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 Oldйus (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. Aspsеs, 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.