Box 21 aka The Vault

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… Unconscious female, unknown identity, brought in by ambulance 09:05. Neighbour called emergency services to flat at 3 Völund Street.

She clung to her mother’s hand.

During the last year she had done this a lot, held on tight to her mother’s soft hand and felt it squeeze hers back.

She didn’t really want to go to the big city.

Her name was Lydia Grajauskas and she already had a sore tummy when they boarded the bus outside the ugly bus terminal in Klaipeda. The further away from home they went, the worse she felt.

Lydia had never been to Vilnius before – she had only imagined it and looked at pictures and listened to people’s stories – but now she didn’t want to go there at all, because it wasn’t her kind of place; she had nothing to do there.

It was more than a year since she had seen him.

She was about to turn nine and she had thought a hand grenade was a kind of cool present.

Dad hadn’t noticed that she was watching him. He had his back turned to her and Vladi, and he was excited about being with the other men; they all drank and shouted and hated the Russians. She was lying top to tail with Vladi in the sofa, a huge brown thing with a worn corduroy cover that smelt horrible; they used to lie there sometimes when school was closed and Dad was working. They listened. There was something special about the men’s loud voices and guns and boxes of ammunition that fascinated them, that made them hide on the sofa to listen and watch more often than was perhaps good for them. Dad’s cheeks had been so red, which they weren’t normally, only sometimes at home, when he had been drinking straight from the bottle and sneaked up behind Mum and pressed himself against her bum. Of course, they had no idea that Lydia noticed what they were up to and she didn’t let on.

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