John Lindqvist - Little Star

He picked up the child, holding her at arm’s length, and took a step away from the bed. ‘If I drop you on the floor, you should bloody well feel that, shouldn’t you? Don’t you think?’ He brought the child closer and said it again, so that it would understand. ‘Do you hear me? I’m going to drop you on the floor.’

He never found out if he would have done it or not. As he uttered the last word, the child’s hand shot out with reptilian speed and grabbed hold of his lower lip. Its fingers burrowed in, the little nails scraping against his gums. Then it pulled.

It hurt so much that tears sprang to Jerry’s eyes. Whatever his intention may have been, the pain made him drop the child. It clung to his lip for less than a second, just long enough to tear it away from the gum slightly, blood seeping into his mouth.

The child fell onto the cement floor and landed on its bottom, where it lay looking up at Jerry as he pressed his hands to his mouth, whimpering. On the bedside table there was a sippy cup in the shape of an elephant, its ears forming the handles. Jerry took off the lid and spat. Blood and saliva mingled with the milk. He sat there spitting for a while until the worst had passed. Then he tore off a piece of a paper towel, rolled it up and pushed it under his lip like an upside-down plug of tobacco.

The kid was still lying on its back, looking at him. Jerry crouched down beside it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem. So now we know.’

He picked up the girl, taking care to keep his face out of reach of her hands, and carefully placed her back in the cot. She was utterly calm; the only thing that had changed was that she now had a small amount of blood on the tips of the fingers on her left hand.

Jerry perched on the edge of the spare bed, his elbows resting on his knees. He looked carefully at her. Despite the fact that his lip was hurting, he couldn’t hold back a big smile. He was positively beaming. Suddenly he grabbed hold of the bars and rattled the cot, shaking her to and fro.

‘Fuck, sis!’ he said. ‘Sis! Bloody hell!’

The child didn’t respond, but there was no denying it: he had a sister, sort of. He liked the little bastard. She was completely crazy. Nobody was going to mess with her. She was invincible, his sister.

Jerry was in the mood for a celebration, so he clattered back up the stairs and found a bottle of whisky and a glass, then went back down to the cellar, perched on the edge of the bed, half-filled his glass and clinked it against the bars of the cot.

‘Cheers, sis!’

He took a big gulp and pulled a face as the alcohol penetrated through the paper towel and touched the wound. He spat the plug out onto the floor and rinsed his mouth clean with more whisky. Then he rested his chin on his hand and looked thoughtfully at the girl.

‘Do you know what your name is?’ he said. ‘Theres, that’s what. Like that Baader-Meinhof chick. Theres.’ It was crystal clear, he could hear it as he uttered the name. ‘Theres. That’s it.’

He topped up his glass. The child pulled herself up into a sitting position, then to her feet. She was standing as she had been when he came into the room.

‘What is it?’ Jerry asked. ‘Do you want to taste?’

He picked up a cloth and dipped it in the glass, then held out the damp corner to Theres, who didn’t open her mouth. He pushed the edge of the cloth against her lips. ‘This is what they used to do in the old days, you know. Open wide.’

Theres opened her mouth, and Jerry pushed the corner of the flannel in. The girl sucked at it, then lay down. She carried on sucking away at the cloth, never taking her eyes off Jerry.

‘Cheers,’ he said, emptying the glass.

After ten minutes and another glass, Jerry started to get restless. He looked around the room for something to do. A sudden inspiration made him look under the bed, and lo and behold!

He got down on his knees and pulled out the guitar case. It was covered in a layer of dust, and the lock had begun to rust after several damp winters, but there it was. He opened the case and took out the guitar, weighing it in his hands.

It’s so bloody small.

When he thought back to his days as a guitarist, he remembered the guitar as a great big thing on his lap; his fingers had trouble stretching to the right frets. Now it was a toy in his hands, and he had no problem whatsoever getting his hand around the neck.

He tried an E minor, and it sounded bloody awful. He struck an experimental chord and started turning the tuner on the E-string-to begin with. There was something odd about the acoustics in the room. When he plucked the string it sounded like a double note. He let the note fade away, and put his ear to the soundboard. The resonance sounded purer. He plucked the string again, leaning his head towards the body. He didn’t have Lennart’s ear; he could only hear notes in relation to one another, but surely the resonance sounded purer than the note itself?

Some kind of damage from the damp.

He straightened up so that he could reach the tuners, and saw that Theres had pulled herself up in the cot. He plucked the E-string again. This time he could hear where the purer note was coming from.

No, no, no.

Just for fun he tuned the E-string to the sound Theres was making, and moved on to the B-string. When he tuned that one to the sound she made, he was able to hear that the interval was absolutely perfect. He did the same thing with G, and so on. Tuning a guitar had never been so quick. He couldn’t have done it better with an electronic tuner.

He took a swig straight out of the whisky bottle and looked at Theres, who was still standing up in her cot, her cheek bright red and her face expressionless.

‘You’re quite a piece of work, aren’t you? So what do you think about this, then?’

He tried a C. Not the note, but the chord. C, E and G. Theres’ clear voice responded; it was hard to tell where the guitar ended and she began. Jerry allowed the chord to die away. Her voice lingered for a couple of seconds before it too fell silent. Jerry took another swig from the bottle and nodded to himself.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s rock.’ He stamped his foot to set the beat, struck C again and launched into the first line of ‘Space Oddity’.

Beside him the girl joined in with pure, wordless notes. When he changed chords it took a second before she switched to the new note. Just as well. He would have been seriously spooked if she’d known the song on top of everything else. But she didn’t. So he played it to her, with her. Then he moved on to ‘Ashes to Ashes’ so she could hear the whole story.

When Jerry had sung the last lines a few times with Theres, it was as if he woke from an enchantment. He looked around the room and realised there would be a hell of a fuss when his parents got home.

He put back the whisky and shoved the boozy cloth out of sight, gathered up the blood-stained plugs of paper and poured the contents of the cup down the sink in the laundry room. Finally he put the guitar back in its case. The room looked the same as it had when he arrived.

Theres was standing in her cot, looking at him. He leaned down and sniffed at her mouth: nothing. Almost a pity, really. It would have given Lennart and Laila something to think about if the kid had been standing there reeking of Famous Grouse when they got home.

‘OK, sis. See ya.’

He left. After ten seconds he came back and took the guitar.

The gig wasn’t quite the success the promoters had hoped for, but nor was it a fiasco. The majority of the audience consisted of fairly overweight men in denim jackets and women wearing too much make-up, all about the same age as Lennart and Laila. Only a small number of young people had turned up to see the singer behind ‘Bearing Capacity: 0’, which was just as well, because they didn’t actually have permission to use the sampling on that song.