Lulu and the Hamster in the Night

by Hilary McKay

  “Baths, pajamas, bed!” she said.

  The cats followed after them. They prowled around the bedroom, sniffing the wrapped-up parcels, searching for their present. But the window was shut and they could not find it anywhere. They marched into the bathroom and looked at Lulu with such round indignant faces that the girls could not stop laughing.

  “The cats think you ate it!” said Mellie.

  “Cats! Cats! Cats!” called Nan. “Bring them down, girls! I’ll shut them in the kitchen or they’ll wander the house all night.”

  Lulu and Mellie took the cats down to the kitchen and tucked them into their basket. “Good night!” they said, hugging first the cats and then Nan. “Thank you for the fair and the park and the tree and the pool!” They gave Nan extra hugs because she had been such a very good nan. “And because it is almost your birthday,” added Mellie.

  “You won’t come into our room tonight, will you?” asked Lulu anxiously.

  “Goodness, no!” said Nan. “I know it is full of secrets!”

  Lulu and Mellie looked guiltily up at her.

  “Bed!” said Nan. “Bed for all of us!” And she chased them up the stairs and followed behind.

  As soon as Lulu and Mellie were in their room and the door was safely closed, Lulu went across to the window.

  “I won’t take a minute!” she told Mellie. “You stay inside and I’ll pass Ratty up to you.”

  She was out of the window before Mellie could say, “Why not leave him there all night?” Lulu bent to pick up the cage. Mellie heard a small squeak. The squeak was not Ratty. It was Lulu.

  “Mellie! Mellie! Mellie!” squeaked Lulu. “You didn’t shut the door!”

  “I did!” said Mellie indignantly, and Lulu saw her glance over her shoulder as she spoke, as if to make sure she had shut it again.

  “Not the bedroom door, the cage door!”

  “I …” began Mellie, and then she said, “Oh. OH! But he was asleep!”

  “He’s not now.” Lulu’s hand searched the cage, sifting through hamster bedding and rose petals with her fingers. “He’s gone.”

  “There’s nowhere for him to go,” said Mellie, and she looked around the little roof space, empty except for the cage, dusky in the corners, bare right up to the little walls …

  “Could he have climbed down the walls?” Mellie asked, and she made a moaning sound at the thought.

  Lulu was already leaning over the walls, peering into the shadows at the base, hoping not to see a bundle of orange fur.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” said Mellie unhappily, and then in a completely different voice, “Oh! There he is!”

  Ratty had not fallen over the wall. He was climbing the rose bush, or rather the trellis that held the rose bush against the house. He was almost at the top. Nearly at the place where the roof tiles sloped down to reach the wall.

  “Don’t make him jump!” begged Lulu. “He might get frightened and fall.”

  But Ratty did not look frightened. He looked busy and happy.

  He looked like he had been climbing houses all of his life.

  “He’ll have to turn around and come back when he reaches the top,” whispered Lulu, but Ratty did not turn around. He reached the top, examined the edge of the roof, and vanished.

  Lulu and Mellie waited and waited and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  “Stupid hamster,” growled Mellie.

  “Stupid you, not shutting the door!”

  “Stupid you, bringing him! And now where is he?”

  Lulu felt the rose trellis against the wall. It wasn’t very strong, but at least it didn’t wobble. She looked at the rose, and wished it wasn’t prickly.

  “Don’t!” said Mellie. “What if you fell?”

  “I’d only fall on the flat roof,” said Lulu. “Anyway, I won’t.”

  All the same, she climbed the trellis very carefully, getting rather scratched. It was not high. Two steps and she had reached the top, the place where Ratty had disappeared. Lulu reached out a hand and felt.

  “There’s a hole!” she whispered down to Mellie.

  “A hole in the roof?”

  “Yes. Underneath. Just a little one. It must go into the attic.”

  “Nan doesn’t have an attic.” “I mean the empty space in the roof over the bedroom ceilings. Dad showed me ours once. It’s all dusty and there’s a water tank and it’s dark and there’s cobwebs.”

