Little Star

THE OTHER GIRL

The experience with Tora Larsson’s song had shaken Teresa. She was boiling inside and needed to let off steam. As soon as she got to her room that evening, she logged on to Lunarstorm to see how the discussion was going. Idol was always a hot topic.

She thought she had been struck by spontaneous dyslexia. It took a while for her to grasp that it did actually say what she thought it said. Tora Larsson was the most written about of that evening’s contestants, and most people thought she was terrible, or worse. They said she had no presence, no star quality. They said her clothes were ugly and her haircut was even uglier. They said the song she sang was crap. The only thing nobody complained about was her voice, but everything else about her appearance was scrutinised and deemed to be dire, stupid, meaningless and boring.

Teresa had always conducted herself sensibly in chat rooms and on discussion forums. Apart from the wolf forum, she was a calculating troll who dragged her baited hook where it would have the greatest effect, only to watch with an ironic smile as the little fish made their pathetic attempts to bite. But now she saw red. She was so agitated that her fingers would hardly obey her as she logged in with her alter ego Josefin, and started to write her reply.

She tried to remain calm, in spite of everything. She wrote that Tora Larsson had the most fantastic voice that had ever been heard on Idol, and that what others called a lack of star quality was just Tora being herself. That it was nice to see somebody who wasn’t trying to be Britney or Christina. She said she was convinced that Tora Larsson could sing just about anything, because she was singing from who she was, not who she was pretending to be.

It didn’t really cover everything Teresa felt, but it was impossible to put the most important things into words so it would have to do. She clicked on send. The answers came quickly. One or two people who agreed with her plucked up the courage to crawl out into the open and give her tentative support, but the majority simply jeered. You’d have to be a complete loser to like such a reject. Tora was totally out of place; she wouldn’t get a single vote, and so on.

It was a relief for Teresa to let herself go. She hadn’t felt comfortable writing calmly about what she really felt. Now she gave free rein to everything that was boiling and fermenting inside her.

Her joy in finding exactly the right phrase came to the fore as she wrote about the detractors’ vacant heads, how they had been force fed so much plastic pop music that their brains short circuited when they actually saw a real person; she suggested they get up from in front of the computer and go kneel before the shrine to Elin Lanto which they no doubt had in their bedroom, next to their signed Idol poster of Kaj Kindvall.

Less-gifted barbs came back at her, and Teresa was in her element. Sometimes she got hesitant support from the sidelines, someone who squeaked, ‘Hi, Josefin. You’re right’, fanning the flames. A few dropped out of the mudslinging and new participants joined in. However, those who supported her stayed on.

At one o’clock in the morning, Teresa wrote, ‘Good night’, and logged out. Her head was buzzing, but the pressure she had felt was gone. When she went to bed the image of Tora Larsson remained in her mind’s eye for a long time before she managed to fall asleep.

The following day there was a lot of talk in school, but Teresa didn’t join in the discussions. Somewhere inside she knew you can’t convince people that something is fantastic if they don’t already think it is. Her behaviour on the net was just a way of letting off steam, not a serious attempt to recruit support.

Besides which, there was a key difference in school. The general opinion was the same as it had been on the net: that Tora Larsson was useless and didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance. This view was put forward by the loud, popular girls whose opinions always got airtime, along with the small number of boys who cared enough. From a purely statistical point of view there must have been some people who thought differently, but in the real world they didn’t even have the courage to squeak. They either agreed or stayed out of the discussions.

A girl called Celia from 9a stood up in the dining room and did a horrible imitation of Tora. With a blank expression and her mouth half-open she burbled, ‘A thousand and one nights, does anyone know where I left my tights’ to general sniggering. Teresa flushed with anger, but said nothing. She couldn’t work out what it was about Tora Larsson that had touched her heart, but it was something, and she acted on it. She felt like a faithful warrior as she squeezed superglue into the keyhole of Celia’s locker during the lunch break.

Teresa’s nails got shorter and shorter as she chewed them through the different stages of the final audition. The judges were unimpressed by Tora Larsson’s stage presence, and it sounded as if they were always on the point of sending her home. But her voice triumphed in the end. Maybe they were only playing to the gallery, but the judges seemed almost reluctant to give her a place in the final twenty whose fate would be decided by the viewers. It was as if they wished they could ignore her voice. But it was more than perfect, it was magical, and it couldn’t be dismissed.

