Books / short story
‘Jacqui and the Lift Shaft’ – a short story by Tim Kindberg
Once upon a future time – and a hard but transformative time it will be – a girl named Jacqui will live with her mother in a flat in a tower block in Barton Hill in the city of Bristol. One very hot day, when everyone will be sweaty and cross, first the food will run out and then the electricity.
There Jacqui is, in her front room. “Don’t worry, mum”, Jacqui says, “I’ll go and find power, and then I’ll find food. And I’ll bring them to you, and to everyone in the block who needs them.” She sets off down the stairs – for the lift was no use without electricity – and emerges into the sweet city air and the sound of birdsong from a sycamore nearby, and the whoosh of Bristolians all cycling and tuktuk-ing and scootering around before their batteries die.
In the ill-tempered fug of the heatwave, as she pushes her way through the lairy crowds, verbiage stings Jacqui’s ears from all around. “Screw those windmills and those panels!” She overhears a couple of locals complaining. “Where’s the bleeding leccy when we need it? And I’m starving, I tell you! I could eat a whole butternut squash!”
is needed now More than ever
The cafe is closed for lack of supplies and electricity, but this pair sits at a pavement table anyway, beneath the plane trees that line the pavements, all planted in the Good Year 2024. “Nothing for our bellies, nothing for our tellies, and our mobiles need charging. Screw them renewables!”
All Jacqui has in her pockets is her mobile. She’s taking it to old St Nick’s Market, where she’ll sell it and spend the proceeds on a spicy black bean pie and enough energy for her mother to warm it in the microwave. However hot the day is, her mum baulks at eating cold pies. Jacqui said she’d help everyone in her block, but her mum will do, to be going on with. Her mum will give her a bite, too.
She’s walking through Castle Park, its grass dotted with people lying beneath the trees, when a stranger calls out to her.
“Hey, sistah!”
At first she ignores him but he continues, “Jacqui, I got sometin’ for ya!”
She takes a second look at him. She has never seen this man before and he should not be knowing her name.
“Did I miss the bit when we were introduced?” she says.
“Nah, ya no know I. I jus’ need ya mobile for one call, and in return I’s give ya sometin’ speciahl. Some seeds, ya know. N’ a key.”
“Seeds? You jokin’ me? I need food man, I ain’t no bird. And a key to what? Your place, eh? You dirty old man.”
“Lend us ya mobile for jus’ one call innit, I beg ya.”
Jacqui assesses the man’s ability to run faster than she can – which is very fast – and finds him wanting. She shrugs and hands him the mobile. He rapidly dials a number and places the mobile next to his ear, beneath his dreads.
“Hallo? Wa g’waan?” He smiles. “Yes, mon. It ahl taken care of. You be safe now, ya hear me?”
He hands back Jacqui’s mobile and gives her a packet of seeds and a silver key.
“Are they to grow… weed?”
“Girl, wha’ ya tek me for? Nah, ya sow da seeds and dem will grow into somethin’ ya caan believe. Dem not a grow up, though, seen? Dem a grow down.”
“Down?”
“Far down. Dem grow in a concrete. Dem a excavate wid dem roots. Then ya be needing transport to where dem a gone down in da eart’.”
“What the Gordon are you actually talking about, man?”
“Listen to me now, ya grow dem under a lift, ya get me? That’s when ya need deh key.”
Jacqui shakes her head in incomprehension.
“Deh key to dem lift. A key to tek yerself to floors that need dem authorisatiahn.
Jacqui can’t believe she’s actually taking this man’s madness seriously to any degree, but she does recall that the lift in her tower block has a place to insert a key. There’s a floor at the top that normal folks can’t access – probably because they’d party there and fall off the roof.
She can’t keep a straight face. “So I go home, right, plant these seeds on the concrete. Next to my block?”
“Nah, nah, listen to me now. Ya drop dem in da likkle gap underneat’ da lift doors, between da lift ‘n deh floor.”
“Oh, right. Then I wait how long?”
“Not long. Minutes.”
“And do I water them, though?”
“Nah, ya no water dem.”
“Then, right, I get in the lift.”
“Ya get in da lift.”
“And I turn the key.”
“Ya turn deh key.”
“Then what?”
“Ya go down, down. To riches, beyond ya dreams!”
“You’re forgetting one thing, me lover. There ain’t no leccy right now for lifts ‘n that, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Trust me now. When ya plant da seeds, there be ‘lectricity. Ya get me?”