  “Squeeze your hand through the hole and see if you can touch Ratty,” suggested Mellie.

  Lulu tried, but she couldn’t.

  “We’ll have to think of another way of getting him back,” she said as she carefully climbed back down the trellis.

  “What does he like best?”

  “Carrots,” said Lulu. “He loves carrots. If you give him carrots he takes them to bed.”

  “Do you think if we put a carrot in the hole at the top of the trellis he might smell it and come and get it?”

  “He might,” said Lulu. “Perhaps we could put a trail of carrot pieces leading down to his cage. Only I don’t have any carrots left. Ratty ate it all this afternoon. Maybe Nan has some.”

  “I’ll go and see,” said Mellie, and she ducked back into the bedroom again. Then she paused, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Lulu! Lulu!”

  “What?”

  “Come and listen! I can hear him!”

  “I’ll go and look for a carrot,” said Mellie and tiptoed out of the room. Lulu heard her feet on the stairs, the murmur of her voice as she spoke to the cats, the thud of the fridge, opening and closing, and then she was coming back up the stairs again. And then there was Nan’s voice, at her own bedroom door.

  “Mellie!”

  “Hello, Nan! I just wanted a carrot!”

  “A carrot!”

  “Carrots are healthy!” said Lulu, appearing suddenly beside Mellie.

  Nan had very sparkly eyes sometimes. They sparkled now at Lulu. She said, “So they are! Well. Eat up your carrot and go to sleep. It’s very late.”

  “How late?” asked Lulu.

  “It’s after half past ten.”

  “Less than an hour and a half to your birthday, then,” said Lulu. “Oh …”

  Patter, patter, patter, went the footsteps overhead.

  Lulu gazed at Mellie in alarm, and then, to everyone’s surprise, she began to sing. She sang much louder than she usually did, her eyes fixed on Nan.

  “Happy-birthday-in-an-hour-and-a-half to you! (Join in, Mellie!)”

  “Happy-birthday-in-an-hour-and-a-half to you!” Mellie also sang very noisily, glancing up at the ceiling.

  “Happy-birthday-in-an-hour-and-a-half, dear Na-an!” they chorused anxiously.

  “Happy-birthday-in-an-hour-and-a-half to you!”

  Lulu and Mellie stopped. And listened. Nan, who had suddenly doubled up with laughter, hugged them.

  And then Lulu and Mellie scurried back to their room and they sat on their beds in the dark and they whispered.

  “I suddenly heard him!”

  “I guessed you did!”

  “Good thing I thought of ‘Happy birthday’!”

  “Yes, but what now?”

  They listened and listened and listened.

  They heard the breeze in the wind chimes that hung from the orange and lemon tree.

  They heard tired Nan snoring her ladylike snores.

  They heard, just once and far away, the raindrop patter of Ratty’s feet on the plaster ceiling.

  They heard a sudden clawing.

  It might have been bears. It might have been tigers. It might have been lions or one of those T. rexes.

  “The cats!” said Lulu.

  Down in the kitchen, the cats were scratching at a wall.

  Snore, went Nan again
, as Lulu and Mellie tiptoed past her bedroom door.

  The cats hardly looked at Lulu and Mellie as they crept into the kitchen. They were up on the cupboard, glaring at the wall.

  Their golden ears were pricked into flags. They tilted their heads to listen. Then they scrabbled at the wall with their twelve golden paws.

  They were not at all pleased when Lulu and Mellie scooped them up around their furry middles, carried them to the living room, dumped them on the sofa, and closed the door.

  “Now listen!” said Lulu to Mellie.

  They listened and sure enough they heard Ratty, climbing around on the other side of the wall.

  “He must have climbed right down from the roof!” whispered Mellie.

  Lulu and Mellie unlocked the back door and tiptoed into the garden and were very surprised not to see Ratty clinging to the wall.

