Ewert looked up at the sky again and it was just as grey as before.
It was still only morning; she could hear the birds outside singing to each other, as they always did. Lydia sat on the edge of the bed and listened. It was so nice; they sang just like the birds around the ugly concrete blocks of flats in Klaipeda. She didn’t know why, but she had woken several times last night, always after the same dream about her and her mum’s trip to Vilnius and the Lukuskele prison, so many years ago.
In the dream her father was standing in the dark corridor of the tuberculosis ward, waving goodbye to her as she walked away, past the room called the HIV ward with its fifteen beds occupied by slowly decaying inmates. Then, from a distance, she turned to look back at him and saw him collapse. She stood still for a moment. When he didn’t get up from the flagged floor she ran to him as fast as she could, dragged and pulled at him until he was upright again, coughing and emptying himself of the blood and yellow stuff he had to get rid of. The whole scene was actually a rerun of something that had really happened, but it was her mum who had been crying and screaming until some of the ward orderlies turned up to take Dad away. The dream recurred every time she fell asleep last night and she had never dreamt it before.
Lydia sighed deeply and shifted position a little. She had to sit further out on the edge of the bed to part her thighs just as widely and slowly as the man in front of her demanded.
He was sitting about a metre away. A middle-aged man, in his forties, the age her father would have been now.
He was her third customer today.
He had come to see her punctually every Monday morning for nearly a year. He always knocked on the door just as the church bells started pealing outside her locked window.
He didn’t spit. He didn’t want to force himself inside her. She didn’t have to do anything with his sexual organ. She didn’t even know what he smelt like.
He was one of those who hugged her when she opened the door, but then didn’t touch her again. All he wanted was to sit with his cock in one hand and wave at her with the other to get undressed and do other things.
He wanted her to thrust her crotch backwards and forwards while he squeezed his cock harder and harder. He wanted her to bark like a dog he once had. In the meantime, he kept squeezing his dick, which would go more and more pink until he fell back into the armchair and let his stuff flow over the black leatherette.
By twenty past nine he was done. When the bells rang out for half past he would be gone. Lydia stayed where she was, sitting on the edge of the bed and listening to the birdsong. She could hear it again.
The blood was dripping from the raw sore on his nostril, down on to the Östgöta Street pavement. Hilding was almost running. He was in pretty poor shape despite having been inside. He had never been one of those guys who worked off their hatred, or built up respect, in the prison gym, but now he was jogging along, raging at the fucking bitch at the Katarina-Sofia social and panicking, desperate for heroin, and was therefore out of breath when he arrived at the Skanstull metro station on the ring road.
Sod their fucking handouts. He would just have to get the money himself.
‘Hey, you!’
Hilding prodded one of the kids standing just in front of him on the platform. She was twelve or thirteen, that sort of age. She didn’t respond and he poked at her again. She turned away deliberately to look in the direction of the train they were waiting for.
‘Hey, I’m talking to you.’
He’d seen her mobile phone. He reached out for it, took a step forwards, grabbed it from her hand and dialled the number, despite her protests, then waited for the line to connect.
Hilding cleared his throat.
‘It’s me, sis. Hilding.’
She said nothing, so he continued.
‘Listen, sis. You got to lend me some.’
She sighed, then replied. ‘You won’t get any money from me.’
‘Sis, I need food. Clothes. That sort of stuff. That’s all.’
‘Try Social Services.’
He glared angrily at the phone, drew a deep breath and shouted into what he figured was the speaking end.
‘Fuck’s sake! I’ll have to sort it out myself then. Whatever, it’s your fault!’
She answered in the same tone of voice as before. ‘No, it’s your choice, Hilding. And your problem, not mine.’
She hung up. Hilding shouted abuse into the electronic void. He threw the bloodstained phone on to the platform. The fucking kid was still standing there crying when the train pulled in and he got on.
He stood in front of the doors and kept scratching at the red, dripping wound on his nose. His pale, emaciated face was spotted with blood and crusty with drying sweat. Some kind of smell hung around him.
At the Central Station he took the up-escalator. It was hardly raining at all when he emerged from the underground. Maybe it hadn’t rained all morning. He looked around; he was still sweating inside his buttoned raincoat, his back soaking. He crossed Klaraberg Street and the pavement on the other side, then slipped in between the houses near the Ferlin statue and through the gate to St Klara Cemetery.
Empty, just as empty as he had hoped.
On the grass, a bit away, some guy who was off his head, but nobody else.
He walked past the large Bellman statue, to the bench behind it, under a tree he thought might be an elm.
He took the weight off his legs, humming to himself. Felt with his hand inside the right coat pocket. There it was. Bag full of washing powder. He sifted it between his fingers.
He put his other hand in the left pocket and pulled out the pack of twenty-five small plastic stamp envelopes, eight by six centimetres, each containing a little amphetamine, which was barely enough to cover the bottom. Hilding topped up all the bags with washing powder.
He needed cash and would have it soon.
It was evening. Her working day was at an end. No more customers.
Lydia walked slowly through the flat, which was pleasantly dark, lit only by a few table lamps. It was quite big, with four rooms. Probably the largest she’d been in since she came here.
She stopped in the hall.
She had no idea why she kept looking for something hidden in the wallpaper pattern, somewhere behind the fine stippling of lines filling the barren surfaces between floor and ceiling. She often stood there, forgetting everything else; she realised that the wallpaper reminded her of something she had seen on another wall, in another room, long ago.
Lydia remembered that wall and that room very well.
The security police had stormed in and her dad and the other men in the room were pushed up against the wall, and voices were shouting things like Zatknis, zatknis! Then a strange silence.
She had known that her dad had been in prison once before. He had put up a Lithuanian flag on the wall at home and was sentenced to five years in Kaunas prison for it. At the time she was too little to understand. She had shaken her head. It was just a flag. She still couldn’t understand. Of course they hadn’t given him back his army job afterwards. Once, she remembered it well, when the vodka was finished and his cheeks were flushed and they were all in the room with the stippled wallpaper, surrounded by weapons that were about to be sold, he had noisily demanded explanations, shouted out: ‘What choice did I have? When my children were screaming with hunger and the state wouldn’t help, what the hell was I supposed to do?’
Lydia stayed in the hall. She liked evenings, the silence and deepening darkness that slowly wrapped around you and brought peace. She let her eyes follow the little lines upwards and had to crane her neck; the ceiling was high, as it was an old flat. She remembered times when she had worked alone in much smaller flats, but usually there were two of them, giving the men who knocked on the door a choice of girls to paw.