Benny & Shrimp (3 page)

Reading the jottings in my blue book from that autumn, it strikes me that maybe I was depressed, in the clinical sense of the word.

At work I’d joke almost hysterically in the staffroom, and relish seeing people laugh until their mascara ran. Everything would suddenly feel normal then, and I’d be the one enjoying it all the most.

And when I got home with my Co-op carrier bag at the end of the afternoon, I always made sure I had plenty to keep me occupied. I arranged the vegetables I’d just bought into a still life on a ceramic dish from Denmark, watered my sprouting seeds, carefully selected some
suitably
wild opera aria to play at top volume, lit candles in the bathroom and took long baths as the lavender scent of the aromatherapy lamp slowly filled the white room.

That autumn I read autobiographies and whole series of fantasy fiction; at best they had a narcotic effect – like stepping into other worlds. And when they suddenly came to an end, I would lie back at one end of the sofa, weak and trembling, as if washed ashore on a beach after a shipwreck. The biographies and the fantasy worlds asked me: Why are you alive, and what are you making of this life, so fragile, so unwieldy and short?

At night I dreamt a variety of answers. In one of the dreams I was a goddess, moving through a latticework of shadows and light, and my fingertips sprouted life in different forms: luxuriant, fleshy creepers and plump children’s bodies.

Other days seemed mostly to consist of sleet and eternal waits for the bus. I increased my pension
contributions
, made a will and left instructions for my funeral – if Örjan had chosen that funeral director, the least I could do was follow his lead. On days like those I sorted receipts into separate folders, bought IKEA storage boxes to stack in the wardrobe and started
putting
old transparencies in frames – the pictures held no more significance than the last year’s dead, rustling leaves.

I’d often masturbate. The men in my fantasies were all strapping types with rough chins and callused hands. They had no faces above chin level.

Märta was my lifebuoy, my anchor in life. She might come charging in, right into the bathroom, waving two cinema tickets until I dragged myself upright, blew out the candles in the candelabra and went with her.
Afterwards we’d come back to my place, take a sofa each and review the details of our daily grind and the meaning of life in one glorious mix, from her neurotic boss’s latest tricks to an impassioned critique of St. Augustine’s views on women.

Märta exuded a warm scent of bread, eau de parfum and cigarillos. She lived intermittently with Robert, her Greatest Passion, and sometimes when he was away on one of his mysterious business trips, Märta and I would drink a bottle of white port between us and then she’d spend the night on my sofa. We’d devote the following morning to peaceable, low-level bickering, with lank hair and bags under our eyes. Märta in Örjan’s drab bathrobe that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of. More than once we bemoaned the fact that we weren’t
lesbians
– I could imagine myself living with someone like her, and she often found Robert more than she could bear.

One night I told her about the Forest Owner and the inexplicable smile. She sat upright on the sofa, licked her index finger and held it up to test the way the wind was blowing.

“There’s something in the air!” she said delightedly.

A solitary life, without family or children – maybe it comes home to you more if you happen to be a farmer with a fair few acres of arable land and some forest.

Who are you planting the trees for, those trees that take thirty years to be mature enough for felling? Who are you letting that land lie fallow for, so it won’t be drained of nutrients and suffer long-term damage?

And who will there be to help me get the hay harvest in?

I tried to focus on the monthly milk test
results
. Better figures every time, higher yield and fewer
bacteria
. I planned improvements to the manure system, freshened up the milking parlour and got a new tank. I bought a new tractor with tandem mounting, not
because I really needed one, but because I wanted to convince myself that at least something in my life was changing for the better.

However nonsensical it may sound, I stayed out working around the farm later and later each evening. I was reluctant to face the concentrated, empty silence of the house. It had a faint smell of decay and discomfort – so one day in the middle of the week I drove into town and bought a black, cigar-shaped monster radio and stood it on the kitchen worktop.

From then on, the first thing I did when I got in in the evenings, before I got under the shower, was to turn on one of the commercial stations at top volume. The excited voices pouring out of the radio gave me the feeling that at least life was going on somewhere, and a little trickle of it found its way into my shabby old kitchen. But I still couldn’t bring myself to chuck out the old brown bakelite radio with the yellowish fabric front that Dad had bought Mum for one of their
wedding
anniversaries in the Fifties – sometimes I even had it on with the volume turned down, because the cat liked lying on it when it warmed up.

