Benny & Shrimp (11 page)

He’s got a couple of little chicken-pox scars on his face, one on his temple and one at the corner of his mouth. Right in the middle of a complicated computer search for reference material at work this morning, I found myself stroking the keyboard with my index finger as if it were his face and his scars. I closed my eyes and traced them across from P to D, caressed the slightly concave keys with my fingertip, then opened my eyes and looked at my hands as if I’d never seen them before. Those bony white fingers know the down on his neck bones, the hollows at his collarbone and the twisting veins on his forearms, and they’ve followed the line of hair from his navel and down…

Existence has become so physical I feel I’m losing my
grip on it. People have told me that when they stopped smoking, they could suddenly appreciate how fragrant tea was, how cream tasted, how springtime was a whole composition of scents. My tactile corpuscles seem to have taken that leap; I can feel a chair soft and
wellsprung
beneath my thigh; the roughness of linen to the touch, a precise little sensation if you run a feather across your lips. If it goes on like this, people will start tapping their heads knowingly and rolling their eyes to heaven whenever I start fingering the things around me.

I had to ring Märta. When I told her I’d been stroking my computer keyboard, she made such a strange sound, a sort of low, warm, protective cooing, seeming to express how pleased she was for me. But all she said was that I should watch out I didn’t get myself arrested for sexual harassment of office equipment.

I’ve never been a particularly sensual person; life with Örjan taught me that. I took it with equanimity, in fact, I may even have been proud of it, as if it made me a rational being, above more carnal behaviour. The tabloids’ Sunday sex supplements made me snort in irritation: apply pressure here and rotate your tongue there, sometimes concluding with an “and that’s the way to keep him loving you…”; it all seemed so
clinically
efficient, like a course in re-tiling your bathroom using the best possible technique for getting the edges flush. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with courses in efficiency and effectiveness, but don’t try telling me they’ve got anything to do with Love. I refused to embark on a career as a member of the harem; I got
quite enough of being efficient at work.

And Örjan understood, and was more than happy to take the role of Husband who always wants a Bit More than his wife; I made him seem more potent by being less than hot myself. What would he have done if I, wild with hunger, had put out a foot and felled him on the hall rug? I think he’d have wilted instantly. Looking back, I’m not convinced he was so very sensual himself.

Because he’d never have shown such childish
impatience
as Benny sometimes does, when we haven’t seen each other for a while. As if he’d been standing for ages with his nose pressed to the sweet shop window,
longing
himself almost to death with his pocket money in his hand. He’s really gone over me comprehensively, every square centimetre, with all five senses and sometimes even the sixth, or that’s the way it feels. He can find birthmarks I never knew existed, nose into the back of my knee or lie looking at a nipple as if he’s never seen one before. He gets a bit uncomfortable when I laugh at him, and tells me it’s a professional thing: he’s so used to assessing udders… but there’s no mistaking his eagerness and pleasure, or his wish for me to share them with him.

When he first started his voyages of discovery, I was really rather embarrassed, and asked him if he was
giving
me my MOT. But in fact, that was mainly because I felt so stupidly, unexpectedly shy. I don’t know when I embarked on my own investigations of him, but from that moment, of course, we found twice as much, and
my hands started feeling empty when I hadn’t got him to occupy them.

Sometimes when I look at his lips and think about where they’ve been, my face still flushes well and truly red. Me! Who prescribed myself regular doses of lovers as vitamin pills to keep my system in trim.

We’re usually at my place, because its trickier for me to get away, but now and then we spend an evening at her flat. I don’t like it there at all. The walls are white, the carpets are white, the few items of furniture she’s got are all tubular metal ones. It feels like being in a bloody hospital ward. She stands there in the kitchen cooking some vegetable concoction that gives me wind. Before I know it, somebody’ll stick their head around the door and say, “Do come in. The doctor will see you now!”

In the corner she’s got some potted plants as tall as young birches. For all I know, they could be plastic; the whole flat seems to have been sanitised of anything that could give you allergies. The only thing that brightens it up is that poster I bought her. It’s pretty silly, so it’s nice of her to have kept it.

Maybe I should give her some of Mum’s cross-stitch pictures? God knows, I’ve got more than enough. I think Mum must have produced one a week for fifty years; most of them she found a use for as birthday presents for friends and neighbours. I can go anywhere in the village and find her nimble handiwork staring me in the face from some corner or other. And yet there are still enough left at home for me to wallpaper the whole house; there’s a trunkful in the attic.

She hasn’t got a television. No video, either, of course. So I avoid going over if there’s a big match – but naturally I don’t tell her that. Those evenings it’s “absolutely vital to get some paperwork done”. Once she came to my place instead, and then, of course, I had to miss the match and wrestle with Dad’s bureau and all its overflowing piles of paper. And it was a bloody good job I did. I found an Overdraft here and Threat of Debt Collection there, Final Deadline for Payment and Despite Repeated Reminders. I sat up half the night sweating over it, and did actually get through most of the backlog. Perhaps she’s a kind of guardian angel, without knowing it.