Teresa could relax, temporarily at least. Now it was up to her and all the others who understood to make sure Tora Larsson stayed in the competition so that they could see more of her.

The following week was ‘agony week’ on Idol. Twenty competitors would be reduced to eleven. Agony was the word, said Bull. Tora Larsson was to sing in the first semi-final, and as the evening approached Teresa was so anxious she didn’t know what to do with herself.

She knew it was ridiculous to invest so much emotion in a fucking Idol contestant, but she couldn’t help it. She had watched Tora’s performance several times on the net, and the effect it had that first time was still there.

As the family settled down noisily in front of the TV as usual, Teresa was sitting inside a bubble. She didn’t want to hear the others’ small talk, and above all she didn’t want to hear their opinions. If they said anything negative about Tora, Teresa might well explode. When Tora walked onto the stage, Teresa dug her nails into the palms of her hands and sat there, taut as a piano string.

A few months had passed since the filming of the auditions, but Tora hadn’t changed much. Some stylist on the program had presumably had a go at her hair and clothes, but the general impression of a person from another, less broken world remained intact.

Appropriately enough, Tora sang ‘Life on Mars’, and it was doubtful if Teresa so much as blinked during her performance. One thing had changed, actually. Tora completely ignored the audience in the studio, but she did look into the camera from time to time. Every time Teresa met that gaze, a shock went through her.

A small affair, the lyrics said; but it wasn’t a small affair to Teresa. She thought it was the best performance she had ever seen on Idol. When it was over she said she wasn’t feeling very well, and left the family in the living room. She felt absolutely fantastic, but for one thing she didn’t want to hear what the others had to say; for another, she obviously needed to hit the phone.

Since she didn’t want to run out of credit on her mobile, she went and sat in her parents’ bedroom and rang the number for Tora over and over again until her index and middle fingers were sore. Then she went back to the TV in time for the announcement of the results. Tora had got through. Of course.

She spent the evening defending Tora on various internet forums. There were a few more supporters, but there was still a huge preponderance of people who thought Tora was more or less useless. Presumably those who did like Tora liked her so much they had helped her get through by ringing over and over again.

Teresa saw things differently these days. Ever since she had started reading about wolves, she had fantasised about herself in wolf form. The teeth, the agility, the danger. Lone wolf. She was the lone wolf, slinking around the residential areas and terrifying the anxious little people who immediately rang the local paper.

But at school she had begun to observe and recognise the other aspect of man as wolf: the pack mentality. The social game, the pecking order. She was so intensely absorbed by Tora that her opinion became a litmus paper showing the composition and content of those around her.

She saw. Saw how it was permissible for an alpha female like Celia to establish what the group should think. When she yelped you had no choice but to flatten your ears and laugh, whimper, act submissively. Otherwise the snap of the teeth might come. A derogatory comment about your new trousers? Everyone immediately realised they were the ugliest trousers they’d ever seen.

The boys stood around pushing each other, physically or verbally. Who got to deal out the insults, and to whom; and who was that person in turn permitted to joke with before the pack showed its displeasure by turning away?

Among wolves, the rank order was more or less established at the cub stage, but since classes in school had been rearranged over the years, this was more like the second life-stage of the wolf, when hierarchies were established: the onset of sexual maturity.

Teresa saw clearly for the first time how this conflict was played out in the corridors, in the playground, in the dining room. Day after day. And it frightened her. The lone wolf may be a romantic idea, but in practice it’s an animal that is destined to die.

The clusters at break time, the dress codes, the taste in music and the in-jokes that bound the packs together. Teresa would have been perfectly happy to have been left off the text message lists, not to be included in the gossip, not to be invited to parties if only she had been left in peace.

But that was no longer the case. True, she had never actually rolled over and showed them her throat, so she was never actually bullied, but she was poked and prodded. An amusing comment in the showers about her fat thighs, some boy who pulled a face as she walked past. An anonymous text: ‘Shave your armpits before somebody throws up’.

Nothing more than that, but it was quite enough.

She was competing in an endless series of Idol that she could never win. The best she could do was lose with dignity.

