talk like that. You didn’t kill them because you’re bad. I don’t know why you did it, but it’s nothing to do with being bad, I do know that. Why do you say you’re bad?’

‘You’re sad. Because Mum and Dad got dead. Little One bad.’

Jerry cleared his throat and adopted a firmer tone of voice: ‘Right. Stop calling yourself Little One, stop saying you’re bad, and stop calling them Mum and Dad. Pack it in.’

Theres was once more gazing into emptiness. When she said, ‘Little One soon be dead’, Jerry’s anger flared up. He placed his hand over her head and squeezed her temples between his thumb and middle finger.

‘Stop it!’ he said. ‘It’s I will soon be dead. I! And you’re not going to die. You can fucking forget that. I’m looking after you. If you die I’ll kill you.’

Theres frowned and did something he had never seen before. She smiled. ‘You can’t do that. When you’re dead you’re dead.’

Jerry rolled his eyes. ‘It was a joke, stupid.’

The subtle lightening of the atmosphere in the room came to a sudden stop: ‘Mum and Dad got dead. Then. Little One got them.’

Despite the fact that Theres was obviously no threat, Jerry backed away from her slightly. ‘What the hell are you talking about, and stop saying Little One, what do you mean you got them?’

‘I got them. They’re mine now.’

‘They are not yours! They’re not even your parents, will you stop talking like that!’

Theres closed her eyes and her mouth and rolled over so that she was lying with her back to Jerry. Her narrow chest rose and fell jerkily as she breathed. Jerry leaned back in the armchair and sat there listening to her breathing; he tried to get to sleep, but without success. He asked the question straight out: ‘Why did you do it?’ But there was no answer.

Perhaps it was the lack of sleep combined with being shut in the apartment, but during the course of the morning Jerry got more and more irritated. He had known for a long, long time that there was something seriously wrong with Theres, and that she could hardly be held responsible for her actions. However, he still couldn’t cope with her lack of emotion when it came to what she had done. I got them.

That’s probably something you might come out with if you’ve bagged a couple of ducks with a shotgun. Not when you’ve killed two people-who just happened to be Jerry’s parents, regardless of what he thought of them. I got them.

Theres seemed to have improved after her dreadful night. She was still pale and couldn’t even keep a sip of water down, but she sat up on the sofa with a couple of pillows behind her, flicking through an illustrated Winnie-the-Pooh book Jerry had had when he was little. In his confused state Jerry thought she looked shamelessly smug as she sat there. I got them.

Jerry stood by the unit housing all his videos with his arms folded, looking at her as she studied the nice, brightly coloured pictures without the slightest concern for all the grief she had caused. Without considering what he was doing he selected Cannibal Holocaust and said cheerfully, ‘Shall we watch a film?’

Without looking up from the book, Theres asked, ‘What’s a film?’

You’ll see, thought Jerry, inserting the tape in the video player. If he did have a thought in his head it was something to do with getting Theres to realise that killing wasn’t just tra-la-la and I got them, but a seriously unpleasant business.

The film began, and people were chopped up and slaughtered with screams and tears, internal organs were removed and bodily fluids spurted. Jerry noticed that what had happened to his parents had made him more sensitive, and he no longer took any pleasure in the images. From time to time he glanced at Theres, who was sitting on the sofa watching the bloodbath, her face completely expressionless.

When the film was over he asked her, ‘What did you think? Lots of people died, didn’t they? Pretty gruesome.’

Theres shook her head. ‘They weren’t really dead.’

Jerry had always thought Cannibal Holocaust was one of the better splatter films. It felt and looked real. Since Theres was totally unfamiliar with the phenomenon of film, he had thought she would see it as a pure documentary, which fitted in with his somewhat unclear aim.

‘What do you mean?’ he said, stretching the truth. ‘Of course they were really dead. You could see that, couldn’t you? I mean, they got hacked to pieces.’

‘Yes,’ said Theres. ‘But they weren’t dead.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘No smoke.’

Jerry had prepared a number of responses to possible objections in order to get her to understand at last, but this was so unexpected that all he could say was, ‘What?’

‘There was no smoke. When they smashed the heads.’

‘What are you talking about? There’s never any smoke.’

‘Yes. There’s a little bit of smoke. Red.’

Theres had approximately the same expression on her face as when Jerry had said, ‘If you die I’ll kill you.’ She looked suspiciously amused, as if she knew that Jerry was teasing her, and would soon admit it. Then he realised what she was talking about.

‘You mean blood,’ he said. ‘There was loads of blood, all the time.’

‘No,’ said Theres. ‘Stop it, Jerry. You know.’

‘No, I don’t know. It just so happens that I’ve never killed anyone, so I don’t know.’

‘Why have you never killed anyone?’

Jerry didn’t really know how he had expected Theres to react to the film. With tears, perhaps, or screams, or a refusal to watch, or fascination and lots of questions. This hadn’t been among the possible alternatives.

Acidly he said, ‘I don’t know, I suppose the opportunity never came up.’

Theres nodded, her expression serious. Then she said, as if she was explaining something to a slightly backward child, ‘Blood comes later. First smoke. Just a bit. Red. But then it’s gone. You can’t find any more. But you get that little bit. That’s love. I think.’

There was something about the way she spoke. With the monotonous, soporific voice of someone reading out the stock market prices, she listed dry facts that brooked no contradiction, and for a moment Jerry started to believe that what she said was the truth. Then a minute or so passed in silence, and the spell was broken. Jerry looked at Theres. Beads of sweat had started to break out along her hairline. He plumped up her pillows and shook the blanket, told her to lie down and rest. When she was settled he perched on the edge of the sofa.

‘Sis,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked you this before, but now I’m asking you again. Just say all that stuff about smoke and so on when somebody dies is true. And say I’ve got it inside me as well. Are you thinking of trying to take it?’

Theres shook her head and Jerry asked the obvious follow-up question. ‘Why not?’

Theres’ eyes grew misty and she blinked a few times, but Jerry couldn’t let her fall asleep until he had an answer. He shook her shoulder gently and she said, ‘I don’t know. It says stop.’

Her eyes closed and Jerry had to be content with her answer. He went and lay down to try and sleep off the worst of the woolly mess inside his head, but sleep wouldn’t come. After half an hour he got up, took a cold shower and went out to buy some baby rice.

