I said that I wanted to write about something real and I knew people who had died but I did not know any people who had been killed, except Mr. Paulson, Edwards father from school, and that was a gliding accident, not murder, and I didnt really know him. I also said that I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people. Steve, for example, who comes to the school on Thursdays, needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick. Siobhan asked me not to say this to Steves mother.
11. Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing. There was a policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side.
The policewoman put her arms round Mrs. Shears and led her back toward the house.
I lifted my head off the grass.
The policeman squatted down beside me and said, Would you like to tell me whats going on here, young man?
I sat up and said, The dog is dead.
Id got that far, he said.
I said, I think someone killed the dog.
How old are you? he asked.
I replied, I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.
And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden? he asked.
I was holding the dog, I replied.
And why were you holding the dog? he asked.
This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the dog was dead.
I like policemen, too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me enough time to work out the correct answer.
Why were you holding the dog? he asked again.
I like dogs, I said.
Did you kill the dog? he asked.
I said, I did not kill the dog.
Is this your fork? he asked.
I said, No.
You seem very upset about this, he said.
He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.
The policeman said, I am going to ask you once again
I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that
all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.
The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.
I didnt like him touching me like this.
And this is when I hit him.
13. This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Fathers.
His face was drawn but the curtains were real.drawn
If I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice like white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.
And that is why there are no jokes in this book.
17. The policeman looked at me for a while without speaking. Then he said, I am arresting you for assaulting a police officer.
This made me feel a lot calmer because it is what policemen say on television and in films.
Then he said, I strongly advise you to get into the back of the police car, because if you try any of that monkey business again, you little shit, I will seriously lose my rag. Is that understood?
I walked over to the police car, which was parked just outside the gate. He opened the back door and I got inside. He climbed into the drivers seat and made a call on his radio to the policewoman, who was still inside the house. He said, The little bugger just had a pop at me, Kate. Can you hang on with Mrs. S. while I drop him off at the station? I'll get Tony to swing by and pick you up.
And she said, Sure. I'll catch you later.
The policeman said, Okeydoke, and we drove off.
The police car smelled of hot plastic and aftershave and take-away chips.
I watched the sky as we drove toward the town center. It was a clear night and you could see the Milky Way.
Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isnt. Our galaxy is a huge disk of stars millions of light-years across, and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disk.