The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (10 page)

Father came home at 5:48 p.m. I heard him come through the front door. Then he came into the living room. He was wearing a lime green and sky blue check shirt and there was a double knot on one of his shoes but not on the other. He was carrying an old advert for Fussell's Milk Powder which was made of metal and painted with blue and white enamel and covered with little circles of rust which were like bullet holes, but he didn't explain why he was carrying this.

He said, “Howdy, pardner,” which is a joke he does.

And I said, “Hello.”

I carried on watching the video and Father went into the kitchen.

I had forgotten that I had left my book lying on the kitchen table because I was too interested in the
Blue Planet
video. This is what is called
Relaxing Your Guard,
and it is what you must never do if you are a detective.

It was 5:54 p.m. when Father came back into the living room. He said, “What is this?” but he said it very quietly and I didn't realize that he was angry because he wasn't shouting.

He was holding the book in his right hand.

I said, “It's a book I'm writing.”

And he said, “Is this true? Did you talk to Mrs. Alexander?” He said this very quietly as well, so I still didn't realize that he was angry.

And I said, “Yes.”

Then he said, “Holy fucking Jesus, Christopher. How stupid are you?”

This is what Siobhan says is called a rhetorical question. It has a question mark at the end, but you are not meant to answer it because the person who is asking it already knows the answer. It is difficult to spot a rhetorical question.

Then Father said, “What the fuck did I tell you, Christopher?” This was much louder.

And I replied, “Not to mention Mr. Shears's name in our house. And not to go asking Mrs. Shears, or anyone, about who killed that bloody dog. And not to go trespassing in other people's gardens. And to stop this ridiculous bloody detective game. Except I haven't done any of those things. I just asked Mrs. Alexander about Mr. Shears because—”

But Father interrupted me and said, “Don't give me that bollocks, you little shit. You knew exactly what you were bloody doing. I've read the book, remember.” And when he said this he held up the book and shook it. “What else did I say, Christopher?”

I thought that this might be another rhetorical question, but I wasn't sure. I found it hard to work out what to say because I was starting to get scared and confused.

Then Father repeated the question, “What else did I say, Christopher?”

I said, “I don't know.”

And he said, “Come on. You're the fucking memory man.”

But I couldn't think.

And Father said, “Not to go around sticking your fucking nose into other people's business. And what do you do? You go around sticking your nose into other people's business. You go around raking up the past and sharing it with every Tom, Dick and Harry you bump into. What am I going to do with you, Christopher? What the fuck am I going to do with you?”

I said, “I was just doing chatting with Mrs. Alexander. I wasn't doing investigating.”

And he said, “I ask you to do one thing for me, Christopher. One thing.”

And I said, “I didn't want to talk to Mrs. Alexander. It was Mrs. Alexander who—”

But Father interrupted me and grabbed hold of my arm really hard.

Father had never grabbed hold of me like that before. Mother had hit me sometimes because she was a very hot-tempered person, which means that she got angry more quickly than other people and she shouted more often. But Father was a more levelheaded person, which means he didn't get angry as quickly and he didn't shout as often. So I was very surprised when he grabbed me.

I don't like it when people grab me. And I don't like being surprised either. So I hit him, like I hit the policeman when he took hold of my arms and lifted me onto my feet. But Father didn't let go, and he was shouting. And I hit him again. And then I didn't know what I was doing anymore.

I had no memories for a short while. I know it was a short while because I checked my watch afterward. It was like someone had switched me off and then switched me on again. And when they switched me on again I was sitting on the carpet with my back against the wall and there was blood on my right hand and the side of my head was hurting. And Father was standing on the carpet a meter in front of me looking down at me and he was still holding my book in his right hand, but it was bent in half and all the corners were messed up, and there was a scratch on his neck and a big rip in the sleeve of his green and blue check shirt and he was breathing really deeply.

After about a minute he turned and walked through to the kitchen. Then he unlocked the back door into the garden and went outside. I heard him lift the lid of the dustbin and drop something into it and put the lid of the dustbin back on. Then he came into the kitchen again, but he wasn't carrying the book anymore. Then he locked the back door again and put the key into the little china jug that is shaped like a fat nun and he stood in the middle of the kitchen and closed his eyes.

Then he opened his eyes and he said, “I need a fucking drink.”

And he got himself a can of beer.