She has to eat something, after all.

On the stairs he met his neighbour, Hirsfeldt-an elderly man whose neat clothes were in sharp contrast with his face, which was strongly marked by his fondness for alcohol. He peered at Jerry in the harsh morning light as it bounced off the concrete. ‘Has somebody moved in with you?’ he asked.

Jerry’s stomach went cold. ‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘But I can hear them,’ said Hirsfeldt. ‘You can hear everything in this building. I can hear somebody throwing up like a sick calf, and it’s not you.’

‘It’s a friend-she’s not very well, so I’m letting her stay with me for a few days.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Hirsfeldt in a tone which implied that he didn’t believe a word Jerry said. Then he tipped his exaggeratedly elegant hat. ‘My condolences on your loss, by the way. A terrible business.’

‘Yes. Thank you,’ said Jerry, hurrying off down the stairs. When he had covered two flights he looked up through the gap between the landings and thought he could see a tiny bit of Hirsfeldt’s coat by his door. As if he were standing there listening.

Jerry gave up the idea of walking to the big supermarket, and quickly headed for the local shop. He didn’t dare leave Theres alone for too long. What if she woke up and did something while bloody Hirsfeldt was sniffing around the letterbox? Why couldn’t people just mind their own business?

He’d planned on buying ordinary baby rice, but they’d run out, so he had to buy Semper’s organic baby rice, one year and up. When he put the box on the conveyor belt, the checkout girl gave him an odd smile. He’d seen her several times before, she’d seen him, and she was bound to know who he was. If it hadn’t been for the incident with Hirsfeldt he wouldn’t have been particularly bothered, but now he felt like a hunted animal as he hurried home with the baby rice in a plastic bag.

Theres was still asleep, and Jerry flopped down in the armchair to catch his breath. When she woke up he put the TV on very loud to drown out any possible suspicious noises. He couldn’t stop himself from going over to the window a couple of times to peer down at the street.

The day passed against the backdrop of repeats and ad breaks on TV4. Theres lay on the sofa, following everything with dull eyes. He tried feeding her a couple of spoonfuls of baby rice. Then he sat on the armchair, hugging his knees and waiting anxiously for the poor attempt at nutrition to come back up again. When it didn’t, he was absurdly pleased and gave her a little more. She’d had enough then, but at least she didn’t throw it up.

The incidents with Hirsfeldt and the checkout girl had brought things to a head. Jerry could no longer amble along pretending everything would be fine. Unfortunately, he was much too tired to be able to come up with any kind of strategy. He fed Theres a few spoonfuls of baby rice from time to time, was pleased when she kept it down, wiped her sweating brow and sat with her as fresh cramps racked her body from time to time.

For Jerry, the hours that passed in their little bubble were dominated by two strong impressions. The first was claustrophobia. The room felt smaller than usual, the walls were closing in around him and outside the walls were watchful eyes. He shrank into himself, compressed down to a stock cube whose sole function was to feed and care for Theres.

However, the claustrophobia was balanced by a new discovery: the joy of caring for another person. It was deeply satisfying to support Theres’ head with his hand as he brought the spoon to her lips, then watched her swallow and keep down the food he had given her. He got a warm feeling in his chest when she sighed with relief as he wiped her hot face with a cool, damp towel.

Or maybe it wasn’t quite such a pretty picture. Maybe it was all about power, the fact that she was completely dependent on him. No one had ever depended on him for survival, but Theres was very clearly in that position now.

Nobody even knew she existed. He could press a pillow over her face and nobody would say a word.

But did he do that? No, not Jerry. He made her baby rice and moistened towels and changed sheets. He was there for her, looking after her. He had such power over her that he didn’t even need to exert it. Jerry was a terrific guy, for a change.

Idol started at eight o’clock. When some girl pitched up and started melodramatically wailing, ‘Didn’t we almost have it all’, Theres lay on the sofa and sang along in a weak voice. Jerry’s eyes grew moist, no thanks to the girl on the screen.

‘Bloody hell, sis,’ he said. ‘You could do a much better job than her. You can sing the crap out of the lot of them.’

Later in the evening Theres took a turn for the worse. The cramps were coming more frequently, and when Jerry took her temperature the thermometer showed 40.3. By midnight she was too weak even to lift her head to vomit, so Jerry had to sit by her, poised with a towel. He might have fainted with exhaustion if the fear hadn’t kept him awake.

He dragged his mattress into the living room and lay down on the floor beside her. He no longer cared if Hirsfeldt called the cops or if the checkout girl was spying on him from the bushes, he just didn’t want Theres to die. He’d never seen anyone this ill. If Ingemar showed his snout in Norrtälje again, Jerry would knock it down his throat.

He might just have dropped off for a moment when he heard Theres whisper, ‘Toilet.’

He carried her to the bathroom, then sat in front of her holding onto her shoulders to stop her falling off the toilet. She was so hot his palms were covered in sweat. It was impossible to understand how her little body could produce so much heat. Her head was drooping, and suddenly she gave up the last vestige of resistance and went limp.

‘Sis? Sis? Theres!’

He lifted her head. Her eyes had rolled back so that the whites were showing, and a dribble of saliva trickled from her motionless lips. He put his ear close to her mouth and could hear the faintest sound of breathing, a puff of desert heat against his ear. He picked her up and carried her back to the sofa, bathed her with cloths soaked in cool water, then lay down beside her and took her hand.

‘Sis? Sis? Don’t die. Please. I won’t hand you over. I’ll look after you, do you hear me? I’ll sort it out somehow, but don’t die. Do you hear me?’

Jerry curled up on his mattress without letting go of her hand; he lay there staring at her mouth in the semi-darkness, because only her lips moving from time to time indicated that she was still alive. Jerry fixed his gaze on them and realised something he should have grasped long ago: Don’t die. You’re all I’ve got.

Perhaps five minutes had passed, or it might have been an hour. Perhaps he was asleep and dreaming, or perhaps he was awake and really did see what he saw. If he was dreaming, then he dreamed that he was lying on a mattress next to Theres holding her warm, lifeless hand when her mouth opened a couple of centimetres. A first he was pleased, because it was the clearest sign of life for a couple of hours. Then he saw the thin curl of red smoke beginning to emerge from her lips.

