Benny & Shrimp (13 page)

I’ve never felt so bad in all my life.

And I was so pleased to start with. His school
leaving
grades, which I found at the back of a drawer,
sandwiched
between a swimming certificate and a cutaway diagram of a moped motor, confirmed what I’d been suspecting all along. Top grades in almost everything – Swedish, Maths, English. He’d only dropped a grade in two subjects – R.E. and Handicraft. There was a good head on those shoulders. He’d never had time to be any kind of swot; I knew he’d had to start helping on the farm almost as soon as he could walk. That was
probably
what made him do his uneducated peasant act every time I tried to force any highbrow culture down his throat. It was a provocation to him. He knew he’d be capable of getting something out of it, and if he ever let
it near him, he’d be forced to admit he’d missed something. Made the “wrong” choice.

I was totally unprepared for his furious outburst. There seemed nothing I could say. I’d only been trying to get to know him better, and I’d imagined we might find a few stars to build that bridge with. Gold stars.

I had tears of self-pity in my eyes as I put my foot down and zoomed off. Oh, how misunderstood I was.

Of course I wasn’t anything of the kind! It was me who’d got entirely the wrong end of the stick, as I realised by about six that evening after fourteen cups of tea. The girl who’d always got gold stars in her own
little
book. And praise from Mummy. Clever Desirée who was going to shine the light of Education and Culture into his rural darkness. It was quite true: I didn’t know a pissing thing about what his parents had asked of him. All I knew was that they were dead and he’d set up a whole garden centre on their grave.

Suddenly I was longing desperately for my own mother, so much so that I even longed for Daddy a
little
bit, too. For the big oak table, an heirloom, where I used to sit and read aloud to Mummy from my English book, with wildly exaggerated pronunciation. She didn’t speak English, but she made sure I went to England on a language course every summer. She cried the first time I faltered my way through a Mozart sonatina on the piano. She couldn’t decide if she
wanted
me to be a concert pianist or just a Nobel
prizewinner
in whatever field I chose.

A librarian was what I became, with a very modest
salary and several hundred thousand owing on my
student
loan. But so well-read. No longer played the piano but could now perform “Jingle Bells” on the mouth organ. I was the obvious choice to preach to Big Benny of Rowan Farm.

I didn’t dare answer the phone the next day. I was afraid it might be Benny. And I was even more afraid it might not be Benny. So I took three days’ leave and told Daddy I’d be coming home.

Some people say they can tell you the precise moment when they grew up. Märta says it was when she found her mum in bed with the red-haired man next door. Märta’s the only redhead in her family.

For me it was during that visit home.

Not that I uncovered any family secrets. If there were any, they’re long buried under the inland ice sheet. And nothing particularly unexpected happened, really. Daddy had reluctantly foregone a Rotary meeting and told me peevish tales about the uselessness of the sluts they sent him as home helps. In between, he said
nothing
. He didn’t ask a single question about how things were going in my life, and all he said about Mummy was, “She’ll just have to put up with the way things are. I haven’t the energy to be running around there all the time, and she certainly can’t count on you!”

Oh yes she can, I thought, while I’m here she can count on me. I shall go there and see if her hands still feel the way I remember them.

I went to visit her on all three days. Once she smiled at me and said, “Oh, have you got a free period, dear?”
Apart from that, I didn’t understand very much of what she said, though she said quite a lot. Her head was like a malfunctioning telephone exchange; she kept
answering
the wrong calls.

On the train home, it occurred to me that if I had to fill in a form and give my next of kin, I might as well leave the space blank. And if I got up in the night to go to the toilet on the train, opened the wrong door and fell out into the darkness, it would make very little
difference
to the world.

I worked like mad for several days, so I wouldn’t be in if the phone rang. I even went out and cleared a new area of trees, though I generally try not to work alone in the forest; I know of too many people who’ve ended up trapped under trees that fell the wrong way, or crawling through the woods with their leg half sawn through. And then I thought: if that happened to me, who’d put the death announcement in the paper? I imagined the world’s longest death announcement, signed by twenty-four cows with their names and
numbers
.

But I’m not a babe in the wood, lost and all alone; I know that. It would soon be Christmas, and at least ten lots of people had asked me to come over and spend it with them. My relations, of course, but they don’t
live that locally, and they know I can’t really bring the cows along with me. And then various families in the village. An old couple who were Mum’s closest friends and have no children of their own – they’d flutter around me like delighted sparrows if I turned up there on Christmas Eve. And Bengt-Göran and Violet, no doubt; they took it for granted I’d be with them, and I supposed I would. Violet’s Christmas buffet took some beating!

I tried to avoid the thought of me and Shrimp
twinkling
together in front of a Christmas tree. And eating brawn – from a shop, not the traditional home-made – straight out of the plastic wrapper. Or some flipping lentil soup!

Mum and I used to invite the family over. Even last year we did; she was allowed home from hospital for a couple of days, and Auntie Ingrid and my cousin Anita turned up with their car roof boxes full of food. There were eleven of us. We all knew it was Mum’s last Christmas, but we had a really good time, strange though it may sound. Anita’s a nurse at the county
hospital
, and before that she worked in Switzerland for quite a few years.

She told us stories about her time there, and then the air was thick with tall tales, childhood memories and worn-out family jokes. We even laughed when Uncle Greger did his same old imitation of Evert Taube singing. And, as the night wore on, Mum said craftily: “Well, maybe we should leave the youngsters on their own for a while!”

