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 around Mrs. Shears and led her back towards the house.
I lifted my head off the grass.
The policeman squatted down beside me and said, “Would you like to tell me what’s going on here, young man?”
I sat up and said, “The dog is dead.”
“I’d 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 the 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 didn’t like him touching me like this.
And this is when I hit him.
Why does Christopher like the police?
They wear uniforms and Christopher is reassured of what the police are “meant to be doing”.
Why does Christopher find it difficult to answer the “WHY” question raised by the policeman?
Christopher uses a simile here to describe his difficulty in coping with the “fast” questioning of the policeman. He tells us that the policeman’s questions are “stacking up in his head like loaves” a baking factory.
Another simile is being used here: comparison of information overloading with “white noise”.
What is relevant to Christopher is not that relevant to us in terms of our expectation of how a writer or a narrator’s storytelling should take us as we read.
Why does the policeman ask Christopher for his age? Has he sensed something different about Christopher in the way he provides his response? In terms of how he responds rather than what he says to him?
Why does Christopher repeat here that “he likes policemen, too”?
Christopher cannot cope with “fast” conversation, especially when he thinks and claims that the policeman is “asking too many questions”.
Unless you know Christopher and we should not expect the policeman to understand that Christopher is trying to cope with information overloading by “groaning”.
Christopher hit the policeman not on purpose but because he does not like being touched like what the policeman has done.
