Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Sometimes these things would make Mother and Father really angry and they would shout at me or they would shout at each other. Sometimes Father would say, “Christopher, if you do not behave I swear I shall knock the living daylights out of you,” or Mother would say, “Jesus, Christopher, I am seriously considering putting you in a home,” or Mother would say, “You are going to drive me into an early grave.”

79.When I got home Father was sitting at the table in the kitchen and he had made my supper. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt. The supper was baked beans and broccoli and two slices of ham and they were laid out on the plate so that they were not touching.

He said, “Where have you been?”

And I said, “I have been out.” This is called a white lie. A white lie is not a lie at all. It is where you tell the truth but you do not tell all of the truth. This means that everything you say is a white lie because when someone says, for example, “What do you want to do today?” you say, “I want to do painting with Mrs. Peters,” but you don’t say, “I want to have my lunch and I want to go to the toilet and I want to go home after school and I want to play with Toby and I want to have my supper and I want to play on my computer and I want to go to bed.” And I said a white lie because I knew that Father didn’t want me to be a detective.

Father said, “I have just had a phone call from Mrs. Shears.”

I started eating my baked beans and broccoli and two slices of ham.

Then Father asked, “What the hell were you doing poking round her garden?”

I said, “I was doing detective work trying to find out who killed Wellington.”

Father replied, “How many times do I have to tell you, Christopher?”

The baked beans and the broccoli and the ham were cold but I didn’t mind this. I eat very slowly so my food is nearly always cold.

Father said, “I told you to keep your nose out of other people’s business.”

I said, “I think Mr. Shears probably killed Wellington.”

Father didn’t say anything.

I said, “He is my Prime Suspect. Because I think someone might have killed Wellington to make Mrs. Shears sad. And a murder is usually committed by someone known—”

Father banged the table with his fist really hard so that the plates and his knife and fork jumped around and my ham jumped sideways so that it touched the broccoli, so I couldn’t eat the ham or the broccoli anymore.

Then he shouted, “I will not have that man’s name mentioned in my house.”

I asked, “Why not?”

And he said, “That man is evil.”

And I said, “Does that mean he might have killed Wellington?”

Father put his head in his hands and said, “Jesus wept.”

I could see that Father was angry with me, so I said, “I know you told me not to get involved in other people’s business but Mrs. Shears is a friend of ours.”

And Father said, “Well, she’s not a friend anymore.”

And I asked, “Why not?”

And Father said, “OK, Christopher. I am going to say this for the last and final time. I will not tell you again. Look at me when I’m talking to you, for God’s sake. Look at me. You are not to go asking Mrs. Shears about who killed that bloody dog. You are not to go asking anyone about who killed that bloody dog. You are not to go trespassing in other people’s gardens. You are to stop this ridiculous bloody detective game right now.”

I didn’t say anything.

Father said, “I am going to make you promise, Christopher. And you know what it means when I make you promise.”

I did know what it meant when you say you promise something. You have to say that you will never do something again and then you must never do it because that would make the promise a lie. I said, “I know.”

Father said, “Promise me you will stop doing these things. Promise that you will give up this ridiculous game right now, OK?”

I said, “I promise.”

83.I think I would make a very good astronaut.

To be a good astronaut you have to be intelligent and I’m intelligent. You also have to understand how machines work and I’m good at understanding how machines work. You also have to be someone who would like being on their own in a tiny spacecraft thousands and thousands of miles away from the surface of the earth and not panic or get claustrophobia or homesick or insane. And I like really little spaces, so long as there is no one else in them with me. Sometimes when I want to be on my own I get into the airing cupboard outside the bathroom and slide in beside the boiler and pull the door closed behind me and sit there and think for hours and it makes me feel very calm.

So I would have to be an astronaut on my own, or have my own part of the spacecraft which no one else could come into.

And also there are no yellow things or brown things in a spacecraft, so that would be OK, too.

And I would have to talk to other people from Mission Control, but we would do that through a radio linkup and a TV monitor, so they wouldn’t be like real people who are strangers, but it would be like playing a computer game.

Also I wouldn’t be homesick at all because I’d be surrounded by lots of the things I like, which are machines and computers and outer space. And I would be able to look out of a little window in the spacecraft and know that there was no one else near me for thousands and thousands of miles, which is what I sometimes pretend at night in the summer when I go and lie on the lawn and look up at the sky and I put my hands round the sides of my face so that I can’t see the fence and the chimney and the washing line and I can pretend I’m in space.

And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which stops you from being anemic was made in a star.

And I would like it if I could take Toby with me into space, and that might be allowed because they sometimes do take animals into space for experiments, so if I could think of a good experiment you could do with a rat that didn’t hurt the rat, I could make them let me take Toby.

But if they didn’t let me I would still go because it would be a Dream Come True.

89.The next day at school I told Siobhan that Father had told me I couldn’t do any more detecting, which meant that the book was finished. I showed her the pages I had written so far, with the diagram of the universe and the map of the street and the prime numbers. And she said that it didn’t matter. She said the book was really good as it was and that I should be very proud of having written a book at all, even if it was quite short and there were some very good books which were very short like Heart of Darkness, which was by Conrad.

But I said that it wasn’t a proper book because it didn’t have a proper ending because I never found out who killed Wellington so the murderer was still At Large.

And she said that was like life, and not all murders were solved and not all murderers were caught. Like Jack the Ripper.

I said I didn’t like the idea that the murderer was still At Large. I said I didn’t like to think that the person who killed Wellington could be living somewhere nearby and I might meet him when I went out for a walk at night. And this was possible because a murder was usually committed by a person who was known to the victim.

Then I said, “Father said I was never to mention Mr. Shears’s name in our house again and that he was an evil man and maybe that meant he was the person who killed Wellington.”

And she said, “Perhaps your father just doesn’t like Mr. Shears very much.”