Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist Read Free Book Online Page A

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 theshort 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 lines.’
    Lennart smiled and nodded, while his mind’s eye conjured a desert with skeletons reaching out, screaming for help.
    It would have been a terrible autumn if he hadn’t had the time he spent with the girl to look forward to. Sitting there with her on his knee, her crystal clear voice responding to his practice scales, he felt he wasin touch with something bigger. Not just bigger than his wretched keyboard fripperies, but bigger than life itself.
    The music. She was the music. The real music.
    Lennart had always believed that everyone was born with a musical talent. It was simply there. But what happened was that they were force-fed crap from an early age, and they got hooked. In the end they believed that the crap was all there was, that that was how it was supposed to sound. If they heard anything that wasn’t crap, they thought it sounded weird, and switched to another radio station.
    The girl was living proof that he was right. Of course, babies were not normally able to express the unspoilt music that existed inside them, but she could. He didn’t want to believe that it was only by chance she had ended up with