John Lindqvist - Little Star

Laila shook her head, but in such an unconvincing way that she might as well have said yes. Jerry nodded and scratched his stubble. Lennart stood there holding out his open wallet. The glowing points on either side of his head made contact and sent a thread of pain burning through his skull.

With a sudden jolt Jerry half-rose from the chair, heading towards Lennart, who instinctively recoiled. Jerry completed the movement at a more measured pace, and before Lennart had time to react the wallet was in Jerry’s hands.

Jerry hummed to himself as he opened the notes compartment, seizing three hundred kronor between his thumb and forefinger with a vestige of his childhood dexterity before tossing the wallet back to Lennart. He said, ‘That’ll cost you, you know.’ He went over to Laila and stroked her hair. ‘This is my darling mother, after all. You can’t just do whatever you like.’

His hand stopped on Laila’s shoulder. As if he were expressing real tenderness, he grabbed Laila’s hand and squeezed it. She took what she could get. Lennart watched, utterly revolted. How had these two monsters ended up as his family? Two fat self-pitying blobs who stuck to him like glue, dragging him down; how did that happen?

Jerry withdrew his hand and took a step towards Lennart, whose body automatically jerked backwards. Even if most of Jerry’s hundred-kilo bulk came from kebabs rather than weights, he was still considerably stronger than Lennart, and he knew how to handle himself. No doubt about that.

‘Jerry.’

Laila’s voice was weak, pleading. The mother standing beside her disobedient son, saying don’t do that to the frogs, darling and not lifting a finger. But Jerry stopped and said, ‘Yes, Mother?’

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘So?’ Jerry turned to Laila and her eyes sought Lennart’s. He shook his head briefly and angrily, leaving Laila trapped between a rock and a hard place. In her confusion she fell back on her usual escape route. Her body went limp and she stared down at the table, mumbling, ‘I’m in so much pain, everything hurts.’

It was unlikely to have been Laila’s intention, but the effect was exactly what Lennart had been hoping for: Jerry sighed and shook his head. He couldn’t cope with hearing his mother going on and on about her stiff joints, the rheumatic twinges in her neck and the entire medical lexicon of side-effects from drugs she wasn’t even taking. He lumbered out of the kitchen and Lennart’s heart almost stopped when Jerry’s shirt brushed over the giraffe’s head on the worktop; Lennart had forgotten to hide it.

The giraffe rocked back and forth as Jerry went into the hallway and pulled on his biker boots. Lennart moved forward slightly so that his body was hiding the toy. Jerry looked up with a sarcastic smile.

‘Coming to say goodbye? It’s been a while.’

‘Bye then, Jerry.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I will be back, you know.’

Jerry slammed the door behind him. Lennart waited ten seconds, then hurried over and locked it. He heard Jerry’s motorbike start up, then fade into the distance. He massaged his temples, rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he went back into the kitchen.

Laila was sitting exactly as he had left her, slumped at the table, picking at her blouse like a little girl. A stray sunbeam found its way in through the window and touched her hair; it shone for a brief moment with a golden glow. Against all expectation Lennart was gripped by a sudden tenderness. He saw her loneliness. Their loneliness.

Quietly he sat opposite her and took her hand across the table. A few seconds passed. The house was still after the natural disaster that was Jerry. But there had been another time. Another life. Lennart allowed himself to rest in his memories for a moment, thinking about how everything could have been different.

Laila straightened up a fraction. ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Nothing. Just that we…maybe there’s a chance.’

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know. Something.’

Laila withdrew her hand and started rubbing at a button on her blouse. ‘Lennart. Whatever you say, we cannot keep that child. I’m going to ring social services, and we’ll see what they have to say. What we need to do.’

Lennart put his head in his hands. Without raising his voice he said, ‘Laila. If you so much as touch that telephone, I will kill you.’

Laila’s lips twitched. ‘You’ve said that before.’

‘I meant it then. And I mean it now. If you’d…carried on with what you were doing, I would have done the same thing as I will do now if you make a call or speak to anyone. I will go down into the cellar and I will fetch the axe. Then I will come up here and hit you on the head with it until you are dead. I don’t care what happens after that. It doesn’t matter.’

The words flowed from his mouth like pearls. He was perfectly calm, utterly lucid, and he meant every word he said. It was a wonderful feeling, and his headache disappeared as if someone had pressed a button. The gauntlet had been thrown down, everything that needed saying had been said and there was nothing to add.

Life could begin again. Possibly.

Lennart and Laila.

It wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven.

Perhaps some of you might remember ‘Summer Rain’ from 1969. It managed to get to number five in the Swedish chart, and it’s probably on one of those compilation albums you can pick up in the supermarket for next to nothing.

When they first got together in 1965, and also started to work together musically, they simply called themselves Lennart & Laila, until they changed their name in 1972. They had a couple more songs that just nudged the bottom of the charts, enough to get them quite a few gigs, but they never really took off.

Then they got a new manager. He was twenty years younger than his predecessor, and the first piece of advice he gave them was to change their name. The old one sounded like a hokey downmarket version of Ike and Tina Turner, and the business of listing names had gone as far as it could go with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. No; now it was all about something short and clever.

And so from 1972 onwards, Lennart and Laila went by the name of The Others. Lennart liked the feeling of coming from the outside, coming up from below, that was inherent in the name. Laila hated it and thought it was stupid. They didn’t play the kind of music it suggested: they were more like The Lindberg Sisters than The Who, and they had no plans to smash up their acoustic guitars on stage.

But The Others it was, and it suited Lennart perfectly, because he wanted a fresh start. He had written a few songs that broke out of the old straitjacket with harmonies that put them somewhere between the Swedish chart stuff and ‘Top of the Pops’. Something new-and what could signal a new direction more clearly than a new name? He shrugged off Lennart & Laila like an old raincoat and settled down to write their debut album.

By the spring of 1973, the album had been recorded and pressed. When Lennart held the first copy in his hands, he felt prouder than ever before. It was the first record he had made where he was happy with every one of the tracks.

The first single was ‘Tell Me’, a subtle hybrid of the classic Swedish dance band sound-saxophone, three chords-mixed with Beatles-style sections in a minor key, and a bridge that was almost like a folk song. It was a sure-fire Swedish chart hit, but so much more at the same time. Something for everyone.

At the beginning of May it was played on the radio for the first time, along with three other songs tipped to make the Swedish chart the following week: Thorleifs, Streaplers, Tropicos. And The Others. Lennart shed a few tears. It wasn’t until he heard the song on the radio that he realised how good it really was.