  “But we heard him!” said Lulu, very puzzled, and she stepped back into the kitchen to listen. Once again, there was Ratty, plain to be heard, climbing around.

  But outside, no Ratty. Nothing.

  So Mellie stayed inside and Lulu found a flashlight and went outside and they left the door open and Mellie called directions. “He’s right beside the window! Now he’s a bit lower! He’s halfway down now, between the window and the floor!”

  Lulu peered, more and more puzzled, at the outside wall of Nan’s little kitchen. Then suddenly she understood. Walls were not one brick thick, like Lego house walls. They were two bricks thick. There was an inside wall and an outside wall, with a gap in between.

  And in the gap in between was Ratty.

  When Lulu understood this she rushed inside and told Mellie they must call the fire department to come and knock down the house.

  “The whole house?” asked Mellie, dreadfully shocked.

  “Only the back half,” said Lulu.

  “That’s a lot of house, though,” said Mellie, and she picked up the phone and held it behind her back to stop Lulu from arranging anything reckless.

  “It’s the wrong thing to do!” said Mellie. “Especially on Nan’s birthday! Just listen to Ratty! There he is again! Right under the window.”

  They both went outside again, and shone the flashlight at the wall, and while they were there Lulu noticed something.

  Not all the bricks were the same. One, low down, almost on the ground, was not solid. It was brick colored. It was made out of brick. But it looked like a little grating. A little grating, an air brick, with little square holes like windows, opening into the wall.

  Lulu lay down on her stomach and shone her flashlight through the holes.

  There, on the other side, was Ratty.

  For a moment it seemed to Lulu and Mellie that all their problems were solved. There was Ratty. They had found him. And Nan was still asleep in bed.

  “All we have to do,” said Lulu, “is to make those little holes big enough for Ratty to squeeze out.”

  “Easy peasy!” said Mellie at once.

  They fetched from the kitchen the tin opener and a screwdriver and they set to work.

  After a while they went back for the potato peeler and some spoons.

  Small flakes of air brick broke away in thin sharp splinters.

  Mellie crept upstairs and brought down their swimming goggles.

  Ratty scurried around on the other side of the wall. He was very happy. He had never had any adventures living with Emma Pond.

  Time passed.

  The stars swung around the sky.

  Lulu and Mellie’s knees began to ache.

  “What we need,” said Lulu, “is a very big hammer.”

  For as long as Lulu and Mellie could remember, Nan had lived alone in her little bright house. But once there had been a big, quiet Granddad living there too. He had liked making things and he had owned a shed full of tools. It was still there, right at the end of the garden, beyond the orange and lemon tree.

  Mellie took the flashlight and visited Granddad’s shed, and she came back with a very big hammer indeed.

  “Perfect!” said Lulu, and she seized it from Mellie, swung it mightily back into the air, and walloped the air brick with the most tremendous crash.

  “Careful!” cried Mellie, forgetting to be quiet.

  “I am being careful!” said Lulu and did it again. She was about to swing it a third time when Nan appeared.

  “Lulu! Mellie!” exclaimed Nan. “It’s one o’clock in the morning!”

  That surprised them.

  “Wow! One o’clock!” said Mellie, and Lulu said brightly, “Happy birthday, Nan!”

  “Yes, yes! Happy birthday, Nan!” agreed Mellie.

  “Happy birthday!” said Nan indignantly. “HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Never mind ‘Happy birthday’! What in the world are you doing?”

  Lulu looked at Mellie.

  Mellie looked at Lulu.

  “We’ve lost something in the wall,” said Lulu at last.

  “Something?” repeated Nan.

  “Yes,” said Mellie, “and we didn’t want to call the fire department, not on your birthday.”

  “The fire department?”

  “To knock down your house!”

  “Really only the back half,” put in Lulu soothingly.

  “So,” continued Mellie, “we thought we would just bang a hole in this holey brick …”

  “That one at the bottom with gaps in it,” said Lulu.

