Benny & Shrimp (12 page)

In the winter months it’s not quite so hectic on the farm. I should really have been doing some forestry work, of course, but a lot of loose, wet snow fell in November and it was hard to get about. Or so I
convinced
myself. It was raw, icy cold and windy, too – the sort of weather no amount of wrapping up can keep out.

I felt a real urge to do something to the old house. I don’t mean fancy carved woodwork on the front porch, mind you; that’s way down on my to-do list. But…

I saw a programme the other day about some Fifties petrol stations that are listed buildings. And suddenly it hit me that they could just as well have listed my living room. The kitchen, too. Mum was never really interested
in home decorating. She kept the place clean, all right, but otherwise she was happy to leave most things the way they were in her parents’ time, and she could never bear to get rid of anything she and Dad had bought together. And me?

The only room in the house I’ve ever felt any urge to decorate is my own. There was this time when I was about seventeen, just before I had to take over the farm: I went at Grandma’s drab old brown wallpaper and painted it black all over! I put a tigerskin rug on the bed and posters on the walls, of hard rocksters with big hair, plus one of a naked girl with jointing instructions, her body divided up by blue pencil lines. It seemed
incredibly
daring, back then. God, I was cool! And Carina thought I was cool, too. One mid-summer’s eve, when my parents were away and I was going to do the
morning
milking, I smuggled her up to my room and tried to draw the same diagram on her. In marker pen. We were both quite pissed, on something that could well have made us go blind. And by the time we’d had a good roll around on the tigerskin rug, it looked pretty disgusting; Mum threw it out without asking any questions. She was like that.

Later on, I took down the rock stars and put up
pictures
of monster tractors. But I never got round to redecorating the room. Desirée said once it made her feel as if she were lying in a crypt whenever she looked at the black walls. And that was when I got to thinking I ought to change a few things in the house. I suppose I started feeling some kind of nesting instinct when she
came into my life. I should have known better. The whole subject turned out to be a minefield.

First, I re-wallpapered my room in a very nice
flowery
pattern. Then I sent off for some ready-made
curtains
from the Halén’s catalogue, white with lots of frills, and shiny ribbons to bunch them up at the side of the window. I finished it off with a couple of Mum’s cross-stitch pictures of flowers, in place of the tractors.

I did it when I knew there was a whole week before her next visit. And when she did come, I took her up to the bedroom, flung open the door and tried to sound like a trumpet fanfare.

She stared. “Oh… very nice!” was all she said.

I just stood there, crestfallen. And then I tried to prod her into saying more, to tell me how clever I’d been, to…

To say she knew she was going to be really happy in this bedroom.

But all I could get her to say was that it was much lighter now, and seemed bigger.

“But don’t you think it looks nice?” I prompted.

I shouldn’t have asked. Desirée isn’t much of a one for lies, even the white kind. She just said that it was quite right for me to decorate the room according to my own taste, not hers.

“Do you mean you wanted to be there to help choose the wallpaper?” I said, before I could stop myself.

So that really brought the whole thing to a head, though I didn’t realise it at the time. A question that had come far too early. Because all she said was, “No, why
would I?”, then went down to switch on the telly because she didn’t want to miss the news.

Then there was an atmosphere all evening. We started arguing about the news. She’s sort of left-wing: not
exactly
a champagne socialist, more a herbal tea lefty; and I defend the employers because I see myself as a small
businessman
. She wastes no time trapping me in a position where I find myself defending international big business, and since she’s so much more used to arguing than I am, she gets me to say things I don’t even agree with. And then I lose my temper and out it all comes: I defend industrialscale tree-felling and pour scorn on naive field biologists; she holds forth passionately on the destruction of the
environment
and exploitation of the earth’s resources, and I practically accuse her of being an animal rights activist who sets fire to meat lorries.

And all the while, I can sense that this argument’s
really
about bedroom wallpaper. She wants to pick a quarrel because she doesn’t want to confront the question of whether what happens in this house is anything to do with her.

For the first time, we go to sleep without making love.

But we hold hands.

I had to fight back a violent urge to giggle when I first saw the curtains, which looked like a ball gown from
Gone with the Wind
, and realised the cross-stitch pictures had invaded the last sanctuary in the house, his own, dear old crypt. But he was standing there bursting with pride; I felt my spirits sink and was lost for words. I had absolutely no intention of expressing any opinion on his decorating tastes – because it would have implied I thought I should have a say in the matter. And that was an issue I didn’t want to touch with a barge pole. Not yet.

And then all that silly bickering in front of the
television
! At the time I was quite elated as I lured him into one trap after another, but later I was on the verge of
tears. The last thing I wanted was for him to blurt out all those reactionary clichés so I’d lose all respect for him. Especially since I know he’s neither stupid nor reactionary. And he’s knowledgeable in areas where I’ve never even set foot. But if you’re on different stars there’s nothing to be done.

There’ve been other times when it’s taken a more good-humoured form.

Another area where we disapproved of each other, for example, was our clothes.

One day he turned up at my place with a carrier bag from Diana’s Modes, a place where fifty-something female executives buy tailored three-piece skirt suits, navy blue with chic little scarves. And draped party numbers for special occasions, with sequinned
embroidery
spreading like eczema across their chests. Märta and I often take a look in their window for a laugh.

“They had a sale!” he said proudly. “Go on, open it!”

Not a skirt suit, not a party number. But a
horrendous
, flared, “girly” skirt with gigantic mauve roses and fluorescent green leaves. I could conceivably have hung it on the wall at home and called it an installation. But be seen wearing it in public? Not on your life!

