Little Star

BOTH THE GIRLS

Max Hansen.

If that name means anything to you, then either you’re interested in old Danish films, or you’re in the music industry. The Hansens came from Denmark, and when their only son was born in 1959, they named him Max after the actor who appeared in the first film they saw together in the cinema, Beautiful Helena.

It would be quite interesting to investigate Max Hansen’s early years, to try and work out how such a person is formed, but that lies outside the scope of this narrative. It is enough to report that the family moved to Stockholm when Max was two years old, that he grew up as a Swede, and that he makes his entrance into this story forty-five years after that move.

In his twenties Max tried his hand at a musical career as the singer with the glam rock band Campbell Soup, but the only thing this led to was that he got to know the more successful band Ultrabunny and through a series of decisions and coincidences, ended up as their manager.

When Ultrabunny dissolved due to the songwriter’s crippling writer’s block, Max looked around for another band to help along the way. He had a winning attitude, a firm handshake, and a particular talent for making himself look much more important than he was. After a couple of years he had a small stable of fairly successful acts.

It was the middle of the 1980s, and Café Opera was the playground of choice for anyone who was someone or wanted to be someone in the music industry. Max wasn’t at the top of the tree, but he made sure he invited the right people, hung out in the right company and made useful contacts. If an up and coming songwriter needed something to shove up his nose, Max wasn’t slow to share, and when some well-known band made their noisy entrance, a bottle of chilled champagne would sometimes arrive at their table. Who’s it from? Max Hansen, over there. Come and sit yourself down buddy, what did you say your name was? Spread the name around, spread the name.

The girls they let in solely because of their looks swarmed the tables, pretending to be unimpressed. Max focused on the ones with the wrong brand of handbag and the slightly desperate look. Chatted for a while, made sure he said hi to a couple of faces they would recognise from TV; that was usually all it took. Home to his two-room apartment on Regeringsgatan and wham, bam, thank you ma’am, breakfast not included. His all-time record was thirty in one month, but to make that he’d had to trawl Riche on the nights when Café Opera was dead.

And so it went on. Max had a highly developed sense of hierarchy, which was both a blessing-because it told him what his position should be within a group-and a curse, because it informed him implacably that he had got stuck two tiers below the top level.

If it had been just one tier, his artists would probably have stuck with him even if they got their big break, and would then have hauled him up with them. As it stood, if things started to go too well they left him when their contracts ran out.

He was fortunate enough to sign a completely unknown band, Stormfront, on a five-year contract that was dubiously advantageous for him; he then saw them break through after only a year. This made him plenty of money, but also led to a whole lot of bad feeling. The band bad-mouthed him constantly and called him a parasite: what should have been his great success turned out to be the beginning of his decline.

A few years after Stormfront had left him, pissing on his hall carpet by way of a farewell gift, the situation was completely reversed.

The only young artists he had any chance with were those who hadn’t heard of him. Or those who knew exactly who he was, but were desperate. He still had his contacts, in spite of everything.

By the end of the nineties there was a saying in the industry that summed up the situation perfectly: ‘Max Hansen-the last chance’. There were still songwriters, producers and record companies he could turn to if there was anything brewing, but they were down at the lower end of the scale, and the good times were over.

One thing remained unchanged: his taste for young girls. Since it was no longer enough to say hi to the right people in order to make an impression (and since the right people no longer said hi back), he had to bring in the heavy artillery to get the tender young flesh into his bed: the half promises.

Times had changed. In the mid-eighties, the dream of fame had been just that-an unattainable dream for most people. But now, thanks to the reality TV explosion, Lisa from Skellefteå and Mugge from Sundbyberg could suddenly believe, in all seriousness, that they were rising stars, that something big was just around the corner, and they grabbed at every opportunity.

Max hung out in the Spy Bar, keeping an eye out for anyone whose star had noticeably begun to fade. Those who had done the suburban clubs and shopping malls, and who now had only the odd gig with a backing track in a small-town pizza joint to keep the dream alive. Then he struck.

In this context his nickname, ‘Last chance’ was no liability. The girls in question were usually painfully aware that their moment had passed, even when they kept up a good front. ‘Last chance’ at least meant there was a chance, and that was what Max told them.

Untapped potential, a good stylist, a songwriter I know who’s worked with the Backstreet Boys, this guy at the record company who’s looking for someone exactly like you, contacts in Asia, they absolutely love Swedish girls over there.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it bombed. In November 1999 Max recorded his first shag-free month since he was twenty. He got a hair transplant to restore his fringe, had a few wrinkles ironed off his upper lip and considered his situation.

It wasn’t that he actually scammed the girls. He did give them a few numbers to call, occasionally set up the odd meeting. With a girl from Big Brother he even managed to get her song listed as ‘bubbling under’ on Tracks, plus a few gigs in shopping malls. OK, so his promises were dubious, but these were hard times.

He decided to change tactics. Trawling in Spy Bar had become more and more difficult, and he decided to go back to basics. He started turning up at the public end-of-term concerts at music schools, and he kept an eye on the young girls who sang on TV, then got in touch.

Sometimes he would manage to get one of them into a manufactured group for a tour in Japan, or fix a couple of appearances at games fairs where they needed a Lara Croft. He recorded videos of girls dancing in their underwear, and he made the position clear: they could put out or push off, and yes, he was intending to film it.

One evening when he was sitting on his sofa half-drunk, jerking off to a DVD of a girl he had taped a couple of days earlier dancing clumsily to ‘Oops, I Did It Again’, he realised he had reached some kind of rock bottom, and that he hadn’t the slightest desire to do anything about it. Then he came and fell asleep.

That was the situation when Max Hansen switched on the television at the end of September 2006 to watch ‘agony week’ on Idol. Every single boy and girl he saw on the program had some measure of talent, and he thought he could predict the ones who would get through, and how things would go for them after that. He was really after those who were voted off.

An incredibly pretty and innocent girl from Simrishamn piqued his appetite, but he suspected she was one of the ones where all contact had to go via the parents. However, he did make a note of her name as a possibility for business rather than penetration.

Then came Tora Larsson with ‘Life on Mars’, arousing something in him that was usually fast asleep: his curiosity. He couldn’t work her out. He had been in the business for such a long time, and was musical enough to recognise a matchless voice when he heard it, but the girl herself? And her performance? What was all that about? Was it fantastic, or utter crap?

For once he had no idea how things would go for her, even though her voice echoed in his head long after she had stopped singing. She was pretty as a picture and at the same time ice-cold, in a way that was both repellent and arousing.

Tora got through, and the following day Max got hold of her contact details through an acquaintance at TV4. An address, nothing more. He printed out his standard letter with some modifications, but decided to wait and see how things went before sending it. Presumably she would have received a number of offers.

He watched the program when Tora sang ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. He was pleased when she went out, because that increased his chances. If he had ever seen an uncut diamond, he was looking at one right now. She had the voice and the appearance going for her, more than most in fact, but there was a hell of a lot missing if she wanted to have a successful career and become really popular.

And who would polish this diamond if not Max Hansen? Filled with inspiration, he dispensed with his standard letter and put together a new one, in which he went through her current qualities and defects, explained how he could help her, and outlined the opportunities that were open to her.

As usual he exaggerated a fair amount, but there was still a significant level of truth in what he wrote. He managed to convince himself that he just wanted to take her under his wing and help this fragile plant to grow, and so on. He almost got tears in his eyes; it was only the discovery that he had got an erection while he was writing that brought him back to reality.

He went straight down to the post box to send the letter. By the time he got back to the apartment, a part of him was already waiting anxiously for a reply.

He wanted this. Oh, how he wanted this.

The Idol adventure had been quite taxing for both Jerry and Theres, although in very different ways. It had changed them, and it had changed their relationship. Jerry had been forced to bring out aspects of himself that he didn’t know existed, and he had seen elements of Theres that were completely new to him.

It had begun at the very first audition. On the subway he had asked her what she had actually said to console all those weeping girls, and Theres had replied, ‘Words.’

‘I get that. But what kind of words?’

‘Normal words. The way things are.’

That was all he could get out of her, and his curiosity would eventually be satisfied by something that happened.

Theres sailed through the various stages of the Idol auditions in the spring and summer as if it was something completely natural, while Jerry became more and more exhausted. He hadn’t realised there was so much of it. He thought you just turned up, sang for the judges, were either accepted or not accepted, and then you were ready for the program.

But that wasn’t how it worked. After the preliminary audition at the Grand Hotel, Theres was asked to come back three days later with the same number, the same clothes and the same hairstyle to avoid any continuity problems; she had then sung for the main judging panel, got through and been congratulated by a small group of girls.

There had been breakdowns and streaky mascara on that occasion too, and once again Theres had stepped in; bending her head close to the distressed contestant, whispering words that Jerry strained, unsuccessfully, to hear. Theres was given more bits of paper with telephone numbers on them, and made not the slightest attempt to ring them.

But there was more. A month or so later there was the final audition at Oscar’s Theatre, and Jerry had to put up with hours and days of waiting while Theres sang solo or in various groups. Every day he hoped she would be eliminated so that it would all be over, every day she got through. There was sweat and suffering and kids singing in every corner and cameras filming and it was hell on earth.

When Theres had finally been filtered through as one of the twenty lucky contestants who would return for the live shows in the autumn, Jerry felt undiluted relief. Not because she had got through, but because it was finally over. For now. He would worry about the autumn when the time came.

One very hot day in the middle of July, when the heat between the three-storey buildings was enough to make your skin hurt, Jerry finally found out what it was that Theres did.

They had gone into the local shop to choose an ice cream each, when they heard raised voices from the direction of the freezer. Then the owner appeared, marching towards the storeroom and dragging a girl of about thirteen by the arm.

From a few monosyllabic exchanges Jerry realised that the girl had been stealing, and she was now being called to account. The owner was squeezing the girl’s forearm hard with one hand, and she was sobbing, ‘No, look, I’m really sorry, I won’t…’

Like anything unexpected that has some element of violence, it created a kind of physical numbness in the observer, and Jerry stood there with his arms dangling as he watched the owner push open the doors leading to the storeroom and drag the girl along with him.

He thought the owner was basically a nice guy who just wanted to make a point, rather than reporting the incident to the police. A good telling-off, and that would be the end of the matter. That was his interpretation. Theres’ interpretation was different.

When Jerry emerged from his temporary paralysis, he caught sight of Theres. She had gone over to the shelf containing kitchen items, picked up a carving knife and ripped off the packaging. She was now heading for the storeroom with great determination, holding the knife at waist level.

‘Sis? Sis!’

He ran after her and grabbed her by the shoulder. Theres raised the knife and turned to face him. Her eyes were empty, her face a grimacing mask. Instinctively Jerry let go of her shoulder and held up his hands in self-defence. Theres seemed to be on the point of stabbing at him, but stopped. He could hear a low growl coming from her throat.

Incredibly, Jerry had enough presence of mind to see that there was a question in her expression, her posture: Why are you getting in my way? You have one minute to explain.

‘You’re wrong,’ Jerry said. It was the quickest thing he could come up with to give himself a little bit of breathing space. ‘You’re wrong. You’re doing the wrong thing.’

‘Little girl will be dead,’ said Theres. ‘The big person will kill her. Not wrong.’

Jerry made a huge effort to speak in clear sentences that Theres would hopefully be able to grasp as truths. ‘You are wrong. He is not going to kill her. He is not going to harm her. He is going to say…words to her. Some harsh words. Then she will be allowed to leave.’

Theres lowered the knife a fraction. ‘How do you know?’

‘You have to trust me.’ Jerry pointed at the storeroom doors. ‘In a couple of minutes she’ll come out. She won’t be harmed. I promise.’

The knife returned to waist level as Theres stared fixedly at the doors, keeping watch. Jerry looked around the shop. Fortunately there were no other customers, but someone could come in at any moment.

‘Theres? Could you give me the knife?’

Theres shook her head. ‘If the little girl doesn’t come, the big person will be dead.’

Jerry scratched the back of his head hard. His scalp was damp and more sweat was breaking through. He got the dizzying feeling that his and Theres’ day-to-day existence was no more than a matter of tripping along across suspension bridges. There was actually an abyss between them, a chasm so deep that he couldn’t even see the bottom. It had just become visible for a moment.

‘OK,’ said Jerry. ‘But if…when the little girl comes out, will you give me the knife then?’

Theres nodded.

They waited. A minute passed. Two. No other customers came into the shop. Jerry stood next to Theres, staring at the closed double doors. When another minute had passed, an irrational fear began to grow in his breast. That Theres was right. That a murder or rape was being committed right now in the storeroom. He glanced at Theres. Her face was hard, closed. The girl needed to come out now, otherwise something terrible was going to happen.

And then she appeared. The doors opened and the owner saw Jerry, nodded in greeting and gestured at the tear-stained creature meekly trailing behind him.

‘Sometimes you just have to make a stand, don’t you?’

Jerry nodded and took a step to one side so that he was standing at an angle that hid the knife from the owner’s view. The girl headed for the exit, and the owner called after her, ‘You’re welcome to come in again. But no more of that kind of thing.’

The girl shook her bowed head, and Theres followed her. Jerry let her go, because she no longer had the knife in her hand. He glanced sideways and saw that it was lying on top of the ice cream freezer.

The owner was talking about how it was essential to tackle this kind of thing from the start rather than simply letting these kids carry on, because they would end up paying for it later. Jerry nodded and made noises to indicate agreement as he manoeuvred the knife into his hand behind his back. When the owner turned away, he hid it among the packets of crisps. Then he left.

Theres and the girl were sitting side by side on the wall outside the shop. The girl was curled up into a weeping bundle, and the scene looked familiar. This time Jerry was going to find out what it was all about. The girls were sitting with their heads close together, taking no notice of him, so he crept around them until he was standing on the pavement behind the wall.

As he moved into position he could hear Theres’ voice like a rhythmic mumble, rising and falling as if she were singing a lullaby. When he got closer, he could hear what she was saying.

‘You mustn’t be afraid.’

‘No.’

‘You mustn’t get upset.’

‘No.’

‘You are little. They are big. They do bad things. They will be dead. They are angry because they will be dead. You are little. You will not be dead.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You will live forever. You are not in pain. You do not hurt anyone. You have a lovely song inside your head. They have ugly words. You are soft. They are hard. They want your life. Do not give your life to them. Do not give them tears. Do not be afraid.’

Her voice had a hypnotic quality that made Jerry start to sway back and forth where he stood. He too was touched by the message. Do not be afraid, do not be afraid. The fear he had felt in the shop was washed away, like words written on the shore. He had never heard Theres’ voice like this. It was caressing, inviting, healing. It was the voice of a mother comforting her child, it was the voice of a doctor telling the patient that everything will be fine, and it was the voice of the person who takes your hand in the darkness and leads you out.

Despite the fact that the voice wasn’t even speaking directly to Jerry, he swayed along with its rhythm and believed the simple truth it revealed: There was nothing to be afraid of.

As he swayed he lost his balance and moved his foot to straighten up. Theres heard it, and turned around. For a second she gazed into his eyes, looking at him like a stranger. Then her eyes slid away and she stood up. The other girl got up too. She was holding her head high now, relieved. Jerry shook himself as if to wake himself from a dream he didn’t really want to leave.

On the way home Theres said in her normal voice, ‘You mustn’t lie. You’re not to lie.’

‘What?’ said Jerry. ‘I haven’t lied. Everything turned out just the way I said.’

Theres shook her head. ‘You said the little girl wouldn’t be harmed. She was harmed. The big person harmed her. What you said was wrong.’

Yes, thought Jerry. Bloody good job, too.

During the late summer they would still sit jamming with the guitar sometimes, writing outlines of songs, but something had changed between them. After the incident in the shop Jerry had the feeling that he had unequivocally been moved into the category ‘big people’, and could therefore no longer be trusted. That it was only statistics that made Theres accept his presence: he hadn’t tried to kill her yet, and therefore was probably unlikely to do so in the future.

He thanked his lucky stars that she couldn’t remember how their acquaintance had started. He really had been trying to hurt her then. Perhaps she did remember somehow, and it was lying there beneath the surface, smouldering away as a lingering suspicion of evil intentions. But he had been a different person then. Or had he? Do we ever really become a different person?

Perhaps not. But people change. When Jerry looked back at his youth, he could hardly grasp what kind of person had broken into summer cottages and run wild. He seemed like the bad guy in some obscure old film.

It was when he sat on the cellar steps in his childhood home looking at the remains of his parents smeared all over the floor that he had taken the step. No. It was just after that. When he had decided to protect and care for the person who had murdered them. He could have made a very different choice. But at that critical moment he took a step in an unexpected direction and set off along a new road. Since then he had continued on that road, and it was taking him further and further away from his former self. It was just visible, far far away, and soon it would have to start sending postcards if it wanted to communicate with him.

Two months before Max Hansen sat down to write his message to Theres, she got a letter from TV4 congratulating her on a successful audition, and inviting her to present herself at Studio 2 in Hammarbyhamnen for sound check and make-up five hours before the program was to be recorded. There was also a new contract which involved signing over all her rights to everything.

