Then it was 1:20 a.m. but I hadn’t heard Father come upstairs to bed. I wondered if he was asleep downstairs of whether he was waiting to come in and kill me. So I got out my Swiss Army knife and opened the saw blade so that I could defend myself. Then I went out of my bedroom really quietly and listened. I couldn’t hear anything, so I started going downstairs really quietly and really slowly. And when I got downstairs I could see Father’s foot through the door of the living room. I waited for 4 minutes to see if it moved, but it didn’t move. So I carried on walking till I got to the hallway. Then I looked round the door of the living room.

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (123)