Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti Read Free Book Online

back, three hours late and without any marzipan gateau.

 

     
    It cost me dear. No, not the presents – but when I got to the cowshed an hour and a half late for milking, the cows were all bellowing at me. They’d eaten up all the feed and been lying in the shit and were so unsettled it took me several hours to deal with them. It was only when I switched on the washer afterwards that I realised the milk from a cow that had just had penicillin had gone into the tank with all the rest, and that could only mean one thing: I’d have to throw away twenty-four-hours ’ worth of milk production, and quite apart from it costing me thousands of kronor I couldn’t afford, I’d have to spend several more hours getting rid of the milk. But it was worth it. Definitely.
    The only other time I did something as disastrous asthat, I was fifteen. Mum worked as a home help in those days, and I used to do the afternoon milking when I got in from school. We had a big end-of-year maths exam coming up and I was worried about getting good marks for my report and was brooding on some theorem. You mustn’t do that. Farmers need to be as alert as fighter pilots every minute of the day, Dad used to say. Otherwise they find themselves under a speeding tractor or with a horn through their guts, or they slice their thigh with the power saw. We had to tip away seven hundred litres that time; Dad went and stuck his head in the water butt, but he didn’t say much. I know he blamed himself all his life for me losing my fingers in the circular saw when I was four.
    Not that my good marks in maths did me much good. When Dad died, I left school and took over his job. Mum didn’t want me to; she’d rather have given up the farm, she said, although it had been passed down through her family. I made up my mind one summer night when I saw her sitting under the big rowan in front of the house with her arm around the trunk, staring out over the grassy bank.
    And I felt like one hell of a guy when my old classmates came round to see me and I screeched into the yard on the big tractor, jumped out in my steel-capped cowshed boots and spat chewing snuff in all directions. We managed, with Granddad’s help. And then he died and I had fewer and fewer visitors. I expect they got tired of me always being out working when they came, and even when they did get to see me, all I talked aboutwas carcass weights and pulpwood prices. I understand how they felt.
    Right, time to pull my socks up. Check which cows are on heat – I can’t afford to miss any. Got to clean the harrow before it clogs up entirely. Ring the vet. And the bank, tomorrow. I’m behind with the book-keeping. And almost out of wood.
    Freezing cold in the house – I didn’t have time to light the stove before I went to the cowshed. It’ll be an hour before I can have a shower. First thing tomorrow I’ll have to chop some more wood before I see to the cows. So I can have a shower after I’ve done the morning milking. Because I’m going into town to find her again and that’s that. No, bugger it! Tomorrow I’ve got the inseminator and the vet coming, and I never know when to expect them. Damn!
    I didn’t have time to do any food shopping, either. What’s left in that tin of herring I opened ages ago probably isn’t fit for human consumption – and if I keeled over and died of botulism she’d never even know! Because she doesn’t know my name! Would she wonder why I never got in touch again?
    But I know her name, all right! Or at least, I sort of do. Holding a bit of soggy crispbread spread with almost rancid butter in one hand, I start looking up Wallin in the phone book.
    There are eight of them, but none with girls’ names. There’s a D. Wallin with an address in Kofferdist Road – I couldn’t make out what she was saying when she shouted her name. but it sounded like somethingbeginning with “D”. Only the Prize Saddo of all Sweden would ring a person they don’t know and ask to