She hadn’t thought of him for a long time, or indeed of anything that belonged to that time back then. And now she was sitting there thinking about it. She thought about that last hug in the Lukuskele prison ward when she was ten years old and he had looked so small and coughed so his whole body rattled and Mum had given him a tissue, which filled with blood clots before he scrunched it up and put it in one of the big bins in the corridor.
It was the last time, but she hadn’t realised it then. Perhaps she still hadn’t taken it in.
Lydia took a deep breath.
She shook off the feeling of sadness, smiled at the large mirror in the hall. It was still early in the morning.
A knock on the door. She still had the hairbrush in her hand. How long had she been standing there? She glanced in the mirror again, her head a little to the side. Another smile, she wanted to look good. She was wearing the black dress; the dark material contrasted with her pale skin. She looked at her body. It was still a young woman’s. She hadn’t changed much since she came here, not on the outside.
Another knock, harder this time. She should answer it. She put the hairbrush on the shelf by the mirror and took a few steps towards the door.
Her name was Lydia Grajauskas and she used to sing her name; she sang it now to the tune of a children’s song she remembered from school in Klaipeda. The chorus had three repeated lines and she sang Lydia Grajauskas for each line. She had always done this when she felt nervous.
Lydia Grajauskas
Lydia Grajauskas
Lydia Grajauskas
She stopped singing when she reached the door. He was there on the other side. If she put her ear to the door, she could quickly pick up the sound of his breathing. She knew its rhythm so well. It was him. They had met often, was it eight or maybe nine times? His smell was special. She could sense it already, the smell of him, like one of her dad’s workmates from that filthy room with the big sofa where she had hidden when she was a girl. Almost like them, a mixture of tobacco and aftershave and sweat that seeped through the closely woven material of his jacket.
He knocked for the third time.
She let the door swing open. There he was. Dark suit, light blue shirt, gold tiepin. His fair hair was short and he was suntanned. It had been raining steadily since the middle of May, but he still had a late-summer glow, as he always did. She smiled at him, the same smile as at the mirror a moment earlier; she knew he liked her to smile.
They didn’t touch each other.
Not yet.
He came in from the stairs, into the flat. She looked quickly at the hallstand and nodded at one of the coat hangers, as if to say let me take your jacket and hang it up for you. He shook his head. She guessed he was about ten years older than herself, maybe thirty-something, but it was only a guess.
She felt like singing again.
Lydia Grajauskas. Lydia Grajauskas. Lydia Grajauskas.
He raised his hand, as he always did, touched her black dress lightly, slowly sliding his fingers along the shoulder straps, across her breasts, always on top of the material.
She kept very still.
His hand traced a wide circle over one breast, then towards the other. She hardly breathed. Her chest had to be still, she must smile, must stay still and smile.
She kept smiling when he spat.
They were standing close together then; it was more like he let it go rather than spat. He didn’t usually spit in her face, instead the spittle landed in front of her feet in their high-heeled black shoes.
He thought that she was too slow.
He pointed.
One straight finger, pointing down.
Lydia knelt, still smiling – she knew he liked that. Sometimes he smiled as well. Her knees clicked a little as she pressed her legs together and went down on all fours, her face looking ahead. She asked him to forgive her. That was what he wanted. He had learnt how to say it in Russian and insisted on her getting it right, making sure she used the right words. She lowered herself in stages by bending her arms until she was almost folded double and her nose touched the floor. It was cold against her tongue as she licked the gob into her mouth, swallowed it.
Then she got up, like he wanted her to, closed her eyes and, as usual, tried to guess which cheek.
Right, probably the right one this time.
Left.
He hit her with the flat of his hand, which covered her whole cheek. It didn’t hurt that much. His arm came right round and the slap left a pink mark, but mostly it just burned. It stung only if you wanted it to sting.
He pointed again.
Lydia knew what she had to do, so the pointing wasn’t necessary, but he did it anyway, just waved his finger in her direction, wanted her to walk into the bedroom, to stand in front of the red bedspread. She went in front of him. Her movements had to be slow, and as she walked she had to absently stroke her bottom and breathe heavily. That was what he wanted. She could feel his eyes on her back, burning, his eyes already abusing her body.
She stopped by the bed.
She undid the dress, three buttons at the back, rolled it down over her hips and let it fall to the floor.
Her bra and panties were black lace, just as he wanted and he had brought them personally, making her promise to use them only for him. Only him.
The moment he lay down on top of her, she no longer had a body.
That was what she did. It was what she always did.
She thought of home, about the past and all the things she missed and had missed every single day since she came here.
She was not there, she had absented herself. Here she was just a face with no body. She had no neck, no breasts, no crotch, no legs.
So when he was rough, when he forced himself into her from behind, when her anus was bleeding, it wasn’t happening to her. She was elsewhere, having left only her head there, singing Lydia Grajauskas to a tune she had learnt long ago.
It was raining as he drove into the empty car park.
