‘No.’
‘So which centre have you been attending, then?’
Laila’s head was suddenly completely empty, and she said the first thing that came into her mind. ‘Skövde.’
‘Mmm. If I can just take her ID number, we’ll see if we can-’
Laila slammed the phone down as if it had burnt her hand, then she sat and stared at it for thirty seconds before picking it up again. The dial tone. No voice was pursuing her, and she went through the conversation in her mind. The critical point was but.
It’s difficult to make any kind of assessment over the telephone, but I would suggest…
Her fears were not groundless. That but meant something wasn’t as it should be. Besides which, no doubt the staff at the childcare centre were very careful about what they said, so as not to frighten insecure parents.
When Lennart emerged from his home studio, Laila tried to raise the issue with him. Of course she didn’t dare tell him she had made the phone call, so she had only her own vague observations to go on, which got her precisely nowhere. Lennart might possibly agree that the girl was unusually passive, but was that really a cause for complaint?
‘Do you want her to be like Jerry? Getting up five or six times a night because he was lying there bawling his head off?’
It wasn’t Lennart who had got up five or six times a night, but Laila didn’t pursue that detail. Instead she said, ‘I just wish we could get her checked out somehow.’
She saw the muscles in his jaw tense. She was approaching the danger zone. Lennart clasped his hands tightly together as if to prevent himself from doing something with them, and said, ‘Laila. For the last time. If one single person finds out that we’ve got her, they will take her away from us. Stop thinking about all that, there’s no chance. And besides…if it is what you think, if there is something wrong with her, what do you imagine they can do? Are they going to give her drugs? Put her in some kind of clinic? What is it you actually want?’
This final question was entirely rhetorical, and was actually a statement: you are such a stupid bitch. Lennart’s hands were opening and closing, and Laila didn’t say another word.
He had a point, anyway. What did she actually want? Did she want the child to have some kind of medical care? Drugs? No. All she really wanted, when she thought about it, was for someone who knew what they were talking about to look at the girl and tell her everything was all right. Or that it wasn’t all right, but that the problem was called so-and-so, and there was nothing they could do. Just so she knew.
Two weeks later, Lennart went into the city for the final mix of the album. The snow had melted, but the temperature had dropped below freezing again and the garden was covered in ice in places; Laila wouldn’t leave any footprints.
And the girl needed to get out.
The times when Laila dressed the girl for an outing were little special occasions. As she busied herself with the child’s top, trousers, snowsuit and hat she felt a closeness to her that was otherwise missing. As she rolled up the tiny socks and put them on the child’s equally tiny feet, she even allowed herself to formulate the thought: I love you, Little One.
It wasn’t that she was indifferent to the child on a day-to-day basis, but there was never any response to the feelings she expressed. At best the child might explore Laila’s face with her fingers, but she did it in the same way as she did everything else: methodically, almost scientifically. As if she were trying to understand how this particular object worked.
Perhaps that was why the business of dressing the child created a perception of mutual understanding. As Laila gently pushed the slender limbs into the snowsuit and slipped on her mittens, she was treating the girl like an object. Gently handling something that needed to be protected.
She carried the girl to the door and put her down on the step. The ice crunched beneath their feet as Laila held the girl’s hands above her head so that she was half walking, half being carried up the steps.
The garden was covered in ice and lumps of frozen snow. Laila manoeuvred the girl towards the lilac arbour, its branches now bare of leaves. ‘See this, Little One? This is ice.’
They hadn’t got round to giving the girl a name. They had discussed the matter, but since she wasn’t going to be christened and nobody had got in touch to demand a name, they hadn’t come to a decision. Laila had heard Lennart say ‘Little One’ as well when he spoke to the girl on one occasion, and that was as far as they had got.
They sat for a while on the bench in the arbour. Laila gave the girl sticks and dry leaves to examine. Then they went for a little walk. The child’s unsteady legs had difficulty with the conditions underfoot, and the cold made Laila’s knee stiff, so they shuffled along a little bit at a time.
They were perhaps twenty metres from the house when Laila heard the sound of an engine. She had heard it often enough to recognise it. Jerry’s motorbike.
She heaved the child up into her arms and staggered towards the cellar steps. She had managed ten metres when a sharp pain stabbed through her knee. She slipped on a patch of ice and fell forward. As she fell, she managed to twist to the side so that she landed on her shoulder instead of on top of the girl. Her head snapped downwards and hit the ice; everything went dark red before her eyes, and the girl slid out of her arms.
From inside the red veil she could hear the motorbike coming closer, and then the engine was switched off. The side stand clicked down and footsteps approached. A patch of light grew inside the redness and continued to grow until she could see the snow and the ice and the girl’s blue woolly hat once more. Jerry’s biker boots entered her field of vision and stopped.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Mother? And who’s that?’
Lennart was in the car on his way home. He wasn’t dissatisfied, which was unusual. Normally he was more or less furious after a studio session or a meeting in Stockholm. But this time things had gone his way.
A new producer had come on board for the final phase of the album. When Lennart first saw the young lad ambling around the studio in his yellow shades, all hope had drained from his body. But surprise surprise, the new guy liked Lennart’s stuff, called it ‘updated Motown sound’ and ‘a fantastic vintage vibe’. He had picked up two tracks that had been recorded but weren’t going to be included, and Lennart was now down as the composer of three of the tracks on the album. One of Lennart’s songs was actually under consideration as the first single.
So Lennart didn’t even pull a face when he saw Jerry’s motorbike parked outside the house; not so much as a small sigh escaped him. He was temporarily wrapped in a protective cloak. He was a composer, and was above the trials of everyday life.
He and Laila had been married for twenty-five years, and had lived in the same house for almost as long. As soon as he closed the door behind him and began to undo his shoes, he could feel that something was different. Something had altered in the atmosphere of the house, but he didn’t know what it was.
When he walked into the kitchen, he had his answer. Laila was sitting there. And Jerry. And on Jerry’s knee sat the girl. Lennart stood in the doorway and the protective cloak fell around his feet. Laila looked at him with a pleading expression, while Jerry pretended to be unaware of his presence, grabbing the girl under the arms and lifting her above his head while saying, ‘Toot, toot, toot.’
‘Be careful,’ said Lennart. ‘She’s not a toy.’
How much had Laila told him? Lennart waved at her and said, ‘Laila, come here,’ whereupon he turned on his heel and headed for the studio, where they could talk undisturbed. But Laila didn’t follow him.