She meant me and Anita. And we sat there
obediently
, drinking brandy mixed with Christmas root beer until half past four on Christmas morning, and Anita told me how she’d got pregnant by a married Swiss doctor and had an abortion.

I didn’t bother putting up any Christmas decorations in the house this year. I sat morosely at the kitchen table, staring around the kitchen.

Mum would have despaired. I was letting the place go; it already had the air of an abandoned farmhouse or a hostel for old bachelors. I’d repainted the veranda railing and replaced the guttering – but I didn’t know where to start when it came to fancy touches indoors. I did the basic cleaning up, but I couldn’t go starching little cloths or putting friezes of Santa’s elves along the kitchen shelves like Mum used to at Christmas.

The old couple gave me a plastic basket with two spindly pink hyacinths and big box of Aladdin chocolate assortments as a thank you for cutting the grass in their fallow pasture for them. And I’d bought a box of red candles on special offer.

Once I put a few of those in the candle holders and lit them, at least I didn’t have to see the rest of the kitchen. The telly went on as soon as I got in, and droned away festively to itself in a corner. I’d brought it into the kitchen.

Two days before Christmas Eve, at ten in the evening, Shrimp rang.

“It’s me. Can I spend Christmas with you?” she said.

“Of course you can spend Christmas with me!” I said.

And the next day I drove in to fetch her.

Märta and her Passion had invited me round for Christmas Eve. As I mentioned, the Passion’s name is Robert – Märta calls him Robertino, Bobby or Bloody Bob, depending on how she’s feeling about him at that particular moment and whether he’s done anything to humiliate her lately. Robert’s forty-five and he’s got dark hair combed across a bald patch and could charm the knickers off a shop-window dummy – I mean that sincerely. And he’s always ready to exercise
his charm on me, too.

Several of my library colleagues who live alone or are single parents had decided to get together for Christmas Eve at a place you could hire outside town, and all bring something for the buffet. I’d been one of the keenest promoters of the idea. Robertino with a few glasses of mulled wine inside him was more than I could cope with.

I went out shopping to get some little Christmas gifts for them and their children.

But I came home with a bagload of presents for Benny. It took me until that evening to realise every single thing I’d bought was for him. I tried to convince myself I’d bought them for the children, or a Merry Band of Partygoers, but all I had in my head was what Benny would think of them. At that point, I gave in and rang to ask if I could spend Christmas with him. He said yes straight away; I think we were both pretty surprised. I rang off and then I had a little cry, as I saw in my mind’s eye a train door gaping wide in the darkness.

The next day he came to fetch me and we did the rounds of the crowded Domus store. Märta had lent me an old, grease-stained copy of the
Swedish Princesses’
Cookbook
from the Thirties, and I bought the ingredients for Superior Toffee 1, Crisp Doughnut Twists, Stuffed Pork Ribs (Mock Goose) and Herring à la Russe. I had a couple of other schemes, but had to abandon them when I couldn’t find potash, brewer’s wort or
full-cream
milk in the super-market section.

Benny was all for Pork Brawn, but the recipe called for a pig’s head, so he transferred his enthusiasm to Lung Hash. He claimed he could provide the calf’s pluck. While I was hunting for potash among all the exotic chutney mixes in the spice display, Benny sneaked off and came back with a bag he wouldn’t let me open. Then we drove back to Rowan Farm.

We turned on the fluorescent light in the kitchen, tied teatowels around our heads and waists, propped the
Swedish Princesses’ Cookbook
against the television and set to work.

Superior Toffee 1 went well. We’d forgotten to buy sweet cases, of course, but Benny reckoned he could easily make his own from greaseproof paper, the way it showed you in the book. We poured the
delicioussmelling
mixture into his crumpled little creations and felt very pleased with ourselves.

Crisp Doughnut Twists proved more of a challenge. “If the dough is worked for too long, air bubbles will form!” Benny quoted sternly, setting an egg-timer for two minutes.

So far so good, but when we came to the part where you were supposed to pass one end through a
lengthways
slit before pulling it into a knot, we came totally unstuck.

“Just give me a princess and we’ll see how she likes having one end passed through a lengthways slit before being pulled into a knot!” Benny roared.

I, meanwhile, was battling with Stuffed Pork Ribs (Mock Goose) and whining on about Pre-Shrunk
Twine and Larding Needles.

If the truth be told, we were both getting pretty
talkative
and inclined to take shortcuts with the cooking, because we were knocking back the mulled wine more or less continuously. We also had a very lively discussion about who was actually mock, the poor pork ribs trying to look like goose, or the poor goose who’d never asked for its name to be used. I took the ribs’ side, Benny, the goose’s.

The Herring à la Russe looked very attractive, a bit like an early Niki de Saint Phalle, one of those where she baked coloured paint into plaster and used a
shotgun
to spray out a work of art.

By half past eleven that evening, the kitchen pretty much resembled the cowshed – though it smelt better, Benny said, and promptly fell asleep on the kitchen settle.

I cleared up as best I could, and had the satisfaction of feeling generations of exhausted housewives lining up behind me.

Then I dragged him up to bed. And he was drunk! I was too, of course, which slightly spoilt my exhausted housewife image. He woke up and grumbled when I dropped him on the stairs, but then went peacefully back to sleep. I collapsed headlong beside him and stared with inebriated concentration at his floral
wallpaper
; I even felt a sentimental tenderness for those ball gown curtains.

Surely it’s possible to live this way, to be simply the best of friends, he on his star and she on hers, having fun
together when loneliness breathes too heavily down their necks? Surely it’s possible?