Panic hammered a nail into his chest and he leapt to his feet. Crazed with exhaustion and fear, he grabbed the damp towel and threw it over her mouth, over her face, to stop the smoke escaping. He pressed the fabric against her lips, shaking his head dementedly.

It’s not like this, this isn’t what happens, this isn’t happening.

A few seconds passed and he expected to see the red smoke begin to seep through the fabric. Then he realised what he was doing. He ripped away the towel and placed his ear to her mouth. He couldn’t hear or feel anything, and he banged his temples with both hands until brass bells started reverberating in the back of his head.

I’ve killed her. I’ve killed her. I’ve suffocated her.

Theres opened her eyes and Jerry screamed and staggered backwards, knocking over the coffee table which went crashing to the ground. She held her hand out to him. Jerry took a couple of deep breaths and regained control of himself. He took her hand and whispered, ‘I thought you’d died. Just now.’

Theres closed her eyes and said, ‘I was dead. Then I wasn’t dead.’

Someone knocked on the wall. Hirsfeldt was awake.

During the night the fever began to abate, and by morning her temperature was down to 38 degrees. Theres was able to drink water, and even managed a little of the apricot puree left in the fridge. She sat up in bed and managed to hold the spoon herself. Jerry had slept for a couple hours, and felt so relieved he had to express it in some way. When he stroked her cheek she didn’t look at him, didn’t give the slightest hint of a smile. But nor did she move her head away.

An hour or so later Jerry was sitting at the computer searching for property to rent.

After a couple of days spent exchanging emails and making phone calls, Jerry gave Theres detailed instructions on what she could and couldn’t do during his absence, then set off for Stockholm to check out an apartment in Svedmyra.

It was a three-room apartment, 82 square metres, in an area that turned out to be so quiet and peaceful that you could have heard a pin drop on one of the many glassed-in balconies.

Jerry plodded slowly from the subway station and tried to get a feel for the place. It felt…finished. Maybe things had happened here once upon a time, maybe young lads in caps had run around feeling trendy among the three-storey brick buildings, but that was long ago. The lads had hung up their caps, and had their feet up with the cat and the TV these days.

When Jerry had checked out the discussion pages on different areas, there was one expression that had come up a few times, presumably posted by older people: running up and down the stairs. They complained that there was always somebody running up and down the stairs. Jerry had a feeling that Svedmyra was a place where there wasn’t a great deal of running up and down stairs. Enough said.

The apartment was on the top floor, and wasn’t much to get excited about. Two bedrooms with a view of some pine trees, a large bathroom with a washing machine and a living room with a kitchen area. The contract was one hundred and forty thousand kronor, and the black market agent had assured Jerry that the last person he’d heard of who got an apartment here through legal channels had been on the housing list for twelve years.

The minor and major criminals Jerry had come into contact with over the years would usually have been easy to pick in a line-up, but the agent looked so smart and trustworthy that Jerry became quite suspicious. Suit, neatly combed hair; ingratiating teeth.

If the agent had been a wide boy in a track suit and a gold chain, Jerry would have found it easier to cough up the fifty thousand he had brought with him for the deposit. In the circumstances, however, he refused to pay more than twenty-five. The agent went on at length about the fake contracts that had to be sorted out, the papers that had to be signed and so on, but Jerry stood his ground.

He took another walk round the apartment as the agent laid it on with a trowel, getting more and more annoyed. Jerry saw how he could have his computer desk next to the broadband outlet there, put the bed there, which room Theres would have and so on. He liked the place. When the agent said he wasn’t prepared to do a deal unless Jerry paid a deposit of at least forty thousand, Jerry said he wasn’t prepared to move from twenty-five, but that he would pay an extra ten on top once the whole thing had gone through. One hundred and fifty thousand in total.

Twenty-five one-thousand-kronor notes changed hands, and they shook on it.

Sitting on the subway and then on the bus to Norrtälje, Jerry was quite pleased with himself. If he’d been conned, then it wasn’t the end of the world. He had a good three hundred thousand tucked away from his internet poker.

But he hadn’t been conned. A week later he was able to collect the keys, sign the contract and hand over the rest of the money for the apartment where he would be living with his daughter, according to the official version.

The move itself was a problem. Jerry didn’t have all that many possessions, but there were a number of things he couldn’t carry down the stairs by himself. The bed, the sofa, the bookcases. Among other things. There was no one he could ask for help, and even if Theres could have carried one end, he didn’t dare let her be seen like that in Norrtälje.

He would have to use removalists.

On the designated day he explained to Theres that a couple of men would be coming to help them move their things to Stockholm. She was terrified, her eyes darting all over the apartment in the quest for a place to hide. Jerry coaxed her into the bathroom, where she locked herself in.

Quarter of an hour later the doorbell rang, and outside stood two lads who made Jerry shrink on the spot. Now he understood the name of their company, Twin Transport. Two identical lads aged about twenty-five wearing overalls towered above him. Both were over two metres tall. Jerry’s hand disappeared inside a huge paw as they said hello.

They emptied the bedroom and kitchen in no time, and Jerry soon abandoned any attempt to help when he realised this was a smooth ballroom dance, with furniture and boxes as props, and he was only getting in the way. The only thing he insisted on carrying down himself was the computer. He had recently upgraded to the latest Mac, and he wanted to make sure the box containing the computer didn’t get squashed.

The huge removal van was no more than a third full and only the sofa in the living room remained, as Jerry carefully placed the box next to the bookcase and made sure it was safe. The twins stood watching him with their arms folded, smiling indulgently. Jerry followed them up the stairs. As they were approaching his floor he heard a door close; presumably Hirsfeldt, being nosey until the last possible moment.

Mats (or it might have been Martin) stopped in the doorway and said, ‘Hello?’ When Jerry caught up with them he saw through the gap between their backs that Theres had emerged from the bathroom for some reason, and was standing in the hallway, her fists clenched by her sides, staring wide-eyed at the twins.

The big people, Jerry thought. If Theres had strange ideas about adults, the sight of the twins was unlikely to help much.

Jerry said quietly, ‘My daughter. She’s a bit…different.’

As if to confirm his statement Theres began slowly backing away into the living room. When the twins cheerfully moved towards her, she held her hands up in front of her for protection as she continued to walk backwards.