Jerry couldn’t work out what idiotic impulse had made him set this particular ball rolling. The papers and the contract made it clear that he had no control whatsoever, that TV4’s machinery had both him and Theres firmly in its grasp. They were no longer the ones rolling the ball; the ball was rolling along with them inside it.

He might have been able to hide the papers and forget the whole thing if it hadn’t been for the fact that Theres was expecting them to arrive. Some girl at the auditions who had got through last year but fallen at the last hurdle had explained the whole thing to her. Theres knew exactly what was going on, and knew the date even before the papers arrived. There was nothing he could do.

Besides which, he felt the same as he had when it came to the auditions. However nervous Jerry was about the whole thing, a part of him was curious to see how things might go. The ball again. Something has been set in motion, and must be allowed to complete that movement.

They practised ‘Life on Mars’ and when the day of the recording arrived Jerry gave Theres precise instructions. The incident in the shop haunted him, and he was pushed to the very limit of his patience as he explained to Theres over and over again that whatever happened, she was not allowed to harm the big people.

‘What if they want to make me dead?’

‘They won’t do that. I promise.’

‘But if they do?’

‘They won’t. They won’t do you any harm at all.’

‘But they’ll want to. They always want to.’

And so on and so on. The time when they would need to leave was drawing closer and closer, and Jerry still wasn’t sure he had got anywhere. He turned to the last inducement he could come up with: ‘OK. Bugger all that. But listen to me. I’ll be furious if you do anything. Furious and upset.’

‘Why?’

‘Because…because it’ll cause all kinds of problems.’

Theres was quiet for a little while. Then she said, ‘You want to protect the big people.’

‘Think that if you want. But actually, I just want to protect you. And myself.’

Jerry had to use all his powers of persuasion to get his own pass at TV4, but after all it wasn’t exactly unknown for Idol contestants to want someone with them to provide support. He promised to stay in the background and not disrupt the preparations for the recording.

He went and sat right by the edge of the stage as Theres tested microphones and sang to the backing tape that had been prepared for her. As usual her voice gave him goosebumps, and all activity in the studio seemed to stop completely during the three minutes the song lasted.

Then Theres was given instructions on how to behave with regard to the cameras, and Jerry started chewing his nails when he saw her body stiffen as a choreographer gently took her by the shoulders to move her into the right position. Jerry was on the point of leaping out of his seat to explain the choreographer’s instructions, but the young man-who in Jerry’s opinion was almost certainly gay-was so soft and flexible in the way he moved that Theres never seemed to perceive him as a real threat.

Jerry couldn’t hear what was said, but he could see that Theres was listening to the instructions, looking at the cameras and into the cameras. When she sang the song again, she moved her body and her eyes in a way that suggested she had embraced the choreography, at least to a certain extent.

It was time for lunch, and when Theres quietly accepted that she couldn’t sit among the rest of the contestants eating baby food, Jerry began to relax slightly. She was adapting to the situation in spite of everything, and perhaps it was all going to work out.

After lunch a woman came along, cast a critical eye over what Theres was wearing, then disappeared and came back with a shimmering silver number which she ordered Theres to put on in the changing room. This too went well. The woman had picked up on the title of the song and found something that was a cross between a spacesuit and a ball gown. It didn’t particularly suit Theres. She wasn’t bothered in the slightest.

One hour before the recording they were told to go along to make-up. After being directed up various flights of stairs and along corridors, they came to a large room with eight empty hairdresser’s chairs. A young woman with seriously teased blonde hair was sitting reading a magazine, while a big black woman of about Jerry’s age was sweeping underneath the chairs.

The blonde woman stood up as they came in, welcomed Theres without looking at her and held out her hand. When Theres made no move to take it, Jerry shook it instead. Her hand was cold and slender, and she had lots of bracelets around her wrists. She was wearing a very low-cut top that emphasised a pair of unnaturally globular breasts; Jerry assumed he ought to find her attractive, but he didn’t.

Theres sat down in the chair and when Jerry went and stood next to her, the woman pointed to an ordinary chair at the far end of the room and said, ‘It would be fantastic if you could go and sit over there.’ When Jerry hesitated, she said, ‘Or outside would be brilliant too.’

Jerry lumbered over to the chair and perched on the edge. He had a bad feeling, and he wanted to be ready. The woman slipped a black hairdresser’s cape around Theres’ shoulders as she sat staring at her own reflection. Silence. The only sound was the whisper of the broom across the floor.

Jerry glanced towards the sound. The woman who was cleaning had a broad, dark brown face and coal-black curly hair caught up in a bun at the back of her neck. She must have weighed ninety kilos, and everything about her was big and round and soft; you might have thought she had been put there purely as an effective contrast to the make-up girl’s blonde rigidity.

The cleaner seemed to become aware that he was looking at her; she turned towards him and fired off a smile that was impossible to resist. Jerry felt like an idiot as the corners of his mouth curled upwards without any help from him, and he had to stare at the floor. Then he caught sight of himself in a mirror, and the smile died away.

Not much to write home about.

He looked like a superannuated teenager. He had made a special effort for the occasion and combed his hair back and up into some kind of rockabilly style, and with the bushy sideburns he could never quite bring himself to shave off, he looked like an Elvis well past his prime. His puffy face, the dark circles under his eyes, the nose that seemed to get bigger every year. The fact that someone had given this face a smile was a major event.

He saw a flash of silver in the mirror, then everything happened very quickly. The make-up girl had obviously decided that Theres’ face didn’t need any major input, and instead had turned her attention to her hair. It was long, blonde, and slightly wavy.

When Jerry saw the flash of silver, the make-up girl had already grabbed hold of Theres’ hair with one hand, and in the other she was holding a pair of scissors that flashed for a second before she moved them down towards the girl’s neck. If Jerry had seen what was going to happen, he could have prevented it. But his attention had wavered for a short while, and now it was too late.

Theres growled and hurled herself to one side, which made the chair spin around with some speed. The footrest hit the make-up girl’s shins. She gasped with pain and fell backwards. In a second Theres was out of the chair and on her, snatching the scissors out of her hand.

It all happened so fast. Jerry had barely got out of his chair by the time Theres raised the scissors in order to stab the make-up girl in the face. Fortunately there was someone quicker than him. As Theres raised her arm, a dark hand grabbed hold of her wrist. With a single movement the cleaner lifted Theres and plonked her back in the chair as she said, ‘Hey girl! You mad or something?’

She took the scissors off Theres and threw them back on the make-up table. Then she stood there with her hands on Theres’ shoulders as Jerry hurried over. The expression on Theres’ face was something completely new. There was fear, but also sheer amazement. Her jaw had dropped and her blue eyes were wide open.

‘Thanks,’ Jerry said to the cleaner. ‘I mean…thank you very much.’

‘That’s OK,’ the cleaner said with a strong American accent. ‘What’s the girl’s problem?’ She squeezed Theres’ shoulders. ‘Hey there! What’s your problem? You seem pretty nervous!’ Theres didn’t move; she simply stared in the mirror at the creature towering behind her.

The make-up girl got up from the floor, her legs trembling.

‘What the fuck…’ she said. ‘This is crazy, I don’t have to put up with this.’ She had started to cry, and the streaky mascara gave her a ghost-like appearance. She pointed at Theres and sobbed, ‘She’s off her head, she shouldn’t be here, she shouldn’t be anywhere, she needs locking up…’

She staggered out, presumably to report to a higher authority. The cleaner spun the chair around so that Theres was facing her, and tried without success to catch her eye.

‘Hey girl,’ said the cleaner. ‘You’re so pretty. You shouldn’t be so angry. Come on, let’s get you looking even better.’

She lifted up Theres’ hair, and Theres allowed it to happen. She plugged in the curling tongs and started to wind strands of hair around it; Theres simply kept on staring. After a couple of minutes Theres turned her head in Jerry’s direction and asked the question that explained her incomprehensible acceptance of the fact that someone was touching her. She asked, ‘Is that a human being?’

Jerry blushed and started stammering out an answer, but the cleaner just laughed and said, ‘Where have you been for the last hundred years, girl?’ as she carried on doing Theres’ hair.

‘I’m really sorry,’ said Jerry. ‘She’s not really used to…being out like this.’

‘You must live in a weird place-where do you live?’

‘Err, Svedmyra.’

‘Svedmyra? Is that the name of the place? Don’t you have any black folk in Svedmyra?’

‘I think it’s mostly…old Swedes.’

The cleaner shook her head and started rubbing mousse into Theres’ scalp. Jerry was inexpressibly grateful for her intervention and would have liked to inform Theres that yes, this was a human being, and probably a good one. But if the prerequisite for her tolerance was that she regarded the cleaner as something else, then it would be best if things continued as they were.

Naturally Theres had seen black people before, but Jerry hadn’t realised how she regarded them, because she had never asked. Perhaps the cleaner’s strong accent also contributed to the fact that Theres saw her as some kind of alien creature.

‘Excuse me,’ said Jerry, ‘but what’s your name?’

The cleaner wiped the mousse on her overall and held out her hand. ‘Paris.’ She pronounced it perris. ‘And you?’

‘Jerry. Is that…perris as in the city?’

‘Yes. My sister’s called Venice.’

Jerry tried to come up with some witticism about whether they had a brother called London, but it just sounded stupid, and before he managed to think of something else to say, the make-up girl was back with a man trailing behind her.

The man had a pass on a cord around his neck. He was in his thirties, and looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. When the girl started going on about what had happened, his eyebrows went up and the outer corners of his eyes went down in an expression that said: Here we go again. Presumably a complaint from the make-up girl wasn’t a unique occurrence.

He listened without interest for thirty seconds, then glanced over at Paris who was busy making Theres’ eyebrows a little darker in order to bring out her blue eyes. He shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, yeah. But everything seems to be back on track now,’ at which point he turned and walked out.

The make-up girl followed him, and Jerry heard her say, ‘That’s actually my job!’ to which the reply was, ‘Evidently not.’

Paris gently swept a powder brush over Theres’ face, and once again Jerry was amazed when Theres closed her eyes, as if she was enjoying it. Paris lowered her voice, ‘In America we have a saying: Go fuck yourself.’ She nodded in the direction of the door. ‘That woman. The number of times I’ve wanted to…how would you say it in Swedish?’

Jerry thought for a moment, then said, ‘Stick och brinn.’

‘Stick och brinn. Like…fuck off and burn?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jerry. ‘Fuck off and burn. Stick och brinn.’

Paris undid the cape and removed it. She said, ‘Stick och brinn,’ gave Theres a big smile and said, ‘Not you, honey. You did good. Maybe next time you should just relax a little.’

She picked up the broom which she had dropped in the midst of all the tumult, and carried on with her work. Theres stood there looking at herself in the mirror. In her silver dress she looked like something from a sci-fi film, a wondrously beautiful creature sent to Earth to ensnare and seduce mankind. Or to be ensnared and seduced.

Jerry cleared his throat, went over to Paris and held out his hand. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know what to say.’

Paris looked at his hand without taking it. ‘You could do something instead.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Dinner would be nice,’ said Paris, her concentration fixed on the movement of the brush across the floor.

‘Dinner?’ Jerry understood each individual word she said, but what they implied was so unimaginable that his brain couldn’t make a sentence out of them.

Paris sighed and stopped brushing. ‘Yes, dinner. You take me out to dinner. Sometime. Someplace. Don’t you do that in Sweden?’

‘Oh yes, absolutely. Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘Absolutely. I’d be delighted. Any time. Or anywhere. Or…shall I…have you got a phone number?’

With a kohl pencil Paris wrote her phone number on a tissue, and Jerry tucked it in his wallet as if it were a claim certificate for a share in a goldmine. Then he backed out of the room with Theres, waved and slid around the corner.

For the rest of the day he might as well have been on the moon. Or Mars, if you prefer. Gravity had lost its power over him; he weighed twenty kilos at the most. Several times he took out the tissue with Paris’ number on it, just to make sure it was still there. After unfolding it and folding it up again so many times, he thought the numbers were starting to look blurred, so he wrote them down on a piece of paper which he put in his wallet. Then he wrote them on another piece of paper which he put in his pocket.

He had never-never!-had anything like this happen to him; someone had…what was it called? Made advances to him. Never. He would invite her out to dinner. Where would he take her? No idea. He never ate in restaurants. He would have to…

That’s where Jerry’s head was at.

There were no further incidents with Theres during the course of the day, which was just as well because Jerry wasn’t really there. Twenty kilos of his body mass, perhaps. The rest was floating somewhere out in space.

Theres got through that week and went out the following week with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. It was Jerry who won Idol. A couple of days after she had given him her number, he called Paris. He had checked the restaurant pages in the newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and suggested Dragon House, a buffet restaurant near Hornstull. All you can eat and so on.

They met up, they both ate enormous amounts of Thai and Chinese food, drank plenty of beer. Jerry found out that Paris was forty-two years old and had come to Sweden five years earlier when the father of her son, who was now nine, had got a job here. They had gone their separate ways three years ago, after the man started seeing a Swedish woman he was working with.

Paris had done all kinds of jobs both in the USA and in Sweden, and among other things had worked as a make-up artist on a local TV station in Miami. Hence her knowledge. She regarded herself as a survivor, and was absolutely categorical when it came to judging people and events. This was bad, that was good, he was an idiot, he was a sweetheart.

Jerry seemed to have the good fortune to fall into the sweetheart category, since he got a long hug before they parted. When he asked if he could ring her again, Paris said that she expected nothing else, honey.

The day Max Hansen’s letter plopped through the letterbox, Jerry was standing on the balcony smoking as he devoted himself to detailed dreams involving going to bed with Paris. They had seen each other several times, he had been allowed to kiss her, and her lips had been a foretaste. He imagined it would be like falling into a feather bed. Allowing himself to be enveloped by her huge breasts, her round arms, burrowing down in her skin. Disappearing.

His fantasies had become so delicious that he felt caught out when Theres came out onto the balcony. His hands moved instinctively to hide his groin, even though there was nothing to hide but his thoughts.

Theres tilted her head to one side.

‘Why are you embarrassed?’

‘I’m not, I’m just having a smoke.’

Theres held out a piece of paper. ‘Somebody says I’m good. Somebody wants to talk to me. You have to read it and tell me if it’s all right.’

Jerry took Max Hansen’s letter into the living room, sat down in the armchair and read it twice. He couldn’t decide if it was empty words or a genuine opportunity. He might have been a little bit impressed by the mention of Stormfront, but at the end of the day it wasn’t about that.

Jerry put down the letter and looked at Theres, who was sitting on the sofa with her hands folded on her lap like a patient saint.

‘It’s an agent,’ he said. ‘Somebody who wants to work with you.’

‘What do you mean, work?’

‘Sing. Fix things so that you can do that as a job. Sing. Make a CD, perhaps.’

Theres looked over at the CD rack on the wall. ‘Am I going to sing on a CD?’

‘Yes, maybe. Would you like that?’

‘Yes.’

Jerry picked up the letter again, turning it this way and that as if he could suss out its weight and import through his feelings. This Max Hansen seemed to be genuinely interested in Theres, and the fact was their money wouldn’t last forever.

After all, this was what he had fantasised about long ago. The chance of squeezing a bit of ready cash out of the force of nature that was Theres. Now the chance had come along, he wasn’t so sure. A lot of polluted water had passed under the bridge since then. He folded up the letter, put it in the top drawer of the desk and said, ‘We’ll see.’

Somewhere inside he knew he would open that drawer again, that a new ball had appeared at the top of the slope, and that it would probably start to roll, with or without his co-operation.

Max Hansen, he thought. Take a chance?

At the beginning of November, Teresa was sitting on her bed with an empty sports bag next to her. She knew she ought to put something in the bag, but she didn’t know what. Her train was leaving in an hour, and she had gone up to her room to pack. She glared at the empty bag.

Two days earlier Theres had emailed and asked if she could come over to Stockholm for a visit at the weekend. After a certain amount of difficulty Teresa had managed to book a train ticket on the internet, and had then presented her parents with a fait accompli. She was going to Stockholm on Saturday, could someone give her a lift to the station?

She was going to visit a friend. A girl. In Stockholm. Yes, she was absolutely sure it wasn’t some dirty old man. They had met on the net and now they wanted to meet IRL. In real life. Yes, she would come home the same night and yes, she had checked on Google maps and knew exactly where she was going and how to get there. Svedmyra.

She didn’t want to tell them it was the same girl they had all seen on Idol. Perhaps because they would think she was lying, perhaps they wouldn’t believe her. Perhaps because she would be revealing something she wanted to keep secret.

Her parents knew how lonely she was, and presumably that was why they agreed. She gave them Theres’ address and telephone number and promised to ring when she got there.

So far so good.

It was when she got round to trying to pack a bag that the whole thing ground to a halt. She had never travelled alone on the train before. You were supposed to have a bag when you were travelling, weren’t you? But what was she supposed to put in it? What did she need?

Who am I?

That was another way of putting it. What did she want to take with her to Theres, what did she want to show, who did she want to be? She sat on her bed, staring at the empty bag, and she thought it was mocking her. The bag was her. Empty. Nothing. She had nothing to bring.

She went into the bathroom, did her best with some make-up and thought the result looked OK. She had learned to apply blusher so that her face looked less chubby from certain angles. She fluffed up her hair with a little mousse to create some air around her forehead. Kohl, eye shadow.

