It was intoxicating and quite unpleasant. She was no longer in control of herself. The fine hairs on her forearms missed Theres’ presence, the warmth of the body by her side. Yes. When she examined her longing, she discovered that was exactly how it looked: she wanted to be next to Theres. They didn’t have to do or say anything, they could just sit next to one another in silence as long as they were together.
She had never experienced anything like it, this purely physical perception of a lack, an awareness that something big and important was missing. She wasn’t blind. She realised that there was something significantly wrong with Theres, perhaps she even had some kind of brain damage. She didn’t do anything in the same way as normal people, she didn’t even eat normal food.
But ‘normal’? What was so good about ‘normal’?
The people in Teresa’s class were more or less normal. She didn’t like them. She wasn’t interested in the other girls’ tacky little secrets, she thought the boys were just stupid with their hoodies and their baseball caps, their pimply skin. None of them had courage. They walked like cowards and talked like cowards.
She could imagine them all in a deep hole, lined up just as they would be for a class photo, but with their hands and feet bound. She herself would be standing up at the top next to a huge pile of earth. Then she would throw one shovelful at a time into the hole. It would take many hours, but eventually it would be done. Nothing could be seen, nothing could be heard, and the world would be not one jot poorer.
Ten minutes before the train was due to arrive in Österyd, Teresa started to smile. She gave a big smile, she gave a little smile, she gave a medium-sized smile. Trained up her muscles as she constructed a role for herself.
When Göran picked her up at the station, the rehearsal was over. She was the lonely girl who had found a good friend at last. They had watched films and talked half the night and had a brilliant time. The smile and the glow around her were firmly in place, and Göran felt much better when he saw his daughter’s changed mood. Teresa noticed how credible she was, and it wasn’t really difficult because it was all true, on a simple level.
As soon as she got home she checked her emails and found a message from Theres in her Inbox, ‘hi come back soon write more words to the songs’. Four MP3 files without titles were attached. Teresa opened them and found they were four of the melodies she had liked best.
She got to work. After working for a couple of hours she watched the clip of Theres on Idol several times, then carried on writing. When she was on her way to bed, she remembered the DVD from Max Hansen’s camera. She took it out of her bag and stood there turning it over in her hands for a long time. Then she put it in an unmarked case and slid it into the CD rack.
The role she had invented for herself could also be used in school. She was less frosty if anyone spoke to her, and on the whole displayed a less pugnacious attitude. Not that anyone actually cared, but the friction lessened slightly.
To be fair, Johannes noticed the change in her, and when he asked she told him the same story she had dished up to Göran, with a little more detail. Friend in Stockholm, brilliant time and so on. She also let slip that they made music together. Johannes was pleased for her.
As far as her school work went, it was a different story. Her mind was elsewhere. She sat through an entire social studies lesson on the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and literally grasped not one word apart from the fact that someone called Jimmy Carter used to grow peanuts. He might have been a president of the USA. That was the sum total of her knowledge after a forty-minute lesson: that Jimmy Carter used to grow peanuts.
The fact was that the following sentence had suddenly come to her: Fly to the place where wings aren’t needed. It was an exciting sentence, a good sentence. But clumsy. Impossible to find a rhyme. And what did it mean? That you should go to a place where you would no longer need to run away. Yes, something along those lines.
Fly to the place where you need no wings. Better. Rhymes with sings. Go where your heart sings. No, that was ugly. Fly high until your heart sings. Better.
She had scribbled down odd words and sentences on the sheet of paper with Democrats / Republicans written at the top. The information about Jimmy Carter and his peanuts had slipped through when she paused for thought, but she hadn’t written it down. Then she started to play with the word rings. Rings in the water, on fingers, sitting in a ring. And so on. Then the lesson was over.
On the Saturday she caught the train to Stockholm again. Jerry had agreed to give Maria a call in order to lend credibility to Teresa’s interpretation of the role. He told her the girls had had a brilliant time together and confirmed that Teresa was very welcome to stay with them any time, then he went off to see his girlfriend and left the two of them in peace.
They worked on the songs and watched Dawn of the Dead. In the evening they rang Max Hansen and arranged to meet at the hotel the following day, in the restaurant.
Then there was something Teresa wanted to do, but she found it hard to ask. In spite of the fact that it was a completely normal thing between two friends, she felt embarrassed. Perhaps because they weren’t just two friends. She sat there fiddling with her mobile phone, and couldn’t quite bring herself to ask. As if Theres sensed her difficulties, she came straight out with it, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I’d like to take a photograph of you.’
‘How?’
‘With this.’ Teresa held up her phone, pointed it at Theres, then took a photograph and showed it to Theres on the display. Theres stroked the surface of the phone and asked how it worked. Teresa couldn’t really explain that, of course, but they spent a while taking photographs and looking at the pictures. Theres even took a couple of pictures of Teresa which Teresa secretly deleted, because she thought she was so ugly.
The wound in Max Hansen’s back had been stitched and was healing well, but the damage to his self-esteem was another matter. The incident in the hotel room had knocked him off balance. He spent four days shut in his apartment drinking heavily, looking through his old films and trying to masturbate, but without success.
He watched only the films featuring the most submissive and obliging girls, the ones who had got on their knees or spread their legs at the first hint. It didn’t help. In the weary movements of their hands, in the passive acceptance of their bodies he seemed to see a threat that finished his erection before it had even started.
Tora Larsson had taken from him his only real pleasure. Drunk almost to the point of unconsciousness, he sat flicking through images of young, naked bodies and felt nothing but fear and a faint masochistic enjoyment of his own fear.
On the fifth day he woke up with a hangover that felt like being buried alive. Instead of a hair of the dog he took two strong painkillers and a long shower. When he had dried himself and put on clean clothes the situation had improved to the point where he merely felt like shit.
One thing was absolutely clear: Tora Larsson was his biggest opportunity for a long time, and he had no intention of messing it up. But she would pay for what she had done to him; she would literally pay, in hard cash.
Towards the afternoon, when he had had a couple of whiskies after all, just to restore the chemical balance in his body, his new strategy was ready.
This industry was killing him; it was time to pack it in. Tora Larsson would be his final project, and he would put everything he had into making her a success. She didn’t seem to have a clue about anything, and he intended to amend his standard contract so that it gave him the maximum return.