And it was amazing sitting there, frowning over my current account balance while she was slinking onto my lap and exploiting me shamelessly. With those sort of professional perks, I could well imagine myself becoming a very hard-working, conscientious
accountant
… Well, all right, we don’t always manage to save ourselves for our late night sessions of blindman’s buff. I’ve got a cowshed to drag myself to at dawn each day.

I asked her why she hasn’t got a television. When she’s at my place, she has no inhibitions about goggling at everything, especially the adverts. Her favourites are those podgy babies lisping about their snug-fitting
nappies
. She watches everything wide-eyed, from chat shows with studio audiences of happy pensioners who collect garden gnomes, to late-night thrillers which always end with somebody driving off a high cliff. I’ve made love to her on the deep-pile rug in front of the TV set without her even dragging her eyes away from
Friends
repeats.

“You see!” she said. “It would be hopeless for a
person
like me to have a television!”

The only thing she can’t stand is sport. As soon as she hears the theme tune of a sports programme, she groans with irritation and digs out some flipping
poetry
book from her flowery fabric bag. She never goes anywhere without it, and she’s always got a couple of books in there.

Or she does whatever she can to distract me. I’ve been straddled by her on the deep-pile rug without
taking
my eyes off the Björklöven-Modo match.

A couple of times we rented a video. Or rather, we’ve never rented just one, because we can never agree. We rent two. Then she gets out her flowery bag while my video’s on, and I fall asleep during hers.

We’re like chalk and cheese, as Mum and Dad used to say. And I don’t want it ever to end. I’ll just have to take it one day at a time.

Occasionally I ask him if he wants me to borrow
anything
from the library for him, since he hasn’t time to go in person.

“If you’ve read one book, you’ve read them all, and I read one last year!” he says, with a silly, cross-eyed look.

Sometimes I manage to talk him into going to a film, and just as he’s plodding determinedly into
Die Hard 4
, I divert him into
The Painted Veil.
He watches the film morosely for a bit. During the love scenes, he lets his fingers creep down between my thighs until I’m squirming like a maggot on a hook. “I’m missing the sports news right this minute!” he hisses in my ear.

Once, and only once, I drag him along to the theatre with me. It’s a noirish, avant-garde play with lots of
short scenes meant to illustrate the emptiness of modern city life; he whinnies audibly in the deathly quiet of the auditorium. “Haven’t enjoyed myself this much since I saw
101 Dalmatians
, he announces loudly in the foyer, and gives me a defiant stare.

“You only do it to provoke me!” I roar at him in the hamburger bar afterwards. “No one could call you deranged or mentally deficient. So why is it you can’t bear me having an existence of my own, or admit there’s something of value in it? I don’t come along and make stupid comments about your disc harrow!”

“But then I’ve never expected you to sit and stare at it for two hours,” he says indignantly.

Silence descends.

To get his own back, he drags me along to something called Tractor Pulling the Sunday after. Gigantic tractors are competing to pull heavy weights and spewing out dirty blue diesel fumes into the clear autumn air. The noise is appalling. It would have made Örjan burst into a series of angry articles. I feel ill, and ill at ease, in every possible way. Benny pulls his forest owner’s cap further down his nose and totally ignores me while he talks carburettors with other blokes in caps.

Then we go home and make mad, passionate love.

“Is that all it’s about?” I whinge to Märta.

“Whaddya mean, ‘all’?” she says.

The very best times are when we lie there all tangled together afterwards, calm and relaxed. We often invent little tests to find out more about each other.

“What would you do if you were standing eyeball to
eyeball with a bull on the loose?” he asks.

“I’d make a fantastic five-metre leap to reach a fence, then pass out just before I managed to climb over it, and be gored to a pulp,” I say.

“Oh no, you wouldn’t. You’d go up to the bull and tell him sternly he wasn’t to molest women in public, and the bull would pass out!” he says.

“What do you do if you suddenly discover you’ve been going around at a posh party with your flies undone and selected bits hanging out?” I ask.

“I’d get out the whole lot and say I’ve been sent by the National Flashers’ Association and ask people if they’d like to support our work with a small financial contribution,” he answers straight away.

“No, in real life I’d try to pull up the zip without
anyone
noticing, but get the tablecloth caught in it and pull all the plates onto the floor. Then I’d back towards the door with the cloth hanging from my flies, grinning from ear to ear, trip over the cloth as I edged out, fall downstairs and break both legs! What would you do if you’d gone and bought a book, then went in another bookshop where the assistant suspected you of
shoplifting
it?”

“I’d pay for it all over again with a hysterical laugh, and what’s more, I’d buy three more copies of the same book and go wittering on about it being so good I
wanted
to give it to all my friends. And then leave the shop with bright red ears, accidentally leaving all four copies behind on the counter!”

We agree that if he’s the Prize Saddo of all Sweden,
I could be the Prize Saddess, and end up sharing the same glass case at the folk museum, stuffed just like him.