The best thing would have been if Whirlwind had been given a cat of his own. Or perhaps even better, a different animal. A dog probably wouldn’t be a good idea. But some goldfish, perhaps, or canaries? Lukas wondered how he could be cunning enough to fix things so that he could give Whirlwind an animal as a birthday present. One day when he was out shopping with Beatrice, he persuaded her to take him into a pet shop. But he was depressed when he saw how expensive an aquarium was, even though it was the smallest one in the shop. And he’d never be able to afford a bird cage, complete with birds.
But Night was giving Lukas more than enough to think about. Every new day brought with it a new problem. Even so, every day made Lukas think that his cat was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
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.
One night, before going to sleep, he made up his mind that he would start a school of his own with Night. He would try to teach him the same things that he’d been learning at school.
Then he fell asleep; and a few days later they moved back to Rowan Tree Road. They left the caravan by the lake, because they would still be going back there every weekend.
But Axel’s holidays were over, there was nothing anybody could do about that. And in three weeks’ time, Lukas would be starting school.
Lukas thought they would be three very long weeks. Three more weeks to go before his very first day at school came around.
But nothing turned out as he had expected.
One morning, Night disappeared.
Four
Night disappeared on a perfectly normal day.
When Lukas woke up in the morning he knew that it was Thursday and that he would be having pancakes for dinner. He stretched out in his bed, and felt around on the covers to see if Night was lying there, asleep. Then he remembered that Night had woken him up long before dawn. Feeling tired, and perhaps also a bit angry at having been disturbed, Lukas had shuffled into the kitchen with the cat dancing around his feet, and placed a little herring in his food bowl. Night hardly ever drank milk now, he’d been eating proper food for some time. Lukas then closed the kitchen door, went back to bed and fell asleep immediately.
But when Lukas got up and went to the kitchen, Night wasn’t there. Lukas shouted for him, but there was no response. He put a chair in front of the work surface and clambered up so that he could see the tops of the kitchen cupboards. Night wasn’t lying there either. Lukas put the chair back, and thought that his dad must have forgotten to close the kitchen door when he’d finished breakfast. Night had no doubt hidden himself away somewhere else. Lukas still wasn’t worried. He’d begun to get used to the fact that Night was like himself: sometimes he just wanted to be left in peace.
As Night didn’t have a room of his own to which he could retire and close the door, he had to keep looking for new hiding places. Lukas had often thought that Night was much better than he was at discovering new hideaways that were difficult to find.
Lukas sat down at the kitchen table, drank some milk and ate a sandwich. He could hear his mother working in the laundry room. There was a whining noise a bit like an aeroplane’s engine when the washing machine was in operation. Lukas thought that Night had no doubt gone with Beatrice into the laundry room. He liked playing with the heap of dirty linen.