Benny & Shrimp (6 page)

I couldn’t find any clean socks and the pump stopped working, so there was no hot water, and when I came tearing along to the cemetery gates ten minutes late, I knew I stank of the cowshed. Sometimes, like when you go to the village shop, you forget you’re wearing your overalls until you notice people moving out of range of the smell. They probably think it’s a flatulence problem; not many people recognise ordinary cowshed smells these days.

She was wearing the mauve tights. They clashed with her coat.

“I smell of the cowshed, because I’m a farmer,” I reeled off before I’d even said hello. “Twenty-four milk cows, plus followers.” I hadn’t even managed to tell her that, the time before.

“… and a few sheep,” I added. Sheepishly. And
squinted
at her as I tried to keep my distance and stay
down-wind
.

She stared at me. Then her summer holiday smile spread slowly across her whole face. “What does
followers
mean?” she asked.

We decided a trip to the swimming baths was in order, and on the way I told her followers means young stock. I hired an awful pair of dark blue swimming trunks and bought a little sachet of shampoo and gave myself a good scrub, then we met at the edge of the pool. She’d wound her straight, white blonde hair into a wet little sausage of a bun; I hardly recognised her.

Her swimsuit was beige, of course, and she was thin, you might almost say bony. If it hadn’t been for her
little
plums of breasts you could easily have put her in the “male, 14-16” category. And yet – her slenderness was more greyhound than famine victim – her movements were sort of efficient and energy-saving; I watched spellbound as her pale hand painted pictures in the air as she spoke.

I thought how I’d always liked bright colours – and plenty of flesh and even rolls of fat for that matter, something to get a nice firm grip on. Decided I’d only ever use the very tips of my fingers if I ever got
anywhere
near her plums.

I once had a collie bitch I tried to mate with a dog of the same breed, a real pedigree animal. The bitch was climbing up the walls, frantic to get out – she totally refused to get it together with that particular dog. A few
months later she stood there placidly letting herself be mounted by a Norwegian elkhound-Labrador cross.

There’s no predicting how that sort of thing works.

We swam a few lengths and had a race on the
exercise
bikes, then we went to the cafeteria and made our choice from their selection of dry, crumbly almond cakes. We talked the whole time – well, mostly she did, of course.

In mid-sentence I felt her foot rubbing along my calf, and totally lost her drift. Children’s shouts and screams echoing from the pool came together with the
thumping
in my ears, and I had to put my towel across my lap. We played footsie for a while and I struggled to keep my eyes on her face. All I could see was her mouth moving, but I’ve no idea what she was saying.

Suddenly she took hold of my damaged hand and started nibbling the fingerless knuckles. I sat stock-still.

“Let’s go back to my place,” she said.

So we did. To her white and beige flat.

I shall remember it until the day I die.

She unlocked the door, threw her swimming things down in one corner and her coat in another. Then she turned to face me, peeled off her pale blue T-shirt and put her head on one side.

I peered furtively about me as I started pulling off my jeans. And then I went completely limp. It was like stripping off in the central library.

“All these bloody bookshelves are making me
nervous
!” I muttered.

“That’s a new one!” she grinned, putting my empty
knuckles to her lips again.

Then we made love, twice, straight off. No finesse – but it would have been as hard to stop as a high-speed train on a clear stretch of track.

The third time, I mumbled in her ear: “Now we’re two dogs that’ll be stuck fast in each other until
someone
throws a bucket of water over us!”

So then we started lurching around the flat still joined together. She fried eggs and bacon with me inside her, behind her. She tied an apron around her front and my back.

We went for a shower like some eight-legged primeval creature.

We considered wrapping ourselves in a sheet and going down to buy an evening paper and scare the wits out of people, so we started practising our footwork. But before we’d managed to get the sheet to fit
properly
, her eyes went out of focus and she sank down in a heap on the hall carpet. She kept saying something about red patches on her breasts; I never discovered what she was going on about.

For once I didn’t have to look at my watch, because I’d talked Bengt-Göran into doing the evening milking, but there was still tomorrow morning to think of. I couldn’t bear the idea of being parted from her even for a minute, so I asked her to come home with me.

The fourth time we slipped together, I had time to feel her squeezing me inside her. She had muscles down there like a milkmaid’s hands after a whole summer up in the mountain pastures. I told her so.

She rubbed her nose against mine.

“Do you think I can learn hand milking, too?” she murmured.

