Tora listened to the negative comments with the same indifference and self-possession as she had shown when positive comments were made. No gratitude, no distress. She just waited until they had finished, then left the stage. She was replaced by a pastel-coloured bouncy ball singing ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’.
Teresa sat through the rest of the songs with a fateful note quivering through her bones. When the lines opened for voting she got up without a word and went into her parents’ bedroom. She had just reached for the phone to start calling when Maria came in and sat down on the bed.
‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘Are you upset about something?’
Through gritted teeth Teresa said, ‘No, Mum. I’m not upset. I just want to be on my own.’
Maria settled down more comfortably, and Teresa just wanted to scream. Maria tilted her head on one side. ‘Tell me. What is it? I can see there’s something wrong. Why were you crying earlier on?’
Teresa could no longer contain herself. Her voice was trembling with anger, the telephone was glowing just in the corner of her field of vision, and she spat out, ‘Why do you have to start caring right
‘Now that’s not fair. You know perfectly well I always…’
Teresa had had enough. She got up, ran to her room, got out her mobile and started ringing. She only had enough credit for three calls.
Ten minutes later she went back downstairs to sit with the others, and the very thing she feared had happened. Tora Larsson was voted out. The very best artist she had ever seen hadn’t received enough votes to stay in the competition.
She didn’t know how many people rang in, and it was probably totally irrational, but at that moment she was convinced that her missing votes had made the difference. The twenty or so calls she could have made would have saved Tora. She would still have been in the competition if only Maria had left her alone.
Teresa had the weekend to calm down. She didn’t look at any of the discussion forums on the Friday; she didn’t want to see the gloating comments. On Saturday she started to come to her senses again. It was over. She had got far too involved, but now it was finished.
She had no intention of watching
They were as different as two people of the same age from the same country can be, and yet there was something about Tora that made Teresa feel as if she
It is impossible to say why we love something or someone. We can come up with reasons if we have to, but the important part happens in the dark, beyond our control. We just know when it is there. And when it goes away.
Perhaps it would be accurate to say that Teresa was grieving, as we might grieve for a friend who has moved abroad or even further away, to the other side. She would never see Tora Larsson again, never experience that intoxicating recognition of a twin soul. Never meet those eyes again.
Despite the fact that Teresa was often alone, she rarely felt lonely. But this weekend she did. An empty space had appeared and it followed her like a white shadow wherever she went. She wandered aimlessly around the garden listening to Bright Eyes, sat for a while curled up in the cave that had been her and Johannes’ secret place.
She listened to the words of the song: a lover you don’t have to love. She stood for some time looking at the house where Johannes used to live. Swings had been put up in the garden, there were plastic toys in lots of different colours strewn around. A couple of trees had been chopped down. Bright Eyes sang in her ear in his cracked voice, and she felt as if everything was slipping away from her. As if she was fourteen years old, and it was already too late.
Seized by a sudden impulse she went indoors and started searching through her wardrobe. She would start wearing colourful clothes! She always wore black, white, grey. Now she was hunting for trousers, T-shirts, blouses or cardigans in different colours. From now on she was going to look like a rainbow!
She gave up when the only things she could find that satisfied her sudden whim were either too short because she’d outgrown them, or too tight for her disgusting fat legs and round belly. In the end she grabbed a yellow woolly hat, crammed it on her head and lay down on the bed on her stomach to read Kristian Lundberg’s latest collection,
I dreamt about her She was standing beside my
bed, pale grey like ash, whispering in my
ear-‘Do not be afraid, do not be afraid!’
The constant hovering emptiness made her restless, unable to concentrate. She pressed the palms of her hands to her ears and mumbled, ‘Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go and eat some worms…’ over and over again until she was sweaty and felt revolting in her woolly hat. Then she went down to the kitchen and made herself some sandwiches.
And so the weekend passed.
Nothing special happened in school, nothing special happened anywhere. Johannes and Agnes had got themselves matching necklaces, blue stones that meant happiness to some native American tribe or something. They asked if Teresa wanted to go with them to a gig where some local bands were playing the following weekend, but Teresa said no. She couldn’t help liking them, but she couldn’t cope with their company for any length of time. They were just too cheerful.
One afternoon as Teresa was getting on her bike to cycle home, she heard Jenny say to Caroline that it looks disgusting when fat people ride bikes; the saddle disappears up their arse like some weird variation on anal sex. Teresa wept for a while as she pedalled home, then spent the rest of the journey fantasising about someone raping Jenny with a red-hot iron spike.
That evening she sat at her computer and considered doing a little bit of trolling on Lunarstorm, but it had somehow lost its charm since she had felt genuine hatred and gone into battle on Tora’s behalf. Instead she joined the discussion forum on wolves. A few sightings in Varmland, someone whose chickens had been eaten (but that could just as easily have been a pine marten), someone drawing comparisons with wild boar, claiming they were a much greater threat. The thread thinned out and trailed off into a recipe for how to cook wild boar.
A new thread on how the very existence of a wolf somewhere in the vicinity paradoxically brings a feeling of security in these times when so much of our environment is being destroyed. This wild, beautiful and admittedly dangerous creature is still out there. Teresa rested her chin on her hand and scrolled down. She suddenly stiffened.
She had glimpsed the name ‘Tora Larsson’ in one post. She read it more carefully. ‘MyrraC’ was making a comparison between the wolf and Tora Larsson from
Teresa thought the comparison was a bit lame, but still. The contribution had been posted just a couple of minutes earlier, and judging by MyrraC’s profile she seemed to be about fifteen or sixteen. Teresa wrote a reply and said that she felt the same, the whole thing was just so tragic.
Myrra was online, and a reply came through just a minute or so later. After they had exchanged a couple of messages Myrra asked if she could have Josefin’s email address so they didn’t have to use the wolf forum to talk about this.
After some hesitation Teresa gave her address, with the comment: ‘The name does not mean me.’ Only when she had clicked on send did she remember where she had got the line from. She looked through her old
