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

I lifted my head off the grass.

The policeman squatted down beside me and said, “Would you like to tell me what’s going on here, young man?”

I sat up and said, “The dog is dead.”

“I’d got that far,” he said.

I said, “I think someone killed the dog.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

I replied, “I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.”

“And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden?” he asked.

“I was holding the dog,” I replied.

“And why were you holding the dog?” he asked.

This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the dog was dead.

I like policemen, too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me enough time to work out the correct answer.

“Why were you holding the dog?” he asked again.

“I like dogs,” I said.

“Did you kill the dog?” he asked.

I said, “I did not kill the dog.”

“Is this your fork?” he asked.

I said, “No.”

“You seem very upset about this,” he said.

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.

The policeman said, “I am going to ask you once again…”

I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.

The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.

I didn’t like him touching me like this.

And this is when I hit him.

13.This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father’s.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. It is because drawn has three meanings, and they are (1) drawn with a pencil, (2) exhausted, and (3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the face and the curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.

If I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice like white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.

And that is why there are no jokes in this book.

17.The policeman looked at me for a while without speaking. Then he said, “I am arresting you for assaulting a police officer.”

This made me feel a lot calmer because it is what policemen say on television and in films.

Then he said, “I strongly advise you to get into the back of the police car, because if you try any of that monkey business again, you little shit, I will seriously lose my rag. Is that understood?”

I walked over to the police car, which was parked just outside the gate. He opened the back door and I got inside. He climbed into the driver’s seat and made a call on his radio to the policewoman, who was still inside the house. He said, “The little bugger just had a pop at me, Kate. Can you hang on with Mrs. S. while I drop him off at the station? I'll get Tony to swing by and pick you up.”

And she said, “Sure. I'll catch you later.”

The policeman said, “Okeydoke,” and we drove off.

The police car smelled of hot plastic and aftershave and take-away chips.

I watched the sky as we drove toward the town center. It was a clear night and you could see the Milky Way.

Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isn’t. Our galaxy is a huge disk of stars millions of light-years across, and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disk.

When you look in direction A, at 90° to the disk, you don’t see many stars. But when you look in direction B, you see lots more stars because you are looking into the main body of the galaxy, and because the galaxy is a disk you see a stripe of stars.

And then I thought about how for a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light from reaching earth.

Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang, and the further the stars were away from us the faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which was why their light never reached us.

I like this fact. It is something you can work out in your own mind just by looking at the sky above your head at night and thinking without having to ask anyone.

And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall toward the center of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving toward us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Except that no one will see this because there will be no people left on the earth to see it. They will probably have become extinct by then. And even if there are people still in existence, they will not see it because the light will be so bright and hot that everyone will be burned to death, even if they live in tunnels.

19.Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13and so on because I like prime numbers.

This is how you work out what prime numbers are.

First you write down all the positive whole numbers in the world.

Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 2. Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 3. Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and so on. The numbers that are left are the prime numbers.

The rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. If a number is really, really big, it can take a computer years to work out whether it is a prime number.