Benny & Shrimp (8 page)

Every time I picked up the receiver to dial her number, I just sat there until I was cut off by the tone. She said she’d had a culture shock and needed to be alone. So I waited three days for her to ring. Then I rang. No answer.

I found an old “get well soon” card, put her address on it, stuck a stamp on and tore it up.

Several times I thought of driving into town and going to the library. But I decided that would be too extreme.

The weather got worse and worse. It took me two days to get the sheep in, with the help of my neighbour’s thirteen-year-old lad. They’d been outside for far too long and had muscles like elite gymnasts. The young
rams went sailing over the fences with room to spare and the ewes were leaping about like deer. If I sent them to the abattoir now, they’d bring me in about as much as I could spend on a single blow-out at McDonalds’. If I slaughtered them at home with old Nilsson to help me, we’d hardly be able to saw through the accumulations of muscle. The lad and I ran to and fro in the sleet,
swearing
like troopers. Well, mostly he did. “Fuck you!” he shrieked at the sheep.

I don’t know why I hang onto them. It was Mum’s idea to have a few; she used to use the wool for her knotwork classes. And she used to make a lamb stew with potatoes and beans that was hard to beat. It never occurred to me to learn how to cook it.

It wouldn’t feel right to get rid of her sheep. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was going through her room, just after she died. Throwing out clothes that still smelt of Mum, handling her reading glasses and
medicines
and knitting patterns. Nothing had prepared me for the fact that this would need doing. So I took the easy way out, of course: put the whole lot in a couple of old suitcases and took it up to the attic. And I haven’t done anything with her room except take the sheets off the bed. She had the whole windowsill full of those plants with little bluey-mauve flowers. Expect they’re all dead by now.

What the hell did she mean when she said culture shock?

This morning I was in town. There were a few things I needed to do. More than once, I thought I caught sight
of her. At the agricultural supplier’s, at Berggren’s
ironmonger’s
, at the dairy!

Bengt-Göran’s dropped by two evenings in a row, no doubt to check out my sinful woman from town at close quarters.

“I’m not sure I’ll be bringing her here again,” I told him. He gasped in dumb admiration. Let him think I just dispose of women whenever it suits me.

He doesn’t need to know that I’m longing for her, or that I take the phone upstairs and plug it in beside my bed at nights.

Märta finally came home from Copenhagen. She was waiting for me after work with a carrier bag in which she’d got some Danish beer and a souvenir, a plastic snowstorm with a naked couple inside. We went back to my place and made tea and stretched out on the sofas.

She gave me an evasive answer when I asked what they’d really been up to in Copenhagen.

“We’re not here to talk about me!” she said. “You know that very well!”

So I gave her a totally uncensored account of the last week. With Märta there’s no point wasting your effort
trying anything else; she still manages to fish up most of it from your muddy depths.

I spared her none of the details. The tasteless
gravestone
, the saddo cap, the embroidery, the fly specks and the mossy wallpaper. She snorted.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she said. “That man sounds the ideal playmate for you! And you sit here worrying about home furnishings! Why should his cross-stitch bother you? After all, I don’t suppose he embroidered it himself; he just didn’t want to get rid of things that remind him of his parents. Have you really been going around imagining all Swedish farmhouses look like Carl Larsson paintings inside?

That brought me up short. If I’d had any mental image at all of the inside of a Swedish farmhouse, it probably had been something along Carl Larsson lines. A big kitchen with an open fire burning in the grate, copper pans, and ring loaves hung on a pole along the ceiling. She’d touched a raw nerve there, so I raised my voice.

“You know as well as I do it’s not a question of home furnishings! This is about two lifestyles on a total
collision
course! I’m never letting any cross-stitch over my threshold, and I don’t suppose he’d let a Käthe Kollwitz over his – let’s face it, this isn’t just a matter of taste!”

“So why did you put up the poster with the couple in the seashell?” she asked slyly.

“Because he made me feel so happy…” I mumbled.

She gave a knowing nod.

“But you can’t honestly imagine
me
on a three-legged
stool with a milk pail jammed between my knees?”

“You weren’t there for a bloody job interview!” Märta roared. “That guy gave you the best lay you’ve had for decades, maybe ever. And you’ve had a good laugh with him, which is more than you ever did with that bird fanatic you were married to! So what do a few fly specks matter? Don’t be such a bloody coward! Grab it while you can! Otherwise you might just as well go in there and pull your pristine duvet cover over your head.”

“But what should I do? I don’t know what he’s
thinking
! He hasn’t been in touch!”

Märta held up the snowstorm with the pair of lovers inside.

“What you do is take this and a couple of Danish beers, right, and buy a pack of frozen meatballs and go out there and surprise him tomorrow night. He made the first move; take it in turns and you might get
somewhere
! You can borrow my car.”

A picture came into my mind of Salami and Zulamith. They’re two characters in “The Milky Way”, an old poem by Zacharias Topelius that I fell in love with when I was little, though I hardly understood a word of it. With Mummy’s help I learnt it off by heart, and at her coffee parties she used to stand me proudly on the table and get me to recite it for her bored guests.

