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?
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.
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 Oldйus 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 Aspsеs 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.
Not many people waiting here.
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.
