The Cat Who Liked Rain

Henning Mankell The Cat Who Liked Rain

One

Lukas woke up suddenly.

When he opened his eyes, the room was almost completely dark. As he was still afraid of the dark, his mum used to leave a small light on every night. Lukas looked at the old alarm clock standing on the floor beside his bed. He wasn’t absolutely sure about telling the time yet, but he thought it was five o’clock — and that was much too early. Nothing would happen until seven o’clock. He pulled the covers angrily over his head again, and tried to go back to sleep. But that was impossible. He was wide awake. And it wasn’t easy to lie still. It was hard to have to wait for two more hours before anything happened when it was your birthday, and you were now seven years old.

He wondered what his present would be. Last year, on his sixth birthday, he’d guessed he would get a little tool box he’d seen in a shop window. That was what he’d asked for. The day before his birthday his dad had come home with a parcel that rattled. That made Lukas certain he was going to get his tool box. But he didn’t tell anybody he knew what it was. A surprise had to be a surprise, even if you happened to know what was in the parcel.

But this year, he didn’t know. The problem was that he’d said he wanted so many things. He hadn’t been able to make up his mind what he wanted most of all. That was probably why he’d woken up so early. He was nervous, in case he was given something he didn’t want.

Lukas drummed his fingers on the blue and white wallpaper with a pattern made up of sailing boats. His head was full of thoughts jumping backwards and forwards.

He thought it was pretty special, being seven years old. Not least because his big brother, who was called Markus but known to everybody as Whirlwind, was now exactly twice as old as he was. Whirlwind was fourteen.

Lukas started giggling as he lay in bed. If Whirlwind was twice as old as Lukas, shouldn’t he also be twice as tall? But that would make him nearly six foot six. And his eyes ought to be twice as big as well. As big as saucers. Or maybe he ought to have twice as many eyes? Four instead of two? No, that was a silly idea, even if it was funny. Whirlwind wouldn’t be at all pleased if he knew Lukas thought he had four eyes. Whirlwind got angry very easily, especially with Lukas. You always had to think carefully before you said or did anything.

The thoughts kept on jumping around inside Lukas’s head. Now he was thinking about his dad, who was a lorry driver. Often when he came home there was a smell of a farmyard about him. Then Lukas knew he’d been taking some pigs or calves to the slaughterhouse. Other times, he might smell of something quite different.

Lukas always liked to try to guess what his dad had been carrying in his lorry when he came home in the evening. He would go out into the garage and sniff at the overalls hanging on a hook in there. Then he would go to the television room where his dad was lying on the sofa, waiting for his dinner to be ready. Lukas tried telling him what he thought his load had been and asked if he was right. Sometimes he’d guess right, but at other times he’d be completely wrong. He’d been wrong yesterday. When Lukas sniffed at his dad’s overalls, he thought he could smell oil and petrol. He’d guessed that his dad had been delivering things to lots of petrol stations. But he’d been wrong. His dad smelled of oil because the lorry had broken down, and he’d been forced to lean over the engine with various tools in order to mend it.

Lukas’s dad was called Axel. Axel Johanson, and that’s why Lukas was also called Johanson.

‘Axel Johanson and Lukas Johanson,’ said Lukas out loud as he lay in bed, drumming his fingers on the wallpaper. But he was careful not to speak too loudly. That might wake his mum up, and he didn’t want that as she would realise he was lying awake and couldn’t get to sleep.

Now his thoughts jumped over to her. Her name was Beatrice Aurore, and she was much younger than Axel. She wasn’t at all like him, in fact. Axel was big and strong and had a very loud voice, but Beatrice was small and slim and spoke very quietly. It often sounded as if she was whispering. Axel spent all day from early in the morning driving his lorry around, and didn’t come home until five in the evening. Beatrice stayed at home all day, except when she needed to go shopping.

She prepared meals and did the cleaning, and sometimes she would paint one of the old wooden chairs she used to buy at auctions during the summer. Lukas had never been able to understand why she was so fond of repainting old chairs. Axel probably couldn’t either, but he never said anything.