The Lady Downstairs

By: Andrew Alexander Miller

I’m seated at my computer, staring at the screen that hovers above the little glass apple, wondering what to write about.  There’s a writing assignment you see – write a memoir.  I’ve had more than one start-and-stop, and it’s more than a little frustrating.  I’m really good (or at least I feel like I’m good) at writing imagined stories, letting my mind wander and spin up worlds rich with characters and history.  I’ve even tried my hand at writing a fair amount that’s set in this world, but I’ve never been much for writing about myself.  I remember in elementary school; we had an assignment where we wrote an autobiography; the twist was that it followed the alphabet.  I hated that assignment.  I felt that it was stupid then and still do!  Now I’m mulling over the subject of memoire and personal essays, and I’ve been reading peoples’ work who have poured their hearts onto the page, talking about the most difficult of subjects.  I tried to do the same – to bare myself – but I’ve chickened out.  Maybe later it’s something I can examine again, but as one of my classmates said of her own experience in writing her story, it was difficult to go back to that place.

I started writing about football next but quit after half a page.  I’m a coach and have been for more years than I care to think about, and I began this awful piece reflecting on championship games and what they mean.  Awful stuff if you’re not a sports fan, especially if not handled well.  It also felt hokey!  It’s something I could work out, but not when under the gun.

So, what I’ve decided to do is to cheat and write about writing.

At least I’m going to try to write about the story of my writing.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me when we lived in our first apartment after coming to Canada.  The tale was King Oberon’s Forest, by Hilda Van Stockum.  I can’t remember the details now, only that it involved dwarves and a foundling child.  When I first heard the story, I had no idea what foundling meant until mom explained that the child had been abandoned and “found” and so was called a found-ling.  It was a troubling word, and I think it was probably the first time I came to understand what orphans were, or that in the right (or wrong) circumstances, parents might abandon their children.

There was a woman who lived in the apartment below us who would bang on her ceiling whenever I took a bath because she didn’t like the noise.  To me that thump, thump, thump, was the most terrifying thing imaginable, and would change the fun of bath time – rubber ducks and all – into a time of danger.  I have no idea who she was, nor what she looked like, but in my young mind, she became a haggard old witch – the kind you would find in a forest, perhaps living in a gingerbread house.  This idea evolved into the belief that she ate children; after all, anyone who would interrupt the sanctity of bath-time play must also be the kind of monster who would eat children.

Now, I don’t know when it happened, or precisely why, but there came an occasion when I made my mother furious, and she uttered eleven horrifying words.  “Do you want me to give you to the lady downstairs?”

I know I cried, and I know I said that I was sorry.  I mean, who wouldn’t when being told they could be given to a woman who ate children?  Seeing me cry, made my mother cry. She said that she was sorry, and how much she loved me, and that she would never give me away!

Of course, she hadn’t meant it.  I don’t think I believed at the time that she did – even as a three-year-old, I knew good mothers didn’t allow their children to be eaten by evil women who lived downstairs – but I can remember the disturbing thought occurring to me.

But what if?

That’s really when my writing began.  I couldn’t physically write yet, but I could play, and my play took on a narrative quality.  There were storylines involved with definitive beginnings, middles, and endings.  My Star Wars action figures would plan what they would do if I ever was given to the lady downstairs, led, of course, by my trusty Glow Worm.  I would act out these rescue missions, in part to comfort myself but more and more because it was fun to mix real life and fantasy.  I knew that if my mom gave me to the lady downstairs, that my toys would not really come to save me, but it was fun to play with that idea of but what if.

It was around the same time that my interest changed from Van Stockum to the books Edith Nesbit.  Nesbit’s books were fantastic, and I was particularly fond of the series of The Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet.  These surrounded five children who moved from London to Kent and kept encountering magical creatures that led to adventures.  Nesbit was followed closely by my discovery of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe at my Nana’s apartment.  She had a whole box of books but that first book about Aslan was my favourite and led to a Christmas or birthday present of a box set of the entire series of The Chronicles of Narnia.  Before long, I graduated on to The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, and things grew from there.

By the time I reached high school, I had a healthy collection of, and appetite for, books that blurred the lines of reality.  I had also developed an interest in books that involved pirates.  That was me in ninth grade when my English teacher, Mr. Galiani stood at the front of the class, mid-way through the semester.

