John Lindqvist - Little Star

‘Well, you can hear the phone down there, can’t you?’

‘I was feeding her.’

Lennart fell silent. That was obviously the correct answer. His voice was gentler as he asked, ‘So did she take it?’

‘She certainly did. A whole bottle.’

‘And did she fall asleep then?’

‘Yes. Straight away.’

Laila sat down on a chair and closed her eyes. This is a perfectly normal conversation. A man and a woman are talking about a child. It happens all the time. Her body felt so strangely light, as if in the short walk around the garden she had shed twenty kilos.

‘So everything’s all right then?’ asked Lennart.

‘Yes. Everything’s fine.’

Laila could hear a door opening in the background at Lennart’s end. The tone of his voice altered as he said, ‘OK, good. I’ll be a few hours, things are a bit tricky here.’

‘No problem,’ said Laila. A little smile curled around her lips. ‘No problem at all.’

Lennart was very busy that autumn. He had to go into Stockholm at least once a week, and at home he spent a great deal of time at his keyboard. Lizzie Kanger, a singer who had had a minor breakthrough with the Eurovision Song Contest, was about to release a follow-up to her debut album, which had been panned. The record company had asked Lennart to ‘tidy up’ the songs that had already been written.

Lennart wrote new songs, retaining just enough phrases from the old crap for the contracted songwriter to accept the devastation of his original creation.

He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for. At the very first meeting with the record company they had played him a song he had been unable to avoid hearing on the radio all summer:

Summer in the city, nineteen ninety,

Do you remember me?

Some middle manager had switched off the DAT player and said, ‘We were thinking of something along those lines.’

Lennart smiled and nodded, while his mind’s eye conjured a desert with skeletons reaching out, screaming for help.

It would have been a terrible autumn if he hadn’t had the time he spent with the girl to look forward to. Sitting there with her on his knee, her crystal clear voice responding to his practice scales, he felt he was in touch with something bigger. Not just bigger than his wretched keyboard fripperies, but bigger than life itself.

The music. She was the music. The real music.

Lennart had always believed that everyone was born with a musical talent. It was simply there. But what happened was that they were force-fed crap from an early age, and they got hooked. In the end they believed that the crap was all there was, that that was how it was supposed to sound. If they heard anything that wasn’t crap, they thought it sounded weird, and switched to another radio station.

The girl was living proof that he was right. Of course, babies were not normally able to express the unspoilt music that existed inside them, but she could. He didn’t want to believe that it was only by chance she had ended up with him. There had to be a purpose.

Another source of relief was that Laila seemed happier than she had been for some considerable time. Occasionally he even heard her humming to herself as she moved around the house. Mostly old pop songs, of course, but he actually like hearing her voice as he sat at his keyboard sweating over yet another three-chord tune he was trying to smarten up by inserting a surprising minor chord, even though it did feel like putting an evening jacket on a pig.

However, every rose has a thorn.

One evening when Lennart had been in the boiler room stoking up the fire for the last time and was on his way to the girl’s room to get her ready for the night, he heard a sound. He stopped by the half-open door to the girl’s room and listened. Very, very faintly he could hear the girl’s voice as she lay in her cot…humming. When Lennart had been standing there for a while he began to pick out a melody he recognised, but was unable to place. Odd words that fitted the melody flickered through his mind.

Glances…something…eyes

Lennart refused to believe his ears. But it was impossible to deny it. The girl was lying there humming ‘Strangers in the Night’. Lennart opened the door and walked in. The humming stopped abruptly.

He picked up the girl and looked into her unfathomable eyes, which never seemed to be looking into his, but at a point far beyond him. He realised what was going on. It wasn’t actually ‘Strangers in the Night’ he had heard, but ‘Tusen och en natt’, Lasse Lönndahl’s saccharine Swedish version of the same song. One of Laila’s favourites.

This is how it happens.

The fact that it was totally unreasonable for a baby to be able to remember and reproduce a tune was something that didn’t even cross Lennart’s mind. The girl had already crossed so many boundaries when it came to music that he had grown used to it, but…

This is how it happens.

Crap has an astonishing ability to find its mark. It doesn’t matter how carefully you try to enclose and protect. The crap seeps in through the gaps, through the cracks you have forgotten to fill. And then it takes over.

Lennart put the girl down on the straw mat, where she began clumsily hitting out at the colourful blocks Laila had put there. Lennart cleared his throat and began to sing quietly, ‘O Värmland, thou art beautiful…’ The girl took no notice of him; she simply carried on hitting the blocks until they were all out of reach.

It was a mild winter, and Laila was able to continue her outdoor excursions with the child well into December. At the beginning of January there was a cold snap with snow, and it was the snow rather than the cold that prevented her from going out when Lennart was away. She didn’t want to leave any tracks.

Lennart had strictly forbidden her from having any contact whatsoever with the child, beyond what was absolutely necessary. She was not allowed to talk, or sing, or make any noise at all. The child was to live in a bubble of silence, apart from the singing practice which Lennart conducted with her. Laila had understood the aim of his project and thought it was completely insane, but since she was able to offer the child small oases of normality, she left him to it.

One afternoon she was sitting watching as the child played, or whatever it was she did. The girl had learned to grip things, and would sit there for ages with the same coloured block, picking it up and dropping it, picking it up and dropping it.

Laila tried to give her one of the soft toys she had brought out of storage. A little fox came bobbing along, ‘Here comes Freddy Fox, sniff sniff sniff…but what’s this he can smell?’

The girl was completely uninterested, and took no notice whatsoever of Freddy, even when he nudged her thigh with his nose. Instead she grabbed hold of her block once again, lifted it up to eye level and looked at it, dropped it, and watched carefully as it fell and rolled away. When it ended up out of reach, she simply waited until Laila handed it back to her. Then she carried on picking it up and dropping it.

The next day when Lennart had shut himself in the studio, Laila called the childcare centre in Norrtälje.

‘Erm, I have a question about…my child. She’s almost six months old and I was just wondering about her behaviour.’

‘How old is she exactly?’

Laila coughed and said, ‘Five months. And three weeks. And I was wondering…she doesn’t really react when…if you try to play with her, that sort of thing. She won’t look, she just…she’s got a block that she picks up and drops. And that’s virtually all she does. Is that normal?’