Forget Me Knot (6 page)

“But you grew out of it?”

“Eventually, but even when I was at university, the morbid curiosity lingered. I remember forming this band with some mates and insisting we call it Spastic Colon.”

She burst out laughing. Afterward, they fell into silence.

“So, how does it feel to be getting married?” he said eventually.

“Exciting, but a bit scary,” she said, aware that concentrating on answering his questions really was easing her panic.

“Why scary?”

She shrugged. “Isn’t it normal to be scared before you get married? ’Til death do us part is such a long time.”

“Even if you’ve found the right person?”

She couldn’t work out why the question had pricked her
and made her feel defensive. “Oh, I’ve absolutely found the right person,” she declared. “No doubt about that. Toby’s wonderful. He works hard. He’s solid, reliable. I know he’ll never let me down.” She paused. “God, I’ve made him sound like a Volvo. I mean, obviously there’s more to him than that. Far more. He’s handsome, clever, funny.”

The lights started to flicker again. Abby felt her body tense.

“There’s clearly a problem with the power supply,” he said.

“Omigod. Please don’t tell me that means the elevator could go plummeting to the bottom of the elevator shaft.”

“Abby, you have to calm down. The station staff will sort this out. They’re probably waiting for an engineer.” His eyes turned to the bottle of wine standing on the floor. “Look, why don’t I open this? A drop of alcohol might ease your nerves.”

“OK,” she said. At this stage she was willing to try anything. “But how are you going to open the bottle?”

He grinned. “Easy.” He put his hand into his jacket pocket and produced a Swiss Army knife. “Thirteenth-birthday present,” he said. “I’ve carried it with me ever since. You never know when you might need to scale a fish or take a stone out of a horse’s hoof.”

She giggled. “Or open bottles of wine to calm crazy phobics trapped in elevators. Toby thinks I should have gotten over my phobia by now. He doesn’t say as much, but even though I’ve worked really hard to overcome it, I think he thinks I’m a bit of a wimp.”

“I don’t think you’re a wimp or crazy. Your elevator phobia is based on an event that scared the hell out of you. Not wanting to repeat it isn’t mad, it’s perfectly rational.”

She was impressed by his analysis, and for a moment or two she felt rather drawn to him. She’d always been of the opinion that emotional insight in a man was rather sexy.

He was standing up now, the bottle between his knees, tugging at the cork. It finally came out with a delicious pop. He passed her the bottle. “Right, get some of that down you.”

She didn’t need telling twice. It was a delicious fruity red. “Wow, that is yummy.” She looked at the label. “Hang on, this is a Chateau Haut Lafitte Grand Cru. I don’t know much about wine, but isn’t that megaexpensive?”

“Not really,” he said, twisting the cork off the cork screw.

“Yes, it is. I know it is. While I was driving the other day I was listening to this wine program on the radio and Chateau Haut Lafitte was mentioned. I remember the presenter saying that prices start around fifty quid. And you’re meant to decant it and filter it. This was your friend’s birthday present, wasn’t it?”

“OK, it was. Matt’s a bit of a wine buff, but he’s got loads of the stuff. This bottle is going to a much better cause.”

“I don’t know what to say. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Thank you.”

Dan folded the corkscrew back into the body of the Swiss Army knife and put it in his jacket pocket. “My pleasure.”

By now he was back on the floor, sitting next to her. She passed the wine bottle to him. “Here, you have some. I haven’t eaten since lunchtime, and the alcohol is going straight to my head.”

“That’s the idea.” He smiled, insisting that she drink
some more. When she finally passed him the bottle, she was aware that she’d downed more than half of it.

“Wow, this is good,” he said. “Anyway, getting back to what you were saying about the elevator plummeting to the bottom of the shaft. I promise you that can’t possibly happen.”

“How do you know?” Her head was starting to spin again, but this time it was due to the alcohol rather than her hyperventilating.

“I have a degree in engineering, and I happen to know for a fact that all modern elevators are fitted with a… um…” As he groped for the word, his eyes appeared to comb the elevator walls for inspiration. He was hardly going to find the missing word there, she thought. “A Bialystock joint,” he announced finally.

“A Bialystock joint? What’s that?” Her brow knitted into a frown. She was sure she’d come across this name somewhere, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember where.