  “… and let it out,” said Mellie.

  “Get it out!” corrected Lulu. “Not let, get! If it’s still there.”

  She lay down again with the flashlight to check. “Poor little thing!” said Lulu.

  “Oh!” said Nan.

  “Ah!” said Nan.

  “I see!” said Nan, and she looked down at Lulu and nodded.

  Lulu didn’t notice. She was down on her stomach again, shining the flashlight. At first there was nothing, but then ginger fur appeared. An inquisitive dark eye glinted silver in the flashlight.

  “Is he still there?” asked Mellie, getting down to join her.

  “Still there,” said Lulu, sighing with relief. “I think perhaps he goes away when we bang and then comes back when the flashlight is shining.”

  Then they both rolled over and looked guiltily at Nan.

  There was a small silence while Nan looked back at them.

  “Well,” she said at last. “We’d better take turns with the hammer!”

  Chapter Five

  Ratty in the Morning

  Deep in the night, in Nan’s little garden, Lulu and Mellie and Nan took turns, sharing the hammer and the swimming goggles. Every now and then they would pause their banging and Lulu would lie down with the flashlight to check that the lost thing was still there.

  Once, when Mellie was hammering, Lulu thought she heard something. Then she thought she hadn’t, because who would ever telephone in the middle of the night.

  Nan was having her turn when the police cars arrived.

  Two of them, blue lights flashing.

  As well as four large policemen with flashlights so bright they put out the stars.

  Lulu and Mellie ran one each side of Nan, and they held her tight.

  “Don’t you worry!” Lulu told her. “We’ll look after you! We’ll tell them it’s your birthday!”

  That didn’t need to be done. They were very nice policemen, not at all as scary as they looked.

  They were very polite too. They said, “Would you mind telling us what is going on?”

  Lulu looked at Mellie.

  They both looked at Nan.

  Then they looked at the waiting policemen and Mellie asked, “Can we whisper?”

  “Can they whisper?” the largest policeman asked Nan, and Nan nodded yes.

  So Lulu and Mellie took the largest poli
ceman down to the orange and lemon tree and they explained everything that had happened. They began with Emma Pond and they ended with the hammer. And while they were doing it, Nan made everyone cups of tea.

  The policemen took their cups of tea under the orange and lemon tree and they stood in a circle around the paddling pool and Lulu and Mellie’s policeman told the others all that he had discovered. He was very careful to whisper.

  Then all the policemen came back smiling and told Nan and Lulu and Mellie how pleased they were to find that they didn’t have to rescue a poor old lady from desperate burglars. That was what they had expected, when Nan’s neighbor had called them to say that his next-door neighbor would not answer her telephone and the bangs were terrible and peering from his window he could see three shadowy criminals knocking down the walls.

  Then three of the policemen went away in case they were needed for any other emergencies that night.

  But the largest policeman stayed. He whispered to Lulu and Mellie that he had three children at home and three hamsters to match, and he knew what to do when hamsters became lost things.

  First, with bangs ten times louder than any that Lulu or Mellie or Nan had made, he knocked out the air brick.

  Next, using a bucket, two clothes pegs, a long dangling scarf, something soft to land on, and Mellie’s carrot, sliced up, he made a lost-thing catcher. He fixed the scarf to the bucket with the clothes pegs at one end. He dangled the other end in the air-brick hole.

  “That makes a ladder to the top of the bucket,” he said.

  Next he put a trail of carrot slices all the way up the scarf-ladder. He put more carrot inside the bucket, on top of a folded kitchen towel. Then he explained:

  “Whatever you have lost will smell the carrot, climb the scarf, tumble in the bucket, land safely on the towel and there you go!” he told them. “All you have to do is wait. Trust me! I’m a policeman!”

  Then he went away too.

  “Well,” said Nan, “this is the most exciting birthday I’ve had for years! And now we’d better make ourselves comfortable while we wait!”