Every true crime book has a neighbour. She’s in chapter four. She saw a van, or a light on at the wrong hour, or a man she didn’t recognise carrying something heavy to a car, and she thought about it, and she didn’t say anything, and twenty years later she tells the author, “I always wondered.”
I have read enough of these books that I’ve become her. Pre-emptively. I notice everything now, and I write it down, and I’d like to report that it’s not a comfortable way to live, and I can’t stop.
The log
It started as a joke with myself. A notebook on the windowsill, for “incidents.” Here’s a representative week.
I’d like to make clear that nothing is happening on my street. The rug is a rug. The van is, I eventually learned, a man who drops his wife at the hospital for her early shift and waits until he’s sure she’s in. The loft at No. 14 has a new skylight. Nothing’s happening.
But I’ve read the books, and in the books, nothing’s happening either, until it was.
What the genre does to you
True crime trains a particular muscle. It’s the muscle that notices the thing that doesn’t fit: the car that’s there twice, the light that’s on once, the man who waved slightly too readily. The books are built on these details, and they reward you, as a reader, for catching them before the detective does. After enough of them, you can’t un-flex it. You walk down your own street reading it.
The uncomfortable part is this: in the books, the neighbour who noticed and said nothing is always, gently, blamed. “If only someone had.” So the genre leaves you with two bad options. Say nothing and be chapter four. Or say something, about a rug, to a man who waved at you, and be the other kind of neighbour, the kind the whole street has a nickname for.
What I’ve settled on
A middle way, which I’ll admit isn’t very dignified. I keep the log. I tell nobody. I’ve accepted that the log is for me, that it’s a side effect of the reading, like the deadbolt and the porch light, and that it does no harm as long as I never, ever act on it.
I’ve also started keeping a second column: “boring explanation.” Van: hospital. Loft: skylight. Rug: rug. Cat: cat. The second column is nearly always right, and filling it in is the small ritual that lets me close the notebook and go back to the chair.
Nearly always. Thursday still bothers me. Nothing happened on Thursday. In the books, that’s the day.