Benny & Shrimp (10 page)

No. 506 Amersfoort has hardly been able to put any weight on her left foreleg these last few weeks. Her hooves are as long as a cartoon cow’s and I’m worried she might have hoof rot. It always makes me queasy just thinking about it, them standing there in the shit while the rot eats inwards. Dad was always very careful about getting their hooves trimmed in good time, and when the hoofcare man came, I’d take over outside – but who the hell is there to take over from me?

Every day as I’ve battled to get the autumn
ploughing
done, it’s been in my mind to ring the farrier, but I’ve got to have the time to be his assistant, too. And one thing’s for sure: going around dreaming about totally irrelevant stuff doesn’t help one bit. Someone ought to
tell her, Desirée, that her summer holiday smile almost made my best cow go lame.

I finally got hold of him; he came one afternoon and we set to it. When we were indoors having a coffee, after several hours’ work, Desirée rang. I closed the door to the kitchen and prepared myself to say a
number
of things not intended for the farrier’s ears. But she hadn’t rung for a chat. She was sobbing down the phone.

“I’ve got to come out and talk to you, right now,” she said. “When does the next bus go?”

I felt a peculiar crawling sensation on my scalp.
DDay
. She was about to tell me she’d had enough of me, more than enough, and then there’d be nothing left but 506 Amersfoort’s hooves to occupy my time. Life would be sent back to Start, for me to play tedious new rounds for ever and ever Amen.

I stood staring at myself in the hall mirror. A dirty old woolly hat, brown and orange. And under it, hair like handfuls of tow, a lot thinner than I remembered. Was this me? When had I last looked at myself in the mirror? Fancy her taking the trouble to come out on the bus to tell me in person! Great girl, that one.

Listlessly, I told her the bus times and dragged myself back out to the cowshed to finish the job. Then I did the milking, and just as I was putting out their silage, she came, with her toadstool hat pulled down over her ears and her hands thrust deep into her
pockets
. She climbed cautiously up onto the feeding
platform
and came trudging towards me, right up to me,
jumping nervously aside whenever the cows tossed their heads. I put down the wheelbarrow and stood there, tense as a drawn bowstring.

She came up to me, put her arms around me and rested her cheek against my filthy overall.

“You’re so normal,” she said. “And you’ve got such a horrible old hat!”

She said it in the sort of tone she might’ve used for saying, “Listen darling, they’re playing our song!”

I swear the cowshed instantaneously got lighter. It can do that sometimes, on late summer evenings when you turn off the hay drier and there’s suddenly enough power for a few extra watts in the lights. It gets brighter, and you realise that yes, of course, this is how it should be!

She hadn’t come to say she was through with me.

We went in and made some tea and had the rest of the cinnamon buns I’d bought for the farrier. Then she told me about her colleague at work going off the rails.

Inez had bought her filing cabinets when the regiment was disbanded, sometime back in the Seventies. She’d been stocking them with files for twenty years.

First, on the subject of her own family, unto the
seventh
generation. She got interested in genealogy. That was how it started, I later realised.

But why only collect information about people long since dead? She started putting together files on
neighbours
, colleagues, old classmates from school. She had no friends.

“I’ve never been interested in making any,” she said matter-of-factly. “It only leads to all that tiresome give and take. You never have any freedom.”

She had files on the checkout girl in the nearby Co-op, and on the landlord’s agent and the postman.
They weren’t very comprehensive.

“It’s hard to find out things about them,” she
confided
apologetically. “Sometimes I make direct
observations
, and sometimes I get information from the births, marriages and deaths columns in the paper. But I don’t go to their homes.”

“Direct observations?” I asked.

She gave a smile of satisfaction.

“You’ve never noticed, have you?” she said.

Noticed? Noticed what?

“I do a bit of spying,” she said. “I’m not remotely interested in making any impact on people’s lives; I don’t want to harm anybody, or help anybody, either. And I’ve absolutely no intention of making any use of this information. The sort of material I collect is of no interest to most people, anyway. I’ve made an
arrangement
with a lawyer for all this to be shredded, unread, in the case of my death. But I’ll let you see your own file.”

She pulled out a green metal drawer marked “Colleagues” and extracted a hanging file. It was quite full.

“Sit!” she snapped, as if I were a particularly dozy dog. She put the file in front of me on the table.

There were black and white photos of me at the library, in a street in town and on my balcony; the last of these seemed to be taken sideways from below, from the other side of the road. The photos from work were grainy, as if they’d been taken from a distance and enlarged.

“I’ve got developing equipment in the bathroom!” she said proudly.

There were lists of my work shifts, right up to today. There were circulars, minutes from union meetings and memos I’d signed and sent round. There was a little notebook marked “Clothes” where she’d correctly recorded my favourite colours and fabrics, and made a few comments on things I’d worn: “Christmas party: red pleated skirt, long cardigan, blouse with a big collar”. “May 15th: dark blue jacket, too big. Her late husband’s?”

There was a list of books I’d borrowed from the library and a couple of receipts from the supermarket where I shopped.

“They’re your receipts!” she said. “Do you feel uncomfortable about me taking your picture without you knowing, and collecting up your receipts in the shop?”

I couldn’t honestly say I did, especially not with her staring at me, head cocked to one side, as inscrutable as a house sparrow.

From the folder I took a large white handkerchief that smelt vaguely familiar. She blushed.

“Yes, it’s yours!” she said. “I don’t normally keep objects, but I wanted to preserve your perfume. It’s Calvin Klein’s ‘Eternity’, isn’t it? That was what I
decided
, anyway, at the perfume counter in Domus.”

“But you must do something with all this information you find out? Is it just because you like
collecting
and filing things? Or are you going to write a
novel?” The idea suddenly came to me. I’ve read about writers who work like that.

