Benny & Shrimp (9 page)

So we embarked on the painstaking process of getting to know each other.

It was anything but straightforward, despite the fact that we outwardly seemed such free agents.

We were both without parents – he, definitively, I in practice. Mummy’s been in a care home for five years now, and rarely recognises me. Daddy just seems to think I’m disturbing him when do I occasionally go home to see him, especially if I try to talk to him.

He was like that even when I was little, actually. He disliked the slightest mention of what he called “women’s matters”: home and children, cooking, clothes, decor, and, of course, anything that could come under the heading of “feelings”. Among women’s
matters he also included art, literature and religion… Above all, he hated any complaint relating to the female body. Not a word was to be breathed of these in his hearing; it was as if he was afraid of catching girl germs. As soon as he decently could, he disappeared off to the regiment. He was a major.

I sometimes wonder if he’s really a homosexual. It’s an odd thought, but then I’ve never been very close to my father. I mean, it’s classic for children to shiver with amazement at the thought that their parents have done “it”; they count their siblings and think, “They must have done it at least three times.” In my case there’s good
reason
to suspect he only ever did “it” once, at least with Mummy. I’ve decided not to think about it, just to be glad it did happen that one time, at least.

So Mummy had nothing else to do except look after me. I was the doll with the shutting eyes that was
finally
hers, and she loved me as fervently as you do when you’ve been yearning for something too long. The long wait didn’t exactly leave her critical or clear-sighted, either.

She came from a wealthy home. Grandfather had a canning factory that did brilliantly during the war – if I know anything about the old man, he probably made his fortune out of foxes and squirrels labelled and sold as “game”.

Daddy came from a Good Family, and once I heard the ladies in Mummy’s bridge group whispering that he’d married Mummy because of his huge gambling debts. Sounds anachronistic but could very well be
true; there’s a straight line of descent from those types who shot themselves outside the casino in Monte Carlo at the turn of the last century to the sort who can’t drag themselves away from the one-armed bandits in today’s arcades. It’s asking for trouble to ring Daddy while the lottery draw is on.

When I was a child, Mummy had dyed, brassy yellow hair which she set in stiff curls with Carmen Curlers. She was nearly forty when she got married, and
fortytwo
when I was born, and she’d never needed to earn her living.

It was her idea to christen me Desirée, the much-desired daughter, and it was a beautiful thought, but I came to hate that name when I was at school, where I was bullied off and on, and they called me Dizzy.

I wanted to be called Kitty. Or Pamela.

Maybe being bullied is the fate that awaits any child who’s been brought up to consider themselves the eighth wonder of the world, and doesn’t encounter grim reality until they get to school.

Anyway, my parents’ marriage was utterly invisible. They somehow contrived to live together, but totally independently of each other, in a large apartment with oak parquet and rows of interconnecting rooms, where Mummy had chosen the furniture and Daddy hung his peaked cap.

They never argued in my presence, and most
probably
never in my absence, either. Daddy generally ate in the mess; Mummy and I would spend my summer
holidays on our own, staying at a succession of guest houses. Daddy was always “on manoeuvres”.

At home, we didn’t have a social life or any parties worthy of the name – there were occasional visits from bridge-playing ladies and their husbands, or Daddy’s colleagues and their wives, for dreary three-course
dinners
with hired serving help. Madeira in cut glass, and cigarillos in special tins for offering around.

I would be allowed to come in and say hello, my bony legs and arms protruding from the velvet dresses purchased for the occasion. Red-faced men would thump me on the back until I coughed, and say the girl needed to get out in the fresh air more and get some colour in her cheeks. Mummy would have more curls than usual.

I never saw Mummy and Daddy touch each other, not even walk arm in arm.

So how was I to know what a marriage should look like? No wonder I thought Örjan and I had a model relationship. And it was hardly surprising I wasn’t able to grieve for him, either. Husbands were either there, or they weren’t; it was mostly a question of how many chops to buy for dinner. Their presence had no other significance; that was the message I brought with me from home.

So I’m totally unprepared for a person like Benny. There are days when I think he’s invading my territory and forcing his way into my bedroom and lounge, days when I can’t bear the sight of him. That never happened with Örjan; he was perfectly content to be somewhere
on the sidelines, and I could put up with that.

And then there are the other days.

Desirée – I have trouble with that name. It sounds sharp, stand-offish and hoity-toity, all those things I thought she was to begin with. I call her Shrimp. It fits her so well it’s almost cruel. Pale, curled around her soft parts, with her shell on the outside. And long
feelers
.

