Elevator Talk

Meredith Gilbert is thirty-four years old, a quarter troll on her mother's side, and she has been on her feet for nine hours. Her boots squeak on the kitchen floor. The Night Bus smells like fryer oil and cheap lager, same as every Friday, and the bass from the dining floor up top thuds through the walls like a headache with a rhythm section.

She's had two fights tonight. One drunk lad who grabbed a waitress and one drunk lad who grabbed the first drunk lad. Same lad, actually. Both fights. That's the kind of night it's been.

So when she hits the button on the service elevator and the little gate opens and there's a man already standing in it, she almost just swings. Troll reflexes. It is not always a gift.

Then she sees who it is.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she says.

Lance Martinez. Forty-one years old, graying at the temples, holding a clipboard against his chest like it's a shield. Smiling that smile he's had since the day she met him, six years back, when they both survived the worst diner in Selly Oak together.

"Meredith Gilbert." He says her name like he's winning a raffle. "Still here. Still kicking people out of places. Some things never change."

"It's a living," she says. She steps in, pulls the gate shut behind her, and stabs the button for the dining level. "Move over. You're standing on my spot."

"There's a spot?"

"There is now!" She plants herself in the corner, arms crossed. The elevator is roughly as spacious as a phone booth. There's a mop bucket in it. She has to stand toe to toe with him and she can smell the club on him already, someone else's beer and somebody's cigarette even though it's supposed to be indoors-only now.

He leans on the rail. "How've you been? Honest answer."

"Tired. Busy. Working a double, so if you're planning on talking my ear off, pick a shorter ear."

"Noted." He flips the clipboard around. There's a stack of cards on it. Little green cards with a big blue logo at the top. She knows exactly what those are before he says a word, and knowing it makes her jaw tight.

"You're not supposed to be in the building," she says.

"I'm allowed in the kitchen prep area. Your manager Danny signed a visitor form. Well, he signed a form. Whether he read it is his business." Lance taps the cards. "Back of house wants to talk. Cooks, prep, dish. They're ready, Mer. I've been to forty kitchens this year and this one's the angriest."

The elevator gives a lurch. Then it stops. The light overhead buzzes and stays on, but the cable sound goes quiet in that wrong way cables go quiet.

They both look up at the same time.

"Nope," Meredith says. She presses the button again. Nothing. She bangs the heel of her hand on it. Nothing. She thumps the gate with her fist and yells "Oi!" at the top of her lungs, which in an elevator is deafening, and Lance flinches.

"Somebody's up there," he says. "It's Friday. That prep hatch gets used every four minutes."

"It better." She pulls her radio off her belt and clicks it. "This is Mer. Service elevator's jammed, ground to one. Anybody copy?"

Static. More static. Then a voice, tinny, one of the dish kids, saying something about the walk-in and a delivery and then cutting off mid-word.

"Did he say he'd come?" Lance asks.

"He said something about a delivery. Could've been a yes. Could've been a haiku." She clips the radio back. "Fine. We wait. Nobody panics, nothing catches fire, we wait."

They wait.

It takes about ninety seconds for the silence to get to her. That's her personal record for silence with Lance Martinez and she's annoyed it's still that short.

"So," he says, and she holds up a hand.

"Don't."

"Didn't say anything yet."

"You were winding up. I saw the shoulders."

He laughs. He's got a good laugh and it's unfair and she hates it a little. "Fine. Union stuff can wait. Tell me about your week."

"My week is nine hours old and has two assaults in it. One guy, twice. You don't want my week."

"I do, actually." He sets the clipboard down on the mop bucket, which is such a Lance move, treating his whole crusade like a coaster. "I've been in town three weeks and this is the first time I've run into anybody I actually know. You know what organizing is? Talking to strangers about their worst day at work, forty times a week. It's nice to talk to a friend."

"We're friends?"

The word comes out sharper than she meant. She hears it land and doesn't fix it, because fixing it would mean admitting she noticed.

"Six years, Mer. We survived the Starlight Diner. That's more than friends, that's like trench brothers." He leans back against the rail. "Which, speaking of. You've been doing security, what, the last four years? You were management material at the Starlight. Doris had you training people."

"Doris also paid us in expired vouchers and vibes." Meredith shrugs. "Security pays better than serving. That's the whole math."

"It's not the whole math."

"It's my math."

He looks at her. Not smug now. That's worse, somehow. "You were good at everything there. You ran a line, you closed the books, you talked down a guy with a cleaver on a Tuesday. And now you're standing in a doorway at a bus restaurant telling drunk men to go home."

"Someone has to tell drunk men to go home. I'm very good at it. Watch, I'll demonstrate on you later."

"Meredith."

"Don't Meredith me. What do you want me to say? That I had a five-year plan? I had a five-year plan at thirty and then my mum got sick and the plan went in the bin. Now it's four years later and I'm good at opening doors and telling lads to sit down and that's a skill and I take pride in it." She hears her own voice going up. She makes herself stop. "Sorry. That's not your fault. That's the elevator and the double."

"You're allowed to be pissed. I'd just rather you be pissed at the club and not yourself."

"You always were a pusher." She kicks the mop bucket, gently, an old habit. "How's your thing? The union thing. Actually good or Kickstarter good?"

