The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon

43.  Mother died 2 years ago.

I came home from school one day and no one answered the door, so I went and found the secret key that we keep under a flowerpot behind the kitchen door. I let myself into the house and carried on making the Airfix Sherman tank model I was building.

An hour and a half later Father came home from work. He runs a business and he does heating maintenance and boiler repair with a man called Rhodri who is his employee. He knocked on the door of my room and opened it and asked whether I had seen Mother.

I said that I hadn’t seen her and he went downstairs and started making some phone calls. I didn’t 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 2 ½ 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.