Box 21 Read online

  Olsson’s cheek twitched upwards, over and over, making his eye open and close. He was caught in his junkie tic.

  ‘Worth a thousand, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I want my cash.’

  ‘Haven’t got it.’ Olsson patted his anorak pocket. ‘But I have got some smack. Powder.’

  He pulled the plastic bag from its hiding place and held it up for Hilding to see.

  ‘One gram, what about it? Take it and we’re even.’ Hilding stopped scratching.

  ‘A gram?’

  ‘Fucking strong too.’

  Hilding reached out, waved his hands around, slapped Olsson.

  ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘Pure heroin. Real strong.’

  ‘I’ll take a quarter now. I’ll just shoot up a quarter. OK?’

  The train to Malmö and Copenhagen was late, the loudspeakers in the ceiling filled the hall, fifteen minutes more to go, sit down on your seats, keep waiting. From somewhere else, café noises, the smell of brewing coffee and greasy pastries sneaked about and clung to everything. They didn’t notice, didn’t notice the great space around them filling up with commuters hurrying to their platforms – young people with rover tickets and huge, flag-covered rucksacks, families travelling at inconvenient times on the special saver tickets that the businessmen despised. All that passed them by. Jerkily they walked to the photo booth near the main entrance. Olsson stood guard; he was to stop anyone wanting to get in and make sure that Hilding didn’t OD and flake out. Hilding sat on the low folding seat and drew the curtains. He was shaking and his legs showed, so Olsson moved over a little.

  The spoon was in the inside pocket of the raincoat.

  He filled the spoon with white heroin powder, added a few drops of citric acid on top, cooked the mixture over the flame of his cigarette lighter, then mixed it in the water and drew the solution up into his syringe.

  He had lost a lot of weight. It used to be enough to take the belt into the third or fourth hole, but now he got to the seventh. He pulled it tight, and enough was left to go one more time round his arm. The leather cut deep into the flesh.

  He bent forward and grabbed the end of the belt between his teeth to keep the ligature tense, looked for a vein at the elbow. Nothing there. He prodded with the tip of the needle, pushed it against stringy, tough cartilaginous bits, past them and into the big hollow that had formed inside his arm where innumerable injections had eaten away the substance of his body.

  He searched about, tried, tried again, and then suddenly felt the wall of a vessel give way under the needle.

  He pulled back and smiled. Usually it wasn’t this easy. Last time he had had to find a track in his neck before he could shoot up.

  The thin stream of blood was held suspended in the transparent fluid inside the plastic wall of the syringe for a moment, then dispersed into a spreading plume, like the petals of a red flower opening. It was so pretty.

  Hilding collapsed, unconscious, within a second or two.

  He fell forward from the seat, became easily visible below the curtain. He had stopped breathing.

  WEDNESDAY 5 JUNE

  Lydia had just woken up.

  She tried to turn over in bed. Resting on her right side meant that her back hurt a little less. She waited, alone in the large room. She had been unconscious for twelve hours, at least that was what a nurse, who spoke Russian, had told her.

  Her left arm was broken. She couldn’t remember everything, had no idea how he had done it. She must have lost consciousness before he did it. It was in plaster and the cast was to stay on for a couple of weeks.

  She remembered him kicking her in the stomach, over and over, and screaming, Whore, whores like you fuck when you’re told. And when he had done with kicking her, he buggered her, first pushing his organ up her anus, then his fingers.

  She knew that Alena had tried to stop him, shouted at him and thumped his back, but he had pushed her into her room, made her take her clothes off and locked her in. It would be her turn next.

  Lydia remembered what had happened right up to the time he started to use the whip on her. She remembered everything before that.

  He struck her on the back above her backside. I won’t do your arse, your back is OK, nothing to fuck there, it’s useless.

  She had counted to eleven, that was as many as she could remember. The nurse had said her back showed many more marks than that.

  ‘Good morning.’

  The nurse was called Irena, a dark-haired woman from Poland – you could tell from her accent. She had lived in Sweden for nearly twenty years and was married to a Swede. They had three children. Irena said she was happy in Sweden, that it was a good place.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Slept well?’

  ‘Now and then.’

  Irena cleaned Lydia’s wounds as she had the day before. She started with the face, then the back. The bruises on her legs would go away by themselves.

  She twitched when the nurse’s hands touched her back.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll be as gentle as I can.’

  A guard had been stationed outside her room. His green uniform reminded her of the security staff on the big Scandinavian railway stations which she and Alena had been hurried through every time Dimitri had panicked and forced them to move to another city. He would order them to pack quickly and then off they’d go, five times in three years, though the flats had been all alike. Always on the top floor, with red bedspreads and electronic locks.

