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

109.That night I wrote some more of my book, and the next morning I took it into school so that Siobhan could read it and tell me if I had made mistakes with the spelling and the grammar.

Siobhan read the book during morning break when she has a cup of coffee and sits at the edge of the playground with the other teachers. And after morning break she came and sat down next to me and said she had read the bit about my conversation with Mrs. Alexander and she said, “Have you told your father about this?”

And I replied, “No.”

And she said, “Are you going to tell your father about this?”

And I replied, “No.”

And she said, “Good. I think that’s a good idea, Christopher.” And then she said, “Did it make you sad to find this out?”

And I asked, “Find what out?”

And she said, “Did it make you upset to find out that your mother and Mr. Shears had an affair?”

And I said, “No.”

And she said, “Are you telling the truth, Christopher?”

And then I said, “I always tell the truth.”

And she said, “I know you do, Christopher. But sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes we are sad but we don’t really know we are sad. So we say we aren’t sad. But really we are.”

And I said, “I’m not sad.”

And she said, “If you do start to feel sad about this, I want you to know that you can come and talk to me about it. Because I think talking to me will help you feel less sad. And if you don’t feel sad but you just want to talk to me about it, that would be OK, too. Do you understand?”

And I said, “I understand.”

And she said, “Good.”

And I replied, “But I don’t feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn’t around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn’t real and doesn’t exist. And that would be stupid.”

And then I practiced maths for the rest of the morning and at lunch I didn’t have the quiche because it was yellow, but I did have the carrots and the peas and lots of tomato ketchup. And for afters I had some blackberry and apple crumble, but not the crumble bit because that was yellow, too, and I got Mrs. Davis to take the crumble bit off before she put it onto my plate because it doesn’t matter if different sorts of food are touching before they are actually on your plate.

Then, after lunch, I spent the afternoon doing art with Mrs. Peters and I painted some pictures of aliens which looked like this:

113.My memory is like a film. That is why I am really good at remembering things, like the conversations I have written down in this book, and what people were wearing, and what they smelled like, because my memory has a smelltrack which is like a soundtrack.

And when people ask me to remember something I can simply press Rewindand Fast Forwardand Pauselike on a video recorder, but more like a DVD player because I don’t have to Rewind through everything in between to get to a memory of something a long time ago. And there are no buttons, either, because it is happening in my head.

If someone says to me, “Christopher, tell me what your mother was like,” I can Rewind to lots of different scenes and say what she was like in those scenes.

For example, I could Rewind to 4 July 1992 when I was 9 years old, which was a Saturday, and we were on holiday in Cornwall and in the afternoon we were on the beach in a place called Polperro. And Mother was wearing a pair of shorts made out of denim and a light blue bikini top and she was smoking cigarettes called Consulate which were mint flavor. And she wasn’t swimming. Mother was sunbathing on a towel which had red and purple stripes and she was reading a book by Georgette Heyer called The Masqueraders . And then she finished sunbathing and went into the water to swim and she said, “Bloody Nora, it’s cold.” And she said I should come and swim, too, but I don’t like swimming because I don’t like taking my clothes off. And she said I should just roll up my trousers and walk into the water a little way, so I did. And I stood in the water. And Mother said, “Look. It’s lovely.” And she jumped backward and disappeared under the water and I thought a shark had eaten her and I screamed and she stood up out of the water again and came over to where I was standing and held up her right hand and spread her fingers out in a fan and said, “Come on, Christopher, touch my hand. Come on now. Stop screaming. Touch my hand. Listen to me, Christopher. You can do it.” And after a while I stopped screaming and I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other and Mother said, “It’s OK, Christopher. It’s OK. There aren’t any sharks in Cornwall,” and then I felt better.

Except I can’t remember anything before I was about 4 because I wasn’t looking at things in the right way before then, so they didn’t get recorded properly.

And this is how I recognize someone if I don’t know who they are. I see what they are wearing, or if they have a walking stick, or funny hair, or a certain type of glasses, or they have a particular way of moving their arms, and I do a Search through my memories to see if I have met them before.

And this is also how I know how to act in difficult situations when I don’t know what to do.

For example, if people say things which don’t make sense, like, “See you later, alligator,” or “You’ll catch your death in that,” I do a Search and see if I have ever heard someone say this before.

And if someone is lying on the floor at school, I do a Search through my memory to find a picture of someone having an epileptic fit and then I compare the picture with what is happening in front of me so I can decide whether they are just lying down and playing a game, or having a sleep, or whether they are having an epileptic fit. And if they are having an epileptic fit, I move any furniture out of the way to stop them from banging their head and I take my jumper off and I put it underneath their head and I go and find a teacher.

Other people have pictures in their heads, too. But they are different because the pictures in my head are all pictures of things which really happened. But other people have pictures in their heads of things which aren’t real and didn’t happen.

For example, sometimes Mother used to say, “If I hadn’t married your father I think I’d be living in a little farmhouse in the south of France with someone called Jean. And he’d be, ooh, a local handyman. You know, doing painting and decorating for people, gardening, building fences. And we’d have a veranda with figs growing over it and there would be a field of sunflowers at the bottom of the garden and a little town on the hill in the distance and we’d sit outside in the evening and drink red wine and smoke Gauloises cigarettes and watch the sun go down.”

And Siobhan once said that when she felt depressed or sad she would close her eyes and she would imagine that she was staying in a house on Cape Cod with her friend Elly, and they would take a trip on a boat from Provincetown and go out into the bay to watch the humpback whales and that made her feel calm and peaceful and happy.

And sometimes, when someone has died, like Mother died, people say, “What would you want to say to your mother if she was here now?” or “What would your mother think about that?” which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can’t say anything to people who are dead and dead people can’t think.