looking for. Considering that the treasure was normally hidden in the last chest, he reckoned he’d been lucky.
He flicked through the book, glancing at the class photos, looking for names. Of course, yes. Him. And him. Wasn’t she the sister of …? The teacher’s daughter who looked like she wanted the ground to swallow her up in her picture. The boy who set fire to the playground. The girl who committed suicide. And that poor sod who had to look after his siblings and always slept through the classes.
Madeleine moment after madeleine moment, a la Proust.
Finally, the whole class. Jorgen got a shock. They were just kids, their hairstyles and clothes bore witness to the passing of time. Yet the black-and-white photograph still made him uncomfortable.
He looked at the picture, scanned row after row.
His classmates stared back at him. Jorgen could almost hear the clamour from the corridor: the comments, the shouts, the jostling and laughter. The power struggle, that’s all it was. Maintaining your position on the ladder. The girls were self-regulatory, the boys more forceful.
The four loudest at the back. Arms folded and staring confidently straight at the camera, radiating world domination. Judging by their smug faces, they couldn’t possibly imagine a reality other than their own.
One of them, Morgan, had died of cancer a year ago. Jorgen wondered whether anyone missed him. He certainly didn’t.
He carried on through the rows of names. He’d forgotten some of them and was forced to look up at the photograph to pull any information from his mental archives. Of course, yes.
But he still didn’t recognise two or three of his classmates. The faces and names were not enough. They were erased from his brain, just like the blank faces on Lasse Aberg’s picture.
Jorgen looked at himself, squashed into the front row, barely visible and with an expression that was just begging to get out of there.
Calle Collin looked happy. A bit detached, not worried about being an outsider, strong enough in himself.
The teacher, jeez, the old bird was younger in the photo than Jorgen was now.
He put all the removal boxes back and took the yearbook with him up into the house. He was going to look at the photos until they no longer frightened him.
Jorgen went into the kitchen and rang his friend.
‘D’you want to go for a beer?’
‘Just the one?’ Calle Collin asked.
‘Two, three. As many as you like,’ Jorgen said. ‘I’ve dug out some of our old yearbooks, I’ll bring them with me.’
‘What the hell for?’
6
Mike Zetterberg picked his daughter up from the after-school club at half past four. She was sitting at a table at the back of the room, engrossed in an old magic box. When she caught sight of her father, her face lit up as it hadn’t done since he picked her up when she first started nursery.
‘Daddy, come.’
Sanna was sitting with an egg cup in front of her. A three-piece egg cup with a plastic top. Mike realised that her pleasure at seeing him had something to do with him playing captive audience.
‘Hey, sweetie.’
He kissed her on the forehead.
‘Look,’ she said, and lifted the top off the egg cup. ‘There’s an egg here.’
‘I can see that,’ Mike said.
‘And now I’m going to magic it away.’
‘Surely you can’t do that?’ Mike exclaimed.
‘Yes, watch.’
Sanna put the top back on and moved her hand in circles above the egg cup.
‘Abracadabra.’
She lifted the top off and the egg had vanished.
‘What? How did you do that?’
‘Daddy! You know.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Mike said.
‘Yes, you do, I’ve shown you.’
‘Have you?’
‘It’s not a real egg.’
Sanna showed him the middle section that was hollow and hidden inside the top of the egg cup.
‘You knew that,’ Sanna said.
Mike shook his head.
‘If I did, then I’ve forgotten,’ he assured her.
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Really, it’s true. It must be because you’re so good at it.’
Sanna had already started to put things back on the plastic tray in the box.
‘Do you like magic?’ Mike asked.
Sanna shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’
She put the colourful lid, which was worn in one corner from frequent use, back on the box.
‘Maybe you’d like to get a magic box for your birthday?’
‘How far away is that?’
Mike looked at his watch.
‘Not in hours,’ Sanna said.
‘Fifteen days,’ Mike told her. ‘It says on the clock what day it is.’
‘Does it?’
Mike showed her.
‘The numbers in the little square tell you what day it is. It’s the fifth of May today, and your birthday is on the twentieth. In fifteen days’ time.’
Sanna took on board this information without being overly impressed. Watches weren’t the status symbol they used to be, Mike thought to himself.
He hadn’t been much older than his daughter when he and his parents had moved back to Sweden. They said they were moving home, even though the only home that Mike had ever known was in Fresno, a baking hot town in central California, caught between the Coast Range and the Sierra Nevada. The temperature remained around thirty to forty-five degrees for the greater part of the year. It was too hot to live in, and most people went from air- conditioned houses to air-conditioned cars and drove to air-conditioned schools and workplaces.
Practically no one had a suntan in The Big Sauna, as his parents used to call the place, and Mike got a shock when he came to Helsingborg in summer 1976 and saw all the brown people splashing around in the water, despite the fact that the air was freezing, barely twenty-five degrees.
Mike’s parents had spoken Swedish to him since he was little, so he had no problem with the language, except that people often said he spoke like an American. They thought he sounded sweet. Mike had been horrified at having to move back to Sweden and then having the way he talked corrected the whole time.
The children of his own age that he met on the beach the first evening were of a different opinion. They thought he sounded like Columbo and McCloud. And Mike knew instantly that that was no bad thing.
Having noticed the strangely overdressed boy wandering about, the other children had finally approached him and asked if he wanted to play football. Half an hour later, when he’d played up a sweat and peeled off his thick sweater, his new friends discovered his watch, which had no hands, but showed the time in square numbers