Jacqui walks on, leaving the man stretched out on the grass, absorbed in the sunrays. As she approaches St Nick’s she takes out her phone, wondering how much she should ask for it, and finds to her horror that the phone is dead. It was charged when she leant it to the stranger in the park.
The surly woman in the shop does not contradict Jacqui’s expectations when she advises her without grace that she will not accept a dead mobile. On her way home, the piece of Jacqui’s mind which she wishes to give the man in the park remains intact when she finds that he has disappeared.
Jacqui’s mum cannot believe her ears as she listens to the rank nonsense her daughter is spouting. The seeds in Jacqui’s hand are almost certainly to grow drugs. She is going to cause them both to suffer a period of incarceration. Her belly rumbles. She goes back to bed. With luck, she won’t have to deal with the police when they arrive.
Jacqui takes the stairs to the basement of her tower block. It smells of damp and faintly of urine. A smeared window at the top of a wall busy with graffiti lets in what little light there is to see by, as she drops the seeds one by one into the gap between the lift and the floor.
Apparently there is a place further down where the lift can go; the unmarked door nearby is probably how the engineers descend to it. She thinks about the seeds lying on the ground in the darkness.
She waits, shaking her head at her gullibility. She is about to climb back up the stairs to take some fresh air and ponder her next move, when the lift doors slide open. The compartment’s eerie light illuminates the basement. At least there isn’t a bogeyman inside. When she looks behind her, expecting the man from Castle Park erupting with laughter, all she sees is her own shadow.
The lift has an LED display which confirms she is on the basement floor. The lowest button is ‘B’. The man was talking rubbish; of course there is nothing below that. At the top is a button marked ‘roof’. She knows – everyone who grew up in this building knows – that only those with a key can reach that floor. She tries the key.
It fits. She turns it, and presses the top button. The lift doors close. The sign shows 0… 1… 2… all the way up to 14, then ‘Roof’. The doors slide open.
There are solar panels at one end and a garden at the other – every spare part of this city has been used either to generate energy or absorb carbon. As she walks along the path that leads from the lift, a seagull which has perched on the railing ahead stares at her, winging off when she has almost reached the edge of the building.
The drop makes her giddy; but as long as she keeps her eyes closer to the horizon she finds she can take in the vista of Bristol, which almost shimmers in the heat. It exudes greenery: trees line the streets; allotments and nature reserves fill every gap; most of the roofs are either flat and covered in grass, or slope, bedecked with solar panels.
Bristol is a farm and a power plant. Jacqui is not alone in finding Bristol’s hunger and electricity outages hard to grasp sometimes. But food is seasonal and sometimes disrupted by weather; the sun and the wind can be unpredictable and insufficient. “External factors” is one of the phrases in public announcements that do the citizens’ heads in.
Her city is beautiful, up so high. You cannot see the pissed-off faces below. That man in Castle Park never said anything about this roof, but he has led her to this delight, at least.
She presses ‘7’ to take the lift back to her flat. She won’t tell her mum. It’s Jacqui’s secret; her mum won’t believe her, anyway. Her stomach shifts queasily as the lift begins its descent, and the LED display shows 14… 13… Thoughts of the seeds and what the man said about them “excavating” fill her brain. Why had he wanted to engage her with such particularities of foolishness?
When she looks back at the display it says 5… 4… Had she pressed a lower button by mistake? 3… 2… 1… 0… B.
But the lift is still moving. It’s descending, descending, picking up speed. There is a mechanical rushing sound. There are bumps and jarrings and the shrill sounds metal makes when close to the point of failure. It seems as though it might never stop.
Until at last it slows and, with a slight jiggle of the cables from which it hangs, it stops. Silence. She presses ‘7’. Nothing happens. She presses it again, and again. She tries every button, even ‘B’. The lift stays put. The silence grows deeper. She takes a breath and presses the button to open the doors.
Darkness – next to the harsh lift light. Moist air. Gingerly, she presses her foot outside. An unyielding surface meets it. She steps into the shadowy space which her senses tell her is cavernous, even though she can see little in the lift’s glare. A whirring sound begins and the smell of food cooking reaches her nostrils. She follows it, along a path lit with soft lights. The more unwise her distance from the lift becomes, the greater grows the attraction of the delicious aroma. She can’t help herself.
“Would you like some, dear? It’s for the six giants, of course, but I expect I could give you a bite while we’re waiting. They’ll be here soon.” The speaker’s face clarifies as Jacqui nervously walks towards her and away from the only possible means of return, which is now hidden from sight.
