Erica ran a finger over the photo and felt a strong sense of melancholy in her stomach. It was so long ago. She and Alex stood naked in the garden on a warm summer day. If she remembered correctly they had been naked because they were running back and forth through the water spraying from the garden hose. What seemed a bit odd about the picture was that Alex was wearing winter mittens.

‘Why does she have mittens on? This looks like it’s in July or something.’ Julia turned an astonished face to Erica, who laughed at the memory.

‘Your sister loved those mittens and insisted on wearing them, not only all winter long but also for large parts of the summer. She was as stubborn as a mule, and nobody could convince her to put away those darn disgusting mittens.’

‘She knew what she wanted, didn’t she?’

Julia looked at the picture in the album with an almost tender expression. The next second it was gone, and she impatiently moved on to the next page.

The photos felt like relics from another lifetime for Erica. It was so long ago, and so much had happened since then. Sometimes it felt as if the childhood years with Alex were only a dream.

‘We were more like sisters than friends. We spent all our waking hours together, and we often slept over at each other’s house too. Every day we used to compare notes on what was for dinner and then we picked the house with the best food.’

‘In other words, you often ate here.’ For the first time a smile crept onto Julia’s lips.

‘Yes, say what you will about your mother, she could never have made a living on her cooking.’

One particular photo caught Erica’s eye. She touched it gently. It was an incredibly lovely photograph. Alex was sitting in the stern of Tore’s boat, laughing boisterously. Her blonde hair was flying round her face, and the silhouette of all of Fjällbacka was spread out behind her. They must have been on their way out for a day of sunshine and swimming on the skerries. There had been many such days. Her mother had not come along, as usual. She had always blamed a host of small matters she had to attend to, and chose to stay home. That’s how it always was. Erica could easily count on the fingers of one hand the excursions that had included her mother Elsy. She chuckled when she saw a picture of Anna from the same boat trip. As usual, she was playing monkey; in this picture she was hanging daringly outside the railing and making faces at the camera.

‘Your sister?’

‘Yes, my little sister Anna.’

Erica’s tone was curt, indicating that she didn’t want to discuss that subject any further. Julia got the message and kept paging through the album with her short fat fingers. Her nails were bitten to the quick. On some of her fingers she had bitten the nail so much that sores formed around the edges. Erica forced her gaze away from Julia’s wounded fingers and looked instead at the pictures flipping past in her hands.

Towards the end of the second album Alex was suddenly no longer included in the pictures. It was quite a sharp contrast. Before she was on every page; now there were no more pictures of her. Julia carefully stacked the albums on the coffee table and leaned back in the corner of the sofa with her coffee cup in her hands.

‘Would you like some fresh coffee? That must be cold by now.’

Julia looked at her cup and saw that Erica was right. ‘Yes, if there’s more I’ll take some, thanks.’

She handed over her cup to Erica, who was happy for a chance to stretch her legs a bit. The wicker sofa was lovely to look at, but after sitting on it a while both her back and her bottom were protesting. Julia’s back seemed to share this opinion, since she got up and followed Erica into the kitchen.

‘It was a nice funeral. Lots of friends for the reception at your place as well.’

Erica stood with her back to Julia and poured fresh coffee into their cups. A noncommittal murmur was the only reply she got. She decided to be a little nosy.

‘It looked as though you and Nelly Lorentz were quite well acquainted. How do you happen to know each other?’

Erica held her breath. The paper she had found in the wastebasket at Nelly’s house made her very curious about Julia’s answer.

‘Pappa worked for her.’ The reply came reluctantly from Julia. She put a finger in her mouth without even seeming to be conscious of it and began gnawing at it frantically.

‘Yes, but that must have been long before you were born,’ said Erica. She was still fishing for information.

‘I had a summer job at the cannery when I was younger,’ said Julia.

Her replies still came like pulling teeth. She stopped biting her nails only long enough to answer.

‘You looked like you were getting along well.’

‘Well, I suppose that Nelly sees something in me that nobody else does.’ Her smile was bitter and introspective. All at once Erica felt great sympathy for Julia. Life as the ugly duckling must have been hard. She said nothing, and after a while the silence forced Julia to go on.

‘We were here every summer, after all. The summer after tenth grade Nelly rang Pappa and asked if I’d like to earn a little extra and work in the office. I could hardly turn it down, so after that I worked there every summer until I started at the teachers’ college.’

Erica understood that this answer left a good deal unsaid. But it would have to do. She also understood that she wouldn’t get much more out of Julia about her relationship with Nelly. They sat down on the sofa on the veranda again and drank a few sips of coffee in silence. Both of them gazed blankly out across the ice that stretched towards the horizon.

‘It must have been hard for you when Mamma and Pappa and Alex moved away.’ It was Julia who spoke first.

‘Yes and no. We were no longer playing with each other by then, so of course it was sad, but it wasn’t as dramatic as if we’d still been best friends.’

‘What happened? Why did you stop hanging out together?’

‘If I only knew.’

Erica was astonished that the memory could still hurt so much. That she could still feel the loss of Alex so strongly. So many years had passed since then, and it was probably the rule rather than the exception that childhood best friends often slipped away from each other. Maybe it was because there had never been any natural ending and above all no explanation. They didn’t have a disagreement, Alex didn’t find a new best friend; none of the reasons why a friendship usually dies. She simply withdrew behind a wall of indifference and vanished without saying a word.

‘Did you have a fight about something?’

‘No, not that I know of. Alex just lost interest somehow. She stopped ringing me and stopped asking if we should think up something to do together. If I asked her to do something she wouldn’t say no, but I could tell that she was utterly uninterested. So finally I stopped asking.’

‘Did she have new friends she hung around with?’

Erica wondered why Julia was asking all these questions about her and Alex, but she had nothing against reviving old memories. She might be able to use them in the book.

‘I never saw her with anyone else. At school she always kept to herself. And yet…’

‘What?’ Julia leaned forward eagerly.

‘I still had a feeling that there was someone. But I could be wrong. It was just a feeling.’

Julia nodded thoughtfully. Erica had the feeling that she had merely confirmed something that Julia already knew.

‘Excuse me for asking, but why do you want to know so much about when Alex and I were kids?’

Julia avoided looking her in the eye. Her answer was evasive.

‘She was so much older than I was, and she’d already left the country by the time I was born. Besides, we were really different. I don’t think I ever really got to know her. And now it’s too late. I looked for pictures of her at home, but we have hardly any. So I thought of you.’