Salami and Zulamith are a man and a woman who each live on separate stars and love each other so much that they build a bridge of stars through space. I had a sudden vision of us taking it in turns: competent
bricklayer Benny, trowel in hand, fixing star to star at his end, while I at mine tried to jump between the stars as if they were ice floes…

Märta’s advice isn’t always foolproof, but it usually involves some action that moves things forward. The following evening, I packed a basket with Danish beer, frozen meatballs, ready-made potato salad and a (
shopbought
) blueberry pie. And Märta’s snowstorm with the lovers, wrapped up in gold paper. Then I drove out to Benny’s farm. There was no answer to my knock, but the door was unlocked and the kitchen light was on, so I went in.

The strip light was buzzing, and a black monster of a radio on the draining board was blaring out some
commercial
station. I switched over to the shipping forecast and started bustling about; soon the air inside the
grubby
bobble-trimmed curtains was thick with a comfortable, childhood sort of feeling. I cleared a dirty porridge bowl off the table and put it to soak in cold water in the sink, along with the one already floating there. Then I searched drawers and cupboards until I came across china and cutlery, found a dainty embroidered
tablecloth
in the oak sideboard in the sitting room, and fried meatballs in a less than hygienic frying pan. When I heard him clomping up the stairs from the cellar, I had a sense of deja vu: this had happened before.

“What the hell…” He stopped in the doorway, dressed in his cowshed gear. Then he strode across to me, moulting straw and chaff, and gave me a mighty hug.

“Oh, meatballs?” he grinned. “Did you fry them all by yourself, my pale little lady?”

“Don’t go thinking I shall make a habit of it!” I
mumbled
into his rank-smelling orange Helly Hansen jacket.

It was the best thing she could possibly have done – though I still feel I’ve got meatballs coming out of my ears. Violet had given me a bucketload to bring home; I’d been living off them for three days.

She spent the night with me, and as I was changing the sheets, she said she’d got her period and hoped she wouldn’t leak on them.

Be my guest, I thought, because I liked the fact that she was saying it. It felt so intimate, homely even. You don’t bother going to visit a short-term lover if your period’s just started. She was sort of elevating me to more permanent status; no rush for the lovemaking. That wasn’t what she’d come for. Actually, I’d quite like a stain left by her on my sheets. There’s probably a Latin name for perversions like that.

We lay talking for hours. And we were so happy the whole time; we couldn’t stop prattling. I remember that particularly.

“I’ll give you culture shock!” I said. “I’ll get myself a traditional costume! Yellow breeches and a double-breasted jacket with silver buckles. And you’ll have to weave the cloth for my waistcoat, and then, you know what? Then I’ll strut about outside the church on Sundays with my thumbs stuck in my waistcoat,
discussing
the weather and the harvest with the other farmers, and everybody’ll know me as Big Benny of Rowan Farm! And you’ll have to hold your tongue and make coffee for the entire congregation!”

“So I suppose a hundred years ago you’d have been quite a solid and prosperous farmer? With twenty-four cows?”

“You bet I would! And a lay magistrate and
churchwarden
into the bargain. A well-to-do farmer with loads of farmhands to boss about, and pretty farm girls whose bottoms I could pinch. The villagers would have wanted Big Benny’s opinion on everything, and invited me to join the parish council. Instead of which, here I am running around on my own from machine to machine like a headless chicken, and haven’t even got time to go to union meetings.”

“Would you have asked for the hand of the slender maiden from the town with nothing but a chest of books to her name?”

“Of course not! Benny of Rowan Farm’s got to marry fat Brita from the farm next door, to extend his
property. But I’d have hired the slender little thing as a maid and crept down to her on the kitchen settle at nights and got her pregnant. And I’d have paid decently for all her children and taken them on as shepherd boys and shepherdesses, whatever fat Brita had to say about it.”

“But one day the slender maid runs away with Emil, the gypsy with the fiddle! What does Benny do then?”

“Then he kicks out her kids, too, and hires a new maid for the kitchen settle! A younger one!”

She clipped me round the ear with the pillow and we tussled for a bit. Then I had to give in, or I’d have
needed
to go for a cold shower.

Her panting subsided.

“I’m never going to be a maid on your settle, you know that, don’t you?” she said. “And I wouldn’t be worth having, anyway. I don’t know how to bake or do washing or deal with all the bits from a slaughter. Isn’t the farmer’s woman supposed to cut the pig’s throat and drain off the steaming blood and make it into some
disgusting
kind of dish?”

“Dunno. We’ve got an arrangement to have our meat back from the abattoir. Jointed and everything.”

It all went quiet.

“But that bit about creeping down to me on the kitchen settle and getting me pregnant…” she said, as if to herself. “Hearing stuff like that turns me to jelly down there. The biological clock’s ticking like mad.”

I turned on my stomach and whimpered.

“You mustn’t say things like that. These sheets’ll be
pregnant with little pillowcases before I can stop myself!”

She fell asleep with my knuckles pressed to her lips again.