It was time for the first weekly final in the TV competition. Eleven contestants would be reduced to ten, and the theme was Eighties. Teresa hadn’t read the TV papers and had no idea what she was going to see. When the program started, she discovered that Tora would be appearing in fifth spot.

She regarded the four who came before Tora as filler. Arvid and Olof sat there headbanging ironically when one of the boys did ‘Poison’, doing a particularly bad hard-man act. A chubby girl sang ‘The Greatest Love of All’ so hard she almost burst a blood vessel; Maria thought it was ‘lovely’.

Then came Tora. Teresa crawled into a tunnel, with only the television visible at the other end. Everything else was extinguished-literally as well. Only a single spotlight fell on the stage where Tora Larsson stood, wearing a black dress that merged with the background so that almost the only thing you could see was her face. She looked straight into the camera and sang.

Teresa stopped breathing.

‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. The words told the familiar desolate story. The camera angle changed, but Tora continued to gaze into the close-up camera, and soon the angle shifted back again. Tora’s face filled the screen. She was looking straight at Teresa, who only remembered to breathe when her chest started hurting.

The song continued, and it wasn’t a question of liking or not liking it. Teresa was bewitched; transported. She was no longer in her living room, surrounded by her family. She was with Tora, she was inside her eyes, inside her head. They gazed into one another and dissolved, melted into one.

Towards the end of the song a few tears trickled down from Tora’s eyes, and it was only when the last note had faded away that Teresa realised her cheeks were also wet.

‘Sweetheart, what is it?’ asked a voice from a long way off. Teresa returned to the living room and saw her mother’s face close to her own. She dashed away the tears and waved crossly. She wanted to hear what the judges had to say.

They weren’t particularly impressed. While there was no denying that Tora had an incredible voice, this wasn’t Stars in Their Eyes. Contestants were expected to bring something of their own to the competition, and this had been nothing more than a straight copy of the original, blah blah blah. Teresa couldn’t understand what they meant, but realised that, bewilderingly, Tora was in danger. The pack was growling.

Tora listened to the negative comments with the same indifference and self-possession as she had shown when positive comments were made. No gratitude, no distress. She just waited until they had finished, then left the stage. She was replaced by a pastel-coloured bouncy ball singing ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’.

Teresa sat through the rest of the songs with a fateful note quivering through her bones. When the lines opened for voting she got up without a word and went into her parents’ bedroom. She had just reached for the phone to start calling when Maria came in and sat down on the bed.

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘Are you upset about something?’

Through gritted teeth Teresa said, ‘No, Mum. I’m not upset. I just want to be on my own.’

Maria settled down more comfortably, and Teresa just wanted to scream. Maria tilted her head on one side. ‘Tell me. What is it? I can see there’s something wrong. Why were you crying earlier on?’

Teresa could no longer contain herself. Her voice was trembling with anger, the telephone was glowing just in the corner of her field of vision, and she spat out, ‘Why do you have to start caring right now? I just want to be left in peace, can’t you understand that?’

‘Now that’s not fair. You know perfectly well I always…’

Teresa had had enough. She got up, ran to her room, got out her mobile and started ringing. She only had enough credit for three calls.

Ten minutes later she went back downstairs to sit with the others, and the very thing she feared had happened. Tora Larsson was voted out. The very best artist she had ever seen hadn’t received enough votes to stay in the competition.

She didn’t know how many people rang in, and it was probably totally irrational, but at that moment she was convinced that her missing votes had made the difference. The twenty or so calls she could have made would have saved Tora. She would still have been in the competition if only Maria had left her alone.

Teresa had the weekend to calm down. She didn’t look at any of the discussion forums on the Friday; she didn’t want to see the gloating comments. On Saturday she started to come to her senses again. It was over. She had got far too involved, but now it was finished.

She had no intention of watching Idol again, but for God’s sake-it was only a girl standing there singing, nothing more. Tora Larsson. A girl who was a couple of years older and blessed with a fantastic singing voice, was that really something to get so worked up about? No. And yes.

They were as different as two people of the same age from the same country can be, and yet there was something about Tora that made Teresa feel as if she recognised herself. In spite of their dissimilarity, it was Teresa standing there in front of the threatening audience, the blasé judges. It was Teresa who had a wall around her heart, and yet at the same time held it in her hands, the blood seeping between her fingers. The silent scream, the suppressed panic.

