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.
Lukas thought he had two smashing parents. The best thing of all was that there were two of them. A lot of his friends only had one. If you had two parents, you could always ask twice for something you wanted. If one of them said no, you could ask the other one. And then the answer might be yes. For instance, one of them might say no when you wanted to go out and play after dark. If Mum said no, he could always ask Dad instead. Lukas had realised that the best time to ask his mum for something dodgy was when she was busy painting an old chair. She was nearly always in a good humour then, and Lukas knew that she often didn’t even hear what it was he was asking for. The worst time to ask her for something was when his dad wasn’t around. She always said no then. With his dad, it was much harder to know when it was a good time to ask for something, and when it was better to keep quiet. And sometimes his dad would forbid him to do something he’d previously been given permission to do.
Parents can be difficult, Lukas thought. But even more difficult was having a brother older than yourself. Lukas sometimes felt angry when he thought about Whirlwind always being older than he was. No matter how much he grew, no matter how many years passed by, Whirlwind would always be older than Lukas. That was unfair, but there was nothing anybody could do about it.
Lukas sat up in bed. He looked at the clock again.
‘Go faster,’ he said to the hands. ‘Run.’
But they didn’t move any faster.
He would have to do something to make it seven o’clock. Maybe he ought to tiptoe into his parents’ bedroom and move the hands on their alarm clock forward? No, they would notice. And besides, his dad didn’t like getting up any earlier than necessary.
Lukas lay down again and continued thinking about Whirlwind. That was another thing that was unfair: his brother had a nickname, but nobody called Lukas anything other than Lukas. Whoever it was that had given Markus the name Whirlwind was a mystery. He’d simply been called that, always. And Whirlwind really was a whirlwind. He was incapable of standing still, and when he sat down at the table, he never stopped wriggling and squirming. But Lukas thought his brother must have been given that name because he was so brilliant on a skateboard. Nobody anywhere in Rowan Tree Road, where they lived, was as good as Whirlwind on a skateboard. He’d tried a few times to teach Lukas how to ride a skateboard — there were occasions when Whirlwind was the best big brother anybody could possibly ask for. But Lukas found it hard, and Whirlwind soon lost patience with him.
It seemed to Lukas that he would never be as good on a skateboard as Whirlwind. He’d have to find something else he was just as good at. But what might that be? He didn’t know, and found it hard to think it through, because what he was most interested in just now was what his birthday present was going to be. He checked the time again. Another hour to go before his parents would wake up.
What had they bought for him? He’d mentioned new ice skates and a computer game, but he didn’t really think he’d get either of those things. He hoped they hadn’t bought him some new clothes. That would be an awful present. You can’t play with new clothes.
Another awful present would be something his parents considered to be useful. A bedside light, for instance, or a chair. Or worse still, a carpet.