The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon [51]
So I put my hands over my ears to block out the noise and think. And I thought that I had to stay in the station to get on a train and I had to sit down somewhere and there was nowhere to sit down near the door of the station so I had to walk down the tunnel. So I said to myself, in my head, not out loud, “I will walk down the tunnel and there might be somewhere I can sit down and then I can shut my eyes and I can think,” and I walk down the tunnel trying to concentrate on the sign at the end of the tunnel that said WARNING CCTV in operation. And it was like stepping off the cliff on a tightrope.
And eventually I got to the end of the tunnel and there were some stairs and I went up the stairs and there were still lots of people and I groaned and there was a shop at the top of the stairs and a room with chairs in it but there were too many people in the room with chairs in it, so I walked past it. And there were signs saying Great Western and cold beers and lagers and CAUTION WET FLOOR and Your 50p will keep a premature baby alive for 1.8 seconds and transforming travel and Refreshingly Different and IT'S DELICIOUS IT'S CREAMY AND IT'S ONLY £1.30 HOT CHOC DELUXE and 0870 777 7676 and The Lemon Tree and No Smoking and FINE TEAS and there were some little tables with chairs next to them and no one was sitting at one of the tables and it was in a corner and I sat down on one of the chairs next to it and I closed my eyes. And I put my hands in my pockets and Toby climbed into my hand and I gave him two pellets of rat food from my bag and I gripped the Swiss Army knife in the other hand, and I groaned to cover up the noise because I had taken my hands off my ears, but not so loud that other people would hear me groaning and come and talk to me.
And then I tried to think about what I had to do, but I couldn't think because there were too many other things in my head, so I did a maths problem to make my head clearer.
And the maths problem that I did was called Conway's Soldiers. And in Conway's Soldiers you have a chessboard that continues infinitely in all directions and every square below a horizontal line has a colored tile on it like this
And you can move a colored tile only if it can jump over a colored tile horizontally or vertically (but not diagonally) into an empty square 2 squares away. And when you move a colored tile in this way you have to remove the colored tile that it jumped over, like this
And you have to see how far you get the colored tiles above the starting horizontal line, and you start by doing something like this
And then you do something like this
And I know what the answer is because however you move the colored tiles you will never get a colored tile more than 4 squares above the starting horizontal line, but it is a good maths problem to do in your head when you don't want to think about something else because you can make it as complicated as you need to fill your brain by making the board as big as you want and the moves as complicated as you want.
And I had got to
and then I looked up and saw that there was a policeman standing in front of me and he was saying, “Anyone at home?” but I didn't know what that meant.
And then he said, “Are you all right, young man?”
I looked at him and I thought for a bit so that I would answer the question correctly and I said, “No.”
And he said, “You're looking a bit worse for wear.”
He had a gold ring on one of his fingers and it had curly letters on it but I couldn't see what the letters were.
Then he said, “The lady at the café says you've been here for 21