It's 2.30am and I have just got out of bed for the second time since I got into it at 11 pm to make sure there is nobody hiding under it. I've also checked behind every door, the hallway cupboard and peeked through the curtains to make sure there's nobody on the balcony of my first-floor new build flat.
I've just finished the latest season of Luther, can you tell?
When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark. The world would transform for me as soon as the lights went out. Every shadow became a surreal symbol of a potential threat. When I was 19 my then-boyfriend bought me an owl-shaped night light as a joke because he knew I always slept with a light on.
I grew up in suburbia, where South Croydon meets the home counties. A liminal place where almost nothing happens but, if you stand in the right spot at dusk, you can look out over brightly-lit London and vast expanses of ark countryside.
Despite this, as a teenager, I would regularly sneak out of my parents' house to meet my two best friends who lived equidistant from me in opposite directions we would then go on to house parties and local pub lock-ins. If you plotted us on a map, we made a perfect triangle. It amazing what phobias can be overcome if older boys and Archers Aqua are involved.
One warm summer night, I made the journey up the dark wooded path that lead to our meeting point. A strange figure loomed at the top. As I got closer my heart began to beat aggressively in my chest, my fingers tingled because I was breathing so sharply and every fibre of my being told me to RUN. Run fast.
The figure turned around. It was my best friend. Her silhouette was completely distorted because she was wearing two hoodies, a large woolly hat, two pairs of trousers and wellies. In July.
'Why the fuck' I asked 'are you dressed like this?' wanting to hug and punch her at the same time for scaring the living daylights out of me.
Her answer was simple. "I realised that if we dress like rapists or murders then nobody will rape us because they'll be too scared." She said this as she peeled the layers away from her body.
I couldn't fault her warped logic. We were no longer girls afraid to go to sleep in the dark in case our dreams served up things we'd rather not see. We were young women, in the world and aware that, statistically speaking, we were more likely to be raped or murdered than the boys we sneaking out to meet because there are men out there who hurt women in real life, not just on TV.
According to the latest data on femicide in the UK, 139 women were killed by men in 2017 and 40% of those cases featured 'overkilling' which is when the force used is greater than required to kill the victim. 30 of those women were killed by a stranger, 21 were killed in a terrorist attack and 105 - 76% - were killed by someone they knew. Similarly, the latest statistics from the Crime Survey of England and Wales show that one in five women have been sexually assaulted. Various studies show that in huge numbers of these cases, the attacker was someone known to the victim.
The realisation that you - as a woman - are at risk of violence and sexual violence is a rite of passage. It is what carries young women from girlhood to adulthood. Somehow, we still manage to keep it together and grow up knowing all of this.
Lying awake after bingeing on Luther, I thought of that night. I thought of all the times I have been afraid at night, of all the time I have run home, clutching my keys in one hand and my phone in the other. I thought of all the noises that have stirred me from sleep, of the hours between night and day when you legitimately question where a creaking pipe is, in fact, a serial killer. In real life, it rarely is. In mainstream thrillers like Luther, though, it invariably means that death is imminent.
During Luther's final episode I watched as an innocent young woman lay tied to a bed in the basement of a multi-million pound modernist house in North London because of the whims of a male psychopath. All she did to end up in that situation was open her front door to someone she thought had bought her old fridge on GumTree. As she waited to be rescued by our favourite anti-hero, Luther himself, you can see the cogs inside her brain ticking in overtime. I didn't particularly want to watch but nor could I look away. There was, in all honesty, nothing else good on.
As she - how telling is it that I can't remember her name - awaited her fate in a murderer's specially modified basement torture chamber, not knowing quite how it would arrive, her eyes flicked around the room in fear, I did not see a pop culture fantasy or a routine crime drama unfolding. I saw the chilling reality of the female consciousness - fear, survival and a constant need to have a survival plan, just in case.
She was waiting to be attacked by the bogeyman that lurks in all of our nightmares, the one we are warned about by parents and teachers, the one we see whenever we turn on the TV or go to the cinema. She screamed a scream not only of desperation but of frustration.
The problem with Luther is that there is not enough about it to redeem the constant tales of female torture that viewers see. Alice is a powerful woman, sure, but as a character, she hardly fulfils her potential. No matter how clever, how cunning or how competent a criminal she is, her Achilles Heel is always Luther and therefore, the ultimate power in the story, no matter what goes down, is always his.
Luther is only ever really about Luther. The women he saves and fails to save are only ever really footnotes in his male quest. They are collateral damage and plot devices.
True crime is no better than fiction. The stories that get told are, predominately, about the abuse of women. It's hard to find anything decent to watch these days that isn't about a woman being raped and/or murdered. From Luther to Making a Murderer, from The Staircase toKeepers, it feels like everything that does well is a tale which centres around the abuse of women at the hands of invisible male killers and the male saviour investigators or lawyers who swoop in to seek justice. I'm as guilty of anyone for getting into it. I have wondered more about Steven Avery's innocence than I have about what actually happened to Teresa Halbach.
It makes you realise that show like The Fall){href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(TV_series)' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'} were so great because they are rare. Gillian Anderson's character - a female Detective Inspector who is only interested in sex for its own sake - was nothing short of revolutionary. It's why BBC THREE'S Killing Eve was such a revelation. Phoebe Waller-Bridge managed to deliver a thriller with an unapologetically strong, solipsistic female protagonist that was both terrifying and hilarious. It did not give me nightmares.
We've come a long way culturally, but our 'most watched' tells us that we still haven't gone far enough.
After 'doing the rounds' and checking every entry point of my flat twice I eventually went back to bed. It was gone 3 am, I had work in the morning. Why do I do it to myself, I asked? Why? I never learn. Every time I watch Luther I think it won't ignite a primal fear inside me, that it won't switch on my survival mode. I want to believe that I am not afraid of the dark, of what it holds. The irony, of course, is that the statistics show that if were something violent were to happen to me, it's more likely to happen at home, because of someone I know. But, that wouldn't make very good TV, would it?
The various cartoon murderers and rapists of Luther all blur into one, as do their victims. They're scary because they speak to the faceless but ever-present danger we all fear is lurking just around the corner.
As I dozed off, light crept in through a strategic crack in my bedroom door. I had left the bathroom light on and our sharpest knives were buried in my wardrobe (at the back, under the jumpers).