Little Star

it, just to make sure it was still there. After unfolding it and folding it up again so many times, he thought the numbers were starting to look blurred, so he wrote them down on a piece of paper which he put in his wallet. Then he wrote them on another piece of paper which he put in his pocket.

He had never-never!-had anything like this happen to him; someone had…what was it called? Made advances to him. Never. He would invite her out to dinner. Where would he take her? No idea. He never ate in restaurants. He would have to…

That’s where Jerry’s head was at.

There were no further incidents with Theres during the course of the day, which was just as well because Jerry wasn’t really there. Twenty kilos of his body mass, perhaps. The rest was floating somewhere out in space.

Theres got through that week and went out the following week with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. It was Jerry who won Idol. A couple of days after she had given him her number, he called Paris. He had checked the restaurant pages in the newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and suggested Dragon House, a buffet restaurant near Hornstull. All you can eat and so on.

They met up, they both ate enormous amounts of Thai and Chinese food, drank plenty of beer. Jerry found out that Paris was forty-two years old and had come to Sweden five years earlier when the father of her son, who was now nine, had got a job here. They had gone their separate ways three years ago, after the man started seeing a Swedish woman he was working with.

Paris had done all kinds of jobs both in the USA and in Sweden, and among other things had worked as a make-up artist on a local TV station in Miami. Hence her knowledge. She regarded herself as a survivor, and was absolutely categorical when it came to judging people and events. This was bad, that was good, he was an idiot, he was a sweetheart.

Jerry seemed to have the good fortune to fall into the sweetheart category, since he got a long hug before they parted. When he asked if he could ring her again, Paris said that she expected nothing else, honey.

The day Max Hansen’s letter plopped through the letterbox, Jerry was standing on the balcony smoking as he devoted himself to detailed dreams involving going to bed with Paris. They had seen each other several times, he had been allowed to kiss her, and her lips had been a foretaste. He imagined it would be like falling into a feather bed. Allowing himself to be enveloped by her huge breasts, her round arms, burrowing down in her skin. Disappearing.

His fantasies had become so delicious that he felt caught out when Theres came out onto the balcony. His hands moved instinctively to hide his groin, even though there was nothing to hide but his thoughts.

Theres tilted her head to one side.

‘Why are you embarrassed?’

‘I’m not, I’m just having a smoke.’

Theres held out a piece of paper. ‘Somebody says I’m good. Somebody wants to talk to me. You have to read it and tell me if it’s all right.’

Jerry took Max Hansen’s letter into the living room, sat down in the armchair and read it twice. He couldn’t decide if it was empty words or a genuine opportunity. He might have been a little bit impressed by the mention of Stormfront, but at the end of the day it wasn’t about that.

Jerry put down the letter and looked at Theres, who was sitting on the sofa with her hands folded on her lap like a patient saint.

‘It’s an agent,’ he said. ‘Somebody who wants to work with you.’

‘What do you mean, work?’

‘Sing. Fix things so that you can do that as a job. Sing. Make a CD, perhaps.’

Theres looked over at the CD rack on the wall. ‘Am I going to sing on a CD?’

‘Yes, maybe. Would you like that?’

‘Yes.’

Jerry picked up the letter again, turning it this way and that as if he could suss out its weight and import through his feelings. This Max Hansen seemed to be genuinely interested in Theres, and the fact was their money wouldn’t last forever.

After all, this was what he had fantasised about long ago. The chance of squeezing a bit of ready cash out of the force of nature that was Theres. Now the chance had come along, he wasn’t so sure. A lot of polluted water had passed under the bridge since then. He folded up the letter, put it in the top drawer of the desk and said, ‘We’ll see.’

Somewhere inside he knew he would open that drawer again, that a new ball had appeared at the top of the slope, and that it would probably start to roll, with or without his co-operation.

Max Hansen, he thought. Take a chance?

***

At the beginning of November, Teresa was sitting on her bed with an empty sports bag next to her. She knew she ought to put something in the bag, but she didn’t know what. Her train was leaving in an hour, and she had gone up to her room to pack. She glared at the empty bag.

Two days earlier Theres had emailed and asked if she could come over to Stockholm for a visit at the weekend. After a certain amount of difficulty Teresa had managed to book a train ticket on the internet, and had then presented her parents with a fait accompli. She was going to Stockholm on Saturday, could someone give her a lift to the station?

She was going to visit a friend. A girl. In Stockholm. Yes, she was absolutely sure it wasn’t some dirty old man. They had met on the net and now they wanted to meet IRL. In real life. Yes, she would come home the same night and yes, she had checked on Google maps and knew exactly where she was going and how to get there. Svedmyra.

She didn’t want to tell them it was the same girl they had all seen on Idol. Perhaps because they would think she was lying, perhaps they wouldn’t believe her. Perhaps because she would be revealing something she wanted to keep secret.

Her parents knew how lonely she was, and presumably that was why they agreed. She gave them Theres’ address and telephone number and promised to ring when she got there.

So far so good.

It was when she got round to trying to pack a bag that the whole thing ground to a halt. She had never travelled alone on the train before. You were supposed to have a bag when you were travelling, weren’t you? But what was she supposed to put in it? What did she need?

Who am I?

That was another way of putting it. What did she want to take with her to Theres, what did she want to show, who did she want to be? She sat on her bed, staring at the empty bag, and she thought it was mocking her. The bag was her. Empty. Nothing. She had nothing to bring.

She went into the bathroom, did her best with some make-up and thought the result looked OK. She had learned to apply blusher so that her face looked less chubby from certain angles. She fluffed up her hair with a little mousse to create some air around her forehead. Kohl, eye shadow.

When she had finished Goran shouted from downstairs that they would have to go if they were going to catch the train. Without thinking, Teresa chucked in her map, her mobile and her MP3 player, her notebook and her black velour tracksuit. The tracksuit went in mostly because she needed something to fill up the bag.

On the way to the station, Goran asked more questions about the girl she was going to see, and Teresa told him the truth: that they had met on a forum about wolves, that they were the same age, and that she lived in Svedmyra. She lied or stretched the truth when it came to everything else.

Goran waited until the train came in, then gave Teresa a hug which she couldn’t bring herself to return. When she was settled and the train was starting to pull out, Goran waved. She waved back without enthusiasm, and saw him turn away and head back to the car.

It only took a couple of minutes for the journey to sink its claws into her. She was travelling. She was sitting alone on a train going somewhere she had never been before. Between two points she was a passenger, a person who was on their way. A person who was free. She caught