“Not at all,” she said irritably. “There are far too many novels already. But… well, sometimes… I try out your lives a bit, like you might try on clothes in a shop. Things you’re not planning to buy at all, but you just fancy seeing yourself in something new! I might sit on the balcony and imagine I’m you, on your balcony, early one spring morning, in your old quilted jacket and your hat with the toadstools, eating some of those Finn Crisp you always buy. I shut my eyes and imagine my hair’s straggly and white and I’m in my thirties. I mean, I would have made some preparations, bought the Finn Crisp, even been tempted to buy a bottle of ‘Eternity’!

“So I sit there and think about what I’m going to wear tomorrow; shall I choose my long green skirt or my jumper and jeans? Shall I go for lunch with my
girlfriend
or go to the cemetery?

“And then I think about my late husband; well, I often used to see him when he came to collect you! Not that I immerse myself in it or anything. I’m not all that interested in your actual feelings.”

“My file’s bulging,” I mumbled. “I can see you haven’t got anything like as much on Lilian.”

“Her life doesn’t interest me as much. I’ve just got a few external observations, because I might happen to catch sight of her when I’m being someone else. And she has to have birthday presents too, of course!”

Birthday presents! No wonder she was so good at choosing just the right present!

“I’m quite interested in you, on the other hand,” said Inez. “You seem to be someone else who observes, more than you take part. But I think you’re too
impatient
to file away what you see. Maybe, if you give it time.”

She sounded like a patient primary school teacher. Given time, you could be stark raving mad too, dear! But was she?

“Can you tell me anything about my life that I don’t know?” I asked, all of a sudden.

“Yes,” she replied. “But I’m certainly not going to. That would be cheating. And it could be dangerous. It would feel like one of those science fiction stories, you know, where somebody accidentally alters some little detail in the past and completely changes the present. Well, I don’t know. But I do know I’m really just trying out your life for brief spells, now and then. Just
borrowing
it. I don’t wear it out!”

I once heard a Finnish scientist say that normal just means someone who hasn’t yet been studied in sufficient detail. Why was it any crazier to map out people’s lives than to go birdwatching? No, she was no more mad than I was, and neither bitter nor sentimental. Just practical and efficient and rather poetic.

“That new man,” she said. “He puzzles me. He’s either completely wrong for you, or the only
conceivable
one.”

“Benny? Oh, Inez, what shall I do about Benny?”

“I most certainly do not hand out advice!” said Inez.

Something happened, around about the time she came out and told me about that colleague of hers. It was as if after that she started opening her eyes more often than her mouth. It’s hard to describe.

Of course, she tended to talk a lot. And I wasn’t one to object – considering the silence I’d been living in. I found most of what she said interesting, or fun, or sweet, or something. But I did sometimes wonder if it was possible for her to experience anything without talking about it simultaneously. It seemed to be her way of absorbing what she saw, as if she had to grind it up small to be able to swallow it, like pensioners with dodgy teeth.

There are people who use cameras like that, you know. Once when I was little, we went on holiday to
Gothenburg for three days, with Mum’s cousin Birgitta. And Birgitta spent all her time taking pictures: the botanical gardens, the harbour, the funfair at Liseberg, the tour boats and the trams. Somehow she didn’t enjoy anything unless she could take a picture of it. And then that winter, when she’d come to visit and we all sat talking about the trip and looking at her album, she turned out not to remember a single thing she hadn’t got a shot of, not even that daft waiter in the hotel restaurant who could waggle his ears. It must be hell for Birgitta if one of her films doesn’t come out – like
losing
a few months of her life. She didn’t even take
particularly
good pictures.

Shrimp was a little bit like that. She had to talk about everything. And there was really only one place where it bothered me: in bed. Because even as she was fondling me to the point where I felt quite giddy, she’d be talking, sometimes about what we were doing, and that made me feel a bit embarrassed: “Mm, wonder if the elbow’s an acknowledged erogenous zone, or if it’s you making it into one?… Did you know the Duchess of Nivers drew a map of her private parts and painted it in watercolours, so her lovers would find it easier to
satisfy
her?”

She’d go on like that. And I could never find anything to say.

Until that evening when she’d been with the old lady and her filing cabinets. At first she didn’t seem very interested in doing anything at all, even though she said she wanted to stay the night. She got undressed and lay
down on my bed, flat on her back, and stared silently at the ceiling. But since it always still feels like Christmas for me just having her here, I couldn’t keep my hands off her.

Sometimes I think I’m trying to learn her body off by heart, as if it was going to disappear. I know the hollows behind her collarbone, her straight little toes, the
birthmark
under her left breast and the white fuzz on her forearms. If we’d been playing blind man’s buff, I’d never have mistaken her for anyone else, at least not if she was naked. I think, in fact, I could recognise her just from the way her nose turns up. The funny thing about her is, she thinks she’s completely uninteresting. I’ve no idea if she’s ugly or beautiful; it’s kind of irrelevant. As long as she’s her.

That evening she didn’t say a word. I didn’t know if I could start making love to her or not; she usually gives me a clear signal when she thinks it’s time. But then she gave a big sigh and pushed me down onto my back, took my hands and crossed them on my chest. And then she started playing blind man’s buff with me, still in
complete
silence.

They say lonely people go to the hairdresser’s and the dentist’s and the chiropodist’s when they don’t need to, just to feel someone’s touch. She’d never touched me like that before – and it was nothing to do with erogenous zones. Not for a while, at any rate. I think I was on the verge of tears. And I know she was crying. Her tears were falling onto my hand, but when I tried to say something, she put her finger over my mouth.

“Shhh, I’m trying out my life!” she said. I don’t know what she meant, but just then it seemed so obvious, like it does in a dream.