“Our next unit is creative writing,” he said in his slightly hesitant way.  It was always as though he was figuring out how to say what he wanted to say as he said it.  “Each of you is going to craft a story…”

I don’t remember exactly what he said after that, but I absolutely remember that first part – each of you is going to craft a story.  Not write a story, or come up with a story, but craft a story.  It sounded so big to me.  Real writers crafted stories, not high school students.  I think I missed much of what he said next, as I was examining the task, wondering what I could write about.  Mr. Galiani was still talking at the front of the classroom, when I began to turn the pages in my binder, advancing to a blank sheet of lined paper.  I took up my pencil – a trusty yellow HB-1 suitable for scantron sheets and touched pencil to paper, and just as it would have happened in one of those old fairy tales, a story began to appear on the page.

Cannons crashed as the thunder roared, and the two ships were tossed about in the violent torrent of the sea.

Even as I wrote, the image filled my head – a sea battle between two ships.  The good guys – as I thought of them – were a band of sailors aboard a merchant ship. The pirates, aboard a fast-moving and well-armed brig, circled on the swells as the wounded merchant craft prepared to be boarded.  I wrote for the rest of the period.  Then I went to Communication Technology with Mr. D’Alves and probably learned a bit about computer animation, or how to make a slide show presentation.  Then I went home and wrote.  This was the pattern for the next few days as we were given time in class to work, and I would continue after school.

The following week we had English in the library; I don’t remember why, but I do remember asking Mr. Galiani how many pages our story needed to be.

“You’re probably good if you have five to seven hand-written pages, it should come to the right length in typed pages,” he said.

I hesitated, frowning.

“Is that going to be a problem?” He asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s just that I have at least twenty-seven pages.”

I’ll never forget the look of shock on his face as he repeated, “twenty-seven?!”

He told me that would be plenty, and I can only imagine what was going on in his mind – that he was going to have to read an exceedingly long short story written by a ninth grader and imagining what that could be like.

I don’t really remember the process of writing the story by hand.  I remember that first day – the first line especially – and I remember typing the story out after editing on my long-hand sheets.  I had gone through looking for spelling errors, and other grammatical issues, and mom had as well and marking some things I had missed as she transitioned from one of the people who read to me, to one of the people who read for me. She’s still usually the first person who I’ll share my work with.  Mom’s got a keen eye for errors, but a gentle-enough way of drawing my attention to things that my confidence isn’t shattered by the process.

We didn’t have a computer back then (most people didn’t – it was the early nineties), but we did have a typewriter with a single-line marquee.  You could read what you typed as you went, then hit print, and the typewriter would pound out everything you had written.  I don’t remember how many characters it could hold, but I know I filled it a few times in the process, and I loved hearing the rapid machinegun sound as the text appeared on the page, one letter at a time.

I have a pretty good idea that I never read the final copy before bundling it into its duotang and submitting it the following afternoon.  I don’t recall thinking much about it until the stories came back graded.  Mr. Galiani handed them out to us, making his way around the class, and that’s when anxiety started to nip at me.  I became sure that my story would come back covered with angry red slashes, and perhaps a little note at the end.  “A lot of words to say so little,” it would say, or something similar.  Mr. Galiani didn’t give my story back though.  I looked around at my classmates, who were looking at their own papers, talking amongst themselves, and I felt a little bit like I didn’t really exist in that moment.

One of my friends – Andrae (“Dre” for short, though his nickname had started in the days before we had ever heard of the doctor) – asked me what I got, and I told him I hadn’t got mine back.  He frowned, and I was about to raise my hand to inquire, when Mr. Galiani quieted the class.

“Hopefully you’re all satisfied with your marks.  Your stories were all really quite enjoyable,” he said between those blinks.  “I’ve held on to two of them though because I wanted to spend some of the period reading them to you.”

I felt my face colour as the faces of my classmates turn to look at me.

“Margaret and Andrew – your stories were really very special, and I wanted to give you both a chance to read yours for the class.”

I looked ahead and to my left to where Margaret sat, and we exchanged a look of panic.  I had written my story for several reasons – it had been fun, and I wrote it with the intention of the teacher reading it, and in the hopes that he would give it a decent mark.  I had not written it with the intention of my friends ever getting a look at it, nor hearing anything about it.  Sharing was not the point!

“Would either of you like to go first?”

I began to shake my head no, as Margaret said she would read her story.  Mr. Galiani handed it back to her.  Her face was pretty flushed and I’m a bit ashamed to say I felt comforted by not being alone in my embarrassment.  I don’t know how long she read, but I know the room was gripped as her story unfolded, as the slightly wicked looks of “here we go” exchanged among friends were replace with expressions of interest as we all began to connect.  Margaret’s story was about a girl with a brain tumor – her diagnosis, battle through chemotherapy, remission, and relapse.  It ended with her in a rowboat out on her favourite pond – her favourite place.

