The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly

by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

“You know what, I think we can stay here a week or two,” she said. “We need to get our strength back and to putter around a bit in the garden like real retirees are meant to do. That would be really excellent, wouldn’t it? I think we can do nicely here.”

  “Why not? I slept really well up there in the loft,” said Christina.

  “And the sofa bed was comfortable. Besides, I can deal with my bank errands from here,” said Anna-Greta waving the modem for her mobile broadband.

  “And I can look after the garden,” said Rake. “There’s lots to do . . . salad, radishes and all that.”

  “In that case, we can prepare something vegetarian,” said Christina who had bought a book called The Older You Are, the Healthier You Are. “With a lot of greens in our diet, we will all feel fit and live longer,” she went on and threw a glance at Rake. She tried to have projects together with him so that he wouldn’t flirt with others and here on this land they could busy themselves in the garden together. “For dinner I can make beetroot, chèvre cheese with honey and walnuts. Yummy!”

  “But what about me?” Brains mumbled pathetically, feeling a bit left out. If they were going to stay here two weeks, the wedding would be delayed even longer. And what would he do in this teeny weeny cottage in the meanwhile? Crochet? Not exactly his thing. And another thing was that here he couldn’t sleep in the same room as Martha. He and Rake had their sleeping places in the shed so that the ladies could have the cottage for themselves. But Rake snored like a threshing machine and talked in his sleep as well. No, Brains was not particularly enthusiastic.

  “Two weeks—there’s a definite risk that we’ll get on each other’s nerves,” he started tentatively.

  “We’ll soon settle in. And anyway, this is better than prison,” Martha determined. “We can make it cozy. Read a good book, Brains. And we can play Monopoly—”

  “When there are computer games . . .” he muttered, and he got up and went out to the shed.

  Rake watched him leave. Brains wasn’t in good form, he never used to be so grumpy. It was high time to do something about it. He must get Brains to work on an invention, indeed, anything as long as his good old friend was in a better mood. He pulled on his chinstrap beard for quite a while before he came up with something. Brains would be given a real challenge. An invention that would be of use to them all.

  17

  BRAINS KEPT OUT OF THE WAY FOR SEVERAL DAYS. HE ATE HIS dinner but then went back into his quarters as quickly as he could. In the end, Martha became worried, put on her sweater and headed out to the shed.

  She knocked on the door, but nobody opened. She sniffed the air. A strange smell seeped through the crack in the door, a smell she didn’t recognize. Still nobody opened. She impatiently pressed the door handle a couple of times. Then Brains opened the door a fraction and looked like a boy who had been caught doing something naughty.

  “Oh, so you’re coming to visit? I wasn’t expecting—er, it’s a bit of a mess here,” he said and looked troubled. “I’m rather busy, perhaps we can meet later.” He tried to pull the door closed, but Martha was quicker and put her foot in the way.

  “But what on earth?” she exclaimed when she had stepped inside the cramped shed. Clothes and shoes were bunched together on the floor with a computer game and Rake’s neckties. Under the bed lay a heap of empty juice bottles and a bucket, some flexible pipes and a toolbox. Above all, there was a dreadful stench. It really wasn’t a good idea at all that two elderly gentlemen should share such a tiny space, she thought. And everything looked so very different! Instead of the bed where Rake had slept before, there was now a temporary bench with a sink and a garden hose with a tap. On the bench was a little hotplate, a saucepan with a lid that had been taped shut and a plastic bucket. Between the plastic bucket and the saucepan ran a transparent pipe, and at the bottom of the bucket there was a drainage hose with one of those clamps that you use with a steam juicer.

  “But my dearest friend, whatever are you up to?”

  Brains backed into the shed and looked very guilty. He had never tried his hand at home distillation before. When he made his first batch he didn’t have the activated carbon so he had tried to filter the liquid through two of Christina’s organic wholemeal loaves of bread, but that hadn’t worked either. Fusel alcohol smelled and despite his having put the loaves—drenched in spirits—in thick plastic bags and sealing them, the odor still hung heavily. He had heard that experienced drunkards often used loaves of bread to purify the spirits and he thought it would take away the smell. But now Martha was sniffing this way and that inside the shed, and had become very suspicious.

