Parrot in the Pepper Tree Read Free Page A

and in a couple of days they’ll look like new!’
    ‘Well then, shall we go and have something to eat?’ he said, with the beginnings of a grin. I decided that I liked Björn.
     
     
     
    Björn’s parents, Tord and Mia, were waiting for us in the kitchen. Unlike the barn this had a scrubbed, colourful look — it was clearly Mia’s domain — and a warm smell of cinnamon buns and coffee wafted towards us from a tray on the broad wooden table.
    ‘Come and eat,’ intoned Mia, clumping back to the oven and then bending at the hip in a stiff bow to lift out another tray of buns. She winced a little before straightening up.
    ‘We hope you’ll stay,’ she added and glanced at her husband as if calling on him to flesh out the invite. Tord, a larger, rounder, pinker version of Björn, smiled broadly at me but seemed unwilling to commit himself to words. Instead he helped himself to another bun, and gestured that I should do the same.
    ‘Thank you, these are nice buns,’ I enthused. It was true they were nice buns, with lots of cinnamon and sugar, but they were also the same as every other bun I’d tasted from the north to the south of rural Sweden on any given day.
    ‘Aah det är de — that they are…’ Tord agreed, and gestured towards the coffee pot.
    ‘Nice coffee,’ I commented, a mite less sincerely as I hate coffee that’s been boiled twice. This didn’t, however, seem the moment for experimental chit-chat.
    I looked meaningfully at Björn. He nodded and we rose from the table to go back to the sheep shed. Back in the barn I changed into icy, grease-caked shearing clothes and hung my machine in a corner while Björn set up a mercury lamp. It was only half past two but the sun was dropping fast. The shabby black sheep surrounded us, munching insolently, and as the mercury lamp built up to full power I was illuminated in a pool of bluish white light like an actor in a very fringe theatre. Björn disappeared into the darkness and came back with a sheep. The first customer of the day. I pulled the starter cord.
    The first stroke when you shear a sheep goes down across the brisket and out over the belly — or it should do. But the machine stuck almost immediately on a matted snag of belly-wool. I pushed a little harder, took the comb out and tried another angle. Same thing. I pushed and pulled and tugged and strained but still that first bit of wool of the day refused to come off. Either Björn had selected the worst sheep in the flock for me or else I was in for a time of utmost misery.
    The sheep was bad all over but eventually I managed to get most of its wool off, by dint of merciless pushing and jabbing and pulling the more reluctant bits off with my hand. She looked awful as she tripped back into the darkness.
    ‘I’m sorry about that, Björn,’ I gasped. ‘She looks a fright, but it’s taken nearly fifteen minutes to do one bloody sheep. If there are as many as you say there are then we’re going to be here all week, and it’s going to be a god-awful week!’
    Björn looked miserable. ‘Maybe this one is a little better,’ he offered hopefully, dragging the next sheep from the shadows.
    But it wasn’t. Nor was the next one. Then came one that you could describe only with expletives. I straightened up and groaned with the pain in my back. I had been at it for an hour and I had done four sheep. There were supposed to be three hundred-odd sheep in the flock.., that would be seventy-five hours of this misery.
    With a groan I looked ahead through the long tunnel of the week — the cold, the smelly barn — and most of all the loneliness, for much as I liked Björn, neither he nor his parents were the sort of folks you’d want to spend a whole week with. I started thinking about doing a bunk there and then.
    ‘Who normally shears these sheep, Björn?’
    ‘I usually do it myself, only I’ve hurt my back — chainsawing in the woods.’ The old Swedish complaint.
    Björn seemed to be reading my