that there was anything to remember. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe it was some odd form of déjà vu. Maybe he’d seen something on TV or in a film, or merely heard something, that was making his brain try to search for something that didn’t exist. But just as he was about to cast aside the papers in frustration, a flash occurred between the synapses in his brain. He leaned forward to inspect more closely the photo he still held in his hand, and a feeling of triumph came over him. Maybe he wasn’t so far off course after all. Maybe something specific had been hovering in the darkest nooks of his memory after all.
In one stride he was at the door. It was time to head down to the archives.
Barbie listlessly let the goods pass by on the conveyor belt as she read off the bar codes. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she stubbornly blinked them away. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself by sitting here crying.
The conversation that morning had stirred up so many emotions. So much muck that had been lying on the bottom was now coming up to the surface. She looked at Jonna sitting at the checkout in front of her. She envied her in a way. Maybe not her depression and all that cutting. Barbie would never be able to slice a knife through her own flesh like that. What she envied was Jonna’s obvious indifference to what everyone else thought. For Barbie there was nothing more important than the way she looked and appeared to others. That hadn’t always been the case, as the school pictures dug up by that damned evening tabloid had shown. The photos of her when she was small and skinny, with gigantic braces, almost nonexistent breasts, and dark hair. She was upset when the photos appeared on the newspaper placards. But not for the reason everyone thought. Not because she worried that people would know that both her hair colour and her boobs were fake. She wasn’t that stupid. But it hurt to see what she no longer had. Her happy smile. Full of self-confidence. She’d been happy about who she was, secure and satisfied with her life. But everything changed the day her pappa died.
She and Pappa got along so well. Her mamma died when Barbie was little, of cancer. But somehow he had managed to make her feel whole in spite of her mother’s death; she had never felt as though she lacked anything. She knew that things had been up and down for a while, when she was a baby, right after her mamma died, and when All The Evil happened. She had heard all about it, but her pappa had paid the price, learned from it, and gone on to build a life for himself and his daughter. Until that day in October.
It felt so unreal when it happened. In an instant her whole life had been eradicated and everything had been taken from her. She had no other family, no other relatives to go to, so she’d been cast into a world of foster families and temporary living situations. She had learned lessons she would have preferred not to know. The self-confidence she’d had before vanished. Her friends couldn’t understand that she had changed inside because of what had happened. That day took something away from her, and she would never be the same. Her friends tried to support her for a while, but eventually they left her to her fate.
That was when her craving for confirmation among older boys and tough girls began. It wasn’t enough to be an ordinary tomboy any longer. And the name Lillemor no longer fit either. So she started with what she could do on her own and what she could afford. She dyed her hair blonde in the bathroom belonging to one of the boyfriends who passed through her life. She replaced her old clothes with new ones: tighter, shorter, sexier. Because she had discovered what her ticket out of misery was going to be. Sex. It could buy her attention and material things. It gave her a chance to stand out from the crowd. One boyfriend had plenty of money, so he financed the breasts. She would have preferred them a bit smaller, but he was the one paying, so he got to decide. He wanted E-cups and that’s what he got. When her physical transformation was done, it was merely a matter of packaging. The boyfriend after the breast financier had called her ‘little Barbie doll’, and that solved the question of her name. Then all she had to do was decide what would be the best forum for launching her new self. It had begun with some small modelling jobs, requiring scanty clothing, or none at all. But her breakthrough had come on Big Brother. She became the big star of the series. And it hadn’t bothered her in the least that the entire population of Sweden was able to observe her sex life from their living rooms. Who cared? She had no family to berate her for publicly shaming them. She was alone in the world.
She usually succeeded in not thinking about what was going on inside Barbie. She had pressed Lillemor so far back in her consciousness that the girl hardly existed anymore. She had done the same thing with the memory of her father. She couldn’t permit herself to remember him. If she were to survive, the sound of his laughter, or the touch of his hand against her cheek, could no longer exist in the life she was now living. It would hurt too much. But this morning’s conversation with that psychologist had touched strings that stubbornly continued to vibrate inside her. And she didn’t seem to be the only one to have such a reaction. The mood had been subdued after they had each gone into the room behind the set and sat in the chair facing the man. Sometimes it felt as though all their negativity was being directed at her, and she occasionally had the feeling that some of the others were giving her malicious looks. But every time she turned round to see where that creeping feeling was coming from, the moment would pass.
At the same time there was something stirring restlessly inside her. Something that Lillemor tried to fix her attention on. But Barbie forced back the feeling. Some things she simply couldn’t allow to slip out.
Groceries continued to pass along the conveyor belt in front of her at the checkout stand. It never ended.
Searching in the archives was, as usual, both dreary and arduous work. Nothing seemed to be where it should be. Patrik had sat down on the floor cross-legged, with boxes all around him. He knew what sort of document he was looking for, and in a foolish moment he had thought they would be easily found in a box labelled ‘Educational Material’. But no such luck. He heard footsteps on the stairs and looked up. It was Martin.
‘Hey, Annika said she saw you headed down here. What are you doing?’ Martin gazed in wonderment at all the boxes spread out in a circle around Patrik.
‘I’m looking for notes from a conference I attended in Halmstad a couple of years ago. You would have thought they’d be archived in some logical manner, but no. Some idiot has moved everything around, so nothing matches.’ He tossed another stack of papers into yet another box that had been archived in the wrong place.
‘Yeah, Annika’s always nagging us about keeping the documents in order down here. She claims that she files everything in the right place, but then the documents apparently grow feet.’
‘I don’t understand why people can’t simply put things back where they found them. I know I put the notes in a folder that I archived in this box.’ He pointed to the one labelled ‘Educational Material’ and continued, ‘But now they’re not here. So the question is, which damn box are they in? “Missing persons”, “Solved cases”, “Unsolved cases”, and so on and so forth. Your guess is as good as mine.’ He swept his hand round the cellar piled with boxes from floor to ceiling.
‘Well, what fascinates me most is the fact that you actually filed your conference notes. Mine are still back in my office in some pile or other.’
‘I should probably have done the same thing. But I was naïve enough to think that somebody else might have a use for them.’ Patrik sighed and grabbed another stack of documents and started leafing through them. Martin sat down next to him on the floor and started in one of the boxes too.
‘I’ll help you. Then it’ll go faster. What am I looking for? What sort of conference was it? And why are you looking for your notes, anyway?’
Patrik didn’t look up but merely replied, ‘As I said, it was a conference in Halmstad, in 2002 if I remember correctly. It had to do with strange cases that were still raising questions and remained unsolved.’
‘And
