The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon [32]
Then I looked in his clothes cupboard. This was full of his clothes on hangers. There was also a little shelf at the top which I could see onto if I stood on the bed, but I had to take my shoes off in case I left a dirty footprint that would be a clue if Father decided to do some detecting. But the only things on the shelf were more porn magazines and a broken sandwich toaster and 12 wire coat hangers and an old hair dryer that used to belong to Mother.
In the bottom of the cupboard was a large plastic toolbox which was full of tools for doing Do It Yourself, like a drill and a paintbrush and some screws and a hammer, but I could see these without opening the box because it was made of transparent gray plastic.
Then I saw that there was another box underneath the toolbox, so I lifted the toolbox out of the cupboard. The other box was an old cardboard box that is called a shirt box because people used to buy shirts in them. And when I opened the shirt box I saw my book was inside it.
Then I didn't know what to do.
I was happy because Father hadn't thrown my book away. But if I took the book he would know I had been messing with things in his room and he would be very angry and I had promised not to mess with things in his room.
Then I heard his van pulling up outside the house and I knew that I had to think fast and be clever. So I decided that I would leave the book where it was because I reasoned that Father wasn't going to throw it away if he had put it into the shirt box and I could carry on writing in another book that I would keep really secret and then, maybe later, he might change his mind and let me have the first book back again and I could copy the new book into it. And if he never gave it back to me I would be able to remember most of what I had written, so I would put it all into the second secret book and if there were bits I wanted to check to make sure I had remembered them correctly I could come into his room when he was out and check.
Then I heard Father shutting the door of the van.
And that was when I saw the envelope.
It was an envelope addressed to me and it was lying under my book in the shirt box with some other envelopes. I picked it up. It had never been opened. It said
Christopher Boone
36 Randolph Street
Swindon
Wiltshire
Then I noticed that there were lots of other envelopes and they were all addressed to me. And this was interesting and confusing.
And then I noticed how the words Christopher and Swindon were written. They were written like this
I only know 3 people who do little circles instead of dots over the letter i. And one of them is Siobhan, and one of them was Mr. Loxely, who used to teach at the school, and one of them was Mother.
And then I heard Father opening the front door, so I took one envelope from under the book and I put the lid back on the shirt box and I put the toolbox back on top of it and I closed the cupboard door really carefully.
Then Father called out, “Christopher?”
I said nothing because he might be able to hear where I was calling from. I stood up and walked around the bed to the door, holding the envelope, trying to make as little noise as possible.
Father was standing at the bottom of the stairs and I thought he might see me, but he was flicking through the post which had come that morning so his head was pointing downward. Then he walked away from the foot of the stairs toward the kitchen and I closed the door of his room very quietly and went into my own room.
I wanted to look at the envelope but I didn't want to make Father angry, so I hid the envelope underneath my mattress. Then I walked downstairs and said hello to Father.
And he said, “So, what have you been up to today, young man?”
And