The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (12 page)

I'm very tired now and I must go to sleep and I want to put this into the letterbox tomorrow morning, so I'll sign off now and write you another letter soon.

You haven't written to me yet, so I know that you are probably still angry with me. I'm sorry Christopher. But I still love you. I hope you don't stay angry with me forever. And I'd love it if you were able to write me a letter (but remember to send it to the new address!).

I think about you all the time.

Lots of Love,
Your Mum
X X X X X X

Then I was really confused because Mother had never worked as a secretary for a firm that made things out of steel. Mother had worked as a secretary for a big garage in the center of town. And Mother had never lived in London. Mother had always lived with us. And Mother had never written a letter to me before.

There was no date on the letter so I couldn't work out when Mother had written the letter and I wondered whether someone else had written the letter and pretended to be Mother.

And then I looked at the front of the envelope and I saw that there was a postmark and there was a date on the postmark and it was quite difficult to read, but it said

Which meant that the letter was posted on 16 October 1997, which was 18 months after Mother had died.

And then the door of my bedroom opened and Father said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I'm reading a letter.”

And he said, “I've finished the drilling. That David Attenborough nature program's on telly if you're interested.”

I said, “OK.”

Then he went downstairs again.

I looked at the letter and thought really hard. It was a mystery and I couldn't work it out. Perhaps the letter was in the wrong envelope and it had been written before Mother had died. But why was she writing from London? The longest she had been away was a week when she went to visit her cousin Ruth, who had cancer, but Ruth lived in Manchester.

And then I thought that perhaps it wasn't a letter from Mother. Perhaps it was a letter to another person called Christopher, from that Christopher's mother.

I was excited. When I started writing my book there was only one mystery I had to solve. Now there were two.

I decided that I would not think about it anymore that night because I didn't have enough information and could easily
Leap to the Wrong Conclusions
like Mr. Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, which is a dangerous thing to do because you should make sure you have all the available clues before you start deducing things. That way you are much less likely to make a mistake.

I decided that I would wait until Father was out of the house. Then I would go into the cupboard in his bedroom and look at the other letters and see who they were from and what they said.

I folded the letter and hid it under my mattress in case Father found it and got cross. Then I went downstairs and watched the television.

151.
Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.

For example, some people believe in the ghosts of people who have come back from the dead. And Uncle Terry said that he saw a ghost in a shoe shop in a shopping center in Northampton because he was going down into the basement when he saw someone dressed in gray walk across the bottom of the stairs. But when he got to the bottom of the stairs the basement was empty and there were no doors.

When he told the lady on the till upstairs, they said it was called Tuck and he was a ghost of a Franciscan friar who used to live in the monastery which was on the same site hundreds of years ago, which was why the shopping center was called
Greyfriars Shopping Center,
and they were used to him and not frightened at all.

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.

But sometimes a mystery isn't a mystery. And this is an example of a mystery which isn't a mystery.

We have a pond at the school, with frogs in it, which are there so we can learn how to treat animals with kindness and respect, because some of the children at school are horrible to animals and think it's funny to crush worms or throw stones at cats.

And some years there are lots of frogs in the pond, and some years there are very few. And if you drew a graph of how many frogs there were in the pond, it would look like this (but this graph is what's called
hypothetical,
which means that the numbers aren't the real numbers, it is just an
illustration
)

And if you looked at the graph you might think that there was a really cold winter in 1987 and 1988 and 1989 and 1997, or that there was a heron which came and ate lots of the frogs (sometimes there is a heron who comes and tries to eat the frogs, but there is chicken wire over the pond to stop it).

But sometimes it has nothing to do with cold winters or cats or herons. Sometimes it is just maths.

Here is a formula for a population of animals

N
_new
=
λ
(N
_old
) (1 – N
_old
)

And in this formula
N
stands for the population density. When
N = 1
the population is the biggest it can get. And when
N = 0
the population is extinct.
N
_new
is the population in one year, and
N
_old
is the population in the year before. And λ is what is called a constant.

When λ is less than 1, the population gets smaller and smaller and goes extinct. And when λ is between 1 and 3, the population gets bigger and then it stays stable like this (and these graphs are hypothetical, too)

And when λ is between 3 and 3.57 the population goes in cycles like this

But when λ is greater than 3.57 the population becomes chaotic like in the first graph.

This was discovered by Robert May and George Oster and Jim Yorke. And it means that sometimes things are so complicated that it is impossible to predict what they are going to do next, but they are only obeying really simple rules.

And it means that sometimes a whole population of frogs, or worms, or people, can die for no reason whatsoever, just because that is the way the numbers work.

157.
It was six days before I could go back into Father's room to look in the shirt box in the cupboard.

On the first day, which was a Wednesday, Joseph Fleming took his trousers off and went to the toilet all over the floor of the changing room and started to eat it, but Mr. Davis stopped him.

Joseph eats everything. He once ate one of the little blocks of blue disinfectant which hang inside the toilets. And he once ate a £50 note from his mother's wallet. And he eats string and rubber bands and tissues and writing paper and paints and plastic forks. Also he bangs his chin and screams a lot.

Tyrone said that there was a horse and a pig in the poo, so I said he was being stupid, but Siobhan said he wasn't. They were small plastic animals from the library that the staff use to make people tell stories. And Joseph had eaten them.

So I said I wasn't going to go into the toilets because there was poo on the floor and it made me feel uncomfortable to think about it, even though Mr. Ennison had come in and cleaned it up. And I wet my trousers and I had to put on some spare ones from the spare clothes locker in Mrs. Gascoyne's room. So Siobhan said I could use the staff room toilets for two days, but only two days, and then I would have to use the children's toilets again. And we made this a deal.

On the second, third and fourth days, which were Thursday, Friday and Saturday, nothing interesting happened.

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

I went upstairs and sat in my room and watched the water falling in the street. It was falling so hard that it looked like white sparks (and this is a simile, too, not a metaphor). And there was no one around because everyone was staying indoors. And it made me think how all the water in the world was connected, and this water had evaporated from the oceans somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico or Baffin Bay, and now it was falling in front of the house and it would drain away into the gutters and flow to a sewage station where it would be cleaned and then it would go into a river and go back into the ocean again.

And in the evening on Monday Father got a phone call from a lady whose cellar had flooded and he had to go out and fix it in an emergency.

If there is only one emergency Rhodri goes and fixes it because his wife and his children went to live in Somerset, which means he doesn't have anything to do in the evenings apart from playing snooker and drinking and watching the television, and he needs to do overtime to earn money to send to his wife to help her look after the children. And Father has me to look after. But this evening there were two emergencies, so Father told me to behave and to ring him on his mobile phone if there was a problem, and then he went out in the van.

So I went into his bedroom and opened up the cupboard and lifted the toolbox off the top of the shirt box and opened the shirt box.

I counted the letters. There were 43 of them. They were all addressed to me in the same handwriting.

I took one out and opened it.

Inside was this letter

3rd May

451c Chapter Road
London NW2 5NG
0208 887 8907

Dear Christopher,

We have a new fridge and cooker at last! Roger and I drove to the tip at the weekend to throw the old ones away. It's where people throw everything away. There are huge bins for three differant colours of bottles and cardboard and engine oil and garden waste and household waist and larger items (that's where we put the old fridge and cooker).