Benny & Shrimp (7 page)

I was woken by Benny, sitting on the side of the bed, trying to plait my thin, straight hair.

It felt like the middle of the night, and there was a nightmare lurking dimly at the back of my mind. Something about Örjan trying to get me into a
lifejacket
. “But I’m only going in a shell,” I tried to say, but when I looked around me I couldn’t see land in any direction. I moaned.

Benny threw himself across me to the far side of the bed and started plaiting my hair that side. “We should be able to get you looking the part,” he said. “Though you did sleep through the morning milking.” His hair was wet and he smelt of soap.

“Get lost, country bumpkin,” I croaked. “Take your
cows and go! Bring me a
café au lait
in bed, with
croissants
and the review section of
Dagens nyheter
! Then you can go and listen to the farming news or something!”

He twisted the plaits into place on top of my head and fastened them with a rubber band the size of a
bicycle
tyre. “That’s how you ought to look for work in the cowshed tomorrow,” he said. “And wear wellies and waddle along with your hips swaying, lecturing them on hoofcare.”

I did the waddling part all right. I was all swollen between the legs.

“See what happens if you don’t watch out for
untethered
bulls,” he said with satisfaction.

We went down to the kitchen and I carried on
chewing
my way through the boring petrol station bread. Benny shovelled down porridge with apple sauce as if he had hollow legs. He asked if I made my own bread, and I said I thought bread grew on trees, and you either picked it as little rolls or let it ripen into big, fat loaves.

He laughed, but it sounded a bit forced.

Then he dragged me out to view the property,
impatient
to show me everything. I nodded and said aha and oh ho and ooh yes, kind sir. It wasn’t difficult, because the farm was in a beautiful setting: in a landscape of rolling hills, with the last golden leaves of autumn to complete the pretty picture. Light trails of mist across rich, black soil he’d just ploughed for winter. Gleaming rowanberries, the sort his mother used to make a
delicious
jelly with, he told me… Enormous plastic bags full of some kind of soured grass in neat rows behind
the barn. And finally, a cowshed full of well-fed, sleepy cows – I’ve rarely seen a life-sized cow in the flesh; they seemed almost unreal.

Of course, I made straight for the calf pens and let the doe-eyed little creatures suck my fingers, but Benny dragged me away to show me the finer points of his new manure-handling system. He can’t really have believed I was the slightest bit interested? The sheep were still outside, “but we’ll have to get them in soon!” he said. We?

I had a sense of being in the middle of someone else’s dream. Someone was about to land herself an attractive farm owner with twenty-four dairy cows. Plus
followers
. Though really, someone hadn’t asked for anything like that at all, but had got quite used to the idea of being an old maid, perhaps with a cat. And lovers in small doses to keep her hormones in balance.

It was, like, too much, as Märta would put it. Yes, too much by at least twenty-four. But I didn’t say it. He was so proud.

Then, of course, there was a big fuss when I decided I wanted to go home. I’d had just about as much
crossstitch
embroidery and manure-handling gadgetry as I could take for one day. I needed to pamper my battered undercarriage in a hot bath and read
Dagens nyheter
and listen to a bit of Boccherini and lie on clean white sheets and drink herbal tea.

I needed to think.

But before I’d had time to put any of that into
acceptable
words, Benny threw me a kilo of frozen mince
straight from the freezer and said eagerly that it would be fine for our dinner – maybe meatballs? I stared from him to the ice-cold lump and back again. Then I said something laboured about still being in culture shock and needing to be put back in my natural habitat for a while.

He looked at me, and I had an almost tangible sense of his long antennae moving over my face. Yes, he’s
sensitive
to emotional moods. I suppose you have to be if you need to make contact with our dumb friends the animals.

And his wonderful smile clouded over.

“Sure. I’ll give you a lift,” was all he said. “There are no buses from here on Sundays.”

So he drove me the forty kilometres to town, ran his hand lightly over my hairy wool hat and dropped me off in the street. Because he was in a hurry to get back for evening milking.

When I unlocked the door and looked about me in the flat, which we’d left in such a state the day before, my mood changed again, and I rushed back out onto the landing. Should I have accepted the challenge of the frozen lump, just so I didn’t have to see his smile snuffed out?

