Box 21
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. Feltwith 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.
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