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.

I would have been the twelfth. In a car that was already too full, in heat that made people faint, I would have been one more body, and I am, myself, not good in tight spaces, and I have thought a great deal about the version of that day where my foot obeyed me and crossed the threshold like it does a dozen times a day.

It didn't. Something with no words and no reasons stopped me at the door of a lift I have taken a thousand times, on the one occasion it was about to trap eleven people in the heat for two hours, and it let go of me the moment the doors closed on the danger I wasn't in.

I take the stairs when the lift is crowded now. Not always — I'm not a hermit, and most crowded lifts are just crowded lifts. But when it's full, and it's warm, some quiet part of me weighs it, and if that part says step back, I step back, and I say I've forgotten something, and I let it go up without me. It's been right once. Once was enough to make me listen.