Though there was no way I could have turned it into meatballs, even so; and that was probably the sticking point. Örjan and I ate vegetarian meals, and since he died, the only meatballs in my kitchen have been the frozen, pre-packaged sort. I haven’t stood eye to eye with a home-made meatball since I lived at home with
Mummy. And she wasn’t one to let her little Desirée soil her scholarly hands with messy mince.

She wouldn’t be able to teach me how to make them now, even if I asked her to. The last time I went to visit her, she called me Sister Karin and told me off because no one had brought her coffee.

I turned again, went back into the flat and started running the bathwater.

It wasn’t that I didn’t notice something wasn’t right. She was about as excited by what I showed her on the farm as she would’ve been if I’d given her a detailed account of my digestive system. Polite, yes. Asked quick-witted questions. But not what you’d call
starry-eyed
with interest.

I kept telling myself I’d have been just the same if she’d tried taking me around the library explaining what the letters on the shelves meant and how they organise the card indexes. But I didn’t really convince myself. I mean, books are still just books. A farm is a farm.

And when I gave her a pack of frozen mince, I knew from the moment I lobbed it in her direction, while it
was still in mid-air, that it was the Wrong Thing.

I hadn’t really thought it through; I live in the sort of place where the men bring a dead elk home to the women and later sit down to an appetising elk stew without ever wondering about the stages in between. I suppose my thoughts went roughly along the lines of: I’ll have time to see to the calves while she gets us some dinner, then there’ll be time to eat and have an after-dinner nap – ha ha – before evening milking. She looked at the mince as if it were a frozen cowpat. And then she wanted to go home. There was nothing I could do.

She sat with her hand on the back of my neck all the way home in the car. Now and then her fingers played with my hair.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” the fingers said. “And don’t go thinking it’s all over between us!”

But no one else in the car was saying anything.

That evening I went over to Bengt-Göran and Violet’s.

“We saw you had a girl with you!” said Violet,
clearly
curious.

Bengt-Göran gave me a wink and nudged me in the side, smiling the way he might have done if we’d just watched a porn film together. Well, we used to do that sort of thing occasionally, before Violet.

“Someone from town, eh?” he said eagerly.

Bengt-Göran kind of thinks girls from town are permanently on heat, and wear sexy black lace knickers with slits in the crotch, and lie back and part their
legs the minute you get them alone. That’s comical, considering what a meek little town it actually is. And considering the way I once got laid in the hay by
Bengt-Göran’s
own sister, who held me tight by the scruff of the neck. I was fourteen and she was seventeen; it was my first time – and my last, with her at any rate. I was petrified and went out of my way to avoid her after that. She didn’t have lace knickers; in fact, she didn’t have any at all. Bengt-Göran doesn’t know anything about it, of course. His sister’s got four kids now, and looks like a sumo wrestler.

“Mmmm. A girl from town. I found her in the
cemetery
. I mean, that’s where we happened to meet.”

“Yeah, she did look a bit pale…” Bengt-Göran began with a snigger, but Violet just looked disapproving.

“The cemetery?” she said. “You always did like to be different, didn’t you, Benny?”

I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve Violet thinking I’m so odd. Maybe it was that time at a party when she and I were sitting talking, confiding in each other like you do when you’ve had a few. I told her I thought she’d be just the person to help Bengt-Göran cope with his archetypal farmer’s melancholy. Farmer’s
melancholy
! It makes me squirm with embarrassment to think of it now.

“Just look at him, sitting there so quiet and
introspective
in all this din,” I hiccuped. “He’s just drunk,” Violet snapped. And she was right, of course; he threw up in a lilac bush straight after.

“She can’t even make meatballs,” I said. “All she can
do is read books and talk about Lackong and his theories.”

Best lay it on with a trowel. Don’t want them
expecting
to be invited round for coffee and wafer rolls and engagement announcements in a hurry. Things are tricky enough as it is.

“Can’t make
meatballs
!” said Violet, eyeing the table with great satisfaction. On it stood a serving dish the size of a washtub, brimming with crisp brown meatballs. “Would you like some, by the way?”

“That’s right, Benny!” laughed Bengt-Göran, and his porn film look was back. “She’s disposable. Don’t get bogged down in any marriage plans.”

In Bengt-Göran’s world there’s no way you could get really fond of a woman who can’t make meatballs, still less marry her.

As Violet handed me a heaped plateful, with
lingonberry
sauce made from berries she’d picked herself, I was on the verge of agreeing with him.

