Free Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti Page A

with room to spare and the ewes were leaping about like deer. If I sent them to the abattoir now, they’d bring me in about as much as I could spend on a single blow-out at McDonalds’. If I slaughtered them at home with old Nilsson to help me, we’d hardly be able to saw through the accumulations of muscle. The lad and I ran to and fro in the sleet, swearing like troopers. Well, mostly he did. “Fuck you!” he shrieked at the sheep.
    I don’t know why I hang onto them. It was Mum’s idea to have a few; she used to use the wool for her knotwork classes. And she used to make a lamb stew with potatoes and beans that was hard to beat. It never occurred to me to learn how to cook it.
    It wouldn’t feel right to get rid of her sheep. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was going through her room, just after she died. Throwing out clothes that still smelt of Mum, handling her reading glasses and medicines and knitting patterns. Nothing had prepared me for the fact that this would need doing. So I took the easy way out, of course: put the whole lot in a couple of old suitcases and took it up to the attic. And I haven’t done anything with her room except take the sheets off the bed. She had the whole windowsill full of those plants with little bluey-mauve flowers. Expect they’re all dead by now.
    What the hell did she mean when she said culture shock?
    This morning I was in town. There were a few things I needed to do. More than once, I thought I caught sightof her. At the agricultural supplier’s, at Berggren’s ironmonger’s , at the dairy!
    Bengt-Göran’s dropped by two evenings in a row, no doubt to check out my sinful woman from town at close quarters.
    “I’m not sure I’ll be bringing her here again,” I told him. He gasped in dumb admiration. Let him think I just dispose of women whenever it suits me.
    He doesn’t need to know that I’m longing for her, or that I take the phone upstairs and plug it in beside my bed at nights.

 

     
    Dismay seized all the Cherubs now;
to God there flew a horde – “What Salami and Zulamith have built,
now see, O Lord! ”
     
    [From “The Milky Way” by Zacharias Topelius]
    Märta finally came home from Copenhagen. She was waiting for me after work with a carrier bag in which she’d got some Danish beer and a souvenir, a plastic snowstorm with a naked couple inside. We went back to my place and made tea and stretched out on the sofas.
    She gave me an evasive answer when I asked what they’d really been up to in Copenhagen.
    “We’re not here to talk about me!” she said. “You know that very well!”
    So I gave her a totally uncensored account of the last week. With Märta there’s no point wasting your efforttrying anything else; she still manages to fish up most of it from your muddy depths.
    I spared her none of the details. The tasteless gravestone , the saddo cap, the embroidery, the fly specks and the mossy wallpaper. She snorted.
    “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she said. “That man sounds the ideal playmate for you! And you sit here worrying about home furnishings! Why should his cross-stitch bother you? After all, I don’t suppose he embroidered it himself; he just didn’t want to get rid of things that remind him of his parents. Have you really been going around imagining all Swedish farmhouses look like Carl Larsson paintings inside?
    That brought me up short. If I’d had any mental image at all of the inside of a Swedish farmhouse, it probably had been something along Carl Larsson lines. A big kitchen with an open fire burning in the grate, copper pans, and ring loaves hung on a pole along the ceiling. She’d touched a raw nerve there, so I raised my voice.
    “You know as well as I do it’s not a question of home furnishings! This is about two lifestyles on a total collision course! I’m never letting any cross-stitch over my threshold, and I don’t suppose he’d let a Käthe Kollwitz over his – let’s face