  “Brains, you surely haven’t started a home distillery?”

  “Well, you see, all you others have something nice to occupy yourselves with, and then it occurred to me that I could make some apple liqueur. There is so much fruit in these community gardens so, well, I just constructed a little apparatus.” He bent down and pulled out a glass bowl which had been hidden under the bed. It was an old mixer that Christina had been using to make smoothies, but that Brains had now adapted. At the bottom of the bowl there was a valve and from there several tubes stuck out like the arms of an octopus. The tubes ended in a tap. “Look at this!” Brains went on, and he pulled out several schnapps glasses which he placed under the pipes. Then he poured water into the bowl and opened the valve, upon which the liquid ran into the tubes and was distributed equally to all the glasses. “There, you see. A good way to save time.”

  Martha picked up one of the glasses and sniffed at the contents. A schnapps glass full of water. So that was the invention he had been busy with when he had refused to help with the dishes and blamed a headache. She couldn’t help but smile. Brains looked so proud that it was impossible to be angry with him, and instead she felt a warm feeling spread inside her. However angry and down in the dumps he might be, he never gave up but always found something positive to do. You couldn’t help but love a man like Brains.

  “You haven’t got any moral objections to this, Martha dear?” he wondered. “I mean, this is a fine old Swedish tradition. And of course it would be a shame if the apples were just left to rot on the ground.” He pointed to the mixer. “You see, I wanted to find out if I could invent an apparatus that was suited to these small cabins. Here, people drop in on each other and with this you can make sure you can serve a bit of something strong with the coffee.”

  “So where are the spirits, then?” Martha wondered.

  “Well, at first it didn’t go too well, but now we have made a new batch.” He pointed at three plastic containers. “Now I’ll dilute the spirits with water so that it’ll be forty percent. After that we can make a really tasty liqueur. Just say what sort you want.”

  “Oh that’s nice! Beet liqueur, perhaps, or why not mango and banana? Anyway, what does Rake think?” Martha asked, suddenly realizing that both Rake and his bed were gone. “But for goodness’ sake, where does Rake sleep?”

  “Up there,” said Brains, pointing to the rolled-up hammock hanging from the ceiling. “He pretends he is at sea and now his snoring doesn’t sound so loud.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to say, but the main thing is that you’re both doing all right,” Martha said.

  Brains felt encouraged and leaned forward and gave her a hug.

  “Come and sit down here so we can talk a little.” He cleared a space for her on the bed. “How are you, my friend?”

  “I’m fine, yes, even though I miss you now that you’re living out here in the shed.”

  “Oh, so you do, then?” A hopeful glimmer lit up in Brains’s eyes. “You know what? I miss you too. Something awful. And I’ve been thinking about the future. What about a wedding here in Gothenburg? We could even arrange the marriage ceremony here in the Slottsskogen community gardens.”

  “Perhaps, yes,” said Martha. “But not until we’ve given out the bank robbery money, of course . . .”

  “Yes, and then there’s the drainpipe,” Brains fille
d in.

  “Oh that’s right, I forgot.”

  “Bank robbery money and drainpipe. You hear what that sounds like?”

  “What?” said Martha, a little confused, regretting her insensitivity and leaning forward to give him a hug. But then Brains had turned angry. He got up and was already halfway out through the door. He needed a while on his own so he could think about his relationship with Martha. As things stood now, it didn’t feel good at all.

