Dickybird waved, it was a command. The new inmate heard him, but kept his eyes ahead, ignored the hectoring voice. He walked almost demonstrably slowly into the kitchen and drank water straight from the tap. The large shiny head glistened with scattered drops.
'Hey! Over here!'
This was irritating, it was Dickybird's unit and he decided who did what. That skinhead had no fucking rights.
'Here!'
Dickybird pointed at the floor in front of his chair, waited. The new man didn't shift.
'Now!'
He didn't get it, that shaved moron didn't fucking get it.
Hilding could sense the silence and glanced nervously at Dickybird, grabbed the deck of cards, sticking a finger up to show the others that they should hold it. But Dragan and Skane and Bekir had caught on long ago; it was time to teach the skinhead a lesson. Not that the beating was their problem, they just had a grandstand view! They too could sense the silence; it looked like a fight, quite a few good rounds coming up.
They squared up to each other. The new guy was walking towards Dickybird and stopped when there was only a hand's breadth separating them.
Dickybird had never been faced down before and had no intention of letting it happen now. The skinhead was taller than he was, probably one hundred and eighty-five, and had this fucking big scar running from his left ear down to the corner of his mouth. It was clean, could've been a knife but more likely a razor. He had seen razor scars before, they looked like that.
'I'm Lindgren, Dickybird Lindgren.'
'And?'
'We usually say who we are, round here.'
'Fuck off.'
The images started up in his mind, Per and Larren, Per's balls bleeding something fucking awful, Auntie Laila over by the sink screaming her head off, Dickybird himself running about with the ice-pick lifted shouting that if anyone wanted a taste he'd stick it in, Per wailing; he had jabbed with the ice-pick at his eyes when Larren suddenly let his uncle go. Not eyes, that was Larren's bottom line.
Dickybird was trembling. He tried to hide it but everyone noticed; he shook and hesitated and spat, this time on the floor.
'Where are you from?'
The new guy yawned. Twice.
'Police cells.'
'So fucking what, of course it's the cells, don't mess with me. Do you have your papers?'
Once more.
'Listen, Icky-dicky. That's you, isn't it? You must know I'm not allowed to bring my sentence in here.'
Dickybird shifted his weight from left to right leg. Per was dead long ago, a corpse with not much left of its balls. The ice-pick had been kept as evidence, shown over and over to the authorities, on the long way from Blekinge to the young offenders' institution.
'Fuck your sentence, I'm not interested. What I want to know is what's the score. Like, I don't want no sodding nonces or faggots in this place.'
Weird how a room can suddenly shrink, how sounds become words that turn into spoken messages that bounce off the walls and take up space, suck up energy until there is no more, only intakes of breath in the silence, and piled- up expectations.
The new guy shouldn't have been able to get any closer but somehow he did. He was hissing, sending a shower of saliva into the air between them.
'You asking for special treatment then? Is that it?'
One of them must give way, look down or away, but they stayed facing each other.
'There's just one thing you've got to fucking remember, Dickybird. No one, and I mean no one, calls me a faggot or a nonce. And if it comes from some shot-up, junk-crazed old wanker, then there'll be bad, bad trouble.'
The skinhead poked at Dickybird's chest with his index finger, several times, hard. Still hissing, he mumbled something incomprehensible.
'Hotikar di rotepa, burobengf
Prison lingo.
Then he poked Dickybird's chest once more, turned and walked back to the cell with the wide-open door.
Dickybird stood quite still.
His unseeing eyes followed the newcomer until he had disappeared. Then he focused, first on Hilding and then on the rest of them, and shouted down the empty corridor.
'What the fuck. What the fuck.'
No one showed. Nothing but an open door.
That finger poking at his chest. Dickybird shouted again.
Lennart saw him, waiting by the tower on the east side of the wall. It was their usual meeting place, at lunchtime or in the afternoon, when the shifts had changed over. Nils looked young, in shirtsleeves with his jacket thrown over one shoulder. A mere boy, waiting for his sweetheart.
Only a few seconds left to watch him unnoticed. Lennart slowed down. Nils was facing the other way, the way Lennart normally took; today was different because he had gone out for lunch at the old inn on the village square, he and Bertolsson had feasted on steak and fresh garden peas. Bertolsson had dropped him off halfway to the prison, because Lennart had said that he wanted to walk, needed time to think over what had happened, to try to get his mind round the note-scribbling and the microphones and the camera being shoved into his face. Strange to think that for a few minutes of midday news he had been inside all those homes, with his ready-made statements about how criminals ought to be managed.
It was still windy, a change after weather dominated by high pressure for the best part of a month. It had been an eternity of stagnant heat, sweating and irritation, always something itching, always something troubling around the corner.
Nils smiled. He had caught sight of Lennart and couldn't wait. He started strolling towards his lover, came close, held him and wouldn't let go, kissed his forehead and then his cheek.
'Did you see it?'
'I did.'
They walked across the grassy slope, keeping a space between them. Seventy metres to go before they were safely into the wood. Behind the first fir tree they reached out and found each other's hand. They walked on, holding hands tightly.
'We've done all we could. At all levels of the service.'
'Stop worrying.'
'Environmental adjustment training. Pills. Group therapy. Person-to-person stuff.'
'It wasn't about that, I mean, not about what you or the service had done or not done. It was television, for Christ's sake, a reality entertainment show. Point the camera at the culprit, strip him naked, make him sweat and lose his cool and jabber. Make him look shifty. Then the editorial people think it's a red-hot show and your average couch-potato enjoys every minute, because it lets him forget his own bloody awful life. He can laugh at the bureaucrat who's looking sad and stupid and dead ignorant. Screw them all. It's not about content and meaning, it's about scoring points, making people look weird.'
'Nils, you don't see what I'm after. We did try, we threw everything we've got at Lund. What happened? He grabs the first chance he gets, makes mincemeat of two guards and runs off. Now he's on the loose some damned place. All he's after is getting to toss off on dead little girls.'
They were out of the wind now, following a path that wound its way through the dense, untidy forest of fir and spruce to the water-tower on the hill. It was a two-and-a- half-kilometre round-trip. Walking briskly, they'd have