When she had finished Göran shouted from downstairs that they would have to go if they were going to catch the train. Without thinking, Teresa chucked in her map, her mobile and her MP3 player, her notebook and her black velour tracksuit. The tracksuit went in mostly because she needed something to fill up the bag.

On the way to the station, Göran asked more questions about the girl she was going to see, and Teresa told him the truth: that they had met on a forum about wolves, that they were the same age, and that she lived in Svedmyra. She lied or stretched the truth when it came to everything else.

Göran waited until the train came in, then gave Teresa a hug which she couldn’t bring herself to return. When she was settled and the train was starting to pull out, Göran waved. She waved back without enthusiasm, and saw him turn away and head back to the car.

It only took a couple of minutes for the journey to sink its claws into her. She was travelling. She was sitting alone on a train going somewhere she had never been before. Between two points she was a passenger, a person who was on their way. A person who was free. She caught sight of her reflection in the window, and didn’t recognise herself.

Who’s that sitting there? Who can it be?

She took out her notebook and a pen, then sat there sucking the pen and occasionally glancing at herself in the glass. She would have loved to be the exciting stranger, sitting on the train and writing, but nothing came to her. Not a word. Her imagination had always been feeble, and now it had fainted dead away.

She wrote, ‘I am sitting on a train…’ but that was it. She wrote it again. And again. When she had been sitting there for ten minutes and filled two pages with the same six words, she looked at herself. The stranger.

Enough!

She shoved the notebook back in her bag and went to the toilet. She leaned against the washbasin for a long time, examining herself in the mirror. Then she wet her face, squirted liquid soap in her hands and washed herself thoroughly, scrubbing off every scrap of make-up. Then she wet her hair to flatten it down at the front, and dried herself with paper towels until her hair lay flat and shapeless.

She got undressed, pulled the black sweatshirt and the black velour tracksuit bottoms out of her bag and put them on. When she looked at the result in the mirror she was able to confirm that she looked bloody awful.

This is me.

When she sat down again the face looking back at her from the other side of the glass was familiar. That ugly cow had been right there with her all through her life, and now she was coming with her to Stockholm. Teresa opened her notebook and wrote:

Those who have wings fly

Those who have teeth bite

You have wings you have teeth

Make sure something happens

Use your hands, grip!

Use your teeth, bite!

Use your wings, fly!

Fly, fly, fly high one day

Fly high for fuck’s sake

The streams of people at T-Centralen, the central subway station, terrified her. As she was going down the stairs from the platform she literally felt as if the waters were closing over her head. That she had a river in front of her, and she was at risk of drowning. Because she didn’t even know which direction she was supposed to go in, she stepped into the river and allowed herself to be swept along until she reached the barriers leading to the tracks.

She handed over some money at a window and said, ‘Svedmyra.’ She was given three coupons and she asked where she should go, then she joined a new stream. She clung to her bag, feeling anxious all the time. There were too many people and she was too alone and too small.

Things were a bit better once she had boarded the train, checked that it was going to Svedmyra and found an empty seat. She could settle down, she had her place. But there were still too many people. Mostly adults with expressionless faces, surrounding her on all sides. At any moment an arm might reach out or someone might start talking to her, wanting something from her.

People kept trooping on and off, and by the time they reached Svedmyra the carriage was almost empty. Teresa stepped onto the platform and unfolded her map. She had made a cross by Theres’ address, just like a treasure map.

There was a light covering of snow on the street, and she shivered in her thin sweatshirt. She pretended that she was a black hole: she wasn’t actually moving-instead, the building where Theres lived was being drawn towards her, about to be sucked into her.

She found the right street and the right door was brought towards her. She kept the game going until she was standing in the lift pressing the button for the top floor, and then she had to stop. She suddenly felt nervous, and only her chilled skin stopped her from breaking out in a sweat.

Fly high for fuck’s sake…

The lift carried her upwards.

It said ‘Cederström’ on the door, as Theres had told her it would. Teresa rang the bell and tried to arrange her face in a suitable expression, but couldn’t come up with one and decided not to bother.

She didn’t know what she had expected. Theres had written that she lived with ‘Jerry’, but hadn’t explained who this Jerry was. The man who opened the door looked like the men who usually sat on the benches in the park, apart from the fact that the check shirt he was wearing looked brand new.

‘Hi,’ said Teresa. ‘Does Theres live here?’

The man looked her up and down and glanced out onto the landing. Then he stepped to one side and said, ‘Come in. You look cold.’

‘I’ve got a jacket.’

‘Right. You could have fooled me.’ He gestured towards the interior of the apartment. ‘She’s in there.’

Teresa took off her shoes and walked through the hallway, keeping a firm grip on the strap of her bag. There was still a risk that the whole thing was a con. That the man who answered the door had sent the emails, and that something terrible would happen to her at any minute. She’d heard about that kind of thing.

When there was no one in the living room her heart started pounding. She listened, waiting for the bang as the front door slammed shut. It didn’t come. The door to another room was open, and she saw Theres, sitting on a bed with her hands resting on her lap.

Everything simply fell away. The crowds of people that had frightened her, the anxiety about getting the wrong train, doing the wrong thing. The cold out on the streets, the brief fear of the man in the shirt. Gone. She had reached the cross on the map, she had reached Theres. She wasn’t surprised that Theres didn’t get up and come to meet her. Instead Teresa walked into the room, dropped her bag by the door and said, ‘I’m here now.’

‘Good,’ said Theres, placing one hand on the bed beside her. ‘Sit here.’

Teresa sat down next to her. In her head she had tried out and rejected a number of opening remarks, tried to visualise what she would say and do if their meeting went like this or that. This particular possibility hadn’t occurred to her. That they would just sit next to each other without saying anything.

A minute or so passed, and Teresa began to warm up and relax. After the chaos of the journey it was really good just to sit still, not thinking. She registered that the room was bare, almost Spartan. No posters on the walls, no little ornaments tastefully or less than tastefully displayed. Only a bookshelf containing children’s books, a CD player and a CD rack. Her own bag, thrown down by the door, looked like an intrusion.

‘I wrote a poem,’ said Teresa. ‘On the train. Do you want to read it?’

‘Yes.’

Teresa pulled her bag over. She opened her notebook and read through the poem one more time. Then she tore it out and gave it to Theres. ‘Here. I think it’s for you.’

Theres sat with the sheet of paper in front of her for a long time. Teresa glanced sideways at her and saw her eyes moving down the lines; when they reached the bottom, they went back to the top and started again. And again. Teresa squirmed, and in the end she couldn’t bear it any longer, ‘Do you like it?’

Theres lowered the paper. Without looking at Teresa, she said, ‘It’s about people being wolves. And birds. I think that’s good. But there are ugly words too. Can you have ugly words in poems?’

‘Yes, I think so. If it feels right.’

Theres read the poem once more. Then she said, ‘It does feel right. Because the person is angry. Because they’re not a wolf. Or a bird.’ For the first time she looked Teresa in the eye. ‘It’s the best poem I’ve ever read.’

Teresa’s cheeks flushed red. It was almost unbearable to meet the gaze of someone who had just said something like that, and the muscles in the back of her neck were shouting at her to turn her head away. But her eyes were steadfast and kept her head in place. In Theres’ big, clear blue eyes there was not a hint of irony or expectation or any other emotion that aimed to provoke a reaction from Teresa. The only thing her eyes said was: You have written the best poem I have ever read. There you are. I am looking at you. That was why Teresa was able to maintain the contact, and after a few seconds it felt completely natural.

Theres pointed at Teresa’s notebook and said, ‘Have you written any more?’

‘No. Just that one.’

‘Can you write more?’

‘Yes, maybe.’

‘When you write I want to read them.’

Teresa nodded. Suddenly she didn’t want to sit here any longer. She wanted to go home to her room and write poems, to fill the whole notebook. Then she would come back and just sit here and look at Theres while she read her poems. That was what she wanted. That was how she wanted things to be.

Jerry appeared in the doorway. ‘So there you are. Everything OK?’ Theres and Teresa nodded in unison and Jerry gave a snort. ‘You look like…I don’t know what you look like.’

‘Laurel and Hardy?’ suggested Teresa.

A grin spread across Jerry’s face and he pointed at Teresa, waggling his finger. Then he stepped into the room and held out his hand. ‘My name’s Jerry. Hi.’

Teresa took his hand. ‘Hi. Teresa. Are you…Theres’ dad?’

Jerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘Kind of.’

‘Kind of?’

‘Yes. Kind of.’

‘He’s my brother,’ said Theres. ‘He hid me when Lennart and Laila got dead.’

Jerry folded his arms and looked at Theres with a somewhat anguished expression. Then he sighed deeply and seemed to give up. He cleared his throat, but his voice was still thick when he said, ‘Would you like some juice? Or something? Biscuits?’

Teresa went to the toilet and used her mobile to ring home and tell them everything was fine. Then she sat in the living room and drank raspberry juice and ate a couple of chocolate brownies that were so old they were leathery. Jerry drank coffee and Theres ate apricot puree with a teaspoon out of a baby food jar. Teresa thought the whole thing was very uncomfortable. It felt as if Jerry was studying her and Theres all the time, as if he was trying to work something out. He was an unusual adult, and she liked him in a way, but she still wanted him to go away.

When they had finished eating and drinking, her prayers were answered. Jerry slapped his thighs and said, ‘Right, girls, I have to go out for a while. And you seem to be getting on fine, so…I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back, but you’ll be OK, won’t you?’

When Jerry was ready to go, he waved Teresa over to him. She went out into the hallway and Jerry lowered his voice. ‘Theres is a little bit special, as I expect you’ve noticed. If you find some of the things she says a bit strange, just…don’t give it too much thought. You’re not a telltale, are you? You’re not the kind of person who runs around telling everybody everything?’

Teresa shook her head and Jerry chewed air in his closed mouth as if he were thinking, trying to reach a decision. ‘It’s like this. If Theres tells you anything…you mustn’t tell anyone, you understand? Not your mum, not your dad, not anyone, OK? I’m relying on you.’

Teresa nodded and said, ‘Yes. I know.’

The look Jerry gave her was so long and so penetrating that Teresa started to feel uncomfortable. He patted her on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m glad she’s met you.’ Then he left.

When Teresa went back to the living room, Theres was sitting at the computer. She asked, ‘Do you want to listen to some music?’

‘Sure,’ said Teresa, and crashed down on the sofa. She stretched out, free of the stiffness produced by having Jerry’s eyes on her. It would be exciting to find out what kind of music Theres liked.

She didn’t recognise the songs coming through the computer’s speakers, but from the thin, synthetic sound she guessed it was something from the early eighties. Then again, what did she know. Maybe music was supposed to sound like that these days, she didn’t really keep up. Anyway, she liked the intro, the melody. It came as a bit of a shock when she heard Theres’ voice.

She couldn’t pick up much of what Theres was singing, it just seemed like disjointed sentences with no connection, mixed with wailing in a lot of places. But it didn’t really matter. The song had her hooked right away. It was catchy, melancholy, beautiful and happy all at the same time, and shivers of pleasure ran up and down Teresa’s spine.

When the song came to an end Teresa sat up and called out, ‘That was fantastic. It was…brilliant. What song was it?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You know…what’s it called?’

‘It’s not called anything.’

Then Teresa got it. The song was so self-evident and so immediately accessible that she had assumed she’d heard it before. But that wasn’t the case. ‘Did you write it?’

‘Jerry wrote it. I’m singing.’

‘Yes, I could tell. What’s it about?’

‘Nothing. I sing words. Your words are better.’

Theres turned and clicked on another track. The song began to play, and Teresa closed her eyes and leaned back on the sofa, ready to enjoy the experience again. When she heard Theres’ voice it took her a couple of seconds to realise two things. One: the voice was no longer coming from the speakers, but from Theres herself. Two: she was now singing the words of the poem Teresa had given her.

Two warm hands grabbed her lungs and wrung them like floor cloths. It was a feeling of happiness so great that it was more like fear. She couldn’t move. Theres modulated her voice and adapted the pauses so that the words flowed perfectly with the melody, as if they had been written together from the start. When the song reached its first crescendo and Theres sang, ‘Fly, fly, fly high one day, fly high for fuck’s sake’, Teresa began to cry.

Theres pressed the space bar and the music stopped. She looked at Teresa, slumped on the sofa with tears pouring down her cheeks. Then she said, ‘You’re not sad. You’re happy. You’re crying but you’re happy.’

Teresa nodded and swallowed several times, then wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘Yes. I just thought it was so beautiful. Sorry.’

‘Why do you say sorry?’

‘Because…I don’t know. Because I said it was beautiful even though I wrote it. But it’s really because your voice is so fantastic.’

Theres nodded. ‘My voice is fantastic. Your words are good. They go well together.’

‘Yes. I suppose so. But it sounded much better when you sang it.’

‘The words were the same. I have a good memory. Jerry says so.’ Theres turned and clicked on a folder. She pointed at the rows of files filling the screen from top to bottom. ‘We’ve made a lot of songs. Can you write words for them?’

They listened to a number of songs. Only a couple were as immediately appealing as the first one Theres had played, but there were melodies and moods among the other songs that also demanded lyrics. Fragments of sentences popped up in Teresa’s head and she wrote them down in her notebook. She couldn’t really get her head round what she was doing. It was possibly the most fun she had ever had in her whole life.

When they had listened to all the songs Teresa flopped against the back of the sofa, her brain exhausted. They had been busy for several hours, and towards the end she had started jotting down disjointed words to the melodies she was hearing, as if in a trance. She had always thought she hadn’t got much imagination, but this didn’t feel as if it had anything to do with imagination. She was just writing down what the music said.

It had started to get dark outside the balcony window, and Teresa gazed blankly at the top of a street lamp which was illuminating individual snowflakes as they fell. Suddenly she sat bolt upright. ‘Shit! Shit, shit, shit!’ She spotted the telephone on the coffee table. ‘I just have to…can I…can I use your phone?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theres. ‘I can’t.’

The alarm clock next to the telephone was showing half past five. Her train had left ten minutes ago. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the receiver hard against her ear. It was Göran who answered. He sighed deeply when he heard what had happened. Then he offered to get in the car and come pick her up.

Teresa saw herself sitting next to her father for almost three hours, trying to avoid answering his questions because she didn’t want this day to be questioned and subjected to explanations.

Theres was standing in front of her watching with interest as Teresa put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked, ‘Could I stay the night?’

‘Yes.’

Teresa had to ward off a few questions, but in the end it was decided that she would catch the train at one o’clock on Sunday instead. When she had hung up she was just about to start explaining to Theres that she didn’t want to be a nuisance and so on, but Theres pre-empted her by pointing at the telephone and asking, ‘Can you use that?’

Teresa had stopped puzzling over all the strange things about Theres, and simply answered, ‘Yes.’

Theres took a piece of paper out of a drawer, handed it to Teresa and said, ‘Ring this man.’ Teresa read through the letter from Max Hansen, and saw that there was both a mobile number and a landline.

‘What do you want me to say?’ she asked.

‘I want to make a shiny CD. With my voice on it. That you can use as a mirror.’

‘He says he just wants to meet you. Discuss things.’

‘I will meet him. Tomorrow. You will come with me. Then I’ll make a CD.’

Teresa read through the letter again. As far as she could work out, it was the kind of letter every girl and boy with artistic ambitions dreamed of receiving. But she noticed it was dated ten days earlier. ‘Have you had a lot of letters like this?’

‘I’ve had one letter. That one.’

Teresa looked at the two short lines of numbers and tried to work out what to say when she had rung one of them. It was all too weird. ‘Are you seriously telling me you’ve never used a phone? You’re joking, right?’

‘I’m not joking.’

Teresa pulled herself together and picked up the phone, keyed in the landline number. As it was ringing she glanced through the letter again. Apart from the fulsome words about Theres’ talent, it had a businesslike tone. Teresa straightened up and tried to make herself bigger and more confident than she was. When a voice at the other end said, ‘Max Hansen speaking’, she cleared her throat with a deeper timbre than necessary and said, ‘Good evening. I’m calling on behalf of…Tora Larsson. She has asked me to tell you that she would like to meet you.’

There was silence at the other end for a few seconds. Then Max Hansen said, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘No. Tora Larsson would like to meet you tomorrow. In the morning.’ Teresa thought about her one o’clock train and quickly added, ‘At ten o’clock. Tell me where.’

‘But this is just completely…why can’t I speak to Tora herself?’

‘She doesn’t like using the telephone.’

‘Oh, right, she doesn’t like using the telephone. And can you give me one good reason why I should believe any of this?’

Teresa held the phone up in the air and said to Theres, ‘Sing. Sing something.’

Without a second’s hesitation Theres started to sing Teresa’s poem. It sounded even more beautiful a cappella, if that were possible. Teresa brought the phone back to her ear and said, ‘Tell me where.’

She heard papers rustling at the other end, a pen moving across a sheet of paper. Then Max Hansen said, ‘The Diplomat Hotel on Strandvägen-do you…does she know where that is?’

‘Yes,’ Teresa lied, trusting in the wonders of the internet.

‘Ask for me in reception,’ said Max Hansen. ‘Ten o’clock. I’m looking forward to it. Really.’

