Diana sat in front of her computer with a referral open, but she wasn’t looking at the screen; she was gazing out the window, at the forest of downy birches and willow thickets covering the slope outside the house. A lettuce-green jungle that reached all the way to the dark band of spruce trees and mountains that bulged up under a grey blanket of clouds to the north. Grey, grey, grey. The rain hurled itself in rattling showers against the glass and she felt sorry for Kiruna. When she finally got to ride the dragon, it rained.

She had been happy but not particularly surprised to suddenly one morning find a merry-go-round and a rollercoaster in the park. The day before Midsummer, the lawns in the park had been white and they had built a small snowman and crowned him with a wreath of frostbitten birch twigs, and in the girl’s wondrous world the sudden appearance of the carnival seemed like a similar phenomenon. Something that just happened. A natural kind of magic.

Merry-go-rounds were not the only thing to appear out of thin air. While the festival was on, the city teemed with returnees; it was like Christmas Day. That’s why she had opted to stay home. She hated when people came back to town. And she was tired. That was what she had told Håkan and it wasn’t an outright lie. She didn’t want to meet a horde of drunken ghosts and she was tired. As usual. Håkan claimed it was chronic, maybe one of those illnesses the evening papers were always writing about? A hidden epidemic. That only afflicted working women.

Her real reason for staying at home was something else: she had got it in her head that she would bump into Susso in the crowd. She knew it wouldn’t happen, but the premonition was so vivid and insistent that she had let it influence her decision to stay home. You go, she had said. I have to get some work done before I go on leave.

After her run-in with Gudrun in the park, she had started thinking about Susso and with these thoughts, an older image of the city had surfaced. This image seemed like an overexposure and given the nostalgic atmosphere the returnees generated, she wasn’t sure which Kiruna was waiting outside their front door. Was it present-day Kiruna, or Kiruna in 1998?

She tried to visualise Susso, but her face kept slipping away. Did she even have a picture of her?

She watched the screen. Moderate ethyl consumption. No family history of dementia. Somatically healthy. The marker blinked in the diagnosis field. Retrograde amnesia and nascent dementia, she had written. Now she typed: Something else?

Then she opened her web browser and typed:

Susso Myrén.