John Lindqvist - Little Star

It took her five minutes to finish the water, and when she went out into the garden afterwards she was so overwhelmed with the happiness bubbling up from the impressions flooding into her body that she had to sit down on the steps for a while. She closed her eyes, put her hands over her ears and concentrated only on the scents, the scents of early summer.

To think that people can walk around on this earth and not be aware of what is around them. What a waste. They might just as well be robots, soulless automata moving between work, the bank, the shop and the TV until their batteries run down.

Teresa had been just the same, but that person now lay crumpled in a grave. She was a goddess, and perceived things with the senses of a goddess. She was Urd, the primitive one.

And so her day passed. She wandered through the trees, gently running her hands over leaves and stones; she walked like Eve through Paradise, knowing that everything was hers, and everything was good.

She woke up feeling happy on Tuesday as well, and another day passed in a state of joyful awareness that might have burst her chest open if she hadn’t divided it into manageable parts, one or two senses at a time. Towards evening it slowly began to slip away from her.

She could hear the voices of her parents and her brothers again. Of course they were no longer her parents or her brothers: her family was thirteen people who were not present. But she knew what they were called, these people sitting around the dinner table with her.

Their inane babble about trivialities was a grating distraction and the food did not taste as good as it had done the previous day, when she had eaten very little and had had to conceal how much she was enjoying each bite of potato-the poor appetite fitted nicely with the impression of illness she wanted to maintain.

Tuesday evening was different. She pretended to feel weak and exhausted, closed her eyes and tried to recapture the feeling. It was there, but much fainter. She excused herself and went up to her room.

When she woke up on Wednesday another little bit had disappeared, and by Thursday morning she was being honest when she said she didn’t feel well. She told herself her senses were still stronger, but she was beginning to feel pretty much like an ordinary person. And that felt like an illness compared with the way things had been at the beginning of the week.

Friday and Saturday were the direct opposite of Monday and Tuesday. She felt ill, as if she was constantly quivering inside, but she had to pretend to the family that she was feeling much better so they wouldn’t stop her going to Stockholm on Sunday. It was stressful and difficult, and she collapsed at night into uneasy sleep filled with nightmares.

They would have had to bind her hand and foot to stop her going. She would have run away, hitch-hiked, caught the train without a ticket if necessary, but it was simpler if the others believed she was feeling OK. So at night she lay there tossing and turning, and during the day she walked around with arms folded or fists clenched in her pockets to hide her shaking hands, and all the time she smiled, smiled, smiled and spoke nicely.

Only when she was sitting on the train on Sunday was she able, at last, to drop the act. She slumped in her seat, flowing like jelly over the rough upholstery. When an elderly lady leaned forward to ask if she was all right, she went and shut herself in the toilet.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked every bit as sick as she had pretended to be on Monday: cold sweat, pallor; lank, greasy hair. She splashed her face a few times with cold water, dried herself with paper towels, then sat on the toilet and breathed deeply until some of the weight inside her chest disappeared.

She looked at her hands and forced them to stop shaking. Soon everything would be better. Soon she would be with her pack.

Just being with Theres on the subway, then the bus, made Teresa feel better; by the time they were lying on the blankets outside the wolf enclosure, her body was able to soak up the warmth of the sun. The shivering that had gripped her over the last few days diminished, and she was able to talk without having to control the shake in her voice. She could do it. With Theres beside her, she could do it.

She lay on her stomach gazing into the enclosure, but couldn’t see any of the wolves. She took her piece of wolf skin out of her pocket, waved it around and stroked it like a talisman.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Theres.

‘I want them to come. The wolves.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to see them.’

There was silence for a while, then Theres said, ‘Here they come.’

Teresa peered among the tree trunks and rocks, but there was no sign of any grey shape. When she turned to Theres to ask her where they were, she saw that Theres was looking over towards the far end of the fence, where the rest of the girls were approaching in a group.

‘I thought you meant the wolves,’ said Teresa.

‘We are the wolves. That’s what you said.’

Yes. That’s what she’d said. But the pack creeping along the narrow track was no more wolf-like than she was right now. They came and sat down, shuffling close to each other on the blankets with Theres at the centre. An inaudible whimper hung in the air along with a scent indistinguishable, to Teresa, from her own. The scent of exhaustion and nagging pain.

It turned out that the others had felt much the same over the course of the week. To begin with, a joyous, crackling proximity to life that felt indestructible, as if it would last forever, then the slow change to fever and despair as the feeling dissolved.

Like Teresa, the others found consolation in the group, relief in simply being close to one another, but the voices echoing between them were weak; empty in a ghostly way.

‘…I thought that now, at long last…and then when it disappeared, I saw myself…I mean, you’re like, nothing… I haven’t done anything, I’m never going to do anything…as if I was invisible…nobody’s going to remember me…everything will disappear…it’s as if you’re too small to be heard…when it disappeared, all I had left was empty hands…’

This went on for a good five minutes, a low whimpering made verbal, until Theres yelled, ‘Quiet!’

The voices broke off abruptly. Theres was holding both hands up in front of her, the palms facing outwards as if she was stopping a runaway train, and she shouted again, ‘Quiet! Quiet!’

If they could have pricked up their ears, they would have done so now. They were sitting in a huddle around Theres, who straightened up and looked from one to the other. They were focussed on her lips, waiting for a few words that could free them. A suggestion, an order, a telling-off. Anything.

When Theres opened her mouth, they were so intently anticipating some pithy, vital truth that it took them a couple of seconds to realise that she was singing.

I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore

If I tell a joke, you’ve probably heard it before

But I have a talent, a wonderful thing

’cause everyone listens when I start to sing

I’m so grateful and proud

All I want is to sing it out loud…

By the time she had got that far most of them had recognised the song, and even if they didn’t know the words to the verse, they knew the chorus. Theres’ pure, clear voice, so perfectly pitched, resonated through their bodies like a giant tuning fork, guiding them to the right note as they joined in.

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing…

Theres sang the song all the way through, the others helped out in the choruses, and the music was like morphine. The pain in their bodies eased, flowed out through the notes, and as long as the song went on there was nothing to fear. In the silence after the final words died away, they heard distant applause. People walking their dogs had stopped in various places and one of them shouted, ‘Yay! Sing Along at Skansen!’ before moving on.