  Lydia felt how her back ached, how the sterile fluid stung her open wound. She couldn’t think why, but her thoughts wandered back to a graveyard in a village somewhere along a country road between Klaipeda and Kaunas. Her father’s mother and father were buried there, and that’s where her dad was put into the ground too. She realised that she no longer missed the man with the shaved head who had seemed so small when she saw him in Lukuskele prison. He didn’t exist any more; he had finally disappeared while she wept for him, standing next to her mum in that cemetery. Since then he hadn’t existed for her.

  Lydia became restless, anxious, had to stop herself from crying out. The cuts on her back were burning. She fixed her eyes on the green-uniformed guard, if she concentrated on him it didn’t hurt as much.

  She didn’t know why he was standing there. Maybe they thought Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp would come back. Or maybe that she would run away.

  Irena talked while she washed Lydia’s back, asked questions about the notebook on her bedside table and the hospital food – did she like it? They both knew that they were meaningless questions, that the answers didn’t matter, but chatting would help Lydia to think of something else and relax a little, forget the pain from her torn skin. Lydia told Irena that the notebook was just for writing her thoughts in, about the future and things like that, and that the food didn’t taste of much, but it was hard to chew, because her cheeks ached.

  ‘My dear . . .’

  Irena was looking at her and shaking her head.

  ‘My dear, I have no idea what you have been through.’

  Lydia didn’t answer. She knew. She knew what she had been through. She knew what her body, the thing she tried not to feel, looked like now. Also, she knew what she had written in that notebook on the bedside table.

  She knew that it would never happen to her again.

  ‘There you are, dear. That’s it for now. I’ll come back in the afternoon, but it’s going to hurt less and less every time. You’re very brave, dear.’

  Irena caressed Lydia’s shoulder quickly and smiled at her. As she left the room, a doctor entered with four other white-coated people in tow – three men and a woman. The doctor spoke to the guard and then to Irena, who came back to Lydia’s bedside and pointed at the doctor and the others.

  ‘Lydia, this is the doctor who has looked after you. He examined you when you arrived here. The other four are medical students. Söder Hospital is one of the hospitals where students train to help ill people. The doctor wants them to see your injuries. To l
earn about them. Is that all right?’

  Lydia only registered their faces. She didn’t know them. She was tired, didn’t want people to stare at her, she hurt so.

  ‘Let them look.’

  The doctor waited as Irena translated and nodded a thank you to Lydia. He asked Irena to stay and translate. It was important that Lydia could understand. He told the students about what happened when someone was admitted to Casualty, about Lydia’s journey from the ambulance, through the hospital to the department of surgery. Then he produced a laser pointer and let the red dot wander over her naked back, demonstrating her injuries.

  ‘Marked redness and swelling. See . . . The beating was carried out with quite a lot of strength. See . . .We believe an ox-hide whip was used, some three to four metres long. See . . .’

  Irena turned to Lydia again and tried to hold her gaze while she translated. Lydia nodded in agreement. The four students said nothing. They had never seen a lashed back of a human being before. The doctor waited for their comments and then continued.

  ‘Ox-hide whips are used for cattle droving. This patient had thirty-five lashes.’

  He talked on for a bit longer, but Lydia could not bear to listen any more. They left a little later – she hardly noticed.

  She looked at her notebook.

  She knew.

  She knew what had been done to her.

  She knew it would never happen again.

  One floor down.

  There were three patients in Ward 2 of Söder Hospital’s medical department.

  None of them knew anything at all about the woman upstairs with the flayed back.

  She knew nothing about them.

  The floor in Lydia Grajauskas’s ward was their ceiling. That was all.

  Lisa Öhrström stood in the middle of Ward 2 and looked at her three patients. She stood there for a while. She was thirty-five years old and she was tired. After a couple of years of work, she was as tired as her contemporaries on the medical staff. They often talked about it. Lisa worked almost all the time, but never felt she did enough, and carried this sense of inadequacy home with her, falling asleep with it at her side. The feeling of never spending enough time with patients, let alone talking properly to them once she had dealt with the diagnosis and general health survey and appropriate treatment. She could hear how she speeded up before hurrying off to the next bed, the next ward, the next clinic, always making important decisions on the hoof, never being able to stop and dwell on them.

  Now she made herself look at the patients, one at a time.

  The elderly man was awake and propped up against the pillows. He hurt somewhere inside, and was clutching his abdomen while he used the other hand to search on his bedside table for the bell-push. It should be somewhere near the food he hadn’t touched.

  The man in the next bed was much younger, more a boy actually, eighteen or nineteen years old, who for the last five years had been in and out of just about every department in the hospital. His body had been strong before he was suddenly taken ill, and ever since he had been hanging on for dear life, crying and swearing, refusing to die. His breathing was very slow and he had lost most of his body mass long ago, together with his hair and youthful looks, but he still lay in his bed, angrily staring at the wall until he was certain that he would wake up to see yet another morning.

