Two warm hands grabbed her lungs and wrung them like floor cloths. It was a feeling of happiness so great that it was more like fear. She couldn’t move. Theres modulated her voice and adapted the pauses so that the words flowed perfectly with the melody, as if they had been written together from the start. When the song reached its first crescendo and Theres sang, ‘Fly, fly, fly high one day, fly high for fuck’s sake’, Teresa began to cry.
Theres pressed the space bar and the music stopped. She looked at Teresa, slumped on the sofa with tears pouring down her cheeks. Then she said, ‘You’re not sad. You’re happy. You’re crying but you’re happy.’
Teresa nodded and swallowed several times, then wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘Yes. I just thought it was so beautiful. Sorry.’
‘Why do you say sorry?’
‘Because…I don’t know. Because I said it was beautiful even though I wrote it. But it’s really because your voice is so fantastic.’
Theres nodded. ‘My voice is fantastic. Your words are good. They go well together.’
‘Yes. I suppose so. But it sounded much better when you sang it.’
‘The words were the same. I have a good memory. Jerry says so.’ Theres turned and clicked on a folder. She pointed at the rows of files filling the screen from top to bottom. ‘We’ve made a lot of songs. Can you write words for them?’
They listened to a number of songs. Only a couple were as immediately appealing as the first one Theres had played, but there were melodies and moods among the other songs that also demanded lyrics. Fragments of sentences popped up in Teresa’s head and she wrote them down in her notebook. She couldn’t really get her head round what she was doing. It was possibly the most fun she had ever had in her whole life.
When they had listened to all the songs Teresa flopped against the back of the sofa, her brain exhausted. They had been busy for several hours, and towards the end she had started jotting down disjointed words to the melodies she was hearing, as if in a trance. She had always thought she hadn’t got much imagination, but this didn’t feel as if it had anything to do with imagination. She was just writing down what the music said.
It had started to get dark outside the balcony window, and Teresa gazed blankly at the top of a street lamp which was illuminating individual snowflakes as they fell. Suddenly she sat bolt upright. ‘Shit! Shit, shit, shit!’ She spotted the telephone on the coffee table. ‘I just have to…can I…can I use your phone?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Theres. ‘I can’t.’
The alarm clock next to the telephone was showing half past five. Her train had left ten minutes ago. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the receiver hard against her ear. It was Göran who answered. He sighed deeply when he heard what had happened. Then he offered to get in the car and come pick her up.
Teresa saw herself sitting next to her father for almost three hours, trying to avoid answering his questions because she didn’t want this day to be questioned and subjected to explanations.
Theres was standing in front of her watching with interest as Teresa put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked, ‘Could I stay the night?’
‘Yes.’
Teresa had to ward off a few questions, but in the end it was decided that she would catch the train at one o’clock on Sunday instead. When she had hung up she was just about to start explaining to Theres that she didn’t want to be a nuisance and so on, but Theres pre-empted her by pointing at the telephone and asking, ‘Can you use that?’
Teresa had stopped puzzling over all the strange things about Theres, and simply answered, ‘Yes.’
Theres took a piece of paper out of a drawer, handed it to Teresa and said, ‘Ring this man.’ Teresa read through the letter from Max Hansen, and saw that there was both a mobile number and a landline.
‘What do you want me to say?’ she asked.
‘I want to make a shiny CD. With my voice on it. That you can use as a mirror.’
‘He says he just wants to meet you. Discuss things.’
‘I will meet him. Tomorrow. You will come with me. Then I’ll make a CD.’
Teresa read through the letter again. As far as she could work out, it was the kind of letter every girl and boy with artistic ambitions dreamed of receiving. But she noticed it was dated ten days earlier. ‘Have you had a lot of letters like this?’
‘I’ve had one letter. That one.’
Teresa looked at the two short lines of numbers and tried to work out what to say when she had rung one of them. It was all too weird. ‘Are you seriously telling me you’ve never used a phone? You’re joking, right?’
‘I’m not joking.’
Teresa pulled herself together and picked up the phone, keyed in the landline number. As it was ringing she glanced through the letter again. Apart from the fulsome words about Theres’ talent, it had a businesslike tone. Teresa straightened up and tried to make herself bigger and more confident than she was. When a voice at the other end said, ‘Max Hansen speaking’, she cleared her throat with a deeper timbre than necessary and said, ‘Good evening. I’m calling on behalf of…Tora Larsson. She has asked me to tell you that she would like to meet you.’
There was silence at the other end for a few seconds. Then Max Hansen said, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’
‘No. Tora Larsson would like to meet you tomorrow. In the morning.’ Teresa thought about her one o’clock train and quickly added, ‘At ten o’clock. Tell me where.’
‘But this is just completely…why can’t I speak to Tora herself?’
‘She doesn’t like using the telephone.’
‘Oh, right, she doesn’t like using the telephone. And can you give me one good reason why I should believe any of this?’
Teresa held the phone up in the air and said to Theres, ‘Sing. Sing something.’
Without a second’s hesitation Theres started to sing Teresa’s poem. It sounded even more beautiful a cappella, if that were possible. Teresa brought the phone back to her ear and said, ‘Tell me where.’
She heard papers rustling at the other end, a pen moving across a sheet of paper. Then Max Hansen said, ‘The Diplomat Hotel on Strandvägen-do you…does she know where that is?’
‘Yes,’ Teresa lied, trusting in the wonders of the internet.
‘Ask for me in reception,’ said Max Hansen. ‘Ten o’clock. I’m looking forward to it. Really.’
Max Hansen’s voice sounded different now. If it had been deliberately distant at the beginning of the conversation, now it sounded all too close, as if he wanted to crawl out of the telephone and whisper directly into Teresa’s ear. When they had said goodbye, Teresa sank back on the sofa.
What the fuck have I got into here?
It was as if she had ended up in the middle of some spy story. The meeting at the hotel, brief messages, cryptic phone calls. She had no control, and didn’t know whether she found that unpleasant or exciting. Once again there was the chance to take a leap, become someone else. Someone who could handle this situation. She would try.
Theres sat down next to her on the sofa. Teresa told her about the meeting, the time and place, and Theres merely nodded and said nothing.
They sat there side by side. After a while they both leaned back, almost simultaneously. One of them started the movement and the other completed it. Their shoulders were touching. Teresa could feel the faint warmth of Theres’ body. They just sat there, not moving. The clock ticked on the coffee table.
Theres felt for Teresa’s hand, and their fingers intertwined; they sat completely still, gazing into the dark rectangle of the TV screen where they could see themselves as two distant figures, sitting in a room far away. There was a faint overlap where their shoulders met, as if their sweatshirts were sewn together.