  RAKE AND BRAINS COULDN’T THINK OF WHAT THEY SHOULD DO with the unsuccessful first batch of spirits. The stench of fusel alcohol got worse and worse, so in the end they decided to stuff the loaves into decomposable paper bags and bury them. According to their own calculations the bags would hold the damp wholemeal bread and rot in an environmentally acceptable manner in the soil. And thus nobody would find out about their illegal distillery and not even Nils would notice anything. No sooner said than done. The elderly gentlemen went out into the garden, dug a hole for the loaves and poured the rest of the fusel alcohol in, after which they covered it all over with soil and leaves. Then they put the shovels back in the tool shed and returned to the storage shed again. Back inside, they made sure the door was properly closed before they opened the trapdoor in the floor—this was their new hiding place. Twenty or so large plastic water bottles were lined up with their 40 percent alcohol content. Brains picked up one of the bottles, unscrewed the cork and poured the liquid into the mixer. When that was done, he shut off all the tubes except two, opened the valve and let the spirits drip down into two glasses.

  “Of course it might be quicker to pour it out directly, but if there are a lot of you, then this gains time,” said Brains handing one of the schnapps glasses across to his friend.

  “But you know what? Next time we can let it drop from all the tubes. Then we can drink one schnapps glass after the other without having to fill them again. Just a few more glasses to wash.” Rake grinned and sipped the transparent drink. “And of course we must flavor this in some way. It’s hardly got any taste at the moment.”

  “We can do that tomorrow. It’s potent stuff regardless. Skål! Here’s to us!” said Brains, and he put his head back and emptied his glass.

  With a satisfied “Ah,” the men sank comfortably down on Brains’s unmade bed, lifted up the folding table top and put down the glasses. Rake opened a packet of crisps that he had kept hidden from Christina—and handed it over to Brains.

  “Spirits and chips . . . to think that it can be such a treat!” he said. He spat out his tobacco and took a fistful. The men toasted each other again and spent the rest of the evening drinking their home brew and eating chips while they took turns telling stories to each other about ships, motorbikes and their adventures with women. When the clock showed well after midnight, they became very sentimental, and with tears in their eyes swore friendship to each other. They must stick together, they agreed, because since they’d left the old folks’ home, the women, for some strange reason, had ended up deciding far too much.

  “Nothing can beat a conversation man to man,” said Rake and he put his arm around Brains’s shoulders.

  “That’s true,” his friend concurred. “But women are all right as well,” he said as he had suddenly found himself thinking about Martha.

  “In the right dose,” Rake added.

  “Yes, of course, in the right dose,” Brains slurred and thought about Martha again.

  THE NEXT DAY MARTHA WOKE UP EARLY AND WHEN SHE WALKED across to the showers she discovered that there was now a large white tent in the gravel yard between the club hall and the outdoor dance floor. Yes, now she remembered, it was today that the community’s harvest festival was to take place, the first Sunday in September. Today they couldn’t just sit inside the cabin and lie low, that would look suspicious. No, they must go out and socialize with all the neighbors. But that also had its risks, of course. It would be best if they too had something to display and sell, she considered, so that they could blend in among the community gardeners in a natural way. They could take a few apples, tomatoes and some beets from Nils’s garden, but that wasn’t enough. They ought to have something more.

  When Martha had finished her shower, she woke the others and while her friends went to the showers for their morning routine, she quickly raided the cabin and sheds. She didn’t find very much, but there were the pillowcases that Anna-Greta had embroidered with a flower pattern, the vinyl records that they had doubles of, four loaves of Christina’s home baked whole-wheat bread and the concentrated lingonberry juice that she had bought from a neighboring property and had doctored up a bit with some ginger and oriental spices that she didn’t know the name of. The idea had been to have the spicy fruit juice themselves, but now she had found several bottles of water under the trapdoor in the storage shed. Why not mix a homemade fruit drink and sell that at the festival? The sun was shining; there would be lots of visitors who would be thirsty and something to drink would be popular. Admittedly, Martha did have a bit of a cold and perhaps shouldn’t be handling food and drink, but she could use plastic gloves so that she wouldn’t infect anybody. It was better she did it quickly so that it would all be ready before the others came back. She fetched her specially concocted lingonberry extract and the water as well as some empty bottles she had found under Brains’s bed. Then she got to work in the kitchen and mixed her homemade fruit drink. There were some packets of lemon wafers on the shelf too, so she would take those with her as well. In the end, she had gathered together everything in four bags and put them on the terrace. As soon as her friends returned, she would ask Brains to take it all to the sales booth.