“But… it’s not me!” I ventured, trying not to hurt his feelings.

Wasted effort. He understands things instantly. So then I elaborated, not wanting him to think I was being hypocritical. “It’s… well, dreadful, actually.”

He’d definitely have preferred me to be hypocritical.

“Why do you always have to dress so you look like a
drowned corpse that’s just been washed up?” he snarled, stuffing the skirt back into the carrier. “Take the bloody thing, anyway. You can always tear it into rags and use it to clean the windows!”

“Drowned corpse!” I was speechless. “Take it yourself. Just in case you ever get round to cleaning any
windows
! Or wear it in the cowshed; the smell couldn’t make it any worse than it already is!”

We glared at each other.

Then he sat down heavily on his hands, beside me on the sofa.

“I don’t hit people smaller than me!” he said through gritted teeth. “I don’t, I don’t!”

“I do shove them, though,” he added, pushing me so I fell over on the sofa. He pulled off my T-shirt, made of unbleached, organically grown cotton. “Come to think of it, you always look best without clothes. Or without your own clothes, at any rate. I’ve never seen anything worse than your hairy wool hat with toadstools!”

I’d had time to spot that he’d paid quite a lot of money for the skirt, and I knew he didn’t have money to burn. So I decided we’d go out to the shops, where I’d buy him some item of clothing that cost the same, as a gesture of reconciliation. The choice would be mine, and if he didn’t like it, he’d have the pleasure of telling me so, to my face. Then we’d be quits.

We wandered around department stores for several hours, until he had to dash off back to the cowshed as usual. I fingered soft Mulberry flannel shirts: small checks in eggshell shades or tobacco brown. Perfect
casual wear for the country squire! “I buy those from the catalogue in bargain three-packs, to wear in the cowshed!” he grumbled. A delicious French shirt designed to be worn open almost to the waist made him laugh uproariously. “I’d be sure to get lots of offers in that one!” he said. “From other blokes!”

Like a hunting dog on a leash, he kept tugging me towards racks of garishly patterned shirts with
matching
ties, and jackets in weird styles that might have been all the rage in Hollywood ten years ago. When it came to “smart” clothes for town, he favoured the pimp look. As for work clothes, it wasn’t done to buy them in shops at all; you got them from a mail-order catalogue and charged them to the farm account.

In the end I had to settle for a T-shirt like the one I was wearing, which he blithely promised to wear next time he had to clean the muckspreader.

“Do you mind if I snoop in your cupboards and
drawers
?” she said.

I thought I probably hadn’t got much to hide, apart from the odd porn magazine, which I’d be prepared to justify if it came to it.

But she found something much worse.

She found my final report and exam marks from upper secondary school.

She looked through all my good grades with her mouth dropping wide open, almost down to her little plums of breasts. She got excited and started stuttering that if I didn’t mind her saying so, it was shameful my parents hadn’t let me carry on with my studies. With results like that! She started drivelling on about adult education and grants and courses for mature students.

That was the first time I was really, blazingly angry with her. I felt like punching her right in the middle of her pale eggshell face until her nose bled. But in our family we simply don’t hit women. Nothing to do with chivalry, though; it’s more that we don’t want to damage a valuable part of the labour force.

But I did want to hit her, and you could hardly call her part of the labour force.

Instead, I pulled on my jacket and ran out without a word, right in the middle of her ranting. I went to the cowshed to check on a cow with postpartum paralysis who had just started trying to get up from the pallet in her stall. I was so agitated that my hands were shaking as I stroked the sweaty ridge of hair along her head, while she struggled up. At last she managed to get all four legs straight and stood munching her extra scoops of concentrated feed. I rested my forehead against her side. “Don’t give up!” I whispered. “Don’t give up! Don’t give up!”

Then I went back in.

Miss Desirée, the Much-Desired, gave an irritable snort.

“Can’t you leave your cowshed clothes in the cellar?” she said. “Anyway, those residential courses for mature students…”

I clenched my fists and pressed them to my ears.

“D’you realise what you’re saying? You’re telling me to sell the farm!” I shouted. “Because I don’t suppose you were thinking of running the place while I live the high life on my mature student’s grant? Or were you
maybe thinking I’d take the cows along with me and keep them in the student accommodation?”

She turned paler still, more white than beige.

“I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about,” she muttered. “There must be some way you could study, if you felt like it. I just meant you seem to have the brains for it. But maybe you don’t want to. Forget I mentioned it!”

“Want!” I roared. “Oh yeah, I might want! And what then? When I’ve spent five or six years studying and building up an extra half-million kronor in student loan repayments to add to the debts I’ve already got? Become a librarian maybe, and mince around the shelves thinking about my posh qualifications? And what the hell do you know about what my parents ‘let’ me do!”

She sat in complete silence, her eyes fixed on my school report. I snatched it away from her, tore it into tiny pieces and let them shower down over her head. I totally lost it.

“You couldn’t care less what I ‘want’!” I bellowed. “You do all the wanting yourself. Wanting somebody to talk Lackong with, so you needn’t feel ashamed in front of your library friends. And you don’t understand a
pissing
thing about what having a farm means. What I want is somebody to help me make sure the cows who’ve just calved get their Paragel in time, so they don’t lie down and give up!”

I was shouting, louder and louder.

She stood up.

“Who exactly are you trying to shout down?” was all she said as she slipped out of the room. I heard the car start in the yard, then there was a deafening silence. And the question hung in the air.