131.
These are some of the reasons why I hate yellow and brown

YELLOW

1. Custard

2. Bananas
(bananas also turn brown)

3. Double Yellow Lines

4. Yellow Fever
(which is a disease from tropical America and West Africa which causes a high fever, acute nephritis, jaundice and hemorrhages, and it is caused by a virus transmitted by the bite of a mosquito called
Aëdes aegypti,
which used to be called
Stegomyia fasciata;
and nephritis is inflammation of the kidneys)

5. Yellow Flowers
(because I get hay fever from flower pollen, which is one of 3 sorts of hay fever, and the others are from grass pollen and fungus pollen, and it makes me feel ill)

6. Sweet Corn
(because it comes out in your poo and you don't digest it so you are not really meant to eat it, like grass or leaves)

BROWN

1. Dirt

2. Gravy

3. Poo

4. Wood
(because people used to make machines and vehicles out of wood, but they don't anymore because wood breaks and goes rotten and has worms in it sometimes, and now people make machines and vehicles out of metal and plastic, which are much better and more modern)

5. Melissa Brown
(who is a girl at school, who is not actually brown like Anil or Mohammed, it's just her name, but she tore my big astronaut painting into two pieces and I threw it away even after Mrs. Peters sellotaped it together again because it looked broken)

Mrs. Forbes said that hating yellow and brown is just being silly. And Siobhan said that she shouldn't say things like that and everyone has favorite colors. And Siobhan was right. But Mrs. Forbes was a bit right, too. Because it is sort of being silly. But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others. It is like being in a restaurant like when Father takes me out to a Berni Inn sometimes and you look at the menu and you have to choose what you are going to have. But you don't know if you are going to like something because you haven't tasted it yet, so you have favorite foods and you choose these, and you have foods you don't like and you don't choose these, and then it is simple.

137.
The next day Father said he was sorry that he had hit me and he didn't mean to. He made me wash the cut on my cheek with Dettol to make sure that it wasn't infected, then he got me to put a plaster on it so it didn't bleed.

Then, because it was Saturday, he said he was going to take me on an expedition to show me that he was properly sorry, and we were going to Twycross Zoo. So he made me some sandwiches with white bread and tomatoes and lettuce and ham and strawberry jam for me to eat because I don't like eating food from places I don't know. And he said it would be OK because there wouldn't be too many people at the zoo because it was forecast to rain, and I was glad about that because I don't like crowds of people and I like it when it is raining. So I went and got my waterproof, which is orange.

Then we drove to Twycross Zoo.

I had never been to Twycross Zoo before so I didn't have a route worked out in my mind before we got there, so we bought a guidebook from the information center and then we walked round the whole zoo and I decided which were my favorite animals.

My favorite animals were

1. RANDYMAN,
which is the name of the oldest
Red-Faced Black Spider Monkey
(Ateles paniscus paniscus)
ever kept in captivity. Randyman is 44 years old, which is the same age as Father. He used to be a pet on a ship and have a metal band round his stomach, like in a story about pirates.

2.
The
PATAGONIAN SEA LIONS,
which are called
Miracle
and
Star.

3. MALIKU,
which is an
Orangutan.
I liked it especially because it was lying in a kind of hammock made out of a pair of stripy green pajama bottoms and on the blue plastic notice next to the cage it said it made the hammock itself.

Then we went to the café and Father had plaice and chips and apple pie and ice cream and a pot of Earl Grey tea and I had my sandwiches and I read the guidebook to the zoo.

And Father said, “I love you very much, Christopher. Don't ever forget that. And I know I lose my rag occasionally. I know I get angry. I know I shout. And I know I shouldn't. But I only do it because I worry about you, because I don't want to see you getting into trouble, because I don't want you to get hurt. Do you understand?”

I didn't know whether I understood. So I said, “I don't know.”

And Father said, “Christopher, do you understand that I love you?”

And I said “Yes,” because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.

And then he held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan, and I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other.

Then I got out a piece of paper from my bag and I did a map of the zoo from memory as a test. The map was like this

Then we went and looked at the giraffes. And the smell of their poo was like the smell inside the gerbil cage at school when we had gerbils, and when they ran their legs were so long it looked like they were running in slow motion.

Then Father said we had to get home before the roads got busy.

139.
I like Sherlock Holmes, but I do not like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. That is because he wasn't like Sherlock Holmes and he believed in the supernatural. And when he got old he joined the Spiritualist Society, which meant that he believed you could communicate with the dead. This was because his son died of influenza during the First World War and he still wanted to talk to him.

And in 1917 something famous happened called
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies.
Two cousins called Frances Griffiths, who was 9 years old, and Elsie Wright, who was 16 years old, said they used to play with fairies by a stream called Cottingley Beck and they used Frances's father's camera to take 5 photographs of the fairies like this

But they weren't real fairies. They were drawings on pieces of paper that they cut out and stood up with pins, because Elsie was a really good artist.

Harold Snelling, who was an expert in fake photography, said

These dancing figures are not made of paper nor any fabric; they are not painted on a photographic background—but what gets me most is that all these figures have moved during the exposure.