Max Hansen’s voice sounded different now. If it had been deliberately distant at the beginning of the conversation, now it sounded all too close, as if he wanted to crawl out of the telephone and whisper directly into Teresa’s ear. When they had said goodbye, Teresa sank back on the sofa.

What the fuck have I got into here?

It was as if she had ended up in the middle of some spy story. The meeting at the hotel, brief messages, cryptic phone calls. She had no control, and didn’t know whether she found that unpleasant or exciting. Once again there was the chance to take a leap, become someone else. Someone who could handle this situation. She would try.

Theres sat down next to her on the sofa. Teresa told her about the meeting, the time and place, and Theres merely nodded and said nothing.

They sat there side by side. After a while they both leaned back, almost simultaneously. One of them started the movement and the other completed it. Their shoulders were touching. Teresa could feel the faint warmth of Theres’ body. They just sat there, not moving. The clock ticked on the coffee table.

Theres felt for Teresa’s hand, and their fingers intertwined; they sat completely still, gazing into the dark rectangle of the TV screen where they could see themselves as two distant figures, sitting in a room far away. There was a faint overlap where their shoulders met, as if their sweatshirts were sewn together.

When Teresa looked at their hands after a long time, she thought the skin on her fingers was flowing out across the back of Theres’ hand, and that the tips of Theres’ fingers were beginning to melt into her own knuckles in the same way. She stared at their hands and thought it would take a knife, a sharp knife to separate them; there would be a lot of blood.

‘Theres?’

After the long silence the single word was a big bird that flew out of her mouth and thudded around the room, bumping into the walls.

‘Yes.’

‘Who were Lennart and Laila?’

‘I lived there. There was a house. I was in a room. I was hidden.’

‘What happened?’

‘I made them dead. With different tools.’

‘Why?’

‘I was scared. I wanted to have them.’

‘Did you stop being scared after that?’

‘No.’

‘Are you scared now?’

‘No. Are you scared?’

‘No.’

And it was true. Some level of fear had been Teresa’s companion for so long that she had been unable to see it, had accepted that it was as much a part of her life as her own shadow. It was only now that she caught sight of it. As it left her.

As soon as Max Hansen had ended the call and carefully stored the caller’s number, he rang the Diplomat and booked one of the larger rooms he often used for business.

He found it difficult to sleep that night. So much was unclear about this Tora. He usually had a better handle on things before a crucial meeting, he would have had the chance to see how the land lay, suss out the situation, soften up the other party if necessary. This time he hadn’t a clue; he hadn’t even managed to speak to the lady in question. Which meant he had no idea how to plan his strategy. The hours of the night crawled by as he went through possible scenarios, parrying objections and considering manoeuvres that would lead to the desired result.

He was fairly sure that Tora Larsson was a genuine talent who could be a pretty good earner with a little moulding, a few nudges in the right direction. He was lucky to be first on the scene. So far so good. But then there was the other matter. Simply put, he wanted to fuck her. He wanted her signature on his contract and he wanted her body, at least once.

If Max Hansen took a step to one side and looked at himself objectively, he could see that he was a complete bastard. He wasn’t stupid. But there was nothing he could do. His mouth went dry and his fingers began to itch as soon as he thought about the meeting with that cool little beauty. He had no choice. And he had long ago stopped taking that step to one side, and with a self-loathing that bordered on smugness had concluded: You’re a pig, Max Hansen. That’s your nature, and the only thing you can do is keep screwing around.

He wanted to screw young girls. Young girls didn’t want anything to do with him in that way, he was under no illusions. But with the right preparation he could create a situation where young girls felt it was necessary to go to bed with him so that their dreams would come true. It was no more complicated than that.

He thought he had the situation more or less under control when he got up from his tangled sheets at two o’clock and took a sleeping pill. Twenty minutes later he was sleeping peacefully, and was woken by the clock radio at half past seven. He got up, groggy but determined, and began to gather together his paraphernalia.

At nine-thirty he was ready and waiting in room 214 at the Diplomat Hotel. During the past two years he had met seven wannabe artists here. Two of them had ended up on their backs in the fair-sized double bed, one had given him a half-decent blow job, and one had let him cop a feel before she drew the line. A reasonable success rate.

But this success rate depended on the fact that the ground had been prepared in advance. He had hinted at opportunities, coaxed half promises from girls who weren’t exactly wet behind the ears, then cashed in. Tora Larsson would be a challenge.

He didn’t really have any memory of the actual sex, since it had been over-written by the films he had made at the time, then watched over and over again. The number of times he had masturbated while watching himself having sex so far exceeded the number of times he had actually had sex that his real memories were not in his head, but on his DVD shelf.

The room was a good shape. When he mounted the camera on its stand, the viewfinder showed the generous floor space in front of the bed where the girls would do their little audition. When they had finished, he would zoom in on the bed while pretending to switch off the camera. All he could do then was hope for the best.

After setting up the camera he got out the champagne and put it in the bucket he had filled with ice from the machine in the corridor. Well, it was actually sparkling wine rather than champagne, the same thing at half the price, but he’d like to see the teenager who could tell the difference, even the experts are hard pushed to do that. Next to the bucket he placed two slender long-stemmed crystal flutes; they were the genuine article, and even came in their own case.

He took a shower without wetting his hair. He had arranged his hairstyle very carefully that morning: the eight hundred strands in his fringe had cost thirty kronor apiece and they were swept back to achieve just the right kind of tousled look. He snipped off a couple of nasal hairs, smoothed a discreet tinted moisturiser over his face, dabbed on a couple of drops of Lagerfeld.

He was forty-seven years old but on a good day, a day like this, he could pass for forty. He might be a pig but he was no dirty old man. Max Hansen looked at himself in mirror and did the usual pep talk, telling himself he looked pretty good, that there was nothing strange about a young girl getting it on with this guy. He winked at himself in the mirror. Here’s looking at you, babe.

When he was dressed he sat down on the bed and waited, his mind an empty chess board, the pieces not yet set out. This was what it was all about: not taking anything for granted, being flexible. In this case his adaptability stretched to the point where he could accept it if he didn’t even get to first base today. He wanted to go further with this girl, whatever happened.

At quarter past ten there was a soft tap on the door. Max Hansen wiped his palms on his trousers, smoothed down the bedspread and cast a final glance at himself in the mirror. Then he opened the door.

A strikingly unattractive girl was standing there. Small, deep-set eyes in a fat face framed by mousy hair plastered shapelessly to her skull. Her plump body was covered by a faded hoodie, and if the concept unsexy needed a material expression, here she was. Max Hansen almost took a step backwards.

‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘Are you Max?’

‘I am. And who are you?’

The girl glanced at something just out of sight. Max couldn’t help stepping forward and looking out, and there she was. The apple in the Garden of Eden, and all that. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt under a thin, open jacket, Tora Larsson’s figure was more boyish than it had looked on TV, but the mere outline of the small breasts beneath the cotton fabric was enough to send a warm quiver through his groin. It was almost hard to believe she was old enough to take part in Idol.

Her face was small, dominated by the lips and two big blue eyes which gazed at a point just to his left, not blinking at all. Max had seen girls who were prettier, more beautiful, more exciting, whatever. But never anything as attractive as Tora Larsson, standing there in the semi-darkness of the corridor with her thin arms by her sides.

‘Hi,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘So you must be Tora?’

Tora looked at his outstretched hand without taking it, and the central plank of his strategy fell to pieces right there. In one single movement he withdrew his hand and gestured towards the room: ‘Come on in.’

The other girl took a step forward and Max placed one hand on the doorpost, blocking her way.

‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘You’re not Tora, are you?’ The girl shook her head. ‘No. So what exactly do you think you’re doing?’

‘I’m coming with her.’

‘I’m sorry, but this is a matter of contract negotiations. It’s a discussion between two parties. No outsiders. That’s how it works.’

His authoritative tone made an impression. The girl looked at Tora, seeking support, and Tora said, ‘Teresa is coming with me.’

Max decided to risk everything on one throw of the dice. Without more ado he said, ‘Sorry, in that case we have nothing to discuss,’ and closed the door. Then he stood just inside the room, his heart pounding. The doors were heavily soundproofed, and he couldn’t hear what the girls were saying. He was not going to put his ear to the door. He tucked his thumbs inside his fists and squeezed hard.

After perhaps thirty seconds there was another knock at the door. Max let out a long breath, waited for ten rapid heartbeats, then opened the door with an irritated, ‘Yes?’

Tora was standing there this time. The other girl was sitting on the floor opposite the door. ‘Teresa will wait,’ said Tora, stepping into the room as the other girl glared at Max, who took out his wallet and held out a fifty-kronor note.

‘Here. Go and sit in reception and get yourself a soft drink or something. Sorry, but that’s the way it works in this industry.’ The other girl took the note, but made no move to get up. Max closed the thick, heavy door as if he were sealing a bank vault. First stage completed.

Tora stood in the middle of the room, arms at her sides. She looked at the camera, but as Max was about to launch into his carefully prepared spiel, she had already turned her gaze to the champagne bucket. Max took this as an encouraging sign and said, ‘Let’s have a drop of bubbly, shall we? To celebrate.’

Tora watched as he filled two glasses. As he passed her a glass it almost slipped out of his sweaty hand, which had started to tremble on top of everything else. Tora’s calm silence was confusing him. He had seen every possible variation: hysterical gabbling, rock-hard attitude (assumed or genuine), hesitant seductiveness or something close to panic. Everything but this. A visiting princess who knows that all this is mine, and barely tolerates the presence of others. It left him nonplussed, almost scared and really, really excited.

He clinked his glass against Tora’s and took a large gulp. When she didn’t move he said, ‘Try it. It’s absolutely delicious. Excellent label.’

Tora sipped the sparkling wine and said, ‘No. It isn’t delicious. It tastes bad.’

Something snapped inside Max Hansen and he slumped down into an armchair where he rested his cheek on his hand and simply looked at her. Then he clicked a button to start the camera. If nothing else came of this he would at least have a short film of her. Tora was standing in the middle of the floor with the glass in her hand, gazing at the window.

‘Sing something,’ said Max Hansen.

‘What shall I sing?’

‘Whatever you like. Sing “A Thousand and One Nights”.’

Without hesitation Tora began to sing, and after just a few seconds it was as if a clear, cool stream was flowing through Max Hansen. Her voice washed away his anxiety, and he felt pure inside.

‘There is no one in this world like you…’

When the song was over Max Hansen sat there with his mouth hanging open and realised that he had probably been crying; his eyes felt as if he had. The girl standing in front of him was immensely talented, there was no doubt about it. It wasn’t just that she sang perfectly, there was something about the timbre of her voice that penetrated straight through the breastbone and squeezed, squeezed.

If only he could have been satisfied with that. He wanted to be satisfied with that. He was already exhausted, sated as if he’d had terrific sex. He should have simply rolled over and lit a cigar to celebrate. Not risked this.

But the little red devil that lived in his chest woke up and started swishing his tail around Max’s nether regions, tickling where he could feel it the most. Max Hansen put his strategies to one side; after Tora’s song he just couldn’t do it anymore.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘With a bit of practice I think you could be really good. I’d like to work with you.’

‘Am I going to make a CD?’

‘Yes. You’re going to make a CD. I’ll make sure of it. I’m going to make you a star. A big star. There’s just one thing.’

Max Hansen knocked back the remains of the wine in his glass in order to combat the desert-dryness in his mouth. He didn’t want to say it. He wasn’t going to say it. He had his best chance for a very long time here, and he mustn’t mess it up. But then the devil’s forked tongue shot out and said the words for him.

‘I need to know what you look like with no clothes on.’

There, it was said. The cards were on the table, and Max Hansen’s body tensed as if expecting a blow. The expression, the howl from Tora that would crush all his hopes.

It happened so fast he almost didn’t realise what was going on. Tora put her glass down on the bedside table, shrugged off her jacket, pulled off her T-shirt, stepped out of her trousers and knickers and stood there naked, two metres away from him. Max Hansen blinked. And blinked again. He didn’t understand. He went over what had happened in the last few minutes, how it had come about that he was sitting here in an armchair with the girl he desired standing naked in front of him. The dialogue. What he had said. What she had said. He could see the pattern.

She does whatever you tell her to do.

It was that simple. Max Hansen’s eyes drank in the smooth, slender body in front of him and if he had believed in God, if his prayers being answered had been a possibility, then the moment had come.

She does whatever you tell her to do.

A dizziness came over him. The possibilities. Go there, Tora. Sing here, Tora. Come here, Tora. Lie down here, Tora. Feverishly he tore off his shirt and vest, struggled out of his trousers and underpants and stood up, his arms spread wide. Tora looked at his erection. It wasn’t too impressive, he knew that. Twelve centimetres, and even then you had to press the ruler right down to the root.

But that didn’t matter now. Everything had become so simple when Tora just removed her clothes. They were like two children, innocents before each other’s bodies.

‘You’re so beautiful,’ whispered Max, falling to his knees.

The carpet rubbed against his kneecaps as he crawled towards Tora to bury his face in the blonde bush between her legs. When he was almost there she backed away half a step, bumping into the bed frame. She said, ‘No.’

‘Yes,’ said Max Hansen. ‘Come here, it’s nice, I promise. Just a little…’

‘No,’ said Tora. ‘Don’t touch.’

Max Hansen grinned. Don’t touch. This really was like a game. He couldn’t remember when he had last felt so uncomplicatedly happy. Two naked bodies. Don’t touch. Come on, a little bit, just a little bit. He shuffled forward and grabbed hold of her buttocks, buried his nose in her pussy and stuck out his tongue, sliding over the warm flesh inside.

He heard a crack, and a second later felt as if someone had slapped him across the back. His tongue was just slithering out again when a cramp shot through the muscles in his back, and he felt another blow. And another. He twisted his head around awkwardly, but couldn’t see anything.

Strange, really, because it felt as if someone was standing there pouring warm water over his back. He looked up at Tora and saw that she was holding something in her right hand, although he couldn’t work out what it was. In her left hand she was holding her champagne flute, which seemed to be missing its base.

That was what she was holding in her right hand. The base, with a piece of broken stem three centimetres long and dripping red with his blood. Tora raised the weapon again and Max Hansen cried out and curled up into a ball. A second later he felt a deeper blow between his shoulder blades. The glass spike penetrated his flesh and stayed there.

He screamed. The uneven surface of the broken stem must have damaged some nerve when it went in, because he started jerking as if he were having a fit. It was throbbing and pounding. He managed to raise his head to beg for mercy, but Tora was no longer there. He managed to haul himself to his feet with the help of the bed head. Throbbing, pounding. Then he heard the door opening.

There was something not right about that Max Hansen. Teresa had felt it as soon as he opened the door of the hotel room. Something wasn’t quite right about the look on his face or the tone of his voice. Perhaps everyone in the music industry was like that, but she wouldn’t have left Theres alone with him if it hadn’t been necessary, and if Theres hadn’t said that was what she wanted. She was going to make her CD.

However, there was absolutely no chance of Teresa going down to reception. As soon as Max Hansen had closed and locked the door, Teresa crept over and placed her ear to the door. She could hear the sound of voices inside, but not what they were saying. After a while she heard Theres singing ‘A Thousand and One Nights’ and felt a stab of jealousy. That was their song, somehow. Although of course Theres didn’t know that.

And what if she had known? Would it have made any difference?

Teresa had a sentimental streak. She liked what was known as elegiac mood in poetry. A persistent, imprecise longing for what had been, even if it hadn’t been particularly good. She was sometimes struck by a blissful melancholy when she saw Bananas in Pyjamas on TV, despite the fact that she hadn’t really liked it when it was on the first time round.

Theres was the least sentimental person she had ever met. Only the present existed, and when Theres spoke about things that had happened in the past, it was as if she was reading aloud from a history book. Dry facts that had no relevance to what was happening now.

Teresa heard a scream from inside the room. She leapt to her feet and rattled the handle, banged on the door. When no one opened it, she banged again. A moment later the door opened and Theres was standing there, naked. There were streaks of blood on her stomach. One hand was red, and in the other she was holding a champagne glass without a base.

‘What have you…what…’

Before Teresa managed to formulate a sensible question she caught sight of Max Hansen, disappearing into the bathroom. He too was naked, and before he locked the door she caught a glimpse of his back. A T-shaped object was sticking out in the middle of all the red, a tap that had been opened and let out the blood.

‘Help me,’ said Theres. ‘I don’t understand.’

If it hadn’t been for the word ‘help’ Teresa would have taken to her heels. This was too much. But Theres had asked for help. Theres needed help. Therefore she had to help. Teresa walked into the room and closed the door behind her.

‘Here,’ said Theres, holding out the glass with the broken stem. ‘Do you like this stuff? I don’t. It tastes bad.’

Teresa shook her head. ‘What…have you done?’

‘I sang,’ said Theres. ‘Then I took off my clothes. Then he tried to eat me up. I wasn’t scared. I knew I could make him dead.’

‘Listen. Get dressed. We have to get out of here.’

When Teresa followed Theres into the room, she caught sight of the camera, the red light showing that it was recording. They had a similar one at school, and while Theres was getting dressed, Teresa rewound, and quickly looked through what had happened before she came into the room. Theres’ refusal, Max Hansen’s insistence, the result. She pressed eject, took out the DVD and slipped it into her pocket.

