The Nightmare Below Me

 

There's this tenant in the apartment beneath mine. She's as odd as two left feet according to other residents. A hoarder, a hermit, no one sees the inside of her apartment. 

The residents here manage the gardens, lovely little plots everywhere full of flowers, some vegetables, bird baths, extremely creative.

In the garden below my apartment was her particularly area and ever since I moved in there was just a vast hole with rocks and 4 bags of soil that were never opened. Finally, a few of the tenants did something about this eyesore and took over her plot and now it is gorgeous, full of flowers. She demanded they dig up bulbs she purchased years before (which had never bloomed due to aforementioned rocks and hole).

This gives you some idea of her personality.

I have never exchanged two words with this woman as every time I encountered her, despite my "hello" she turned her head away.

But now? She has launched a personal vendetta against me. She insists I have music playing and people partying in my apartment at all hours of the night.

A month ago, someone rang my doorbell and woke me at 1.00am. I didn't answer but my neighbour did. And in the tomb-like silence of the building, R complained to M, my neighbour that she couldn't sleep with the racket coming from my apartment. 

M told her there was never noise from my apartment as I was a quiet person.

I complained to the Board of Directors about this. In writing.

Fast forward to last week and I was woken again, but this time terrified as there was what seemed to be a sledgehammer banging on my bedroom floor. I thought the building would collapse or at least holes would appear on my floor.

R again obviously. I phoned a friend downstairs and she told me she had also been terrorized as she thought it was an earthquake  and got out of bed and spoke to another neighbour, two doors away from R who had also been woken up.

Again, I wrote to the Board outlining what had happened. They said there would be a prompt investigation. I know they did investigate by chatting to neighbours of R who confirmed the incident. But as to assuring me of a cease and desist order to her? Not a word. 

I am extremely unsettled and frightened by all of this as she is so unpredictable and, well, violent. I view her as unwell. No one in the building speaks to her as through various actions she has alienated them all.

I'm locking my door for the first time. I tiptoe around my apartment in my moccasins. I turn my book pages quietly. I knit on wooden needles. 

I know she lurks below me, all day, every day. In her head, there are parties and music only she can hear. 

And I am the target of her enormous rage.

Bizarro

I was up the road today to help a neighbour set up a website for her business. You'd think I knew what I was doing. Well, I knew more than her and was able to offer her a bit of assistance and load some photos and pricing and other bits and bobs.

It is wonderful to be thought of as some sort of techno genius. I am far from it, I assure you. I just know the highways and biways of the interwebz a little better than her.

Anyways, her hubbie is stretched out in his recliner at the other end of the room, exhausted, having mowed their meadow all day. He barely waves at me. He's a very good looking man with the manners of a turnip. Don't get me started.

They lost a son to brain cancer last year and I just made up my mind to be kinder than I used to be to them. Kindness doesn't cost a dime. And some need it more than others, right?

So there we are, I'm loading up some (awful) pictures to her site and I glance over at the teevee that he is nodding off to.

"Isn't that porn?" I ask her as I watch a couple contort themselves into those peculiar positions beloved by Hollywoodland - female appendages in full throttle, male's discreetly entwined in blankies. Everything hanging, banging and howling.

"Whut?" she says, barely glancing at the screen, "Oh that? Johnny needs it to go to sleep."

Off-putting

off-put·ting   /ˈɔfˌpʊtɪŋ, ˈɒf-/ Show Spelled[awf-poot-ing, of-] Show IPA
–adjective
provoking uneasiness, dislike, annoyance, or repugnance; disturbing or disagreeable.

I have these next-door neighbours. Next door here being a relative term as this couple are not within shouting distance but about 500 metres from my own house.

She irritates the hell out of me. And she did it again this morning as I picked up my messages off my voicemail from yesterday evening. There she was, as usual, parked at position 3.

"Call me NOW!" she says charmingly, "Where the heck are you? It is 9 o'clock in the Pee-Em at my house."

She uses 'heck' a lot. She never says please or thank you. Never mentions if it is an emergency health situation or whether she needs cat litter.

I invited her and her husband once here for a dinner party. Husband didn't even bother to show but she did. And insisted, just after dinner, that everyone walk the 500 metres to her house and admire her new floors. End of dinner party. End of invitations to her.

I call her back, bracing myself. Without preamble she says:

"I need your fax machine".

This has happened many times. It is never just about the fax machine though. It is an hour out of my life listening to her go on and on and on and on. About nothing. She never asks a question, never extends any kind of courtesy.

And I realize that the reason I dread contact with her is that she always wants something from me. Always. Pick her up something in town, fix her turbo stick, bring her up newspapers for her painting. And the white lie creeps up on top of me and I can't shrug it off.

"Elsie," I say, right easily, "I disconnected it. It's all scanning and PDFing now."

But she's not finished with me. There's a nasty edge to her voice as she responds:

"Well, heck then," she huffs,"You should change your voicemail, shouldn't you? You're still announcing your disconnected fax number on it along with your disconnected old cell phone number!"