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.
You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things.
Smiles. The way she turned over in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.
Ove goes to get his box of drill bits. These are single-handedly the most important things when drilling. Not the drill, but the bits. It's like having proper tires on your car instead of messing about with ceramic brakes and nonsense like that. Anyone who knows anything knows that. Ove positions himself in the middle of the room and sizes it up. Then, like a surgeon gazing down on his instruments, his eyes move searchingly over his drill bits. He selects one, slots it into the drill, and tests the trigger a little so that the drill makes a growling sound. Shakes his head, decides that it doesn't feel at all right, and changes the drill bit. He repeats this four times before he's satisfied, then walks through the living room, swinging the drill from his hand like a big revolver.
He stands in the middle of the floor staring up at the ceiling. He has to measure this before he gets started, he realizes. So that the hole is centered. The worst thing Ove knows is when someone just drills a hole in the ceiling, hit-or-miss.
He goes to fetch a tape measure. He measures from each of the four corners—twice, to be on the safe side—and marks the center of the ceiling with a cross.
Ove steps down from the stool. Walks around to make sure the protective plastic is in position as it should be. Unlocks the door so they won't have to break it down when they come to get him. It's a good door. It'll last many more years.
He puts on his suit jacket and checks that the envelope is in his inside pocket. Finally he turns the photo of his wife in the window, so that it looks out towards the shed. He doesn't want to make her watch what he's about to do, but on the other hand he daren't put the photograph facedown either. Ove's wife was always horribly ill-tempered if they ever ended up in someplace without a view. She needed "something to look at that's alive," she was always saying. So he points her towards the shed while thinking that maybe that Cat Annoyance would come by again. Ove's wife liked Cat Annoyances.
He fetches the drill, takes the hook, stands up on the stool, and starts drilling. The first time the doorbell goes he assumes he's made a mistake and ignores the sound for that very reason. The second time he realizes that there's actually someone ringing the bell, and he ignores it for that very reason.
