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

I said, “Why not?”

He waited for a very long time, then he said, “Your mother has had to go into hospital.”

“Can we visit her?” I asked, because I like hospitals. I like the uniforms and the machines.

Father said, “No.”

I said, “Why can’t we?”

And he said, “She needs rest. She needs to be on her own.”

I asked, “Is it a psychiatric hospital?”

And Father said, “No. It’s an ordinary hospital. She has a problem… a problem with her heart.”

I said, “We will need to take food to her,” because I knew that food in hospital was not very good. David from school, he went into hospital to have an operation on his leg to make his calf muscle longer so that he could walk better. And he hated the food, so his mother used to take meals in every day.

Father waited for a long time again and said, “I’ll take some in to her during the day when you’re at school and I’ll give it to the doctors and they can give it to your mum, OK?”

I said, “But you can’t cook.”

Father put his hands over his face and said, “Christopher. Look. I’ll buy some ready-made stuff from Marks and Spencer’s and take those in. She likes those.”

I said I would make her a Get Well card, because that is what you do for people when they are in hospital.

Father said he would take it in the next day.

47.In the bus on the way to school next morning we passed 4 red cars in a row, which meant that it was a Good Day,so I decided not to be sad about Wellington.

Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day,and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day,and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day,and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day,which is a day when I don’t speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don’t eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn’t very logical.

I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Daysand Black Days.And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it made them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn’t have anything to do with whether they had a good day or a bad day.

I said that when Father got up in the morning he always put his trousers on before he put his socks on and it wasn’t logical but he always did it that way, because he liked things in a nice order, too. Also whenever he went upstairs he went up two at a time, always starting with his right foot.

Mr. Jeavons said that I was a very clever boy.

I said that I wasn’t clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn’t clever. That was just being observant. Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new. Like the universe expanding, or who committed a murder. Or if you see someone’s name and you give each letter a value from 1 to 26 ( a = 1, b = 2, etc.) and you add the numbers up in your head and you find that it makes a prime number, like Jesus Christ(151), or Scooby-Doo(113), or Sherlock Holmes(163), or Doctor Watson(167).

Mr. Jeavons asked me whether this made me feel safe, having things always in a nice order, and I said it did.

Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.

He asked whether I wanted to become an astronaut and I said I did.

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn’t take orders. Also I didn’t have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Terry, who is the older brother of Francis, who is at the school, said I would only ever get a job collecting supermarket trollies or cleaning out donkey shit at an animal sanctuary and they didn’t let spazzers drive rockets that cost billions of pounds. When I told this to Father he said that Terry was jealous of my being cleverer than him. Which was a stupid thing to think because we weren’t in a competition. But Terry is stupid, so quod erat demonstrandum, which is Latin for which is the thing that was going to be proved, which means thus it is proved.

I’m not a spazzer, which means spastic, not like Francis, who is a spazzer, and even though I probably won’t become an astronaut, I am going to go to university and study mathematics, or physics, or physics and mathematics (which is a Joint Honor School), because I like mathematics and physics and I’m very good at them. But Terry won’t go to university. Father says Terry is most likely to end up in prison.

Terry has a tattoo on his arm of a heart shape with a knife through the middle of it.

But this is what is called a digression, and now I am going to go back to the fact that it was a Good Day.

Because it was a Good Day I decided that I would try and find out who killed Wellington because a Good Day is a day for projects and planning things.

When I said this to Siobhan she said, “Well, we’re meant to be writing stories today, so why don’t you write about finding Wellington and going to the police station.”

And that is when I started writing this.

And Siobhan said that she would help with the spelling and the grammar and the footnotes.

53.Mother died two weeks later.

I had not been into hospital to see her but Father had taken in lots of food from Marks and Spencer’s. He said that she had been looking OK and seemed to be getting better. She had sent me lots of love and had my Get Well card on the table beside her bed. Father said that she liked it very much.

The card had pictures of cars on the front. It looked like this:

I did it at school with Mrs. Peters, who does art, and it was a lino cut, which is when you draw a picture on a piece of lino and Mrs. Peters cuts round the picture with a Stanley knife and then you put ink on the lino and press it onto the paper, which is why all the cars looked the same, because I did one car and pressed it onto the paper 9 times. And it was Mrs. Peters’s idea to do lots of cars, which I liked. And I colored all the cars in with red paint to make it a Super Super Good Dayfor Mother.

Father said that she died of a heart attack and it wasn’t expected.

I said, “What kind of heart attack?” because I was surprised.

Mother was only 38 years old and heart attacks usually happen to older people, and Mother was very active and rode a bicycle and ate food which was healthy and high in fiber and low in saturated fat like chicken and vegetables and muesli.

Father said that he didn’t know what kind of heart attack she had and now wasn’t the moment to be asking questions like that.