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

And Father didn’t say anything either. He just sat down on the bed next to me and put his elbows on his knees and looked down at the carpet between his legs where there was a little red piece of Lego with eight nobbles on.

Then I heard Toby waking up, because he is nocturnal, and I heard him rustling in his cage.

And Father was silent for a really long time.

Then he said, “Look, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but… I want you to know that you can trust me. And… OK, maybe I don’t tell the truth all the time. God knows, I try, Christopher, God knows I do, but… Life is difficult, you know. It’s bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it’s impossible. And I want you to know that I’m trying, I really am. And perhaps this is not a very good time to say this, and I know you’re not going to like it, but… You have to know that I am going to tell you the truth from now on. About everything. Because… if you don’t tell the truth now, then later on… later on it hurts even more. So…”

Father rubbed his face with his hands and pulled his chin down with his fingers and stared at the wall. I could see him out of the corner of my eye.

And he said, “I killed Wellington, Christopher.”

I wondered if this was a joke, because I don’t understand jokes, and when people tell jokes they don’t mean what they say.

But then Father said, “Please. Christopher. Just… let me explain.” Then he sucked in some air and he said, “When your mum left… Eileen… Mrs. Shears… she was very good to us. Very good to me. She helped me through a very difficult time. And I’m not sure I would have made it without her. Well, you know how she was round here most days. Helping out with the cooking and the cleaning. Popping over to see if we were OK, if we needed anything… I thought… Well… Shit, Christopher, I’m trying to keep this simple… I thought she might carry on coming over. I thought… and maybe I was being stupid… I thought she might… eventually … want to move in here. Or that we might move into her house. We… we got on really, really well. I thought we were friends. And I guess I thought wrong. I guess… in the end… it comes down to… Shit… We argued, Christopher, and… She said some things I’m not going to say to you because they’re not nice, but they hurt, but… I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that’s not so stupid, looking back. Maybe we are a bloody handful. And maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt than sharing your life with other actual human beings. I mean, shit, buddy, we’re not exactly low-maintenance, are we…? Anyway, we had this row. Well, quite a few rows to be honest. But after this particularly nasty little blowout, she chucked me out of the house. And you know what that bloody dog was like after the operation. Bloody schizophrenic. Nice as pie one moment, roll over, tickle its stomach. Sink its teeth into your leg the next. Anyway, we’re yelling at each other and it’s in the garden relieving itself. So when she slams the door behind me the bugger’s waiting for me. And… I know, I know. Maybe if I’d just given it a kick it would probably have backed off. But, shit, Christopher, when that red mist comes down… Christ, you know how it is. I mean, we’re not that different, me and you. And all I could think was that she cared more about this bloody dog than she did about you or me. And it was like everything I’d been bottling up for two years just…”

Then Father was silent for a bit.

Then he said, “I’m sorry, Christopher. I promise you, I never meant for it to turn out like this.”

And then I knew that it wasn’t a joke and I was really frightened.

Father said, “We all make mistakes, Christopher. You, me, your mum, everyone. And sometimes they’re really big mistakes. We’re only human.”

Then he held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan.

But I screamed and pushed him backward so that he fell off the bed and onto the floor.

He sat up and said, “OK. Look. Christopher. I’m sorry. Let’s leave it for tonight, OK? I’m going to go downstairs and you get some sleep and we’ll talk in the morning.” Then he said, “It’s going to be all right. Honestly. Trust me.”

Then he stood up and took a deep breath and went out of the room.

I sat on the bed for a long time looking at the floor. Then I heard Toby scratching in his cage. I looked up and saw him staring through the bars at me.

I had to get out of the house. Father had murdered Wellington. That meant he could murder me, because I couldn’t trust him, even though he had said “Trust me,” because he had told a lie about a big thing.

But I couldn’t get out of the house straightaway because he would see me, so I would have to wait until he was asleep.

The time was 11:16 p.m.

I tried doubling 2’s again, but I couldn’t get past 2^15, which was 32768. So I groaned to make the time pass quicker and not think.

Then it was 1:20 a.m. but I hadn’t heard Father come upstairs to bed. I wondered if he was asleep downstairs or whether he was waiting to come in and kill me. So I got out my Swiss Army knife and opened the saw blade so that I could defend myself. Then I went out of my bedroom really quietly and listened. I couldn’t hear anything, so I started going downstairs really quietly and really slowly. And when I got downstairs I could see Father’s foot through the door of the living room. I waited for 4 minutes to see if it moved, but it didn’t move. So I carried on walking till I got to the hallway. Then I looked round the door of the living room.

Father was lying on the sofa with his eyes closed.

I looked at him for a long time.

Then he snored and I jumped and I could hear the blood in my ears and my heart going really fast and a pain like someone had blown up a really big balloon inside my chest.

I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack.

Father’s eyes were still closed. I wondered if he was pretending to be asleep. So I gripped the penknife really hard and I knocked on the doorframe.

Father moved his head from one side to the other and his foot twitched and he said “Gnnnn,” but his eyes stayed closed. And then he snored again.

He was asleep.

That meant I could get out of the house if I was really quiet so I didn’t wake him up.

I took both my coats and my scarf from the hooks next to the front door and I put them all on because it would be cold outside at night. Then I went upstairs again really quietly, but it was difficult because my legs were shaking. I went into my room and I picked up Toby’s cage. He was making scratching noises, so I took off one of the coats and put it over the cage to make the noise quieter. Then I carried him downstairs again.

Father was still asleep.

I went into the kitchen and I picked up my special food box. I unlocked the back door and stepped outside. Then I held the handle of the door down as I shut it again so that the click wasn’t too loud. Then I walked down the bottom of the garden.

At the bottom of the garden is a shed. It has the lawn mower and the hedge cutter in it, and lots of gardening equipment that Mother used to use, like pots and bags of compost and bamboo canes and string and spades. It would be a bit warmer in the shed but I knew that Father might look for me in the shed, so I went round the back of the shed and I squeezed into the gap between the wall of the shed and the fence, behind the big black plastic tub for collecting rainwater. Then I sat down and I felt a bit safer.

I decided to leave my other coat over Toby’s cage because I didn’t want him to get cold and die.

I opened up my special food box. Inside was the Milkybar and two licorice laces and three Clementines and a pink wafer biscuit and my red food coloring. I didn’t feel hungry but I knew that I should eat something because if you don’t eat something you can get cold, so I ate two Clementines and the Milkybar.