The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon [73]
And Mrs. Shears said, “So, has he finally dumped you, too?”
Then Mother opened her door and got into the car and unlocked my door and I got in and we drove away.
And when we got to school Siobhan said, “So you're Christopher's mother.” And Siobhan said that she was glad to see me again and she asked if I was OK and I said I was tired. And Mother explained that I was upset because I couldn't do my maths A level so I hadn't been eating properly or sleeping properly.
And then Mother went away and I drew a picture of a bus using perspective so that I didn't think about the pain in my chest and it looked like this
And after lunch Siobhan said that she had spoken to Mrs. Gascoyne and she still had my A-level papers in 3 sealed envelopes in her desk.
So I asked if I could still do my A level.
And Siobhan said, “I think so. We're going to ring the Reverend Peters this afternoon to make sure he can still come in and be your invigilator. And Mrs. Gascoyne is going to write a letter to the examination board to say that you're going to take the exam after all. And hopefully they'll say that that's OK. But we can't know that for sure.” Then she stopped talking for a few seconds. “I thought I should tell you now. So you could think about it.”
And I said, “So I could think about what?”
And she said, “Is this what you want to do, Christopher?”
And I thought about the question and I wasn't sure what the answer was because I wanted to do my maths A level but I was very tired and when I tried to think about maths my brain didn't work properly and when I tried to remember certain facts, like the logarithmic formula for the approximate number of prime numbers not greater than x, I couldn't remember them and this made me frightened.
And Siobhan said, “You don't have to do it, Christopher. If you say you don't want to do it no one is going to be angry with you. And it won't be wrong or illegal or stupid. It will just be what you want and that will be fine.”
And I said, “I want to do it,” because I don't like it when I put things in my timetable and I have to take them out again, because when I do that it makes me feel sick.
And Siobhan said, “OK.”
And she rang the Reverend Peters and he came into school at 3:27 p.m. and he said, “So, young man, are we ready to roll?”
And I did Paper 1 of my maths A level sitting in the Art Room. And the Reverend Peters was the invigilator and he sat at a desk while I did the exam and he read a book called The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and ate a sandwich. And in the middle of the exam he went and smoked a cigarette outside the window, but he watched me through the window in case I cheated.
And when I opened the paper and read through it I couldn't think how to answer any of the questions and also I couldn't breathe properly. And I wanted to hit somebody or stab them with my Swiss Army knife, but there wasn't anyone to hit or stab with my Swiss Army knife except the Reverend Peters and he was very tall and if I hit him or stabbed him with my Swiss Army knife he wouldn't be my invigilator for the rest of the exam. So I took deep breaths like Siobhan said I should do when I want to hit someone in school and I counted 50 breaths and did cubes of the cardinal numbers as I counted, like this
1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000, 1331,
1728, 2197, 2744, 3375, 4096, 4913 . . . etc.
And that made me feel a little calmer. But the exam was 2 hours long and 20 minutes had already gone so I had to work really fast and I didn't have time to check my answers properly.
And that night, just after I got home, Father came back to the house and I screamed but Mother said she wouldn't let anything bad happen to me and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible. And when Father came out of the house he looked at me for a long time and then he punched the fence and made a hole in it and went away.
And I slept a little bit that night because I was doing my maths A level. And I had some spinach soup for