John Lindqvist - Little Star

Jerry pretended he didn’t understand; he wondered aloud what the visitor’s problem with the billiard hall was, and explained that he wasn’t actually the owner. If he wanted it shut down, he would have to speak to Mats. The guy didn’t even crack a smile; he just said that Jerry had been warned, and if he carried on, things could get very nasty.

Jerry’s hands were shaking slightly when the man left, but he wasn’t really scared. He’d heard about a gang who had got together in the offenders’ institution in Norrtälje; they called themselves Bröderna Djup after the singing group, which was an incredibly stupid name for a criminal organisation, and was one reason why Jerry didn’t take the threat seriously. Besides which, there was nothing to suggest that this guy really did belong to some kind of gang. He was probably a free agent like Jerry himself, but with a slightly harder attitude.

Jerry was a bit more careful about checking the spy hole in the door before he opened it, but he kept on selling his cigarettes. No slap-head pumped up on steroids was going to come between him and his Cinema Display, his heart’s desire.

He had only fifty cartons left of the latest delivery when his life was once again kicked in a new direction. One evening at the beginning of March, the doorbell rang. Jerry got up from the infinitely slow download of a web manual on creating homepages and went to look through the spy hole.

Outside stood a friend of a friend whose name he didn’t know, but who had bought from him a couple of times before. He opened the door. As soon as he saw the expression on the man’s face close up, he realised something was wrong. From behind his back the man produced a long metal shoehorn and despite the fact that Jerry didn’t understand what the danger actually was, he moved to shut the door. Too late. The shoehorn had been shoved into the opening and it was impossible to close the door.

Then he heard running footsteps on the stairs, and seconds later they were in. The man with the shoehorn whispered, ‘Sorry, no choice,’ and took off.

There were three of them: the guy who had been in the billiard hall and two more who at first glance were barely distinguishable from him. Same shaved heads, same jackets.

They took the sacks of cigarettes. They forced Jerry to show them where he kept his money, and took that as well. Then they took Jerry. Calmly and politely they led him down the stairs to a waiting car. Jerry was numb with fear, and it didn’t even occur to him to scream. Half-slumped in their arms he noticed they had a Volvo 740. A real hick’s car. However, the reason for it soon became apparent. The car was equipped with a tow bar.

They drove Jerry down to the gravelled car park next to the Lommar swimming pool. Beneath the sign that announced Sweden’s second-longest water slide, they threw him on the ground and handcuffed his feet together. Then they ran a chain from the handcuffs to the tow bar. When they put on ‘We Live in the Country’ by Bröderna Djup at full volume, Jerry shat himself.

The guy from the billiard hall wrinkled his nose as he became aware of the smell. He pointed at Jerry’s soiled backside and said, ‘I take it that means you get it now.’ He waved his hand in a circular movement over the dark, deserted car park. ‘I warned you, fat boy. We’re going for a little drive. There’s going to be blood and shit all over the gravel, but look on the bright side. You’re bound to lose a few kilos.’

From inside the car, Bröderna Djup were squealing and grunting as they imitated all the animals they were going to buy when they had sold their possessions. Jerry wept and whispered, ‘Please, please, no. You can have anything you want.’

The guy smirked. ‘Like what? You’ve got fuck all. We’ve just taken everything.’

Jerry was about to vomit with fear, and tried to form his lips around the words that would promise them all his savings, all his…everything. Before he had the chance, the guy taped his mouth shut and said, ‘We don’t want to wake the neighbours, now do we?’ Then he got in the car and revved the engine, dousing Jerry in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

He was dragged across the gravel and his shirt ripped, baring his back to the sharp stones. He plunged into a vortex of imagining the skin, the muscles being ripped from his body until his naked skeleton was screaming against the ground. He wanted to lose consciousness, he wanted to die quickly, he wanted…

He didn’t even notice when the car stopped, ten metres from where it had started. All three of them climbed out, stood around him and pissed on him. Then they unhooked him from the tow bar. He heard a voice in his ear, ‘Next time it’ll be the full treatment, OK?’

Doors slammed shut and gravel sprayed over his face as the car shot away. He lay there staring up at the night sky and the bright winter stars. His back was burning, and he was breathing heavily and unevenly through his nose.

It took ten minutes before he managed to get up and rip the tape from his mouth. His feet were still fastened together, and he stank of piss and shit. Shuffling and hopping, he made his way towards the lights and the apartment blocks, barely noticing when he fell and cut his cheek open on a sharp stone. Something inside him had broken beyond repair.

When Jerry hadn’t been in touch for a month, Laila began to get worried. Although there had been periods before when they went for months without hearing from him, they usually spoke every couple of weeks or so. But Jerry didn’t ring, and when Laila rang him there was no reply.

She might have investigated the matter more closely, she might even have broken the taboo and gone to visit Jerry-if she hadn’t had a new project that took up so much of her time and her attention.

She had started teaching the girl to read.

She still couldn’t imagine what the future might look like. The girl was around eight years old now, she would probably be nine soon, and what was going to happen when she got older? When she reached puberty, when she became a teenager, when she became…an adult? Would she and Lennart be sitting here as pensioners with a grown woman in the cellar, a woman who had never set foot outside the door?

It didn’t bear thinking about, so Laila took one day at a time. She had created a compensatory fantasy in which the girl was a refugee threatened with deportation, and that was why they were keeping her hidden. She had read about such cases in the local newspaper, and the fantasy fitted in well with the unpleasant story Lennart had served up to the girl. A hostile world was out to get her, and if she showed herself she would be sent away, perhaps even killed. Like Anne Frank. It made Laila feel much better.

Since the girl was disinclined to speak, it was no easy matter to teach her the alphabet, to get her to repeat and imitate the sounds that corresponded with the letters. To begin with it was downright impossible. For example, Laila wrote ‘A’ on a piece of paper and said the letter out loud. The girl wouldn’t look at the paper, didn’t make a sound.

Laila tried with other letters, other ways of writing them or illustrating them. She drew pictures of objects the girl would recognise, wrote their names in big letters, said them out loud. The girl showed no interest whatsoever; she simply sat there playing with her drill, or arranging nails in dead straight lines without even acknowledging Laila’s existence.

When Laila eventually came up with the solution, she could have kicked herself for her stupidity. It was just so obvious. She sang the letters. The girl imitated her. Laila held the piece of paper with the letter on it in front of her face so that the girl wouldn’t look away, and sang ‘Aaa’ as if the letter itself was singing. When she swiftly lowered the paper she could see that the girl had looked, before her eyes slid away. She carried on with the rest of the vowels in the same way.