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.
TUESDAY 4 JUNE