It was the kind of summer when people held their breath when they woke up and crept over to the bedroom window, hoping that today, today the sun would be beating against the slats of the venetian blinds. It was the kind of summer when instead the rain played freely outside. Every morning weary eyes would give up hope as they scanned the greyness, while the mind registered the tapping on the window pane.
Ewert Grens sighed. He parked the car, turned the engine off, but stayed in the driver’s seat until it was impossible to see out and the raindrops were a steady flow that obscured everything. He couldn’t be bothered to move. He didn’t want to. Unease crawled all over him; reluctance tugged at whatever there was to catch. Another week had passed and he had almost forgotten about her.
He was breathing heavily.
He would never truly forget.
He lived with her still, every day, practically every hour, twenty-five years on. Nothing helped, no fucking hope.
The rain eased off, allowing him a glimpse of the large red-brick villa from the seventies. The garden was lovely, almost too carefully tended. He liked the apple trees best, six of them, which had just shed their white flowers.
He hated that house.
He relaxed his grip on the wheel, opened the car door and climbed out. Large puddles had formed on the uneven tarmac and he zigzagged between them, but the wet still soaked through the soles of his shoes before he was halfway there. As he walked, he tried to shake off the feeling that life ended a little with every step he took towards the entrance.
The whole place smelt of old people. He came here every Monday morning, but had never got used to the smell. The people who lived here in their wheelchairs or behind their Zimmer frames were not all old. He had no idea what caused the smell.
‘She’s sitting in her room.’
‘Thanks.’
‘She knows you’re coming.’
She didn’t have the faintest idea that he was coming.
He nodded at the young care assistant, who had come to recognise him and was just trying to be friendly, but would never know how much it hurt.
He walked past the Smiler, a man of about his own age who usually sat in the lobby, waving cheerily as people came and went; then there was Margareta, who screamed if you didn’t pay attention to her and stop to ask how she was. Every Monday morning, there they were, part of a photograph that didn’t need to be taken. He wondered whether, if they were not lined up and waiting one morning, he would miss them, or whether he would be relieved at not having to deal with the predictability of it all.
He paused. A quiet moment outside her room.
Some nights he would wake, shaken and covered in sweat, because he had clearly heard her say Welcome when he came, she had taken his hand in hers, happy to hold on to someone who loved her. He thought about it, about his recurring dream and it gave him the courage to open the door, as he always did, and enter her space, a small room with a window overlooking the car park.
‘Hello, Anni.’
She was sitting in the middle of the room, the wheelchair facing the door. She looked at him, her eyes showing nothing remotely like recognition or even a response. He went to her, put his hand against her cold cheek, talked to her.
‘Hi, Anni. It’s me. Ewert.’
She laughed. Inappropriate and too loud as always, a child’s laughter.
‘Do you know who I am today?’
Another laugh, a sudden loud noise. He pulled over the chair that was standing by the desk she never used, and sat down next to her. He took her hand, held it.
They had made her look nice.
Her fair hair was combed, held back with a slide on each side. A blue dress that he hadn’t seen for a while, that smelt newly washed.
It always struck him how bafflingly unchanged she really was, how the twenty-five years, wheelchair-bound years in the land of the unaware, had left so few traces. He had gained twenty kilos, lost a lot of hair, knew how furrowed his face had become. She was unmarked, as if you were allowed a more carefree spirit that kept you young to make up for not being able to participate in real life.
She tried to say something as she looked at him, making her usual gurgling baby noises, which always made him feel that she was trying to reach him. He squeezed her hand and swallowed whatever it was that was hurting his throat.
‘He’s being released tomorrow,’ he told her.
She mumbled and drooled and he pulled out his hankie to wipe away the saliva dribbling down her chin.
‘Anni, do you understand? From tomorrow, he’ll be out. He’ll be free, littering the streets again.’
Her room looked just the same as when she had moved in. He had picked out which pieces of furniture she should have from home and positioned them; he was the only one who knew why it was important for her to sleep with her head to the window.
Already on the first night she had looked at peace.
He had carried her in, put her in the bed and tucked the covers round her slender body. Her sleep had been deep and he had left her in the morning when she woke up. Leaving the car there he had walked all the way to police headquarters in Kungsholmen. It was afternoon by the time he had arrived.
‘I’ll get him this time.’
Her eyes rested on him, as if she were listening. He knew this was an illusion, but because it looked right, he sometimes pretended they were having a talk the way they used to.
Her eyes, were they expectant or just empty?
If only I had managed to stop.
If only that bastard hadn’t pulled you out. And if only your head hadn’t been softer than the wheel.
Ewert Grens bent over her, his forehead touching hers. He kissed her cheek.
‘I miss you.’
The man in the dark suit with the gold tiepin, who usually spat on the floor in front of her feet, had just left. It hadn’t helped this time to think of Klaipeda and have no body, only a head. She had felt him inside her; it happened sometimes that she couldn’t shut out the pain when someone thrust themselves into her and ordered her to move at the same time.
Lydia wondered if it was his smell.
