A Man Called Ove: A Novel

Fair enough that Ove no longer wants his life. But the sort of man who ruins someone else’s by making eye contact with him seconds before his body is turned into blood paste against said person’s windshield; damn it, Ove is not that sort of man. Neither his dad nor Sonja would ever have forgiven him for that.

“Are you all right?” one of the hard hats calls out behind Ove.

“Another minute and you’d have been a goner!” yells one of the others.

They stand there staring at him, not at all unlike the way they were standing just now and staring into that hole. It seems to be their prime area of competence, in fact: to stare at things. Ove stares back.

“Another second, I mean,” clarifies the man who still has a banana in his hand.

“It could have gone quite badly, that,” sniggers the first hard hat.

“Really badly,” the other one agrees.

“Could have died, actually,” clarifies the third.

“You’re a real hero!”

“Saved their life!”

“His. Saved his life,” Ove corrects and hears Sonja’s voice in his own.

“Would have died otherwise,” the third one reiterates, taking a forthright bite of his banana.

On the track is the train with all its red emergency lights turned on, puffing and screeching like a very fat person who’s just run into a wall. A great number of examples of what Ove assumes must be IT consultants and other disreputable folk come streaming out and stand about dizzily on the platform. Ove puts his hands in his trouser pockets.

“I suppose now you’ll have a lot of bloody delayed trains as well,” he says and looks with particular displeasure at the chaotic press of people on the platform.

“Yeah,” says the first hard hat.

“Reckon so,” says the second.

“Lots and lots of delays,” the third one agrees.

Ove makes a sound like a heavy bureau that’s got a rusted-up hinge. He goes past all three of them without a word.

“Where you off to? You’re a hero!” the first hard hat yells at him, surprised.

“Yeah,” yells the second.

“A hero!” yells the third.

Ove doesn’t answer. He walks past the man behind the Plexiglas, back out into the snow-covered streets, and starts walking home.

The town slowly wakes up around him with its foreign-made cars and its statistics and credit-card debt and all its other crap.

And so this day was also ruined, he confirms with bitterness.

As he is walking alongside the bicycle shed by the parking area, he sees the white Škoda coming past from the direction of Anita and Rune’s house. A determined woman with glasses is sitting in the passenger seat, her arms filled with files and papers. Behind the wheel sits the man in the white shirt. Ove has to jump out of the way to avoid being run over as the car races round the corner.

The man lifts a smoldering cigarette towards Ove through the windshield, and offers a superior half smile. As if it’s Ove’s fault that he’s in the way, but he’s generous enough to let it go.

“Idiot!” Ove yells after the Škoda, but the man in the white shirt doesn’t seem to react at all.

Ove memorizes the license number before the car disappears round the corner.

“Soon it’ll be your turn, you old fart,” hisses a malevolent voice behind him.

Ove spins around with his fist instinctively raised, and finds himself staring at his own reflection in Blond Weed’s sunglasses. She’s holding that damned mutt in her arms. It growls at him.

“They were from Social Services,” she jeers, with a nod towards the road.

In the parking area, Ove sees that imbecile Anders backing 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.

“What business is it of yours?” Ove says to the Weed.

Her lips are pulled into the sort of grimace that comes as close to a real smile as a woman whose lips have been injected with environmental waste and nerve toxins is ever likely to achieve.

“It’s my business because this time it’s that bloody old man at the end of the road they’re putting in a home. And after that it’ll be you!”

She spits at the ground beside him and walks towards the Audi. Ove watches her, his chest puffing in and out under his shirt. As the Audi swings around she shows him the middle finger on the other side of the window. Ove’s first instinct is to run after them and tear that German sheet-metal monster, inclusive of imbeciles, weeds, growling mutts, and wave-shaped headlights, to smithereens. But then suddenly he feels out of breath, as if he’s been running full-tilt through the snow. He leans forward, puts his hands on his knees, and notices to his own fury that he’s panting for air, his heart racing.

He straightens up after a minute or so. There’s a slight flickering effect in his right eye. The Audi has gone. Ove turns and slowly heads back to his house, one hand pressed to his chest.

When he gets to his house he stops by the shed. Stares down into the cat-shaped hole in the snowdrift.

There’s a cat at the bottom of it.

Might have bloody known.

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