Theres was dressed now. The contents of the glass without a base had spilled out all over the bedside table. ‘Come on,’ said Teresa. ‘We need to leave.’

Theres didn’t move. There was the sound of running water from the bathroom. Teresa was beginning to get an odd taste in her mouth. The particular taste that comes when you are facing something completely unpredictable, a mixture of bile and honey. She didn’t want to do this anymore. ‘Come on,’ she wheedled. ‘We can’t stay here.’

‘Yes we can,’ said Theres. ‘I’m going to make a CD.’

‘Not with him.’

‘Yes. He wants to make a CD with me.’

‘Before, maybe. Not anymore.’

‘Yes, he does.’

Theres sat down on the bed and indicated that Teresa should come and sit beside her. Teresa wavered for a few seconds, but there wasn’t really any alternative. She picked up the champagne bottle, tipped the contents into the ice bucket, tested its weight in her hand as a weapon, then sat down next to Theres. She handed her the bottle. ‘Here.’

Theres didn’t take it. ‘What for?’

‘In case he…tries to eat you again.’

‘He won’t.’

‘But just in case.’

‘If he does you can make him dead.’

They sat side by side. The intensity of the whimpering from the bathroom was lessening somewhat. Theres was probably right. That Max Hansen was an unpleasant character, but not particularly dangerous. A coward.

Teresa weighed the bottle in her hand. It was thick and heavy. The shape of the neck and the bulge at the top made it ideal for use as a club. She imagined what it would be like to bring it down on Max Hansen’s coiffured skull, examined her feelings carefully. No. It wasn’t unthinkable. Something within her actually longed to do it.

They were two defenceless girls. There was proof of Max Hansen’s attempted attack on film. They would walk free on every count. She thought. But as Teresa sat there on the bed next to Theres, she felt anything but defenceless. On the contrary. She tried out a couple of mock blows with the bottle in her hand, looked at Theres, so calm and erect, her hands resting on her knees. Not defenceless.

We are invulnerable, thought Teresa. We are the wolves.

When Max Hansen emerged from the bathroom five minutes later, he was literally as pale as a corpse. Every scrap of colour had left his skin, and he had knotted a couple of bath towels around his chest and stomach as temporary bandages. He gave a start when he saw Theres and Teresa sitting on the bed.

‘What the fuck…what the fuck are you doing here?’ he said faintly, glancing at the bottle in Teresa’s hand. He fumbled in his jacket pocket and took out his wallet, threw it on Theres’ knee. ‘Here. Take it. It’s all I’ve got.’

Theres gave the wallet to Teresa, who didn’t know what to do with it. She opened it and considered removing the money, but decided it was best not to, so she threw it back to Max Hansen.

‘I’m going to make a CD,’ said Theres.

Max Hansen swallowed. ‘What?’

‘I’m going to make a CD,’ Theres repeated. ‘I’m going to sing. You’re going to help me.’

For a moment it looked as if Max Hansen was going to burst into tears. He swayed on his feet. Then he opened his mouth to say something, but no sound emerged. He was about to take a step towards Theres, but something in her posture stopped him.

‘Is that…is that what you want?’ he said eventually.

‘Yes,’ said Theres.

‘So we can…we can just draw a line under this, and kind of…?’

Since Theres didn’t reply, possibly because she wasn’t familiar with the expression, Teresa answered instead. ‘Nobody’s drawing a line under anything. But you heard what she said, didn’t you?’ She patted her pocket and nodded at the camera. ‘By the way, I’ve got the movie.’

‘OK,’ said Max Hansen. ‘OK, OK.’

In the mirror Teresa could see blood seeping through the towels. Presumably Max Hansen ought to go to hospital, if he was going to be in a position to help anybody with anything.

When Teresa got up, she realised her legs weren’t quite as steady as her discussion with Max Hansen might have suggested. But she managed to get Theres to her feet, and placed the empty bottle on the table next to Max Hansen. She had to keep up the show for a little while longer.

And she succeeded. She would remember that moment for a long time, and how for once she actually managed to say the right thing in a difficult situation instead of thinking of it afterwards. As she and Theres headed for the door, Teresa turned back to the ashen, sweating figure.

‘Don’t call us,’ she said. ‘We’ll call you.’

Teresa thought she was in a fairytale. The subway train rumbling along through the bowels of the earth was a magic train, and Theres by her side was a creature from another world.

Perhaps it was a way of dealing with the incomprehensible blood-splattered episode she had just witnessed, but from her final comment onwards her brain had decided that the whole thing was a fairytale in which she had been given a role.

Once upon a time there were two girls sitting on the subway. They were as different from one another as two girls can be.

‘Theres,’ she asked when they had gone a couple of stops. ‘How come you killed those people you were living with?’

‘First a hammer. Then different tools.’

‘No, I mean why. Why did you do it?’

‘What was inside. I wanted it.’

‘And did you get it?’

‘Yes.’

One of the girls looked like a fairy princess, but she was a dangerous killer. The other girl looked like a troll, but was as cowardly as a hamster.

‘How does it feel?’ asked Teresa. ‘To kill someone?’

‘Your hands get tired.’

‘But I mean, how does it feel. Does it feel good or bad or horrible or…what does it feel like?’

Theres leaned closer and whispered, ‘It feels good when it comes out. You don’t feel scared anymore.’

‘What is it that comes out?’

‘A little bit of smoke. It tastes good. Your heart gets big.’

‘Do you mean you feel braver?’

‘Bigger.’

Teresa took Theres’ hand in hers and examined it as if it were a sculpture and she was trying to understand the technique behind it. The fingers were long and slender; they seemed so fragile they might snap under the slightest pressure. But they were attached to a hand that was attached to an arm that was attached to a body that had killed. The hand was beautiful.

‘Theres,’ said Teresa. ‘I love you.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I don’t want to be without you. I want to be with you all the time.’

‘I love you.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I love you, Teresa. Let go of my hand.’

Without noticing, Teresa had squeezed Theres’ hand tightly when she heard the words that had never been spoken to her before. She let go of the hand, leaned back and closed her eyes.

But in spite of the difference between them, they needed each other as the day needs the night. As the water needs the person who drinks it, and as the wanderer needs the water.

Teresa didn’t know how the story went on, or how it would end. But it was hers, and she wanted to be a part of it.

When Jerry got back to Svedmyra, he was feeling happier than he had for a long time. Everything had gone according to expectations, even if Paris hadn’t been the voracious lover he had hoped for. She had mostly lain still, gazing into his eyes in a way that paradoxically felt much too intimate. When he came she bit him hard on the shoulder, then began to cry.

It brought back so many things, she explained as they lay smoking afterwards. They would have to give it time. It would get better. Jerry stroked her curves and said that was all he wanted. Time with her. All the time in the world.

When he stepped into the lift her skin and her soft flesh were still there within him like a body memory. He had been woken by her hand on his penis, and had made love with her again, half-asleep, gently; with no tears. She was wonderful, he was wonderful, everything was wonderful.

He had been careless, he knew that. He had hardly given Theres a thought since he went home with Paris. But that was the way things were now; it would all work out, or it wouldn’t. He was in love for the first time in his life, and if everything else went to hell, then so be it.

However, he still felt a stab of anxiety when he inserted the key and realised that the door wasn’t locked. He walked in and shouted, ‘Theres? Theres? Are you here? Theres?’

The DVD cases for Saw and Hostel were lying on the table in the living room. His own mattress was on the floor next to Theres’ bed. Breadcrumbs and an empty baby food jar on the kitchen table. No note anywhere; he went around like a CSI technician trying to reconstruct the girls’ activities before they disappeared.

He sat down at the kitchen table, swept the crumbs into his hand and ate them. There was nothing he could do but wait. He sat there looking out of the window, and the whole thing felt like a dream. Theres had never existed. The events of the last year had never happened. Would he really live with a fourteen-year-old girl who had killed his parents and who didn’t exist in the eyes of society? The very idea was just absurd.

He slipped his shirt off his shoulder and studied the marks left by Paris’ teeth, glowing red against his pale skin. That had clearly happened, at least. Which was a good thing. He got up and drank a glass of water, wondering what he ought to do, but came to no conclusion.

When the doorbell rang ten minutes later he was sure it was the police or some authority figure coming to put a stop to everything, one way or another. But it was the girls.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’

Theres slunk into the apartment without answering, and Teresa pointed at her wrist, where she appeared to be wearing an invisible watch. ‘I have to go. My train leaves in half an hour.’

‘Yes, that’s all very well, but where have you been?’

Teresa was on her way down the stairs, and answered over her shoulder, ‘Out.’

When he went back inside, Theres was busy dragging his mattress out of her room. He picked up the other end and helped her to carry it, then sat down on his bed.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Start talking. What have you done?’

‘We made songs. Teresa did the words. They were good.’

‘OK. Then you watched horror films and then you both slept in your room because you got scared…’

Theres shook her head. ‘Not scared. Happy.’

‘Yeah, right. But what did you do this morning?’

‘We went to see Max Hansen.’

‘The agent, the one who wrote? What the fuck did you do that for?’

‘I’m going to make a CD.’

Theres was standing in front of him, and Jerry grabbed hold of her hand. ‘Theres, for God’s sake. You can’t do things like that. You can’t just go off like that without me. You get that, don’t you?’

Theres pulled her hand away and examined it, as if she wanted to make sure it was unharmed after the contact. Then she said, ‘Teresa was with me. That was better.’

Teresa didn’t know how much of her was sitting on the train to Österyd. It felt like less than half. She had left the essential parts in Theres’ safekeeping in Stockholm, and the thing filling the seat on the train was no more than a functioning sack of blood and internal organs.

It was intoxicating and quite unpleasant. She was no longer in control of herself. The fine hairs on her forearms missed Theres’ presence, the warmth of the body by her side. Yes. When she examined her longing, she discovered that was exactly how it looked: she wanted to be next to Theres. They didn’t have to do or say anything, they could just sit next to one another in silence as long as they were together.

She had never experienced anything like it, this purely physical perception of a lack, an awareness that something big and important was missing. She wasn’t blind. She realised that there was something significantly wrong with Theres, perhaps she even had some kind of brain damage. She didn’t do anything in the same way as normal people, she didn’t even eat normal food.

But ‘normal’? What was so good about ‘normal’?

The people in Teresa’s class were more or less normal. She didn’t like them. She wasn’t interested in the other girls’ tacky little secrets, she thought the boys were just stupid with their hoodies and their baseball caps, their pimply skin. None of them had courage. They walked like cowards and talked like cowards.

She could imagine them all in a deep hole, lined up just as they would be for a class photo, but with their hands and feet bound. She herself would be standing up at the top next to a huge pile of earth. Then she would throw one shovelful at a time into the hole. It would take many hours, but eventually it would be done. Nothing could be seen, nothing could be heard, and the world would be not one jot poorer.

Ten minutes before the train was due to arrive in Österyd, Teresa started to smile. She gave a big smile, she gave a little smile, she gave a medium-sized smile. Trained up her muscles as she constructed a role for herself.

When Göran picked her up at the station, the rehearsal was over. She was the lonely girl who had found a good friend at last. They had watched films and talked half the night and had a brilliant time. The smile and the glow around her were firmly in place, and Göran felt much better when he saw his daughter’s changed mood. Teresa noticed how credible she was, and it wasn’t really difficult because it was all true, on a simple level.

As soon as she got home she checked her emails and found a message from Theres in her Inbox, ‘hi come back soon write more words to the songs’. Four MP3 files without titles were attached. Teresa opened them and found they were four of the melodies she had liked best.

She got to work. After working for a couple of hours she watched the clip of Theres on Idol several times, then carried on writing. When she was on her way to bed, she remembered the DVD from Max Hansen’s camera. She took it out of her bag and stood there turning it over in her hands for a long time. Then she put it in an unmarked case and slid it into the CD rack.

The role she had invented for herself could also be used in school. She was less frosty if anyone spoke to her, and on the whole displayed a less pugnacious attitude. Not that anyone actually cared, but the friction lessened slightly.

To be fair, Johannes noticed the change in her, and when he asked she told him the same story she had dished up to Göran, with a little more detail. Friend in Stockholm, brilliant time and so on. She also let slip that they made music together. Johannes was pleased for her.

As far as her school work went, it was a different story. Her mind was elsewhere. She sat through an entire social studies lesson on the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and literally grasped not one word apart from the fact that someone called Jimmy Carter used to grow peanuts. He might have been a president of the USA. That was the sum total of her knowledge after a forty-minute lesson: that Jimmy Carter used to grow peanuts.

The fact was that the following sentence had suddenly come to her: Fly to the place where wings aren’t needed. It was an exciting sentence, a good sentence. But clumsy. Impossible to find a rhyme. And what did it mean? That you should go to a place where you would no longer need to run away. Yes, something along those lines.

Fly to the place where you need no wings. Better. Rhymes with sings. Go where your heart sings. No, that was ugly. Fly high until your heart sings. Better.

She had scribbled down odd words and sentences on the sheet of paper with Democrats / Republicans written at the top. The information about Jimmy Carter and his peanuts had slipped through when she paused for thought, but she hadn’t written it down. Then she started to play with the word rings. Rings in the water, on fingers, sitting in a ring. And so on. Then the lesson was over.

On the Saturday she caught the train to Stockholm again. Jerry had agreed to give Maria a call in order to lend credibility to Teresa’s interpretation of the role. He told her the girls had had a brilliant time together and confirmed that Teresa was very welcome to stay with them any time, then he went off to see his girlfriend and left the two of them in peace.

They worked on the songs and watched Dawn of the Dead. In the evening they rang Max Hansen and arranged to meet at the hotel the following day, in the restaurant.

Then there was something Teresa wanted to do, but she found it hard to ask. In spite of the fact that it was a completely normal thing between two friends, she felt embarrassed. Perhaps because they weren’t just two friends. She sat there fiddling with her mobile phone, and couldn’t quite bring herself to ask. As if Theres sensed her difficulties, she came straight out with it, ‘What do you want to do?’

‘I’d like to take a photograph of you.’

‘How?’

‘With this.’ Teresa held up her phone, pointed it at Theres, then took a photograph and showed it to Theres on the display. Theres stroked the surface of the phone and asked how it worked. Teresa couldn’t really explain that, of course, but they spent a while taking photographs and looking at the pictures. Theres even took a couple of pictures of Teresa which Teresa secretly deleted, because she thought she was so ugly.

The wound in Max Hansen’s back had been stitched and was healing well, but the damage to his self-esteem was another matter. The incident in the hotel room had knocked him off balance. He spent four days shut in his apartment drinking heavily, looking through his old films and trying to masturbate, but without success.

He watched only the films featuring the most submissive and obliging girls, the ones who had got on their knees or spread their legs at the first hint. It didn’t help. In the weary movements of their hands, in the passive acceptance of their bodies he seemed to see a threat that finished his erection before it had even started.

Tora Larsson had taken from him his only real pleasure. Drunk almost to the point of unconsciousness, he sat flicking through images of young, naked bodies and felt nothing but fear and a faint masochistic enjoyment of his own fear.

On the fifth day he woke up with a hangover that felt like being buried alive. Instead of a hair of the dog he took two strong painkillers and a long shower. When he had dried himself and put on clean clothes the situation had improved to the point where he merely felt like shit.

One thing was absolutely clear: Tora Larsson was his biggest opportunity for a long time, and he had no intention of messing it up. But she would pay for what she had done to him; she would literally pay, in hard cash.

Towards the afternoon, when he had had a couple of whiskies after all, just to restore the chemical balance in his body, his new strategy was ready.

This industry was killing him; it was time to pack it in. Tora Larsson would be his final project, and he would put everything he had into making her a success. She didn’t seem to have a clue about anything, and he intended to amend his standard contract so that it gave him the maximum return.

Then people in the industry could say whatever they liked, piss on his hall carpet and encourage everyone to boycott him and whatever the fuck they could think of. He would rake up his money and put all this behind him, head off somewhere with a better climate, wash down his Viagra with cocktails with a little umbrella in them and live life for as long as life was there to be lived.

When Teresa rang him on the Saturday he was as nice as pie. He asked her to pass on his apologies, as far as he was concerned the whole thing was forgiven and forgotten, and now it was a matter of looking to the future. The world was their oyster and Tora was his number one priority.

During the afternoon he made some calls. A studio and producer posed no problems, but as he suspected his good name wasn’t enough to persuade any record company to pay for a demo. However, he eventually managed to strike a deal with Ronny Berhardsson at Zapp Records, which was owned by EMI. They’d known each other for years, and Max Hansen had supplied him with a couple of artists who had at least recouped their production costs.

Ronny said Zapp could cover the cost of studio time, but the rest would have to come out of Max’s own pocket. Ronny had seen Idol, and even if he wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as Max, he agreed that the girl had potential. It was worth a shot.

As Max Hansen got ready to leave for the meeting, he was careful not to omit a detail he had forgotten last time. He took Robbie with him.

Robbie was a sun made of metal, a happy face the size of a fivekronor piece surrounded by five stubby points. Max had won it at the Tivoli theme park in Copenhagen when he was eight years old, on a family visit with both sets of grandparents.

