The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (13 page)

I sat on the bed and looked at my knees.

So Father went out of the room and picked up my clothes from the bathroom floor and put them on the landing. Then he went and got the sheets from his bed and brought them out onto the landing together with my shirt and my jumper. Then he picked them all up and took them downstairs. Then I heard him start the washing machine and I heard the boiler starting up and the water in the water pipes going into the washing machine.

That was all I could hear for a long time.

I doubled 2's in my head because it made me feel calmer. I got to 33554432, which is 2 25 , which was not very much because I've got to 2 43 before, but my brain wasn't working very well.

Then Father came back into the room again and said, "How are you feeling? Can I get you anything?"

I didn't say anything. I carried on looking at my knees.

And Father didn't say anything either. He just sat down on the bed next to me and put his elbows on his knees and looked down at the carpet between his legs where there was a little red piece of Lego with eight nobbles on.

Then I heard Toby waking up, because he is nocturnal, and I heard him rustling in his cage.

And Father was silent for a really long time.

Then he said, "Look, maybe I shouldn't say this, but. . . I want you to know that you can trust me. And. . . OK, maybe I don't tell the truth all the time. God knows, I try, Christopher, God knows I do, but. . . Life is difficult, you know. It's bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it's impossible. And I want you to know that I'm trying, I really am. And perhaps this is not a very good time to say this, and I know you're not going to like it, but. . . You have to know that I am going to tell you the truth from now on. About everything. Because. . . if you don't tell the truth now, then later on. . . later on it hurts even more. So. . ."

Father rubbed his face with his hands and pulled his chin down with his fingers and stared at the wall. I could see him out of the corner of my eye.

And he said, "I killed Wellington, Christopher."

I wondered if this was a joke, because I don't understand jokes, and when people tell jokes they don't mean what they say.

But then Father said, "Please. Christopher. Just. . . let me explain." Then he sucked in some air and he said, "When your mum left. . . Eileen. . . Mrs. Shears. . . she was very good to us. Very good to me. She helped me through a very difficult time. And I'm not sure I would have made it without her. Well, you know how she was round here most days. Helping out with the cooking and the cleaning. Popping over to see if we were OK, if we needed anything. . . I thought. . . Well. . . Shit, Christopher, I'm trying to keep this simple. . . I thought she might carry on coming over. I thought. . . and maybe I was being stupid. . . I thought she might. . . eventually . . . want to move in here. Or that we might move into her house. We. . . we got on really, really well. I thought we were friends. And I guess I thought wrong. I guess. . . in the end. . . it comes down to. . . Shit. . . We argued, Christopher, and. . . She said some things I'm not going to say to you because they're not nice, but they hurt, but. . . I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that's not so stupid, looking back. Maybe we are a bloody handful. And maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt than sharing your life with other actual human beings. I mean, shit, buddy, we're not exactly low-maintenance, are we. . . ? Anyway, we had this row. Well, quite a few rows to be honest. But after this particularly nasty little blowout, she chucked me out of the house. And you know what that bloody dog was like after the operation. Bloody schizophrenic. Nice as pie one moment, roll over, tickle its stomach. Sink its teeth into your leg the next. Anyway, we're yelling at each other and it's in the garden relieving itself. So when she slams the door behind me the bugger's waiting for me. And. . . I know, I know. Maybe if I'd just given it a kick it would probably have backed off. But, shit, Christopher, when that red mist comes down. . . Christ, you know how it is. I mean, we're not that different, me and you. And all I could think was that she cared more about this bloody dog than she did about you or me. And it was like everything I'd been bottling up for two years just. . ."

Then Father was silent for a bit.

Then he said, "I'm sorry, Christopher. I promise you, I never meant for it to turn out like this."

And then I knew that it wasn't a joke and I was really frightened.

Father said, "We all make mistakes, Christopher. You, me, your mum, everyone. And sometimes they're really big mistakes. We're only human."

Then he held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan.

But I screamed and pushed him backward so that he fell off the bed and onto the floor.

He sat up and said, "OK. Look. Christopher. I'm sorry. Let's leave it for tonight, OK? I'm going to go downstairs and you get some sleep and we'll talk in the morning." Then he said, "It's going to be all right. Honestly. Trust me."

Then he stood up and took a deep breath and went out of the room.

I sat on the bed for a long time looking at the floor. Then I heard Toby scratching in his cage. I looked up and saw him staring through the bars at me.

I had to get out of the house. Father had murdered Wellington. That meant he could murder me, because I couldn't trust him, even though he had said "Trust me," because he had told a lie about a big thing.

But I couldn't get out of the house straightaway because he would see me, so I would have to wait until he was asleep.

The time was 11: 16 p.m.