“The Bialystock joint is possibly one of the most important inventions in twentieth-century engineering. It took over from the Bloom overload breaker. Once you combine it with the Ulla oscillator, you’ve got a pretty foolproof system. It’s why there hasn’t been an elevator disaster anywhere in the Western world for over fifty years.”

“Is that really true?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, that’s certainly reassuring.”

By now the alcohol was really starting to kick in. Drinking always made her garrulous. “Did I tell you that Toby’s a corporate lawyer?” she said.

“No, I don’t think you did.”

“He works for this really big West End firm. Of course, they expect complete loyalty and devotion. They work him far too hard, poor thing.” He handed her back the bottle and she took a couple more swigs. “He’s always exhausted and irritable. But it’s not his fault. It’s just his workload. He’s promised me that once they make him a partner in a few years, things will calm down. At the moment he’s at the beginning of his career and he feels that he’s got so much to prove.”

“I can understand that.”

She carried on drinking. “I know our relationship isn’t as exciting as it could be, but, given Toby’s work situation, that’s only to be expected, isn’t it?”

Dan gave a noncommittal nod.

“Plus, we’ve been together nine months. Work issues aside, things generally start to taper off after a few months, don’t they?” She put the bottle to her lips again and drank. “When I say ‘things taper off,’ I mean, you know”—she leaned in toward him and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“in the bedroom department.”

Dan registered his discomfort by clearing his throat. “Ah… right. I see.” More throat-clearing. “I’m not sure… I mean, I really wouldn’t know….”

“The truth is,” she carried on, well into her alcohol-induced stride by now, “we haven’t done it in ages. But that’s normal, isn’t it? I know they try to convince you in the magazines that everybody’s shagging all the time, but everybody knows it’s not like that in real life.”

“Well, er… I guess… you know… all relationships go through their ups and downs.”

“Exactly. And Toby and I are in a bit of a down phase
at the moment. That doesn’t mean to say that one of these days, soon, Toby won’t be able to get it up again.”

He winced. “Oh, God.”

“You see, at the moment”—she lowered her voice again—“Toby says that for him it’s like trying to get jelly into a letter box.”

Dan sprang to his feet. “Tell you what, why don’t I try banging on the door again? Maybe somebody will hear this time.”

“I mean, you’re a man, Dan—ooh, that rhymes—you must have encountered similar problems.”

Dan responded by giving the door three quick thumps. “Can anybody hear me? Can anybody hear me?”

Nothing. “I said, can anybody hear me?”

“You have to make a new plan, Stan!”

“Abby, my name’s Dan, not Stan. The wine really has gone to your head.”

“Of course your name’s Dan. Then what am I thinking of?… Oh, I know—it’s that old Paul Simon song. How does it go?” With that she started singing. “…slip out the back, Jack… You don’t need to be coy, Roy… set yourself free.” She paused. “You know, that’s what we should do.”

“What?”

“Slip out the back, Jack.”

“There is no back.”

“Of course there’s a back.” She burst into a fit of giggles and snorted. “Everything gotta have a back.”

“Yes, but there isn’t a back we can escape out of.”

“Ah. Right.” Hiccup. “Gotcha.”

He bashed the door again. “Hey! Can anybody hear me?”

The reply—albeit faint—came immediately: “Yes, mate,
‘ang on. The elevator engineer’s just got ’ere. We’ll ’ave you out A-S-A-P.”

Dan turned to Abby. “There you are. What did I tell you?”

“Hey, Dan, my main man,” Abby cried, “gimme five!”

But there was no time to celebrate. At that moment the elevator doors hissed open. Abby and Dan found themselves staring out onto a filthy, soot-covered elevator shaft wall. They both looked up into the blackness. Thirty or forty feet above them, somebody was shining a torch into the shaft.

“All right,” another male voice said. “What we want you to do is to keep well inside the elevator while we try to raise it a few more feet.”

Abby and Dan stepped back. Because of all the wine she’d had, Abby was a bit wobbly on her feet by now. Dan took her arm to steady her. After a few moments, the elevator mechanism whirred and clanked and slowly they started to climb. It took nearly a minute to move less than ten feet. By now they could see three or four faces staring down at them.

“How many of you in there?” one of the faces said.

“Only two,” Dan said.

“OK, that’s something.”