The smell she recognised reminded her of the men who sat with her dad in that dirty room full of weapons. She wondered if it was a good thing that she recognised it, if that meant that she was still somehow connected to what had been back then and which she longed for so much, or if it was just breaking down even more, that everything she could have had, and that was now so far away, was being forced deeper into her.
He didn’t speak afterwards. He had looked at her, pointed, one last time – that was all. He didn’t even turn round when he left.
Lydia laughed.
If there had been anything between her legs, she would have been aggrieved that his bodily fluids had filled it and she would have felt him inside her even more. But she hadn’t. She was just a face.
She laughed as she lathered one part of her body after another with the white bar of soap until her skin was red; she rubbed hard, pressing the soap against her neck, shoulders, over her breasts, her vagina, her thighs, feet.
The suffocating shame.
She washed it away. His hands, his breath, his smell. The water was almost painfully hot, but the shame was like some horrible membrane that would not come off.
She sat down on the floor of the shower cubicle and began to sing the chorus of the children’s song from Klaipeda.
Lydia Grajauskas.
Lydia Grajauskas.
Lydia Grajauskas.
She loved that song. It had been theirs, hers and Vladi’s. They had sung it together loudly every morning as they walked to school through the blocks of flats in the housing estate, a syllable for each step. They sang their names loudly, over and over again.
‘Stop singing!’
Dimitri shouted at her from the hall, his mouth close to the bathroom door. She carried on. He banged the wall, shouted again for her to get out of there fucking pronto. She stayed where she was, sitting on the wet floor, but stopped singing, her voice barely carrying through the door.
‘Who is coming next?’
‘You owe me money, you bloody whore!’
‘I want to know who’s coming.’
‘Clean up your cunt! New customer.’
Lydia heard real anger in his voice now. She got up, dried her wet body and stood in front of the mirror that hung above the sink, put on her red lipstick, put on the nearly cream underwear in a velvet-like material that Dimitri had handed to her that morning, sent to her in advance by the customer.
Four Rohypnol and one Valium. She swallowed, smiled at her reflection and washed the tablets down with half a glass of vodka.
She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hall. The next customer, the second of the day – a new one, someone she’d never seen before – was already waiting on the landing. Dimitri was glaring at her from the kitchen, watching as she passed him, the last few steps before opening the front door.
Before opening it she made him knock once more.
Hilding Oldéus gave the wound on his nose a good hard scratch.
The sore on his nostril wouldn’t heal. It was the heroin: whenever he shot up, it itched and scratched. He’d had a sore there for years now. It was like it was burning; he had to rub, rub, his finger digging deeper, pulling at the skin.
He looked around.
A crap room at the welfare office. He hated it, but he always came back, as soon as he got out there he was, ready to smile for a handout. It had taken him one week this time. He’d been brown-nosing the screws at Aspsås prison. Said ‘Cheerio’ to Jochum. He’d been kissing the big boy’s arse these last few months; he needed someone to hide behind, and Jochum was built like a brick shithouse. None of the lads even thought of messing with him as long as he hung out with Lang. And Jochum had said ‘see you’ back. He only had one bleeding week left. (Hilding suddenly realised he’d be out tomorrow. A week had passed: fuck, it was tomorrow.) They’d probably never meet up again outside. Jochum had protected him for a while, but he didn’t do drugs and people who didn’t just sort of disappeared, went somewhere else.
A couple of gyppo birds and a fucking Finn and two bloody pensioners. What the fuck did they want?
Hilding scratched the sore on his nose again. They were just taking up time, a crowd of losers getting in his way.
It was one of those days, a day when he was all sensitive. He didn’t want to feel anything, mustn’t, and then one of the days from hell hit him, when he knew, felt, felt, felt. He needed a hit badly, had to get rid of this crappy feeling. Had to get some fucking kit. But all these bloody awful people were sitting there, in this crappy room, holding him back. It was his turn now, fuck’s sake, it was his turn.
‘Yes. Who’s next?’
That fat old cow opened her office door again.
He hurried over to her, his jerky movements propelling his thin body forward. Everyone could see that here was another young person, not even thirty yet, whose childish face somehow blended in with his punctured junkie skin. He was heading somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t life.
Hilding scratched his nose again and realised that he was sweating. It was June, but raining non-fucking-stop, so he was wearing a long raincoat. It didn’t let any air in or out. He should take it off, but couldn’t be arsed to. He sat down on the visitor’s chair in front of the bare desk and empty bookshelves. A nervous glance round the office. No one else there, no other fucker. There were normally two of them.
Klara Stenung settled on her side of the desk. Klara was twenty-eight, the same age as the heroin addict facing her. She had come across him before, knew who he was and where he was going. She knew the type; she’d worked as a social worker’s assistant in the suburbs for two years, and then at the Katarina-Sofia office here in the city for three years. Thin, stressed out, noisy, just out of prison. They came and went, disappeared for ten months at a time inside, but always reappeared.
She stood up and reached across the desk. He looked at her hand. He looked at it, considered spitting in it, but then took it in a flaccid shake.
