The Owl Always Hunts at Night

The little boy lay under the duvet, looking at the calendar on the wall next to his bed. He was so excited his whole body was taut. The big day. The one they had been looking forward to for so long. His mum had talked about it ever since … he tried counting, but he did not have enough fingers … well, certainly since the summer, probably before that. The big day. When everything would happen. OK, so he did not know exactly what would happen, but it was terribly important, and bigger than the sun or the moon, and the birth of the Earth. He pulled his thin duvet closely around his neck and looked at the calendar again. Although his mum had told him to go to sleep, it was quite impossible. December 1999. That was what it said. That was the year now. 1999. But that was not the exciting bit, the exciting bit was the page behind December 1999, the one he was not allowed to see until the clock struck twelve. He had sneaked a peek anyway; he couldn’t help himself. January 2000. Imagine that? The year 2000? The boy smiled to himself and could feel his toes curl up at the far end of the bed, like they always did when he was as happy as he was now; he could feel it all the way through his body, right up to his ears, which tended to get very hot, and that was good, because the small room was cold in December. Very cold. And they could only afford to buy logs for the wood-burning stove in the living room. Stoves were expensive. As was wood. He would usually go to sleep in his clothes and a woolly hat, but he could feel them all the same, his toes, how they curled up inside his socks.

The big day. A new millennium. Fancy that. That just one day could be so important? That just a few minutes on the clock could make such a difference? The hands would go tick-tock and, hey presto! the hands would take away everything that was wicked, and the big day would arrive, the one they had been looking forward to. He tried counting again, but he still did not have enough fingers, nor was it easy to find all of them inside his mittens.

The little boy had a clock on his wall, but it did not show the right time because the batteries had stopped working some time ago, and new ones were expensive; the hands were stuck on a quarter past five all the time. He could not trust it, so he had tried counting ever since his mum had told him to go to bed. The clock in the living room had shown five minutes past eight, and he had counted the seconds like this: one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three; but after one thousand five hundred and something, his head had started to spin, so it was better to wait in his bed until his mum came to tell him that it had arrived.

He still did not know what would happen, but he knew the evil spirits would disappear somehow, and he hoped his mum would be happier. He thought that she would be, because she had been looking forward to this for a long time.

The little boy pulled his woolly hat further down over his ears and tried to keep warm under the flimsy duvet.

‘The basement is too big,’ his mum would often say, whenever he asked why the house was always so cold.

‘Your dad wasn’t quite right in the head, but he knew about building houses. He knew what was coming, that we would need a place to hide when it blows up, when the world goes under, but he made it too big, there should have been more house and less basement, because it gets cold underground, and then the cold seeps up through the floorboards, do you understand?’

He did not understand much of what his mum said when she talked about his dad, because he had never met him, but he would nod anyway, because she did not like him asking too many questions. He knew that his dad was a real person because he had built the house. He had never actually seen him with his own eyes, but his mum could not build anything, so it had to be true. Sometimes he would imagine that his dad was like Pippi Longstocking’s pirate dad. That he was a very good dad, but that he had to be away a lot of the time, that he might turn up one day, a cheerful man with a big, bushy beard. He had never said anything to his mum – he had barely said it out loud to himself – but he had often wondered if the big day might be about that. That his dad might be the surprise. That his dad would burst through the door with golden treasures, lift up his mum and whirl her around, and he would bring them presents from every corner of the world, and one of them would be a wood-burning stove just for him, so he would never be cold again in his little room that never seemed to heat up, especially not in December.

He had given a lot of thought to what the big day would bring. He had made a list. He had not shown it to his mum; he kept it under his pillow. Now there were seven things on it: seven things he hoped might happen on the big day.

He wondered whether to take it out now and look at it again, but his mum had told him to go to bed, lie still and not come out, although the clock in the living room had shown only 8.05.

He had written it in capital letters across the top of the paper. He had taught himself to write, and he was proud of that. Also counting. Telling the time. The alphabet. All by himself, and that was good because, like Pippi, he did not go to school. To begin with he had not understood the writing he saw everywhere. On the back of the cornflakes box, on the tube of toothpaste, on the side of milk cartons, inside the three books he had in his room; at first they were just weird squiggles, small drawings, but one day when his mum was out of the house, it had come to him. He did not know how it had happened, but it had to do with the words which came out of his mum’s mouth and the words he used to reply, which at first he had thought just existed in the air, but then he had made the connection that they were the same words written on the things he was looking at.

And he had used a pen to write down the words on a piece of paper, and the discovery had been almost as exciting as lying under the duvet, waiting for the big day. How the words in his mouth and the letters he saw everywhere could be written down on paper with just a small pen.

The little boy got up now, left his bed in order to move about a bit, get his circulation going, because, even fully dressed he was freezing cold under the flimsy duvet and, when he breathed, cloudy puffs came out of his mouth.

His dad had built the house, but the boy could not help thinking that, though his dad was good at construction and they did indeed need somewhere to hide when the world fell apart, his mum still had a point. The basement was too big. It made no difference that he wore his clothes to bed, his room was still freezing cold, and for a moment he wondered if it might be all right to go back to the living room, where the stove was, but he decided against it. If he had learned anything, then it was that it was terribly important not to make his mum angry.

The little boy went over to his wardrobe and found another jumper. A Norwegian knitted sweater. It was the finest one he owned, and he wore it only on birthdays or when he was allowed to leave the house, but he put it on nevertheless, on top of all his other clothes, and crept back under the duvet. He glanced up at the calendar again: 1999, a bad year; he could not wait until he could turn the page.

He was not naughty, certainly not. He always did as he was told, and his mum had only said that he had to go to bed, not that he could not look at his list.

The little boy pulled off his mittens, found his torch, took out the list he had hidden under his pillow, and smiled.

THE BIG DAY

My wish list:

1. Mum will be happy.

2. Dad comes back and makes the basement smaller.

3. I am allowed to leave the house.

4. I stop pulling Mum’s hair when I brush it.

5. I am allowed to go to school.

6. I can tell Mum that I know the alphabet, the numbers, and that I can read and write without her getting angry.

7. I get a friend.

The wind came suddenly, knocking on the walls, refusing to go away. It continued through the thin windows; it breathed icy air across his face, on to the small patch of skin that was exposed between his woolly hat and the edge of his duvet.

Yet again he considered getting up and going to the living room, but he did not, because his mum had told him not to.

The little boy had no other people around him – he never had had – he had only ever had his mum.

When she left the house, he would be home alone. Sometimes it would be days before she returned, but it did not matter. She was everything to him.

He would brush her pretty, blonde hair in front of the stove. Help her sponge and soap those parts of her body she could not easily wash herself. The little boy smiled now.

And without knowing it, he had closed his eyes so tightly that he disappeared from the cold room and into his dreams, and when he woke up again, he knew it, even though the clock on his wall still showed quarter past five.

It had to be. Only she had forgotten to wake him up. He flung aside his duvet and ran from the cold bedroom. Grinning from ear to ear, he marched through the living room towards her bedroom. Silly Mummy. He opened the door to her bedroom and stopped in his tracks.

From the rope, which was tight around her neck, hung a naked body with long blonde hair, immobile limbs and a blue face. Her eyes were wide open, and her mouth did not look as if it could speak.

The little boy pulled a chair out on to the floor, sat down, looked expectantly at the naked body hanging from the roof and smiled to himself.

Chapter 55