The Cat Who Liked Rain

One milyen.

He wasn’t sure how to spell it. He asked one of the checkout ladies at the mini-market how to spell the word ‘million’, but she had just snapped angrily at him and told him not to get in the way of paying customers. So he went into the street and asked old Trumlund, who used to sit there every day in a little hut selling raffle tickets for the local bowling club, how to spell ‘million’.

‘You spell it exactly as it sounds,’ said Trumlund.

Lukas gave up the attempt to find out how to spell ‘million’. He wrote it as he thought it sounded, and thought that whoever read it would understand anyway.

Then he went back home, shouting for Night all the way.

‘Didn’t you buy your comic?’ asked Beatrice in surprise.

‘They’d sold out,’ said Lukas.

‘Didn’t you buy anything else instead?’ she wondered.

‘I’m saving up until I’ve got a million,’ he said.

That night Lukas made up his mind about two things. He would never give up until he’d found Night. He knew that Night needed him. He also made up his mind that if Night hadn’t come back by the following morning, he would leave home and go looking for him. Maybe it would be easier to find Night if he tried to live like a cat does? Out in the night, all alone, slinking around in the shadows? Once he’d made up his mind, he went back to the living room and placed the chair in front of the window. Then he sat there all evening, staring out into the night.

Sometimes he would jump up from the chair. He thought he’d seen a pair of cat’s eyes, glittering in the darkness. But then they faded away, and everything was black, everywhere was black.

‘I shall find you, Night,’ he said quietly to himself, so that nobody else could hear him. ‘I know that something’s happened. But I’ll find you. I promise.’

That night Axel carried Lukas to his own bed, once he’d fallen asleep on the chair in front of the window.

The following day when Lukas woke up, it had more or less stopped raining. Ragged, grey clouds were chasing each other across the sky. Occasionally, between light showers of rain, the cold sun shone down on the streets, which were still very wet.

Lukas stood by the window in his room for ages, gazing out into the garden.

But Night hadn’t come back.

Night was still missing.

Five

The third day after Night’s disappearance turned out quite differently from what Lukas had expected.

What on earth had he sparked off?

Early in the morning the telephone started ringing, and people came knocking on the door carrying cats of every colour imaginable. An old lady came trudging through the rain with a cat that was orange from top to toe, and asked Axel — who was only half awake — if this was the cat that had run away.

‘Eh?’ said Axel. An orange cat? Our missing cat is black, apart from some white at the very tip of his tail.’

‘Well,’ said the old lady, ‘maybe this is him even so?’

‘No,’ said Axel. ‘But thank you for coming.’

As he closed the door, the telephone rang; Beatrice answered, and she had barely put the receiver down when it rang again. Axel didn’t even have time to get dressed, as he was running backwards and forwards to the door all the time.

Black cats, grey cats, ugly cats, handsome cats, young cats, cats with evil eyes, cats that purred and rubbed up against your legs. They were all being carried in cardboard boxes, or inside raincoats.

‘What’s going on?’ Axel wondered in the end. The whole town is coming with their cats to our house. What on earth did you write on those notices you stuck up yesterday?’

‘That the missing cat was black with a little white patch at the tip of its tail,’ said Beatrice. ‘I don’t understand why all these people are coming with cats that aren’t even black.’

All this time, Lukas was fast asleep in bed, and had no idea about all these people who thought the cat they had found was Night. It wasn’t until he’d got up and Axel had gone to work, leaving all the chaos behind, that he realised what he had started.

‘Can you imagine how many people there must be who can’t read?’ asked Beatrice with a sigh.

‘I certainly think they can read,’ said Lukas. ‘I wrote on all the notices that the reward for finding Night was a million. I probably spelled it wrongly, but people must have understood even so.’

Beatrice was so surprised that she almost fell over one of the kitchen chairs.

‘You did what, did you say?’ she asked.

Lukas repeated what he had said.

‘I told you I was going to buy a comic,’ he said. ‘But what I really did was to go round the notices and write in that the reward was a million kronor.’

Lukas was surprised to discover how easy it was to tell the truth. It was as if everything that had been so difficult before had been swept away, now that Night had disappeared. Since that was the only thing that mattered to Lukas, everything else became much easier.

Beatrice shook her head.

‘Lukas,’ she said slowly, ‘why did you do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lukas said. ‘I just had to.’

That was as far as they got, because there was another knock on the door.