I tried doubling 2's again, but I couldn't get past 2 15 , which was 32768. So I groaned to make the time pass quicker and not think.

Then it was 1:20 a.m. but I hadn't heard Father come upstairs to bed. I wondered if he was asleep downstairs or whether he was waiting to come in and kill me. So I got out my Swiss Army knife and opened the saw blade so that I could defend myself. Then I went out of my bedroom really quietly and listened. I couldn't hear anything, so I started going downstairs really quietly and really slowly. And when I got downstairs I could see Father's foot through the door of the living room. I waited for 4 minutes to see if it moved, but it didn't move. So I carried on walking till I got to the hallway. Then I looked round the door of the living room.

Father was lying on the sofa with his eyes closed.

I looked at him for a long time.

Then he snored and I jumped and I could hear the blood in my ears and my heart going really fast and a pain like someone had blown up a really big balloon inside my chest.

I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack.

Father's eyes were still closed. I wondered if he was pretending to be asleep. So I gripped the penknife really hard and I knocked on the doorframe.

Father moved his head from one side to the other and his foot twitched and he said "Gnnnn," but his eyes stayed closed. And then he snored again.

He was asleep.

That meant I could get out of the house if I was really quiet so I didn't wake him up.

I took both my coats and my scarf from the hooks next to the front door and I put them all on because it would be cold outside at night. Then I went upstairs again really quietly, but it was difficult because my legs were shaking. I went into my room and I picked up Toby's cage. He was making scratching noises, so I took off one of the coats and put it over the cage to make the noise quieter. Then I carried him downstairs again.

Father was still asleep.

I went into the kitchen and I picked up my special food box. I unlocked the back door and stepped outside. Then I held the handle of the door down as I shut it again so that the click wasn't too loud. Then I walked down the bottom of the garden.

At the bottom of the garden is a shed. It has the lawn mower and the hedge cutter in it, and lots of gardening equipment that Mother used to use, like pots and bags of compost and bamboo canes and string and spades. It would be a bit warmer in the shed but I knew that Father might look for me in the shed, so I went round the back of the shed and I squeezed into the gap between the wall of the shed and the fence, behind the big black plastic tub for collecting rainwater. Then I sat down and I felt a bit safer.

I decided to leave my other coat over Toby's cage because I didn't want him to get cold and die.

I opened up my special food box. Inside was the Milkybar and two licorice laces and three Clementines and a pink wafer biscuit and my red food coloring. I didn't feel hungry but I knew that I should eat something because if you don't eat something you can get cold, so I ate two Clementines and the Milkybar.

Then I wondered what I would do next.

173. Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion.

People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this

But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur

And there aren't any lines in space, so you could join bits of Orion to bits of Lepus or Taurus or Gemini and say that they were a constellation called the Bunch of Grapes or Jesus or the Bicycle (except that they didn't have bicycles in Roman and Greek times, which was when they called Orion Orion).

And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don't know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away.

And that is the truth.

179. 1 stayed awake until 5:47. That was the last time I looked at my watch before I fell asleep. It has a luminous face and lights up if you press a button, so I could read it in the dark. I was cold and I was frightened Father might come out and find me. But I felt safer in the garden because I was hidden.

I looked at the sky a lot. I like looking up at the sky in the garden at night. In summer I sometimes come outside at night with my torch and my planisphere, which is two circles of plastic with a pin through the middle. And on the bottom is a map of the sky and on top is an aperture which is an opening shaped in a parabola and you turn it round to see a map of the sky that you can see on that day of the year from the latitude 51.5° north, which is the latitude that Swindon is on, because the largest bit of the sky is always on the other side of the earth.

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

I didn't sleep very well because of the cold and because the ground was very bumpy and pointy underneath me and because Toby was scratching in his cage a lot. But when I woke up properly it was dawn and the sky was all orange and blue and purple and I could hear birds singing, which is called the Dawn Chorus. And I stayed where I was for another 2 hours and 32 minutes, and then I heard Father come into the garden and call out, "Christopher. . . ? Christopher. . . ?"

So I turned round and I found an old plastic sack covered in mud that used to have fertilizer in it and I squeezed myself and Toby's cage and my special food box into the corner between the wall of the shed and the fence and the rainwater tub and I covered myself with the fertilizer sack. And then I heard Father coming down the garden and I took my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and got out the saw blade and held it in case he found us. And I heard him open the door of the shed and look inside. And then I heard him say "Shit." And then I heard his footsteps in the bushes round the side of the shed and my heart was beating really fast and I could feel the feeling like a balloon inside my chest again and I think he might have looked round the back of the shed, but I couldn't see because I was hiding, but he didn't see me because I heard him walking back up the garden again.