Sofia calms down slightly, and the young woman puts her hand on her back. What the hell am I doing? she wonders. This is beneath me.
She straightens up and takes a deep breath before looking irritably at the girl and snapping, ‘What do you mean by that? And why are you following me?’
Close up, her face looks even worse. It might seem OK in front of a camera, but in the flat, grey afternoon light her doll-like, unnatural features look grotesque. She appears at least fifteen years older than she actually is.
‘I hang out at the Clarion a lot, and I’ve seen you there a few times,’ Carolina says. ‘I know a few people who work there, and they think you’re on the game. I actually had to stop them from throwing you out.’ She attempts a smile through her make-up and surgery.
A few times? Shouldn’t go there anymore? Sofia finally realises.
Victoria.
Sofia softens slightly as she looks at Carolina Glanz.
Maybe she’s not a lost cause after all?
‘I haven’t been sleeping well recently,’ Sofia says. ‘And I’ve split up with someone and maybe I’m not quite myself.’
‘Let’s go and get some coffee,’ Carolina suggests, nodding towards the entrance to the shopping centre. Sofia presumes she means the cafe in the middle of Ringen.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘We can’t sit here, can we, it’s pouring.’
As they walk into the shopping centre Carolina Glanz tells her that she’s got a contract with a major publisher, and that for the first time in her life she feels like she’s doing something she can be proud of. They get coffee and sit down at one of the tables.
‘The book’s going to be a sensation,’ Carolina says dramatically, and Sofia marvels at the young woman’s ability to just shake herself and move on. From one thing to the next, with just one goal. To make a living from celebrity.
Selling herself in any way she can.
She can’t help agreeing with those who say it shows entrepreneurial spirit.
She thinks about herself, and her efforts to do the exact opposite. To keep her identity secret from everyone, and never reveal who she is at all costs, even to herself.
Today everything has come close to disaster.
Her thoughts are interrupted when the young woman’s mobile phone rings. After a short conversation she looks apologetically at Sofia and explains that her publisher wants to see her, so she’s got to go.
And, just as suddenly as she appeared, Carolina Glanz is gone.
Her appearance makes men and women alike stop and look round, and as she disappears she leaves a furrow of curious faces behind her, from the cafe to the exit of the shopping centre.
Sofia realises that that’s precisely what Carolina wants. Here I am. Look at me. Give me your attention, and I’ll give you all my secrets.
She decides to sit there for a while, at least until her hair has dried, and the more she thinks about Carolina Glanz, the more certain she gets.
She’s envious of the young woman.
Her cosmetic surgery acts like a costume. Hidden behind all the putty and silicon, Carolina Glanz dares to reveal everything about herself. Her costume gives her the courage to play every note on the emotional scale, from foolish vulgarity to sharp intelligence. Because Sofia doesn’t doubt that Glanz is actually an extremely intelligent, determined young woman. There’s a logic to Carolina Glanz’s behaviour, an instinctive logic that also seems to come from her heart. She knows how to show who she is.
Unlike me, Sofia thinks.
She knows that inside her there’s a permanent fancy-dress party going on, where the participants’ characteristics are so varied and diametrically opposed to one another that they can’t actually make up an entire person. No matter how odd it might sound, Carolina Glanz with her constructed exterior is more authentic and coherent than Sofia will ever be.
There isn’t even a me, she thinks.
Then the rushing sound in her head is back. A never-ending stream of voices and faces. Simultaneously inside and outside her.
She stares at the people going towards the exit, and after a while she sees their bodies moving through the shopping centre, vague, elongated streaks in different colours, like cars moving past on a motorway. But sometimes she can freeze the image and look at their faces, one after the other.
Two blonde girls are walking towards the exit of the shopping centre, each one with a dog on a lead.
They bear a striking resemblance to Hannah and Jessica.
Two people who are three people, she thinks. Or rather three fragments of one personality.
The Worker, the Analyst and the Moaning Minnie have their models in her old classmates Hannah ?stlund and Jessica Friberg. Two girls who were very similar, almost like mirror images of each other. Like a single, apathetic shadow of a person.
Victoria used those personality fragments to avoid having to do anything dull, but they were also substitutes for feelings in herself that she doesn’t like.
Thinking she knows best, or pessimism, or pettiness. Also unquestioning obedience, subservience, obsequiousness and fawning. Being just one of a flock of clever blondes. The very qualities that Victoria had seen in Hannah and Jessica.
The Worker, the Analyst and the Moaning Minnie mean nothing to her any more. She can take care of all the banal emotions and qualities that they represented, it’s all just a matter of being more mature and either abandoning or accepting the trivial parts of her nature.
Even a dog ought to be able to learn to do that.
Go home, she thinks. I have to go home.
Nowhere
ULRIKA WENDIN DOESN’T know how long she’s been tied up in the dry, warm room. The darkness knocked out her awareness of time a while back.
The silence is as oppressive as the darkness, and all she can hear are sounds inside her. Sometimes she wakes up because she can no longer feel her body, and the lack of sensory information makes her feel like she’s in a vacuum, drifting weightlessly without a sense of complete darkness and silence.
She realises that she’s got to find a way to free her arms, which are taped together behind her back, before they become useless. With a great effort she occasionally manages to raise her body enough to be able to move them and regain some degree of feeling. But the intervals are getting longer, and her room for manoeuvre is limited by the metal bars just centimetres above her chest and knees.
She leans her head back again and looks up. The strip of light is still there. It occurs to her that the light is the Milky Way, and that the galaxy contains as many stars as there are cells in a human brain. Perhaps everything in there will blur together and turn uniformly grey in the end? Is it all just an optical illusion?
Is she seeing things from inside her own mind?
Her throat stings with thirst the whole time, and she’s probably dehydrating faster because of the heat and her fits of crying.