Free Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist Page A

back. Didn’t want to anyway. During his absence Elvis had passed his driving test, which opened up all kinds of new possibilities.
    Freed from the burden of normality, Jerry let go of any semblance of ambition. The three of them moved on from summer cottages to bigger houses, and robbed a couple of petrol stations before they got caught. Jerry got a year in a youth offenders’ institution, which only served to reinforce his view of the world.
    When he came out, they started again. An old man was at home in one of the houses, and they knocked him down. When he started screaming abuse at them, they kicked him a few times until he shut his mouth. This played on Jerry’s conscience for a time, but it passed. He was becoming hardened.
    One day when he was shaving, he caught sight of himself and looked carefully. He examined his feelings, and realised he had crossed an important line. He could kill someone without it breaking him. If necessary. That was definitely progress.
    His mother and father carried on with the usual shit, and he took no notice whatsoever. They didn’t want him at home anymore, but he thought it worked very well; he liked having his room as a sort of hole to crawl back into from time to time. He didn’t listen to a word they said in any case.
    When Jerry was twenty, Elvis went out cruising in Norrtälje, high as a kite. He lost control of his Chevy on the hill leading down to the harbour, drove straight into the water and drowned. Nothing was the same after that.
    The steam went out of Roy and Jerry. They felt obliged to burgle a couple of houses, and talked about trying some post offices, but it never happened. It was no fun anymore. They drifted apart, and since Jerry was spending more time at home, he was able to hear Lennart and Laila talking. When they organised an apartment for him through social services, he moved out.
    He had a few bits and pieces stashed away which he sold so that he could buy a motorbike. He got a few dead-end jobs, but never stayed more than a couple of weeks. He built up a reasonable collection of splatter films on VHS.
    That’s how it was, and perhaps it couldn’t have been any different.

In the spring the year after Lennart had found the girl, something very unusual happened. Laila received an offer. A group calling themselves DDT wanted Laila as their featured singer on a dance track. At first Laila thought it was a joke, and in a way she was right. The idea was to do a Swedish version of The KLF’s monster hit ‘Justified and Ancient’, with Laila as Sweden’s answer to Tammy Wynette, singing a couple of verses to a heavy dance beat.
    Laila found out later that both Lill-Babs and Siw Malmkvist had been approached and turned it down. Perhaps other legendary Swedish chart-toppers had been asked too, before they ended up with the somewhat less legendary Laila.
    She had no reputation to lose and no image to maintain, so she said yes. Anything to get out of the house.
    The atmosphere had soured even more since the incident with Jerry. Lennart hardly spoke to her anymore, but at least he didn’t hit her. It wasn’t clear what Jerry had meant when he said Lennart could ‘forget the kid’ if his instructions weren’t followed, but the threat certainly worked. Jerry got his computer and Laila was left in peace.
    But it was as if a musty blanket had settled on things. The air in the rooms felt stale and close. Laila thought that a visitor who stepped through the door would only need one sniff to know: There’s something bad here. Something sick.
    But nobody came, apart from Jerry who called in from time totime to ‘check things out’. Sometimes he insisted on holding the child, bouncing it up and down on his knee and saying, ‘Toot, toot.’ On these occasions Lennart stood there with clenched fists, waiting until Jerry had finished so he could carry the girl back down to the cellar.
    Perhaps Laila experienced the child’s shut-in existence as her own; sometimes she