Agitated by the noise, she limped over to the cellar door and down to the girl’s room as the telephone continued to ring up in the kitchen. It didn’t stop ringing until she had tucked the child in and placed the giraffe next to her. Laila sat for a while, looking at the girl through the bars of the cot. Even when she was asleep there was something concentrated or watchful about her expression. Laila wished she could make it disappear.
Sleep well, little star.
The telephone rang again; it rang seven times before she managed to get back to the kitchen to pick it up. It was Lennart, and he wasn’t happy.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘In the cellar.’
‘Well, you can hear the phone down there, can’t you?’
‘I was feeding her.’
Lennart fell silent. That was obviously the correct answer. His voice was gentler as he asked, ‘So did she take it?’
‘She certainly did. A whole bottle.’
‘And did she fall asleep then?’
‘Yes. Straight away.’
Laila sat down on a chair and closed her eyes. This is a perfectly normal conversation. A man and a woman are talking about a child. It happens all the time. Her body felt so strangely light, as if in the short walk around the garden she had shed twenty kilos.
‘So everything’s all right then?’ asked Lennart.
‘Yes. Everything’s fine.’
Laila could hear a door opening in the background at Lennart’s end. The tone of his voice altered as he said, ‘OK, good. I’ll be a few hours, things are a bit tricky here.’
‘No problem,’ said Laila. A little smile curled around her lips. ‘No problem at all.’
Lennart was very busy that autumn. He had to go into Stockholm at least once a week, and at home he spent a great deal of time at his keyboard. Lizzie Kanger, a singer who had had a minor breakthrough with the Eurovision Song Contest, was about to release a follow-up to her debut album, which had been panned. The record company had asked Lennart to ‘tidy up’ the songs that had already been written.
Lennart wrote new songs, retaining just enough phrases from the old crap for the contracted songwriter to accept the devastation of his original creation.
He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for. At the very first meeting with the record company they had played him a song he had been unable to avoid hearing on the radio all summer:
Summer in the city, nineteen ninety,
Do you remember me?
Some middle manager had switched off the DAT player and said, ‘We were thinking of something along those lines.’
Lennart smiled and nodded, while his mind’s eye conjured a desert with skeletons reaching out, screaming for help.
It would have been a terrible autumn if he hadn’t had the time he spent with the girl to look forward to. Sitting there with her on his knee, her crystal clear voice responding to his practice scales, he felt he was in touch with something bigger. Not just bigger than his wretched keyboard fripperies, but bigger than life itself.
The music. She was the music. The real music.
Lennart had always believed that everyone was born with a musical talent. It was simply there. But what happened was that they were force-fed crap from an early age, and they got hooked. In the end they believed that the crap was all there was, that that was how it was supposed to sound. If they heard anything that wasn’t crap, they thought it sounded weird, and switched to another radio station.
The girl was living proof that he was right. Of course, babies were not normally able to express the unspoilt music that existed inside them, but she could. He didn’t want to believe that it was only by chance she had ended up with him. There had to be a purpose.
Another source of relief was that Laila seemed happier than she had been for some considerable time. Occasionally he even heard her humming to herself as she moved around the house. Mostly old pop songs, of course, but he actually like hearing her voice as he sat at his keyboard sweating over yet another three-chord tune he was trying to smarten up by inserting a surprising minor chord, even though it did feel like putting an evening jacket on a pig.
However, every rose has a thorn.
One evening when Lennart had been in the boiler room stoking up the fire for the last time and was on his way to the girl’s room to get her ready for the night, he heard a sound. He stopped by the half-open door to the girl’s room and listened. Very, very faintly he could hear the girl’s voice as she lay in her cot…humming. When Lennart had been standing there for a while he began to pick out a melody he recognised, but was unable to place. Odd words that fitted the melody flickered through his mind.
Glances…something…eyes
Lennart refused to believe his ears. But it was impossible to deny it. The girl was lying there humming ‘Strangers in the Night’. Lennart opened the door and walked in. The humming stopped abruptly.
He picked up the girl and looked into her unfathomable eyes, which never seemed to be looking into his, but at a point far beyond him. He realised what was going on. It wasn’t actually ‘Strangers in the Night’ he had heard, but ‘Tusen och en natt’, Lasse Lönndahl’s saccharine Swedish version of the same song. One of Laila’s favourites.
This is how it happens.
The fact that it was totally unreasonable for a baby to be able to remember and reproduce a tune was something that didn’t even cross Lennart’s mind. The girl had already crossed so many boundaries when it came to music that he had grown used to it, but…
This is how it happens.
Crap has an astonishing ability to find its mark. It doesn’t matter how carefully you try to enclose and protect. The crap seeps in through the gaps, through the cracks you have forgotten to fill. And then it takes over.
Lennart put the girl down on the straw mat, where she began clumsily hitting out at the colourful blocks Laila had put there. Lennart cleared his throat and began to sing quietly, ‘O Värmland, thou art beautiful…’ The girl took no notice of him; she simply carried on hitting the blocks until they were all out of reach.
