The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (26 page)

And when we got to Swindon Mother had keys to the house and we went in and she said, “Hello?” but there was no one there because it was 1:23 p.m. And I was frightened but Mother said I would be safe, so I went up to my room and closed the door. I took Toby out of my pocket and I let him run around and I played
Minesweeper
and I did the Expert Version in 174 seconds, which was 75 seconds longer than my best time.

And then it was 6:35 p.m. and I heard Father come home in his van and I moved the bed up against the door so he couldn't get in and he came into the house and he and Mother shouted at each other.

And Father shouted, “How the fuck did you get in here?”

And Mother shouted, “This is my house, too, in case you've forgotten.”

And Father shouted, “Is your fucking fancy man here as well?”

And then I picked up the bongo drums that Uncle Terry had bought me and I knelt down in the corner of the room and I pressed my head into the join between the two walls and I banged the drums and I groaned and I carried on doing this for an hour and then Mother came into the room and said Father had gone. And she said Father had gone to stay with Rhodri for a while and we would get a place to live of our own in the next few weeks.

Then I went into the garden and I found Toby's cage behind the shed and I brought it inside and I cleaned it and put Toby back in it.

And I asked Mother if I could do my maths A level the next day.

And she said, “I'm sorry, Christopher.”

And I said, “Can I do my maths A level?”

And she said, “You're not listening to me, are you, Christopher.”

And I said, “I'm listening to you.”

And Mother said, “I told you. I rang your headmistress. I told her you were in London. I told her you'd do it next year.”

And I said, “But I'm here now and I can take it.”

And Mother said, “I'm sorry, Christopher. I was trying to do things properly. I was trying not to mess things up.”

And my chest began hurting again and I folded my arms and I rocked backward and forward and groaned.

And Mother said, “I didn't know we'd be coming back.”

But I carried on groaning and rocking backward and forward.

And Mother said, “Come on. This isn't going to solve anything.”

Then she asked if I wanted to watch one of my
Blue Planet
videos, about life under the Arctic ice or the migration of humpback whales, but I didn't say anything because I knew I wasn't going to be able to do my maths A level and it was like pressing your thumbnail against a radiator when it's really hot and the pain starts and it makes you want to cry and the pain keeps hurting even when you take your thumb away from the radiator.

Then Mother made me some carrots and broccoli and ketchup, but I didn't eat them.

And I didn't sleep that night either.

The next day Mother drove me to school in Mr. Shears's car because we missed the bus. And when we were getting into the car, Mrs. Shears came across the road and said to Mother, “You've got a fucking nerve.”

And Mother said, “Get into the car, Christopher.”

But I couldn't get into the car because the door was locked.

And Mrs. Shears said, “So, has he finally dumped you, too?”

Then Mother opened her door and got into the car and unlocked my door and I got in and we drove away.

And when we got to school Siobhan said, “So you're Christopher's mother.” And Siobhan said that she was glad to see me again and she asked if I was OK and I said I was tired. And Mother explained that I was upset because I couldn't do my maths A level so I hadn't been eating properly or sleeping properly.

And then Mother went away and I drew a picture of a bus using perspective so that I didn't think about the pain in my chest and it looked like this

And after lunch Siobhan said that she had spoken to Mrs. Gascoyne and she still had my A-level papers in 3 sealed envelopes in her desk.

So I asked if I could still do my A level.

And Siobhan said, “I think so. We're going to ring the Reverend Peters this afternoon to make sure he can still come in and be your invigilator. And Mrs. Gascoyne is going to write a letter to the examination board to say that you're going to take the exam after all. And hopefully they'll say that that's OK. But we can't know that for sure.” Then she stopped talking for a few seconds. “I thought I should tell you now. So you could think about it.”

And I said, “So I could think about what?”

And she said, “Is this what you want to do, Christopher?”

And I thought about the question and I wasn't sure what the answer was because I wanted to do my maths A level but I was very tired and when I tried to think about maths my brain didn't work properly and when I tried to remember certain facts, like the logarithmic formula for the approximate number of prime numbers not greater than
x,
I couldn't remember them and this made me frightened.

And Siobhan said, “You don't have to do it, Christopher. If you say you don't want to do it no one is going to be angry with you. And it won't be wrong or illegal or stupid. It will just be what you want and that will be fine.”

And I said, “I want to do it,” because I don't like it when I put things in my timetable and I have to take them out again, because when I do that it makes me feel sick.

And Siobhan said, “OK.”

And she rang the Reverend Peters and he came into school at 3:27 p.m. and he said, “So, young man, are we ready to roll?”

And I did
Paper 1
of my maths A level sitting in the Art Room. And the Reverend Peters was the invigilator and he sat at a desk while I did the exam and he read a book called
The Cost of Discipleship
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and ate a sandwich. And in the middle of the exam he went and smoked a cigarette outside the window, but he watched me through the window in case I cheated.