‘Theres,’ said Jerry, who couldn’t get past the massive backs, ‘Theres, they’re not dangerous. They’re helping us.’

Theres moved into the almost empty living room. She cast a panic-stricken glance at the balcony door, and for a moment he thought she was going to throw herself out.

‘Theres. What a lovely name,’ said one of the twins, distracting her sufficiently to stop her making a dash for the balcony door before that particular escape route was blocked. Instead, like the very small child she resembled at that moment, she threw herself on the sofa and pulled the blanket over her head.

Mats and Martin looked at one another, grinned and said, ‘OK, kid-here we go.’ Before Jerry could stop them they each picked up one end of the sofa. Incapable of coming up with a better solution, he dashed out onto the landing and positioned himself so that he was blocking the view from the spy hole in Hirsfeldt’s door as Mats and Martin carried the sofa downstairs. He didn’t dare to imagine what Theres must be feeling as she lay there quivering under her blanket, unceremoniously carted out of her safe haven.

When the twins had placed the sofa in the van and Jerry had managed to persuade them to stop trying to coax Theres out, he sat down beside her and whispered, ‘Sis? Sis? Everything’s fine. I’m here and they’re not dangerous, I promise.’ He fumbled under the blanket and found her hand, squeezed it. A gesture that would have been unthinkable just a week ago.

When the twins had brought down the last of the boxes and were ready to set off, Theres refused to leave her cocoon. Jerry tried to get up, but she squeezed his hand harder and hissed, ‘Don’t go. Don’t go.’

Jerry weighed up the situation, then asked the twins: ‘Is it OK if we ride with you? In the back?’ The twins shrugged and said well, it was against the rules really, but…Jerry seized the moment and said they could add an extra couple of hours to the invoice. It had been cheaper than he expected anyway, because the twins had worked so fast.

He dug out another blanket and wrapped himself in it, then found the torch in one of the boxes. When the doors closed and he switched on the torch, he thought it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. They could avoid the midnight taxi ride Jerry had been planning to get Theres out of Norrtälje without the risk of being spotted by anyone he knew.

When Jerry was young, he had had the usual fantasies about leaving Norrtälje and returning many years later to great acclaim, giving major interviews to the local press. He’d given all that up long ago, and resigned himself to becoming quietly embalmed in his desolate apartment.

Even though he was now travelling in a dark removal van like a thief in the night, at least he had finally escaped. Good or bad? Difficult to say, but as the van bumped along and Jerry tried to visualise the places they were passing, he felt a small stirring of excitement. He was on his way. At last.

When they had been on the road for about quarter of an hour, Theres poked her head out. She looked around the dark interior, and Jerry swept the beam of the torch around to show her no dangers were lurking. She said something and Jerry had to lean closer to hear her over the roar of the engine. ‘What did you say?’

‘The big people,’ said Theres. ‘When are the big people going to make Little One dead?’

‘Listen, sis…’ Jerry moved closer to her, but Theres retreated into the far corner of the sofa. When Jerry shone the light on her he saw that she was at least as terrified as she had been up in the apartment. He switched off the torch to avoid dazzling her, and spoke into the darkness.

‘Sis, this whole business with the big people-it’s all just made up. It’s not true. It was just some crap Dad made up because…because he didn’t want you to run away.’

‘You’re lying. The big people have hate in their heads. You said it too.’

‘Yes, but that was just so that you’d…forget it. But nobody’s going to kill you. You don’t need to be scared.’

They sat in silence in the darkness for a long time. The sound of the engine was soporific, and Jerry might have fallen asleep if he hadn’t started to feel really cold. He wrapped the blanket more tightly around him and stared at a thin strip of light along the bottom of the doors. The feeling of being on the way had been replaced by a sense that he was being transported, like a piece of furniture or a pig, and his good mood evaporated. When they had travelled so far that he could tell from the sound of the engine that they were driving along a street with buildings on either side, Theres said, ‘Are the big people nice?’

‘No,’ said Jerry. ‘That’s going a bit far. That’s not what I said. Most of them are nasty bastards, if they get the chance. I’m just telling you they’re not going to kill you. Or hurt you.’

Jerry added silently: unless they’ve got something to gain from it.

When the doors opened Jerry was blinded by the white winter light. Theres had crawled back under her blanket, and Martin and Mats were waiting outside with their arms folded.

‘It’s the third floor, isn’t it?’ said one of the twins, pointing at Theres. ‘I think you’d better try and get the girl to go up with you. It was a bit of fun once, but…’

Jerry asked them to back off a little and leaned over Theres, whispering where he thought her ear might be, ‘Come on, sis. Everything’s fine. I’ll hold your hand.’ A few seconds passed and Jerry had begun to consider carrying Theres wrapped in the blanket, when a hand emerged. He took it and gently folded back the blanket, then led her out of the van.

She walked with her head bent, as if she expected a devastating blow to the back of her neck at any moment. When it didn’t come, she stole a quick glance at the twins. They waved in unison with exactly the same expression on their faces, like something out of a cartoon. Jerry wondered if they lived together as well.

He held his head high as they walked towards the door, because there was no longer anything to hide, and he didn’t want it to look as if there might be. There were always watchful eyes. Here comes a father with his daughter to take over their new apartment, nothing odd about that. Theres, however, was playing her role very badly, and her fingers were squeezing his hand like pincers.

She relaxed slightly once they were inside the small lift, and looked around in confusion when they came out onto the landing; she couldn’t understand how they had got there. Jerry unlocked the door of their apartment and left it open, then led Theres to her new room.

‘This is where you’re going to live,’ he said. As Theres looked suspiciously around the completely empty room, he added, ‘With furniture, and stuff, of course. We’ll have to buy a bed and…’

Theres went and sat on the floor in the corner, drew her knees up to her chin and looked as if she wasn’t entirely displeased with the current state of the room. Jerry heard a bang and a muffled curse from the stairs and said, ‘Listen, they’re bringing the furniture up now, so…’

Theres hugged herself even more tightly and stayed where she was, unassailable. A minute or two later the twins came lumbering in with the sofa, and Jerry asked them to put it in Theres’ room. She would have to sleep on it until he managed to get a bed. The girl followed the movements of the two big men with her eyes wide open, her fingers constantly intertwining. The twins seemed to have accepted that they couldn’t make any contact with Theres, and placed things in her room in silence.