  The third man was a new admission.

  Lisa sighed. He was the one who made her feel exhausted, the reason why she was standing still while a patient’s bell was ringing irritably in the corridor.

  He had been admitted last night and put in a bed at the far end, opposite the older man. Strange and somehow unfair too, though she knew she shouldn’t follow this thought to its conclusion, that he was the only one of these three patients who would leave this hospital with a beating heart.

  And he was the only one of them who acted as if he was intending to end his life. She knew that she could not make him understand how completely he drained her energy and robbed her of time. It didn’t matter that he had just been more dead than alive. He didn’t understand, or perhaps he did and he would do the same thing over and over and over again. And every time, she or one of her colleagues would end up standing in the middle of the ward feeling apathetic and furious. Again.

  She hated him for it.

  She went over to his bedside. That was part of her job.

  ‘Are you awake now?’

  ‘Fuck. What happened?’

  ‘You overdosed. It was a struggle to bring you round this time.’

  He tugged with one hand at the bandage round his head and scratched the sore on his nostril with the other, probing and prodding it in the way she had tried to stop because it distressed her, back in the days when she still cared about him. She read through his journal.

  His history was familiar – she knew it by heart – but she ran her finger down the list of dates, anyway.

  Hilding Oldéus (28). Twelve acute admissions following an overdose of heroin.

  He had needed hospitalisation twelve times. To begin with, she had feared for his life, been terrified, wept the first five or six times. Nowadays she was indifferent.

  She had to share her strength, make sure that everyone got the same care.

  But she couldn’t help it.

  She couldn’t bring herself to care much for his future any more.

  ‘You were lucky. The guy who made the emergency call, one of your mates apparently, gave you mouth to mouth and heart massage on the spot. Inside a photo booth at Central Station. Or so I’m told.’

  ‘That was Olsson.’

  ‘Your body wouldn’t have coped on its own. Not this time.’

  He scratched the sore. She was on the verge of trying to stop him, as she usually did, but reminded herself that his hand would be back there straight away. Never mind, let him. Let him tear his whole face to bits.

  ‘I don’t want to see you here again.’

  ‘Hey, sis. Don’t hassle me.’

  ‘Never.’

  Hilding tried to sit up straight, but collapsed back on his pillows. He was dizzy, put his hand to his forehead.

  ‘You see what gives, don’t you? I mean, you don’t lend me any dosh and that’s it. I take what gives, like pure powder. Get it?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Can’t fucking trust nobody.’

  Lisa sighed.

  ‘Look, it wasn’t me who dissolved the heroin in citric acid. It wasn’t me who loaded the syringe. It wasn’t me who injected it. You did all that, Hilding.’

  ‘So? What’s all that in aid of?’

  ‘I don’t know. I truly don’t know what anything is in aid of.’

  She couldn’t take any more. Not today. He was alive, that was enough. She thought of how his addiction had slowly become hers. How she had somehow felt the effect of every injection, joined every treatment centre, stopped breathing when he OD’d. She had attended therapy sessions for relatives, participated in self-help courses, taken on board that she was a co-dependent, and then, finally, grasped that her feelings had never been of any consequence. For long stretches of time she simply ceased to exist for Hilding. It had been his addiction, but it had ruled her and the rest of the family too.

  She had scarcely stepped out into the corridor when he called her back. She had decided not to go back, to continue on her rounds, so he carried on screaming, louder and louder. She couldn’t take it and ran back, tearful out of sheer anger.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Sis, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Tell me what you want then!’

  ‘Am I just supposed to lie here? Like, I’ve OD’d.’

  Lisa sensed the eyes of the others on her. The older man and the very young man who refused to die were watching her and hoping she would support and encourage them, but she couldn’t, didn’t have the strength, not now.

  ‘Sis, I need something to help me come down.’

  ‘Forget it. We won’t give you any drugs here. Ask the doctor who’s dealing with you, if you must. He will say the same.’

 
; ‘Stesolid?’

  She swallowed, the tears running down her cheeks. As usual he had reduced her to this. ‘We’ve stood by you for years, Hilding. Mum and Ylva and I. We’ve had to live with your paranoia. So stop whining.’

  Hilding didn’t hear a word she said. He didn’t like it when her voice sounded like that.

  ‘Or Rohypnol.’

  ‘We were pleased every time they locked you up. Every time. Aspsĺs, wherever. Do you understand that? Because at least we knew where you were.’

  ‘Valium, eh, sis?’

  ‘Next time, just do it properly. Take a fatal overdose so you’re put away for good and all.’

  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.