John Lindqvist - Little Star

Lennart had programmed the synthesiser as best he could, but the audience got fairly watered down versions of their old hits or attempted hits. Not unexpectedly, they got the best response to ‘Summer Rain’. Four drunks in leather waistcoats stood right at the front with their arms around each other and joined in the chorus, and the applause at the end was almost enough for an encore. But not quite.

A few people came up to talk to them, and a man with his gut protruding like a weapon under his T-shirt asked Laila for an autograph. Where would he like it? On his belly, of course. This turned into a bit of a trend, and another five men were inspired to ask for autographs on their bellies. Laila’s strokes with the felt-tip became broader and broader, while Lennart stood next to her pretending to smile.

Then a shy, dried-up little man came over and expressed his admiration for the first and only record by The Others, and the whole thing turned into a very pleasant experience for Lennart too.

No, it wasn’t a success, but Lennart and Laila still felt quite contented as they gathered up their cables and microphones and packed up the synth. There were people out there who remembered them. Not something they could build a comeback on, but a small consolation, if nothing else.

They had been away from home for at least half an hour longer than expected and the way Lennart drove, he would have lost his licence if he’d been caught by a speed trap. Without bothering to unpack the car he ran inside and down to the cellar to make sure everything was all right.

The child was lying motionless on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Lennart stood and looked at her for a few seconds, waiting for her to blink. When she didn’t, he hurried over and grabbed her hand between the bars. The child wrinkled her nose. Lennart breathed a sigh of relief and pressed his lips against the little hand. Then he saw that there was blood on the fingertips.

He picked up the girl and changed her nappy, inspecting her body to see if she had scratched herself. He couldn’t find anything except a few bruises on her thighs, and thought she must have bitten her tongue, or perhaps a new tooth had come through.

When he got back upstairs, the telephone rang. He got there ahead of Laila as she came hobbling in from the living room, and picked up the receiver.

‘Lennart speaking.’

‘Hi, it’s Jerry.’

‘Oh?’

Lennart quickly ran through in his mind what Jerry could possibly want now, and steeled himself. After a few seconds of silence on the other end, he said, ‘So did you want something?’

‘No. Just wanted to check if you were at home. Bye.’

The connection was broken and Lennart stood there with the phone in his hand, eyebrows raised. Laila looked at him anxiously.

‘What did he want?’

Lennart replaced the receiver and shook his head. ‘To check if we were at home. That’s a new one.’

Two mud-smeared Indians slit open a man’s stomach and ripped out his intestines to feast on them as Jerry slumped on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. He pressed stop; he couldn’t even be bothered to fast forward to the bit where they hung the girl up on hooks through her breasts. He shuffled over to the video and ejected Cannibal Ferox before replacing it in the Italian cannibal section of the bookshelf.

He took out Eaten Alive and put it back, looked at the covers of Cannibal Holocaust and Man from Deep River, but he just wasn’t in the mood. He’d seen every single film at least ten times, some more than twenty. He glanced at the jewel in his collection, the incomplete Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, which had at least made his stomach tingle the first few times he had seen it, but no.

A hole gaped inside him. He took a bottle of Russian beer out of the fridge, knocked the cap off on the edge of the sink and poured half of it down his throat to see if it helped. Not even slightly.

He went out onto the balcony and lit another cigarette, watching a few children with towels slung over their shoulders as they made their way home from a swimming excursion to Vigelsjö. Tanned, cheerful, slender, not a care in the world. Jerry sank down onto a stool and sighed; he took a deep drag and thought about how he was feeling.

A hole? Was it really a hole?

No, he was familiar with that feeling. An empty space that appeared, that you had to hurl things into, food, booze, films, excitement, until the echo stopped. This was different. This was as if something had appeared. Fear. It was white and shaped like a sphere, about the same size as a handball. It travelled around his body, unsettling him.

He wandered around the apartment and stopped at the guitar case, leaning against the wall in the hallway. Why the fuck had he brought the guitar home? The last thing he needed was a reminder of his fucking childhood. He stood there in front of the guitar, his head tilted to one side. In the distance, like a whisper through the water pipes, he heard the girl’s voice. Theres’ voice. Crystal clear, perfect.

He shuddered and carried the case into the living room, then took out the guitar. It had gone out of tune on the ride home, and it took four times as long to retune it without Theres and her voice next to him. When it sounded OK he tried a C7 just to see if his fingers still remembered. They did.

He messed about for a while, and at first his index finger wouldn’t stretch to the barre chords, but soon that was fine too. Jerry rocked his upper body and got through Clapton’s riff to ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ without any problem, then carried on strumming as he hummed the lyrics to himself.

Time passed, and without noticing how it had happened he was sitting there playing a sequence of chords he didn’t recognise. He looked at his fingers, moving across the neck of the guitar by themselves, and went through the sequence again. It sounded good.

But what’s the tune, for fuck’s sake?

One more time, slower. He could hear echoes of both Bowie and The Doors, for God’s sake; he sensed a melody behind the chords, but still couldn’t place it. The Who? No. After running through the whole thing a couple of times more, he accepted the truth: the tune didn’t exist. He’d just made it up.

He wrote down the sequence of chords on the back of an envelope. Verse, chorus. It needed a bridge of some kind. Jerry hummed the verse and tried out a few different things until he found a fully functioning transition, which he changed up before the final chorus. Not perfect, but it would have to do. Something he could work on.

Jerry leaned back on the sofa and exhaled. It had started to get dark outside the window. He looked at the guitar, at the envelope covered in scribbled chords and crossings out. He scratched the back of his neck.

So what was all that about?

At least three hours had passed since he took the guitar out of its case. No, not passed. Flown. His scalp was sticky with sweat and there was hardly any feeling in the fingertips of his left hand, which were red and swollen. It would soon pass, he knew that. A few days’ practice, and the skin would harden.

Lennart turned down the handful of gigs they were offered during the autumn, and Laila wasn’t exactly sorry. She had felt clumsy and rusty standing there on-stage at the motor show, and although she had enjoyed the attention, she wasn’t dreaming of travelling all over the country signing autographs on the bellies of drunks. But what was her dream? Did she actually have one?

The Lizzie Kanger album which Lennart had worked on sold fairly well, and they got by on the royalties from that and the other projects Lennart had been involved in over the years. In theory, they could sit at home twiddling their thumbs while the money trickled in, just fast enough to cover the necessities. The house was paid for, and they had no major outgoings. Everything was set up for a slow, painless stroll down the road we all follow until the light’s turned out.