He could no longer remember why he had called the little smiley sun Robert, later shortened to Robbie, but it had accompanied him throughout his life as his lucky charm. The last thing Max did before leaving the apartment was to kiss Robbie on the nose and tuck him in his jacket pocket.

Wish me luck, buddy.

He got to the restaurant fifteen minutes before the agreed time, ordered sashimi and read through the contract he had prepared the previous evening. It gave him the rights to fifty per cent of all Tora’s income from future recordings and appearances. He was hoping that the girl or girls would have so little idea about this sort of thing that fifty-fifty would sound perfectly reasonable.

He would of course need the signature of a parent or guardian, but his intention was to get the project moving first, so that this person would feel obliged to accept his terms if the whole thing was to go ahead. The scheme was not without risk; there was a reason why he’d brought Robbie along.

Max had finished his sashimi and begun to worry that the meeting would be a wash-out when the freak appeared by the entrance to the restaurant. Teresa, that was her name. Max Hansen got up and went to meet her.

Then Tora appeared, and Max had to turn to Robbie’s other particularly useful quality. The sight of that beautiful creature sent a stab of fear through him. He hadn’t thought he would react like this, but a week of brooding darkly on what had happened in the hotel room had got into his bones. He started to shake and pushed his hand into his jacket pocket, clasped his hand around Robbie’s protruding points. The fear in his heart shot down his arm and gathered around the pain in his hand. A seemingly relaxed pose: left hand in his jacket pocket, right hand outstretched, hello there, welcome. They sat down at the table.

Teresa did the talking and Max relaxed a little, loosened his grip on Robbie. He set out his plan. They would make a demo featuring two songs: a cover of something Tora sang well, plus a new song. He knew several pretty good songwriters and would gather together a few possibilities. At that point he was interrupted.

‘We’ve got songs,’ said the freak.

‘I’m sure you have,’ said Max. ‘But we can look at those later. We need to adopt a completely professional approach at this stage.’

The freak placed a cheap MP3 player with earphones on the table and ordered him to listen. She was rather rude. He extricated his left hand from his pocket, holding it so that the red indentations in his palm wouldn’t show, sighed meaningfully and put the earphones in.

He knew roughly what he was going to hear. Once upon a time it had been cassettes, then CDs, and more recently MP3 files that young wannabes had sent him. They fell into two categories: feeble variations on whatever happened to be current, or mournful ballads accompanied by guitar. By and large.

Teresa pressed play and it took Max Hansen three seconds to realise this was something that had been recorded at home using a music program, without any great finesse. Guitar, bass, percussion and a clumsy synth track. When Theres began to sing he thought he recognised the song, although he couldn’t quite place it.

They say that you will never fly

They say that you’re too young

They say that you must always listen

To all their rules and strictures

But if you have wings you’ll fly…

It was a good song. Actually, it was a really good song. The production was crap and the lyrics needed a bit of work, but the melody was immediately appealing and of course Tora sang perfectly. By the time he heard the first chorus, Max Hansen had already decided that he could perhaps save on the cost of a songwriter. This song showed off Tora’s vocal range and potential beautifully.

He had to keep up the pretence. Before the song came to an end he pulled out the earphones and shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose it might do. It might be OK with decent production. We can probably work with what we’ve got here.’ Max Hansen took out the contract and placed it in front of Tora along with a pen. ‘Right, I need your paw mark on this piece of paper.’ He turned to the last page and pointed to the line at the bottom. ‘Just here.’

Tora looked at the line, then at the pen. Then she said, ‘How do I make a paw mark?’ She turned to Teresa. ‘Can you do it?’

Max forced a smile and slipped his left hand into his jacket pocket, where he rubbed his thumb over Robbie’s face. ‘A signature, I mean. You need to sign here. If I’m going to carry on working with you so that you can make a CD.’

Teresa pushed the contract back across the table. ‘We can’t do that.’ Robbie found his way back into Max’s palm, pressing against the skin until it was almost punctured. Max closed his eyes, concentrated on the pain, and managed to remain calm.

‘Listen, my dear,’ he said to Tora. ‘This is your chance. Trust me, I’m going to make you a star, you’re going to earn money and have fans, the whole shooting match. But you have to sign this piece of paper, or that’s the end of it.’

‘I don’t want money,’ said Tora. ‘I want to make a CD.’

‘And you will make a…’ Max Hansen broke off. ‘What do you mean, you don’t want money?’

‘She means what she says,’ said Teresa.

After some negotiation it emerged that what Tora wanted was a deal where Max Hansen gave her cash in hand. There was no need for paperwork or registration or the allocation of rights. Max Hansen was to act as if he were her guardian, but without any written proof.

It was risky. Max Hansen would never even have considered it if it hadn’t been for his plan: take the money and run. He could cash in bigtime here before it came to light that he had no right to. After all, everyone would just assume the paperwork was in order.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’re agreed,’ as if it was perfectly normal not to have a signed contract between artist and agent.

So Max Hansen put his papers away, forbore from rubbing his hands and explained how things would work over the next few weeks. The biggest fly in the ointment was that Tora refused to do anything unless Teresa came along, which meant he would have to book studio time at the weekends. He hoped the girls’ irritating symbiosis would wear away as time went by; Tora was too talented to drag a troll on a chain along behind her. But for now he would just have to live with it.

All communication was to be via email, and he had no problem with that. He was quite happy to avoid the hassle of trying to explain himself to parents or brothers or whoever.

When they had said goodbye and talk soon, Max sat there for a long time staring straight ahead. Then he took out Robbie and pressed him to his lips, whispering, ‘Well done, buddy.’ When a waiter came to ask if there would be anything else, Max ordered a small bottle of champagne. Well, sparkling wine. The same thing for half the price. That was his theme tune.

The following weekend they recorded the demo in a studio on Götgatan. A series of emails had criss-crossed between Theres, Teresa and Max Hansen. A background tape to the song ‘Fly’ had been prepared, and the decision had been made to cover Abba’s ‘Thank You for the Music’.

Teresa felt small and lost in the soundproofed basement rooms. She didn’t know what Max Hansen had said to the studio technicians and the producer, but it was obvious that everyone regarded her as an irritating hanger-on and barely tolerated her.

This was partly down to Theres. Even when she was due to go in and record her vocal track, she refused to do anything unless Teresa went in with her. Teresa was told not to make a sound. Not to rustle, not to move, not to breathe audibly. Preferably not to exist.

Theres was familiar with the technology involving headphones and the microphone from her home recordings, and as far as Teresa could judge she sang perfectly on the very first take. The warnings about audible breathing were superfluous, since Teresa was holding her breath most of the time in any case.

The producer’s voice came over the speakers, asking Theres to put a little more emphasis on this phrase, hold back in the first verse and so on. Theres did as she was asked, and after two more takes the producer was happy.

After another hour or so they played the raw mix. Teresa couldn’t understand this business of a ‘raw mix’. It already sounded like something you might hear on the radio, and a shiver ran down her arms when she heard the first lines and thought: That’s my song. I wrote that.

Faced with a result, something similar seemed to occur to the studio people, and they looked on her with a slightly kinder expression. A guy in his twenties turned to her and said, ‘Good lyrics, kid,’ and Teresa had to stare at the floor because she was blushing. She could handle nastiness; kindness and praise were tricky.

The song continued, and even though it sounded much more like a real song than it had before, Teresa felt something was missing; it had lost something from the simple version they had recorded in Svedmyra. She couldn’t for the life of her put her finger on what it was, and didn’t dare to say anything because she knew she would be waved away. Presumably they knew what they were doing.

Then they moved on to ‘Thank You for the Music’, and when Theres had sung the last line, ‘For giving it to me…’, the people on the mixer desk were sitting motionless and open-mouthed. Then the producer switched on the speakers so that Theres and Teresa could hear the spontaneous applause.

Max Hansen was satisfied, and announced they were ‘onto a surefire winner’. When Teresa asked if they could have a copy of the raw mix on CD, he said it was impossible because they didn’t want to risk it getting out before the whole thing was finished. It would also be a good idea if they deleted the version they had at home, to make sure there couldn’t be any unnecessary leaks. Teresa said of course, without the slightest intention of doing so. Max Hansen gave Theres a five-hundred-kronor note. He would be in touch as soon as things started moving.

After the comparative calm of the studio it was something of a shock, in spite of everything, to emerge onto Götgatan, which was busy with Sunday shoppers and people out for a stroll. Teresa breathed in the cold air and tried to clear her brain. Then she felt a hand come down heavily on her shoulder; she caught a movement at the corner of her eye and turned around just in time to catch Theres, who was on the point of falling over.

People gave them odd looks as they stood there clinging tightly to one another, with Theres’ face pressed into Teresa’s chest. Teresa whispered, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

Theres’ body shuddered as she let out a single long breath of air that went right through Teresa’s top and spread warmth across her skin. She held Theres more tightly and they stood there without moving for a long time. Then Theres straightened up just enough for her mouth to come away from the fabric, and said, ‘They eat.’

‘Who? The people in the studio?’

‘They take. They eat.’

Teresa groped for Theres’ hand to support her, and found that the hand was clutching the note Max Hansen had given her. When Teresa touched her she opened her hand and the crumpled note fell to the ground. Teresa looked at it, lying there in the wet and the dirt, and a fierce rage flared up in her stomach as she saw how it all worked.

They take. They eat.

In an email Max Hansen had indicated that he would very much like to see the film Teresa had taken from his camera destroyed. Teresa had replied that she had thrown it away. But she still had it, and she remembered exactly what she had seen. How he had wanted to exploit Theres, take something from her, eat her, swallow her, documenting the whole thing so that he could relive it all over again.

The same thing had happened in the studio, only in a way that was deemed generally acceptable. Theres had something they wanted. They would suck it out of her, package it up and sell the result to the highest bidder, and the only thing Theres got was that bit of paper lying in the slush.

They take. They eat.

Teresa hadn’t seen it. She had been misled by the way the people at the studio had behaved as if it were all a matter of course, and the simplicity with which Theres seemed able to sing just about anything.

She hadn’t understood. That it cost. From Theres’ behaviour in public places she had realised that Theres found it difficult to be surrounded by adults. Now she had spent a whole day in that situation. In cramped, silent rooms.

When Teresa tried to hug Theres again, she made a feeble attempt to pull away. Teresa let go, and caught her eye instead. Theres’ eyes were a pale, transparent blue, not unlike the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. As if someone had stuck needles in them and sucked out the colour.

They take. They eat.

Teresa bent down and picked up the five-hundred-kronor note. She ignored Theres’ half-hearted resistance and led her towards Medborgarplatsen.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re taking a taxi.’

Teresa had never hailed a taxi before, but the driver seemed to find it perfectly natural as she waved at him, and stopped to let them climb into the back seat. Teresa told him the address and showed him the crumpled five-hundred-kronor note, just to be on the safe side.

Theres shuffled as far into the corner as she could, wrapped her arms around her body and closed her eyes. She looked so small and pitiful that Teresa was overcome by a new feeling: tenderness. She wanted Theres to rest her head on her knee, she wanted to stroke her hair and whisper: everything’s fine, you’re safe, I’m here.

Instead she simply sat there with her hands clamped between her thighs watching Theres, who appeared to have fallen asleep. An enormous, tranquil happiness came into her body. Grew. And grew. When they passed the Globe Arena she felt as if she might disintegrate with happiness. She had never seen the Globe before. She had never been in a taxi before. She had never sat beside the sleeping form of someone she loved before. She had been living in the shadows.

For the want of any other chance of contact with Theres, she took out her MP3 player and listened to ‘Fly’ at full volume, their version. It wasn’t that it was better than the one that had been recorded in the studio. It was infinitely better.

Theres had recovered somewhat by the time they got back to Svedmyra, and was able to make her way up to the apartment without help. Outside the door she stopped, turned to Teresa and said in a weak voice, ‘I’m not going to make a CD.’ Then she opened the door.

Jerry was home. When he asked what they’d been doing, Theres just shook her head and disappeared into her room, where she flopped down on the bed and fell asleep again.

As Teresa headed for the door of the apartment, Jerry blocked her way. He folded his arms and said with a menacing air of calm, ‘I want to know what you two are up to.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Teresa. If you want to come here to visit Theres again, then I want to know what you’re up to. Whatever it is. Just don’t lie.’

‘My train leaves soon.’

‘I noticed you turned up in a taxi. Take another taxi. Otherwise you’re not welcome here anymore.’

‘That’s not your decision.’

‘Yes, it is.’

Teresa had to tip her head back so that she could see Jerry’s face. It wasn’t as closed and harsh as his voice suggested. More troubled. She asked, ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Why do you think? Because I care about Theres, of course.’

‘So do I.’

‘I believe you. But I want to know what you’re doing.’

Teresa wasn’t capable of making up a story, that had never been her strong point. So she told him. She left out the part with Max Hansen in the hotel room, and gave a brief account of their songwriting and today’s studio session. How exhausted Theres had become.

When she had finished she looked Jerry in the eye. There was neither displeasure nor pleasure there. They stood like that until Teresa just had to look away. Then Jerry gave a brief nod and said, ‘OK. So now I know. Shall I ring for a taxi?’

‘Yes…please.’

While Jerry was making the call Teresa went over to the bedroom and stood for a while, resting her head on the doorpost, watching the sleeping Theres. A cold, slimy unease writhed in her belly, where happiness had bubbled such a short time ago.

Never to see you again.

Jerry could make that decision, as easily as taking a breath. He could lock the door, unplug the phone or move away with Theres, and they wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. They had no power over themselves.

‘I think it’s probably time you made a move,’ Jerry said behind her.

Teresa detached herself from the doorpost like a piece of ivy being ripped off a wall. She went towards the front door with her head lowered; she wanted to ask, ‘Can I come again next weekend?’ but her pride made it impossible. Instead she straightened her back, looked at Jerry and said, ‘I’ll be back next weekend, OK?’

Jerry shook his head and grinned. ‘Of course. What else would you do?’

Teresa didn’t really understand what was behind his remark. There was something odd about it. But she grasped the fact that she could come back. Since she was about to burst into tears of relief, she quickly turned away, opened the door and ran down the stairs.

When she got home she locked her bedroom door, took out Max Hansen’s DVD and watched it. She had expected-had been afraid, to some extent-that the sight of Theres’ naked body would have some effect on her. That was partly why she hadn’t watched the film apart from the glimpses while it was still in the camera.

But it didn’t happen. She thought Theres was beautiful with and without clothes, and that was all there was to it. When Max Hansen’s bare backside came into view, Teresa began to wonder whether she might be asexual. The whole business of sex just seemed unnecessary and ugly. Max Hansen down on his knees, Theres backing away, Hansen grabbing hold of her, pushing his face into her crotch. So undignified.

However, she watched what followed with keen interest. Theres picking up the glass and snapping the stem. Then beginning to hack at Max Hansen’s back with the spike of glass, as devoid of emotion as a carpenter hammering in a nail. It was something that needed to be done, and she did it without even spilling the contents of the glass in her other hand. When Max Hansen realised what had happened and began to scream, she didn’t even look at him as she went to open the door.

You’re totally sick, Theres. You are the wolf above all other wolves.

She played the sequence over and over again.

At the beginning of December Teresa walked into the classroom and saw that five of the girls had gathered around her desk. In the middle sat Jenny, showing them something on her mobile. No. Teresa felt in her pockets. She’d left her phone behind when she went out at break time. It was her mobile Jenny had in her hand.

When the girls caught sight of Teresa, Jenny held up the mobile. The display was showing one of the photos of Theres.

‘Who’s this, Teresa? Is she your girlfriend?’

Jenny turned the mobile back to face her and scrolled through the photos. Caroline said, ‘She’s really pretty. How did you get such a pretty girlfriend?’

Teresa didn’t respond, and made no move to take the phone, because she knew exactly what would happen. Jenny would run off, throw it to someone else, and Teresa would just end up feeling worse than she already did. She didn’t give a damn what they said, but she didn’t like them talking about Theres. She didn’t like it at all.

‘Hang on a minute!’ Johanna said suddenly, pointing at Teresa’s mobile. ‘It’s her! The girl who was on Idol! Do you know her?’

Teresa nodded, and Jenny, aware that the situation was slipping out of her hands, said, ‘Of course she doesn’t. And in any case she was useless. Absolutely fucking useless. Worst thing I’ve ever seen.’

Teresa went and stood on the opposite side of the desk. Then she cleared her throat and spat straight in Jenny’s face. Jenny squealed in disgust and wiped Teresa’s spit out of her eye. Then she did something Teresa wouldn’t have expected of her. Her eyes narrowed; she hissed, ‘You disgusting little bitch, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ and jumped over the desk and scratched Teresa’s face with her long nails.

It didn’t really hurt, and Teresa kept her head. In her mind’s eye she saw Theres with the spike of glass. How calm she had been. It was all about calmness. Calmness and ruthlessness. When Jenny went for her again, hands scrabbling wildly, Teresa leaned back a fraction to gather her strength, clenched her fist and punched Jenny in the face as hard as she could.

