In the Present Tense - panic

Here's something for Moody, after reading his story of lifts and stairwells with a group of Japanese students visiting Sydney.
W.

In the gleaming silver foyer of a Melbourne tower, I stand outside the lift waiting. I have a consultancy task with two people who are on Floor Twenty three. Waiting for the lift to come to Ground Level.

I am in the toilet of an unfamiliar building. Two weeks ago. The latch won’t budge. I breathe deeply and wait, then carefully manipulate the latch until it sweetly slides open.

I am in a squalid smelly entrance hall to a twenty-storey high rise, accommodation for the poor of Melbourne. Our friends have a flat on the 19th floor. My husband reassures me, it will be fine. A notice on the wall says, If the lift fails, phone such and such between 9 a.m. Monday to 5 pm. Friday. It is Saturday. A flock of Muslim women and children push into the lift. They get out at Level 14 and I run with them, and climb stairs to 19. Two hours later I walk down 19 floors in the stairwell and my husband thinks I’m barmy.

I am going through the airport tunnel to Gate Two in order to board the 747. There are no windows or sky. Only the smile of a familiar lad from Labasa who is a steward reassures me.

For thirty years I had travelled back and forth to Fiji, enjoying the flights. This panic regarding planes is something new to experience.

I have bouts of bronchitis and the doctor prescribes Ventalin. But isn’t that for asthma? Twice I have to stop the car, lean over and breathe slowly and deeply.

I am visiting the Animal Health Laboratory a week before it opens. Years ago. We are guests looking about. I go through a locked door with a shower for staff, a second locked door. The inner space for scientists to study dreaded animal diseases. There are no windows. I rush back through doors and shower and passages and watch a video downstairs while I wait for friends.

I am on a bus, fully loaded and sit in the second last seat, upstairs. I demand a seat near a door. I must get to Sydney and even further for a music symposium. I’m given a small seat near the door downstairs.

I listen to a favourite radio program. I am twelve years old. The heroine has been kidnapped, tied up and bundled into the boot of a car.

I am learning to play a Rachmaninoff Prelude. I am eleven. My piano teacher tells me the composer imagines what it’s like to be inside a coffin, buried but still alive and he needs to practically bang on the wood.

Another piano teacher, a nun this time, sends me to the Catholic school classroom, an alien place. I practice scales and then find the door is locked. It is out-of-school hours.

I am six. It’s a summer of blinding dust-storms. I walk alone, returning from Primary School, terrified, trying to find my way back to my mother, feeling the fences with my hands, but lost in the orange dust.

No, I will not go to the 23rd floor. They can come down and we can talk at a café. There are tables and chairs, sunlight and space. Yes. My heart lifts and the day is delightful.