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
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
‘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
