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

When he told the lady on the till upstairs, they said it was called Tuck and he was a ghost of a Franciscan friar who used to live in the monastery which was on the same site hundreds of years ago, which was why the shopping center was called Greyfriars Shopping Center, and they were used to him and not frightened at all.

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people’s brains, or something about the earth’s magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won’t be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.

But sometimes a mystery isn’t a mystery. And this is an example of a mystery which isn’t a mystery.

We have a pond at the school, with frogs in it, which are there so we can learn how to treat animals with kindness and respect, because some of the children at school are horrible to animals and think it’s funny to crush worms or throw stones at cats.

And some years there are lots of frogs in the pond, and some years there are very few. And if you drew a graph of how many frogs there were in the pond, it would look like this (but this graph is what’s called hypothetical, which means that the numbers aren’t the real numbers, it is just an illustration):

And if you looked at the graph you might think that there was a really cold winter in 1987 and 1988 and 1989 and 1997, or that there was a heron which came and ate lots of the frogs (sometimes there is a heron who comes and tries to eat the frogs, but there is chicken wire over the pond to stop it).

But sometimes it has nothing to do with cold winters or cats or herons. Sometimes it is just maths.

Here is a formula for a population of animals:

And in this formula Nstands for the population density. When N = 1the population is the biggest it can get. And when N = 0the population is extinct. Nnew is the population in one year, and Nold is the population in the year before. And ? is what is called a constant.

When ?, is less than 1, the population gets smaller and smaller and goes extinct. And when ?, is between 1 and 3, the population gets bigger and then it stays stable like this (and these graphs are hypothetical, too):

And when ? is between 3 and 3.57 the population goes in cycles like this:

But when ?, is greater than 3.57 the population becomes chaotic like in the first graph.

This was discovered by Robert May and George Oster and Jim Yorke. And it means that sometimes things are so complicated that it is impossible to predict what they are going to do next, but they are only obeying really simple rules.

And it means that sometimes a whole population of frogs, or worms, or people, can die for no reason whatsoever, just because that is the way the numbers work.

157.It was six days before I could go back into Father’s room to look in the shirt box in the cupboard.

On the first day, which was a Wednesday, Joseph Fleming took his trousers off and went to the toilet all over the floor of the changing room and started to eat it, but Mr. Davis stopped him.

Joseph eats everything. He once ate one of the little blocks of blue disinfectant which hang inside the toilets. And he once ate a ?50 note from his mother’s wallet. And he eats string and rubber bands and tissues and writing paper and paints and plastic forks. Also he bangs his chin and screams a lot.

Tyrone said that there was a horse and a pig in the poo, so I said he was being stupid, but Siobhan said he wasn’t. They were small plastic animals from the library that the staff use to make people tell stories. And Joseph had eaten them.

So I said I wasn’t going to go into the toilets because there was poo on the floor and it made me feel uncomfortable to think about it, even though Mr. Ennison had come in and cleaned it up. And I wet my trousers and I had to put on some spare ones from the spare clothes locker in Mrs. Gascoyne’s room. So Siobhan said I could use the staff room toilets for two days, but only two days, and then I would have to use the children’s toilets again. And we made this a deal.

On the second, third and fourth days, which were Thursday, Friday and Saturday, nothing interesting happened.

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

I went upstairs and sat in my room and watched the water falling in the street. It was falling so hard that it looked like white sparks (and this is a simile, too, not a metaphor). And there was no one around because everyone was staying indoors. And it made me think how all the water in the world was connected, and this water had evaporated from the oceans somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico or Baffin Bay, and now it was falling in front of the house and it would drain away into the gutters and flow to a sewage station where it would be cleaned and then it would go into a river and go back into the ocean again.

And in the evening on Monday Father got a phone call from a lady whose cellar had flooded and he had to go out and fix it in an emergency.

If there is only one emergency Rhodri goes and fixes it because his wife and his children went to live in Somerset, which means he doesn’t have anything to do in the evenings apart from playing snooker and drinking and watching the television, and he needs to do overtime to earn money to send to his wife to help her look after the children. And Father has me to look after. But this evening there were two emergencies, so Father told me to behave and to ring him on his mobile phone if there was a problem, and then he went out in the van.

So I went into his bedroom and opened up the cupboard and lifted the toolbox off the top of the shirt box and opened the shirt box.

I counted the letters. There were 43 of them. They were all addressed to me in the same handwriting.

I took one out and opened it.

Inside was this letter:

3rd May

451c Chapter Road

Wittesden

London NW2 5NG

0208 887 8907

We have a new fridge and cooker at last! Roger and I drove to the tip at the weekend to throw the old ones away. It’s where people throw everything away. There are huge bins for three differant colours of bottles and cardboard and engine oil and garden waste and household waist and larger items (that’s where we put the old fridge and cooker).

Then we went to a secondhand shop and bought a new cooker and a new fridge. Now the house feels a little bit more like home.

I was looking through some old photos last night, which made me sad. Then I found a photo of you playing with the train set we bought for you a couple of Christmas’s ago. And that made me happy because it was one of the really good times we had together.

Do you remember how you played with it all day and you refused to go to bed at night because you were still playing with it. And do you remember how we told you about train timetabels and you made a train timetabel and you had a clock and you made the trains run on time. And there was a little woodden station, too, and we showed you how people who wanted to go on the train went to the station and bought a ticket and then got on the train? And then we got out a map and we showed you the little lines which were the trains lines connecting all the stations. And you played with it for weeks and weeks and weeks and we bought you more trains and you knew where they were all going.