‘I need some cash.’
Her eyes met his; she didn’t say anything, just waited for more. He was on her books, filed away. She knew everything about him. Oldéus was just like the rest. No father, not much of a mother, a couple of older sisters who had done what they could. He was very bright, very confused, very lost. Alcohol at thirteen, cannabis at fifteen. By now, he was on the fast track. Smoked heroin, then started to inject. First prison sentence at seventeen. Now, at twenty-eight, he had been inside ten times in eleven years, mostly for burglary and a couple of times for dealing in stolen goods. He was a petty criminal, the kind who had waved a bread knife at the assistant in the late-night corner store and then hung around outside the shop for the first dealer to come along, bought some kit and mainlined in the nearest doorway and couldn’t understand it when someone in the shop pointed him out to the police when they turned up. He still didn’t get it when the police bundled him into the back seat of a patrol car and sped off towards the station.
‘You know the answer. No money.’
He twitched nervously in his chair, rocking backwards and forwards, nearly losing his balance.
‘But I’m just out. For fuck’s sake!’
She looked at him. He shouted, he scratched his nose and then the sore started to bleed.
‘I’m sorry. You’re not registered. As unemployed, or as a job-seeker.’
He got up.
‘You fat cunt! I’m fucking skint. Fuck’s sake. I’m hungry!’
‘I understand that you need money for food. But you aren’t registered so I can’t give you any money.’
The blood dripped from his nose on to the floor. It was flowing fast and the yellow lino was soon covered in red. He hurled abuse, of course, threatened her as well, but never any more, it never got worse than that. He was bleeding, but didn’t fight; he didn’t have it in him and she knew it. It didn’t even occur to her to call for support.
He slammed his fist on the top of the bookshelf.
‘I don’t give a fuck about your fucking rules!’
‘Whatever you say. You still won’t get any money. All I can do for you is give you two days’ worth of food vouchers.’
A lorry rumbled past outside the window, the sound pushing its way up between the solid buildings that lined the narrow street. Hilding didn’t hear it. In fact, he heard absolutely nothing. The stupid old slag in front of him had been banging on about food vouchers. And since when could you get fucking kit with food vouchers? He stared across the desk at the fat woman, glaring at her big droopy tits and fucking pathetic necklace of big round wooden beads. He burst out laughing, then shouted and knocked over the chair, kicked it into the wall.
‘I don’t give a toss about your fucking tickets! I’ll have to find the fucking cash myself then! Fucking cunt!’
He almost ran through the door, through the crappy waiting room, past the Finn and the two gypsy slags and the old buggers. They all looked up at him, didn’t speak, sat in silence, hunched up. He shouted at them, fucking losers, and something else that it was impossible to make out in passing, his shrieking voice breaking up and mixing with the blood dripping from his nose, which marked a trail down the stairs, out through the main door and all the way along Östgöta Street, towards Skanstull.
Windy, rarely above seventy degrees except the odd morning with fleeting sunshine, otherwise the rain fell steadily on the rooftops and barbecue covers.
Ewert Grens had held her hand for as long as she let him, but after a while she became restless, the way she did when she had laughed enough and her babbling was done and the saliva no longer dribbled down her chin. So he had hugged her, kissed her forehead and said he’d be back in a week, always in a week’s time.
If only you had managed to hold on just a bit longer.
Then he got into the car and drove back across Lidingö Bridge on his way to see Bengt Nordwall, who now lived in Eriksberg, some twenty-odd kilometres south of the city. Ewert was driving far too fast and suddenly saw himself, as he often did, behind the wheel of another kind of car. The police van he had been in charge of twenty-five years ago.
He had spotted Lang on the pavement, just ahead of the van; he knew that he was wanted, so he did what they had done so many times before, drove up alongside the running man while Bengt pulled the door back and Anni, who was sitting nearest the door, grabbed hold of Lang and shouted that he was under arrest, as she was supposed to do.
She was sitting in that seat, nearest the door.
That was why Jochum Lang had been able to drag her out.
Ewert blinked and swung off the road for a moment, away from the queue of stressed morning commuters. He switched off the engine and sat very still until the pictures faded from his mind. In recent years, the same thing happened every time he visited her, the memory pounding inside his head, making it hard to breathe. He stayed where he was for a while, ignoring the idiots with their horns, just waited until he was ready.
A quarter of an hour later he pulled up outside his friend’s home.
They met in the narrow suburban street, stood together and got wet while staring up at the sky.
Neither of them smiled very often; it could be their age, or maybe they had always been the kind who rarely smile. But the impenetrable greyness and the wind and the pouring rain were too much; you had to smile because there was nothing else you could do.
‘What do you think about all this, then?’
‘Think? That I can’t be bothered to let it get to me any more.’
They both shrugged and sat down on the rain-sodden cushions on the garden sofa.
Their friendship had begun thirty-two years earlier. They had been young back then, and the years had passed quickly; they had less than half of their lives left.
