Hilding Oldéus had just woken up.
A couple of hours kip in the middle of the day. He looked around.
His body ached from the hard bench. Some sodding guard had been prodding him non-stop.
No food, not since the morning, when one of the cops had given him a couple of custard creams at the joke hearing. Not that it made him grass on Jochum.
He wasnt hungry now. Not randy either.
He was, like . . . nothing.
It made him laugh out loud. Two old bags stared at him
and he gave them the finger. He was nothing. Had to get more kit. Then he could carry on being nothing and shut them all out and have no feelings.
He got up. He smelt of piss, his hair was greasy and matted and the wound on his nose was coated in dried blood. He was thin and filthy and twenty-eight years old, closer to the other side than ever before.
Hilding walked slowly towards the escalator that wasnt working. When it rocked too much he clung to the black rubber railing. The left-luggage lockers were down a concrete corridor. The door was opposite the johns, where some cow demanded five kronor every time you needed to take a leak. Not fucking likely. Stood to reason you pissed in the metro tunnel instead.
Olsson was tucked away at the back as usual, somewhere between boxes 120 and 150. He was asleep. One foot was bare, no sock, no shoe. The fucker could afford shoes, no problem, but who cares about fucking shoes.
He was snoring. Hilding pulled at his arm and shook him a little.
I want some cash.
Olsson was still half asleep and stared vacantly at him.
You hear? I need cash. Now. You were going to settle last week.
Tomorrow.
Olsson wasnt his real name. Hilding had no idea what it was, but he knew it wasnt Olsson. They had been stuck in the same drug rehab place once, down in Skĺne.
Olsson, you heard. One fucking thousand, right now! Or did you take all the shit yourself?
Olsson sat up, yawned, stretched.
Hilding, lay off. I havent got any!
Hilding scratched the wound. The bastard didnt have any money. Just like that cow at the Social Services. Like his sister. Hed phoned her and begged for money again, like he had a few days ago from the metro platform. Same
again: shed stuck to the same old tune, like
Its your choice, its your problem, dont try to involve me
.
He started on the wound again, the crust came off and it bled quite a lot.
Got to get some cash, you fucking cunt. Get it?
I havent got none. Tell you what Ive got. Information, well worth a thousand.
What fucking info?
Jochum Lang is looking for you.
Hilding couldnt leave the wound alone. He sighed and tried to make out that he didnt swallow.
So what? I dont give a shit.
What does he want you for?
I dont know. Meet up? We did some time together in Aspsĺs.
Olssons cheek twitched upwards, over and over, making his eye open and close. He was caught in his junkie tic.
Worth a thousand, wasnt it?
I want my cash.
Havent got it. Olsson patted his anorak pocket. But I have got some smack. Powder.
He pulled the plastic bag from its hiding place and held it up for Hilding to see.
One gram, what about it? Take it and were even. Hilding stopped scratching.
A gram?
Fucking strong too.
Hilding reached out, waved his hands around, slapped Olsson.
Lets see.
Pure heroin. Real strong.
Ill take a quarter now. Ill just shoot up a quarter. OK?
The train to Malmö and Copenhagen was late, the loudspeakers in the ceiling filled the hall, fifteen minutes more to go, sit down on your seats, keep waiting. From somewhere else, café noises, the smell of brewing coffee and
greasy pastries sneaked about and clung to everything. They didnt notice, didnt notice the great space around them filling up with commuters hurrying to their platforms young people with rover tickets and huge, flag-covered rucksacks, families travelling at inconvenient times on the special saver tickets that the businessmen despised. All that passed them by. Jerkily they walked to the photo booth near the main entrance. Olsson stood guard; he was to stop anyone wanting to get in and make sure that Hilding didnt OD and flake out. Hilding sat on the low folding seat and drew the curtains. He was shaking and his legs showed, so Olsson moved over a little.
The spoon was in the inside pocket of the raincoat.
He filled the spoon with white heroin powder, added a few drops of citric acid on top, cooked the mixture over the flame of his cigarette lighter, then mixed it in the water and drew the solution up into his syringe.
He had lost a lot of weight. It used to be enough to take the belt into the third or fourth hole, but now he got to the seventh. He pulled it tight, and enough was left to go one more time round his arm. The leather cut deep into the flesh.
He bent forward and grabbed the end of the belt between his teeth to keep the ligature tense, looked for a vein at the elbow. Nothing there. He prodded with the tip of the needle, pushed it against stringy, tough cartilaginous bits, past them and into the big hollow that had formed inside his arm where innumerable injections had eaten away the substance of his body.
He searched about, tried, tried again, and then suddenly felt the wall of a vessel give way under the needle.
He pulled back and smiled. Usually it wasnt this easy. Last time he had had to find a track in his neck before he could shoot up.
The thin stream of blood was held suspended in the transparent fluid inside the plastic wall of the syringe for a
moment, then dispersed into a spreading plume, like the petals of a red flower opening. It was so pretty.
Hilding collapsed, unconscious, within a second or two.
He fell forward from the seat, became easily visible below the curtain. He had stopped breathing.
WEDNESDAY 5 JUNE
Lydia had just woken up.
She tried to turn over in bed. Resting on her right side meant that her back hurt a little less. She waited, alone in the large room. She had been unconscious for twelve hours, at least that was what a nurse, who spoke Russian, had told her.
Her left arm was broken. She couldnt remember everything, had no idea how he had done it. She must have lost consciousness before he did it. It was in plaster and the cast was to stay on for a couple of weeks.