I put all my clothes in the same wash; everything turned a greyish shade of blue. Now and then I might happen to browse through the family section of
The
Farmer
and see people putting up front porches with fancy carved woodwork or stuffing their own sausages. Who the hell cared what the front porch looked like? It was just a place to kick off your boots and store empty beer crates! As for sausage, you bought it ready-made in
two seconds flat on your weekly trip around the Co-op.

I had vague ideas of clearing out the old fridge. There were things in there that probably could have walked out on their own. There were jars of jam with Mum’s handwritten labels and a thick furring of mould on top. Throwing them out would be like throwing her out.

Of course, it would have been perfectly feasible to go along to some evening classes and Meet People. Our branch of the National Farmers’ Union was running a study group on the subject “Make your farm earn”, but of course, it instantly became known as “Make your farm burn”, since that seemed the most profitable option. I went along to the first few sessions and met exactly the same people I usually meet at the
agricultural
supplier’s, at Göte Nilsson Tractors and the union’s Christmas party.

At the party, though, they had their wives with them, and I’d dance with them and let my hand wander all over the place. That sometimes made some of the wives start breathing heavily and gyrating their pelvises, making me glance self-consciously in their husbands’ direction. Later on in the evening, when we men had gone round the back to have a few swigs of what we’d brought with us, we told jokes about the farmer’s daughter and the travelling salesman, and what the milkmaid said to the farmhand. Sometimes we got
sentimental
and said we were the ones holding the land in trust, and getting nothing but shit for it.

Then the party would be over and the married
couples
would dance the last dance with each other while
the rest of us stood around the doorway arguing about slurry or the EU; and then there’d always be one with a sober wife who had to get up for an early shift at the hospital, and they’d give me a lift home. And if I wasn’t too pissed I’d fantasise about one of the women I’d been holding close, and all the time it’d be in the back of my mind that I had to be up again at six, because I couldn’t afford to get in a relief worker.

Now they’re off home, the lot of them, to their
blasted
front porches with fancy woodwork, to tuck in their sleeping kids, I thought, and in the morning she’ll brew him strong coffee to help him get going and then put some dough to rise and stuff some sausages. What the hell am I living for?

I’m not ashamed to admit I even wrote away to one of those mail-order bride agencies to ask them to send me a Filipino woman on approval. But when I got their brochure – scruffy photocopied pages with smudged black and white photos – it turned my stomach. I suddenly wondered what the beige woman in the cemetery would think if she could see me thumbing through that brochure. I’ve never felt more down in my life.

I went through a phase of feeling reluctant to go to Örjan’s grave. It’s getting colder, I told myself; you can’t sit there letting yourself get inflammation of the ovaries. We’ll risk it, said the ovaries. We fancy another look at that Forest Owner.

One day I simply got up in the middle of a meeting about the annual library budget and headed for the cemetery.

Naturally the Forest Owner wasn’t there. And
anyway
, I wasn’t at all sure I’d recognise him again if he was wearing different clothes and looking serious.

The smile, on the other hand, I’d have recognised that. Absolutely anywhere.

I felt so sorry for Örjan, my brown, handsome,
well-meaning Örjan. Fancy having someone sitting at your graveside and thinking about other things. Though if I’d been the one lying in the ground and Örjan the one sitting here, I bet he’d have had his binoculars with him.

My being madly in love with him was over even before we got married. It faded like a suntan – who notices when that happens? But unlike the suntan, it never came back. And there were periods before the wedding when I’d agonise at the thought of the wide blue yonder I’d never see, or at least, not with Örjan.

I asked a lot of Märta around that time. Buckets of tea until half past three in the morning.

“I mean, you can’t be madly in love all your life, can you? Passion gradually changes into Love, into
something
more substantial to build on, doesn’t it? The sort of Love that’s like a warm friendship, plus sex,” I whinged. Good grief, I’m surprised she didn’t throw up in my lap! She kept books of advice on Love Problems in the loo, so you could tear a page out if you needed one in an emergency.

“Hard work convincing yourself, eh?” was all she said, unconcerned, and glowered at me over her eternal cigarillos. Märta stuck to the principle of Listen to your Heart.