There’s so much about her I don’t understand.

She spent a long time staring at a picture of my
parents
that I like a lot. They’re lying sunbathing on a clifftop, semi-naked, with their arms and legs all
tangled
together. They’re lying cheek to cheek, eyes closed against the sun, smiling.

She found the picture distasteful, far too private.

“They are your parents, after all,” she said. “Doesn’t
it ever strike you as a bit… well, too personal, a bit offensive?”

Offensive?

She’s always freezing. I can never heat the place enough for her, and while I’m feeling as if I’d like to tear my shirt off, she sits there in a jumper and thick socks. She loves me just sitting still, smoothing her hair with firm, regular strokes; then she curls up close beside me like a starving stray cat that’s finally found a master.

But helpless and dependent are the last things she is! It’s hard when I’ve counted on seeing her and she
suddenly
tells me she’s changed her mind and is going to see a film with a good friend instead. Or when she knows I’m so busy and can’t get away to see her in town, and she just says on the phone, “Okay then, might see you next week”. Never, “Right, I’m coming over to your place!”

I want to reach her, and the truth of it is, I want to tie her down as well, but since she only seems to want me sometimes, I can’t make any demands and that’s so damn frustrating. And surely I could expect her to lend a hand in the house just occasionally! Or help me with the test milking or show a bit of interest in what I’m doing! I know I’m too used to women functioning as an extension of my own arm, and I wouldn’t think of
asking
her to bake buns, but I still find it hard when she sits there with her nose in the newspaper while I’m running from job to job!

In fact, I wouldn’t mind turning to bigamy – and
getting
together with Violet
and
Shrimp. Violet could be
downstairs hemming curtains and curing salt beef, and in the bedroom I’d have Shrimp curling up against my chest and laughing her quiet, husky laugh. That laugh’s become my reward and I’ll do almost anything for it. It’s like one of those “test your strength” machines they have at old fairgrounds. You have to hit a button with a heavy mallet, and then a marker runs up a scale. If you’re really strong and hit the button hard enough, a bell rings.

Her laugh is that bell. And I don’t often make it ring, but I’ve managed it a few times. And I can tell exactly whether I’ve got up to eighty on the scale, or missed the button entirely.

“You always like to be different, don’t you, Benny?” Violet says in that disapproving tone. But she thinks I’m a real man, just like her Bengt-Göran, when I’m driving the big tractor with the tandem mounting or going out into the forest with my chainsaw in all my protective gear.

Shrimp’s just the opposite. I can sense it’s my “
different
” side that keeps her interested, and she just finds me tiresome when I put on my helmet and take a wad of chewing snuff.

How far has medical science advanced – could they transplant Shrimp’s convoluted little beige soul into Violet’s plump bosom and hard-working hands?

Something really upsetting happened today. Thinking about it still makes me feel shaky.

Mrs Lundmark didn’t come to work today. That was how it started. It took a while for us to notice.

She often gets here before we do, hangs up her coat and her little fur hat in her room and creeps down into the store to – well, what does she actually do when she isn’t in the Children’s section? We all assume she’s busy cataloguing, sorting and clearing things out, though nobody ever asks her, of course, and her position in the library means none of us have any reason to question her work. She spends more and more time in the
storeroom
, just leaving a message for me or Britt-Mari to look after Children’s.

So we didn’t notice until lunchtime. Mrs Lundmark always sits at the same table by the window and always eats a bowl of soured milk with boring muesli while she reads one of the library service catalogues. If the whole room happens to go quiet, you can hear the wheezing of her airways, but apart from that you’d hardly notice her.

She sits there from 12.01 to 12.55. Then she gets to her feet, washes up her muesli bowl and puts it on the draining rack. Then she goes to the toilet. We joke about it sometimes. Not many people have got a stomach you can set a clock by.

We’re so used to it that she works a bit like a
factory
whistle now; we know it’s lunchtime when she passes shelf X, the Sheet Music section outside the door of the staff room, and we start salivating like Pavlov’s dogs. Sometimes it only takes the sound of her
breathing
to make us feel hungry. And when she gets up and goes over to the sink, having imbibed her soured milk in pointy little sips – she kisses it into her mouth from the tip of her spoon – we quickly bring our conversations to a close. We don’t even need to look at our watches.

