John Lindqvist - Little Star

She tried drawing the letters with crayons, she tried letting the girl scratch them with the nails she had grown so fond of lately, but nothing worked. The nineteen steps leading down to the cellar seemed more and more depressing as the winter drew in, and her leg started to ache even more. She was not getting through; and Lennart didn’t have any helpful suggestions.

The girl’s new interest was hammering nails into pieces of wood. She would keep at it until there was no more space, and the piece of wood split from the amount of nails crammed into it. As Christmas approached Lennart taught her to crack nuts with the hammer: that too became an obsession.

And that was literally how the problem was cracked as well. One afternoon Laila was watching the girl as she sat on the floor, filled with grim concentration, smashing nuts on a chopping board. The arm moving up and down, the carefully judged blow, the monotonous motion. Tock, tock, tock.

An idea came into her head, and after all there was nothing to lose. In the store cupboard Laila found Lennart’s old portable Halda typewriter. She carried it in and placed it on the floor next to the chopping board. The girl looked at it for a while from different angles, then raised the hammer to deliver a blow, but Laila managed to snatch the machine away just in time.

Although it would turn out to be a good idea, it took almost a year before Laila’s efforts really came to fruition. Every key was a new obstacle to surmount, but by the time the girl was ten years old she had learned every sound that corresponded with a symbol that corresponded with a key, and she began to put together simple words.

Jerry’s visits tended to cause backsliding. The girl withdrew and didn’t want to do the exercises, but Laila was patient and didn’t mention it to Lennart. If the girl could bring Jerry a bit of happiness, it was worth the delay.

Besides which, Laila didn’t really know why she was doing this. What pleasure would the girl gain from being able to read and write? Would she ever participate in a society that required these skills?

Sometimes Laila grew tired of the tough, tedious, drawn-out project. Then she would put on a record, Bibi Johns or Mona Wessman, and sing for a while with the girl. It felt like a kind of togetherness, and gave her new strength to carry on.

Jerry didn’t like leaving his apartment, and conducted most of his contact with the outside world via the internet. His pension didn’t cover much more than food, rent and his internet connection. In the autumn of 2001 he came across something called Partypoker. Jerry was a moderately good player and began betting quite carefully, winning as much as he lost.

Six months later the number of players had increased significantly thanks to a couple of spots on cable TV and some articles in the press. New players started up who weren’t particularly good, and he found he could bring home a small profit. Not huge sums, but welcome additions to his meagre allocation from the state.

One evening he got into a game with a guy who called himself Bizznizz, and who played like an idiot. Jerry thought it had to be a ploy to drive up the stakes. However, he carried on. After a couple of hours it seemed to him to be perfectly obvious when the guy was bluffing and when he was seriously betting on his hand. By that stage Jerry had won just over a hundred dollars.

In the next hand Jerry held three tens, refusing to drop out as the stakes were pushed up, and in the end only he and Bizznizz were left in, with the pot at nine hundred dollars. Jerry thought the guy might be bluffing on a putative full house, but at the same time he realised with a sinking feeling that this could well be the hand Bizznizz had been laying the groundwork for. And yet Jerry still couldn’t drop out.

He raised with his last three hundred; despair clutched his heart with its cold fingers as Bizznizz declined to fold, and went for the showdown. It was three weeks until pension day, and Jerry would have nothing left to live on.

He didn’t understand what he was seeing when the other guy’s cards came up. There was a moment of disconnect as his eyes flicked between the open cards and Bizznizz’s cards. It looked as if the idiot only had a pair of threes!

Only when the money came rattling into his account did he realise it wasn’t a misunderstanding. The idiot had sat there bluffing with a low pair, and then been stupid enough to go for the showdown ! Jerry had won something in the region of five thousand kronor from Mr Bizznizz.

He didn’t play any more that night. The game had given him an important insight. There were any number of total idiots out there playing on the net. Idiots with money. All he had to do was find them, and make sure he ended up at the same table.

Jerry began by methodically scanning every website, blog and discussion forum that had anything to do with poker. He gathered information. After a couple of weeks he had a fairly clear picture of the kind of people who played on the net, at least in Sweden. It was true that most used different aliases and usernames when they played and when they were in a discussion, but some were so attached to their names that they couldn’t help using them even when money was involved.

Jerry’s stroke of genius was to start secretly reading forums for people who were likely to have a knack for earning money quickly and easily. Stockbrokers and the IT crowd. He even looked at some of the forums on Dagens Industri, the Swedish equivalent of the Financial Times. A discussion page for property owners in Danderyd proved useless; he combed through page after page on renovations and cheap tradesmen without finding what he was looking for, but a page for owners of Abyssinians-a fashionable and expensive breed of cat-turned out to be pure gold.

He was actually looking for any mention of internet poker. Someone who had recently come into money, for example, had entered the forum to ask for advice on their newly acquired Abyssinian. The cat was so lively, shredding the Svenskt Tenn designer curtains-what could he do? The cat owner might get into conversation with another owner, and poker would be mentioned in passing.

That was the key: in passing. These nouveau riche types thought it was fun to mention in passing how much they had spent on a bottle of wine or a suit, or the fact that they had just thrown away thirty thousand in a game of online poker the other night in spite of the fact that they were such bad players, ha ha, but not to worry, they were sitting on a hundred and twenty thousand IBM B-portfolio options, say no more.

That kind of comment. Made in passing.

It was a time-consuming and tedious task. Often Jerry would find a perfect candidate, but then never see that person on the poker site. Either he was no longer playing, or he was using a different handle.

But he compiled a list, and as time went by one of these rich or slightly less rich idiots would turn up at the table. Then it was time to join the game.

There was no ideology behind it. No Robin Hood fantasies on Jerry’s part. On the contrary. Since the opportunities to skin rich people were so rare, he also gathered information on ordinary players, gambling addicts and poor people. The main thing was that they played badly.

To tell the truth, it gave him even more satisfaction to fleece someone he knew to have problems. He found Wheelsonfire on a forum for caravan owners, complaining that he couldn’t afford a new fridge for his caravan-did anyone know where he could find a second-hand one? The fact that he was a bad poker player was mentioned in a different context.

When Wheelsonfire popped up on Partypoker and Jerry managed to take four thousand off him, he felt a deep, sincere and malicious pleasure. No new fridge for you, wanker. You can sit there roasting on your campsite while your food rots.