other girl got up too. She was holding her head high now, relieved. Jerry shook himself as if to wake himself from a dream he didn’t really want to leave.
On the way home Theres said in her normal voice, ‘You mustn’t lie. You’re not to lie.’
‘What?’ said Jerry. ‘I haven’t lied. Everything turned out just the way I said.’
Theres shook her head. ‘You said the little girl wouldn’t be harmed. She was harmed. The big person harmed her. What you said was wrong.’
During the late summer they would still sit jamming with the guitar sometimes, writing outlines of songs, but something had changed between them. After the incident in the shop Jerry had the feeling that he had unequivocally been moved into the category ‘big people’, and could therefore no longer be trusted. That it was only statistics that made Theres accept his presence: he hadn’t tried to kill her yet, and therefore was probably unlikely to do so in the future.
He thanked his lucky stars that she couldn’t remember how their acquaintance had started. He really had been trying to hurt her then. Perhaps she did remember somehow, and it was lying there beneath the surface, smouldering away as a lingering suspicion of evil intentions. But he had been a different person then. Or had he? Do we ever really become a different person?
Perhaps not. But people change. When Jerry looked back at his youth, he could hardly grasp what kind of person had broken into summer cottages and run wild. He seemed like the bad guy in some obscure old film.
It was when he sat on the cellar steps in his childhood home looking at the remains of his parents smeared all over the floor that he had taken the step. No. It was just after that. When he had decided to protect and care for the person who had murdered them. He could have made a very different choice. But at that critical moment he took a step in an unexpected direction and set off along a new road. Since then he had continued on that road, and it was taking him further and further away from his former self. It was just visible, far far away, and soon it would have to start sending postcards if it wanted to communicate with him.
Two months before Max Hansen sat down to write his message to Theres, she got a letter from TV4 congratulating her on a successful audition, and inviting her to present herself at Studio 2 in Hammarbyhamnen for sound check and make-up five hours before the program was to be recorded. There was also a new contract which involved signing over all her rights to everything.
Jerry couldn’t work out what idiotic impulse had made him set this particular ball rolling. The papers and the contract made it clear that he had no control whatsoever, that TV4’s machinery had both him and Theres firmly in its grasp. They were no longer the ones rolling the ball; the ball was rolling along with them inside it.
He might have been able to hide the papers and forget the whole thing if it hadn’t been for the fact that Theres was expecting them to arrive. Some girl at the auditions who had got through last year but fallen at the last hurdle had explained the whole thing to her. Theres knew exactly what was going on, and knew the date even before the papers arrived. There was nothing he could do.
Besides which, he felt the same as he had when it came to the auditions. However nervous Jerry was about the whole thing, a part of him was curious to see how things might go. The ball again. Something has been set in motion, and must be allowed to complete that movement.
They practised ‘Life on Mars’ and when the day of the recording arrived Jerry gave Theres precise instructions. The incident in the shop haunted him, and he was pushed to the very limit of his patience as he explained to Theres over and over again that whatever happened, she was not allowed to harm the big people.
‘What if they want to make me dead?’
‘They won’t do that. I promise.’
‘But if they do?’
‘They won’t. They won’t do you any harm at all.’
‘But they’ll want to. They always want to.’
And so on and so on. The time when they would need to leave was drawing closer and closer, and Jerry still wasn’t sure he had got anywhere. He turned to the last inducement he could come up with: ‘OK. Bugger all that. But listen to me. I’ll be furious if you do anything. Furious and upset.’
‘Why?’
‘Because…because it’ll cause all kinds of problems.’
Theres was quiet for a little while. Then she said, ‘You want to protect the big people.’
‘Think that if you want. But actually, I just want to protect you. And myself.’
Jerry had to use all his powers of persuasion to get his own pass at TV4, but after all it wasn’t exactly unknown for
He went and sat right by the edge of the stage as Theres tested microphones and sang to the backing tape that had been prepared for her. As usual her voice gave him goosebumps, and all activity in the studio seemed to stop completely during the three minutes the song lasted.
Then Theres was given instructions on how to behave with regard to the cameras, and Jerry started chewing his nails when he saw her body stiffen as a choreographer gently took her by the shoulders to move her into the right position. Jerry was on the point of leaping out of his seat to explain the choreographer’s instructions, but the young man-who in Jerry’s opinion was almost certainly gay-was so soft and flexible in the way he moved that Theres never seemed to perceive him as a real threat.
Jerry couldn’t hear what was said, but he could see that Theres was listening to the instructions, looking at the cameras and into the cameras. When she sang the song again, she moved her body and her eyes in a way that suggested she had embraced the choreography, at least to a certain extent.
It was time for lunch, and when Theres quietly accepted that she couldn’t sit among the rest of the contestants eating baby food, Jerry began to relax slightly. She was adapting to the situation in spite of everything, and perhaps it was all going to work out.
After lunch a woman came along, cast a critical eye over what Theres was wearing, then disappeared and came back with a shimmering silver number which she ordered Theres to put on in the changing room. This too went well. The woman had picked up on the title of the song and found something that was a cross between a spacesuit and a ball gown. It didn’t particularly suit Theres. She wasn’t bothered in the slightest.
One hour before the recording they were told to go along to make-up. After being directed up various flights of stairs and along corridors, they came to a large room with eight empty hairdresser’s chairs. A young woman with seriously teased blonde hair was sitting reading a magazine, while a big black woman of about Jerry’s age was sweeping underneath the chairs.
The blonde woman stood up as they came in, welcomed Theres without looking at her and held out her hand. When Theres made no move to take it, Jerry shook it instead. Her hand was cold and slender, and she had lots of bracelets around her wrists. She was wearing a very low-cut top that emphasised a pair of unnaturally globular breasts; Jerry assumed he ought to find her attractive, but he didn’t.
Theres sat down in the chair and when Jerry went and stood next to her, the woman pointed to an ordinary chair at the far end of the room and said, ‘It would be fantastic if you could go and sit over there.’ When Jerry hesitated, she said, ‘Or outside would be brilliant too.’
Jerry lumbered over to the chair and perched on the edge. He had a bad feeling, and he wanted to be ready. The woman slipped a black hairdresser’s cape around Theres’ shoulders as she sat staring at her own reflection. Silence. The only sound was the whisper of the broom across the floor.
Jerry glanced towards the sound. The woman who was cleaning had a broad, dark brown face and coal-black curly hair caught up in a bun at the back of her neck. She must have weighed ninety kilos, and everything about her was big and round and soft; you might have thought she had been put there purely as an effective contrast to the make-up girl’s blonde rigidity.
The cleaner seemed to become aware that he was looking at her; she turned towards him and fired off a smile that was impossible to resist. Jerry felt like an idiot as the corners of his mouth curled upwards without any help from him, and he had to stare at the floor. Then he caught sight of himself in a mirror, and the smile died