It is impossible to say why we love something or someone. We can come up with reasons if we have to, but the important part happens in the dark, beyond our control. We just know when it is there. And when it goes away.

Perhaps it would be accurate to say that Teresa was grieving, as we might grieve for a friend who has moved abroad or even further away, to the other side. She would never see Tora Larsson again, never experience that intoxicating recognition of a twin soul. Never meet those eyes again.

Despite the fact that Teresa was often alone, she rarely felt lonely. But this weekend she did. An empty space had appeared and it followed her like a white shadow wherever she went. She wandered aimlessly around the garden listening to Bright Eyes, sat for a while curled up in the cave that had been her and Johannes’ secret place.

She listened to the words of the song: a lover you don’t have to love. She stood for some time looking at the house where Johannes used to live. Swings had been put up in the garden, there were plastic toys in lots of different colours strewn around. A couple of trees had been chopped down. Bright Eyes sang in her ear in his cracked voice, and she felt as if everything was slipping away from her. As if she was fourteen years old, and it was already too late.

Seized by a sudden impulse she went indoors and started searching through her wardrobe. She would start wearing colourful clothes! She always wore black, white, grey. Now she was hunting for trousers, T-shirts, blouses or cardigans in different colours. From now on she was going to look like a rainbow!

She gave up when the only things she could find that satisfied her sudden whim were either too short because she’d outgrown them, or too tight for her disgusting fat legs and round belly. In the end she grabbed a yellow woolly hat, crammed it on her head and lay down on the bed on her stomach to read Kristian Lundberg’s latest collection, Job.

I dreamt about her She was standing beside my

bed, pale grey like ash, whispering in my

ear-‘Do not be afraid, do not be afraid!’

The constant hovering emptiness made her restless, unable to concentrate. She pressed the palms of her hands to her ears and mumbled, ‘Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go and eat some worms…’ over and over again until she was sweaty and felt revolting in her woolly hat. Then she went down to the kitchen and made herself some sandwiches.

And so the weekend passed.

Nothing special happened in school, nothing special happened anywhere. Johannes and Agnes had got themselves matching necklaces, blue stones that meant happiness to some native American tribe or something. They asked if Teresa wanted to go with them to a gig where some local bands were playing the following weekend, but Teresa said no. She couldn’t help liking them, but she couldn’t cope with their company for any length of time. They were just too cheerful.

One afternoon as Teresa was getting on her bike to cycle home, she heard Jenny say to Caroline that it looks disgusting when fat people ride bikes; the saddle disappears up their arse like some weird variation on anal sex. Teresa wept for a while as she pedalled home, then spent the rest of the journey fantasising about someone raping Jenny with a red-hot iron spike.

That evening she sat at her computer and considered doing a little bit of trolling on Lunarstorm, but it had somehow lost its charm since she had felt genuine hatred and gone into battle on Tora’s behalf. Instead she joined the discussion forum on wolves. A few sightings in Värmland, someone whose chickens had been eaten (but that could just as easily have been a pine marten), someone drawing comparisons with wild boar, claiming they were a much greater threat. The thread thinned out and trailed off into a recipe for how to cook wild boar.

A new thread on how the very existence of a wolf somewhere in the vicinity paradoxically brings a feeling of security in these times when so much of our environment is being destroyed. This wild, beautiful and admittedly dangerous creature is still out there. Teresa rested her chin on her hand and scrolled down. She suddenly stiffened.

She had glimpsed the name ‘Tora Larsson’ in one post. She read it more carefully. ‘MyrraC’ was making a comparison between the wolf and Tora Larsson from Idol. Saying it was the same thing. Fear of the unknown. If something didn’t behave in an approved, predictable way it was rejected, thrown out, irrespective of how beautiful or natural it might be.

Teresa thought the comparison was a bit lame, but still. The contribution had been posted just a couple of minutes earlier, and judging by MyrraC’s profile she seemed to be about fifteen or sixteen. Teresa wrote a reply and said that she felt the same, the whole thing was just so tragic.

Myrra was online, and a reply came through just a minute or so later. After they had exchanged a couple of messages Myrra asked if she could have Josefin’s email address so they didn’t have to use the wolf forum to talk about this.