Ewert looked at his old friend. The only one he had really, the only person he talked to outside work, the only one he could bear to be with.
Bengt was still in good shape, slim, lots of hair. They were roughly the same age, but Bengt looked much younger. Maybe that was the effect of having young children. They forced you to stay young, as it were.
Ewert had no children and he had no hair and his body had grown heavy. He had a limp, while Bengt walked with a light step. They were both policemen and shared past and present in the Stockholm city force. Both had been given a finite gift of time, but Ewert had used up his faster.
Bengt let out an exasperated sigh.
‘It’s so bloody wet. I can’t even get the kids out of the house any more.’
Ewert was never sure why the family asked him over for breakfast, whether it was because they thought it would be nice or whether it was out of duty. Maybe they felt sorry for him, so lonely, so naked outside the four walls of the police headquarters. Whenever they asked, he went and never regretted it, but still he could not help wondering.
‘She seemed well today. Sent her regards. At least, I’m sure she would have.’
‘And what about you, Ewert? Are you all right?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know. It’s maybe just that you look . . . heavier these days. No, more burdened. Especially when you talk about Anni.’
Ewert heard him say this, but didn’t reply. He looked around and observed with disinterest the suburban life that he could not understand. The small villa was actually quite nice. Very normal. Brick walls, a bit of lawn, a bunch of neatly trimmed shrubs. Sun-bleached plastic toys scattered here and there. If it hadn’t been raining, the two children would’ve been running about in the garden, playing whatever kids of that age played. Bengt had had children rather late in life, when he was nearly fifty. Lena, who was twenty years his junior, had given him another chance. Ewert had no idea what a pretty, clever young woman like Lena saw in a middle-aged policeman, but he was pleased for Bengt, of course, even if he didn’t understand.
Their clothes were soaking and started to hang heavily. They didn’t notice any more and forgot about the weather.
Ewert leaned forward.
‘What is it?’
‘Jochum Lang gets out today.’
Bengt shook his head. ‘Ewert, you’re going to have to let go of that one day.’
‘Easy for you to say. You weren’t driving.’
‘And I wasn’t in love with her, you mean. Never mind, you must let go. Leave the past behind you, Ewert. It was twenty-five years ago.’
He had turned to look back.
He had seen her reach out and grab the fleeing body.
He sighed, rubbed his wet scalp, felt the old anger rise inside him.
Jochum reacted to the hand holding him back and half turned, still running. He grabbed her and pulled hard, and Bengt, who was sitting next to her, had not been able to hang on to her.
He sighed and rubbed his head again.
In that moment, as she fell and the rear wheel bumped over her head, he had realised the rest of their life together was no more.
Lang had laughed as he ran away. And he laughed when he was later sentenced to a few lousy months for grievous bodily harm.
Ewert hated him.
Bengt undid the top button of his shirt and tried to make eye contact with his old friend.
‘Ewert?’
‘Yes?’
‘Lost you for a moment, there.’
Ewert stared at the sodden lawn, at the tulips drooping in the neat border.
He felt tired.
‘I’ll nail that bastard.’
Bengt put his arm round his shoulder. Ewert pulled back. He wasn’t used to it.
It wasn’t long since he had held her hand; she had laughed like a child. Her hand had been cool, limp. Absent. And he remembered what it had once been like, warm and firm and very much present.
‘From today he’ll be walking the streets. Don’t you understand? Lang is walking, laughing.’
‘But Ewert, whose fault was it? Was it Lang’s? Or mine? I couldn’t hold on to her. Maybe it’s me you should hate. Maybe it’s me you should nail.’
The wind was back, catching the rain and whipping it into their faces. The terrace door opened behind them. A woman came out holding an umbrella and smiling, her long hair tied back.
‘What are you two doing there? You’re crazy!’
They turned round and Bengt smiled back.
‘Once you’re wet, it doesn’t matter any more.’
‘Well, I want you indoors. Breakfast time.’
‘What, now?’
‘Now, Bengt. The kids are hungry.’
They got up. Their clothes stuck to their skin.
Ewert looked up at the sky again and it was just as grey as before.
It was still only morning; she could hear the birds outside singing to each other, as they always did. Lydia sat on the edge of the bed and listened. It was so nice; they sang just like the birds around the ugly concrete blocks of flats in Klaipeda. She didn’t know why, but she had woken several times last night, always after the same dream about her and her mum’s trip to Vilnius and the Lukuskele prison, so many years ago.
In the dream her father was standing in the dark corridor of the tuberculosis ward, waving goodbye to her as she walked away, past the room called the HIV ward with its fifteen beds occupied by slowly decaying inmates. Then, from a distance, she turned to look back at him and saw him collapse. She stood still for a moment. When he didn’t get up from the flagged floor she ran to him as fast as she could, dragged and pulled at him until he was upright again, coughing and emptying himself of the blood and yellow stuff he had to get rid of. The whole scene was actually a rerun of something that had really happened, but it was her mum who had been crying and screaming until some of the ward orderlies turned up to take Dad away. The dream recurred every time she fell asleep last night and she had never dreamt it before.