Örjan and I used to read
The Joy of Sex
together. We’d massage one another with oil and then try all the
positions
, even a strange pretzel-shaped one. I often faked orgasms. Not to make Örjan happy, I have to admit – I just couldn’t go on sometimes, and he never liked to give up until he’d achieved the goal he’d set himself. It was the same with his research, actually – he’d put
forward
a hypothesis and not give up until he’d proved it.

But he’d certainly read somewhere that women get red blotches on their breasts after orgasm, and when I stayed my usual white, he’d get an irritated frown and look as if he was going to start all over again. I tried
taking
the line that I was short of pigment, but that made him launch into an account of the difference between
pigmentation and nerve stimulation, until I fell asleep from exhaustion.

I’d assumed I just wasn’t naturally erotically inclined.

I was wrong.

When I came out of the ladies’ changing room at the baths and scanned the bathers through squinting eyes, I couldn’t at first identify my Forest Owner. I was
looking
out for a lumbering walk and that blessed cap with the earflaps. And there he suddenly was beside me, in hired swimming trunks, narrow-hipped and
broad-shouldered
, his arms wiry, with veins like twisted rope. Face and lower arms tanned, the rest of his body white as chalk. That dusty yellow hair had gone into wet
gold-en
-brown curls.

When I stroked his calf with my big toe in the
cafeteria
, he put his towel across his lap with an
embarrassed
grin. I didn’t miss that. My ovaries turned
somersaults
and I couldn’t get him back home quick enough.

Of course, it was still Desirée Wallin who spent that afternoon at her home address with a man. I mean, I had the same personal identity number and driving licence and birthmarks as I’d had that morning. And yet I wasn’t the same person. Maybe it was a sudden case of split personality, the sort you read about in the Sunday supplements.

He hadn’t just turned my head, he’d rotated it so many times that it came off and I had to hold it on a string like a balloon, while my body twisted and
wallowed
. Hour after hour. I even found time to spare a
thought for Örjan when those red patches flared.

Reading in a book about all those different
lovemaking
techniques can sometimes make me yawn. The
concept’s
always the same. But when they’re happening to you, it’s like a nine on the Richter scale. I only have to think about it to feel giddy all over again.

Towards evening we were red and puffy and getting sore in several places. He informed me I was coming home with him, and I threw my toothbrush and
shampoo
into a bag.

No nightie. But I put on the cap he gave me for my birthday. He had a hulking great car, half truck, and I had to shift half a ton of scrap iron before I could squeeze in beside him. We stopped at a petrol station on the way and bought a chunk of cheese and a French stick. He gestured vaguely towards the condoms; I shook my head and drew a coil in the condensation on the window. It was still in place, as a reminder of Örjan.

It was dark when we reached his farm, so I couldn’t get any real idea of my surroundings. But it smelt
reassuringly
rural and the house was a big, old wooden one, painted red. He ushered me through the porch and into the hall, then disappeared towards the cowshed to do one last evening check.

There was a faintly rural smell even indoors, not very pleasant, to tell the truth. Mildew and sour milk and wet dog.

So I was on my own for my first meeting with his house, which was definitely a pity – I could have done with his warm, dry left hand and its three remaining
fingers. Because there was no mistaking that this was where the man with the tasteless gravestone lived.

I started in the kitchen. There was a fluorescent strip light on the ceiling with a few dead flies in it. The walls were greyish blue and clearly had been for the last fifty years. They were fly-specked in some places, in others hung with cross-stitch samplers, some with sayings like “In this Home we find our Rest when Clean and Tidy have done their Best”, and pictures of bright orange flowers in brown baskets, kittens, bluetits and red
cottages
. On the windowsill stood a row of potted plants as dead as the dusty everlasting flowers in the vintage black Fifties-design vase. There was a kitchen settle with a grubby rag rug on the seat, a dirty teatowel,
rib-backed
wooden chairs with seat cushions in a brown floral fabric. Perched on top of the refrigerator, which was so old it was free-standing and had rounded
corners
, were a blue fabric flower in a china shoe and a plastic cat, virtually transparent with age. I put the cheese in the refrigerator; it was all but empty and smelt of compost.

I felt my way into the next room. There was a big black switch by the door, at hip height; dark green embossed vinyl wallpaper, the sort that makes it look as if there’s moss growing on the walls; an old couch with one end kicked through, covered in an odd assortment of shabby rugs; an oak sideboard with a large television set standing on it, an oval mirror hanging above it; an angular, Fifties-style armchair; a magazine rack full of old copies of
The Farmer,
and more cross-stitch pictures.
Plus a framed reproduction of “Urchins at the Farm Gate”.

