Benny & Shrimp Read Online Free PDF Page B

brandishing a wreath and a grave light. I had a vision of myself putting the wreath on the hat rack and depositing the grave light on the issue desk while I asked at the information counter whether they’d seen a beige girl.
    Maybe she’d come out again in a minute with a bulging bag of books, her daily ration. But how long should I wait? People were already starting to give me strange stares. The prize saddo responded with his best Smarmy Benny smile, politely waving his grave light. Don’t mind me, I’m on day release from the asylum!
    I suddenly turned on my heels and started running back through the town to the cemetery.
    And of course, that made people stare all the more.
    Where’s he off to with a wreath in such a hurry? What’s happened, what’s happened? And where’s the corpse?
    Wretched woman!

 

     
    I dream of a scent of apple blossom –
you stagger beneath heavy baskets.
Which of us knows anything of the apples?
    “It’s all right for you,” said Lilian pointedly. She’s one of my colleagues at the library, the one I always try to avoid when she comes steaming past with self-important , tip-tapping heels, arms full of nothing in particular, which she carries to and fro with an air of great concentration. She’s always exhausted, rarely gets anything done and takes great care to ensure nobody else is secretly enjoying their job.
    “Of course,” she sighed, twisting her Kenzo scarf into a rope. “I mean, you can arrange to be available in the evenings and so on. You can put your job first.”
    She said it with a sort of aggressive insinuation that I was somehow cheating. Grown up but with no family, a blackleg in the lives of women.
    Bitch! She was the one who was in the habit ofputting her head on one side and asking me, “since you haven’t got a family”, to do her evening and Sunday shifts for her.
    I’d just been promoted to being in charge of the junior section of the library. Presumably this was because I’ve come up with loads of things for children over the past few years. Storytimes and drama sessions and children’s book festivals and displays of children’s drawings. Mrs Lundmark, who had been in charge of the junior section up to now, would soon be retiring and wanted to cut down her hours. She still saw the traditional old school anthology as the norm for good children’s literature , and seemed to have lost interest long ago; often we didn’t set eyes on her: she tended to work down in the storeroom. She was more than happy for me to pep up her boring old section and left me to get on with it, although it wasn’t really my job. And I did it because secretly I’m totally fascinated by children.
    Yes, secretly! Because you can’t admit it openly, you know, if you’re a childless widow approaching thirtyfive ! If I’d as much as taken a kid on my knee, every female of my acquaintance – except Märta – would have delighted in pitying me, and I didn’t want to give them the chance. And they’d have told themselves that at least they weren’t childless, even if they were having counselling and/or were divorced and could only work part-time and were as poor as church mice. They complained that their kids kept them awake at nights and fought with their siblings and threw up in the car and refused to do their homework; they complained aboutthe price of milk and football boots and riding lessons. And then they had to go early because Pelle was running a temperature or Fia had a dental appointment. Or it was their turn in the town centre parents’ patrol, when they weren’t dashing off to parents’ evenings or taking their kids to violin lessons. “It’s never a problem for you to do a bit of overtime,” they said. “Aren’t you lucky!”
    So I fell into the habit of going back to work sometimes in the evenings and putting in secret overtime! I got a real kick out of all those lively drawings, and I organised storytimes just so I could stand there surreptitiously