Lydia sighed deeply and shifted position a little. She had to sit further out on the edge of the bed to part her thighs just as widely and slowly as the man in front of her demanded.
He was sitting about a metre away. A middle-aged man, in his forties, the age her father would have been now.
He was her third customer today.
He had come to see her punctually every Monday morning for nearly a year. He always knocked on the door just as the church bells started pealing outside her locked window.
He didn’t spit. He didn’t want to force himself inside her. She didn’t have to do anything with his sexual organ. She didn’t even know what he smelt like.
He was one of those who hugged her when she opened the door, but then didn’t touch her again. All he wanted was to sit with his cock in one hand and wave at her with the other to get undressed and do other things.
He wanted her to thrust her crotch backwards and forwards while he squeezed his cock harder and harder. He wanted her to bark like a dog he once had. In the meantime, he kept squeezing his dick, which would go more and more pink until he fell back into the armchair and let his stuff flow over the black leatherette.
By twenty past nine he was done. When the bells rang out for half past he would be gone. Lydia stayed where she was, sitting on the edge of the bed and listening to the birdsong. She could hear it again.
The blood was dripping from the raw sore on his nostril, down on to the Östgöta Street pavement. Hilding was almost running. He was in pretty poor shape despite having been inside. He had never been one of those guys who worked off their hatred, or built up respect, in the prison gym, but now he was jogging along, raging at the fucking bitch at the Katarina-Sofia social and panicking, desperate for heroin, and was therefore out of breath when he arrived at the Skanstull metro station on the ring road.
Sod their fucking handouts. He would just have to get the money himself.
‘Hey, you!’
Hilding prodded one of the kids standing just in front of him on the platform. She was twelve or thirteen, that sort of age. She didn’t respond and he poked at her again. She turned away deliberately to look in the direction of the train they were waiting for.
‘Hey, I’m talking to you.’
He’d seen her mobile phone. He reached out for it, took a step forwards, grabbed it from her hand and dialled the number, despite her protests, then waited for the line to connect.
‘It’s me, sis. Hilding.’
She said nothing, so he continued.
‘Listen, sis. You got to lend me some.’
She sighed, then replied. ‘You won’t get any money from me.’
‘Sis, I need food. Clothes. That sort of stuff. That’s all.’
‘Try Social Services.’
He glared angrily at the phone, drew a deep breath and shouted into what he figured was the speaking end.
‘Fuck’s sake! I’ll have to sort it out myself then. Whatever, it’s your fault!’
She answered in the same tone of voice as before. ‘No, it’s your choice, Hilding. And your problem, not mine.’
She hung up. Hilding shouted abuse into the electronic void. He threw the bloodstained phone on to the platform. The fucking kid was still standing there crying when the train pulled in and he got on.
He stood in front of the doors and kept scratching at the red, dripping wound on his nose. His pale, emaciated face was spotted with blood and crusty with drying sweat. Some kind of smell hung around him.
At the Central Station he took the up-escalator. It was hardly raining at all when he emerged from the underground. Maybe it hadn’t rained all morning. He looked around; he was still sweating inside his buttoned raincoat, his back soaking. He crossed Klaraberg Street and the pavement on the other side, then slipped in between the houses near the Ferlin statue and through the gate to St Klara Cemetery.
Empty, just as empty as he had hoped.
On the grass, a bit away, some guy who was off his head, but nobody else.
He walked past the large Bellman statue, to the bench behind it, under a tree he thought might be an elm.
He took the weight off his legs, humming to himself. Felt with his hand inside the right coat pocket. There it was. Bag full of washing powder. He sifted it between his fingers.
He put his other hand in the left pocket and pulled out the pack of twenty-five small plastic stamp envelopes, eight by six centimetres, each containing a little amphetamine, which was barely enough to cover the bottom. Hilding topped up all the bags with washing powder.
He needed cash and would have it soon.
It was evening. Her working day was at an end. No more customers.
Lydia walked slowly through the flat, which was pleasantly dark, lit only by a few table lamps. It was quite big, with four rooms. Probably the largest she’d been in since she came here.
She stopped in the hall.
She had no idea why she kept looking for something hidden in the wallpaper pattern, somewhere behind the fine stippling of lines filling the barren surfaces between floor and ceiling. She often stood there, forgetting everything else; she realised that the wallpaper reminded her of something she had seen on another wall, in another room, long ago.
Lydia remembered that wall and that room very well.
The security police had stormed in and her dad and the other men in the room were pushed up against the wall, and voices were shouting things like Zatknis, zatknis! Then a strange silence.
She had known that her dad had been in prison once before. He had put up a Lithuanian flag on the wall at home and was sentenced to five years in Kaunas prison for it. At the time she was too little to understand. She had shaken her head. It was just a flag. She still couldn’t understand. Of course they hadn’t given him back his army job afterwards. Once, she remembered it well, when the vodka was finished and his cheeks were flushed and they were all in the room with the stippled wallpaper, surrounded by weapons that were about to be sold, he had noisily demanded explanations, shouted out: ‘What choice did I have? When my children were screaming with hunger and the state wouldn’t help, what the hell was I supposed to do?’
