Little Star

documents until she found the poem she had written as a reply that time.

Everyone is actually called something else

Inside every person there is another person

Talk misleads and behind the words are other words

We can be seen only when it is dark

We can be heard only when there is silence

Was it only a year since she had written that? It felt like much longer. And yet she discovered that she liked it, and wasn’t ashamed of it. It wasn’t too bad for a thirteen-year-old.

She pulled on her yellow woolly hat and felt slightly more cheerful. In an attack of nostalgia she went and fetched the box containing all her plastic beads. Carefully she took out all the little jars, with a lump in her throat as she thought about that little girl who would sit for hours, sorting them according to different systems. For old times’ sake she started to thread a necklace. She used the very smallest beads, and discovered that her fingers were clumsier than they used to be. It was an incredibly fiddly task, but a sense of loyalty to her younger self drove her to continue until she had finished it.

You can go to hell she thought, without directing the comment at anyone in particular, and fastened the necklace around her neck with some difficulty. Then she checked her messages. There was indeed something from MyrraC, but also a message that had been sent ten minutes earlier from [email protected]. It sounded vaguely like some form of spam or virus and she was about to delete it, but double-clicked by mistake and the message opened.

hi i remember the poem thank you for saying nice things about when i sing i remember your poem too inside every person there is another person thats true my name was bim then you can write to me i like wolves too

Teresa read the words over and over again, trying to puzzle out what the message said. So the person who had written it was the person who had called herself ‘Bim’ on poetry.now, and who had written the poem Teresa had quoted on the spur of the moment when she gave out her address. She had used the alias ‘Josefin’ on poetry.now too, which was why she had been recognised.

So far so good. That kind of thing could happen when threads crossed in the mesh that was the internet. But why was the message so oddly written, and what did Bim or Sereht mean by ‘saying nice things about when i sing’? Teresa understood perfectly well what it implied, but it seemed too far-fetched. She wrote a reply ignoring the strange bits and asked whether Bim had carried on writing poems; she herself hadn’t.

Then she sat at the computer and waited, refreshing her Inbox every couple of minutes. Ten minutes later a reply arrived.

when im called bim i write some poems when im called tora i sing when im called theres i dont do anything but im also called wolf and i bite and little one who stays in her room because the big people want to eat her up whats your name

Teresa believed.

She believed that this Theres was the same person as Tora Larsson. If Theres had written, ‘Hi! My name’s really Tora Larsson. Glad you liked me on Idol’, Teresa would have been sceptical. But this fitted. The other-worldly creature she had followed on TV ought to talk like this, write like this. And she was writing to her. Teresa clutched at her chest with both hands. Her heart was pounding as if she had just finished a route march, and her cheeks flushed bright red. Her fingers were sweaty, slipping on the keys as she began to write a reply.

Calm down, Teresa. It’s not that amazing.

She deleted what she had written and stood up. The clock on her bedside table was showing quarter past twelve. When she went to the bathroom, the rest of the house was dark and silent. She took a long shower, then turned off the hot water and stood under the running, ice-cold water for a long time. Then she got dressed, put on the yellow woolly hat and sat down at the computer again. During her absence Theres had sent another message.

whats your name my name is theres most of the time you are small arent you and not big writing with a different name and fooling me because then you mustnt write you can only write if youre the same as you say you are if you are write now because im going to sleep soon

Teresa’s fingers were cool and dry now. They flew over the keys with ease as she wrote:

Hi Theres.

My real name is Teresa, almost the same as yours, and I’m 14 years old. You’re 16, aren’t you? I really meant what I wrote on the wolf forum. I thought you were way better than everyone else on Idol, and it feels really weird to be sitting here writing to you, I almost feel a little bit scared. I’m sure you have a much more exciting life than me, and I don’t really know what to write about. I’ve always liked wolves and I know quite a lot about them. I listen to Bright Eyes a lot, and I read poetry sometimes. What do you do when you’re not singing?

Teresa couldn’t bring herself to check the message to see if it was embarrassing or crap. She just sent it. After five minutes a reply arrived.

i am fourteen years old like you so we are almost the same with the same name but i dont know where to put full stops and things when you write you can teach me i dont do anything exciting and you mustnt be scared im the one who should be scared i hardly do anything but now im going to sleep and tomorrow we will write more

They were the same age and they had almost the same name. Theres and Teresa. It was perfect.

BOTH THE GIRLS

Max Hansen.

If that name means anything to you, then either you’re interested in old Danish films, or you’re in the music industry. The Hansens came from Denmark, and when their only son was born in 1959, they named him Max after the actor who appeared in the first film they saw together in the cinema, Beautiful Helena.

It would be quite interesting to investigate Max Hansen’s early years, to try and work out how such a person is formed, but that lies outside the scope of this narrative. It is enough to report that the family moved to Stockholm when Max was two years old, that he grew up as a Swede, and that he makes his entrance into this story forty- five years after that move.

In his twenties Max tried his hand at a musical career as the singer with the glam rock band Campbell Soup, but the only thing this led to was that he got to know the more successful band Ultrabunny and through a series of decisions and coincidences, ended up as their manager.

When Ultrabunny dissolved due to the songwriter’s crippling writer’s block, Max looked around for another band to help along the way. He had a winning attitude, a firm handshake, and a particular talent for making himself look much more important than he was. After a couple of years he had a small stable of fairly successful acts.

It was the middle of the 1980s, and Cafe Opera was the playground of choice for anyone who was someone or wanted to be someone in the music industry. Max wasn’t at the top of the tree, but he made sure he invited the right people, hung out in the right company and made useful contacts. If an up and coming songwriter needed something to shove up his nose, Max wasn’t slow to share, and when some well-known band made their noisy entrance, a bottle of chilled champagne would sometimes arrive at their table. Who’s it from? Max Hansen, over there. Come and sit yourself down buddy, what did you say your name was? Spread the name around, spread the name.

The girls they let in solely because of their looks swarmed the tables, pretending to be unimpressed. Max focused on the ones with the wrong brand of handbag and the slightly desperate look. Chatted for a while, made sure he said hi to a couple of faces they would recognise from TV; that was usually all it took. Home to his two- room apartment on Regeringsgatan and wham, bam, thank you ma’am, breakfast not included. His all-time record was thirty in one month, but to make that he’d had to trawl Riche on the nights when Cafe Opera was dead.

And so it went on. Max had a highly developed sense of hierarchy, which was both a blessing-because it told him what his position should be within a group-and a curse, because it informed him implacably that he had got