Little Star

side at the computer, and Jerry demonstrated how to get onto different sites and forums, how to set up an email account and so on. Perhaps it was because he had set a definite end date for their relationship that he felt more relaxed.

During the night Theres became ill. As Jerry lay there trying to get to sleep, he heard a long drawn-out whimpering from the living room. He hesitated before getting up and unlocking the bedroom door, as always alert to any changes in Theres that might suggest a shift in her mood.

He didn’t need to worry. Theres was hardly in a state to harm anyone. The room stank, and when Jerry switched on the light he saw Theres flat out on the sofa, her face greenish-white. She had thrown up all over the floor, and one hand was waving feebly.

‘What the fuck, sis…’

Jerry fetched cloths and a mop, cleaned the floor and gave Theres a bucket to throw up in. As he headed back to his room, Theres whimpered behind his back. He stopped, sighed, and sat down in the armchair. When he had been sitting there for a while, something struck him.

He picked up one of the jars of baby food, unscrewed the lid and sniffed at the contents. He wrinkled his nose. Not that baby food normally smelled good, but surely it shouldn’t smell like this, for fuck’s sake? Behind the smell of stale meat there was an undertone of…acetone. Something suffocating, fermented. He turned the jar around to look for the sell-by date, but it had been rubbed out until it was illegible.

Theres was writhing as her stomach contracted with cramp, emitting a damp croaking noise. Sweat poured down her face and a trickle of dark green bile seeped out between her lips and stuck to her chin. Her head drooped helplessly over the edge of the sofa.

Jerry ran into the kitchen and fetched a towel and a bowl of water. He wiped Theres’ face, dabbing her forehead with the cool water. Her skin was hot and her eyes shone like marbles. She was shivering, and a new kind of fear nudged its way into Jerry’s body.

‘Listen, sis, you can’t be this sick. You just can’t, you hear me?’

He couldn’t take her to hospital. She had no patient number or ID card or anything, and he might as well go straight to the police station and turn himself in. Of course he could just dump her there, but then again someone might see him, and in any case he couldn’t put her on the back of his motorbike in this fucking state and how was he supposed to…

Theres’ transparent gaze fixed on his and she whispered, ‘Jerry…’ before her body contracted in a series of fresh cramps, twisting the damp sheets around her thin legs. Jerry stroked her head and said, ‘It’ll be OK, sis, it’ll be OK. You’ve just got a bit of a bad stomach, nothing serious.’ Presumably he was trying to convince himself.

He fetched her a drink of water. Five minutes later she brought it back up. He changed her bedclothes, which were soaked through and stinking. Two hours later they were just as wet. He got her to swallow an Ibuprofen tablet, which came straight back up. He chewed his nails until his fingertips hurt, and didn’t know what to do.

Towards six o’clock the dawn began to breathe on the windows and found an exhausted Jerry slumped in the armchair next to Theres, staring blankly at her skinny body as it lay on the sofa curled up into a question mark. Her breathing was jerky and shallow and her voice was so weak Jerry could barely hear her when she said, ‘Little One bad. Made them dead. Mum and Dad. Little One soon dead now. That’s good.’

Jerry sat up and rubbed his eyes with the damp hand towel he had changed several times during the night. He leaned closer to Theres. ‘Don’t talk like that. You didn’t kill them because you’re bad. I don’t know why you did it, but it’s nothing to do with being bad, I do know that. Why do you say you’re bad?’

‘You’re sad. Because Mum and Dad got dead. Little One bad.’

Jerry cleared his throat and adopted a firmer tone of voice: ‘Right. Stop calling yourself Little One, stop saying you’re bad, and stop calling them Mum and Dad. Pack it in.’

Theres was once more gazing into emptiness. When she said, ‘Little One soon be dead’, Jerry’s anger flared up. He placed his hand over her head and squeezed her temples between his thumb and middle finger.

‘Stop it!’ he said. ‘It’s I will soon be dead. I! And you’re not going to die. You can fucking forget that. I’m looking after you. If you die I’ll kill you.’

Theres frowned and did something he had never seen before. She smiled. ‘You can’t do that. When you’re dead you’re dead.’

Jerry rolled his eyes. ‘It was a joke, stupid.’

The subtle lightening of the atmosphere in the room came to a sudden stop: ‘Mum and Dad got dead. Then. Little One got them.’

Despite the fact that Theres was obviously no threat, Jerry backed away from her slightly. ‘What the hell are you talking about, and stop saying Little One, what do you mean you got them?’

‘I got them. They’re mine now.’

‘They are not yours! They’re not even your parents, will you stop talking like that!’

Theres closed her eyes and her mouth and rolled over so that she was lying with her back to Jerry. Her narrow chest rose and fell jerkily as she breathed. Jerry leaned back in the armchair and sat there listening to her breathing; he tried to get to sleep, but without success. He asked the question straight out: ‘Why did you do it?’ But there was no answer.

Perhaps it was the lack of sleep combined with being shut in the apartment, but during the course of the morning Jerry got more and more irritated. He had known for a long, long time that there was something seriously wrong with Theres, and that she could hardly be held responsible for her actions. However, he still couldn’t cope with her lack of emotion when it came to what she had done. I got them.

That’s probably something you might come out with if you’ve bagged a couple of ducks with a shotgun. Not when you’ve killed two people-who just happened to be Jerry’s parents, regardless of what he thought of them. I got them.

Theres seemed to have improved after her dreadful night. She was still pale and couldn’t even keep a sip of water down, but she sat up on the sofa with a couple of pillows behind her, flicking through an illustrated Winnie- the-Pooh book Jerry had had when he was little. In his confused state Jerry thought she looked shamelessly smug as she sat there. I got them.

Jerry stood by the unit housing all his videos with his arms folded, looking at her as she studied the nice, brightly coloured pictures without the slightest concern for all the grief she had caused. Without considering what he was doing he selected Cannibal Holocaust and said cheerfully, ‘Shall we watch a film?’

Without looking up from the book, Theres asked, ‘What’s a film?’

You’ll see, thought Jerry, inserting the tape in the video player. If he did have a thought in his head it was something to do with getting Theres to realise that killing wasn’t just tra-la-la and I got them, but a seriously unpleasant business.

The film began, and people were chopped up and slaughtered with screams and tears, internal organs were removed and bodily fluids spurted. Jerry noticed that what had happened to his parents had made him more sensitive, and he no longer took any pleasure in the images. From time to time he glanced at Theres, who was sitting on the sofa watching the bloodbath, her face completely expressionless.

When the film was over he asked her, ‘What did you think? Lots of people died, didn’t they? Pretty gruesome.’

Theres shook her head. ‘They weren’t really dead.’

Jerry had always thought Cannibal Holocaust was one of the better splatter films. It felt and looked real. Since Theres was totally unfamiliar with the phenomenon of film, he had thought she would see it as a pure documentary, which fitted in with his somewhat unclear aim.

‘What do you mean?’ he said, stretching the truth. ‘Of course they were really dead. You could see that, couldn’t you? I mean, they got hacked to pieces.’

‘Yes,’ said Theres. ‘But they weren’t dead.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘No smoke.’

Jerry had prepared a number of responses to possible objections in order to get her to understand at last, but this was so unexpected that all he could say was, ‘What?’

‘There was no smoke. When they smashed the heads.’

‘What are you talking about? There’s never any smoke.’