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

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 cando 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.

 

     
    Trying the taste of loneliness,
letting a silent minute melt on my tongue,
only the dusty sunbeam intrudes
    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 Örjangrew. 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