Little Star

net: that Tora Larsson was useless and didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance. This view was put forward by the loud, popular girls whose opinions always got airtime, along with the small number of boys who cared enough. From a purely statistical point of view there must have been some people who thought differently, but in the real world they didn’t even have the courage to squeak. They either agreed or stayed out of the discussions.

A girl called Celia from 9a stood up in the dining room and did a horrible imitation of Tora. With a blank expression and her mouth half-open she burbled, ‘A thousand and one nights, does anyone know where I left my tights’ to general sniggering. Teresa flushed with anger, but said nothing. She couldn’t work out what it was about Tora Larsson that had touched her heart, but it was something, and she acted on it. She felt like a faithful warrior as she squeezed superglue into the keyhole of Celia’s locker during the lunch break.

Teresa’s nails got shorter and shorter as she chewed them through the different stages of the final audition. The judges were unimpressed by Tora Larsson’s stage presence, and it sounded as if they were always on the point of sending her home. But her voice triumphed in the end. Maybe they were only playing to the gallery, but the judges seemed almost reluctant to give her a place in the final twenty whose fate would be decided by the viewers. It was as if they wished they could ignore her voice. But it was more than perfect, it was magical, and it couldn’t be dismissed.

Teresa could relax, temporarily at least. Now it was up to her and all the others who understood to make sure Tora Larsson stayed in the competition so that they could see more of her.

The following week was ‘agony week’ on Idol. Twenty competitors would be reduced to eleven. Agony was the word, said Bull. Tora Larsson was to sing in the first semi-final, and as the evening approached Teresa was so anxious she didn’t know what to do with herself.

She knew it was ridiculous to invest so much emotion in a fucking Idol contestant, but she couldn’t help it. She had watched Tora’s performance several times on the net, and the effect it had that first time was still there.

As the family settled down noisily in front of the TV as usual, Teresa was sitting inside a bubble. She didn’t want to hear the others’ small talk, and above all she didn’t want to hear their opinions. If they said anything negative about Tora, Teresa might well explode. When Tora walked onto the stage, Teresa dug her nails into the palms of her hands and sat there, taut as a piano string.

A few months had passed since the filming of the auditions, but Tora hadn’t changed much. Some stylist on the program had presumably had a go at her hair and clothes, but the general impression of a person from another, less broken world remained intact.

Appropriately enough, Tora sang ‘Life on Mars’, and it was doubtful if Teresa so much as blinked during her performance. One thing had changed, actually. Tora completely ignored the audience in the studio, but she did look into the camera from time to time. Every time Teresa met that gaze, a shock went through her.

A small affair, the lyrics said; but it wasn’t a small affair to Teresa. She thought it was the best performance she had ever seen on Idol. When it was over she said she wasn’t feeling very well, and left the family in the living room. She felt absolutely fantastic, but for one thing she didn’t want to hear what the others had to say; for another, she obviously needed to hit the phone.

Since she didn’t want to run out of credit on her mobile, she went and sat in her parents’ bedroom and rang the number for Tora over and over again until her index and middle fingers were sore. Then she went back to the TV in time for the announcement of the results. Tora had got through. Of course.

She spent the evening defending Tora on various internet forums. There were a few more supporters, but there was still a huge preponderance of people who thought Tora was more or less useless. Presumably those who did like Tora liked her so much they had helped her get through by ringing over and over again.

***

Teresa saw things differently these days. Ever since she had started reading about wolves, she had fantasised about herself in wolf form. The teeth, the agility, the danger. Lone wolf. She was the lone wolf, slinking around the residential areas and terrifying the anxious little people who immediately rang the local paper.

But at school she had begun to observe and recognise the other aspect of man as wolf: the pack mentality. The social game, the pecking order. She was so intensely absorbed by Tora that her opinion became a litmus paper showing the composition and content of those around her.

She saw. Saw how it was permissible for an alpha female like Celia to establish what the group should think. When she yelped you had no choice but to flatten your ears and laugh, whimper, act submissively. Otherwise the snap of the teeth might come. A derogatory comment about your new trousers? Everyone immediately realised they were the ugliest trousers they’d ever seen.

The boys stood around pushing each other, physically or verbally. Who got to deal out the insults, and to whom; and who was that person in turn permitted to joke with before the pack showed its displeasure by turning away?

Among wolves, the rank order was more or less established at the cub stage, but since classes in school had been rearranged over the years, this was more like the second life-stage of the wolf, when hierarchies were established: the onset of sexual maturity.

Teresa saw clearly for the first time how this conflict was played out in the corridors, in the playground, in the dining room. Day after day. And it frightened her. The lone wolf may be a romantic idea, but in practice it’s an animal that is destined to die.

The clusters at break time, the dress codes, the taste in music and the in-jokes that bound the packs together. Teresa would have been perfectly happy to have been left off the text message lists, not to be included in the gossip, not to be invited to parties if only she had been left in peace.

But that was no longer the case. True, she had never actually rolled over and showed them her throat, so she was never actually bullied, but she was poked and prodded. An amusing comment in the showers about her fat thighs, some boy who pulled a face as she walked past. An anonymous text: ‘Shave your armpits before somebody throws up’.

Nothing more than that, but it was quite enough.

She was competing in an endless series of Idol that she could never win. The best she could do was lose with dignity.

It was time for the first weekly final in the TV competition. Eleven contestants would be reduced to ten, and the theme was Eighties. Teresa hadn’t read the TV papers and had no idea what she was going to see. When the program started, she discovered that Tora would be appearing in fifth spot.

She regarded the four who came before Tora as filler. Arvid and Olof sat there headbanging ironically when one of the boys did ‘Poison’, doing a particularly bad hard-man act. A chubby girl sang ‘The Greatest Love of All’ so hard she almost burst a blood vessel; Maria thought it was ‘lovely’.

Then came Tora. Teresa crawled into a tunnel, with only the television visible at the other end. Everything else was extinguished-literally as well. Only a single spotlight fell on the stage where Tora Larsson stood, wearing a black dress that merged with the background so that almost the only thing you could see was her face. She looked straight into the camera and sang.

Teresa stopped breathing.

‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. The words told the familiar desolate story. The camera angle changed, but Tora continued to gaze into the close-up camera, and soon the angle shifted back again. Tora’s face filled the screen. She was looking straight at Teresa, who only remembered to breathe when her chest started hurting.

The song continued, and it wasn’t a question of liking or not liking it. Teresa was bewitched; transported. She was no longer in her living room, surrounded by her family. She was with Tora, she was inside her eyes, inside her head. They gazed into one another and dissolved, melted into one.

Towards the end of the song a few tears trickled down from Tora’s eyes, and it was only when the last note had faded away that Teresa realised her cheeks were also wet.

‘Sweetheart, what is it?’ asked a voice from a long way off. Teresa returned to the living room and saw her mother’s face close to her own. She dashed away the tears and waved crossly. She wanted to hear what the judges had to say.

They weren’t particularly impressed. While there was no denying that Tora had an incredible voice, this wasn’t