Force Majeure #7

Some people keep a diary of their feelings. I keep a diary of cancellations.

Not a diary, exactly. It’s a note on my phone called “FRIDAYS (NOT BITTER, JUST STATISTICS),” and the seventh line appeared last night, when Nigel Fitzgerald, my downstairs neighbour, texted: “Dave, so sorry, can’t make it tonight — force majeure at work.” With an exclamation mark. As if the exclamation mark made the force majeure more believable.

For the record: Nigel works in insurance. I’m no expert in the field, but I’m fairly sure the phrase “force majeure” is meant to apply to other people’s disasters, not to one’s own Friday plans.

I wasn’t offended. I want that on record right from the start: I was not offended. Offence is when you feel lonely and sad. What happened to me as I put my phone away and stared at the untouched pint I’d ordered in advance “to save time” was much closer to professional curiosity.

That pint, for the record, stood there for forty minutes and deserves its own footnote in these memoirs as the single most patient victim of this entire story.

Nigel has lived below me for two years. For eighteen of those months we were model neighbours: he held the door for me, I pretended not to hear his hallway floorboard creak every Tuesday around midnight. Harmony, courtesy, the occasional cup of tea on the landing — everything the good-neighbour pamphlets promise.

Then, about six months ago, something changed. Nigel started cancelling plans. Rarely at first, and plausibly — a migraine, his mum arriving from the airport, once even a leaking bathroom, which I personally inspected after offering to help, and which turned out to be entirely real, temporarily undermining my vigilance.

But then the cancellations picked up pace. And, more importantly, they started to line up — and here I’d ask you to take this seriously, because from this point on we’re dealing with actual statistics, not paranoia — with the evening news bulletins about a man in a grey coat whom the papers had already nicknamed, depending on the outlet, either “the umbrella vigilante” or, less charitably, “that lunatic from the High Street.”

I am not saying my neighbour is a superhero. Do I look like the kind of man who makes claims like that out loud? No. I am saying exactly what was going through my head, purely as an observation, with no conclusions attached: over the last six weeks, Nigel had cancelled on me seven times, and five of those seven evenings the local news ran a segment about someone in a mask and an umbrella foiling a crime within a mile and a half of our building.

Coincidence? Obviously. London is full of crime, and Nigel presumably just has an unusually restless immune system that flares up on Tuesdays and Thursdays, right around when the local news starts.

But there are things you simply cannot help noticing if you happen to be — and I am exactly this kind of person — someone my ex-girlfriend once called “a man with an excessively observant turn of mind,” and my mother, more economically, calls “Dave, honestly, enough.”

For example: three weeks ago Nigel turned up in the lift with a graze on his cheekbone and the explanation that he’d “walked into a cupboard door.” I have lived with open cupboard doors my entire conscious life and never once come away with a graze shaped suspiciously like someone else’s knuckles.

For example: his lights are sometimes still on well past midnight, and yet the next morning he looks better rested than I do after an entire week’s holiday.

For example: I once lent him a stepladder, and when he returned it, the top step had a scratch I would describe as “claw-like,” if I didn’t know for a fact that London hasn’t had anything with claws bigger than a fox in living memory, and foxes, with all due respect, do not scratch stepladders.

I told Poppy about all this at work, and she looked at me the way you look at someone who has just confessed to collecting fingernail clippings. But more on her later — Poppy deserves a proper introduction, and it’s coming soon, because within twenty-four hours she will become an unwitting accomplice in everything described here, and will spend the rest of her life blaming my stapler for it.

Back to last night: I was sitting alone at the Duck and Compass with two pints — mine and his — wondering whether it counted as an obsession that I’d spent the past three weeks mentally referring to Nigel as “the subject,” even though I wasn’t technically surveilling anyone, just living one floor up and, occasionally — very occasionally, a handful of times, really — walking past his door a touch more slowly than strictly necessary.

