The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon [8]
He asked whether I wanted to become an astronaut and I said I did.
He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
Terry, who is the older brother of Francis, who is at the school, said I would only ever get a job collecting supermarket trollies or cleaning out donkey shit at an animal sanctuary and they didn't let spazzers drive rockets that cost billions of pounds. When I told this to Father he said that Terry was jealous of my being cleverer than him. Which was a stupid thing to think because we weren't in a competition. But Terry is stupid, so quod erat demonstrandum, which is Latin for which is the thing that was going to be proved, which means thus it is proved.
I'm not a spazzer, which means spastic, not like Francis, who is a spazzer, and even though I probably won't become an astronaut, I am going to go to university and study mathematics, or physics, or physics and mathematics (which is a Joint Honor School), because I like mathematics and physics and I'm very good at them. But Terry won't go to university. Father says Terry is most likely to end up in prison.
Terry has a tattoo on his arm of a heart shape with a knife through the middle of it.
But this is what is called a digression, and now I am going to go back to the fact that it was a Good Day.
Because it was a Good Day I decided that I would try and find out who killed Wellington because a Good Day is a day for projects and planning things.
When I said this to Siobhan she said, “Well, we're meant to be writing stories today, so why don't you write about finding Wellington and going to the police station.”
And that is when I started writing this.
And Siobhan said that she would help with the spelling and the grammar and the footnotes.
53. Mother died two weeks later.
I had not been into hospital to see her but Father had taken in lots of food from Marks and Spencer's. He said that she had been looking OK and seemed to be getting better. She had sent me lots of love and had my Get Well card on the table beside her bed. Father said that she liked it very much.
The card had pictures of cars on the front. It looked like this
I did it at school with Mrs. Peters, who does art, and it was a lino cut, which is when you draw a picture on a piece of lino and Mrs. Peters cuts round the picture with a Stanley knife and then you put ink on the lino and press it onto the paper, which is why all the cars looked the same, because I did one car and pressed it onto the paper 9 times. And it was Mrs. Peters's idea to do lots of cars, which I liked. And I colored all the cars in with red paint to make it a Super Super Good Day for Mother.
Father said that she died of a heart attack and it wasn't expected.
I said, “What kind of heart attack?” because I was surprised.
Mother was only 38 years old and heart attacks usually happen to older people, and Mother was very active and rode a bicycle and ate food which was healthy and high in fiber and low in saturated fat like chicken and vegetables and muesli.
Father said that he didn't know what kind of heart attack she had and now wasn't the moment to be asking questions like that.
I said that it was probably an aneurysm.
A heart attack is when some of the muscles in the heart stop getting blood and die. There are two main types of heart attack. The first is an embolism. That is when a blood clot blocks one of the blood vessels taking blood to the muscles in the heart. And you can stop this from happening by taking aspirin and eating fish. Which is why Eskimos don't get this sort of heart attack, because they