John Lindqvist - Little Star

Laila had been quite happy about that, and Lennart seemed to be grimly reconciled to the prospect. Until he found the child. Laila couldn’t understand Lennart’s febrile energy in relation to the child but in this as in most other things she just let him get on with it, because that was the easiest thing to do.

During the autumn and winter Lennart received more offers involving composition. Lizzie Kanger’s little burst of success had sent ripples out across the water, and there was no lack of optimistic singers, both male and female, who wanted a similar pebble dropped into the stagnant pool of their career. A song, or just a catchy chorus-got anything up your sleeve, Lennart?

Lennart shut himself in the studio and plinked out phrases, adding bombastic synth riffs so that not even the tone deaf could fail to grasp the potential in the demos he sent out.

The girl had moved on to solids, and it was usually Laila who fed her-jars of baby food she gobbled with a surprisingly healthy appetite. And yet however much she ate, she remained unusually thin for a baby, which was puzzling, given how little exercise she had. Laila wished she had that metabolism.

As the autumn progressed the girl began to walk, but still she didn’t say a word. The only sound that came out of her as she walked around the room was a low, soporific humming-melodies Laila had never heard. Sometimes Laila fell asleep as she sat on the spare bed watching her.

At some point the girl had found a piece of rope about twenty centimetres long with four knots in it, and she never let go of it. She chewed it, she stroked it, she rubbed it against her cheek and she clutched it in her hand when she was asleep.

As the weeks passed, the girl began to use her newly acquired ability to walk in a way that made Laila uneasy, although she didn’t know why. The girl was searching. That was the only word for it.

With the piece of rope in her hand she moved around the room looking behind the cupboard, under the bed. She pulled out the drawers in the desk and closed them again. She took the cuddly toys she never bothered with out of their basket, looked in the basket. Then she went back to the desk, opened the drawers, looked under the bed and so on and so on, humming all the time.

That was all she did, by and large. Sometimes she would sit down on the floor and stroke the knots in her piece of rope, but after a while she was on her feet again, looking behind the cupboard. When Laila was feeding her, the girl’s eyes never met hers. She continued to gaze around the room, as if she were still searching even when she wasn’t on the move.

Laila would sit on the bed following the girl’s progress around the room as a quiet horror began to whisper inside her. The longer she sat there watching the girl’s purposeful search, the more convinced she became that there really was something to search for, and that the girl would find it any moment now. She couldn’t imagine what it might be, and she wondered if the girl knew.

Winter dragged itself along. Dark afternoons and rain hammering on the cellar windows. By early spring, Laila had long given up trying to talk to the girl. Lennart’s dictum had firmed of its own accord into law. The girl didn’t speak, she hummed, and she didn’t stop humming if someone spoke, even for a fraction of a second. In the end it seemed pointless to try. And after all, she hummed so beautifully.

Laila had started to leave the door of the girl’s room open while she was sitting down there. It made no difference. When the girl got to the door she stopped as if an invisible barrier prevented her from continuing out into the rest of the cellar.

To give herself something to do, Laila had taken up knitting again. She had been sitting on the bed for an hour or so working on a new hat for the girl when something changed in the energy of the room.

Laila lowered her needles. The girl was standing with the tips of her toes pressed against the threshold, looking out into the cellar. Then she reached out through the door with one arm, as if to check that there really was a space on the other side. She took one step. Laila held her breath as the girl moved the other foot, then stood with her heels pressed against the other side of the threshold. The girl’s head turned from left to right.

The humming faltered for a moment, as if she were hesitating. Then it changed character. A new melody, a new key. Laila’s vision blurred, and she realised she was crying. Through her tears she saw the girl take an infinitely slow step back, saw the other foot follow until she was standing inside the room once more. She stood there motionless for a few seconds as the melody changed. Then she turned and walked back into the room, where she carried on searching as if nothing had happened.

What do you dream of, Laila? Do you have a dream?

Something had happened. Something had opened up inside Laila and pierced her torpor. She fumbled for the aperture and tried to see what lay behind. She couldn’t see a thing.

Laila gathered up her knitting and fled from the room.

She had thought she was just going out for a drive. As if it were something perfectly natural. These days it was always Lennart who drove, because of her bad knee. But here she was, out on the road in the middle of the day, doing a hundred and ten on the twisting road to Rimbo.

It was only when she turned onto the forest track that she realised this was where she had been heading all the time. She stopped at the car park where the path leading into the forest began, and switched off the engine.

This was where Lennart had found the girl eighteen months ago. Laila got out of the car, pulling her coat around her to keep out the bitterly cold drizzle. The sky was overcast, and although it was midday it was gloomy among the trees. She took a couple of tentative steps and quelled the urge to shout. What would she be shouting for? What was she actually looking for? She was looking for the place. Then she would know.

Lennart’s description hadn’t been exact, but as far as Laila understood, it had been close to the track. She walked slowly across the damp tufts of grass and rotting leaves, searching for something that looked different. A chilly wind suffused with rain whistled between the tree trunks, making her shudder. Something white flickered on the periphery of her vision.

A broken branch was sticking out from the trunk of a pine tree, a fragment of a plastic bag hanging from it. Laila’s gaze roamed over the ground. A couple of metres from the pine tree she spotted a hollow in the earth; a few leaves and twigs had blown into it. Laila pulled off the piece of plastic and lowered herself carefully next to the hollow until she was able to flop down into a sitting position. She scraped away the leaves and twigs.

Traces of earth that had been dug up were still visible around the hole. Laila squeezed the piece of plastic in her hand, released it, squeezed again. She examined it and found nothing but white plastic. She felt around in the hollow with her hand. Nothing.

This was where the girl came from. This was where she had lain. In this bag, in this hole. No other tracks led to this place, none led away from it. This was where it began.

What do you dream of, Laila?

She sat there for a long time with her hand in the hole, moving it back and forth as if she were searching for the remains of a residual warmth. Then she slumped, lowering her head. Icy drops of rain dripped down the back of her neck as she caressed the wet earth and whispered:

‘Help me, Little One. Help me.’

Jerry also noticed the change in Theres’ behaviour when he came to visit every few weeks, but it wasn’t something that bothered him. Something about the way his sister kept searching gave him the impression she was looking for a way out, a way that did not lead through the door she had now started using as she examined the rest of the cellar. A loophole, so to speak. Such a thing didn’t exist, he knew that better than most. But he let her carry on. They had other fish to fry.