Benny & Shrimp (19 page)

When I was in town the other day, I saw Desirée for the first time since we split up. It had turned warm, and she was sitting at an outdoor café with a thin grey-haired bloke. They were leaning towards each other and seemed engrossed in their conversation. There was a pile of books on the table. I passed so close by, I could see the top one was in English. Of course. Desirée was wearing lipstick and a stylish new jacket, bright blue. Her hair was longer than usual and a bit wavy. The
greyhaired
bloke was laughing.

I wanted to kick his front teeth in.

He didn’t look as if he’d put up a fight. If Desirée had given him her summer holiday smile, in all likelihood I’d have jumped over the fence and gone crashing in
between them. But she didn’t.

When Anita’s annual leave was over, she cut down her shifts by half, without even asking me about it. We carried on as we had been, and I taught her to drive the tractor so she could pack the silo when I was getting in the silage. We got the bikes out and started going on
little
excursions with a flask of coffee and a bite to eat; for Friday nights she’d rent a video (just one!) and buy some wine.

The first video she got out was
Die Hard
, by the way.

Whenever I was on my own, I’d have my Walkman blaring. In the back of my mind I started seeing a new Desirée, with make-up and nice clothes and a series of guys who’d seen the world and liked reading books in English. So I suppose she’d got what she wanted!

And so had I, after all.

I wondered if she ever thought about me. And what she’d wanted, those times when she rang in the middle of the night. To shout at me for something, I expect.

I’d have liked to be sitting there opposite her,
laughing
and telling her how lovely she looked in lipstick, and in that new jacket. Seeing her smile.

But I’d made a decision and now it looks as if it won’t have to be either/or: I can have the farm and a family.

With Anita. I guess that’s how it’s going to be and there are certainly worse things.

I don’t think I ever really believed the thing I had with Shrimp could have a future. There was something disturbing about those intense feelings she gave me, and apparently still does give me – like wanting to kick in
the teeth of a complete stranger! Anyway, I’ve never been much of a believer in “marrying for love”, those relationships that start with you drowning in a cleavage at a dance. Then, if the cleavage is the right age and unattached, you move on to all the usual mating rituals like seeing a film, family dinners, Ikea and a holiday on Rhodes, and then you book the local church and it all runs like clockwork right through to the marriage
guidance
counselling.

I’m sure things worked just as smoothly when your parents chose your wife for you; at least you knew she’d be someone who’d suit you reasonably well, and then you just had to get used to her because there wouldn’t be anyone else on offer. Mum could easily have chosen Anita.

I think both Anita and I sense we’ve passed our
sellby
date where romance is concerned. We both need this; we can deprive the world of a middle-aged spinster and an ageing bachelor to laugh at.

“Now she’s an entirely different kettle of fish!” said Violet once she’d met Anita. Bengt-Göran knew her from before.

I went out and punched my fist hard against the porch. But then I went back in again.

Anita isn’t stupid and she isn’t dull, even though she doesn’t make me laugh like Shrimp. I’ve always liked Anita and got on well with her. But I can’t suddenly make myself fall in love with her, any more than I can start warbling operatic arias. I just haven’t got it in me.

And she’d never ask me if I “love” her.

People love cats and strawberry ice-cream and
poloneck
jumpers and Ibiza – and then all of a sudden they’re supposed to “love” one single person until they stop doing that and start “loving” someone else. On a par with a game of postman’s knock, I’ve always thought.

It’s like that old joke about the stork – I don’t believe in the stork, although I’ve seen one myself.

I don’t believe in Love, although I’ve experienced it. I could say. When I can’t sleep, I lie there imagining it’s because I never actually gave it a chance. I kind of never reached the stage of thinking I had to put it first, in front of everything else.

Sometimes I feel I haven’t really reached dry land yet, and maybe never will.

When my thoughts go skidding off to the idea of starting a family, for example, I can’t help thinking of Shrimp, pregnant, with my baby like a ball in that thin white body. Of making her pregnant. Like she longed to be.

I can understand why people’s brains short circuit and repress all memory of it after they think they’ve had an encounter with aliens. They just can’t accommodate it in their picture of the world; they have to rebuild everything from scratch. And believe me, I shall repress Shrimp to the point where I can’t even find my way to the library.

I dreamt I was in a shoe shop at sale time. In a pile of shoes on a table, I found a gorgeous blue leather shoe, all strappy; it was a right shoe, and I put it on my foot. In real life, my legs are as white and sticklike as rounders bats, but in my dream that shoe made my right leg look shapely and silky brown, my ankle as graceful as a ballerina’s. So I started hunting for the left shoe. When I found it, it was tiny, the size that would fit a five-year-old. “That happens sometimes,” said the shop assistant, unconcerned. “Take them or leave them. They’re the only pair we’ve got.” But how could I buy an odd pair of shoes like that? Chop off half my foot? I left the shop regretfully, and then I woke up.

I forced myself to think of that dream whenever my thoughts strayed in Benny’s direction. Half my foot.

