Lift Me Up

May – The Beginning

He would not have been number one on Tam Remington’s list to be stuck in a lift with. In fact, he would have been way down the list, possibly hitting triple figures.

Jack Cesaroni. The man who had stolen her job.

A job that was much more than a job to her because she loved it, she was good at it, she had earned it, and she was doing it.

But in the end the board had decided that someone with ‘more experience’ would be better suited to running the shop.

They, of course, meant by that: ‘a man’, because they were fusty old men who had built a female-resistant glass ceiling over their company, and if they hadn’t been so desperate to steady their ship in the wake of disaster, they wouldn’t have given Tam even a temporary look-in.

Today, Tam’s stress levels were high enough without this happening because she was travelling up to her own execution in the worst mode of transport available.

Lifts did something to her gut. Especially the lifts in this place – small, claustrophobic, upright coffins, which she rarely used because it was too easy to imagine the brushed-metal walls beginning to shift inwards ready to crush her, horror-film style.

Six . . . seven . . . each floor the lift cleared was taking her closer to the end of her time at YorkMart Supermarkets.

Hadn’t Jack said that’s what would be happening?

Well, not in so many words, but his meaning was beyond clear.

Nine . . . ten

Tam felt sick.

Eleven . . . twelve

And then it happened. In between floors thirteen (had to be, didn’t it?) and fourteen of Crown Tower.

That’s when the lift made a horrific squeaking noise, a violent judder, and all the lights went off.

Tam heard a high-pitched shriek, and it took her a delayed few seconds to realise it came from her own throat.

Panic rose in her that didn’t abate when the dim emergency lights came on.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Jack.

And Tam wasn’t sure if her snapped reply – ‘No. How can I be all right?’ – was said aloud or only in her own head.