Free Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti

must be a way of hanging on to it all! Lock the front door and keep him in the wardrobe until I get home from work. Like in that Almodóvar film, the Spanish one with Antonio Banderas.
    I tried imagining myself into his life. But no images came.
    I hadn’t been prepared for quite such a culture shock, in the home of a Swedish man of about my own age, living just forty kilometres away.
    I’d probably have found it easier to adapt to a devout Muslim.
    I immediately visualised a tall, thin man with sad eyes, forced into political exile and living in a oneroomed council flat with the walls covered in reams of Persian poetry. He worked day shifts as a cleaner, despite his university education back home, and at nights sat in smoky venues with his political and poetic friends, or went to see unforgettable black and white films at obscure little cinemas. And I’d find out about his culture and translate his poems and collect money on the streets for his campaign against the dictatorship. We’d sit on beautiful rugs eating spicy dishes.
    But making meatballs in Benny’s disgusting kitchen, and being a slave to twenty-four cows every day of the week, all year round? Keeping his discoloured shower clean, stoking the stove with firewood whenever I needed hot water, discussing articles in The Farmer ? Me?
    I may be a racist, but I’m not the ordinary kind.
    Even so, I clung to the phone obsessively for several days. Sometimes because it never rang, sometimes because I never rang.
    To dispel that humiliating teenage feeling, I spent the evenings out. Worked overtime, went to the cinema, or on pub crawls with unmarried colleagues. They foundme unusually happy and sociable, and so did I.
    The weather got worse as autumn wore on; I hadn’t even got the sunbeams to play with any longer. And in the dirty grey daylight, my flat was about as inspiring as a dentist’s waiting room. The only thing that broke the monotony was the neon-coloured sunrise behind the loving couple in the shell, on the poster Benny had given me for my birthday.
    Not an hour passed without my thinking of Benny.
    At the library I started getting engrossed in The Farmer , to Lilian’s unfettered delight. I said I was looking for an article the local authority had requested. About unblocking drains.
    Olof sometimes looked at me as if he might be going to ask me something. But wisely, he never did.
    One day I took it into my head to go for lunch to a café frequented by immigrants, men from various other countries. I stared at them so fixedly and thoughtfully from my lonely table that they completely misinterpreted my intentions and I ended up in awkward exchanges that I’d really rather forget. Especially as my reason for being there was so confused – not to say stupid – that I blushed all over.
    As the days passed, my old depression came back, as good as new. And Märta still hadn’t come home. I took baths that lasted half the night, until my skin was white and wrinkled, and dragged home bagloads of cheap paperback fantasy fiction. I wore down the butterfl y soap until it was no more than a shapeless pink blob.
    How could something that had felt so right turn out so wrong?
    And Benny was by now presumably asking himself the same question. Since he didn’t get in touch.

 

     
    Every time I picked up the receiver to dial her number, I just sat there until I was cut off by the tone. She said she’d had a culture shock and needed to be alone. So I waited three days for her to ring. Then I rang. No answer.
    I found an old “get well soon” card, put her address on it, stuck a stamp on and tore it up.
    Several times I thought of driving into town and going to the library. But I decided that would be too extreme.
    The weather got worse and worse. It took me two days to get the sheep in, with the help of my neighbour’s thirteen-year-old lad. They’d been outside for far too long and had muscles like elite gymnasts. The youngrams went sailing over the fences