Read Online Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti - Free Book Online Page A

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 withMummy. 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 itwas 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 theirlegs 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