Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti

Author:Katarina Mazetti [Katarina Mazetti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907595233
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2010-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

We’re usually at my place, because its trickier for me to get away, but now and then we spend an evening at her flat. I don’t like it there at all. The walls are white, the carpets are white, the few items of furniture she’s got are all tubular metal ones. It feels like being in a bloody hospital ward. She stands there in the kitchen cooking some vegetable concoction that gives me wind. Before I know it, somebody’ll stick their head around the door and say, “Do come in. The doctor will see you now!”

In the corner she’s got some potted plants as tall as young birches. For all I know, they could be plastic; the whole flat seems to have been sanitised of anything that could give you allergies. The only thing that brightens it up is that poster I bought her. It’s pretty silly, so it’s nice of her to have kept it.

Maybe I should give her some of Mum’s cross-stitch pictures? God knows, I’ve got more than enough. I think Mum must have produced one a week for fifty years; most of them she found a use for as birthday presents for friends and neighbours. I can go anywhere in the village and find her nimble handiwork staring me in the face from some corner or other. And yet there are still enough left at home for me to wallpaper the whole house; there’s a trunkful in the attic.

She hasn’t got a television. No video, either, of course. So I avoid going over if there’s a big match – but naturally I don’t tell her that. Those evenings it’s “absolutely vital to get some paperwork done”. Once she came to my place instead, and then, of course, I had to miss the match and wrestle with Dad’s bureau and all its overflowing piles of paper. And it was a bloody good job I did. I found an Overdraft here and Threat of Debt Collection there, Final Deadline for Payment and Despite Repeated Reminders. I sat up half the night sweating over it, and did actually get through most of the backlog. Perhaps she’s a kind of guardian angel, without knowing it.

And it was amazing sitting there, frowning over my current account balance while she was slinking onto my lap and exploiting me shamelessly. With those sort of professional perks, I could well imagine myself becoming a very hard-working, conscientious accountant… Well, all right, we don’t always manage to save ourselves for our late night sessions of blindman’s buff. I’ve got a cowshed to drag myself to at dawn each day.

I asked her why she hasn’t got a television. When she’s at my place, she has no inhibitions about goggling at everything, especially the adverts. Her favourites are those podgy babies lisping about their snug-fitting nappies. She watches everything wide-eyed, from chat shows with studio audiences of happy pensioners who collect garden gnomes, to late-night thrillers which always end with somebody driving off a high cliff. I’ve

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