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

I said, “Yes.”

He squeezed his face and said, “But you didn’t mean to hurt the policeman?”

I thought about this and said, “No. I didn’t mean to hurt the policeman. I just wanted him to stop touching me.”

Then he said, “You know that it is wrong to hit a policeman, don’t you?”

I said, “I do.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, then he asked, “Did you kill the dog, Christopher?”

I said, “I didn’t kill the dog.”

He said, “Do you know that it is wrong to lie to a policeman and that you can get into a very great deal of trouble if you do?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “So, do you know who killed the dog?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “Are you telling the truth?”

I said, “Yes. I always tell the truth.”

And he said, “Right. I am going to give you a caution.”

I asked, “Is that going to be on a piece of paper like a certificate I can keep?”

He replied, “No, a caution means that we are going to keep a record of what you did, that you hit a policeman but that it was an accident and that you didn’t mean to hurt the policeman.”

I said, “But it wasn’t an accident.”

And Father said, “Christopher, please.”

The policeman closed his mouth and breathed out loudly through his nose and said, “If you get into any more trouble we will take out this record and see that you have been given a caution and we will take things much more seriously. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I said that I understood.

Then he said that we could go and he stood up and opened the door and we walked out into the corridor and back to the front desk, where I picked up my Swiss Army knife and my piece of string and the piece of the wooden puzzle and the 5 pellets of rat food for Toby and my ?1.47 and the paper clip and my front door key, which were all in a little plastic bag, and we went out to Father’s car, which was parked outside, and we drove home.

37.I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I can’t tell lies.

Mother was a small person who smelled nice. And she sometimes wore a fleece with a zip down the front which was pink and it had a tiny label which said Berghaus on the left bosom.

A lie is when you say something happened which didn’t happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn’t happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn’t happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn’t happen.

For example, this morning for breakfast I had Ready Brek and some hot raspberry milk shake. But if I say that I actually had Shreddies and a mug of tea [ 3 3 But I wouldn’t have Shreddies and tea because they are both brown. ] I start thinking about Coco Pops and lemonade and porridge and Dr Pepper and how I wasn’t eating my breakfast in Egypt and there wasn’t a rhinoceros in the room and Father wasn’t wearing a diving suit and so on and even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared, like I do when I’m standing on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head is so full of all these things that I’m afraid that I’m going to forget to stand up straight and hang on to the rail and I’m going to fall over and be killed.

This is another reason why I don’t like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn’t happen and they make me feel shaky and scared.

And this is why everything I have written here is true.

41.There were clouds in the sky on the way home, so I couldn’t see the Milky Way.

I said, “I’m sorry,” because Father had had to come to the police station, which was a bad thing.

He said, “It’s OK.”

I said, “I didn’t kill the dog.”

And he said, “I know.”

Then he said, “Christopher, you have to stay out of trouble, OK?”

I said, “I didn’t know I was going to get into trouble. I like Wellington and I went to say hello to him, but I didn’t know that someone had killed him.”

Father said, “Just try and keep your nose out of other people’s business.”

I thought for a little and I said, “I am going to find out who killed Wellington.”

And Father said, “Were you listening to what I was saying, Christopher?”

I said, “Yes, I was listening to what you were saying, but when someone gets murdered you have to find out who did it so that they can be punished.”

And he said, “It’s a bloody dog, Christopher, a bloody dog.”

I replied, “I think dogs are important, too.”

He said, “Leave it.”

And I said, “I wonder if the police will find out who killed him and punish the person.”

Then Father banged the steering wheel with his fist and the car weaved a little bit across the dotted line in the middle of the road and he shouted, “I said leave it, for God’s sake.”

I could tell that he was angry because he was shouting, and I didn’t want to make him angry so I didn’t say anything else until we got home.

When we came in through the front door I went into the kitchen and got a carrot for Toby and I went upstairs and I shut the door of my room and I let Toby out and gave him the carrot. Then I turned my computer on and played 76 games of Minesweeperand did the Expert Version in 102 seconds, which was only 3 seconds off my best time, which was 99 seconds.

At 2:07 a.m. I decided that I wanted a drink of orange squash before I brushed my teeth and got into bed, so I went downstairs to the kitchen. Father was sitting on the sofa watching snooker on the television and drinking scotch. There were tears coming out of his eyes.

I asked, “Are you sad about Wellington?”

He looked at me for a long time and sucked air in through his nose. Then he said, “Yes, Christopher, you could say that. You could very well say that.”

I decided to leave him alone because when I am sad I want to be left alone. So I didn’t say anything else. I just went into the kitchen and made my orange squash and took it back upstairs to my room.

43.Mother died 2 years ago.

I came home from school one day and no one answered the door, so I went and found the secret key that we keep under a flowerpot behind the kitchen door. I let myself into the house and carried on making the Airfix Sherman tank model I was building.

An hour and a half later Father came home from work. He runs a business and he does heating maintenance and boiler repair with a man called Rhodri who is his employee. He knocked on the door of my room and opened it and asked whether I had seen Mother.

I said that I hadn’t seen her and he went downstairs and started making some phone calls. I did not hear what he said.

Then he came up to my room and said he had to go out for a while and he wasn’t sure how long he would be. He said that if I needed anything I should call him on his mobile phone.

He was away for 2? hours. When he came back I went downstairs. He was sitting in the kitchen staring out of the back window down the garden to the pond and the corrugated iron fence and the top of the tower of the church on Manstead Street which looks like a castle because it is Norman.

Father said, “I’m afraid you won’t be seeing your mother for a while.”

He didn’t look at me when he said this. He kept on looking through the window.

Usually people look at you when they’re talking to you. I know that they’re working out what I’m thinking, but I can’t tell what they’re thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film. But this was nice, having Father speak to me but not look at me.