In the house on the other side of Jimmy live Rune and his wife. Ove wouldn’t exactly call Rune his “enemy” . . . or rather, he would. Everything that went to pot in the Residents’ Association began with Rune. He and his wife, Anita, moved into the area on the same day that Ove and Sonja moved in. At that time Rune drove a Volvo, but later he bought a BMW. You just couldn’t reason with a person who behaved like that.
It was Rune who pushed through the coup d’état that saw Ove deposed as chairman of the association. And just look at the state of the place now. Higher electricity bills and bicycles that aren’t put away in the bike shed and people backing up with trailers in the residential area in spite of signs clearly stating that it’s prohibited. Ove has long warned about these awful things, but no one has listened. Since then he has never showed his face in any meeting of the Residents’ Association.
His mouth makes a movement as if it’s just about to spit every time he mentally enunciates the words “Residents’ Association.” As if they were a gross indecency.
He’s fifteen yards from his broken mailbox when he sees Blond Weed. At first he can’t comprehend what she’s doing at all. She’s swaying about on her heels on the footpath, gesturing hysterically at the façade of Ove’s house.
That little barking thing—more of a mutt than a proper dog—which has been pissing on Ove’s paving stones is running around her feet.
Weed yells something so violently that her sunglasses slip down over the tip of her nose. Mutt barks even louder. So the old girl has finally lost her faculties, Ove thinks, standing warily a few yards behind her. Only then does he realize that she’s actually not gesticulating at the house. She’s throwing stones. And it isn’t the house she’s throwing them at. It’s the cat.
It sits squeezed into the far corner behind Ove’s shed. It has little flecks of blood in its coat, or what’s left of its coat. Mutt bares its teeth; the cat hisses back.
“Don’t you hiss at Prince!” wails Weed, picking up another stone from Ove’s flowerbed and hurling it at the cat. The cat jumps out of the way; the stone hits the windowsill.
She picks up another stone and prepares to throw it. Ove takes two quick steps forward and stands so close behind her that she can most likely feel his breath.
“If you throw that stone into my property, I’ll throw you into your garden!”
She spins around. Their eyes meet. Ove has both hands in his pockets; she waves her fists in front of him as if trying to swat two flies the size of microwave ovens. Ove doesn’t concede as much as a facial movement.
“That disgusting thing scratched Prince!” she manages to say, her eyes wild with fury. Ove peers down at Mutt. It growls at him. Then he looks at the cat, sitting humiliated and bleeding but with its head defiantly raised, outside his house.
“It’s bleeding. So it seems to have ended in a draw,” says Ove.
“Like hell. I’ll kill that piece of shit!”
“No you won’t,” says Ove coldly.
His insane neighbor begins to look threatening.
“It’s probably full of disgusting diseases and rabies and all sorts of things!”
Ove looks at the cat. Looks at the Weed. Nods.
“And so are you, most likely. But we don’t throw stones at you because of it.”
Her lower lip starts trembling. She slides her sunglasses up over her eyes.
“You watch yourself!” she hisses.
Ove nods. Points at Mutt. Mutt tries to bite his leg but Ove stamps his foot down so hard that it backs off.
“That thing should be kept on a leash inside the residential area,” says Ove steadily.
She tosses her dyed hair and snorts so hard that Ove half-expects a bit of snot to come flying out.
“And what about that thing?!” she rages at the cat.
“Never you bloody mind,” Ove answers.
She looks at him in that particular way of people who feel both utterly superior and deeply insulted.
Mutt bares its teeth in a silent growl.
“You think you own this street or what, you bloody lunatic?” she says.
Ove calmly points at Mutt again.
“The next time that thing pisses on my paving,” he says coolly, “I’ll electrify the stone.”
“Prince hasn’t bloody pissed on your disgusting paving,” she splutters, and takes two steps forward with her fists raised.
Ove doesn’t move. She stops. Looks as if she’s hyperventilating.
Then she seems to summon what highly negligible amount of common sense she has at her disposal.
“Come on, Prince,” she says with a wave.
Then raises her index finger at Ove.
“I’m going to tell Anders about this, and then you’ll regret it.”
“Tell your Anders from me that he should stop stretching his groin outside my window.”
“Crazy old muppet,” she spits out and heads off towards the parking area.
“And his car’s crap, you tell him that!” Ove adds for good measure.
She makes a gesture at him that he hasn’t seen before, although he can guess what it means. Then she and her wretched little dog make off towards Anders’s house.
Ove turns off by his shed. Sees the wet splashes of piss on the paving by the corner of the flowerbed. If he weren’t busy with more important things this afternoon he would have gone off to make a doormat of that mutt right away. But he has other things to occupy him. He goes to his toolshed, gets out his hammer-action drill and his box of drill bits.
When he comes out again the cat is sitting there looking at him.
“You can clear off now,” says Ove.
It doesn’t move. Ove shakes his head resignedly.
“Hey! I’m not your friend.”
The cat stays where it is. Ove throws out his arms.
“Christ, you bloody cat, me backing you up when that stupid bag threw stones at you only means I dislike you less than that weedy nutter across the street. And that’s not much of an achievement; you should be absolutely clear about that.”
The cat seems to give this some careful thought. Ove points at the footpath.
“Clear off!”
Not at all concerned by this, the cat licks its bloodstained fur. It looks at Ove as if this has been a round of negotiation and it’s considering a proposal. Then slowly gets up and pads off, disappearing around the corner of the shed. Ove doesn’t even look at it. He goes right into his house and slams the door.
Because it’s enough now. Now Ove is going to die.
7
A MAN CALLED OVE DRILLS A HOLE FOR A HOOK
Ove has put on his best trousers and his going-out shirt. Carefully he covers the floor with a protective sheet of plastic, as if protecting a valuable work of art. Not that the floor is particularly new (although he did sand it less than two years ago). He’s fairly sure that you don’t lose much blood when you hang yourself, and it isn’t because of worries about the dust or the drilling. Or the marks when he kicks away the stool. In fact he’s glued some plastic pads to the bottoms of its legs, so there shouldn’t be any marks at all. No, the heavy-duty sheets of plastic which Ove so carefully unfolds, covering the entire hall, living room, and a good part of the kitchen, are not for Ove’s own sake at all.
He imagines there’ll be a hell of a lot of running about in here, with eager, jumped-up real estate agents trying to get into the house before the ambulance men have so much as got the corpse out. And those bastards are not coming in here, scratching up Ove’s floor with their shoes. Whether over Ove’s dead body or not. They had better be quite clear about that.
He puts the stool in the middle of the floor. It’s coated in at least seven different layers of paint. Ove’s wife decided on principle that she’d let Ove repaint one of the rooms in their house every six months. Or, to be more exact, she decided she wanted a different color in one of the rooms once every six months. And when she said as much to Ove he told her that she might as well forget it. And then she called a decorator for an estimate. And then she told Ove how much she was going to pay the decorator. And then Ove went to fetch his painting stool.