Parrot in the Pepper Tree Read Free Page B

thoughts — and he looked desperate. With good reason. If I didn’t shear these sheep, then I couldn’t see anybody else coming all the way to do it. I thought about the long drive up here, the money that I needed, the worsening task I’d be leaving behind, and relented. I signalled to Björn to pull out another sheep.
    Now I don’t want to go on too much about sheep-shearing, but four sheep an hour is hell. With average clean good sheep I could normally manage twenty to twenty-five sheep an hour. Going at that rate the body is in constant fluid movement, all the muscles well exercised and freely moving in what amounts to almost a choreographed dance. But when you’re bent over the same sheep, poking, jabbing and heaving in the same horrible posture, then the pain in the lower back, the middle back and the legs is almost unbearable — and it’s no ball for the sheep, either.
    Björn stood miserably beside me, his breath steaming in the dank air of the barn, while I heaved and struggled with the sheep. As the day progressed, my thoughts turned black and I silently cursed everybody and everything: Björn and his wretched sheep and his disgusting barn and his parents. I was nothing but bitterness and back-pain. What a way to earn a living! What a waste of life!
    ‘Let’s finish now,’ urged Björn, seeing the demons take hold.
    ‘No, let’s do two more. That way there’ll be two less at the end of the job.’
    Björn brought two more sheep and as if I were being rewarded for steadfastness of character they were both fliers. Young and firm-fleshed and well rounded they sat meek and compliant on the board as the wool peeled away like grey silk.
    I staggered and stretched and thought about beer. Then I remembered that I was in rural Sweden. A light beer, brewed by some vile industrial chemical process, would be the best I could hope for. It might even be lättöl — alcohol ‘free’ and lacking also any flavour, aroma or pleasure. It always makes me think of George Orwell’s ‘Victory Beer’ in 1984.
     
     
     
    I hung up the shears and together Björn and I trudged across the frozen yard, the snow squeaking beneath our boots — which means, if I’ve got it right, that it’s ten degrees or more below zero. Björn wrenched open the farmhouse door and we crowded in among ranks of evil-smelling boots and farm-wear. We peeled off our outer layers and padded in flopping woollen socks into the bright kitchen. Tord was there, smiling broadly as usual. He passed me a bottle of lättöl and a pink-tinged plastic beaker.
    ‘Thanks shall you have,’ I said in that curious Swedish way.
    Tord watched as I worked my way without enthusiasm through the beer. Tonight, he said, we would be going to the Norrskog Farmers’ Study Circle weekly meeting. It would be most interesting for me, he thought, to come along and take part in the proceedings. I thought about declining. It certainly wouldn’t be a wild evening out, but then I pictured us all sitting through that first night staring at a diminishing pile of cinnamon buns and sipping lättöl round the kitchen table. I went to get my coat.
    We whizzed along icy roads in Tord’s car towards a village hall in a clearing in the woods, stopping on the way to pick up Ernst, the chairman of the study circle, who lived in a little red house by the roadside. Ernst was small and wiry with a thin, slightly lop-sided mouth, and Tord seemed very much in awe of him. At the hall, Tord ushered me through the decompression chamber, a set of heavy double doors, and into the warm, brightly-lit wooden room. Motley groups of tall thick-set men in woollen shirts and baseball caps milled uncertainly about, sipping fruit squash from paper cups. These men worked alone deep in the woods with their chainsaws, or communed with their pigs in dark barns with the snow stacked up high against the windows. Small talk was not what they were good at and a grateful silence fell on the spasmodic and