It was a mild winter, and Laila was able to continue her outdoor excursions with the child well into December. At the beginning of January there was a cold snap with snow, and it was the snow rather than the cold that prevented her from going out when Lennart was away. She didn’t want to leave any tracks.
Lennart had strictly forbidden her from having any contact whatsoever with the child, beyond what was absolutely necessary. She was not allowed to talk, or sing, or make any noise at all. The child was to live in a bubble of silence, apart from the singing practice which Lennart conducted with her. Laila had understood the aim of his project and thought it was completely insane, but since she was able to offer the child small oases of normality, she left him to it.
One afternoon she was sitting watching as the child played, or whatever it was she did. The girl had learned to grip things, and would sit there for ages with the same coloured block, picking it up and dropping it, picking it up and dropping it.
Laila tried to give her one of the soft toys she had brought out of storage. A little fox came bobbing along, ‘Here comes Freddy Fox, sniff sniff sniff…but what’s this he can smell?’
The girl was completely uninterested, and took no notice whatsoever of Freddy, even when he nudged her thigh with his nose. Instead she grabbed hold of her block once again, lifted it up to eye level and looked at it, dropped it, and watched carefully as it fell and rolled away. When it ended up out of reach, she simply waited until Laila handed it back to her. Then she carried on picking it up and dropping it.
The next day when Lennart had shut himself in the studio, Laila called the childcare centre in Norrtälje.
‘Erm, I have a question about…my child. She’s almost six months old and I was just wondering about her behaviour.’
‘How old is she exactly?’
Laila coughed and said, ‘Five months. And three weeks. And I was wondering�
��she doesn’t really react when…if you try to play with her, that sort of thing. She won’t look, she just…she’s got a block that she picks up and drops. And that’s virtually all she does. Is that normal?’
‘You say she doesn’t react; if you touch her and try to attract her attention, how does she react then?’
‘Not at all. She’s only…how can I put this…she’s only interested in inanimate objects. That’s all she wants to do.’
‘Well, it’s difficult to make any kind of assessment over the telephone, but I would suggest that you bring her in so that we can have a look at her. Have you been here before?’
‘No.’
‘So which centre have you been attending, then?’
Laila’s head was suddenly completely empty, and she said the first thing that came into her mind. ‘Skövde.’
‘Mmm. If I can just take her ID number, we’ll see if we can—’
Laila slammed the phone down as if it had burnt her hand, then she sat and stared at it for thirty seconds before picking it up again. The dial tone. No voice was pursuing her, and she went through the conversation in her mind. The critical point was but.
It’s difficult to make any kind of assessment over the telephone, but I would suggest…
Her fears were not groundless. That but meant something wasn’t as it should be. Besides which, no doubt the staff at the childcare centre were very careful about what they said, so as not to frighten insecure parents.
When Lennart emerged from his home studio, Laila tried to raise the issue with him. Of course she didn’t dare tell him she had made the phone call, so she had only her own vague observations to go on, which got her precisely nowhere. Lennart might possibly agree that the girl was unusually passive, but was that really a cause for complaint?
‘Do you want her to be like Jerry? Getting up five or six times a night because he was lying there bawling his head off?’
It wasn’t Lennart who had got up five or six times a night, but Laila didn’t pursue that detail. Instead she said, ‘I just wish we could get her checked out somehow.’
She saw the muscles in his jaw tense. She was approaching the danger zone. Lennart clasped his hands tightly together as if to prevent himself from doing something with them, and said, ‘Laila. For the last time. If one single person finds out that we’ve got her, they will take her away from us. Stop thinking about all that, there’s no chance. And besides…if it is what you think, if there is something wrong with her, what do you imagine they can do? Are they going to give her drugs? Put her in some kind of clinic? What is it you actually want?’
This final question was entirely rhetorical, and was actually a statement: you are such a stupid bitch. Lennart’s hands were opening and closing, and Laila didn’t say another word.
He had a point, anyway. What did she actually want? Did she want the child to have some kind of medical care? Drugs? No. All she really wanted, when she thought about it, was for someone who knew what they were talking about to look at the girl and tell her everything was all right. Or that it wasn’t all right, but that the problem was called so-and-so, and there was nothing they could do. Just so she knew.
Two weeks later, Lennart went into the city for the final mix of the album. The snow had melted, but the temperature had dropped below freezing again and the garden was covered in ice in places; Laila wouldn’t leave any footprints.
And the girl needed to get out.
The times when Laila dressed the girl for an outing were little special occasions. As she busied herself with the child’s top, trousers, snowsuit and hat she felt a closeness to her that was otherwise missing. As she rolled up the tiny socks and put them on the child’s equally tiny feet, she even allowed herself to formulate the thought: I love you, Little One.
It wasn’t that she was indifferent to the child on a day-to-day basis, but there was never any response to the feelings she expressed. At best the child might explore Laila’s face with her fingers, but she did it in the same way as she did everything else: methodically, almost scientifically. As if she were trying to understand how this particular object worked.
