Lisa was bending forward, clutching her stomach. The tears were coming faster and she turned away. He mustn’t see her cry. She said nothing more, walked away from his bed to see the older man, the one who had pressed his bell. He was sitting up straight with one hand pressed to his chest. He needed pain relief, his malignant tumour demanded it. Lisa said good morning and took his hand, but addressed Hilding over her shoulder.
‘By the way.’
Her brother didn’t answer.
‘There’s a visitor for you. I promised to let him know when you were awake.’
She had to get out, and disappeared down the bluish-green corridor.
Baffled, Hilding stared at her back. How could anyone know he was here? He hardly knew himself.
Jochum Lang got out of the car when it pulled up outside the hospital entrance. It was good to escape the smell of leather upholstery. In just a couple of hours he had learnt to detest it as much as that of the cell where he had been locked up for the past two years and four months. Both smells meant being under someone else’s power and control. He had been around for long enough to know that it didn’t actually matter who you had to take orders from, a screw in prison or Mio outside it.
He walked past the patients who hung out near the hospital doors, longing for home, along the corridor with a constant traffic of people on their way somewhere else, and stepped into one of the big shiny lifts where a recorded voice informed you sweetly which floor you were on.
Jochum had his own mantra. He used the same ritual every time, knew it would work.
He knew where to find him. General Medicine. Floor 6. Ward 2.
He moved quickly now. It was a job and he wanted to be done with it.
The room was much too quiet. The others were practically asleep, just two of them, an old boy in the bed opposite and a lad who looked more dead than alive. Hilding didn’t like silence, never had. He looked around nervously, stared at the door, waited.
He saw his visitor the moment the door opened. His clothes were soaked. It must be raining outside.
‘Jochum?’
His heart was pounding. He clawed at the sore on his nose and tried to ignore the fear that tore at his insides.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Jochum Lang looked exactly the same as before. Just as fucking big and bald. Hilding felt all sorts of things. He didn’t want to feel them, but couldn’t help himself. No way. All he wanted was some Stesolid. Or Rohypnol.
‘Sit up.’
Jochum was impatient, his voice low but clear.
‘Sit up.’
Jochum grabbed the wheelchair by the older man’s bed, released the brake and pushed it across to Hilding, waiting until he was sitting on the edge of the bed.
He pointed from the bed to the wheelchair.
‘I want you to sit in this.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Can’t say here. Got to get you to the lifts.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Fucking sit here!’
Jochum pointed at the wheelchair again, his hand close to Hilding’s face.
‘I didn’t. Didn’t say a word.’
Jochum stood behind him, then started to wheel him out, past the man and the boy, both asleep by now.
‘I mean. Listen, Jochum, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t talk. Do you hear me? The pigs asked, sure, had me in for an interview and wanted to know about you, but I didn’t say a thing.’
The corridor was empty. Blue-green floor, white walls. And cold.
‘I believe you. You wouldn’t have the guts.’
They met two nurses, who nodded a kind of greeting to the patient in the wheelchair. Hilding wept like he hadn’t done since he was a child, since before the heroin.
‘But you’ve been dealing in cut speed. And flogged it to the wrong punters.’
They had left the wards now and entered the lift area. The corridor was wider here and the colours had changed; it had a grey floor and yellow walls. Hilding’s body trembled violently. He had no idea fear could hurt like this.
‘The wrong punters?’
‘Mirja.’
‘Mirja? That slag?’
‘She’s Mio’s niece. And you’re so fucking stupid that you sold her half-half Yugo whizz and washing powder.’
Hilding tried to stop crying. The tears seemed weird, nothing to do with him.
‘I don’t get it.’
They stopped in front of the lifts. Four lifts, two on their way up.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘You will. You and me. We’re going to have a little chat.’
‘Jochum! Fuck’s sake!’
The lift doors. He could reach them, grab hold of them and maybe hang on.
He couldn’t tell.
Couldn’t tell why the fucking tears kept coming.
Alena Sljusareva ran along the quay at Vдrta Harbour.
She stared down into the dark water. It was raining, had been raining all morning; what could have been a sunlit blue sea was black. The waves crashed against the cement walls of the quay. It was more like autumn than summer.
She was crying and had been for nearly twenty-four hours, from fear at first, then from rage and now from a frail sense of longing mixed with hopelessness.
During the past twenty-four hours she had relived the three years since she and Lydia had boarded the Lithuanian ferry. Two men had escorted them, their hands politely opening doors and their mouths smiling and telling the two young women how lovely they looked. One of the men had been a Swede, who spoke good Russian and had false passports ready and waiting, the key to their new life. Their cabin was really big, larger than the Klaipeda bedroom she had shared with three others. Alena had been laughing and happy then. She and her new friend were leaving the past behind.
She had been a virgin.
The ship had barely left the harbour.
She could still feel the sensation of the blood running down the inside of her thighs.
Three years. Stockholm, Gothenburg, Oslo, Copenhagen, then back to Stockholm. Never fewer than twelve men. Every day. She tried to recall just a few of them, see their faces in her mind’s eye, any of them, the ones who liked hitting or humping you or simply looking at you.
She couldn’t remember a single one.
All faceless.
Like Lydia felt about her body, but the other way round. Lydia said her body wasn’t there, something that Alena