"Actually good." His face changes when he says it. She remembers that face from the diner, the night he decided he was done taking abuse from a manager with a hair trigger and a safe full of tips. "I've got two hundred cards signed across four venues this year. Two of them got contracts. One got a raise to fifteen an hour just from the threat of a vote."

"That's real money. That's a person's rent."

"That's a person's rent," he agrees. "That's why I do it. That and I apparently hate owning furniture."

"You still don't own furniture?"

"I own a chair. It's a good chair."

"Progress," she says, and means it, and hates how warm she sounds.

The elevator clicks. Both of them look up. The light flickers, steadies. Then it dies completely and a little red LED on the button panel comes on and turns everything the color of the club upstairs. Lance goes blind in the sudden dark. Meredith's eyes, her mother's side again, adjust in a blink, and she can see every line of his face.

"You have got to be joking," Meredith says.

"It's fine. Red's slimming."

"I will put you in the mop bucket, Lance."

"I'd like to see you try. I've got thirty pounds on you and a clipboard." He picks the clipboard up, holds it like a baton, and she snorts before she can stop herself.

Somewhere above them the hatch clangs. Feet. A voice, Danny's voice, calling down, "Mer? That you in there? Engineer's coming from Digbeth, half hour, maybe more, don't die!"

"Half an hour," Meredith repeats. She slides down the wall until she's sitting on the floor of the service elevator in the dark with a mop bucket and a union organizer. Her knees crack. Thirty-four is a real age with real sounds.

Lance sits down across from her. His knees crack too. She hears it and grins in the dark where he can't see it.

"Half an hour," he says. "Alright. Ask me anything. I've got nothing but time and grievances."

"You're going to regret that."

"I regret everything. Ask anyway."

The grinding comes from above them. Something moving near the elevator. Metal on metal, slow, like the building has teeth.

"Okay," Lance says. "That sounded expensive."

"Shut up a second."

Meredith listens. The grinding stops. Then starts again, further off, like whatever it is gave up on their shaft and went to bother another one.

"That's the hoist motor," she says. "Or a fan. I don't actually know what anything is, I just say things with confidence."

"Works for security though."

"It's the entire trick of security."

The elevator shudders. A real shudder this time, the whole box dropping maybe two inches and catching hard. Her stomach does the drop with it. Lance grabs the rail and the mop bucket skids across the floor and cracks against her ankle.

"Ow. Sorry."

"You're fine." She rubs her ankle. "We just moved."

"Down."

"I know it was down, Lance, I was there."

The red LED stays on, the only light left. Not the flicker-and-come-back kind. Gone. It paints everything the color of cheap wine. His face. Her hands. The clipboard.

"Right," Meredith says. "New plan. Nobody touches anything."

"I'm not touching anything."

"You were about to. I could see your hand doing a thing."

"I was scratching my nose."

"In the dark. Suspicious."

She gets her radio off her belt. Keys it. "Danny, this is Mer. The cab just dropped and the lights are out. Over."

Static. A long ugly stretch of it. Then a voice, maybe Danny, maybe the radio picking up the ghosts of every walkie in the building, garbled into one word that might be "wait" or might be "mate."

"Danny, say again. Over."

More static. Nothing.

"He's probably got his hands full with the Friday crowd," Lance says.

"He's probably got his headphones in and a delivery in the boot of his car. Danny does his best thinking in the car park." She keys it two more times anyway. Nothing answers her. She clips the radio back on her belt and gets her phone out.

One bar. Half a bar. The bar is gray, mostly, a rumor of a bar. She dials Danny and the phone thinks about it and then the screen says Call Failed like it's disappointed in her.

"Try the engineer line?"

"Everything goes through the same mast." She dials it anyway. Failed. She holds the phone up over her head, which has never once worked in the history of phones, and gets half a bar, and dials, and this time it rings.

It rings four times. Then a woman's voice: the engineer firm's out-of-hours message, telling her all lines are busy, telling her to hold, telling her that her call is important. It is not important. It is a service elevator between a kitchen prep area and a dining floor.

"They're not coming for half an hour regardless," Lance says. "That's what Danny said."

"Danny said that before the lights died and the box dropped. Things have escalated."

"Not really. Same box, same gap, now it's moodier in here."

She puts the phone away because it's dying anyway, eight percent, because of course. She leans her head back against the wall. The wall is cold steel and it feels good against her neck, nine hours of standing radiating out of her calves like a furnace.

Lance finds the alarm button by feel. She hears him press it. Nothing.

"Anything?"

"Not even a click. There's no click. Is there supposed to be a click?"

"There's supposed to be a bell. There's a bell upstairs by the prep door. Danny hit it in March when the thing stuck for twenty minutes and we all stood around laughing."

"Well, the bell's dead."

"Great."

"So we're invisible and silent and half a floor up." He settles back. She hears him get comfortable against the wall, hears the clipboard get set down carefully like it's a child. "You know the funny thing? I've done this in worse. There was a freight lift in a hotel in Manchester, stuck forty minutes, me and a sous chef with a burnt hand and a panic thing going."

"What'd you do?"

"Talked him through it. Counting breaths. He was twenty-three, first big kitchen, thought he was going to die in a lift with a stranger and a crate of lemons."

"Did he die?"

"He's head chef now at one of my signed venues. He brings it up every time I see him.