She didn’t come to the staffroom yesterday. She hadn’t called in sick or booked a day’s leave, either. We discussed the fact for maybe two minutes – and that was probably the most we’ve ever talked about her in all the time she’s worked at this library. None of us has crossed her path, worked with her on any project or had any kind of dispute with her. We haven’t avoided her, either; we’ve chatted to her about the weather and our shift times every day – and for some reason she’s always
the one who organises collections for colleagues who are leaving or having babies or celebrating special birthdays. Surprisingly, she has a knack for always choosing the ideal present – conventional, but exactly what the person wants. Well, for two minutes we wondered where she’d got to. Then we decided as usual that it was someone else’s problem and plodded on with our own lives.

But she wasn’t in the staffroom today, either. So that made us talk about her for maybe three minutes. And then we did actually ask Olof if he knew anything about it. He didn’t, and he said he didn’t know anything about the way she organised her work, either. He’d once tried to discuss her duties with her, and she’d given him an explanation that took half an afternoon.

“Her cheeks went quite pink when I asked,” Olof said, “and she ran off to fetch a ledger she kept, and then told me in great detail about a system she’d developed for when it was time to discard an item. In the end I had to say I’d got a dental appointment. I mean, how was I supposed to lead the conversation round from her ledger to Outlook Express?”

Mrs Lundmark’s absence didn’t seem to have any impact at all on all the normal library routines. I often look after the Children’s and Young People’s section on my own these days, and I’m always grateful to her for giving me a free hand. No, that’s far too nice a way of putting it: in actual fact, I thought I was more competent than she was, and it would have irritated me no end if she’d tried to interfere in how I was running things.
So I suppose for me she’s never been anything more than a not very functional piece of office furniture, one we could easily do without when we were next getting rid of things.

I rang her home number. An answering machine told me I was through to Inez Lundmark, who couldn’t take my call just now. I cried, “Inez? Inez? It’s me, Desirée!” several times in case she was there but hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone, but I had no idea what sort of room my voice was echoing in, or even whether it was really okay to use her first name – I never had done before.

Now I’m no Good Samaritan. It would have been far more typical of us at work for Lilian to wring her hands and say “We must do something” – which all the rest of us would know meant us, not her. And Britt-Mari, with five children and less time than any of us, would have been the one to take action.

But it was that thing Olof said about claiming he had a dental appointment so he could get away from Mrs Lundmark (Inez. Inez?) when she was explaining her system so eagerly. It gave me an ache somewhere in the region of my heart. Or rather, in the region of my gall bladder. A pressure, a vague sense of discomfort.

I asked Olof if I could take the time off to go round to where she lived. She hadn’t phoned in sick, after all, and he didn’t really know who to pass the problem on to, so he nodded, looking relieved. I went.

She lived in a big sooty block of flats with dark
brickwork
, which had seen better days. The stairwell was
decorated with mock marble panels, and niches where statues had presumably once stood. Now, “Fuck your ass” was spray-painted inside them.

She opened her dark brown varnished front door at my first ring. She had a safety chain on the inside. She only hesitated a moment before unfastening it and
letting
me into her hall.

“Hello, Inez!” I said with a forced smile. “Are you all right? We were a bit worried at work.”

She mumbled something and gestured limply towards the living room, and I followed her into a big bare room with filing cabinets along two of the walls. Filing cabinets?

“Do you live… on your own?” I asked. There was no easy way of saying, “And where do you keep Mr Lundmark?”

“Back in the Sixties they brought in the ‘Mrs’ title for unmarried women, too,” she said, jutting her chin forward. “I think it was the journalists who started it. Or maybe the health service, so unmarried mothers wouldn’t feel any stigma.”

What was I supposed to say? That none of us cared less whether she was Mrs or Miss?

“I haven’t been feeling quite right,” she said after that. “Hope you’ll excuse me. It’ll soon pass, I expect.”

Excuse her? What about reporting in sick, and the statutory waiting period before benefit’s payable, and doctors’ certificates? She’d never been ill before, as far as I knew. Maybe she didn’t even know there was more to it than just staying at home and saying sorry
afterwards. But then, I wasn’t really there to represent authority.

She said no more.

“What have you got in your filing cabinets?” I asked, straight out.

She stared out of the window for a moment. It had Fifties-style Venetian blinds, with plastic slats
alternating
in white and faded turquoise.

“You’re a good girl,” she said. “Much nicer than you think you are. So I can show you if you like.”

And she did.

Two hours later, I stumbled down the worn and echoing stone steps from her flat, choking back the tears. I had to talk to somebody, and for once Märta wasn’t the obvious choice. She’d heard my descriptions of Mrs Lundmark’s ultra-regular bowel movements all too often. I went to a telephone box and rang Benny.