“Örjan’s got everything,” I said stubbornly.

“According to consumer research, you mean?”
snorted
Märta. “Best in test, sifted out from all men in the 25-35 age group? Does he really exist, or is he just a prototype? Have you checked to see if he runs on
batteries? You know, if you can hear a faint hum coming from his ear…”

Shortly after that, Robert, her Greatest Passion, sold her car and used the money to go off to Madagascar without her. Märta’s face took a serious tumble at that point, but she regained her poise by hating him,
shedding
the odd tear, working like crazy and then hating him a bit more before bedtime. And when he came back, tanned and gorgeous, she opened her arms to him again within three weeks.

That did it as far as I was concerned. If that was what the wide blue yonder had in store, you could keep it.

So I embarked on the project of being Happily Married. Within six months, we had a marriage as comfy as a pair of old slippers. We were in complete agreement about equal division of the bills and the chores; gave parties for people from work, with bottles of Greek Demestica and proper Bulgarian feta;
renovated
furniture we found at auctions with a lick of paint; and cut interesting articles out of the newspapers for each other.

What went on between us in the double bed was a little problematic and we tended to blame that on my sensually deprived childhood. Örjan did his best with the foreplay, which never took less than half an hour, but I stayed as dry as coarse-grade sandpaper; we
positively
grated on each other.

Of course, I never really knew Örjan.

Not that he tried to conceal anything – if I asked, he was happy to tell me whatever I wanted to know, from
his political views to his mother’s maiden name. But…

“The people in the picture have no connection with the article,” you sometimes read in the paper. That was Örjan in a nutshell, in some indefinable way. So I stopped asking.

He didn’t ask much, either, and if he did, his face had “This is Me Taking an Interest” written all over it. So I stopped answering. It didn’t really seem to bother him.

What seemed to bring us closest was talking about friends and acquaintances who had got divorced after stormy marriage guidance sessions. We loved sitting there going over all their mistakes, and sometimes we’d even get straight under our designer duvets and find I grated less than usual.

But my egg never, ever, turned somersaults,
however
hard Örjan worked on my erogenous zones.

The cemetery bench was freezing my backside off, so I got up and went. No Forest Owner today, ha! He wasn’t there on my next two visits, either.

The third time, I passed him coming in at the
cemetery
gate as I was on my way out. He was carrying some fir twigs, a little wreath with plastic lilies and a grave light. Of course, it was All Saints Day! He gave me a nod as stern as an old schoolmaster’s, as if he was
thinking
: Well? Is your grave light properly positioned, young lady?

I thought of Märta and her Greatest Passion. Was this how it started? With finding yourself going places you didn’t want to go, your feet and ovaries starting to live a life of their own?

A wreath with plastic flowers! Örjan would have found that very funny – yes, Örjan could laugh!

I didn’t go to the cemetery the following week. My feet and ovaries needed putting in their place; anything else would be plain ridiculous.

Olof, who’s the head librarian and recently divorced, asked me if I felt like going out for something to eat after work. We went to a new pub, with the sort of
interior
design no real British pub has had since the Thirties. Olof’s got a boyish fringe with a sprinkling of grey hairs, which falls down over his eyes when he gets enthusiastic about something, and long white hands with which he makes elegant gestures. I think it’s a habit he got into when he studied at the Sorbonne in his youth.

We had kebabs, I drank wine and Olof had a cloudy Belgian beer that made him wax lyrical and toss his fringe. Then we discussed Lacan and Kristeva and Gregorian chants and after that we went back to my place and made love. It was quite okay, really; I’d gone without for so long.

But my ovaries didn’t sit up and take notice that time, either.

When we’d got up and showered and finished off my Pernod, he showed me photos of his two children and told me in great detail about the brace his daughter had on her teeth. Then he cried. I think we were both relieved when he left.

This was followed by several days when I didn’t think about the Forest Owner. That’s obviously what you have
to do to put your ovaries in their place. You take an occasional lover at bedtime to keep the system ticking over. My interest in the Forest Owner was just a
symptom
of some deficiency, a bit like brittle nails indicating a shortage of vitamin B. A few yeast tablets, and
everything’s
in trim again.