She remembered him kicking her in the stomach, over and over, and screaming,
Whore, whores like you fuck when youre told
. And when he had done with kicking her, he buggered her, first pushing his organ up her anus, then his fingers.
She knew that Alena had tried to stop him, shouted at him and thumped his back, but he had pushed her into her room, made her take her clothes off and locked her in. It would be her turn next.
Lydia remembered what had happened right up to the time he started to use the whip on her. She remembered everything before that.
He struck her on the back above her backside.
I wont do your arse, your back is OK, nothing to fuck there, its useless
.
She had counted to eleven, that was as many as she could remember. The nurse had said her back showed many more marks than that.
Good morning.
The nurse was called Irena, a dark-haired woman from Poland you could tell from her accent. She had lived in Sweden for nearly twenty years and was married to a Swede. They had three children. Irena said she was happy in Sweden, that it was a good place.
Good morning.
Slept well?
Now and then.
Irena cleaned Lydias wounds as she had the day before. She started with the face, then the back. The bruises on her legs would go away by themselves.
She twitched when the nurses hands touched her back.
Does it hurt?
Yes.
Ill be as gentle as I can.
A guard had been stationed outside her room. His green uniform reminded her of the security staff on the big Scandinavian railway stations which she and Alena had been hurried through every time Dimitri had panicked and forced them to move to another city. He would order them to pack quickly and then off theyd go, five times in three years, though the flats had been all alike. Always on the top floor, with red bedspreads and electronic locks.
Lydia felt how her back ached, how the sterile fluid stung her open wound. She couldnt think why, but her thoughts wandered back to a graveyard in a village somewhere along a country road between Klaipeda and Kaunas. Her fathers mother and father were buried there, and thats where her dad was put into the ground too. She realised that she no
longer missed the man with the shaved head who had seemed so small when she saw him in Lukuskele prison. He didnt exist any more; he had finally disappeared while she wept for him, standing next to her mum in that cemetery. Since then he hadnt existed for her.
Lydia became restless, anxious, had to stop herself from crying out. The cuts on her back were burning. She fixed her eyes on the green-uniformed guard, if she concentrated on him it didnt hurt as much.
She didnt know why he was standing there. Maybe they thought Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp would come back. Or maybe that she would run away.
Irena talked while she washed Lydias back, asked questions about the notebook on her bedside table and the hospital food did she like it? They both knew that they were meaningless questions, that the answers didnt matter, but chatting would help Lydia to think of something else and relax a little, forget the pain from her torn skin. Lydia told Irena that the notebook was just for writing her thoughts in, about the future and things like that, and that the food didnt taste of much, but it was hard to chew, because her cheeks ached.
My dear . . .
Irena was looking at her and shaking her head.
My dear, I have no idea what you have been through.
Lydia didnt answer. She knew. She knew what she had been through. She knew what her body, the thing she tried not to feel, looked like now. Also, she knew what she had written in that notebook on the bedside table.
She knew that it would never happen to her again.
There you are, dear. Thats it for now. Ill come back in the afternoon, but its going to hurt less and less every time. Youre very brave, dear.
Irena caressed Lydias shoulder quickly and smiled at her. As she left the room, a doctor entered with four other white-coated people in tow three men and a woman. The doctor
spoke to the guard and then to Irena, who came back to Lydias bedside and pointed at the doctor and the others.
Lydia, this is the doctor who has looked after you. He examined you when you arrived here. The other four are medical students. Söder Hospital is one of the hospitals where students train to help ill people. The doctor wants them to see your injuries. To learn about them. Is that all right?
Lydia only registered their faces. She didnt know them. She was tired, didnt want people to stare at her, she hurt so.
Let them look.
The doctor waited as Irena translated and nodded a thank you to Lydia. He asked Irena to stay and translate. It was important that Lydia could understand. He told the students about what happened when someone was admitted to Casualty, about Lydias journey from the ambulance, through the hospital to the department of surgery. Then he produced a laser pointer and let the red dot wander over her naked back, demonstrating her injuries.
Marked redness and swelling. See . . . The beating was carried out with quite a lot of strength. See . . .We believe an ox-hide whip was used, some three to four metres long. See . . .
Irena turned to Lydia again and tried to hold her gaze while she translated. Lydia nodded in agreement. The four students said nothing. They had never seen a lashed back of a human being before. The doctor waited for their comments and then continued.
Ox-hide whips are used for cattle droving. This patient had thirty-five lashes.
He talked on for a bit longer, but Lydia could not bear to listen any more. They left a little later she hardly noticed.
She looked at her notebook.
She knew.
She knew what had been done to her.
She knew it would never happen again.
One floor down.
There were three patients in Ward 2 of Söder Hospitals medical department.
None of them knew anything at all about the woman upstairs with the flayed back.
She knew nothing about them.
The floor in Lydia Grajauskass ward was their ceiling. That was all.
Lisa Öhrström stood in the middle of Ward 2 and looked at her three patients. She stood there for a while. She was thirty-five years old and she was tired. After a couple of years of work, she was as tired as her contemporaries on the medical staff. They often talked about it. Lisa worked almost all the time, but never felt she did enough, and carried this sense of inadequacy home with her, falling asleep with it at her side. The feeling of never spending enough time with patients, let alone talking properly to them once she had dealt with the diagnosis and general health survey and appropriate treatment. She could hear how she speeded up before hurrying off to the next bed, the next ward, the next clinic, always making important
decisions on the hoof, never being able to stop and dwell on them.