Little Star

body language made it clear that she was disturbing them.

She wasn’t allowed to speak in the room. If she sat down, Lennart would place his forefinger on his lips and shush her as soon as she tried to say something. His explanation was that this time the child was not to be ‘talked to pieces’.

Sometimes when she opened the door leading to the cellar she heard notes. Scales. Every time she just stood there, dumbstruck. Lennart’s tenor blending with another, higher voice, as clear as water, tinkling like glass. The child’s voice. She had never heard anything like it, never heard tell of anything like it.

But still. Still.

It was a child they were dealing with here. A child shouldn’t be lying in a cellar with scale exercises as its only source of stimulation.

Lennart still had quite a lot of work as a songwriter, and sometimes his presence was required in the studio when songs were being recorded. Such an occasion arose ten days after the child had ended up in their care.

Lennart usually thought it was fun to travel into Stockholm, to re-enter for a while the world that should have been his, but this time he was reluctant to go.

‘You go,’ said Laila. ‘I’ll take care of the girl.’

‘I don’t doubt that. The question is how you’ll take care of her.’

Lennart was pacing around the kitchen with his leather jacket over his arm, the leather jacket that was reserved for trips of this kind; it was presumably intended as some kind of armour. Or else he needed to look tough, and found the jacket helped.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll talk. Talk and talk. I know you.’

‘I’m not going to talk.’

‘What are you going to do, then?’

Laila took the jacket and held it up so Lennart could put it on. ‘I’m going to feed her and change her nappy and make sure she’s all right.’

When Lennart had gone, Laila wandered around the house for a while doing little jobs, because she wanted to be certain he hadn’t forgotten anything and wasn’t coming back. After twenty minutes she opened the cellar door and went down the steps.

The girl was lying in Jerry’s cot looking at a mobile of brightly coloured plastic animals. She was too pale and too thin. Too lifeless. No pink roses in her cheeks, no seeking, questing movements with her hands.

‘Poor little soul,’ said Laila. ‘You don’t have much fun, do you?’ She picked the girl up and limped over to the storeroom. On the bottom shelf she found the box of winter clothes. She pulled out Jerry’s first snowsuit and felt a lump in her throat as she dressed the child. A woolly hat with ear flaps completed the outfit.

‘There we are, you poor little soul. Don’t you look lovely now?’

She was snivelling as she made her way over to the cellar door and unlocked it. The little bundle in her arms brought back memories. Lennart could say what he liked, but she had loved Jerry. She had loved having a child to take care of, someone who needed her protection, someone who couldn’t manage on their own. Perhaps it wasn’t the best or most adult motivation, but she had done the best she could.

She opened the door and stepped out at the bottom of a flight of cement steps, taking in a deep breath of the chilly autumn air. The girl screwed up her face, and she opened her mouth as if to taste this new air. It seemed as if she were breathing a little more deeply. Laila crept up a few steps and peered out across the lawn.

Pull yourself together, Laila. You’re crazy.

Their garden was secluded, and even if someone did catch a glimpse of the child or heard a cry, what did it matter? It wasn’t as if the child had been kidnapped. It wasn’t being hunted all over Sweden, she had checked the papers. Nothing about a missing baby. If Laila Cederstrom walked around her garden with a baby in her arms, people’s natural reaction would be to come up with a reasonable explanation, not to hurl themselves at the nearest telephone.

Laila took the steps one at a time and went over to the lilac arbour in the furthest corner of the garden, then sat down on the bench with the child on her knee. It had been a wet, mild autumn, and the lilac leaves hadn’t even begun to curl, let alone drop. They were sitting in a protective three-quarter circle of greenery, and Laila was able to relax.

Then she took the girl for a short walk around the sheltered parts of the garden, showing her the herb garden, the gooseberry bushes and the apples-yellow Astrakhans ripe for the picking. The girl’s expression grew more lively the longer they stayed out, and her cheeks began to acquire a healthy pink glow.

When it started to drizzle, they went back to the house. Laila made up a bottle of formula and settled down in the armchair with the girl on her lap. The child slurped down the milk in just a few minutes, then fell asleep in Laila’s arms.

Laila walked around the house with her for a while, just for the sheer pleasure of carrying the warm, relaxed little body. Then the telephone rang. Instinctively Laila clutched the child more closely. She looked at the telephone. It wasn’t looking at her. It couldn’t see her. She loosened her grip and the telephone rang again.

Agitated by the noise, she limped over to the cellar door and down to the girl’s room as the telephone continued to ring up in the kitchen. It didn’t stop ringing until she had tucked the child in and placed the giraffe next to her. Laila sat for a while, looking at the girl through the bars of the cot. Even when she was asleep there was something concentrated or watchful about her expression. Laila wished she could make it disappear.

Sleep well, little star.

The telephone rang again; it rang seven times before she managed to get back to the kitchen to pick it up. It was Lennart, and he wasn’t happy.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘In the cellar.’

‘Well, you can hear the phone down there, can’t you?’

‘I was feeding her.’

Lennart fell silent. That was obviously the correct answer. His voice was gentler as he asked, ‘So did she take it?’

‘She certainly did. A whole bottle.’

‘And did she fall asleep then?’

‘Yes. Straight away.’

Laila sat down on a chair and closed her eyes. This is a perfectly normal conversation. A man and a woman are talking about a child. It happens all the time. Her body felt so strangely light, as if in the short walk around the garden she had shed twenty kilos.

‘So everything’s all right then?’ asked Lennart.

‘Yes. Everything’s fine.’

Laila could hear a door opening in the background at Lennart’s end. The tone of his voice altered as he said, ‘OK, good. I’ll be a few hours, things are a bit tricky here.’

‘No problem,’ said Laila. A little smile curled around her lips. ‘No problem at all.’

***

Lennart was very busy that autumn. He had to go into Stockholm at least once a week, and at home he spent a great deal of time at his keyboard. Lizzie Kanger, a singer who had had a minor breakthrough with the Eurovision Song Contest, was about to release a follow-up to her debut album, which had been panned. The record company had asked Lennart to ‘tidy up’ the songs that had already been written.

Lennart wrote new songs, retaining just enough phrases from the old crap for the contracted songwriter to accept the devastation of his original creation.

He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for. At the very first meeting with the record company they had played him a song he had been unable to avoid hearing on the radio all summer:

Summer in the city, nineteen ninety,

Do you remember me?

Some middle manager had switched off the DAT player and said, ‘We were thinking of something along those