‘You mean the name?’ Jerry thought about it, and realised he had come up with it years ago, but had used it so often it had become completely natural. He didn’t see any harm in telling her the truth. ‘You got it from me.’
‘Who is Theres?’
‘Well, you are.’
‘Before.’
Jerry sensed they were approaching the tangled thicket that was Theres’ view of humanity, and he hadn’t the strength to hack his way through right now, so he said, ‘You just have to come up with a username, not your own name. Write Bim or Bom or something,’ whereupon he went back to his newspaper.
He heard the keys tapping away, and five minutes later Theres said, ‘What do I do?’
Jerry got up and looked at the screen. Under the username Bim she had actually written a poem:
where I am no one can be
inside the brain lies thinking
porridge is not good
talk misleads
the name does not mean me
the moon is my father
‘The moon is my father,’ said Jerry. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘He watches when I’m asleep,’ said Theres. ‘My father.’
The moon often shone in through her bedroom window at the time when she was going to bed. She might have got the bit about how fathers behave from something she’d read.
‘Of course,’ said Jerry. ‘Good poem. Send it.’
He showed her how to click send. Then she sat with her hands resting on her lap, staring at the screen, until Jerry asked her what she was waiting for.
‘Someone to say something,’ she said.
‘It might take a while, you know. Check again tomorrow.’
Theres got up and went out onto the balcony. Jerry watched her as she stood there touching her face, running her fingers over it as she gazed down at the street.
The following day there was a positive comment about the poem from somebody called Josefin. Jerry showed her how to reply to comments, and how to make comments of her own. When Theres had been clicking away and writing for a while, she asked, ‘Are they people?’
‘Who?’
‘The ones who are writing.’
‘What else would they be?’
‘I don’t know. Are they little people?’
‘Most of them are, I suppose. Young, anyway.’
When Jerry had been showing Theres how to use the poetry site, he had noticed that almost all the users were girls between fourteen and twenty, with only the odd boy or older person. Without any planning he seemed to have given Theres an opportunity to take a step closer to the world and people her own age.
She sat at the computer for several hours, so quiet and with such intense concentration that Jerry didn’t want to interrupt and tell her that he needed to work. When she had read through all the poems on the website, she said, ‘They’re sad.’
‘Who? The people who write the poems?’
‘Yes. They’re sad. They don’t know what to do. They cry. It’s a shame.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
Theres furrowed her brow in concentration. She looked at the computer, at her hands. Then she got up and went out onto the balcony for a while. When she came in, she asked, ‘Where are they?’
‘The girls? All over the place. One might be in the building opposite, another might be in Gothenburg. A long, long way away.’
Jerry had been sitting in the apartment all day, and twilight was beginning to fall outside. He had a sudden inspiration. ‘Shall we go out and look?’ he said. ‘See if we can spot any of them?’
Theres stiffened. Then she nodded.
During the days and weeks that followed, Theres ventured further and further from the apartment. At first she wanted to hide as soon as she caught sight of an adult, but gradually she accepted that the big people’s hunger was at rest on weekdays, and that they were not about to fall on her.
Children didn’t interest her, because she seemed to think they belonged to a different, non-threatening species. No, it was mostly people of her own age she was searching for. She wanted to see what they were doing, what they looked like, what they were saying. More than once Jerry had to extricate her from embarrassing situations where she was simply sitting and staring at someone, or was very obviously eavesdropping on a conversation.
She began to speak more like a normal teenager, and Jerry bought her clothes that looked like what her contemporaries were wearing. The only thing he couldn’t sort out was her hair. He tried taking her to the hairdresser, but as soon as the woman picked up the scissors Theres started screaming, and refused to stay in her chair. Nothing could convince her it wasn’t dangerous.
Apart from her hair, which Jerry trimmed with the kitchen scissors, you could have taken her for just about anybody if it hadn’t been for that constantly distant, evasive look in her eyes. So Jerry wasn’t fooled. He knew that in actual fact he hadn’t a clue what was going on inside her head. Not a clue.
A more ambitious or restless person than Jerry would probably have got fed up with the way they lived, but as the days slipped into one another and the sun rose and fell over the square in Svedmyra, Jerry discovered that he was quite content with his existence.
He went back to his childhood home to pick up a few things he wanted to keep, then got a firm in to clear the house. He put it in the hands of an estate agent; the history of the house meant they had to drop the asking price, which was already low, but when the bills were paid and the commission deducted, there was still a couple of hundred thousand left over for Jerry, enough for at least a year or two without any financial worries.
He played Civilisation and Lord of the Rings online, chatted with other players, checked out films with or without Theres, and went for walks. They spent a few evenings sitting together looking through his VHS tapes of videos from different artists: Bowie, U2, Sinead O’Connor.
Theres was particularly taken with Sinead; over and over again she begged Jerry to rewind the tape so that she could join in with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. After those evenings Jerry rummaged through some of the boxes that hadn’t been unpacked yet and found his old bits of paper with chord sequences scribbled on them, songs they used to sing when Theres was little.
As winter turned to spring Jerry started playing the guitar again and they worked their way through the songs, adding lyrics that Theres suggested here and there, writing new ones. For fun Jerry bought a microphone so that they could record the songs on Garageband and play about with them afterwards.
Jerry had no ambitions when it came to music, but it was a sin and a shame that a voice like Theres’ would never reach a wider audience. Despite the fact that they hardly had any lyrics, the songs Theres recorded on Garageband were better than most things Jerry heard on the radio.
He couldn’t shake off the feeling. That it was all such a fucking…waste.
You can plan for things, work towards them for years, and yet they never materialise. Or you just happen to be in the right place at the right moment, and everything falls into place. If you want to believe in something like Fate, she’s a capricious character. Sometimes she stands there blocking the doorway you were born to pass through, and sometimes she takes you by the hand and leads you through the minute you poke your nose out. And the stars gaze down and keep their counsel.
One day at the beginning of May when Jerry came out of the shop, there was a wallet lying on the low wall by the bike stand. He sat down beside it and glanced around, pretending to be catching his breath. None of the people enjoying the spring sunshine was looking in his direction. He slipped the wallet into his pocket.