It was part of my rehabilitation, however, to change the way I looked. I started by applying a little mascara to disguise my swollen eyes, and powder to hide the dark rings. Then I moved on to lipstick, and I realised it felt good, becoming more visible in men’s eyes. Every time somebody’s eyes lingered on me, it felt like a little dose of revenge on Benny: see, there is somebody who wants me, after all! Then I bought a few new clothes in bright colours, mainly to convince myself I was alive. I succeeded quite well.

In May the library sent me on a two-week course down in Lund. I popped over to Copenhagen and went to the Glyptotek. In the entrance hall they’ve got that statue of Niobe with her children crawling all over her. I took pictures from every possible angle. Then I spent hours in the gallery of busts of Roman emperors and empresses. By about 2–300 AD, they start to look as sharp and realistic as photographs, and you can chart a single person’s looks from childhood to old age.

How will I look in fifty years’ time? And Benny?

I promised myself I’d look him up when I was eighty, come what may. He could scarcely refuse me that.

In my summer holidays I signed up for a course in watercolour painting on the west coast of Ireland. We sat all day long with the gulls shrieking around us,
trying
to capture the glint of the sun on the water at the base of the cliffs. An American couple, brother and
sister
, invited me to Wisconsin for Christmas. He was a college lecturer and very pleasant to sit in silence with.

In a dusty little pub in Ballylaoghaire I saw an old fridge like the one Benny has in his kitchen. Or had? It might all be different now.

Once, just once, I borrowed a car and drove through the village where Benny’s farm is. I persuaded myself I was on the way to pick wild raspberries in the big
clearing
in the woods near the next village. And on the way I saw Benny and a dark-haired, sun-tanned woman. There they were, cycling towards me with picnic things in their bike baskets, but they didn’t notice me in the car, of course. Benny seemed to be explaining
something
and pointing out over the fields. He was slim and tanned and had his hair cut a different way. He looked happy.

As for her, she looked rather drab. Good company for Violet, I thought. And then I began to wonder whether he makes love to her the same way he did to me, and then I couldn’t bear it any longer and hardly made it home, and swore I’d never go there again.

Märta was more and more her old self – on the
surface
. But she put me in mind of a toy I had as a child, a yellow tin duck that could waddle on its flat feet and go quack when you wound it up with a key. One day I wound it too far and the spring broke. I just couldn’t accept that it would never go again: it looked the same on the outside.

Märta’s spring had broken.

But the difference between human beings and tin ducks is, among other things, that our springs can heal, given time. Märta met a man in a wheelchair. He’d had
a colostomy, and was irascible and moody. “There you go!” said Märta. “At least with him, I always know where he’s got to!” His life certainly got a lot more adventurous after he met her. She insisted wheelchair users can do everything the rest of us can, then lost hold of the chair on a steep slope when she’d taken him out hill walking. The chair tipped over and he cursed her, but she simply shook herself and dragged him up
another
hill.

In September I started my storytime sessions again. A little blonde boy with brown eyes would often sit right at the front and interrupt the story with
suggestions
on ways to improve it. His dad would sit over by the wall looking proud and embarrassed. They stayed behind afterwards once, to talk, and I went with them to a café. The dad’s name is Anders and he lives alone with his little boy. We started meeting up for outings or museum visits, or cooked dinner for each other. Anders is a historian and talks about the past in such
entertainingly
irreverent terms that I don’t know what to believe, but he often makes me laugh.

I hoped I might be falling in love with him.

One day, when all three of us were out for a walk in the park, his little Daniel, lower lip quivering, came out with: “I feel sorry for eagles!”

“Why’s that?” Anders asked.

“Because they can’t get into nesting boxes.”

It was then I realised it was Daniel I was in love with.

In October, an everyday miracle happened. In a shop window I saw a gorgeous pair of strappy, blue leather
shoes. I recognised them. I went straight in and bought them, wore them home, and made a phone call the minute I got in.

Anita wants us to get engaged.

“I can’t, I’ve got no ring finger on my left hand!” I said. But then I stopped wriggling. It was only fair.

Then suddenly, one evening in October, Shrimp rang. I’d just come in from the cowshed; Anita was in the kitchen with some pork chops sizzling in the pan. Energy Radio was pounding away.

I swapped to the other phone and went up to the bedroom.

“Yes?”

“Can you come to my place? Right away? Nothing terrible’s happened, it’s just that I’ve got to talk to you about something.”

“Now? This evening’s not very convenient. Tomorrow?”

I tried to sound unbothered, but I wasn’t, of course. Bothered?

It went quiet for a bit.

“No,” she said. “This evening or not at all. But I won’t be angry if you don’t come. It’s perfectly all right.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” I said.

Anita didn’t ask why I’d got to go into town all of a sudden. But she wondered, I’m sure. I usually tell her where I’m going.

I didn’t think at all on the way in. Just drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and tried to empty my head of thought.

She let me in with her face set strictly to neutral and asked me to sit down in her uncomfortable tubular steel armchair. She was just the same, and yet she wasn’t. Whose doing was it that she’d started to wear make-up? She had the usual pale-coloured clothes, jeans and a jumper, but peculiarly enough also a really smart pair of blue shoes with straps.

