He didn’t speak afterwards. He had looked at her, pointed, one last time – that was all. He didn’t even turn round when he left.

Lydia laughed.

If there had been anything between her legs, she would have been aggrieved that his bodily fluids had filled it and she would have felt him inside her even more. But she hadn’t. She was just a face.

She laughed as she lathered one part of her body after another with the white bar of soap until her skin was red; she rubbed hard, pressing the soap against her neck, shoulders, over her breasts, her vagina, her thighs, feet.

The suffocating shame.

She washed it away. His hands, his breath, his smell. The water was almost painfully hot, but the shame was like some horrible membrane that would not come off.

She sat down on the floor of the shower cubicle and began to sing the chorus of the children’s song from Klaipeda.

Lydia Grajauskas.

Lydia Grajauskas.

Lydia Grajauskas.

She loved that song. It had been theirs, hers and Vladi’s. They had sung it together loudly every morning as they walked to school through the blocks of flats in the housing estate, a syllable for each step. They sang their names loudly, over and over again.

‘Stop singing!’

Dimitri shouted at her from the hall, his mouth close to the bathroom door. She carried on. He banged the wall, shouted again for her to get out of there fucking pronto. She stayed where she was, sitting on the wet floor, but stopped singing, her voice barely carrying through the door.

‘Who is coming next?’

‘You owe me money, you bloody whore!’

‘I want to know who’s coming.’

‘Clean up your cunt! New customer.’

Lydia heard real anger in his voice now. She got up, dried her wet body and stood in front of the mirror that hung above the sink, put on her red lipstick, put on the nearly cream underwear in a velvet-like material that Dimitri had handed to her that morning, sent to her in advance by the customer.