After some hesitation Teresa gave her address, with the comment: ‘The name does not mean me.’ Only when she had clicked on send did she remember where she had got the line from. She looked through her old documents until she found the poem she had written as a reply that time.

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

Was it only a year since she had written that? It felt like much longer. And yet she discovered that she liked it, and wasn’t ashamed of it. It wasn’t too bad for a thirteen-year-old.

She pulled on her yellow woolly hat and felt slightly more cheerful. In an attack of nostalgia she went and fetched the box containing all her plastic beads. Carefully she took out all the little jars, with a lump in her throat as she thought about that little girl who would sit for hours, sorting them according to different systems. For old times’ sake she started to thread a necklace. She used the very smallest beads, and discovered that her fingers were clumsier than they used to be. It was an incredibly fiddly task, but a sense of loyalty to her younger self drove her to continue until she had finished it.

You can go to hell she thought, without directing the comment at anyone in particular, and fastened the necklace around her neck with some difficulty. Then she checked her messages. There was indeed something from MyrraC, but also a message that had been sent ten minutes earlier from sereht@hotmail.com. It sounded vaguely like some form of spam or virus and she was about to delete it, but double-clicked by mistake and the message opened.

hi i remember the poem thank you for saying nice things about when i sing i remember your poem too inside every person there is another person thats true my name was bim then you can write to me i like wolves too

Teresa read the words over and over again, trying to puzzle out what the message said. So the person who had written it was the person who had called herself ‘Bim’ on poetry.now, and who had written the poem Teresa had quoted on the spur of the moment when she gave out her address. She had used the alias ‘Josefin’ on poetry.now too, which was why she had been recognised.

So far so good. That kind of thing could happen when threads crossed in the mesh that was the internet. But why was the message so oddly written, and what did Bim or Sereht mean by ‘saying nice things about when i sing’? Teresa understood perfectly well what it implied, but it seemed too far-fetched. She wrote a reply ignoring the strange bits and asked whether Bim had carried on writing poems; she herself hadn’t.

Then she sat at the computer and waited, refreshing her Inbox every couple of minutes. Ten minutes later a reply arrived.

when im called bim i write some poems when im called tora i sing when im called theres i dont do anything but im also called wolf and i bite and little one who stays in her room because the big people want to eat her up whats your name

Teresa believed.

She believed that this Theres was the same person as Tora Larsson. If Theres had written, ‘Hi! My name’s really Tora Larsson. Glad you liked me on Idol’, Teresa would have been sceptical. But this fitted. The other-worldly creature she had followed on TV ought to talk like this, write like this. And she was writing to her. Teresa clutched at her chest with both hands. Her heart was pounding as if she had just finished a route march, and her cheeks flushed bright red. Her fingers were sweaty, slipping on the keys as she began to write a reply.

Calm down, Teresa. It’s not that amazing.

She deleted what she had written and stood up. The clock on her bedside table was showing quarter past twelve. When she went to the bathroom, the rest of the house was dark and silent. She took a long shower, then turned off the hot water and stood under the running, ice-cold water for a long time. Then she got dressed, put on the yellow woolly hat and sat down at the computer again. During her absence Theres had sent another message.

whats your name my name is theres most of the time you are small arent you and not big writing with a different name and fooling me because then you mustnt write you can only write if youre the same as you say you are if you are write now because im going to sleep soon

Teresa’s fingers were cool and dry now. They flew over the keys with ease as she wrote:

Hi Theres.

My real name is Teresa, almost the same as yours, and I’m 14 years old. You’re 16, aren’t you? I really meant what I wrote on the wolf forum. I thought you were way better than everyone else on Idol, and it feels really weird to be sitting here writing to you, I almost feel a little bit scared. I’m sure you have a much more exciting life than me, and I don’t really know what to write about. I’ve always liked wolves and I know quite a lot about them. I listen to Bright Eyes a lot, and I read poetry sometimes. What do you do when you’re not singing?

Teresa couldn’t bring herself to check the message to see if it was embarrassing or crap. She just sent it. After five minutes a reply arrived.

i am fourteen years old like you so we are almost the same with the same name but i dont know where to put full stops and things when you write you can teach me i dont do anything exciting and you mustnt be scared im the one who should be scared i hardly do anything but now im going to sleep and tomorrow we will write more

They were the same age and they had almost the same name. Theres and Teresa. It was perfect.