John Lindqvist - Little Star

Arms slung around each other, they strolled off towards Love Point where people usually gathered in the evenings. They were invincible, they were the Three Musketeers, they were the entire bloody history of rock and roll in one package.

There was some kind of party going on, a gang of people about their own age sitting around a bonfire. Someone was strumming away on a guitar. In walked Los Rockers making one hell of a racket! There was no messing about, people just had to make some room for them. Roy grabbed a bottle of wine to share with his compadres.

Jerry couldn’t take his eyes off the guitar. It woke something in him. His fingers began to grope in thin air, remembering the wood, the strings, the frets. He could still do it. The guitar was longing for his fingers to release the music hidden inside it…

Someone spoke. A voice was tapping away at his consciousness, saying his name. With difficulty he dragged himself out of the guitar’s hypnotic power, turned his head towards the voice and said, ‘What?’

Two metres away sat Mats, known as Mats the Love Machine ever since he started driving around a couple of years earlier on a souped-up moped with an imitation leopard’s tail dangling from the antenna. He had once pissed on Jerry in the showers. Among other things.

Mats leaned forward and said, ‘I’m talking to you: wanna play, fat boy?’

It happened so fast. Everything had been moving in slow motion for a while and now somebody had pressed fast forward. Before Jerry had time to think, he had grabbed a lump of wood that was sticking out of the fire, walked over to Mats and smashed him across the face with the burning end.

Mats fell backwards with a scream and Jerry looked at the cooling, pointed piece of wood in his hand. He looked at Mats, writhing on the ground with his hands over his face. His mind started working again, his thoughts crystal clear. He could see exactly what the situation was. Mats was in fact a vampire. Simple as that.

Which meant there was only one thing for it. He grabbed the glowing stake with both hands and drove it into Mats’ chest. Sparks flew, there was a hissing sound, and by the time Elvis and Roy got hold of Jerry, Mats had already started coughing up blood like the vampire he was. Or had been.

Events that had taken perhaps fifteen seconds would define Jerry’s life for a long time to come. It involved police and lawyers, social services and youth services. Mats survived; he got away with the loss of an eye, a few shattered ribs and slight damage to one lung.

But something had gone wrong inside Jerry’s head during the cannabis rush, and it refused to go back to normal. In that moment of clarity when he realised he had to free the world from a repulsive blood-sucker, an insight had taken root in his mind and refused to let go when the rush subsided.

There was a truth in what he had seen.

During a meeting with the family therapist, Laila explained what had really happened to her knee. The therapist regarded this as a possible breakthrough and a chance to move on, but for Jerry it merely provided further confirmation of what he already knew: the world was evil, people were evil, and there was no point in even trying.

When all the investigations and analyses were over, Jerry had slipped so far behind in his schoolwork that he couldn’t go back. Didn’t want to anyway. During his absence Elvis had passed his driving test, which opened up all kinds of new possibilities.

Freed from the burden of normality, Jerry let go of any semblance of ambition. The three of them moved on from summer cottages to bigger houses, and robbed a couple of petrol stations before they got caught. Jerry got a year in a youth offenders’ institution, which only served to reinforce his view of the world.

When he came out, they started again. An old man was at home in one of the houses, and they knocked him down. When he started screaming abuse at them, they kicked him a few times until he shut his mouth. This played on Jerry’s conscience for a time, but it passed. He was becoming hardened.

One day when he was shaving, he caught sight of himself and looked carefully. He examined his feelings, and realised he had crossed an important line. He could kill someone without it breaking him. If necessary. That was definitely progress.

His mother and father carried on with the usual shit, and he took no notice whatsoever. They didn’t want him at home anymore, but he thought it worked very well; he liked having his room as a sort of hole to crawl back into from time to time. He didn’t listen to a word they said in any case.

When Jerry was twenty, Elvis went out cruising in Norrtälje, high as a kite. He lost control of his Chevy on the hill leading down to the harbour, drove straight into the water and drowned. Nothing was the same after that.

The steam went out of Roy and Jerry. They felt obliged to burgle a couple of houses, and talked about trying some post offices, but it never happened. It was no fun anymore. They drifted apart, and since Jerry was spending more time at home, he was able to hear Lennart and Laila talking. When they organised an apartment for him through social services, he moved out.

He had a few bits and pieces stashed away which he sold so that he could buy a motorbike. He got a few dead-end jobs, but never stayed more than a couple of weeks. He built up a reasonable collection of splatter films on VHS.

That’s how it was, and perhaps it couldn’t have been any different.

In the spring the year after Lennart had found the girl, something very unusual happened. Laila received an offer. A group calling themselves DDT wanted Laila as their featured singer on a dance track. At first Laila thought it was a joke, and in a way she was right. The idea was to do a Swedish version of The KLF’s monster hit ‘Justified and Ancient’, with Laila as Sweden’s answer to Tammy Wynette, singing a couple of verses to a heavy dance beat.

Laila found out later that both Lill-Babs and Siw Malmkvist had been approached and turned it down. Perhaps other legendary Swedish chart-toppers had been asked too, before they ended up with the somewhat less legendary Laila.

She had no reputation to lose and no image to maintain, so she said yes. Anything to get out of the house.

The atmosphere had soured even more since the incident with Jerry. Lennart hardly spoke to her anymore, but at least he didn’t hit her. It wasn’t clear what Jerry had meant when he said Lennart could ‘forget the kid’ if his instructions weren’t followed, but the threat certainly worked. Jerry got his computer and Laila was left in peace.

But it was as if a musty blanket had settled on things. The air in the rooms felt stale and close. Laila thought that a visitor who stepped through the door would only need one sniff to know: There’s something bad here. Something sick.

But nobody came, apart from Jerry who called in from time to time to ‘check things out’. Sometimes he insisted on holding the child, bouncing it up and down on his knee and saying, ‘Toot, toot.’ On these occasions Lennart stood there with clenched fists, waiting until Jerry had finished so he could carry the girl back down to the cellar.

Perhaps Laila experienced the child’s shut-in existence as her own; sometimes she had to go out into the garden just to breathe. So she welcomed the chance to go into Stockholm and pretend to be a singer again, if only for a while.

The track was called ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’, and they explained to Laila that she would be singing a deliberate parody of The KLF’s nonsense. She had no idea what it was about. ‘We’re walking on water underground, we’re setting fire to the four words. Lead. Check. Bearing capacity zero’ and so on.