Free Lime's Photograph by Leif Davidsen

the kitchen and family room of our large flat, the boxes came with me. The images which froze time in a thousandth of a second were now to be found in the steel cabinets, beautifully organised.
    But not all the negatives.
    This particular one might be in my secret archive, which even Oscardidn’t know about. I had not only always taken great care of my negatives, I had also considered the best and most controversial ones to be both a life insurance and a pension, plus creating a portrait of my life. I had been in the habit, since I was young, of posting these special images to my parents. I would put the negative inside a letter addressed to myself, which I then put in an envelope and sent. They knew that they just had to look after the letter until I came home. When I dropped in during one of my irregular visits to Denmark, I opened the letters to myself and put the contents in a suitcase. There had been various suitcases over the years, increasing in size, and now my archive was a big, white, steel Samsonite case with a combination lock. Only one suitcase was allowed. That was part of the ritual. Of the myth of my own making which involved a good deal of superstition. I put the negatives in order, filed them and listed the subject matter in a black notebook. It may have been an eccentricity, but I didn’t trust centralised archives and I didn’t trust computers. I didn’t store just negatives of my famous photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy sunbathing naked and other images that had earned me a fortune. There was also a landscape that meant a lot to me, or had done once. There were the first photographs I had taken with my first Leica, or with my first camera. There was a really rather banal tourist shot from the Red Square in Moscow in 1980 alongside a little portrait of my first girlfriend taken with my old Kodak box camera. The first photographs I had developed and printed myself were in my suitcase. There were negatives from Iran, from Denmark, from my childhood and adolescence, of half-forgotten lovers and girlfriends, from my lifelong project of taking photographs in all of Hemingway’s drinking-holes, and then there were the million-dollar-negatives like the one of the “Minister and his Mistress”. There were the first photographs of Amelia and Maria Luisa just after her birth. But there were also love letters from a long life, letters from my father and mother, my firstletter to them written when I had been away on a summer holiday, a couple of school reports, a couple of essays and my clumsy attempts at writing poetry, sketches and hastily scrawled diary entries and thoughts. The odd newspaper cutting, but only a few and all from my childhood and early teens – the Kennedy killings, first John F. and later Robert; the first man on the moon. The photograph I took of the Vopo laughing on the crumbling Berlin Wall. It was more than just a suitcase. It was a safe place for nostalgia, in which I had recorded my life’s adventures, for my eyes only. My will stated that after my death the suitcase should be taken, unopened, to the public incinerator and burnt. Throughout my unsettled existence, the suitcase, which I used like a diary, had been a secure berth, somewhere in which I could store my life’s secrets and innermost thoughts. After my parents died, I had a solicitor store it and receive my post for a while, but for the past five years it had been looked after by Amelia’s father. Being a former intelligence officer, he could keep a secret and, even though we saw things very differently, I knew that he trusted me and respected me, yes, was fond of me because he could see how unconditionally I loved his only daughter and grandchild.
    I picked out the negative of one of the more pornographic shots and put it in an envelope, along with a note of the time and place, and addressed the envelope to myself before putting it into a larger envelope with a short message to Amelia’s father. The photograph of the