He listened without interest for thirty seconds, then glanced over at Paris who was busy making Theres’ eyebrows a little darker in order to bring out her blue eyes. He shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, yeah. But everything seems to be back on track now,’ at which point he turned and walked out.
The make-up girl followed him, and Jerry heard her say, ‘That’s actually my job!’ to which the reply was, ‘Evidently not.’
Paris gently swept a powder brush over Theres’ face, and once again Jerry was amazed when Theres closed her eyes, as if she was enjoying it. Paris lowered her voice, ‘In America we have a saying: Go fuck yourself.’ She nodded in the direction of the door. ‘That woman. The number of times I’ve wanted to…how would you say it in Swedish?’
Jerry thought for a moment, then said, ‘Stick och brinn.’
‘Stick och brinn. Like…fuck off and burn?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jerry. ‘Fuck off and burn. Stick och brinn.’
Paris undid the cape and removed it. She said, ‘Stick och brinn,’ gave Theres a big smile and said, ‘Not you, honey. You did good. Maybe next time you should just relax a little.’
She picked up the broom which she had dropped in the midst of all the tumult, and carried on with her work. Theres stood there looking at herself in the mirror. In her silver dress she looked like something from a sci-fi film, a wondrously beautiful creature sent to Earth to ensnare and seduce mankind. Or to be ensnared and seduced.
Jerry cleared his throat, went over to Paris and held out his hand. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know what to say.’
Paris looked at his hand without taking it. ‘You could do something instead.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Dinner would be nice,’ said Paris, her concentration fixed on the movement of the brush across the floor.
‘Dinner?’ Jerry understood each individual word she said, but what they implied was so unimaginable that his brain couldn’t make a sentence out of them.
Paris sighed and stopped brushing. ‘Yes, dinner. You take me out to dinner. Sometime. Someplace. Don’t you do that in Sweden?’
‘Oh yes, absolutely. Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘Absolutely. I’d be delighted. Any time. Or anywhere. Or…shall I…have you got a phone number?’
With a kohl pencil Paris wrote her phone number on a tissue, and Jerry tucked it in his wallet as if it were a claim certificate for a share in a goldmine. Then he backed out of the room with Theres, waved and slid around the corner.
For the rest of the day he might as well have been on the moon. Or Mars, if you prefer. Gravity had lost its power over him; he weighed twenty kilos at the most. Several times he took out the tissue with Paris’ number on it, just to make sure it was still there. After unfolding it and folding it up again so many times, he thought the numbers were starting to look blurred, so he wrote them down on a piece of paper which he put in his wallet. Then he wrote them on another piece of paper which he put in his pocket.
He had never-never!-had anything like this happen to him; someone had…what was it called? Made advances to him. Never. He would invite her out to dinner. Where would he take her? No idea. He never ate in restaurants. He would have to…
That’s where Jerry’s head was at.
There were no further incidents with Theres during the course of the day, which was just as well because Jerry wasn’t really there. Twenty kilos of his body mass, perhaps. The rest was floating somewhere out in space.
Theres got through that week and went out the following week with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. It was Jerry who won Idol. A couple of days after she had given him her number, he called Paris. He had checked the restaurant pages in the newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and suggested Dragon House, a buffet restaurant near Hornstull. All you can eat and so on.
They met up, they both ate enormous amounts of Thai and Chinese food, drank plenty of beer. Jerry found out that Paris was forty-two years old and had come to Sweden five years earlier when the father of her son, who was now nine, had got a job here. They had gone their separate ways three years ago, after the man started seeing a Swedish woman he was working with.
Paris had done all kinds of jobs both in the USA and in Sweden, and among other things had worked as a make-up artist on a local TV station in Miami. Hence her knowledge. She regarded herself as a survivor, and was absolutely categorical when it came to judging people and events. This was bad, that was good, he was an idiot, he was a sweetheart.
Jerry seemed to have the good fortune to fall into the sweetheart category, since he got a long hug before they parted. When he asked if he could ring her again, Paris said that she expected nothing else, honey.
The day Max Hansen’s letter plopped through the letterbox, Jerry was standing on the balcony smoking as he devoted himself to detailed dreams involving going to bed with Paris. They had seen each other several times, he had been allowed to kiss her, and her lips had been a foretaste. He imagined it would be like falling into a feather bed. Allowing himself to be enveloped by her huge breasts, her round arms, burrowing down in her skin. Disappearing.
His fantasies had become so delicious that he felt caught out when Theres came out onto the balcony. His hands moved instinctively to hide his groin, even though there was nothing to hide but his thoughts.
Theres tilted her head to one side.
‘Why are you embarrassed?’
‘I’m not, I’m just having a smoke.’
Theres held out a piece of paper. ‘Somebody says I’m good. Somebody wants to talk to me. You have to read it and tell me if it’s all right.’
Jerry took Max Hansen’s letter into the living room, sat down in the armchair and read it twice. He couldn’t decide if it was empty words or a genuine opportunity. He might have been a little bit impressed by the mention of Stormfront, but at the end of the day it wasn’t about that.
Jerry put down the letter and looked at Theres, who was sitting on the sofa with her hands folded on her lap like a patient saint.
‘It’s an agent,’ he said. ‘Somebody who wants to work with you.’
‘What do you mean, work?’
‘Sing. Fix things so that you can do that as a job. Sing. Make a CD, perhaps.’
Theres looked over at the CD rack on the wall. ‘Am I going to sing on a CD?’
‘Yes, maybe. Would you like that?’
‘Yes.’
Jerry picked up the letter again, turning it this way and that as if he could suss out its weight and import through his feelings. This Max Hansen seemed to be genuinely interested in Theres, and the fact was their money wouldn’t last forever.
After all, this was what he had fantasised about long ago. The chance of squeezing a bit of ready cash out of the force of nature that was Theres. Now the chance had come along, he wasn’t so sure. A lot of polluted water had passed under the bridge since then. He folded up the letter, put it in the top drawer of the desk and said, ‘We’ll see.’
Somewhere inside he knew he would open that drawer again, that a new ball had appeared at the top of the slope, and that it would probably start to roll, with or without his co-operation.
Max Hansen, he thought. Take a chance?
At the beginning of November, Teresa was sitting on her bed with an empty sports bag next to her. She knew she ought to put something in the bag, but she didn’t know what. Her train was leaving in an hour, and she had gone up to her room to pack. She glared at the empty bag.
Two days earlier Theres had emailed and asked if she could come over to Stockholm for a visit at the weekend. After a certain amount of difficulty Teresa had managed to book a train ticket on the internet, and had then presented her parents with a fait accompli. She was going to Stockholm on Saturday, could someone give her a lift to the station?