Last Saturday morning Leen and Alisdair and I left our little apartment so I could drive Leen to work and spend the day with Al. I was quite sore because the day before I’d finally started exercising again (a deceptively simple bodyweight workout that must have been designed by Satan or at the very least one of his trusted minions). I’m sure I looked pretty pathetic grimacing as I bent down to help Al with his shoes…and even more pathetic when I tried to get back up. But anyway, there we were, walking down the hall towards the lift lobby. Al ran ahead, which is something we rarely let him do. You can never be too careful these days, right? But hey, this wasn’t a crowded shopping mall, this was our apartment building…our floor. There was nowhere for him to go. So we didn’t worry when he disappeared into the lift lobby.
“Wouldn’t it be something,” I said to Leen, “if the lift just happened to be there and Al went in and the doors closed?”
We both laughed. We were still laughing when a woman came out of the lift lobby. Unless she had just gone there to throw something into the garbage room, her presence there meant she had just come out of the lift. Which meant…
Oh no, I thought. He didn’t.
“Oh f**k!” I said, entering the lift lobby. “He did!”
The lifts were all closed. We could hear Al screaming for me, but his voice was getting further and further away. I burst into the stairwell and ran — well, it was more like a combination between jumping and swinging — down 18 floors. When I got to the building’s lobby I lunged at the button to open the middle lift, but suddenly the ‘up’ arrow appeared and the lift was on the move again. Leen came out of one of the other lifts.
“I could hear him!” she said. “But where did he go?”
Suddenly we heard him scream again. But this time he wasn’t in the lift. The scream was coming from somewhere above us. It sounded close. I bolted back up the stairs to the first floor (Malaysians have inherited the very strange British habit of calling the second floor the first floor) and there he was, crying, running to me and telling me very incoherently about his big adventure.
Phew.
And so began our weekend, one which proved to be somewhat eventful: besides Al’s solo elevator ride, we had to deal with rain pouring into Ibu’s living room in Muar (the handiwork of some renovators who did a great job on the front yard but really messed up the roof), a mosquito getting stuck in Leen’s eye, and Al getting his face scratched up by a cat that, to Al’s horror, wouldn’t tolerate being ridden like a horse the way Smokey often does. Oh, and after hurling myself down 18 floors at breakneck speed, I was in even more pain. I could hardly walk.
I know that sounds like a wild weekend, but actually it was quite nice. We enjoyed ourselves at a birthday party at Gymboree and had a nice visit with Ibu in Muar, rain and all. I’m happy to report that Al still likes cats and elevators. And it turns out he really likes to dance as well:
Ah yes, a good time was had by all.
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5 Comments
My daughter had exactly the same experience over a year. I could hear her screaming from our apt - she was w daddy at tht time. She was afraid of lift for a while. Luckily we live on ground floor. And even now she doesn’t dare to get in the lift by herself. Lesson learned. :-)
Quite a big adventure for Al I must say!
To be able to hear them, to know they’re completely terrified, and to not be able to do anything about it. That’s what terrifies me.
I actually did the same thing when I was younger, we lived in an apartment block that had a laundrette in the basement and my mum turned to pick up the laundry basket and I was gone. It’s one of my earliest memories. I remember pressing the buttons and calling out for my mum when suddenly the elevator doors opened and facing me was a wall of bricks and pipes. Though I didn’t know it then, I had actually reached the basement but at the time I thought that by pressing the buttons, I had accidently opened the lift in mid-”flight” and was terrified not so much at being separated by my mother but of falling out of the lift into the shaft. In the end, at one of the floors one of my mum’s friends got on and recognised me and reunited me with my mum.
I keep a claw grip on my daughter at all times in apartment blocks - karma’s a bitch.
that is hilarious! i would have panicked too if Ava did that.