Each time they came in Theres slackened the grip around her knees a fraction, and by the time they brought in the last two little boxes containing her clothes, she was on her feet.

‘So,’ said Mats, or Martin, looking around the apartment where the paltry furnishings echoed in the emptiness. He seemed to be searching for something positive to say, but had no success. Instead he finished off with, ‘There we are, then.’

‘Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘There we are.’

A couple of days after they had moved into the apartment, Theres started her first period. Jerry was sitting at the computer trying to make a bit of money in a poker game when Theres came out of her room and said, ‘How did it get to be open?’

Jerry was so preoccupied with the game that he didn’t look away from the screen as he asked, ‘How did what get to be open?’

Theres came and stood next to him and said, ‘It’s coming out. Who did it?’

Jerry gave a start when he saw her. Then he understood. Her knickers and T-shirt were spattered with red, and blood had trickled down her left leg, all the way to the ankle. Theres wasn’t afraid, just puzzled as she stood there staring at her sticky fingers.

Jerry folded in the poker game, something he’d been intending to do anyway, and logged out of Partypoker. He scratched his head, not knowing where to start. Despite the fact that he had decided what the official version of his relationship with Theres was going to be, this was the first time he actually felt like a single dad.

‘Well…’ said Jerry. ‘This is something that happens. It’s going to happen every month. You’re going to bleed like this. From now on.’

‘Why?’

‘To be perfectly honest…I don’t have much of an idea. But it’s because you’re growing up. It happens to all girls as they grow up. They bleed for a few days each month.’

Theres carried on looking at her fingers, her eyes sliding over her stained clothes and striped legs. Then she frowned and asked, ‘What am I?’

‘What do you mean? You’re a girl-is that what you mean?’

‘More.’

‘You’re about thirteen years old, you’re…I don’t know what you are. You’ll have to work that out for yourself.’

Theres nodded and went back to her room. Jerry stayed where he was for a while, thinking he was completely useless. That was how things were with Theres. She accepted everything you said to her, as long as it wasn’t contradicted by something she’d been told in the past. When he went into her room she was sitting quite happily on the floor looking through a pile of CDs as she bled onto the rug underneath her.

‘Sis,’ said Jerry. ‘I have to go and buy a couple of things. You go and have a shower, and then…’ Jerry found a blank sheet of paper, wrote the word ‘menstruation’ on it and gave it to Theres.

‘That’s what it’s called. When you bleed like that. Look it up on the net while I’m out. When you’ve had a shower.’

Jerry pulled on his jacket and hurried out. The problem of Theres and her periods had never even crossed his mind. He had never thought of her as a young woman, or even a girl, really. She was too different to be anything other than simply herself. Neuter. But now it had happened.

He knew a bit more about the phenomenon than he had told Theres, but not a great deal. During his wild years he had managed to get laid a few times, but he’d never lived with anyone. Never followed a girl’s or a woman’s daily routine. Except Laila’s, of course, and she hadn’t been comfortable talking about that sort of thing.

Besides which, it was so difficult to explain things to Theres because her view of the world was so fucked up. To put it briefly, she thought people were out to get one another. Jerry agreed with her up to a point-man is a wolf to his fellow man and so on-but her version was more violent and concrete, and above all it was the big people who were after the little people so that they could kill them and exploit them.

It was true that the twins’ friendliness had caused some confusion in her conviction, and a couple of times she had ventured out onto the balcony to look at the people down below, but her basic attitude was one of deep suspicion. As far as Jerry was concerned that was a perfectly acceptable attitude, but she needed to loosen up a bit if she was going to be able to live among other people.

In the local shop Jerry read the packets of panty liners and tampons very carefully, but was none the wiser. On top of everything else, the damned things came in different sizes. He had to try and imagine what Theres might be like down there. This evoked a modicum of excitement which made him uncomfortable, and he grabbed a small and a medium of each kind.

A man of his own age was sitting at the checkout, and as he passed the boxes over the reader, Jerry said, ‘My daughter. It’s her first period.’ The man nodded sympathetically and asked if Jerry was on his own. Yes, he was. And what about Mum? Well, she’d cleared off. To Sundsvall, of all places. Didn’t want anything to do with her daughter. Very sad, that kind of thing. Yes, very sad indeed.

Jerry was quite pleased with himself as he left the shop. That was all sorted, then. People did have a tendency to stand around gossiping in local shops. The man on the checkout seemed happy to chat, and if anybody asked, Jerry had given a reasonable account of himself and Theres. Job done.

When he got home, Theres was sitting at the computer with wet hair. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

‘It’s English,’ said Theres. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Jerry. ‘Shift.’

Theres got up, and of course she had bled all over her clothes on his desk chair. Jerry took out a box of tampons and a box of panty liners, and gave them to her. ‘Here. These things will stop you bleeding. Well no, they won’t stop you bleeding, but they’re like a kind of bandage. A plaster. Understand?’

Theres turned the box over and shook her head. Jerry opened the box of tampons and found a number of hard, compressed cotton cylinders and a plastic tube. He sat down in the armchair and read the instructions until he had worked out what to do.

Why the fuck did girls have periods? What was actually the point? The instructions didn’t contain any answers to that particular question, just the practical matters. His cheeks were on fire as he explained to Theres how to insert the tube then push out the cylinder with the string attached. When she pulled down her knickers to do as he’d told her, he turned away and said, ‘Go and do it in the bathroom.’

Theres obeyed, and Jerry flopped down in the armchair. He felt dirty. This wasn’t a new experience, but he didn’t want to feel dirty in this particular way. Theres had begun to develop breasts and she was a pretty girl-beautiful, in fact. She was completely in his power, and an entire scenario flickered through his brain for a few seconds until he gritted his teeth and forcibly ejected the unwanted images.

She was his sister, and he was no fucking incestuous paedophile, end of story! She had that problem girls get, and it was no more complicated than him having a nosebleed once a month, for example. A bit of cotton wool up his nose, and that was that. The fact that he felt so uncomfortable and had to look away didn’t mean he was a psycho with a filthy mind.

