Don't Get in the Lift, Said Nothing at All

I take the same lift a dozen times a day. It's furniture; I don't think about it any more than I think about a door handle. Which is what makes what happened impossible to dress up as caution or common sense.

It was late morning, and the lift arrived, and it was crowded — eight or nine people already in it, a lunchtime crush — and they shuffled to make room, and I moved to step in, and I could not. My foot would not cross the threshold. There was no thought, no fear, no image of disaster, nothing I could point to and say 'that's why.' My body simply declined. It was exactly like the moment your foot finds a stair that isn't there — an automatic, total refusal, below the level of decision. I stood at the open doors with everyone looking at me, and I heard myself say, 'oh — I've forgotten something, go on up,' and I stepped back, and the doors closed on the crush of my colleagues, and the lift went up without me.

I felt like a fool for about forty minutes. Then the emails and the shouting started: the lift had stalled. Stuck between the fourth and fifth floors, doors jammed, eleven people — it had picked up two more on the way — crammed inside in the heat, no air conditioning in a stuck car, for over two hours before the engineers freed them. Nobody was seriously hurt, but it was, by every account, a genuinely awful two hours: the heat, the panic of the claustrophobic among them, one person who fainted, the animal misery of eleven bodies in a stalled steel box in summer.