And when I opened the paper and read through it I couldn't think how to answer any of the questions and also I couldn't breathe properly. And I wanted to hit somebody or stab them with my Swiss Army knife, but there wasn't anyone to hit or stab with my Swiss Army knife except the Reverend Peters and he was very tall and if I hit him or stabbed him with my Swiss Army knife he wouldn't be my invigilator for the rest of the exam. So I took deep breaths like Siobhan said I should do when I want to hit someone in school and I counted 50 breaths and did cubes of the cardinal numbers as I counted, like this

1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000, 1331,
1728, 2197, 2744, 3375, 4096, 4913 . . . etc.

And that made me feel a little calmer. But the exam was 2 hours long and 20 minutes had already gone so I had to work really fast and I didn't have time to check my answers properly.

And that night, just after I got home, Father came back to the house and I screamed but Mother said she wouldn't let anything bad happen to me and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible. And when Father came out of the house he looked at me for a long time and then he punched the fence and made a hole in it and went away.

And I slept a little bit that night because I was doing my maths A level. And I had some spinach soup for supper.

And the next day I did
Paper 2
and the Reverend Peters read
The Cost of Discipleship
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but this time he didn't smoke a cigarette and Siobhan made me go into the toilets before the exam and sit on my own and do breathing and counting.

And I was playing
The 11th Hour
on my computer that evening when a taxi stopped outside the house. Mr. Shears was in the taxi and he got out of the taxi and threw a big cardboard box of things belonging to Mother onto the lawn. And they were a hair dryer and some knickers and some L'Oréal shampoo and a box of muesli and two books,
DIANA: Her True Story
by Andrew Morton and
Rivals
by Jilly Cooper, and a photograph of me in a silver frame. And the glass in the photograph frame broke when it fell onto the grass.

Then he got some keys out of his pocket and got into his car and drove away and Mother ran out of the house and she ran into the street and shouted, “Don't fucking bother coming back, either!” And she threw the box of muesli and it hit the boot of his car as he drove away and Mrs. Shears was looking out of her window when Mother did this.

The next day I did
Paper 3
and the Reverend Peters read the
Daily Mail
and smoked three cigarettes.

And this was my favorite question

Prove the following result:

A triangle with sides that can be written in the form
n
²
+ 1,
n
²
- 1 and 2
n
(where
n
> 1) is right-angled.

Show, by means of a counterexample, that the converse is false.

And I was going to write out how I answered the question except Siobhan said it wasn't very interesting, but I said it was. And she said people wouldn't want to read the answers to a maths question in a book, and she said I could put the answer in an
Appendix,
which is an extra chapter at the end of a book which people can read if they want to. And that is what I have done.

And then my chest didn't hurt so much and it was easier to breathe. But I still felt sick because I didn't know if I'd done well in the exam and because I didn't know if the examination board would allow my exam paper to be considered after Mrs. Gascoyne had told them I wasn't going to take it.

And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.

And Father came round to the house that night and I was sitting on the sofa watching
University Challenge
and just answering the science questions. And he stood in the doorway of the living room and he said, “Don't scream, OK, Christopher. I'm not going to hurt you.”

And Mother was standing behind him so I didn't scream.

Then he came a bit closer to me and he crouched down like you do with dogs to show that you are not an Aggressor and he said, “I wanted to ask you how the exam went.”

But I didn't say anything.

And Mother said, “Tell him, Christopher.”

But I still didn't say anything.

And Mother said, “Please, Christopher.”

So I said, “I don't know if I got all the questions right because I was really tired and I hadn't eaten any food so I couldn't think properly.”

And then Father nodded and he didn't say anything for a short while. Then he said “Thank you.”

And I said, “What for?”

And he said, “Just . . . thank you.” Then he said, “I'm very proud of you, Christopher. Very proud. I'm sure you did really well.”

And then he went away and I watched the rest of
University Challenge.

And the next week Father told Mother she had to move out of the house, but she couldn't because she didn't have any money to pay rent for a flat. And I asked if Father would be arrested and go to prison for killing Wellington because we could live in the house if he was in prison. But Mother said the police would only arrest Father if Mrs. Shears did what is called
pressing charges,
which is telling the police you want them to arrest someone for a crime, because the police don't arrest people for little crimes unless you ask them and Mother said that killing a dog was only a little crime.

But then everything was OK because Mother got a job on the till in a garden center and the doctor gave her pills to take every morning to stop her from feeling sad, except that sometimes they made her dizzy and she fell over if she stood up too fast. So we moved into a room in a big house that was made of red bricks. And the bed was in the same room as the kitchen and I didn't like it because it was small and the corridor was painted brown and there was a toilet and a bathroom that other people used and Mother had to clean it before I used it or I wouldn't use it and sometimes I wet myself because other people were in the bathroom. And the corridor outside the room smelled like gravy and the bleach they use to clean the toilets at school. And inside the room it smelled like socks and pine air freshener.

And I didn't like waiting to find out about my maths A level. And whenever I thought about the future I couldn't see anything clearly in my head and that made a panic start. So Siobhan said I shouldn't think about the future. She said, “Just think about today. Think about things that have happened. Especially about good things that have happened.”

And one of the good things was that Mother bought me a wooden puzzle which looked like this