The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (15 page)

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.
I stayed awake until 3:47. 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.

Then I stayed still and I looked at my watch and I stayed still for 27 minutes. And then I heard Father start the engine of his van. I knew it was his van because I heard it very often and it was nearby and I knew it wasn't any of the neighbors' cars because the people who take drugs have a Volkswagen camper van and Mr. Thompson, who lives at number 40, has a Vauxhall Cavalier and the people who live at number 34 have a Peugeot and they all sound different.

And when I heard him drive away from the house I knew it would be safe to come out.

And then I had to decide what to do because I couldn't live in the house with Father anymore because it was dangerous.

So I made a decision.

I decided that I would go and knock on Mrs. Shears's door and I would go and live with her, because I knew her and she wasn't a stranger and I had stayed in her house before, when there was a power cut on our side of the street. And this time she wouldn't tell me to go away because I would be able to tell her who had killed Wellington and that way she would know that I was a friend. And also she would understand why I couldn't live with Father anymore.

I took the licorice laces and the pink wafer biscuit and the last clementine out of my special food box and put them in my pocket and hid the special food box under the fertilizer bag. Then I picked up Toby's cage and my extra coat and I climbed out from behind the shed. I walked up the garden and down the side of the house. I undid the bolt in the garden door and walked out in front of the house.

There was no one in the street so I crossed and walked up the drive to Mrs. Shears's house and knocked on the door and waited and worked out what I was going to say when she opened the door.

But she didn't come to the door. So I knocked again.

Then I turned round and saw some people walking down the street and I was frightened again because it was two of the people who take drugs in the house next door. So I grabbed Toby's cage and went round the side of Mrs. Shears's house and sat down behind the dustbin so they couldn't see me.

And then I had to work out what to do.

And I did this by thinking of all the things I could do and deciding whether they were the right decision or not.

I decided that I couldn't go home again.

And I decided that I couldn't go and live with Siobhan because she couldn't look after me when school was closed because she was a teacher and not a friend or a member of my family.

And I decided that I couldn't go and live with Uncle Terry because he lived in Sunderland and I didn't know how to get to Sunderland and I didn't like Uncle Terry because he smoked cigarettes and stroked my hair.

And I decided I couldn't go and live with Mrs. Alexander because she wasn't a friend or a member of my family even if she had a dog, because I couldn't stay overnight in her house or use her toilet because she had used it and she was a stranger.

And then I thought that I could go and live with Mother because she was my family and I knew where she lived because I could remember the address from the letters, which was 451c Chapter Road, London NW2 5NG. Except that she lived in London and I'd never been to London before. I'd only been to Dover to go to France, and to Sunderland to visit Uncle Terry and to Manchester to visit Aunt Ruth, who had cancer, except she didn't have cancer when I was there. And I had never been anywhere apart from the shop at the end of the road on my own. And the thought of going somewhere on my own was frightening.

But then I thought about going home again, or staying where I was, or hiding in the garden every night and Father finding me, and that made me feel even more frightened. And when I thought about that I felt like I was going to be sick again like I did the night before.