I gaily told myself: you could open a postmodernist cult café in here! The thought went through my mind that if I’d come across a place like this in Estonia, say, I might have found it touching, even exotic. But I could feel the corners of my mouth trembling with the effort of holding that smile.

And they drooped definitively when I got to the bedroom and saw the unmade bed with the grey-
looking
sheets.

I went in through the cellar door and used the
downstairs
shower so I didn’t spread the cowshed smell around the house. I’ve tried to avoid using it much recently, because to be honest, it needs a good scrub. I’ll need the pressure hose if I’m ever going to get it clean again. And there are various other places in the house that could do with it, too. But how the hell to find time?

Mum used to work at least a ten-hour day, and I must work fifteen; that would make twenty-five, which I couldn’t count up to even if I used toes as well as
fingers
. Let’s face it: sparkling tiles are as much a thing of the past as homemade buns and crisply pressed sheets.

As I stood humming to myself in the shower, I thought I could picture her, my beige beloved, moving her small, pale hands over the kitchen table, laying out
that delicious home-cured salt beef we always used to have, and a loaf of sweet, dark bread and a cold beer. And wafer rolls coated in pearl sugar.

She wasn’t, of course. Where would she have got wafer rolls from, just like that? She hadn’t even unpacked the shopping or put the water on for tea. She was standing there in front of the bookcase in the sitting room, arms dangling at her sides, staring at the spines of the books. She didn’t find any lost treasures there, I’m afraid. My old school books and a few things from Mum’s reading circle – and fifteen years’ worth of ancient bound volumes of the
National Farming
Magazine
.

I didn’t feel very comfortable. Despite getting so carried away at her flat, I had noticed she’d got two walls covered in books.

“Looking for some bedtime reading? Would you like
Elementary School Chemistry
or the
National Farming
Magazines
for 1956? Thrilling year for pig breeding, that one,” I ventured. She gave me a tired smile. Not a
summer
holiday smile, not at all.

We went out to the kitchen and I started noisily
getting
cups out and putting water on to boil. She sat down at the table and began leafing through the agricultural supplies catalogue.

It felt a bit strange. I mean, the fact that she
expected
to be waited on like that.

“I’ve been all through higher education,” she said suddenly, “and I can always answer the current affairs quiz in
Dagens nyheter
without cheating. But even so, I
had no idea there were any such things as self-loading trailers or bras for cows.”

I said nothing. She was trying to make a point. I put the bread on the table and she reached for it
absent-mindedly
.

“I mean, I expect you deal with those sorts of things every day and know them back to front. They’re no stranger for you than Lacan’s theories are for me.”

“Who?” I said. “Lackong?” He was some bloke at Alfa Laval, wasn’t he? Invented the milk separator?”

Of course I realised that she meant it kindly. That I shouldn’t feel I was, like, stupid because I hadn’t got any books and hadn’t been to college, and that she was
ignorant
in her own way, blah, blah, blah. It riled me, even so. Who the hell did she think she was, coming here and consoling me for not being her? I must have sounded sulky, because she peered at me through her fringe.

“I just mean that sitting here on the settee there should be a girl with thick blonde plaits saying, ‘Benny, have you seen, they’ve got some new styles of cow bra this year! And don’t you think you should invest in a Krone 2400 self-loader?’ I don’t know the first thing about what you do.”

“If it was a girl like that I was looking for, I’d have applied to the farmers’ relief service,” I said. “Or put a personal ad in
The Farmer
. ‘WLTM woman with tractor licence, appearance no object, unpaid.’ But if you pick up girls in cemeteries, you have to make do with what you get. And anyway, weren’t you going to learn hand milking?”

That brought out the summer holiday smile.

“Have you got anything I can practise on?” she said.

I had. There and then.

We dragged ourselves to bed; I didn’t even manage to change the sheets, though I’d certainly planned to.

I was woken in the middle of the night by her sitting up in bed, her breath coming fast and panicky.

“Örjan?” she said in a dry little voice, feeling my arm with sweaty fingers.

“You’re with me now,” I mumbled, stroking her arm until she calmed down. She took my three fingers and laid them over her mouth and went back to sleep with a sigh.