The Cat Who Liked Rain

Every night, before he went to sleep, Lukas would lie in bed and talk to Night, who was generally curled up on the pillow beside him. Every time Lukas closed his eyes, it was like closing an invisible door and entering a new world that belonged only to him and Night. It was a secret world that nobody else knew about. Even if it only existed inside his own head, it was absolutely real. You could wander around inside that world behind his closed eyelids, and everything looked just the same as it always did — despite the fact that everything was different.

It seemed to Lukas that this secret world was a fairytale world, full of trolls. There were troll streets and troll houses, troll shops and troll skateboards. In this secret world everybody spoke a troll language, and wore troll clothes. Sometimes a troll sun shone, and sometimes troll rain fell. Everybody ate troll food and played troll games. Laughed troll laughter and got troll scratches when they tripped up and scrubbed their knees. Everything was exactly the same as in the real world. But when Lukas put the word ‘troll’ in front of things, everything became secret and exciting. He was lying in bed, dreaming about all the adventures he, Troll-Lukas, and Troll-Night, would be able to experience together. As soon as summer came, and it was warm again.

And summer did come eventually. Lukas and Whirlwind helped Dad to spring-clean the caravan parked next to the garage. They scrubbed and rinsed with the hose pipe until they were soaking wet through. Then one day in early June, they towed the caravan to the camping site by the lake where they always used to spend every summer. Before Axel had his holidays, they would spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday out there. But once the holidays started, they lived in the caravan for a whole month.

Lukas had been dreading the first journey Night would have to make in the car. Would he be nervous? Would he try to run away? But to his great relief, Axel had thought about the problem and one day came home with a collar and lead for Night.

‘Now you’ll have to teach the cat how to wear a collar, and go for walks on a lead,’ he said.

Lukas found a black laundry pen and wrote Night’s name on the collar. For safety’s sake he also drew a skull, so that nobody would dare to try to steal Night.

Night didn’t like wearing a collar at all. Nor was it easy to teach Night how to go for walks on a lead. All Night did was to chew the lead and get tangled up in it. Whirlwind watched what was happening, with a broad grin on his face. But Lukas didn’t give up. He knew that Night would have to learn, or there would be problems.

It was a long, hot summer in the caravan. Lukas took Night to the little cabin he’d built the previous year — it was really only a gap between two big rocks, with a roof and a back and a door. It had collapsed during the winter, and split open in two places. Lukas made a new roof using branches and pine twigs with lots of needles, and when you stood outside and looked at it, it wasn’t easy to see that there was a cabin there at all. Lukas crept inside, and let Night off the lead. They often stayed in there for hours on end. Lukas would close his eyes and imagine that they were far, far away in the troll world. Only when he heard Beatrice shouting to say that they should come and eat would he put Night back on his lead, and crawl out of the cabin.

‘You’ll have to shout for Night as well,’ he said to Mum. ‘He’s also hungry.’

‘Oh, I forgot that,’ said Beatrice. ‘I’ll try to remember next time.’

Whirlwind had his own set of friends, and didn’t have time to annoy Lukas and Night during the summer. He spent most nights in a tent with his pals, and so Lukas could be alone in his little bed in the caravan with Night. Axel and Beatrice didn’t mind Night jumping up onto their bed during the night. Lukas grew more and more calm, the longer summer went on. Nobody was going to take his cat away from him!

Lukas also had friends of his own who lived in other caravans in long rows next to the lake shore. When he was playing with his friends, he would leave Night in the caravan, and Beatrice promised to look after him and not let him out.

The only thing wrong with summer was that it didn’t last long enough. Lukas tried not to think about the fact that it was August already. He would be starting school soon, and he was both looking forward to it and also worrying about what it would be like. It was best not to think about it at all. But days passed by, and Axel sometimes commented on how it was already getting darker in the evenings.

Lukas sometimes wondered why there weren’t any schools for cats. Why shouldn’t cats also need to learn various things? He tried to imagine a row of little cats at desks, putting their paws up and saying their names to a cat teacher at the front.