So simple. Jenny fell backwards with blood pouring from her smashed nose. The other girls were frozen to the spot, and Teresa picked up her mobile and put it in her pocket. So simple. Everything is actually very simple.

After Jenny had been carted off to the hospital, Teresa had to have a long conversation with the Principal and the school counsellor. In many ways the conversation was like the lesson on the Democrats and Republicans, except that Teresa was unfortunately unable to make notes. She had already begun to transform her experience with Jenny into a song with the working title ‘Mush’. It was about things that had a solid form in everyday life, but which had to be turned into mush if you wanted to live.

She was also preoccupied with her new insight into the concept of simplicity. You usually know what to do in a given situation, but doubt, cowardice or misguided concern for others gets in the way. Moving her hand and body back, then shifting her weight forward and delivering the blow had been the obvious thing to do. The problem was how to apply this same simplicity to situations that were not about violence, that could not be solved with violence.

Listen to your heart.

Yes, in a way it was an incredibly banal insight. But perhaps the most banal insights were the greatest of all, if you were really capable of living by them. It could well be true, and Teresa’s thoughts continued along these lines as the Principal and the counsellor droned on with their questions.

She answered in monosyllables, in a tone of voice she hoped sounded authentic. ‘Don’t know’, ‘Don’t know’, ‘No’, ‘Yes’. The role this time was girl shocked by her own actions.

Fortunately she had scratches on her cheek, which helped with her interpretation of the role. She had seen red, she hadn’t known what she was doing. Eventually she was allowed to go back to her lesson.

When she walked into the classroom everyone fell silent as she sat down at her desk. She glanced at Micke, and the hint of a smile flitted across his face. She took out her exercise book and scribbled down the fragments of ‘Mush’ that had come to her. She already knew what melody they would fit.

If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then many things that end up being of major significance start out as a cool idea. Someone is bored and tries out some small idea just to pass the time. And before you know it we have Pacman, nylon stockings, the theory of gravity or the idea for The Lord of the Rings. A professor is sitting in his study one gloomy day. He takes a piece of paper and jots down, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ He doesn’t know what a hobbit is, or what kind of hole it is. But it’s a jolly little sentence-what might come next?

The weekend after the incident with Jenny, Theres and Teresa were sitting around on Saturday evening with nothing to do. They didn’t feel like watching a film, and they had spent so much time working on songs that they’d run out of steam. Teresa had taught Theres to play noughts and crosses, but after a few trial games they were so unbearably even that each round became simply a matter of who could hold out the longest, and it was always Theres.

Theres seemed to lack any capacity for boredom, and as they sat opposite one another at the coffee table with a round of noughts and crosses between them that already covered half a page, Teresa began to feel a desperate urge to come up with something, anything, new.

Then it came to her. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said. ‘Shall we make a video?’

Max Hansen hadn’t been in touch for several days, and it seemed as if Theres’ career in music was over before it had begun. They might as well mess about a bit on their own, it didn’t really matter after all.

They dug out a dark blue sheet which they hung on the wall in Theres’ bedroom, and mounted some small lamps for the lighting. In a drawer in the kitchen Teresa found a light-rope which they suspended from the ceiling so that it would make Theres’ eyes sparkle when she looked up at it.

Teresa fastened her mobile to the back of a chair with duct tape, then adjusted the height by putting a few DVDs under the legs of the chair so that Theres’ face just filled the screen. Then she began recording and started the song on the computer.

Theres couldn’t grasp the concept of miming; she just sang the song. Perhaps the lip synching worked better that way, and in any case it wouldn’t be a problem to remove the sound from the film and add the pre-recorded track instead. The real Theres’ voice blended perfectly with the pre-recorded version as she sang the whole song.

Fly, fly away from everyday things

Fly, fly away and put aside your wings

Fly, fly away from ties that bind

Fly to me, fly to me…

Teresa never got used to it, she was just as spellbound every single time. When Theres had finished singing it was a long time before Teresa could bring herself to lean forward and switch off the camera.

They had done some work on iMovie in school, and Teresa knew the basics of how to edit and add sound. As she was about to replace what Theres had just sung with the pre-recorded version, she stopped. Instead of removing the new version completely, she simply lowered the volume.

The new version sounded different, but still toned perfectly with the old one. The quality on the mobile’s microphone was much worse, but the tinny, metallic sound in the background somehow made the song fuller, more exciting. Teresa wasn’t musical…What was that called?

‘Theres,’ she asked. ‘What you sang just now. You weren’t singing the same thing, were you? You were singing a harmony, weren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. What’s a harmony?’

‘I think what you just sang was a harmony.’

‘That’s the way it should be. Sometimes.’

Teresa experimented, making Theres’ voice from the mobile louder and softer in different places, removing it from the verse and making it significantly louder in certain parts of the refrain until Theres said that was the way it should be. They played the result on full screen with sound and picture, and everything fitted together in a way that was difficult to define. It just worked.

Theres’ calm, expressionless face, only her mouth moving as she sang the dramatic words to the natural melody, occasionally supplemented by the electronic voice that seemed to come from another world. It fitted.

Teresa leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest as she looked at the frozen image of Theres on the screen. ‘Shall we post it on the net?’ she said. ‘On MySpace or something? Somewhere that people can watch it?’

‘Yes. People can watch it.’

Teresa spent a while sorting out a MySpace account for her old alias Josefin. As she was about to post the video, she came across a problem she hadn’t considered: who was she going to put down as the singer, and who was behind the song? Theres was already known as Tora Larsson, and what about Teresa? Did she want to expose herself to possible derision? That was always a risk when you put yourself out there in some way.

The cursor flashed, demanding a name in the box for artist and originator. Teresa juggled with words. Tora Larsson, Teresa, Theres, Larsson, Tora, Teresa, Larsson…

Te…sla.

‘Tesla,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘We are. That’s what we’re called, the two of us together. Tesla. Is that OK?’

‘Yes.’

Teresa keyed in the name and the title, ‘Fly’, and sent the package off to the incalculable storage area that is MySpace. Then she logged out, switched the computer to standby mode and shrugged.

‘We can check later,’ she said. ‘If anyone’s watched it. Anyway, it’s done now. Although I don’t suppose anyone will be interested.’

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Two days later, twenty people had watched and listened. Four days later it was three hundred. When Teresa went up to Stockholm the following weekend and they checked the number of hits together, it had reached two thousand. Without exception the comments were positive, and some enthusiasts had sent the link to every single person they knew. Virtually all of them seemed to be young girls.

A couple of hours before Teresa was due to go home on Sunday, they checked again. The number of people who had listened to the track was up to four thousand, and the video had been given the honour of a place on the banner as ‘most played’, which would presumably guarantee even more hits.

Just as Teresa was about to leave for the station, Max Hansen rang; he was absolutely beside himself. Someone had told him about the video clip, and how the hell could they possibly have done something so bloody stupid? They’d ruined everything now. All the work he’d put in, all the money he’d invested to get the right version released, and they’d just killed all his efforts stone dead with this fucking awful recording that absolutely anybody could get hold of for free.

Max Hansen was so angry that his voice was breaking, and it was impossible to work out if his screams were rage or just distress.

‘But it doesn’t matter,’ said Teresa.

It was rage. Max Hansen roared with a fury that made it difficult to hear what he was saying, and Teresa had to hold the receiver away from her ear.

‘You have no fucking idea! You think all you have to do is record a song and next week you’re on Tracks and you get to be on TV, you’re so fucking stupid I could kill myself! Let me tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to go into your account and take down that fucking video right now, because otherwise I don’t know what I’m going to-’

‘Bye,’ said Teresa, and put the phone down. When it rang again she pulled the jack out of the wall.

The Christmas holidays arrived, and ‘Fly’ continued to grow exponentially. As more people watched they told others to watch, and when those people had watched they mentioned it to others. Soon the video was also on YouTube, attracting even more hits.

At first Teresa had tried to follow all the comments, lapping up the praise and delighting in the fact that so many young girls found consolation in the song and thought the lyrics were ‘fantastic’, but ignoring the sexual allusions and derogatory remarks from boys and girls who somehow felt threatened by Theres’ appearance.

But it all got too much.

One day when she was sitting reading yet another post along the lines of wasn’t she the girl who was on Idol and why does she look so peculiar and who is she and what are the words really about, she suddenly realised that was enough. She just couldn’t read one more word.

A large part of her life and her thoughts had begun to focus on the lyrics she had written, the little video they had made in a couple of hours, and she couldn’t help it: she regretted it.

She had finally done something that would show those bastards, and her name wasn’t even there. She tried to convince herself that it wasn’t important, that she didn’t care because she was above such things. But it wasn’t true. Even if she had no desire to stand in the spotlight, she wanted people to know. Know that it was her, Teresa Svensson, that girl there, that little grey girl, she was the one who wrote ‘Fly’.

She felt as if her brain was boiling to the point of disintegration as she read all the positive comments that were about her, but without one single person being aware of that fact. She just couldn’t cope anymore.

Göran and Maria had decided to try something new, and had booked a chalet in the mountains for a week over Christmas. Teresa hadn’t wanted to go and had tried to come up with a good reason why she had to stay at home, but a couple of days before they were due to leave, she changed her mind. She needed to get away. Away from the computer, away from the regrets.

After only two days she had withdrawal symptoms. Since she didn’t like skiing, she had nothing to do apart from reading the poetry books she had brought with her, listening to music and playing games on her mobile. She loathed the whole environment, with all these outdoor types packing their skis into their roofrack capsules in the mornings, her contemporaries with their over-sized snowboard clothing and something unbearably sporty about the way they moved. If she was an outsider at school, she was a complete alien here.

Her brothers soon made friends and hung out with them, while her parents set off on cross-country skiing expeditions. On the third day Teresa decided the only way to survive mentally was to get out her notebook and start writing a couple of new songs.

One evening when the family had had dinner in the hotel and were passing reception on the way back to their chalet, Teresa heard the song. A group of young people aged about seventeen or eighteen were sitting on the sofas around a laptop. She could see Theres’ face on the screen, and ‘Fly’ could be heard through the small external speakers. The teenagers sat motionless, staring into Theres’ slightly blurred eyes as she sang.

Olof nudged her shoulder and nodded over towards the group. ‘Have you heard that? It’s brilliant.’

‘I wrote it,’ said Teresa.

‘Sure you did. You and Beyoncé. Why the fuck are you saying that?’

‘Because it’s true.’

Olof grinned at Arvid and twisted his index finger at his temple, and the family headed for the exit. Teresa stayed where she was, her fists clenched, staring down at the floor. The song faded away and the teenagers began to make comments. One girl said it was like the best song ever, and another wondered why there weren’t more. One of the boys brought the discussion to an end by playing a clip where a drunk fell out of a window.

Teresa sat down in an armchair a little way off and picked up a discarded copy of the evening paper, Aftonbladet, in order to distract herself. On page seven there was a feature article with the headline, ‘Who is Tesla?’ pointing out that the song ‘Fly’ had now scored almost a million hits, despite the fact that nobody really knew who the artist was.

Suddenly and without warning, Teresa’s head caught fire. The next moment a thick fire blanket was thrown over her. Darkness enveloped her, and she could hardly breathe. Her lungs contracted and lost all strength. Searing pain sliced through her still-burning head and she was pressed down in the armchair, incapable of moving.

That was how Göran found her fifteen minutes later. He walked into reception, looked around and spotted Teresa, slumped in the armchair. ‘There you are. Where did you get to?’ Teresa opened her mouth to reply, but her tongue refused to co-operate. Göran leaned over her, tugged at her hand. ‘Come on. We’re all going to have a game of Yahtzee.’

Teresa had felt bad many times, been unhappy and spat out the word angst without really knowing what it meant. Now she knew. If she had been capable of thought she would not have referred to the state she was in as angst, but would have believed that some latent illness had suddenly and violently struck her down. But angst was what it was. Pure, sheer panic, paralysing every muscle in her body. Göran had to more or less carry her back to the chalet.

Teresa hardly slept that night; she lay staring into the darkness until the grey light of dawn brought the frost patterns on the window into focus. She didn’t want any breakfast, and Maria forced her to take two painkillers before the family set off on their respective adventures.

Only when they returned in time for dinner did Göran and Maria start to worry. They found Teresa in exactly the same position as they had left her, lying on her side in bed, her eyes fixed on the sign that said waxing skis inside the chalet was not permitted.

Maria placed a hand on her forehead and established that she didn’t have a temperature. ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

Maria’s voice sounded strange to Teresa’s ears. The volume was normal, but it didn’t sound as if it was coming from somewhere nearby. This was probably because the person who was speaking was far away, and the voice was electronically enhanced. So there was no point in responding, and in any case the question didn’t make any sense.

‘Has something happened?’ asked Maria.

Same again. The question had nothing to do with her. It was being directed out into empty space, and the room Teresa took up in that space was insignificant and shrinking. She was slowly being crumpled up like a sheet of paper covered in writing, weighed down by words of no value. Soon she would be a white ball, and would roll away out of sight.

During the night, as Teresa once again lay staring out into the darkness, ‘Fly’ passed one million hits on MySpace.

Christmas didn’t turn out the way Jerry had hoped. He and Theres celebrated Christmas Eve at home with Paris and her nine-year-old son Malcolm. He was a lively boy who found it difficult to accept Theres’ cool, distant attitude. He wanted to show her all his toys, and was furious when Theres didn’t react as he expected. In the end he went into a major sulk and refused to be anywhere near her, let alone speak to her.

Paris did her best to keep things cheerful, and Jerry played and joked with Malcolm while Theres sat and stared at the Christmas tree as if it was a riveting movie. Things were bearable, but it was painfully clear they were never going to be one big happy family.

The success of ‘Fly’ had not yet reached its climax. Jerry had seen the video, thought it was nicely done, and hadn’t given it another thought. He was just grateful that Theres hadn’t used her real name.

On Boxing Day a feeling of gloom overcame him. He had probably been nurturing a stupid hope that he would be able to bring the two half families together into one unit, that the spirit of Christmas would wave its magic wand over them. But it didn’t happen. His real fear was that Paris would decide to end their relationship because it had no future. She said she loved him and wanted to be with him, but the doubt was gnawing away.

So he wasn’t exactly in a buoyant mood as he sat watching an old John Wayne western when the doorbell rang on Boxing Day. He’d had a couple of beers, and he could almost feel the liquid swilling around inside him as he hauled himself out of the armchair and went to answer the door

His first thought was that it was a salesman of some kind. The carefully arranged hair, the salon suntan, the suit, the practised smile. Some bloody mobile subscription or…vacuum cleaners. Yes. Jerry’s first impression was that the man had come to sell him a vacuum cleaner. Then he introduced himself as Max Hansen.

‘Right, yes,’ said Jerry. ‘So that’s who you are. Right.’

As Jerry took his outstretched hand, Max Hansen said, ‘Now I don’t know how much Theres has told you…’ There was an element of anxiety in the way he asked the question that Jerry didn’t understand. When he shrugged his shoulders and said he knew fuck all, Max Hansen seemed relieved.

‘I have tried to ring,’ he said. ‘But perhaps there’s something wrong with your phone.’

‘It’s not plugged in,’ said Jerry. ‘I think it’s meant to be like that.’

Max Hansen asked if he might possibly come in, and Jerry asked what it was about. Max Hansen asked once again if he might possibly come in, and Jerry repeated his question. If you bang your head against a wall, who screams first, you or the wall? Answer: you. So Max Hansen gave up and quietly explained why he was there.

As Jerry no doubt knew, Tora had recorded a song which had become an enormous hit on the internet. But she had also made another, professional recording, and Max Hansen now wanted to release this version as a single.

‘OK,’ said Jerry, beginning to close the door. ‘Best of luck.’

Max Hansen inserted his foot in the door and Jerry had an unpleasant flashback which didn’t improve his mood.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Max Hansen. ‘We could be talking about big money here. The problem is that no record company is prepared to release the single until I have the documentation to prove that I have the right to act for Tora. Are you her guardian?’

Max Hansen’s voice had taken on an aggressive tone. It would of course have been no problem to slam the door on his foot and force him to remove it, but talk of big money couldn’t be completely ignored. Jerry had enough to manage for another year or so, but that was it.

‘No,’ said Jerry. ‘I’m not her guardian. She hasn’t got a guardian. There can’t be any documentation. What do you suggest?’

Jerry had opened the door just enough for Max Hansen to lean forward and whisper close to his face, ‘That I fake all the paperwork. That you don’t make a fuss. And then you’ll get the money on the quiet.’

Jerry thought it over. He had realised that Theres’ non-existence in the system caused insurmountable problems. What the vacuum cleaner salesman was offering was a solution that circumvented all that: money floating down out of the blue without him needing to get dragged into anything.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘You do that. But I’ll be keeping an eye on you.’

Max Hansen removed his foot. ‘You do that. I’ll be in touch.’

Jerry closed the door with an unpleasant feeling in his body. Someone was walking over his grave. Yes. At some point in the future something was happening that he couldn’t foresee. Max Hansen had been a bit quick with his idea of faking the documentation. But what could Jerry have done? Max Hansen could fake away to his heart’s content, there wasn’t a chance in hell that Jerry would go to the police. His only little trump card was that Max Hansen didn’t know that. At least, he didn’t think so.