My flat looks out on a garden surrounded on all sides by three-storey blocks. All these flats must be about
twenty
years old; the trees are tall and mature – we can see them through our windows. The sandpits are often deserted; the children who used to spend their time digging there, fifteen years ago, have flown the nest, but their middle-aged parents still live here. Splendid, dull people with no objectionable habits.

So it’s very quiet outside my windows. They face south, and the sun finds its way in through my
woodenslatted
blinds, making stripes on my white sofas. Occasionally I hear footsteps on the stairs outside, but not often; I live on the top floor. If I open the window, there’s a rustling in the potted fig plant, the one Örjan
grew. But I’m always too chilled to the bone to have it open for long; instead I have all the radiators
permanently
on high, and the temperature in here’s usually at least twenty-three degrees.

I like lying on one of the sofas in my white dressing gown, watching the sun’s rays stripe the air of the room.

Sometimes I raise a hand and let the sun make stripes on that, too, and the only sounds are the hum of the refrigerator and a late autumn fly blundering against the window, heavy thuds in the silence.

Of course I know this thing with Benny is
impossible
.

Like sitting in the shade of the plane tree on the last day of the holiday, drinking cold retsina and dreaming of uprooting yourself and just moving down there and
taking
each day as it comes. Getting some sort of job,
finding
a whitewashed house of your own, with a sun
terrace
covered in pots of herbs. And all the time you know that in five hours you’ll be standing at Stockholm
airport
in the drizzle, and the next day you’ll be sitting there at your desk in your ergonomic chair getting stressy, and the only thing left will be your suntan. And even that’ll get washed down the plughole in the bath before two weeks are out.

That was the way I dreamt as I thought of Benny and our games – there must be a way of hanging on to it all! Lock the front door and keep him in the wardrobe until I get home from work. Like in that Almodóvar film, the Spanish one with Antonio Banderas.

I tried imagining myself into his life. But no images came.

I hadn’t been prepared for quite such a culture shock, in the home of a Swedish man of about my own age, living just forty kilometres away.

I’d probably have found it easier to adapt to a devout Muslim.

I immediately visualised a tall, thin man with sad eyes, forced into political exile and living in a
oneroomed
council flat with the walls covered in reams of Persian poetry. He worked day shifts as a cleaner, despite his university education back home, and at nights sat in smoky venues with his political and poetic friends, or went to see unforgettable black and white films at obscure little cinemas. And I’d find out about his culture and translate his poems and collect money on the streets for his campaign against the dictatorship. We’d sit on beautiful rugs eating spicy dishes.

But making meatballs in Benny’s disgusting kitchen, and being a slave to twenty-four cows every day of the week, all year round? Keeping his discoloured shower clean, stoking the stove with firewood whenever I
needed
hot water, discussing articles in
The Farmer
? Me?

I may be a racist, but I’m not the ordinary kind.

Even so, I clung to the phone obsessively for several days. Sometimes because it never rang, sometimes because I never rang.

To dispel that humiliating teenage feeling, I spent the evenings out. Worked overtime, went to the cinema, or on pub crawls with unmarried colleagues. They found
me unusually happy and sociable, and so did I.

The weather got worse as autumn wore on; I hadn’t even got the sunbeams to play with any longer. And in the dirty grey daylight, my flat was about as inspiring as a dentist’s waiting room. The only thing that broke the monotony was the neon-coloured sunrise behind the loving couple in the shell, on the poster Benny had given me for my birthday.

Not an hour passed without my thinking of Benny.

At the library I started getting engrossed in
The
Farmer
, to Lilian’s unfettered delight. I said I was
looking
for an article the local authority had requested. About unblocking drains.

Olof sometimes looked at me as if he might be going to ask me something. But wisely, he never did.

One day I took it into my head to go for lunch to a café frequented by immigrants, men from various other countries. I stared at them so fixedly and thoughtfully from my lonely table that they completely
misinterpreted
my intentions and I ended up in awkward exchanges that I’d really rather forget. Especially as my reason for being there was so confused – not to say
stupid
– that I blushed all over.

As the days passed, my old depression came back, as good as new. And Märta still hadn’t come home. I took baths that lasted half the night, until my skin was white and wrinkled, and dragged home bagloads of cheap paperback fantasy fiction. I wore down the
butterfl
y
soap until it was no more than a shapeless pink blob.

How could something that had felt so right turn out so wrong?

And Benny was by now presumably asking himself the same question. Since he didn’t get in touch.