“Please, Ove, are you sure you won’t let me pay the parking fine?” says Parvaneh.

“Is it your car?” Ove grunts.

“No.”

“Well then,” he replies.

“But it feels a bit like it was my fault,” she says, concerned.

“You don’t hand out parking fines. The council does. So it’s the bloody council’s fault,” says Ove and closes the door of the Saab. “And those fake policemen at the hospital,” he adds, clearly still very upset that they forced him to sit without moving on that bench until Parvaneh came back to pick him up and they went home. As if he couldn’t be trusted to wander about freely among the other hospital visitors.

Parvaneh looks at him for a long time in thoughtful silence. The seven-year-old gets tired of waiting and starts walking across the parking area towards the house. The three-year-old looks at Ove with a radiant smile.

“You’re funny!” she declares.

Ove looks at her and puts his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. You shouldn’t turn out too bad yourself.”

The three-year-old nods excitedly. Parvaneh looks at Ove, looks at the plastic tube on the floor of his garage. Looks at Ove again, a touch worried.

“I could do with a bit of help taking the ladder away. . . .” she says, as if she was in the middle of a much longer thought.

Ove kicks distractedly at the asphalt.

“And I think we have a radiator, as well, that doesn’t work,” she adds—a passing thought. “Would be nice of you if you could have a look at it. Patrick doesn’t know how to do things like that, you know,” she says and takes the three-year-old by the hand.

Ove nods slowly.

“No. Might have known.”

Parvaneh nods. Then she suddenly gives off a satisfied smile. “And you can’t let the girls freeze to death tonight, Ove, right? It’s quite enough that they had to watch you assault a clown, no?”

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.

Then he picks up the plastic tube from the floor and hangs it up on a hook on the wall. Locks the Saab with the key. Closes the garage. Tugs at it three times to make sure it’s closed. Then goes to fetch his tools from the shed.

Tomorrow’s as good a day as any to kill oneself.

14

A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND A WOMAN ON A TRAIN

She had a golden brooch pinned to her dress, in which the sunlight reflected hypnotically through the train window. It was half past six in the morning, Ove had just clocked off his shift and was actually supposed to be taking the train home the other way. But then he saw her on the platform with all her rich auburn hair and her blue eyes and all her effervescent laughter. And he got back on the outbound train. Of course, he didn’t quite know himself why he was doing it. He had never been spontaneous before in his life. But when he saw her it was as if something malfunctioned.