Elevators

When it comes to elevators, I tend to avoid them. One floor up, I’ll jog. Two floors up, I’ll walk. Four floors, I’ll save the workout for Virgin Active and crowd in with a woman who’s decided to prepare for a nuclear winter.

Trolley brimming, eyes wild, asking the other guy to punch in P1.

Though there’s nothing particularly funny about the situation, I feel a bubble of laughter rising up in my chest. It’s the clear, crazed orb of mirth I often get in elevators and which my best friend James thinks is the harbinger of dementia to come.

A flicker of a future in which I no longer try to suppress the irrational bouts of giggling I get when the doors close and the lack of space crowds and I realise that people would much prefer they weren’t stuck in eight inches of metal with a hysteric.

The laughing is part of the reason I prefer the stairs.

Well, that and because I’m a big fan of M. Night Shyamalan so I can’t shake the idea that one of the people in the lift may very well be the devil.

Add that to the fact that I once got stuck in a Hilton Hotel elevator in a red NAMAs gown and with far too many people to reasonably expect a prolonged supply of oxygen and you’ll know why I’m often doubled over in stairwells, desperately trying to catch my breath.

Virgin Active is on the fourth floor.

It’s me, Nuclear Winter and one of those gym guys who set up promotion tables in shopping malls. One of those slim, insistent agents of Richard Branson who promptly get to wrecking people’s self-esteems as they cheerfully ask whether or not you have a gym membership.

Like you need one, like you’ve fallen four floors off the wagon, like you aren’t clenching everything that can possibly be clenched.

“I don’t need to ask what floor you’re going to!” he says grinning, charming, as if I’m still in the market for a membership.

It’s my yoga pants, sneakers, water bottle and sports bra that give it away bolstered by his dazzling insight into the obvious.

I nod, mumble something about self-coercion, he presses P4 and that’s when Nuclear Winter speaks.

“You’re so voorbeeldig.”

Disciplined? An example?

My eerste taal Afrikaans leaves me in a huff but I know it’s something positive because she’s smiling at me as I eyeball the bag of KitKat Bites in her trolley. Gym Guy is holding the door as she angles out backwards at P1 and they’re both baring their teeth at me in admiration so I wiggle my eyebrows and pull my lips across my face in something akin to a smile as I do when I don’t know what the hell is going on.

This seems to satisfy them both and the woman wishes me a good workout as an Indian family of four shyly crowds in.

It’s terrible me of but as we all become intimately acquainted, I think of the time when I was squashed to a thin Marth-flavoured paste on a crowded New Delhi train before grinning at the fact that I’m also having Indian food for dinner. The lunatic part of me that giggles in elevators thinks to mention it but the rational part of me beats it into inoffensive submission and the Indian people enjoy their elevator ride in peace.

“Hallo, P4, please”, the father says with all the dignity I admire in Indian literature before Gym Guy ruins my Arundhati Roy moment with a booming “so we’re all going to the gym!”

The man clearly has a taste for “duh!” so we leave him to joyfully press buttons as though he’s some kind of grand, slightly special conductor of life.

On P3 a slight and pretty blonde woman slinks in and seems to marvel at something I can’t yet see before smiling widely and ducking her head.

I notice it when I watch everyone clamber out on the fourth floor.

I’ve ridden an elevator with a chicken, marvelled at the “no spitting” signs stuck on elevator doors in Malaysia but in an instant this is my favourite ride.

The one in which an Afrikaans woman says I’m exemplary, a coloured man makes our day by being cheerful, helpful and intensely happy to be ushering us to the gym, an Indian family smiles in greeting and a little blonde woman joins me, the black woman off to the side and towards the back, like the world is happy to have humans in every creed and colour in which they come.

I linger in the elevator a little bit and watch them leave.

The little orb of mirth rises up my throat and bursts out of my mouth but this time there’s a reason.