Little Star

Lennart got a lump in his throat. When the chorus came around he just couldn’t help joining in too:

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing…

They were singing about the thing that united them. They swayed together on the sofa, and the girl swayed along with them. When the song came to an end amid the sound of crackling, both Lennart and Laila had tears in their eyes, and their heads almost collided as they both leaned down at the same time to kiss the girl on the top of her head.

It was a lovely evening.

The girl had started leaving her room. It was remarkable that it had taken so long, but now the day had come when she wanted to expand her world.

Her development was slow in every other area too, except music. Her toilet training had taken a long time, she was awkward and clumsy when she moved and she had the eating habits of a small child. She still refused to eat anything except jars of baby food, and Lennart had to travel to shopping centres a long way from home to stock up on Semper and Findus without arousing suspicion. She had a tendency to become attached to inanimate objects rather than living things, and her use of language was developing very slowly. She seemed to understand everything that was said to her, but spoke only in sentences of three or four words in which she referred to herself as ‘Little One’.

‘Little One more food.’ ‘Little One have it.’ ‘Away.’ The exception was lyrics. Given the girl’s limited vocabulary, it was astonishing to hear her sitting there singing, in perfectly pronounced English, a song she had heard. ‘Singing’ is perhaps the wrong word. She reproduced the song. The day after the wedding anniversary, for example, she wandered around the cellar singing with Agnetha Faltskog’s particular diction, and she knew almost all the words.

After that evening Lennart relaxed his restrictions, and Laila was allowed to share her taste in music with the girl. Schubert and Beethoven were joined on the CD player by Stikkan Anderson and Peter Himmelstrand.

But the problem Lennart had refused to face was now a fact. They couldn’t let the girl show herself outside the house. One possibility was to lock her in, but that wasn’t really an option. So what were they going to do?

‘Lennart,’ said Laila a couple of days later when they were out in the garden hanging up yet another bird box, ‘we have to accept that it’s over now.’

Lennart was right at the top of the ladder, and dropped the bird box he was hanging up. He clung to the tree and leaned his forehead against the trunk. Then he came down, sat on the third rung and looked Laila in the eye.

‘Can you imagine it?’ he said. ‘Handing her over and never seeing her again?’

Laila thought about it, tried to imagine it. The absence. The cellar empty, the jars of baby food gone, the girl’s voice never to be heard again. No. She didn’t want that.

‘Don’t you think we’d be allowed to adopt her, then? I mean, regardless of how it all started, we’re the ones she’s used to now. They’d have to take that into account, surely.’

‘For a start, I’m not sure they’d be so understanding, and secondly…’ He took Laila’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I mean we know, don’t we? There’s something wrong with her. Seriously wrong. They’d put her in an institution. A place where they wouldn’t even appreciate what we value about her. They’d just see her as…damaged.’

‘But what are we going to do, Lennart? Sooner or later she’s going to walk out of the front door, and then we’ll have even less chance of keeping her. What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know, Laila. I don’t know.’

It was what Laila had said about the front door that gave Lennart the idea. The problem could be expressed very simply: the girl could not be allowed to go out the front door. Their house was quite sheltered and there was very little risk that anyone would see her through the window. The only person who came to visit was Jerry.

However, if she went out through the door, she could carry on up the drive. Out onto the road. Into the forest, into town. To other people who would set in motion the machinery that would take her away from them.

Lennart came up with the solution. He didn’t know if it would work, but it was the only thing he could think of. Without mentioning it to Laila, he made up a story. When it was ready, he told the girl his story.

It went like this: the world was a place populated by big people. People like Lennart, Laila and Jerry. Once upon a time there had been little people as well. People like the girl. Like Little One. But the big people had killed all the little people.

When Lennart saw that the girl didn’t understand the word ‘kill’, he changed it to ‘eaten up’. Like food. The big people had eaten up all the little people.

At that point in the story the girl did something extremely unusual. She asked a question. With her gaze firmly fixed on the wall, she asked him, ‘Why?’

Lennart hadn’t exactly polished his story, and had to come up with an answer very quickly. He said it depended on what was in your head. Almost all people had hatred and hunger in their heads. Then there were people like Lennart, Laila and Jerry who had love in their heads.

The girl tasted the word she had sung so many times, but never actually spoken, ‘Love’.

‘Yes,’ said Lennart. ‘And when you have love in your head, you want to love and take care of the little people, you don’t want to eat them up.’ He carried on telling her about all the big people he had seen sneaking around the garden, hunting for a little person to eat. Things were so bad that if the girl went outside, she probably wouldn’t even manage to get through one song before a big person grabbed her and ate her up.

The girl looked anxiously over towards the window, and Lennart stroked her back reassuringly.

‘There’s no danger as long as you stay indoors. Do you understand? You have to stay in the house. You mustn’t stand looking out of the window, and you must never, ever go out through the big door. Do you understand, Little One?’

The girl had crawled up into the very corner of the bed and was still looking over at the window with an anxious expression. Lennart began to wonder if he had succeeded too well with his story. He took her bare feet in his hands and caressed them with his thumb.

‘We’ll protect you, Little One. There’s no need to be afraid. Nothing is going to happen to you.’

When he left the girl’s room a little while later, Lennart forgave himself for his horrible story. Partly because it was necessary, and partly because there was a grain of truth in it. He was convinced that the world out there would eat her up, if not quite as brutally as he had suggested.

However much Lennart might have forgiven himself, his story had a powerful effect on the girl. She no longer dared to leave her room, and insisted on the window being covered so that the big people wouldn’t catch sight of her. One day when Laila came into the room, the girl was sitting with a Mora knife she had fetched from the tool cupboard and was making threatening gestures towards the blanket hanging over the window.

Laila didn’t understand what had happened, but from odd words the girl said she began to piece things together, and eventually she pinned Lennart down: What had he actually said?

Lennart told her about his story, but left out the worst bits. In the end Laila agreed not to correct the girl’s view of the world. She didn’t like what Lennart had done, but since she was unable to come up with a better idea, the girl could go on living with her misconceptions.

Lennart also had his doubts about whether it had been a wise move. The incident with the Mora knife was only the beginning. When Lennart locked it away, she fetched a chisel, a screwdriver, a saw. She placed the tools around her on the bed like an arsenal of weapons at the ready for when the Big People arrived. When Lennart tried to take them away, she let out a single, heart-rending scream.

He had to be a little more cunning. He swapped the most dangerous tools one at a time for less dangerous items. The saw for a hammer, the chisel for a file. They were hardly suitable toys, but the girl never hurt herself. She just wanted the tools as a kind of magic circle, a spell surrounding her as she sat on the bed.

If she moved to the floor, she took the tools with her and arranged them neatly around her. They had become her new friends; she sang to them, whispered to them and patted them. She was never calmer than when she was lying curled up inside her circle with a Mozart adagio on the CD player. Sometimes she would fall asleep like that. After one slip-up, Lennart learned that he must always move the tools with her when he put her to bed, otherwise she woke up screaming.

Time passed, and the girl’s fear moderated to anxiety which in turn moderated to watchfulness. The quantity of tools was reduced. One day when Lennart had left the drill out, he came into the girl’s room to find her sitting with it on her knee, talking quietly to it. From time to time she would press the button and the drill would buzz in