And that was when, looking up at the telly above the bar, I saw the segment: a man in a grey coat, umbrella at the ready, standing over two hapless robbers outside a jeweller’s on the High Street, with police already on their way. The newsreader delivered it with that specific chipper irony the English news reserves for anything inexplicable: “And once again, the mysterious ‘Grey Umbrella’ was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.”

The High Street is a seven-minute walk from our building. I timed it on my phone.

I finished my pint. Then — I won’t lie — I finished his too. And I made myself a solemn, entirely sincere vow: never again, under any circumstances, would I pry into a neighbour’s private life. A man could have a demanding job. He could have a gym habit. He could, for all I knew, be having a secret affair rather than leading a secret double life, and either way it was none of my business.

The vow survived exactly until I got home, climbed the stairs past his door, and noticed on the mat in front of it — I did not, of course, bend down to look more closely, I was simply walking past and happen to have excellent peripheral vision — fresh mud in a shape suspiciously like a man’s size-eleven boot print, running rather than walking.

It’s worth understanding that I wasn’t always like this. There was a time — up until roughly thirty — when I genuinely believed adult life consisted of a mortgage, a gym membership you never used, and the odd date arranged by an app that lies about a man’s height by exactly the same five centimetres I lie about my own. There was no room in that picture for secret societies, superheroes, or mysterious neighbours.

But then I spent three years in a department whose entire job description was finding discrepancies in other people’s logistics reports — hunting for the places where the numbers didn’t match reality — and somehow that habit crept out of the spreadsheets and into ordinary life. I became a man who cannot walk past an inconsistency. Who notices that a man who bought a nine-pound-ninety-nine umbrella at the corner shop yesterday walks out this morning with a brand-new umbrella, even though the old one clearly hasn’t been lost — it’s sitting on the shelf in the hallway, slightly… bent. On exactly the side that only bends if something has hit it, hard.

Yes, I noticed all of it. No, I am not proud of the fact that what I noticed was umbrellas, rather than something sensible, like suspicious bank transfers. But facts are facts, and a bent umbrella next to a brand-new one is a fact.

My neighbour across the landing, Mrs Patel, once told me I “think too much for a man who works with spreadsheets.” I chose to take that as a compliment. She did not, I think, mean it as one.

So: the board. A metre-square corkboard, bought under the pretence of recipes I will never cook, because if I’m honest with myself — which is exactly what I’m doing right now, in a diary that isn’t really a diary — I was tired of pretending my life hadn’t turned into a detective novel I’d accidentally appointed myself the author of.

The next morning I bought a corkboard.

I told myself it was for recipes.

By evening it held three clippings, one list of dates, and one genuinely unsettling question I wasn’t quite ready to say aloud yet, but which hung somewhere at the back of my mind, like that coat that hadn’t actually gone missing on the neighbour’s hook: what if I’m right?

In fairness, a few words about myself are in order — since I’m about to spend an entire book telling you other people’s secrets, it’s only honest to give up a couple of my own. My name is Dave Whitmore, I’m thirty-four, I work for a logistics company, I live alone in a flat with one overly curious outlook on life and one chronically underwatered geranium on the windowsill. I don’t have a secret double life. I barely have enough energy for the first one.

I used to be the sort of person who assumes “drama” is something that happens to other people — on the news, in television dramas, at the sales team’s office parties. My own life ran along smoothly, predictably, and, if I’m honest, a little boringly — work, a gym schedule I always broke, the odd date, and evenings with Nigel, which, until recently, had been the highlight of my week, simply because Nigel tells excellent stories about his insurance clients and can deliver a joke with such a perfectly straight face that it doesn’t land until the following morning.

That’s probably why — and not only because of the news coincidences — it stung so much when he started cancelling those evenings. Not because I suspected a conspiracy. Because, quite frankly, I was bored without him on Fridays, and my brain, rather than admit to that perfectly ordinary human feeling, decided to turn it into a detective investigation instead. Which, if you think about it, is a fairly pathetic defence mechanism. But, as it turns out, a surprisingly productive one.