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

Then I took Toby out of his cage and put him into the pocket of one of my coats because the cage was very heavy to carry all the way to London. And then I went out of the kitchen door into the garden again.

I went out through the garden gate and made sure there wasn’t anyone watching, and then I started walking toward the school because that was a direction I knew, and when I got to school I could ask Siobhan where the train station was.

Normally I would have got more and more frightened if I was walking to school, because I had never done it before. But I was frightened in two different ways. And one way was being frightened of being far away from a place I was used to, and the other was being frightened of being near where Father lived, and they were in inverse proportion to one another, so that the total fear remained a constant as I got further away from home and further away from Father like this:

Feartotal = Fearnew place * Fearnear Father = constant

It takes 19 minutes for the bus to get to school from our house, but it took me 47 minutes to walk the same distance, so I was very tired when I got there and I hoped that I could stay at school for a little while and have some biscuits and some orange juice before I went to the train station. But I couldn’t, because when I got to the school I saw that Father’s van was parked outside in the car park. And I knew it was his van because it said Ed Boone Heating Maintenance & Boiler Repairon the side with a crossed spanners sign like this:

And when I saw the van I was sick again. But I knew I was going to be sick this time so I didn’t sick all over myself and I was just sick onto the wall and the pavement, and there wasn’t very much sick because I hadn’t eaten much. And when I had been sick I wanted to curl up on the ground and do groaning. But I knew that if I curled up on the ground and did groaning, then Father would come out of the school and he would see me and he would catch me and take me home. So I took lots of deep breaths like Siobhan says I have to do if someone hits me at school, and I counted 50 breaths and I concentrated very hard on the numbers and did their cubes as I said them. And that made the hurt less painful.

And then I cleaned the sick away from my mouth and I made a decision that I would have to find out how to get to the train station and I would do this by asking someone, and it would be a lady because when they talked to us about Stranger Danger at school they say that if a man comes up to you and talks to you and you feel frightened you should call out and find a lady to run to because ladies are safer.

So I got out my Swiss Army knife and I flicked out the saw blade and I held it tightly in the pocket that Toby wasn’t in so that I could stab someone if they grabbed hold of me, and then I saw a lady on the other side of the street with a baby in a pushchair and a little boy with a toy elephant, so I decided to ask her. And this time I looked left and right and left again so that I wouldn’t be run over by a car, and I crossed the road.

And I said to the lady, “Where can I buy a map?”

And she said, “Pardon?”

And I said, “Where can I buy a map?” And I could feel the hand that was holding the knife shaking even though I wasn’t shaking it.

And she said, “Patrick, put that down, it’s dirty. A map of where?”

And I said, “A map of here.”

And she said, “I don’t know.” And then she said, “Where do you want to get to?”

And I said, “I’m going to the train station.”

And she laughed and she said, “You don’t need a map to get to the train station.”

And I said, “I do, because I don’t know where the train station is.”

And she said, “You can see it from here.”

And I said, “No I can’t. And also I need to know where there is a cash machine.”

And she pointed and said, “There. That building. Says Signal Point on the top. There’s a British Rail sign on the other end. The station’s at the bottom of that. Patrick, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. Don’t pick things off the pavement and stick them in your mouth.”

And I looked and I could see a building with writing at the top, but it was a long way away so it was hard to read, and I said, “Do you mean the stripy building with the horizontal windows?”

And she said, “That’s the one.”

And I said, “How do I get to that building?”

And she said, “Gordon Bennett.” And then she said, “Follow that bus,” and she pointed to a bus that was going past.

So I started to run. But buses go really fast and I had to make sure that Toby didn’t fall out of my pocket. But I managed to keep running after the bus for a long way and I crossed 6 side roads before it turned down another street and I couldn’t see it anymore.

And then I stopped running because I was breathing really hard and my legs hurt. And I was in a street with lots of shops. And I remembered being in this street when I went shopping with Mother. And there were lots of people in the street doing their shopping, but I didn’t want them to touch me, so I walked at the edge of the road. And I didn’t like all the people being near me and all the noise because it was too much information in my head and it made it hard to think, like there was shouting in my head. So I put my hands over my ears and I groaned very quietly.

And then I could still see the

sign the lady had pointed at, so I kept on walking toward it.

And then I noticed I couldn’t see the sign anymore. And I had forgotten to remember where it was, and this was frightening because I was lost and because I do not forget things. And normally I would make a map in my head and I would follow the map and I would be a little cross on the map that showed where I was, but there was too much interference in my head and this had made me confused. So I stood under the green and white canvas roof outside a greengrocer’s shop where there were carrots and onions and parsnips and broccoli in boxes that had a plastic furry green carpet in them, and I made a plan.

I knew that the train station was somewhere near. And if something is nearby you can find it by moving in a spiral, walking clockwise and taking every right turn until you come back to a road you’ve already walked on, then taking the next left, then taking every right turn and so on, like this (but this is a hypothetical diagram, too, and not a map of Swindon):

And that was how I found the train station, and I concentrated really hard on following the rules and making a map of the center of the town in my head as I walked, and that way it was easier to ignore all the people and all the noise around me.

And then I went into the train station.

181.I see everything.

That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, or school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. For example, one week the Shakespeare’s Globeposter had fallen down in the classroom at school and you could tell because it had been put back slightly to the right and there were three little circles of Blu-Tack stain on the wall down the left-hand side of the poster. And the next day someone had graffitied CROW APTOKto lamppost 437 in our street, which is the one outside number 35.