The mechanism started up again, but this time the elevator didn’t move.

“That’s it,” came the same voice. “This thing isn’t moving any farther. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ve got a couple of harnesses attached to a winch. I’m going to throw them down. You two put them on and we’ll hoist you up.”

Abby turned to Dan. “Wow, we’re going to rappel out of this elevator. How cool is that?”

“You mean you’re not scared?”

“Me, scared? I have no fear.”

“Since when?”

“Since you got me pissed as a pudding.”

The two mountaineering harnesses were lowered. Dan helped Abby into hers. “God, this is so exciting,” she squealed. “It’s like that film
Touching the Void
. This bloke gets stuck at the bottom of a deep crevasse and has to climb out.”

Dan put on his own harness. “OK, we’re ready,” he called out.

“Right you are,” the voice from above came back. “Don’t do anything. Just hold on to the rope; sit tight while we do the work.”

Abby went first. She felt herself rise a few inches. “Geronimo! Wheeee, I’m flying.” Her journey was a bit halting and bouncy, and she kept getting bashed against the filthy elevator shaft, but because her panic had been anesthetized by the wine, it wasn’t at all unpleasant.

A few moments later she was sitting on the ground, removing black cobwebs from her face, surrounded by relieved London Transport staff, paramedics and the police rescue team that had winched her to safety. Somebody in a blue London Transport cap was helping her off with her harness. “You all right, miss? I’ve sent somebody to fetch you a nice cup of sweet tea.”

The chap clearly hadn’t noticed Abby’s ear-to-ear grin. She was more than all right. She was giddy with excitement. “Wow, talk about an adrenaline rush. That was amazing. Usually I get claustrophobic in tight spaces. I cannot believe I just rappelled nearly forty feet up an elevator shaft in the pitch black.”

Even though she still felt pretty sloshed from the wine, she wasn’t so far gone as to forget Toby. She immediately started rooting around in her bag for her phone. She had to ring him to explain what had happened and let him know she was safe. As she picked up her phone, she noticed that she had six missed calls. She decided that listening to the messages would only waste time. She knew they would be from Toby, who, having been irritated by her lateness, would now be frantic with worry. It was far more important that she speak to him right away and put his mind at rest.

This time her phone had plenty of signal, but when she dialed, the number just kept ringing and eventually went to voice mail. She decided there was probably so much noise in the restaurant that he couldn’t hear his phone.

By now Dan was at her side, still in his harness. “You sounded like you were enjoying yourself back there,” he said.

“It was totally fantastic,” she said, letting out a loud hiccup. “I mean, truly amazing.”

The same London Transport man helped Dan off with his harness. Then two paramedics in green overalls came over and suggested Abby and Dan should go to the hospital to be checked out. It was a struggle—particularly as they were convinced that Abby’s high spirits were due to a head injury—but eventually Abby and Dan managed to convince the paramedics that they were both fine.

After Abby and Dan had offered their profuse thanks to the paramedics and the police rescue team, another London Transport person arrived with two mugs of tea. She ushered them into the station office and sat them down. As Abby sipped the sweet, treacle-colored brew, she could feel herself beginning to sober up.

“Don’t hold me to this,” she said, becoming thoughtful,
“but I think I may have conquered my phobia. I’ve been trapped twice in elevators and survived. Suddenly it feels like there’s nothing left to fear.”

“That’s amazing,” Dan said. “I’m really impressed.”

“Not half as impressed as I am by the way you helped me,” she smiled. “You were brilliant down there. I would have totally lost it if it hadn’t been for you keeping me talking. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. Thank you. I’m sorry if I bored on.”

“You didn’t.”

“Really?”

“I promise.”

They sat drinking their tea. “By the way,” she said eventually, “your face is covered in soot.” She took a clean hand-kerchief from her jacket pocket and began wiping his face. “You look like a panda,” she giggled as some clean skin emerged around his eyes.

He told her not to worry and that he’d have a shower when he got to his friend Matt’s apartment. She told him to hang on to the hand-kerchief anyway.

“Actually, I think you might want to keep it,” he said.

She ran her hand over her cheek. “Oh, God,” she said, looking down at the black coating, “I’m going to turn up at the Ivy looking like one of those dancing chimney sweeps in
Mary Poppins.”