It was moving, with the girl moving from anger and sadness to serene calm as she came to accept what was to come.  It was dreadfully mature.  When Margaret finished, everyone clapped, including me, even though I was horrified that my stupid story would follow something that I felt was extraordinary.

Mr. Galiani congratulated her, smiling, then asked if I would read my story.  I shook my head.  There was no way that I was going to read it – might not even look at it ever again.

“Do you mind if I read it?” He asked.

I shrugged resigning myself to my unavoidable humiliation.

I remember Dre looking over at me, his big grin sympathetic even as he enjoyed my discomfort.  I slouched in my chair.  I noticed my classmates glancing at me early on, but as Mr. Galiani read, those looks ceased as everyone faced forward, listening with rapt attention.

They were interested in my story, and I hoped they might even be enjoying it.  Soon, I was listening too, and found with great surprise, that I was enjoying it.

The story was about a boy named Jacob – the nephew of the man who owned the “good guy” ship.  During the sea battle, he lost his footing and was washed overboard.  The ship sank after a powder keg exploded, and Jacob lost consciousness as the ship’s mast disappeared below the waves.  He awoke on a deserted island, and while exploring a cave, found a doorway that led down to the lost city of Atlantis.  What followed was a story of rescuing crewmates, Atlantean submarines, the city rising back to the surface, and Jacob becoming the king of Atlantis because he had fulfilled a somewhat complicated prophecy.  Sword in the stone Arthurian legend type stuff right from childhood.  My story ended with an aged Jacob revealed as the narrator, telling the story of how he became king to his grandson.  He died in the end with some imagery involving feelings of peace and love, and of light.  My classmates clapped for me.  Margaret clapped too, smiling as though we were somehow connected since had been singled out together.  My friend Andrae was smiling too, but his was different – not a “ha! You’re embarrassed,” smile but a “I never imagined you could do that,” smile.

The story was silly stuff.  Fun but serious in the right moments.  The comments from the teacher as he handed it back were of my use of imagery and description that grounded the reader in the setting.

I don’t remember the remainder of school that day.  I feel like I kind of floated through it feeling a strange pulsing sense of affirmation, but I don’t know if that’s real memory or something I’ve made up in the years since.  I remember arriving home, entering through the front door and passing by my father who was cooking in the kitchen, before making my way up the stairs to my room.  My twin bed was under the window, and I sat down on it, pulling the duotang from my bag.  I laid on my stomach then, my lower legs swinging lazily in the air as I re-read my story for the first time.

Away from the eyes of everyone, I joined Jacob on his adventure.  I can’t help but smile at that boy who’d done this strange thing writers do – creating a something that is really a kind of magic connection with a reader.  The ideas in our mind – our own form of play – can be tapped into by others who join us.  I’m also fascinated by how my pirate tale took a turn in order to incorporate the fantastic.  I still enjoy exploring these “side worlds” that spill magic into fiction set in our primary world.  My most recent work began with an FBI Agent named Anthony Williams who hunted serial killers, but has morphed into him travelling the world as a monster hunter, searching for Los Malos in Wampusirpi, Honduras, and Rougarou in Louisiana.  The series takes the most logical person I could find, and drops him into a world posing that old question: what if?  What if monsters are real?  What does it look like if what we tell ourselves as adults – that the supernatural doesn’t exist – is wrong?  For me, what if is powerful stuff!  My longest work – my Trials of Arden series (available on Amazon har har!) – is high fantasy; the characters are real to me though, and like the monster-hunting Anthony Williams, I join and continue the play I enjoyed in childhood.  The amazing power of writing is that all of this can become “real” to others too, and people can travel across space and time to places they’ve never seen.

I can tell you to picture Anthony, a thirty-something-year-old man, sitting in a long thin wooden boat held steady by a wooden side-pontoon.  The boat chugs its way down a muddy-watered river in the jungles of Honduras, powered by what appears to be a modified weed-eater, and your mind goes to work picturing what I’ve imagined.  That sharing is really something magical.  It is fun and exciting, and for me it began long ago even before that day in ENG-1W0 with Mr. Galiani reading my story to the class; it began in a little two-bedroom unit on the fifth floor of the Blue Fountain Apartment with the lady downstairs.  Her mean way of dealing with the noisy boy in the apartment above her – knocking on her ceiling with a broom handle – spurred me forward to begin creating, and that creating became sharing.  I wonder what she would have said if she knew.

Thump, thump, thump!