But it didn’t feel good, and when Theres asked him who had been at the door, and he told her it was a vacuum cleaner salesman, he felt a clinking in his breast like thirty pieces of silver.

Theres spent most of her time at the computer, and when Jerry asked her what she was doing she said that girls liked the song and wrote to her, and she wrote back. Jerry wondered what had happened to Teresa, and was told that she had disappeared. That she didn’t answer messages. Theres didn’t appear to be upset or concerned about this, but as always it was hard to know.

The day before New Year’s Eve the doorbell rang, and Jerry opened it briskly. He was expecting more wheeling and dealing from Max Hansen and had decided to play the heavy and hope for the best. But out on the landing stood a frightened little girl aged about fifteen who almost fell backwards down the stairs when he flung the door open.

‘Hi,’ said the girl, so quietly that it was difficult to hear. ‘Is Theres home?’

‘Who are you?’

The girl gabbled her reply like something that must have been repeated many times, ‘My name’s Linn sorry if I’m disturbing you.’

Jerry sighed and stepped to one side. ‘Welcome Linn-sorry-if-I’m-disturbing-you. Theres is in there.’

The girl quickly kicked off her shoes and padded off to Theres’ room. Soon after that the door closed. Jerry stood in the hallway looking at Linn’s tiny red trainers.

Something told him he was witnessing the birth of a monster. As it turned out, he was absolutely right.

The family came home early from the mountains when Göran and Maria finally realised that Teresa’s condition wasn’t something that could be cured with painkillers. She wasn’t catatonic, but she wasn’t far from it. She refused to eat anything for two days, and when Göran and Maria asked in despair if there was anything she might fancy, she came out with just two words: ‘Baby food.’

So they bought baby food. Teresa ate a few spoonfuls when she was fed, drank a little water, then curled up in her bed and stroked the nose of an old cuddly toy until it was threadbare.

Göran and Maria were ordinary people. It had never occurred to them that one of their children might suffer from problems that came under the heading ‘psychiatric’, and it wasn’t stupidity or negligence that stopped them from contacting the Psychiatric Service for Children and Adolescents. It just wasn’t on their radar.

For reasons they couldn’t work out, their daughter had suddenly become very, very unhappy. Depressed was a word they could say, but without any real understanding of the concept. Depressed just meant very unhappy. But time heals all wounds, even invisible ones, and a person who is very unhappy will cheer up sooner or later.

A few days passed, Teresa ate small portions of baby food, drank water and lay in her bed. It was only when she gradually began to talk that they realised they might need some help after all.

It was Göran who was sitting by her bed trying to get her to drink a little more water when Teresa suddenly said, ‘There’s nothing.’

Perhaps he should have been pleased that she was talking at long last so they could work out what was wrong, but what she said wasn’t exactly something to celebrate.

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘There’s…there’s everything. Everything exists.’

‘Not for me.’

Göran’s eyes darted around the room as if he were searching for something to hold up as real, as evidence. He fastened on a bowl of yellow plastic beads, and a distant memory drifted up like a mist, struggling to find a solid form, and failing. Something about yellow beads and existing. Something about Teresa and another, better time. Teresa mumbled something and Göran leaned closer. ‘What did you say?’

‘I have to go to the other side.’

‘What other side?’

‘Where you become dead and are given life.’

Three hours later Göran and Maria were sitting with Teresa between them in a room at the psychiatric service centre in Rimsta. Teresa’s temporary descent into leaden misery was one thing, but her talk about dying crossed a line. They couldn’t ignore that.

Göran and Maria’s ideas about psychiatric care were somewhat exaggerated. They had expected a lot of white, and silence. White coats, white rooms, closed doors; so they were positively stunned when the person who greeted them was a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman in street clothes. She showed them into a room which looked considerably less sterile than a normal doctor’s surgery.

A long conversation followed, during which Göran and Maria described the period leading up to Teresa’s present condition as best they could, and explained what had finally made them contact the psychiatric service. Teresa didn’t say a word.

Eventually the doctor turned to her and asked, ‘How do you feel? Are your parents right to think you want to take your own life?’

Teresa slowly shook her head without saying anything. When the doctor had waited a while and was on the point of asking a follow-up question, Teresa said, ‘I have no life. It’s empty. I can’t take it. No one can take it.’

The doctor stood up and went over to Göran and Maria. ‘Would you mind waiting outside for a while so that I can have a little chat with Teresa on her own?’

Ten minutes later they were called back in. The doctor was sitting next to Teresa with one hand resting on the arm of her chair as if establishing some kind of ownership. When Göran and Maria had sat down she said, ‘I think we’re going to let Teresa stay here for a couple of days, then we’ll see how we get on.’

‘But what’s the matter with her?’ asked Maria.

‘It’s a little early to say, but I think it would be helpful if we could talk a little more with Teresa.’

While they were waiting Göran had read through some of the information leaflets in the other room, including one on suicidal tendencies in young people. He was therefore able to ask, ‘Will you be keeping her under observation?’

The doctor smiled. ‘We will, yes. You can feel completely reassured.’

But they didn’t feel reassured. As Göran and Maria were driving home to fetch some things for Teresa, Maria launched into a long and mildly hysterical monologue, the key point of which was what they had done wrong.

Göran, who had got some idea from the information leaflets, tried to reassure her that depression was often a purely medical condition, a chemical imbalance for which no one could be blamed, but Maria didn’t want to hear that. She went through the last few months with a fine-tooth comb, and reached the obvious conclusion: it was those trips to Stockholm. What had she actually been doing there?

Göran, on the other hand, maintained that Teresa had been much happier since she started spending time with Theres, but to no avail. The trips to Stockholm were the element in Teresa’s life that had changed, and in some way they were at the root of the problem.

As Maria packed a bag with clothes, books and her MP3 player in Teresa’s room, Göran stood looking at the bowl of yellow beads. When he picked one up and held it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, his left hand found its way up to his collarbone. And he remembered.

If I didn’t exist, then nobody would be holding this bead.

Picking her up from the childminder. The afternoons at the kitchen table. All those necklaces made from plastic beads. Where did they go?

There’s nothing.

Göran’s stomach contracted and he began to cry. Maria asked him to stop.

Teresa was taken into care. People were taking care of her. They passed like shadows outside the window of her eyes. Sometimes their voices reached her, sometimes food was pushed into her mouth and she swallowed it. Right at the back of her consciousness sat a very small Teresa who was perfectly aware of what was happening, but her clarity of mind did not reach the big body. She vegetated. She waited.

From time to time there were periods when her brain worked as it should. She would think, she would feel. It was the emptiness that was the problem. She couldn’t remember how it had felt not to be empty, to have a wall of flesh and blood to protect her from the world. It no longer existed.

Her situation could be described as a state of constant fear, overshadowing everything. She was afraid of moving, afraid of eating, afraid of speaking. The fear came from the emptiness, from being utterly defenceless. If she reached out a hand it might crack like an eggshell when it touched the world. She kept still.

After a few days of fruitless discussions, they started to give her pills. Small, oval pills with a groove in the middle. The days and the weeks flowed together, and she didn’t know how much time had passed when a glimmer of light began to seep into her immense darkness. She remembered the feeling of a fire blanket being thrown over her. Now she could see a tiny gap. The voices around her became clearer, the contours more defined.

For a few days she simply lay, sat or stood looking out through that gap, registering what was happening around her and taking it in. She was neither happy nor sad, but there was no doubt that she was alive.

Eventually she opened the gap a little wider and stepped out. She wasn’t exactly a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but she was transformed. She was Teresa the empty one, but she wore her shell and pretended that she was alive in a way that convinced even her. Sometimes she even thought it was real.

She carried on taking the medication, which she had discovered was called Fontex and was the same as Prozac, and went for counselling. She could remember the old Teresa now, the way she had been, and that was the role she played. Once again she did it so convincingly that she sometimes believed it herself.

At the end of February, almost two months after she had been admitted, she was allowed to go home. In the back seat of the car she sat and looked at her hands. They were her hands. They were attached to her body, and they belonged to her. She understood that now.

Two weeks before she was discharged, her class teacher had come to visit and brought her some school books, and Teresa had worked hard. The school work itself was no problem; the reading and the mathematical problems flowed straight into her mind and were dealt with rapidly, since they were no longer disturbed by the skeins of expectation and anxiety which are part of flesh and blood human beings. In two weeks she covered everything she had missed, and more besides.

When she went back to school the others kept a certain distance, which she regarded as completely natural. Jenny, who was about to undergo yet another operation to straighten her nose, spat out, ‘Oh look, the local headcase. Home from the loony bin, are you?’ but fell silent when Teresa looked at her.

Johannes and Agnes had been to visit her the day after the teacher came, and they made no attempt to avoid her in school. During one break time Teresa told them a little bit about life in the psychiatric unit and the difficulties that arose on a ward where any object that could be adapted for suicide had been removed. Amusing anecdotes.

She watched them as she talked, and a voice inside her head said: They’re so lovely. I like them so much. It was true, and at the same time it wasn’t true, because she needed to say it to herself, trying to establish a fact that she knew ought to be there, but that she just couldn’t feel.

It was easier with Micke.

A couple of days after she came back, as she was ambling around the playground during break, she saw him standing smoking outside the gym equipment storeroom. She went over and took the cigarette he offered her, took a couple of careful drags and managed not to cough.

‘How are you?’ asked Micke. ‘I mean, are you a real psycho now?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose I am. I have to take pills.’

‘My mother takes pills. Loads of them. She sometimes flips out completely if she forgets to take them.’

‘What do you mean, she flips out?’

‘Well, once she went completely…she started yelling that there was a pig hiding in the oven.’

‘An ordinary pig?’

‘No, a cooked one. Although it was still alive and it was going to jump out and bite her.’ Micke looked at Teresa. ‘But that’s not the same as what you’ve got, is it?’

‘Don’t know. Maybe it could be if I work on it.’

Micke laughed out loud and Teresa felt…not happy, but totally unpressured. Micke didn’t make any demands. Even Agnes and Johannes felt like a threat. They expected a certain kind of behaviour from her, she had to conform. Micke, on the other hand, seemed to have a more relaxed attitude towards her since she became a psycho. That was something.

It took three days after she had been discharged before she felt able to go near the computer. During the long period in the unit she had been weaned off it. As she looked at the big metal box, the screen and the keyboard, she thought she was looking at a source of infection. If she pressed the power button, the sickness would come pouring out.

But Theres. Theres.

Teresa took a deep breath, sat down at her desk and opened the lid of Pandora’s box, logged into her email account. Tons of spam had come in during her absence, and in amongst all the rubbish were five, no six, messages from Theres. The last one was dated six weeks ago.

She opened them and read them. Each message was only one or two lines long, and apart from the first two, they were all short questions. Why didn’t she write, why didn’t she reply. In the last line of the last message Theres stated simply, ‘i’m not writing any more’. The rest was spam.

A feeling of sorrow began to rise up inside Teresa, but was stopped before it became painful. Sometimes she thought she could see the medication working in her body. What she saw was a chainsaw; the blade shot out and sheared off the top and bottom of her emotional register. The crown and the roots. Leaving her with a bare trunk to drag around.

She read the last message again, and clicked on reply. Then she wrote:

I’ve been ill. I was in hospital. I didn’t have a computer.

I couldn’t write.

I’m back home now. I miss you. Can I come over at the weekend?

She sent the message, then sat on her bed and read through Ekelöf’s ‘Voices Under the Earth’ three times. She understood every single word.

I long to move from the black square to the white.

I long to move from the red strand to the blue.

She flicked back and forth through the paperback edition of his collected poems. She hadn’t had it with her in the unit, because she had never really got Ekelöf. Now she found that almost every poem spoke to her, and that he had suddenly become her favourite poet. Gunnar Ekelöf. He knew.

This creature, Nameless

comes to life in a closed room

With no other opening but the gap

through which he is forced to emerge

Now he is on the move

is empty in

a fulfilled world

Amazed, she read on and found other poems that struck a chord, other descriptions of things with which she was already familiar. It was almost difficult to put the book aside while she checked her messages. Yes. Theres had replied.

good that you’re home come here soon

Joy gathered itself, ready to make a huge leap in her breast. Then the chainsaw was there, slicing through her happiness as it fled, so that it fell down between her ribs and landed as a mutilated little stump of pleasure. But pleasure nonetheless.

It took a couple of long conversations with Maria, in which Göran was on Teresa’s side, before she was given permission to go. Teresa, forced to resort to a ploy that was beneath her dignity, said, ‘It’s the only thing I enjoy.’ Maria gave in, and Teresa felt vaguely grubby. But she was allowed to go, that was the important thing. As long as she remembered to take her tablets.

This was Maria’s new hobby horse. Since Teresa’s stay in the unit her attitude had changed from being completely ignorant and therefore deeply sceptical of psychiatric drugs to regarding Fontex as God’s gift to mankind. It was thanks to the pills that Teresa was back home and functioning, that they didn’t have to have a depressed child. Teresa wasn’t quite so sure, but for the time being she carried on taking them three times a day.

On the Saturday she packed her tablets, her new-found friend Ekelöf and her MP3 player. Bright Eyes had been a constant companion during her illness, and by this stage she knew every nuance, every remarkable sound on the tracks on ‘Digital Ash in a Digital Urn’. He still had it.

The train journey was a means of transport, nothing else. She had a distant memory of previous journeys when she had felt anxious or excited or wistful. Not any more. When she had written to Theres that she missed her it was, like so many other things, true and not true. She was sitting on a train. She would be reunited with Theres, and what had been divided would become one again. This was right and proper, but no reason for anxiety or hope. It just was.

But still. When she got off at Svedmyra and reached the shop on the corner where she could look up at Theres’ balcony, it was like colour. As if a little colour had come into her empty space. What colour? She closed her eyes and tried to work it out, because this was a welcome feeling, a real feeling.

Violet.

It was dark violet, tending towards purple. She hoisted her bag up on her shoulder and headed for Theres’ door, dark violet Teresa.

It was Jerry who answered. He seemed irritated, but when he saw Teresa he gave a big smile and even touched her shoulder, almost ushering her into the apartment.

‘Hi Teresa,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while. Theres said you’d been ill-what’s been the matter?’

‘I…’

Teresa went blank whenever she tried to describe what had happened in simple terms. She had never been given a neat diagnosis that she could just trot out. Jerry waited for a while, then asked:

‘Was it something to do with your head?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. But you’re better now?’

‘Yes. I’m better now.’

‘Cool. Theres is in there. There’s been so much going on around here, it’s just crazy. You wouldn’t believe it.’

Teresa assumed he was referring to all the fuss about ‘Fly’. She hadn’t read any newspapers, or listened to the radio or gone on the internet for over two months, and had no idea what had become of the little song they had put together in a different life.

As Teresa approached Theres’ room, she thought there must be a television on somewhere. She could hear the murmur of voices talking quietly. Behind her Jerry said, ‘Squeeze in, as they say.’ Teresa stopped dead in the doorway, and every scrap of colour drained away from her. Regardless of what she had hoped or not hoped would happen when she came to visit Theres, she hadn’t expected this.

The room was full of girls of Teresa’s own age. Theres was sitting in the middle of the bed with a girl on either side of her, and five more were sitting on the floor. They were all looking at Theres, who seemed to be finishing an explanation with the words, ‘You will die. First. Then you will live. Then no one can touch you. Then no one can hurt you. If anyone wants to hurt you, you must make them dead. Then it is yours.’

The girls sat open-mouthed, listening to the words flowing in a rhythmic stream from Theres’ mouth. If Teresa hadn’t been so shocked, she would have been carried along too. She had been there, she had been the one to whom Theres directed her words. The girls in the room were like her, and they had replaced her. She couldn’t see any faces, just a shapeless group of enemies.

Theres caught sight of her and said, ‘Teresa.’

Teresa whispered, ‘Theres’-more of a whimper than a reply-and the chainsaw started up with a furious roar, hacking and cutting to chop off the lead weight that was dropping through her body, trying to drag her down, down. Down on her knees, down on her face, down through the floor, down into the ground.

I am nothing. Not even to you.

One of the girls sitting on the floor got up and came over. She was an emo girl about the same age as Teresa. Black hair with a pink fringe, full-on eye make-up, a piercing in her lower lip and stick-thin legs in skinny jeans. ‘Hi. Miranda.’

A fragile hand was extended towards Teresa. The nails were painted black. Teresa looked at the outstretched hand. It was all about to go wrong. She could feel it. Chainsaw and medication or not: the fire blanket was about to be thrown over her. It was here in the room with her now.

‘Are you Teresa?’ asked Miranda. ‘I really love your lyrics. All of them.’

Teresa couldn’t shake the hand, because her arms were locked around her stomach as she concentrated on trying to breathe.

Your lyrics. All of them.

Theres had played the songs to these girls. Their songs. Their secrets.

She clutched her bag tightly and rushed to the door, ran down the stairs and carried on running until she reached the subway station. The train rumbled in and Teresa sat down on the disabled seat right in the corner, making herself as small as possible.

It was over now. It was really over now, and the only voices that existed were the voices under the earth:

I became the last piece of the jigsaw

The piece that doesn’t fit anywhere, the picture complete without me.