Lydia stayed in the hall. She liked evenings, the silence and deepening darkness that slowly wrapped around you and brought peace. She let her eyes follow the little lines upwards and had to crane her neck; the ceiling was high, as it was an old flat. She remembered times when she had worked alone in much smaller flats, but usually there were two of them, giving the men who knocked on the door a choice of girls to paw.
Every day she had to have twelve customers. Sometimes there were more, but never fewer, because then Dimitri would beat her up or rape her from behind, again and again, to make up for the missing gigs. Always up the arse.
She had her own ritual. Every evening.
She showered. The too-hot water washed away their hands. She took her tablets, four Rohypnol and one Valium, washed down with a little vodka. She put on large, baggy clothes that hung on her body, so she had no curves, no one could see, no one could touch her. Even so, sometimes the aching pain down there couldn’t be silenced.
Tonight she felt jabs of pain and knew why. There had been a couple of new customers and they were always a bit too harsh. She rarely complained; she understood now how important it was that they came back.
Lydia got bored with the lines on the wall and turned to look at the front door. It was ages since she had been outside. How long was it? She couldn’t say for sure, but she thought maybe four months. She had thought about it, breaking the kitchen window; you couldn’t open it, or any of the others. She had thought about smashing the glass and jumping. The flat was on the fifth floor, though. Looking down scared her too much; she couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to fall through the air towards the ground. She went to the door, touched it, sensing the cold, hard surface of the steel, closed her eyes and stood with her hand over the red light, breathing deeply and cursing herself for not understanding the electronic lock. She had tried to see what Dimitri did, but he knew she was spying and always made a point of standing in the way.
She left the hall, walked through the unfurnished room that was inexplicably known as the sitting room, past her own room with the large bed she despised but had to sleep in.
She walked to the end of the corridor, to Alena’s room. The door was closed, but Lydia knew that Alena was finished for the day and had showered and that she was alone.
She knocked.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s me.’
‘I’m trying to sleep.’
‘I know, but . . . can I come in?’
Silence, just for a few seconds. Lydia waited and then Alena made up her mind.
‘Of course you can. Come in.’
Alena was lying naked on the unmade bed. Her skin was darker than Lydia’s and her hair was still wet. If she left it like that it would be hard to brush tomorrow. At the end of the day Alena would often lie like this, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Janoz, that she had never told him she was going, that the years had passed, that she could still feel his arms and longed to be held again; it would only be for a few months, then she would come back to him, to Janoz, then they’d get married, later.
Lydia stood still. She looked at Alena’s nakedness and thought about her own body, the one she had to hide in baggy clothing afterwards – she knew that was what she was doing, hiding. She looked and she compared and she wondered how Alena could bear to lie in the same bed without clothes on, and she realised she was looking at her opposite, someone who somehow let things linger, who didn’t hide it, who almost clung to it.
Alena pointed at the bed, the side that was empty.
‘Sit down.’
The room was just like hers – same bed, same set of shelves and nothing else. She sat down on the rumpled sheets. Where someone else had just been. For a while Lydia stayed inside the red wallpaper, watching its swirling little velvety flowers. Then she reached out for Alena’s hand, squeezed it and spoke in a near whisper.
‘How are you?’
‘You know . . . as usual.’
‘Just the same?’
‘Yes.’
They had met on the boat, so they had known each other for more than three years. Back then, they had laughed together. They were on their way. The frothing white water in their wake. Neither of them had ever been at sea before.
Lydia pulled her friend’s hand closer, still holding it tight, caressing it, interlocking her own fingers with her friend’s.
‘I know. I know.’
Alena lay very still. Her eyes were closed.
Her body wasn’t bruised, not like Lydia’s, at least not in the same way.
Lydia lay down beside her, and in the shared silence their minds wandered, Alena’s thoughts drifting back to Janoz, and Lydia’s back to Lukuskele prison, to the shaven-headed men who coughed their lives away in the shabby prison hospital.
Then suddenly Alena sat up, pushed a pillow between the small of her back and the wall and pointed at the evening paper on the floor.
‘Look at that, Lydia.’
She let go of Alena’s hand, bent down and picked it up. She didn’t ask how Alena had got hold of a newspaper. She realised it was from one of the men who had been there today, one of the ones who took things with them, wanted something extra and got it. Lydia didn’t have many customers who gave her things. She wanted money. Cash was all Dimitri cared for, and she liked cheating him of it. Anyone who wanted extras had to pay, a hundred kronor each time.
‘Open it, look at page seven.’
