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

And sometimes Mrs. Shears stayed overnight at our house and I liked it when she did because she made things tidy and she arranged the jars and pans and tins in order of their height on the shelves in the kitchen and she always made their labels face outward and she put the knives and forks and spoons in the correct compartments in the cutlery drawer. But she smoked cigarettes and she said lots of things I didn’t understand, e.g., “I’m going to hit the hay,” and “It’s brass monkeys out there,” and “Let’s rustle up some tucker.” And I didn’t like when she said things like that because I didn’t know what she meant.

And I don’t know why Mr. Shears left Mrs. Shears because nobody told me. But when you get married it is because you want to live together and have children, and if you get married in a church you have to promise that you will stay together until death do us part. And if you don’t want to live together you have to get divorced and this is because one of you has done sex with somebody else or because you are having arguments and you hate each other and you don’t want to live in the same house anymore and have children. And Mr. Shears didn’t want to live in the same house as Mrs. Shears anymore so he probably hated her and he might have come back and killed her dog to make her sad.

I decided to try and find out more about Mr. Shears.

71.All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we’re getting off the bus and they shout, “Special Needs! Special Needs!” But I don’t take any notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won’t go to prison.

I am going to prove that I’m not stupid. Next month I’m going to take my A level in maths and I’m going to get an A grade. No one has ever taken an A level at our school before, and the headmistress, Mrs. Gascoyne, didn’t want me to take it at first. She said they didn’t have the facilities to let us sit A levels. But Father had an argument with Mrs. Gascoyne and he got really cross. Mrs. Gascoyne said they didn’t want to treat me differently from everyone else in the school because then everyone would want to be treated differently and it would set a precedent. And I could always do my A levels later, at 18.

I was sitting in Mrs. Gascoyne’s office with Father when she said these things. And Father said, “Christopher is getting a crap enough deal already, don’t you think, without you shitting on him from a great height as well. Jesus, this is the one thing he is really good at.”

Then Mrs. Gascoyne said that she and Father should talk about this at some later point on their own. But Father asked her whether she wanted to say things she was embarrassed to say in front of me, and she said no, so he said, “Say them now, then.”

And she said that if I sat an A level I would have to have a member of staff looking after me on my own in a separate room. And Father said he would pay someone ?50 to do it after school and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. And she said she’d go away and think about it. And the next week she rang Father at home and told him that I could take the A level and the Reverend Peters would be what is called the invigilator.

And after I’ve taken A-level maths I am going to take A-level further maths and physics and then I can go to university. There is not a university in our town, which is Swindon, because it is a small place. So we will have to move to another town where there is a university because I don’t want to live on my own or in a house with other students. But that will be all right because Father wants to move to a different town as well. He sometimes say things like, “We’ve got to get out of this town, kiddo.” And sometimes he says, “Swindon is the arsehole of the world.”

Then, when I’ve got a degree in maths, or physics, or maths and physics, I will be able to get a job and earn lots of money and I will be able to pay someone who can look after me and cook my meals and wash my clothes, or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.

73.I used to think that Mother and Father might get divorced. That was because they had lots of arguments and sometimes they hated each other. This was because of the stress of looking after someone who has Behavioral Problems like I have. I used to have lots of Behavioral Problems, but I don’t have so many now because I’m more grown up and I can take decisions for myself and do things on my own like going out of the house and buying things at the shop at the end of the road. These are some of my Behavioral Problems:

Not talking to people for a long time [ 4 4 Once I didn’t talk to anyone for 5 weeks. ]

Not eating or drinking anything for a long time [ 5 5 When I was 6 Mother used to get me to drink strawberry-flavored slimming meals out of a measuring jug and we would have competitions to see how fast I could drink a quarter of a liter. ]

Not liking being touched

Screaming when I am angry or confused

Not liking being in really small places with other people

Smashing things when I am angry or confused

Groaning

Not liking yellow things or brown things and refusing to touch yellow things or brown things

Refusing to use my toothbrush if anyone else has touched it

Not eating food if different sorts of food are touching each other

Not noticing that people are angry with me

Not smiling

Saying things that other people think are rude [ 6 6 People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say “I don’t like you” unless that person has been horrible to you. ]

Doing stupid things [ 7 7 Stupid things are things like emptying a jar of peanut butter onto the table in the kitchen and making it level with a knife so it covers all the table right to the edges, or burning things on the gas stove to see what happened to them, like my shoes or silver foil or sugar. ]

Hitting other people

Hating France

Driving Mother’s car [ 8 8 I only did this once by borrowing the keys when she went into town on the bus, and I hadn’t driven a car before and I was 8 years old and 5 months so I drove it into the wall, and the car isn’t there anymore because Mother is dead. ]

Getting cross when someone has moved the furniture [ 9 9 It is permitted to move the chairs and the table in the kitchen because that is different, but it makes me feel dizzy and sick if someone has moved the sofa and the chairs around in the living room or the dining room. Mother used to do this when she did the hoovering, so I made a special plan of where all the furniture was meant to be and did measurements and I put everything back in its proper place afterward and then I felt better. But since Mother died Father hasn’t done any hoovering, so that is OK. And Mrs. Shears did the hoovering once but I did groaning and she shouted at Father and she never did it again. ]