The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

(In Mom's perspective)

You have a good organization of memory, my son. Your memory is like a film. That is why you are really good at remembering things, like the conversations you have written down in this book, and what people were wearing, and what they smelled like, because your memory has a smell track which is like a soundtrack. And when people ask you to remember something you can simply recall them just like pressing Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause on a video recorder, but more like a DVD player because you don’t have to Rewind through everything in between to get to a memory of something a long time ago. And there are no buttons, either, because it is happening in your head.

If someone says to you, “Christopher, tell me what your mother was like,” you can Rewind to lots of different scenes and say what I were like in those scenes.

I know you could still Rewind to 4 July 1992 when you was 9 years old, which was a Saturday, and we were on holiday in Cornwall and in the afternoon we were on the beach in a place called Polperro. And I was wearing a pair of shorts made out of denim and a light blue bikini top and I was smoking cigarettes, which is bad, called Consulate which were mint flavor. And I wasn’t swimming. I was sunbathing on a towel which had red and purple stripes and I was reading a book by Georgette Heyer called The Masqueraders. And then I finished sunbathing and went into the water to swim and I said, “Bloody Nora, it’s cold.” And I said you should come and swim, too, but I know you don’t like swimming because you don’t like taking your clothes off. And I said you should just roll up your trousers and walk into the water a little way, so you did. And you stood in the water. And I said, “Look. It’s lovely.” And I jumped backward and disappeared under the water, I wasn’t meant to scare you but you thought a shark had eaten me and you screamed and I stood up out of the water again and came over to where you was standing and held up my right hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and tried to lead you, “Come on, Christopher, touch my hand. Stop screaming. Touch my hand. Listen to me, Christopher. Come and try with me.” And after a while you stopped screaming and you held up your left hand and spread your fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other and I soothed you, “It’s OK, Christopher. It’s OK. There aren’t any sharks in Cornwall,” and then you felt better.

Just like these, I know you could remember even the slightest detail. Except you can’t remember anything before you was about 4 because you wasn’t old enough and your brain was still too small, so they didn’t get recorded properly.