Little Star

sight of her reflection in the window, and didn’t recognise herself.

Who’s that sitting there? Who can it be?

She took out her notebook and a pen, then sat there sucking the pen and occasionally glancing at herself in the glass. She would have loved to be the exciting stranger, sitting on the train and writing, but nothing came to her. Not a word. Her imagination had always been feeble, and now it had fainted dead away.

She wrote, ‘I am sitting on a train…’ but that was it. She wrote it again. And again. When she had been sitting there for ten minutes and filled two pages with the same six words, she looked at herself. The stranger.

Enough!

She shoved the notebook back in her bag and went to the toilet. She leaned against the washbasin for a long time, examining herself in the mirror. Then she wet her face, squirted liquid soap in her hands and washed herself thoroughly, scrubbing off every scrap of make-up. Then she wet her hair to flatten it down at the front, and dried herself with paper towels until her hair lay flat and shapeless.

She got undressed, pulled the black sweatshirt and the black velour tracksuit bottoms out of her bag and put them on. When she looked at the result in the mirror she was able to confirm that she looked bloody awful.

This is me.

When she sat down again the face looking back at her from the other side of the glass was familiar. That ugly cow had been right there with her all through her life, and now she was coming with her to Stockholm. Teresa opened her notebook and wrote:

Those who have wings fly

Those who have teeth bite

You have wings you have teeth

Make sure something happens

Use your hands, grip!

Use your teeth, bite!

Use your wings, fly!

Fly, fly, fly high one day

Fly high for fuck’s sake

The streams of people at T-Centralen, the central subway station, terrified her. As she was going down the stairs from the platform she literally felt as if the waters were closing over her head. That she had a river in front of her, and she was at risk of drowning. Because she didn’t even know which direction she was supposed to go in, she stepped into the river and allowed herself to be swept along until she reached the barriers leading to the tracks.

She handed over some money at a window and said, ‘Svedmyra.’ She was given three coupons and she asked where she should go, then she joined a new stream. She clung to her bag, feeling anxious all the time. There were too many people and she was too alone and too small.

Things were a bit better once she had boarded the train, checked that it was going to Svedmyra and found an empty seat. She could settle down, she had her place. But there were still too many people. Mostly adults with expressionless faces, surrounding her on all sides. At any moment an arm might reach out or someone might start talking to her, wanting something from her.

People kept trooping on and off, and by the time they reached Svedmyra the carriage was almost empty. Teresa stepped onto the platform and unfolded her map. She had made a cross by Theres’ address, just like a treasure map.

There was a light covering of snow on the street, and she shivered in her thin sweatshirt. She pretended that she was a black hole: she wasn’t actually moving-instead, the building where Theres lived was being drawn towards her, about to be sucked into her.

She found the right street and the right door was brought towards her. She kept the game going until she was standing in the lift pressing the button for the top floor, and then she had to stop. She suddenly felt nervous, and only her chilled skin stopped her from breaking out in a sweat.

Fly high for fuck’s sake…

The lift carried her upwards.

It said ‘Cederstrom’ on the door, as Theres had told her it would. Teresa rang the bell and tried to arrange her face in a suitable expression, but couldn’t come up with one and decided not to bother.

She didn’t know what she had expected. Theres had written that she lived with ‘Jerry’, but hadn’t explained who this Jerry was. The man who opened the door looked like the men who usually sat on the benches in the park, apart from the fact that the check shirt he was wearing looked brand new.

‘Hi,’ said Teresa. ‘Does Theres live here?’

The man looked her up and down and glanced out onto the landing. Then he stepped to one side and said, ‘Come in. You look cold.’

‘I’ve got a jacket.’

‘Right. You could have fooled me.’ He gestured towards the interior of the apartment. ‘She’s in there.’

Teresa took off her shoes and walked through the hallway, keeping a firm grip on the strap of her bag. There was still a risk that the whole thing was a con. That the man who answered the door had sent the emails, and that something terrible would happen to her at any minute. She’d heard about that kind of thing.

When there was no one in the living room her heart started pounding. She listened, waiting for the bang as the front door slammed shut. It didn’t come. The door to another room was open, and she saw Theres, sitting on a bed with her hands resting on her lap.

Everything simply fell away. The crowds of people that had frightened her, the anxiety about getting the wrong train, doing the wrong thing. The cold out on the streets, the brief fear of the man in the shirt. Gone. She had reached the cross on the map, she had reached Theres. She wasn’t surprised that Theres didn’t get up and come to meet her. Instead Teresa walked into the room, dropped her bag by the door and said, ‘I’m here now.’

‘Good,’ said Theres, placing one hand on the bed beside her. ‘Sit here.’

Teresa sat down next to her. In her head she had tried out and rejected a number of opening remarks, tried to visualise what she would say and do if their meeting went like this or that. This particular possibility hadn’t occurred to her. That they would just sit next to each other without saying anything.

A minute or so passed, and Teresa began to warm up and relax. After the chaos of the journey it was really good just to sit still, not thinking. She registered that the room was bare, almost Spartan. No posters on the walls, no little ornaments tastefully or less than tastefully displayed. Only a bookshelf containing children’s books, a CD player and a CD rack. Her own bag, thrown down by the door, looked like an intrusion.

‘I wrote a poem,’ said Teresa. ‘On the train. Do you want to read it?’

‘Yes.’

Teresa pulled her bag over. She opened her notebook and read through the poem one more time. Then she tore it out and gave it to Theres. ‘Here. I think it’s for you.’

Theres sat with the sheet of paper in front of her for a long time. Teresa glanced sideways at her and saw her eyes moving down the lines; when they reached the bottom, they went back to the top and started again. And again. Teresa squirmed, and in the end she couldn’t bear it any longer, ‘Do you like it?’

Theres lowered the paper. Without looking at Teresa, she said, ‘It’s about people being wolves. And birds. I think that’s good. But there are ugly words too. Can you have ugly words in poems?’

‘Yes, I think so. If it feels right.’

Theres read the poem once more. Then she said, ‘It does feel right. Because the person is angry. Because they’re not a wolf. Or a bird.’ For the first time she looked Teresa in the eye. ‘It’s the best poem I’ve ever read.’

Teresa’s cheeks flushed red. It was almost unbearable to meet the gaze of someone who had just said something like that, and the muscles in the back of her neck were shouting at her to turn her head away. But her eyes were steadfast and kept her head in place. In Theres’ big, clear blue eyes there was not a hint of irony or expectation or any other emotion that aimed to provoke a reaction from Teresa. The only thing her eyes said was: You have written the best poem I have ever read. There you are. I am looking at you. That was why Teresa was able to maintain the contact, and after a few seconds it felt completely natural.

Theres pointed at Teresa’s notebook and said, ‘Have you written any more?’

‘No. Just that one.’