Sorted. When Theres shouted from the bathroom a little while later to say that she couldn’t manage, he went in and helped her to insert the tampon, made sure the string was in the right place, and explained to her that she would have to change it a couple of times a day, and she could bloody well do that herself. Then he washed his hands.

Perhaps it had something to do with her menstruation and perhaps not, but Theres was changing. From time to time she opened up her shell a little and peered at the outside world. She had started to take a serious interest in the internet, and when Jerry wasn’t using the computer she often sat there clicking through articles on Wikipedia, mainly about different animals.

One day when Jerry was reading the paper in the living room, Theres asked, ‘What’s this?’

Jerry looked at the screen and saw that Theres-presumably by following various links-had ended up on a website called poetry.now. There was a poem about cats on the screen.

‘It’s poetry,’ said Jerry. ‘Poems. You write like that when it’s a poem, I think. Do you think it’s good?’

‘I don’t know. What’s good?’

‘How the fuck should I know? It doesn’t seem as if it has to rhyme these days, anyway. Write something yourself, then you can see if anybody says anything.’

‘How shall I write?’

Jerry clicked through to another poem that he thought seemed very disjointed, and appeared to be about not knowing what you want to be. He waved at the screen. ‘You just write like this, kind of. A few sentences here and there. Hang on, we’ll set you up an account.’ Jerry keyed in a made-up name and linked it to her email account. Why had they set up an email account for her anyway-who the hell was she going to write to? Oh well, at least it was useful now. ‘All you have to do now is choose a username and press enter, then you can write whatever you want.’

Jerry went back to his armchair and the evening paper, while Theres sat with her fingers resting motionless on the keys. After a while she asked, ‘What’s my name?’

‘Theres. You know that.’

‘When did I get Theres?’

‘You mean the name?’ Jerry thought about it, and realised he had come up with it years ago, but had used it so often it had become completely natural. He didn’t see any harm in telling her the truth. ‘You got it from me.’

‘Who is Theres?’

‘Well, you are.’

‘Before.’

Jerry sensed they were approaching the tangled thicket that was Theres’ view of humanity, and he hadn’t the strength to hack his way through right now, so he said, ‘You just have to come up with a username, not your own name. Write Bim or Bom or something,’ whereupon he went back to his newspaper.

He heard the keys tapping away, and five minutes later Theres said, ‘What do I do?’

Jerry got up and looked at the screen. Under the username Bim she had actually written a poem:

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

‘The moon is my father,’ said Jerry. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘He watches when I’m asleep,’ said Theres. ‘My father.’

The moon often shone in through her bedroom window at the time when she was going to bed. She might have got the bit about how fathers behave from something she’d read.

‘Of course,’ said Jerry. ‘Good poem. Send it.’

He showed her how to click send. Then she sat with her hands resting on her lap, staring at the screen, until Jerry asked her what she was waiting for.

‘Someone to say something,’ she said.

‘It might take a while, you know. Check again tomorrow.’

Theres got up and went out onto the balcony. Jerry watched her as she stood there touching her face, running her fingers over it as she gazed down at the street.

The following day there was a positive comment about the poem from somebody called Josefin. Jerry showed her how to reply to comments, and how to make comments of her own. When Theres had been clicking away and writing for a while, she asked, ‘Are they people?’

‘Who?’

‘The ones who are writing.’

‘What else would they be?’

‘I don’t know. Are they little people?’

‘Most of them are, I suppose. Young, anyway.’

When Jerry had been showing Theres how to use the poetry site, he had noticed that almost all the users were girls between fourteen and twenty, with only the odd boy or older person. Without any planning he seemed to have given Theres an opportunity to take a step closer to the world and people her own age.

She sat at the computer for several hours, so quiet and with such intense concentration that Jerry didn’t want to interrupt and tell her that he needed to work. When she had read through all the poems on the website, she said, ‘They’re sad.’

‘Who? The people who write the poems?’

‘Yes. They’re sad. They don’t know what to do. They cry. It’s a shame.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

Theres furrowed her brow in concentration. She looked at the computer, at her hands. Then she got up and went out onto the balcony for a while. When she came in, she asked, ‘Where are they?’

‘The girls? All over the place. One might be in the building opposite, another might be in Gothenburg. A long, long way away.’

Jerry had been sitting in the apartment all day, and twilight was beginning to fall outside. He had a sudden inspiration. ‘Shall we go out and look?’ he said. ‘See if we can spot any of them?’

Theres stiffened. Then she nodded.

During the days and weeks that followed, Theres ventured further and further from the apartment. At first she wanted to hide as soon as she caught sight of an adult, but gradually she accepted that the big people’s hunger was at rest on weekdays, and that they were not about to fall on her.

Children didn’t interest her, because she seemed to think they belonged to a different, non-threatening species. No, it was mostly people of her own age she was searching for. She wanted to see what they were doing, what they looked like, what they were saying. More than once Jerry had to extricate her from embarrassing situations where she was simply sitting and staring at someone, or was very obviously eavesdropping on a conversation.

She began to speak more like a normal teenager, and Jerry bought her clothes that looked like what her contemporaries were wearing. The only thing he couldn’t sort out was her hair. He tried taking her to the hairdresser, but as soon as the woman picked up the scissors Theres started screaming, and refused to stay in her chair. Nothing could convince her it wasn’t dangerous.

Apart from her hair, which Jerry trimmed with the kitchen scissors, you could have taken her for just about anybody if it hadn’t been for that constantly distant, evasive look in her eyes. So Jerry wasn’t fooled. He knew that in actual fact he hadn’t a clue what was going on inside her head. Not a clue.

A more ambitious or restless person than Jerry would probably have got fed up with the way they lived, but as the days slipped into one another and the sun rose and fell over the square in Svedmyra, Jerry discovered that he was quite content with his existence.

He went back to his childhood home to pick up a few things he wanted to keep, then got a firm in to clear the house. He put it in the hands of an estate agent; the history of the house meant they had to drop the asking price, which was already low, but when the bills were paid and the commission deducted, there was still a couple of hundred thousand left over for Jerry, enough for at least a year or two without any financial worries.

He played Civilisation and Lord of the Rings online, chatted with other players, checked out films with or without Theres, and went for walks. They spent a few evenings sitting together looking through his VHS tapes of videos from different artists: Bowie, U2, Sinéad O’Connor.

