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.