The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Read Online Free

hear what he said.
    Then he came up to my room and said he had to go out for a while and he wasn't sure how long he would be. He said that if I needed anything I should call him on his mobile phone.
    He was away for 21⁄2 hours. When he came back I went downstairs. He was sitting in the kitchen staring out of the back window down the garden to the pond and the corrugated iron fence and the top of the tower of the church on Manstead Street which looks like a castle because it is Norman.
    Father said, “I'm afraid you won't be seeing your mother for a while.”
    He didn't look at me when he said this. He kept on looking through the window.
    Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film. But this was nice, having Father speak to me but not look at me.
    I said, “Why not?”
    He waited for a very long time, then he said, “Your mother has had to go into hospital.”
    “Can we visit her?” I asked, because I like hospitals. I like the uniforms and the machines.
    Father said, “No.”
    I said, “Why can't we?”
    And he said, “She needs rest. She needs to be on her own.”
    I asked, “Is it a psychiatric hospital?”
    And Father said, “No. It's an ordinary hospital. She has a problem . . . a problem with her heart.”
    I said, “We will need to take food to her,” because I knew that food in hospital was not very good. David from school, he went into hospital to have an operation on his leg to make his calf muscle longer so that he could walk better. And he hated the food, so his mother used to take meals in every day.
    Father waited for a long time again and said, “I'll take some in to her during the day when you're at school and I'll give it to the doctors and they can give it to your mum, OK?”
    I said, “But you can't cook.”
    Father put his hands over his face and said, “Christopher. Look. I'll buy some ready-made stuff from Marks and Spencer's and take those in. She likes those.”
    I said I would make her a Get Well card, because that is what you do for people when they are in hospital.
    Father said he would take it in the next day.
    47. In the bus on the way to school next morning we passed 4 red cars in a row, which meant that it was a Good Day, so I decided not to be sad about Wellington.
    Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and
Take No Risks.
He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn't very logical.
    I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it made them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn't have anything to do with whether they had a good day or a bad day.
    I said that when Father got up in the morning he always put his trousers on before he put his socks on and it wasn't logical but he always did it that way, because he liked things in a nice order, too. Also whenever he went upstairs he went up two at a time, always starting with his right foot.
    Mr. Jeavons said that I was a very clever boy.
    I said that I wasn't clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that