Theres was particularly taken with Sinéad; over and over again she begged Jerry to rewind the tape so that she could join in with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. After those evenings Jerry rummaged through some of the boxes that hadn’t been unpacked yet and found his old bits of paper with chord sequences scribbled on them, songs they used to sing when Theres was little.

As winter turned to spring Jerry started playing the guitar again and they worked their way through the songs, adding lyrics that Theres suggested here and there, writing new ones. For fun Jerry bought a microphone so that they could record the songs on Garageband and play about with them afterwards.

Jerry had no ambitions when it came to music, but it was a sin and a shame that a voice like Theres’ would never reach a wider audience. Despite the fact that they hardly had any lyrics, the songs Theres recorded on Garageband were better than most things Jerry heard on the radio.

He couldn’t shake off the feeling. That it was all such a fucking…waste.

You can plan for things, work towards them for years, and yet they never materialise. Or you just happen to be in the right place at the right moment, and everything falls into place. If you want to believe in something like Fate, she’s a capricious character. Sometimes she stands there blocking the doorway you were born to pass through, and sometimes she takes you by the hand and leads you through the minute you poke your nose out. And the stars gaze down and keep their counsel.

One day at the beginning of May when Jerry came out of the shop, there was a wallet lying on the low wall by the bike stand. He sat down beside it and glanced around, pretending to be catching his breath. None of the people enjoying the spring sunshine was looking in his direction. He slipped the wallet into his pocket.

When he got home he investigated his find and was disappointed. He had been hoping for a few hundred-kronor notes, perhaps some interesting cards and a furious owner who would have to spend the whole afternoon ringing around and cancelling them.

But the wallet belonged to a young girl, sixteen years old according to her ID card, and contained only a few bits of paper with telephone numbers on them, two twenty-kronor notes and a Nordea bank card. Perhaps that would have been the end of the matter-Jerry might even have gone down and put the wallet back, if he hadn’t found a piece of paper in one of the side pockets.

‘IDOL 2006’ it said at the top in white letters on a blue background. It was a flyer with the time and place of the auditions for this year’s program. Grand Hotel, May 14.

Jerry looked at the ID card. Presumably the girl-Angelika Tora Larsson-had dreams of stardom.

Jerry was still inclined to give the wallet a chance to be reunited with its owner. Then he spotted the small print right at the bottom of the flyer: ‘Minimum age 16 years. Bring ID and completed application form’.

And Fate stepped aside and opened the door.

‘Sis? How would you like to be on that program we saw? You remember, the one where people were singing?’

Theres was sitting at the computer reading an article about tigers. She nodded without taking her eyes off the screen.

‘No, seriously,’ said Jerry. ‘Would you like to do that? There’ll probably be loads of people.’

‘You’ll come too.’

‘Yes, absolutely. Of course I will. But it would be cool to sing in a place where people could hear just how good you are, wouldn’t it? I mean, it’s kind of a waste just singing in here with me, don’t you think?’

Theres didn’t answer, and Jerry realised he was actually talking to himself; she had already given him her answer. Jerry held out Angelika’s ID card. ‘What do you think? Does this girl look like you?’

‘I don’t know.’

Jerry scrutinised the photograph. It had presumably been taken a couple of years ago, because the girl hardly looked like a teenager. She wasn’t exactly like Theres apart from the long, fair hair, but he didn’t think they’d check that carefully. After all, she wasn’t exactly trying to get into a political summit meeting.

He continued the train of thought. ID number, name. Check, TV. It probably wasn’t a particularly good idea, all things considered. He had got carried away by the possibility. But it was too dangerous, anything could happen. Oh well. He would keep the ID card; you never knew when it might come in handy.

Theres got up from the computer and said, ‘Come on, then.’

‘Come where?’

‘We’re going now. To the TV program.’

Jerry smiled. ‘It’s not for ten days, sis, and I don’t think…We need to give this some thought.’

He thought. And thought. He downloaded the application form just for fun, and filled it in; he checked out where the Grand Hotel was, just to amuse himself. Just to see if it was possible, he sat down with a pin and a drafting pen and changed a one in Angelika’s date of birth to a four. And just to finish what he had started, he rubbed the card around in the gravel a little bit just to make it look scruffy, so that the change would be less noticeable.

Since they had nothing else to do, he and Theres practised a couple of songs that sounded good when she sang them a cappella. Theres wanted to sing ‘A Thousand and One Nights’, which Jerry didn’t think was a good idea. But then it didn’t really matter, because she wasn’t going to the auditions anyway.

Of course it would be good if Theres could get out and meet some people of her own age, and obviously it was almost criminal that more people didn’t have the chance to be touched by her voice, and no doubt there was some kind of desire for revenge within Jerry, listen to this, you bastards, but regardless of who these bastards might be, they could be dangerous in the long run.

He kept thinking like that, and he was still thinking like that at eight o’clock on the morning of May 14 when they took the subway to Kungsträdgården just so that they could stroll over to the Grand Hotel and check things out. They walked along Nybrokajen holding hands. Theres asked about everything she saw, and Jerry hardly knew the answer to any of it. He felt lost in the middle of Stockholm.

Up to now only his thoughts had been opposing the whole thing, while his feelings and impulses had kept driving them forward. Now at last his feelings began to catch up. He wasn’t in control of the situation at all. When they had passed Berzelii Park and turned into Stallgatan, Jerry stopped, let go of Theres’ hand and said, ‘No. No. I don’t think we should do this, sis. We’re fine as we are, aren’t we? This is only going to cause trouble.’

Theres looked around. Boys and girls of her own age, alone or in groups, with or without parents, were walking past them. Without looking in Jerry’s direction, she simply followed them.

Jerry was on the point of shouting ‘Sis!’ after her, but stopped himself just in time, dashed after her and said, ‘Tora. We’re going home now.’

Theres shook her head and kept on walking. Without Jerry noticing exactly when it happened, the disparate groups became a crowd, and they were at the back of a queue that was more than a hundred metres long, with people joining on behind them. Jerry tugged gently at Theres’ hand but she stood there open mouthed, gazing at all the girls who were slightly older than her, and refused to move.

