Hesitantly the ladies asked him to sit down and wait. After fifteen minutes or so the director came out and looked at the peculiar sixteen-year-old sitting on a wooden chair in the corridor with his dead father’s pay packet in his hand. The director knew very well who this boy was. And after he’d convinced himself that there was no way of persuading him to keep the money he felt he had no right to, the director saw no alternative but to propose to Ove that he should work for the rest of the month and earn his right to it. Ove thought this seemed a reasonable offer and notified his school that he’d be absent for the next two weeks. He never went back.
He worked for the railways for five years. Then one morning he boarded a train and saw her for the first time. That was the first time he’d laughed since his father’s death.
And life was never again the same.
People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.
6
A MAN CALLED OVE AND A BICYCLE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT WHERE BICYCLES ARE LEFT
Ove just wants to die in peace. Is that really too much to ask? Ove doesn’t think so. Fair enough, he should have arranged it six months ago, straight after her funeral. But you couldn’t bloody carry on like that, he decided at the time. He had his job to take care of. How would it look if people stopped coming to work all over the place because they’d killed themselves? Ove’s wife died on a Friday, was buried on Sunday, and then Ove went to work on Monday. Because that’s how one handles things. And then six months went by and out of the blue the managers came in on Monday and said they hadn’t wanted to deal with it on Friday because “they didn’t want to ruin his weekend.” And on Tuesday he stood there oiling his kitchen worktops.
So he’s prepared everything. He’s paid the undertakers and arranged his place in the churchyard next to her. He’s called the lawyers and written a letter with clear instructions and put it in an envelope with all his important receipts and the deeds of the house and the service history of the Saab. He’s put this envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket. He’s paid all the bills. He has no loans and no debts, so no one will have to clear up anything after him. He’s even washed up his coffee cup and canceled the newspaper subscription. He is ready.
And all he wants is to die in peace, he thinks, as he sits in the Saab and looks out of the open garage door. If he can just avoid his neighbors he may even be able to get away by this afternoon.
He sees the heavily overweight young man from next door slouching past the garage door in the parking area. Not that Ove dislikes fat people. Certainly not. People can look any way they like. He has just never been able to understand them, can’t fathom how they do it. How much can one person eat? How does one manage to turn oneself into a twin-size person? It must take a certain determination, he reflects.
The young man notices him and waves cheerfully. Ove gives him a curt nod. The young man stands there waving, setting his fat breasts into motion under his T-shirt. Ove often says that this is the only man he knows who could attack a bowl of chips from all directions at once, but whenever he makes this comment Ove’s wife protests and tells him one shouldn’t say things like that.
Or rather, she used to.
Used to.
Ove’s wife liked the overweight young man. After his mother passed away she would go over once a week with a lunchbox. “So he gets something home-cooked now and then,” she used to say. Ove noticed that they never got the containers back, adding that maybe the young man hadn’t noticed the difference between the box and the food inside it. At which point Ove’s wife would tell him that was enough. And then it was enough.
Ove waits until the lunchbox eater has gone before he gets out of the Saab. He tugs at the handle three times. Closes the garage door behind him. Tugs at the door handle three times. Walks up the little footpath between the houses. Stops outside the bicycle shed. There’s a woman’s bicycle leaning up against the wall. Again. Right under the sign clearly explaining that cycles should not be left in this precise spot.
Ove picks it up. The front tire is punctured. He unlocks the shed and places the bicycle tidily at the end of the row. He locks the door and has just tugged at it three times when he hears a late-pubescent voice jabbering in his ear.
“Whoa! What the hell’re you doin’?!”
Ove turns around and finds himself eye to eye with a whelp standing a few yards away.
“Putting a bike away in the bike shed.”
“You can’t do that!”
On closer inspection he may be eighteen or so, Ove suspects. More of a stripling than a whelp, in other words, if one wants to be pedantic about it.
“Yes I can.”
“But I’m repairing it!” the youth bursts out, his voice rising into falsetto.
“But it’s a lady’s bike,” protests Ove.
“Yeah, so what?”
“It can hardly be yours, then,” Ove states condescendingly.
The youth groans, rolling his eyes; Ove puts his hands into his pockets as if this is the end of the matter.
There’s a guarded silence. The lad looks at Ove as if he finds Ove unnecessarily thick. In return, Ove looks at the creature before him as if it were nothing but a waste of oxygen. Behind the youth, Ove notices, there’s another youth. Even slimmer than the first one and with black stuff all around his eyes. The second youth tugs carefully at the first’s jacket and murmurs something about “not causing trouble.” His comrade kicks rebelliously at the snow, as if it were the snow’s fault.
“It’s my girlfriend’s bike,” he mumbles at last.
He says it more with resignation than indignation. His sneakers are too big and his jeans too small, Ove notes. His tracksuit jacket is pulled over his chin to protect him against the cold. His emaciated peach-fuzzed face is covered in blackheads and his hair looks as if someone saved him from drowning in a barrel by pulling him up by his locks.
“Where does she live, then?”
With profound exertion, as if he’s been shot with a tranquillizer dart, the creature points with his whole arm towards the house at the far end of Ove’s street. Where those communists who pushed through the garbage sorting reform live with their daughters. Ove nods cautiously.
“She can pick it up in the bike shed, then,” says Ove, tapping melodramatically at the sign prohibiting bicycles from being left in the area, before turning around and heading back towards his house.
“Grumpy old bastard!” the youth yells behind him.
“Shhh!” utters his soot-eyed companion.
Ove doesn’t answer.
He walks past the sign clearly prohibiting motor vehicles from entering the residential area. The one which the Pregnant Foreign Woman apparently could not read, even though Ove knows very well that it’s quite impossible not to see it. He should know, because he’s the one who put it there. Dissatisfied, he walks down the little footpath between the houses, stamping his feet so that anyone who saw him would think he was trying to flatten the tarmac. As if it wasn’t bad enough with all the nutters already living on the street, he thinks. As if the whole area was not already being converted into some bloody speed bump in evolutionary progress. The Audi poser and the Blond Weed almost opposite Ove’s house, and at the far end of the row that communist family with their teenage daughters and their red hair and their shorts over their trousers, their faces like mirror-image raccoons. Well, most likely they’re on holiday in Thailand at this precise moment, but anyway.
In the house next to Ove lives the twenty-five-year-old who’s almost a quarter-tonner. With his long feminine hair and strange T-shirts. He lived with his mother until she died of some illness a year or so ago. Apparently his name is Jimmy, Ove’s wife has told him. Ove doesn’t know what work Jimmy does; most likely something criminal. Unless he tests bacon for a living?