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 learn 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.