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Nowadays, it was just self-employed people and other disreputable sorts living here.
Ove glares out of the window. The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. Ove couldn’t give a damn about people jogging. What he can’t understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do. It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing
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‘Ove, only a swine thinks size and strength are the same thing. Remember that.’ And Ove never forgot it.
Had Ove been the sort of man who contemplated how and when one became the sort of man one was, he might have said this was the day he learned that right has to be right. But he wasn’t one to dwell on things like that. He contented himself with remembering that on this day he’d decided to be as little unlike his father as possible.
At the funeral, the vicar wanted to talk to him about foster homes, but he found out soon enough that Ove had not been brought up to accept charity. At the same time, Ove made it clear to the vicar that there was no need to reserve a place for him in the pews at Sunday service for the foreseeable future. Not because Ove did not believe in God, he explained to the vicar, but because in his view this God seemed to be a bit of a bloody swine.
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?
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-sized person? It must take a certain determination, he reflects.
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.
Ove steps off the stool, strides across the plastic sheets through the living room and into the hall. Does it really have to be so difficult to kill yourself without constantly being disturbed?
‘Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,’ said Ove.
Ove gives her a dour glance. Silently, to himself, as if negotiating, he concedes that he can hardly let the children perish just because their no-good father can’t open a window without falling off a ladder. There’d be a hellish amount of nagging from Ove’s wife if he went and arrived in the next world as a newly qualified child murderer.
In the parking area, Ove sees that imbecile Anders reversing his Audi out of his garage. It has those new, wave-shaped headlights, Ove notes, presumably designed so that no one at night will be able to avoid the insight that here comes a car driven by an utter shit.
He hears voices from the living room. He can hardly believe his ears. Considering how they are constantly preventing him from dying, these neighbours of his are certainly not shy when it comes to driving a man to the brink of madness and suicide. That’s for sure.
‘Okay,’ says Ove, silently appalled that you can pop upstairs for a moment only to find when you come back down that you’ve apparently started a bed and breakfast operation.
Ove spent most of yesterday shouting at Parvaneh that this damned cat would live in Ove’s house over his dead body. And now here he stands, looking at the cat. And the cat looks back. And Ove remains strikingly non-dead. It’s all incredibly irritating.
Even though everyone in Spain seemed to think they were somehow exceptional because they went round yawning and drinking and playing foreign music in restaurants and going to bed in the middle of the day.
Ove felt it didn’t stop being the butt end of a pig just because you said it another way, but he never mentioned this.
Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he’s been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realises that the worst case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife. After this insight, he reduces his speed and increases the gap significantly between his own car and the one in front.
‘I’m not asking for brain surgery. I’m asking you to drive a car. It’s got an accelerator, a brake and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well.’
But then of course Parvaneh came banging on his door as if it was the last functioning toilet in the civilised world.
But we are always optimists when it comes to time, we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.
If you want something done you have to do it yourself, as usual, Ove confirms to himself as he steers his steps alone towards the cashier. And not until Ove roars, ‘Have you been frontally lobotomised or what!?’ to the young man who’s trying to show him the shop’s range of portable computers does Jimmy come hurrying to his aid. And then it’s not Ove but rather the shop assistant who needs to be aided.
‘You’re just trying to fob me off with a load of CRAP, that’s what you’re doing!’ Ove yells back at him without letting him get to a full stop, and menacing him with something he spontaneously snatches off the nearest shelf. Ove doesn’t quite know what it is, but it looks like a white electrical plug of some sort and it feels like the sort of thing he could throw very hard at the sales assistant if the need arises. The sales assistant looks at Jimmy with a sort of twitching around his eyes that Ove seems adept at generating in people with whom he comes into contact. This is so frequent that
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