It was the summer of 2006 when I moved into my first place with my boyfriend and a mutual friend of ours. I was nineteen at the time and though I'd been living away from my parents for a year and a half with my boyfriend's mother, it was the first time we'd ever been alone and the first time we could officially call the place our own. We'd moved into a raised bungalow in Alcona Beach, just down the road from the waterfront. The owner of the house had left in a hurry to go to British Columbia to practice her religion in the mountains. That was not a joke and really should have been our first warning sign that we were not going to have a normal experience living there, but the house was gorgeous, perfectly located and very affordable. In any case, she was off in the mountains and needed someone to rent out the main floor of her house. Her roommate, a fifty-odd year old woman named Luba, normally resided on the main floor in one of the three bedrooms, but was going to be living in the basement so that the floor could be rented out. My boyfriend was a little put off by this at first as the house was completely open concept and we'd have to share the kitchen and bathroom with this woman since the basement didn't have these amentities, but she seemed nice enough and in the end we decided that it wouldn't be a problem. As it turned out, we were very wrong.
The first night that we spent in the house was the first time she said something strange and it certainly wasn't the last - but I'm getting ahead of myself. My girlfriend and I were out in the backyard taking a look around. There was a firepit back there flanked by a couple of benches and we were just heading over to check it out when we noticed her sitting there in the dark. We stood there making casual conversation with her and although I can't remember for the life of me how she brought it up, she ended up asking us if we believed in reincarnation. I was caught off guard by it, as was my friend, and I remember stammering something about liking the idea that we get recycled when we die, then making a hasty break for the house. As weird as that was, it was only the tip of the iceberg and things proceeded to get stranger in the weeks and months to come.
Luba, we found out, had a habit of talking to herself out loud. I know lots of people do this, myself included, and it's not really so odd. But what was different about the way she talked to herself was that she'd have full conversations, almost as if there was another person in the room. One of her favourite subjects to talk about was how much she disliked us and she made sure that we were upstairs whenever she got on the topic. She'd rant about how our landlord - her friend and the owner of the house - ruined her chance to have the place to herself by renting the top floor to us. Sometimes she'd carry on about how angry it made her that she wasn't given the responsibility of handling our rent cheques every month. When she'd get worked up about things of that nature we could always hear her banging, slamming and smashing the contents of her basement apartment. I'd call her out on all the things she'd say about us when she'd come upstairs into our part of the house to use the washroom and she'd always either deny saying anything at all or go the opposite route and apologize profusely. I recall one instance where my boyfriend had his stereo a couple of notches louder than normal when she was outside watering the grass. He figured she wasn't in the house anyway, so it wouldn't make a difference to her. Even so, he told her that he was listening to some music and that if it bothered her all she had to do was come in and let him know so he could turn it down. She said it was fine because she wasn't going to be in the house anyhow and went outside to do her yard work. When he and I looked out the living room window after she'd closed the front door we saw her walking down the driveway, shaking her head, gesturing wildly at the house and hitting herself in the face repeatedly. When she came back inside a few minutes later to get her cigarettes we asked her a second time whether she wanted us to turn the music down. Like the first time, she told us that it was fine. And again when we looked out the window after she left, we saw her repeat the same antics she pulled the last time she'd left the house.
Apart from punching herself in the head because we played music when she wasn't home, one of her favourite pastimes was whispering - though it was always more a stage whisper than anything else since she wanted us to hear her - five and ten minute long strings of obscenities punctuated by grunts and sighs when one of us was on the computer and we clicked the mouse. That sound drove her absolutely insane - though I'm convinced that she was already there when we moved in and probably had been long before that - as did many others, including the sound of our voices at normal conversation level when she was awake in the middle of the afternoon. Of course, it was completely fine if she wanted to make noise herself and she did exactly that many a time, which brings to mind a wake up call my boyfriend received one morning in the form of this woman swinging windchimes around in the basement, talking to herself and sobbing. Speaking of wake up calls, I recall another instance where we had a friend who'd stayed the night wake up to see her standing by his bedside to "see if he was awake". We caught her once sitting in a lawn chair in the ditch at the side of the house, talking to herself and banging on an empty coffee can with a stick. She also enjoyed coming onto our young, single male friends and would come running whenever she heard my boyfriend get out of the shower, knowing that he always walked around shirtless for a few minutes while he dried off.
She and I had many an altercation in the time that I lived there and after a particularly bad one during which I threw in her face every instance where she'd stormed around the basement, screaming about how angry we'd made her, she apologized - probably the thousandth time she'd done so since we moved in - and told me that she'd been thinking about different ways to deal with her frustrations. When I inquired about her new found anger management methods she told me that from then on, whenever she got mad she was going to walk down to the beach and vent all her problems in the direction of the water because "the lake listens". Well, you learn something new every day, I guess. I'm sure she would have regaled me with even more words of wisdom much like that gem about the lake if we'd stayed longer, but thankfully we moved out after ten months, leaving her and Alcona behind for a private apartment up the road in Barrie, where we've been ever since. As much as certain things about living here annoy me - the usual issues people have about apartment building living I'm sure, including stomp-walkers in the unit above and nosy neighbours - I am thankful every single day that when I come home from work I can lock my door and know that the nutcases are on the outside, not down a flight of stairs. And let me tell you, after ten months of dealing with the psych ward in the basement, that's a very comforting thought.