His parents hadn’t said a word about the gig, but Jerry had seen the posters. He had been thinking of going to the motor show to meet up with some old friends but when he saw that Lennart and Laila would be playing, he changed his mind. There was something else he would much rather do.
The gig was due to start at two o’clock. At half past one Jerry jumped on his motorbike and rode over to the house. He reckoned that his parents would need a good half hour for the sound check and at least that to pack up and drive home, so he had a couple of hours on his own in the house. He calculated that they wouldn’t have taken the kid with them.
The front door was no problem; he could have opened it with a credit card in his sleep, but he’d taken a screwdriver with him just to be on the safe side. It took him ten seconds to push back the old-fashioned catch and step into the hallway. Without taking off his boots he clattered down the cellar steps, shouting, ‘Toot, toot!’
He gave a start when he walked into his old room. The child was standing upright in the cot with her hands resting on the frame, staring straight at him. There was something horrible about the way that kid looked at you, as if it could see straight through everything. But it was still just a kid in a red babygro with its nappy bulging out at the back. Not exactly something to be scared of.
Jerry had understood completely what this kid meant to his father. Forty times more than he himself had ever meant. It was quite upsetting. He didn’t get it. What was so special about this little bastard that just stood there staring?
When Jerry seized the child under the arms and lifted it out of the cot, it just hung there limply; it didn’t even kick its legs. Jerry poked it tentatively in the stomach and said, ‘Toot, toot.’ Not a smile, not even the hint of a frown. Jerry poked harder, really pushed this time. Nothing. It was as if he didn’t exist, as if nothing he did or said could make an impression.
He laid the child down on the spare bed and pinched its arm, pinched hard. The soft baby skin was squeezed together and he could feel his fingers touching through the fabric and the skin. When nothing happened he moved on to the thighs, both thighs. Hard pinches that would have had any seven-year-old screaming the place down. The kid simply carried on staring straight through him without making a sound. Jerry had had enough. He was going to get some kind of fucking reaction.
He gave the child a resounding smack across the face.
OK, maybe the little bastard was deaf and dumb and fuck knows what else, but it must surely have the capacity to feel
He picked up the child, holding her at arm’s length, and took a step away from the bed. ‘If I drop you on the floor, you should bloody well feel that, shouldn’t you? Don’t you think?’ He brought the child closer and said it again, so that it would understand. ‘Do you hear me? I’m going to drop you on the floor.’
He never found out if he would have done it or not. As he uttered the last word, the child’s hand shot out with reptilian speed and grabbed hold of his lower lip. Its fingers burrowed in, the little nails scraping against his gums. Then it pulled.
It hurt so much that tears sprang to Jerry’s eyes. Whatever his intention may have been, the pain made him drop the child. It clung to his lip for less than a second, just long enough to tear it away from the gum slightly, blood seeping into his mouth.
The child fell onto the cement floor and landed on its bottom, where it lay looking up at Jerry as he pressed his hands to his mouth, whimpering. On the bedside table there was a sippy cup in the shape of an elephant, its ears forming the handles. Jerry took off the lid and spat. Blood and saliva mingled with the milk. He sat there spitting for a while until the worst had passed. Then he tore off a piece of a paper towel, rolled it up and pushed it under his lip like an upside-down plug of tobacco.
The kid was still lying on its back, looking at him. Jerry crouched down beside it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem. So now we know.’
He picked up the girl, taking care to keep his face out of reach of her hands, and carefully placed her back in the cot. She was utterly calm; the only thing that had changed was that she now had a small amount of blood on the tips of the fingers on her left hand.
Jerry perched on the edge of the spare bed, his elbows resting on his knees. He looked carefully at her. Despite the fact that his lip was hurting, he couldn’t hold back a big smile. He was positively beaming. Suddenly he grabbed hold of the bars and rattled the cot, shaking her to and fro.
‘Fuck, sis!’ he said. ‘Sis! Bloody hell!’
The child didn’t respond, but there was no denying it: he had a sister, sort of. He liked the little bastard. She was completely crazy. Nobody was going to mess with her. She was invincible, his sister.
Jerry was in the mood for a celebration, so he clattered back up the stairs and found a bottle of whisky and a glass, then went back down to the cellar, perched on the edge of the bed, half-filled his glass and clinked it against the bars of the cot.
‘Cheers, sis!’
He took a big gulp and pulled a face as the alcohol penetrated through the paper towel and touched the wound. He spat the plug out onto the floor and rinsed his mouth clean with more whisky. Then he rested his chin on his hand and looked thoughtfully at the girl.
‘Do you know what your name is?’ he said. ‘Theres, that’s what. Like that Baader-Meinhof chick. Theres.’ It was crystal clear, he could hear it as he uttered the name. ‘Theres. That’s it.’
He topped up his glass. The child pulled herself up into a sitting position, then to her feet. She was standing as she had been when he came into the room.
‘What is it?’ Jerry asked. ‘Do you want to taste?’
He picked up a cloth and dipped it in the glass, then held out the damp corner to Theres, who didn’t open her mouth. He pushed the edge of the cloth against her lips. ‘This is what they used to do in the old days, you know. Open wide.’
Theres opened her mouth, and Jerry pushed the corner of the flannel in. The girl sucked at it, then lay down. She carried on sucking away at the cloth, never taking her eyes off Jerry.
‘Cheers,’ he said, emptying the glass.
After ten minutes and another glass, Jerry started to get restless. He looked around the room for something to do. A sudden inspiration made him look under the bed, and lo and behold!
He got down on his knees and pulled out the guitar case. It was covered in a layer of dust, and the lock had begun to rust after several damp winters, but there it was. He opened the case and took out the guitar, weighing it in his hands.
When he thought back to his days as a guitarist, he remembered the guitar as a great big thing on his lap; his fingers had trouble stretching to the right frets. Now it was a toy in his hands, and he had no problem whatsoever getting his hand around the neck.
He tried an E minor, and it sounded bloody awful. He struck an experimental chord and started turning the tuner on the E-string-to begin with. There was something odd about the acoustics in the room. When he plucked the string it sounded like a double note. He let the note fade away, and put his ear to the soundboard. The resonance sounded purer. He plucked the string again, leaning his head towards the body. He didn’t have Lennart’s ear; he could only hear notes in relation to one another, but surely the resonance sounded purer than the note itself?
He straightened up so that he could reach the tuners, and saw that Theres had pulled herself up in the cot. He plucked the E-string again. This time he could hear where the purer note was coming from.