  “HARVEST FESTIVAL?” MUTTERED BRAINS AN HOUR LATER WHEN he came back from the sales booth with the wheelbarrow. “Nope, I’d rather take a trip to the harbor.”

  “Did you say harbor?” Rake looked longingly toward the gate that led out from the Slottsskogen garden area. He was still a bit unsteady on his feet since the bump on his head (and last night’s escapade) but a trip to the harbor would please him.

  “It’s only a short tram ride. Yes, great, I’ll join you! We can look at the East India clipper.”

  The previous evening Rake had talked a lot about the East Indiaman Götheborg, and the conditions for seamen in times gone by. Brains thought it would be exciting to see the copy of the eighteenth-century clipper. In the old days, artisans were extremely skillful and perhaps he could learn something new. Besides, he had nothing against fleeing from the battlefield for a while. He didn’t like large crowds. He went in to see Martha.

  “Everything is set up. Your table is next to the lady who’s selling waffles. I put the bags there. But you’ll have to run the stall yourself. Me and Rake, we’re going down to the harbor.”

  He hadn’t asked her, hadn’t wondered if she had anything against it, but had simply told her what he was going to do. And Martha would just have to settle for that. He immediately felt proud, as if he had done something good and was taking control of his own life. Perhaps it was a good thing to be a little tougher?

  “But aren’t you . . . and me, um . . .” she began, but then turned silent. She looked a bit disappointed but soon composed herself. “Oh right, yes dear, that sounds nice. So you’re going down to the harbor? Well, have a good time and promise not to climb the rigging.”

  Then she rang for a taxi because she didn’t want the men to walk too far and get tired. They could fall down and break their hips. They had neglected their exercises recently.

  When she had waved Rake and Brains off and was on her way back to the cabin, she turned down Carrot Lane path and thought about what Brains had said. He seemed to care less and less for her. She had thought that he would appreciate sitting with her for a while at the stall, looking at the other stalls and puttering around the community gardens. But no, it was as if he thought it was a relief to go off with Rake. Perhaps she ought to be careful and not take him for granted. It was so easy to be blind to what you had, and to forget to look after
those who are near and dear. And Brains was unique, there was nobody like him in the whole world.

  18

  THE BIG HARVEST FESTIVAL STARTED AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK AND suddenly the entire community garden area was packed with visitors. Old and young, they filled the paths and were on the hunt for local produce at the various stalls. They filled their bags with several sorts of apples, plums and pears which were sold together with blueberries and lingonberries. There were even tomatoes for sale, as well as cucumbers and onions; indeed there seemed to be no end to what was for sale. Lots of flowers and plants too at this time of year, but Martha—who didn’t have a green thumb—had no idea what they were all called. (She was, however, clever when it came to knowing which plastic flowers lasted a long time, and which were inferior and fell to pieces at the slightest touch.) No, gardening, picking mushrooms in the woods and all that, it wasn’t her cup of tea. But bearing in mind the idea of the Vintage Village she ought to learn something about them. Anyhow, that would have to be another time. Instead she looked at the rummage sale stalls. Here too there were lots to choose from: books, kitchen equipment, porcelain, jigsaw puzzles and comics. And some stalls sold old VHS tapes, as well as DVDs and CDs. She could have wandered around for hours, but she had her own fruit drinks to sell. Better to get to work right away.

  She said hello to the lady in the adjacent stall, breathed in the lovely aroma of freshly made waffles and strawberry jam, and lined up her bottles. Lucky for her to have the waffle stand so close, as it would increase demand for her fruit drink. She had hardly finished putting out all her bottles before people thronged in front of the table and she didn’t have a chance to have a taste of her own drink. Early in the morning, Brains had set up a sign proclaiming ORGANIC DRINKS by the stall and as soon as she opened there was a stream of customers. Nothing is as good as homemade fruit drinks, she thought, and if this was a food program on TV, they would say delicious, good old-fashioned lingonberry fruit drink, with a trace of ginger and a touch of the exotic . . .