She took a seat opposite me, with the look of a child counting down to a jump into cold water: ten, nine, eight, seven, six… A moment’s silence, then we both started talking at once.

We laughed, a bit uneasily. She looked at me and I’ve seldom seen her looking so affectionate. I can’t recall her looking like that very often.

“I couldn’t wait fifty years, though that was my
original
plan,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of
messing up your life. But there’s one thing I want to ask you, and I don’t know how to start.”

“You could always turn it into a joke. That’s what you used to do when I was trying to be serious,” I said, and I could hear how bitter I sounded. Below the belt! After all, I’d been the same myself. I had to take the edge off it, somehow.

“Read anything good recently?” I asked. That was one of the old catchphrases that generally got us going. She’d answer something like “Schopenhauer” and I’d say
The Phantom Christmas Annual
, and then we’d compare them. “Schopenhauer’s world view is consistently worked through! – Yes, but the Phantom’s got much cooler underpants…” That sort of routine had been our
salvation
many a time when we’d ventured onto thin ice. And sometimes we’d managed to get some serious things said by kind of wrapping them up in the banter.

“The other day I read about a scientific investigation in France,” she said. “They got a load of men to sleep in new white pants and sweat into them; then they got a load of women to smell the underwear and choose which man they were most interested in. It turned out that every single one chose the man whose immune defences complemented their own. So their offspring would be healthy, in other words.”

“So it was my immune defences that turned you on, not the farm?”

“Who knows?”

She lapsed into silence and looked as if she was counting again: five, four, three, two, one – go!

“This is what I want. I’ve wanted it all along and I don’t know why. What I mean is, I want a baby with you. No, let me finish! I don’t mean I want us to start all over again. I just need to make this bloody biological clock shut up, or I’m not going to get anywhere. Those little eggs I feel so chock-full of, I want to give them a chance, just one. And you needn’t know a thing.”

“Are you planning to knock me out and assault me?” I said. I admit I was gaping at her, open-mouthed.

“My idea is to ask you to come to bed with me one last time,” she said, regarding me gravely. “Now, while they’re really jumping around. And it’s got to be right now. You seem to be the only one who really gets them going.”

My whole life passed before my eyes, as they say.

“And then you needn’t hear another word about it. Unless you absolutely insist, of course. And it’s not going to work – there’s no way it’ll work – but at least I’ll have tried, and then I can stop thinking about it and we can both go off and live happily ever after, in our two separate worlds.” She stole a look at my ring.

I said nothing.

“It’d certainly have one hell of an immune defence system,” she mumbled. “No, forget I said that! I’ve never been more deadly earnest than now. I think I’d put ‘father unknown’ on the form. Don’t say a word! I haven’t thought it all through, for obvious reasons. And there are other considerations, I know, I know! So I’m going to give you an hour to think it over. I’ll leave you to it.”

She leapt up, grabbed her fabric bag and headed for the door.

“If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll know. At least I’ll have done what I could, and they’ll have to start jumping for somebody else… But I’ll always remember you as my very best playmate. Though I shan’t think of you all that often.”

She slipped out before I had a chance to say a word.

I must have looked the way the cows do when the emergency slaughterman fires the stun gun.

I looked around me. The shell poster was gone. In its place was a watercolour painting of some cliffs and the sea, and a blown-up photo of some statue, a fat woman with a mob of kids crawling all over her.

If I went along with her crazy proposal, I’d be doing the same to Anita as that Robertino did to her friend Märta. It was out of the question. I sat there for
forty-nine
minutes, chewing my empty knuckles. Then I disengaged my brain and switched to autopilot.

She threw down her bag in the hall and came
rushing
in. At first she didn’t see me, because it had got dark and I hadn’t put a light on. She switched on the ceiling light, saw ßI was there and started crying, and pretty soon her mascara was running.

“Oh no!” I said. “You needn’t think I’m leaving all the decisions to you! I’ve got conditions, too. Firstly, none of this ‘father unknown’ nonsense. What d’you think I am, a walkover? You’d turn my lad into some
down-atheel
university lecturer in dead languages. Secondly, I want three goes – that’s what they always get in fairy
tales. I come here twice more – tomorrow and the day after. And you don’t go with anybody else in the
meantime
, and neither do I, of course. After the third time, I go home and mind my own business and you stay here and we don’t hear from each other until you ring. By then, you’ve either got a period or a test result.”

“Even so, we’ve only got a one in five chance,” she sniffed.

“Think I don’t know how tricky it is, getting heifers pregnant?” I said. It was a hell of a struggle getting my words out; they were slurring all over the place. “But at least you won’t be sent straight to the abattoir if it doesn’t work. If it does work, we’ll teach it the soprano part of the
Messiah
. And if it doesn’t, I promise to be deliriously happy without you, and every time I go to the library I’ll come by your desk and slap you on the back. You can imagine how often that’ll be.”

We held hands and went into her white bedroom.

There’s no way of describing how it felt, at least not this side of the Nobel Prize for literature.

And when I came back to my senses, I knew I still had two attempts left. Though in fairy tales they always fail the first two. Then some mysterious little man in grey pops up and tells them the magic words.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for that little devil.