A young woman. She had moved into 2A in the spring.
She said she was sorry to bother me, and that she probably had the wrong end of it, and that she had been hearing noise at night.
She said: I’m probably imagining it. I just wanted to ask somebody who’d been here a while.
And I stood in my own doorway and heard the exact sentence I had used on an eighty-one-year-old woman three years earlier, coming back at me in a different voice.
I said: you’re not imagining it. Come in. Write down the dates.
Then I put my coat on and went up with her.He is not there any more, obviously. The flat above 2A is 3A, not 4B, and the noise turned out to be a boiler pump with a bearing going, and it was fixed in eleven days by a man with a van.
It was not a person at all.
And I am glad about that in a way that surprised me, because it means the only thing I actually did that evening was go upstairs with somebody so that she did not have to knock on a stranger’s door on her own.
That is the whole of it. Eleven minutes of my time and a coat.
That is what I could have done for Mrs Vasilopoulos in 2022 and did not, and it turns out it is not a large thing, and it has never been a large thing, and I was fifty-one before I did it once.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a clever woman and a pinboard, and I will admit the board was good. It was the best idea I have had in a decade and it cost eleven dollars.
But the board only worked because I had thirty-eight dates in the back of a notebook.
And I only had those because, at some point, I had decided to find out whether I was exaggerating rather than assume I was.
That is the entire trick. There is nothing else in it.
If something small keeps happening to you and you have started wondering whether you are making too much of it —
do not decide. Count.
Write the date and the time in a notebook, say nothing to anybody, and look at the page in a month.
Because a person can argue with how you feel about it for eleven years.