The customers were charged five hundred kronor and she knew what five hundred times twelve per day came to. Dimitri took nearly everything; they were only allowed to keep two hundred and fifty. All the rest was taken from them for food and their room and to repay their debt. In the beginning she had said she wanted more money, but then Dimitri had sodomised her over and over, until she promised never to ask again. It was then that she had decided to keep an extra hundred when she could. Do it her own way, more for the sake of cheating Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp than for the money itself.
Some men wanted to beat her.
She let them. They paid an extra hundred and she took the blows. Most of them didn’t hit her that hard; it was their way to get in the mood before sex. She took six hundred, gave Dimitri his five and kept her mouth shut. This had been going on for quite a while. She had saved quite a bit and Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp was none the wiser.
Lydia didn’t speak Swedish and she certainly couldn’t read it. Whatever it said in the paper was lost on her, the bold headline as much as the small print. But she saw the picture. Alena held the paper up so she could see and her eyes stopped at the picture. Suddenly she screamed, burst into tears, ran from the room, then came back and stood there staring at the paper, hating it.
‘The swine!’
She threw herself on the bed, close to Alena’s nakedness, crying now more than screaming.
‘The stinking, rotten swine!’
Alena waited. There was no point in talking; she had to let Lydia cry, as she herself had cried not long before.
She held her friend tight.
‘I’ll read it for you.’ Alena knew Swedish quite well. Lydia couldn’t understand how she could bear to learn the language.
She and Alena had been in this country for just as long as each other and met just as many men, but that wasn’t the point. Lydia had decided to shut it out, never to listen, never to learn the language in which she was raped.
‘Do you want me to read?’
Lydia did not want her to. Didn’t. Didn’t.
‘Yes.’
She huddled closer to Alena’s naked skin, borrowing her warmth. She was always so warm. Lydia felt frozen most of the time.
The picture was dull. It showed a middle-aged man leaning against a wall. He was tall and slim, with blond, smooth hair and a moustache. He looked pleased with himself, like someone who has just been praised. Pointing to him, Alena read out the headline, first in Swedish and then in Russian. Lydia lay still, listening, not daring to move. The article was badly written, in a rush, a drama that had been resolved early that morning, just before the paper went to print. The man leaning against the wall was a policeman who had managed to get a small-time crook, who had in a panic taken five people hostage and held them locked up in a bank vault, to enter negotiations. In the end, the hostage-taker had been talked round by the policeman and all his captives were freed.
It wasn’t a very exciting story. Routine police work, see page seven. Tomorrow, another page, another policeman.
But he was smiling. The policeman in the picture was smiling, and Lydia cried with hate.
The Plain was packed with them, speed freaks who couldn’t get enough. Needed more.
Hilding made for the stairs to Drottning Street, where he usually hung out, and stood a few steps up. Easier to spot him there. He didn’t give a toss about the pigs with their telephoto lenses. Fuck them.
She was waiting by the metro entrance. Tiny chick, smallest brownie customer he knew. No more than one metre fifty tall. She wasn’t old, not even twenty and ugly with it. Big tangled hair, a greasy sweater. She must’ve been using for three or four days and now she was going off her head. Randy as hell too; all she wanted was to shoot up and fuck and shoot up and fuck. He knew her name was Mirja and she spoke with a foreign accent that made it hard to understand what she was on about and it was fucking impossible when she was really freaked out; it was like her mouth couldn’t cope any more.
‘You got it?’
His grin was mean. ‘Got what?’
‘You know. Some.’
‘What? Fucking what?’
‘A gram?’
Christ, what a slag. Speed and shagging. Hilding straightened his back, checked out the Plain. The cops were taking no notice.
‘Crystal or ordinary sulphate?’
‘Ordinary. Three hundred.’
She started rooting inside one of her shoes, near the laces, pulled out a wad of crumpled notes and handed him three.
‘Like, just ordinary.’
Mirja had been on a bender for almost a week. She hadn’t eaten, just had to have more, more, more, needed to get away from what seemed like high-voltage circuitry inside her head, thoughts that hummed and pulled her brain this way and that, making it hurt, like high-voltage shocks.
She walked away from Hilding as fast as she could, away from the Drottning Street steps, past the statue in front of the church and into the cemetery.
She heard the people she passed talking about her. Such loud voices, and it was scary, the way they knew everything, all her secrets. They talked and talked, but soon they’d stop and go away, at least for a few minutes.
Mirja was in a hurry now, sat down on the seat nearest the gate, slipped her bag from her shoulder, took out a Coke bottle half filled with water, held it in one hand and a syringe in the other. She drew the water up into the syringe and then squirted it into the plastic bag.
She was crazy for it; she had waited for so long. She didn’t notice that the contents in the bag foamed a little.
Smiling, she drew up the solution, put the needle in place and held it still for a moment.
She had done this so many times before – the tie round the arm, find a vein, pull back blood into the syringe, shoot up.
The pain was instant.
She stood up quickly, cried out but her voice didn’t carry. She tried to pull back what she had already injected. The vein had swollen up already, an almost centimetre-high ridge running from wrist to elbow.
Then the pain passed and her skin went black, as the washing powder had corroded the blood vessel.