Perhaps that was why the business of dressing the child created a perception of mutual understanding. As Laila gently pushed the slender limbs into the snowsuit and slipped on her mittens, she was treating the girl like an object. Gently handling something that needed to be protected.
She carried the girl to the door and put her down on the step. The ice crunched beneath their feet as Laila held the girl’s hands above her head so that she was half walking, half being carried up the steps.
The garden was covered in ice and lumps of frozen snow. Laila manoeuvred the girl towards the lilac arbour, its branches now bare of leaves. ‘See this, Little One? This is ice.’
They hadn’t got round to giving the girl a name. They had discussed the matter, but since she wasn’t going to be christened and nobody had got in touch to demand a name, they hadn’t come to a decision. Laila had heard Lennart say ‘Little One’ as well when he spoke to the girl on one occasion, and that was as far as they had got.
They sat for a while on the bench in the arbour. Laila gave the girl sticks and dry leaves to examine. Then they went for a little walk. The child’s unsteady legs had difficulty with the conditions underfoot, and the cold made Laila’s knee stiff, so they shuffled along a little bit at a time.
They were perhaps twenty metres from the house when Laila heard the sound of an engine. She had heard it often enough to recognise it. Jerry’s motorbike.
She heaved the child up into her arms and staggered towards the cellar steps. She had managed ten metres when a sharp pain stabbed through her knee. She slipped on a patch of ice and fell forward. As she fell, she managed to twist to the side so that she landed on her shoulder instead of on top of the girl. Her head snapped downwards and hit the ice; everything went dark red before her eyes, and the girl slid out of her arms.
From inside the red veil she could hear the motorbike coming closer, and then the engine was switched off. The side stand clicked down and footsteps approached. A patch of light grew inside the redness and continued to grow until she could see the snow and the ice and the girl’s blue woolly hat once more. Jerry’s biker boots entered her field of vision and stopped.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Mother? And who’s that?’
Lennart was in the car on his way home. He wasn’t dissatisfied, which was unusual. Normally he was more or less furious after a studio session or a meeting in Stockholm. But this time things had gone his way.
A new producer had come on board for the final phase of the album. When Lennart first saw the young lad ambling around the studio in his yellow shades, all hope had drained from his body. But surprise surprise, the new guy liked Lennart’s stuff, called it ‘updated Motown sound’ and ‘a fantastic vintage vibe’. He had picked up two tracks that had been recorded but weren’t going to be included, and Lennart was now down as the composer of three of the tracks on the album. One of Lennart’s songs was actually under consideration as the first single.
So Lennart didn’t even pull a face when he saw Jerry’s motorbike parked outside the house; not so much as a small sigh escaped him. He was temporarily wrapped in a protective cloak. He was a composer, and was above the trials of everyday life.
He and Laila had been married for twenty-five years, and had lived in the same house for almost as long. As soon as he closed the door behind him and began to undo his shoes, he could feel that something was different. Something had altered in the atmosphere of the house, but he didn’t know what it was.
When he walked into the kitchen, he had his answer. Laila was sitting there. And Jerry. And on Jerry’s knee sat the girl. Lennart stood in the doorway and the protective cloak fell around his feet. Laila looked at him with a pleading expression, while Jerry pretended to be unaware of his presence, grabbing the girl under the arms and lifting her above his head while saying, ‘Toot, toot, toot.’
‘Be careful,’ said Lennart. ‘She’s not a toy.’
How much had Laila told him? Lennart waved at her and said, ‘Laila, come here,’ whereupon he turned on his heel and headed for the studio, where they could talk undisturbed. But Laila didn’t follow him.
When he came back into the kitchen, Jerry said, ‘Don’t start, Dad. Sit down.’
Lennart walked over to Jerry and held out his arms for the child. Jerry didn’t hand her over. ‘Sit down, I said.’
‘Give her to me.’
‘No. Sit down.’
Lennart couldn’t believe this was happening. ‘Is this some kind of…hostage situation, or what?’
Jerry laid his cheek against the girl’s. ‘This is my little sister, for fuck’s sake. Well, nearly. Can’t I spend some time with her?’
Lennart perched on the very edge of the chair, ready to leap to his feet if Jerry tried anything. It was many years since Lennart had thought he had the slightest idea what went on inside Jerry’s head. He was afraid of him, as we are afraid of everything unknown and therefore unpredictable.
The girl looked small and fragile as she sat there wrapped in Jerry’s great big arms. All he had to do was squeeze, and she would crack like an egg. It was hard to bear, and Lennart tried to speak the only language he was sure Jerry understood.
‘Jerry,’ he said. ‘You can have five hundred kronor if you give her to me.’
Jerry looked down at the floor, apparently considering the offer. Then he said, ‘Do you think I’m going to hurt her or something? Is that really what you think of me?’
The offer of money had been a mistake. If Jerry realised how much the girl meant to Lennart, the situation could only get worse. So he picked up the newspaper and pretended to be interested in the US air-raids on Iraq without even glancing at the child.
After a while Jerry said, ‘She’s so bloody quiet. I mean, she doesn’t make a sound.’
Little Star Page 5