Jerry realised he wasn’t going to get her away without causing a scene, and it was impossible to know what she might do if he started behaving in an unexpected way. He had said they were going to come to the auditions. They had come. Now they were here. Theres was behaving according to what had been said so, with sweat pouring down his back, Jerry joined the queue and whispered, ‘Just remember your name’s Tora. If anyone asks. Tora Larsson. Your name is Tora Larsson, OK?’

Theres shook her head. ‘That’s not my name.’

Jerry realised his mistake, and rephrased. ‘No, that’s right. But if anyone asks what your name is, you have to answer Tora Larsson.’

‘Yes.’

‘And if anyone asks how old you are, what do you say?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘OK. OK.’

Although it wasn’t OK at all. Jerry felt as if everyone was looking at him; he felt like a deviant, he felt threatened as he stood there in the middle of the pack of girls. Most of them were probably between sixteen and twenty. Further away stood a couple of groups of boys and a few older girls, but the majority were just a couple of years older than Theres, and only a few of them had an adult with them.

The opposite was true of Theres. He had never seen her so calm when she was among other people, and presumably she was calm for the same reason that Jerry was overcome with a mild feeling of panic as he stood there surrounded by the aroma of hairspray, lip gloss and chewing gum. She was with her own kind. Jerry wasn’t.

After an hour the queue began to shuffle forwards, and after another two hours they had reached the registration desk. Jerry clenched his fists in his trouser pockets as Theres handed over her application form and ID card. His heart almost stopped as the woman dealing with the registration looked from the form to the card, back to the form.

‘Do you use your middle name?’ she asked. Theres didn’t answer. ‘Hello,’ said the woman. ‘I’m talking to you.’ Jerry saw that Theres had begun to draw back her lips, and he heard a faint growling. He quickly stepped in.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She uses her middle name. It was her grandmother’s name.’

The woman ignored him and fixed her gaze on Theres. ‘Listen to me. What’s your name?’

‘Tora,’ said Theres. ‘My name is Tora Larsson.’

‘There you go,’ said the woman, writing the name next to a number. ‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it? We don’t want to have the wrong name down for you if you go and win, now do we?’ Her tone implied that Theres winning was just about as likely as Bruce Springsteen releasing a disco album, but Theres was given a number to pin on her sweater.

Then all they could do was wait. The wannabes sat scattered about or crowded together in a vast room below street level. From time to time groups of four were called into one of the four rooms on the next floor up, where an initial audition was held, and some were then filtered through to meet the real judges a couple of days later.

Jerry sat down with Theres in a corner behind a gigantic plastic yucca. As Theres gazed around Jerry sat with his head between his knees, grinding his teeth at his own stupidity. When he eventually looked up he saw Theres slowly wandering among the groups of young people, studying them as if they were pictures at an exhibition. That was relatively normal. It was OK. After all, this was one of the reasons they were here, wasn’t it?

Calm down, Jerry. It’s fine. Everything’s cool.

After quarter of an hour, Theres came back and sat down next to him.

‘They’re scared,’ she said.

‘Who?’ said Jerry. ‘The ones who are going to audition?’

‘All the little girls and all the little boys,’ said Theres. ‘They’re scared of the big people.’

‘I should think they’re just nervous, mostly.’

‘They’re nervous because they’re scared. I don’t get it.’

Jerry smiled, in spite of everything. The new expressions Theres had learned still sounded strange coming out of her mouth. ‘What don’t you get?’ he asked.

‘Why they’re scared. There are lots of us. There aren’t lots of big people here.’

‘No,’ said Jerry. ‘That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.’

A little way off sat a girl who actually looked even younger than Theres, and Jerry wondered if any of the others were here under false pretences. The girl was rubbing her scalp compulsively, and suddenly started shaking and sobbing. Theres got up and went over to her, crouching down by her feet.

Jerry didn’t hear what they said, but after a while the girl stopped crying and nodded bravely. She took Theres’ hand and gave it a brief pat. Theres allowed it to happen. Then she came back to sit with Jerry.

‘What was that all about?’ he asked.

‘I can’t tell you,’ she said, staring straight ahead. Jerry had never seen her like this. A heavy, solemn calm emanated from her, so strong that Jerry unconsciously moved slightly closer, drawn to her so that she would soothe his own anxiety. Her back was straight and she was utterly still, with an impassive expression on her face that suggested she had seen through the whole thing, that the ghost was nothing but smoke and mirrors.

A little while later it was an older girl with teased black hair who broke down, dragging her friend down with her until they were both sitting there sobbing as the mascara smeared their cheeks. Theres went over and sat with them.

The result was not as immediate this time, but Jerry could see how quickly the two girls accepted Theres and listened to what she said. One of them laughed out loud and shook her head, as if Theres had said something absurd but uplifting. When she noticed that Theres wasn’t smiling, she stopped laughing and leaned closer to listen.

And so it went on. There were no more breakdowns among those who were waiting, but from time to time a boy or girl came back from one of the rooms upstairs and obviously hadn’t got the reception he or she expected. The boys were usually furious, and Theres took no notice of them, but sometimes there was a girl with tears running down her cheeks, and Theres was there to console her. Or whatever it was she was doing.

Some ignored her, others became slightly aggressive when this stranger tried to make contact in their darkest hour, but several moved close to Theres and sat down with her to talk. Sometimes it ended with a hug which Theres accepted without reciprocating, sometimes she was given a piece of paper or a card. A name or phone number, presumably.

Towards three o’clock a woman with a headset and a clipboard came in and called out Theres’ number, along with three others.

Theres, deep in conversation with a red-haired girl who had practically had to be carried down the stairs from the audition room, didn’t react. Jerry ran over and told her it was her turn now. Theres stood up and said goodbye to the red-haired girl, who whispered, ‘Good luck,’ in a voice thick with tears.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ asked Jerry.

‘There’s no need,’ said Theres, and headed for the stairs. Jerry watched her go into a room on the next floor along with clipboard-woman, and his heart clenched. Something had changed irrevocably today. He didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. As usual.

Three minutes later, Theres emerged. Some of the girls she had talked to had waited, presumably to see how she got on, and she was immediately surrounded by seven eager, questioning faces.

Theres’ expression was unreadable. She looked exactly the same as when she walked in. The only thing that told Jerry how things had gone was a brief nod, then seven cheering voices.