The woman has switched on a wall light which shadows the bones of her face. She is dressed smartly in office wear – like a personal assistant. Jacqui had imagined food cooking on a hob or within an oven but there is only a huge microwave. It pings.
“It’s spicy bean pie.”
Jacqui climbs on one of the huge chairs. As she devours the pie she hears the sound of chanting, growing in volume.
Black is gold and gold is black.
They grow the green, we cut it back.
“That’ll be them,” the woman says. “The giants. Expect they’re hungry like you. Their appetites know no bounds, dear. Best not to let them find you here, eating their pie, even though they wouldn’t touch that beany one with a bargepole.” She pops six giant-sized pies into the microwave and returns her attention to the mobile which has been dinging with message alerts.
The giants’ approach is becoming deafening.
Six, six, six are we
We flood their rivers and burn the trees.
We take their money and the air they breathe.
Drilling and pumping and smoking grief.
Drilling and pumping and smoking grief.
Beneath the chanting, great footsteps boom. The woman calmly opens a cupboard and bids Jacqui to hide within it. Jacqui bends to clamber in, and once settled peers through a gap in the doors.
Six giants are seated at the table. They look around with black, unseeing eyes; their hands are drills and shovels, tearing into the meaty pies. None of them talk. Barrels hang at their belts, jiggling with their movements.
Eventually they fall asleep. Despite the tremors of her pumping heart, Jacqui creeps up to the closest giant to examine the barrel. Her fingers find it slick with oil. In Bristol, oil is a dirty word. At the same time, everyone knows that it is valuable in the underworld market. How many pies would a barrel buy? How much electricity? She unclasps it from the snoring beast, and steals back to the waiting lift.
Jacqui’s mum almost faints at the sight of the contraband barrel in her front room. She scowls at her daughter, whose face is blotchy with its leaking contents, and sweaty from the burden of it.
“I… Where did you… How did you…?” But Mum is in no position to say no to pies and electricity.
Jacqui tells herself she is doing what anyone would do in her situation. The sniggering, hand-rubbing fellow who buys the barrel has no qualms about relieving her of it. He knows people who will pay handsomely to slake the thirst of their retro machinery.
The money is welcome but soon spent. Jacqui wrestles at night with her conscience; but eventually she takes the lift and recreates her journey down below. Once again, the woman, who is wearing a suit but in a different shade of charcoal, feeds her. Once again the giants arrive. But this time, they seem to sense she is there.
Black is gold and gold is black,
If we find a girl thief we’ll break her back.
Subsidise, subsidise,
She’ll pay us for her own demise.
Six, six, six are we.
We’ll flood the rivers and burn the trees.
Drilling and pumping and smoking grief.
Drilling and pumping and smoking grief.
The giants open every door in the kitchen and smell for her, their black eyes swivelling but blind, constantly reaching and touching one another by way of coordination. Fortunately, the woman has thought to hide Jacqui under the table this time, where their pies sit ready for them and steam with a meaty smell that hides her nervous, sweating aroma.
The rumbling in their stomachs grows until they give up and eat, their twelve legs only centimetres from where Jacqui cowers. She listens to the chomping and watches their spillages of bloody juice splatter on the floor beside her. She almost retches. Then the drilling and shovelling cease and soon she hears their snores. A low-hanging barrel on a giant’s belt is easily unhitched. She steals to the lift.
But this time, the giants wake and are quick in pursuit. Rushing into the lift, she turns to see them power towards her, a six-headed, twelve-legged beast with six sensitive noses.
When she presses ‘7’, the doors swish closed just in time, and the lift jerks upwards, upwards. She can hear them thumping on the outer door below her, the sound booming up the lift shaft even though it is soon far below. She collapses, heart racing, panting in a corner.
She closes her eyes and tries to be patient while the lift takes an eternity to reach her tower block. If she concentrates, she tells herself, she can manage not to eat the extra pie which the personal assistant has slipped in her pocket, and save it for her mum. When the lift stops, she opens her eyes again and looks at the lift’s LED display. Which is still blank. The previous time, the lift had eventually shown the succession of floors until hers.
Perhaps it is just one of those little digital malfunctions which plague everyone’s lives. She presses the button to open the doors. And is horrified to find a wall of earth, with roots protruding and sharp stones embedded. There is nothing to support it. If the wall of soil were to collapse, it would suffocate her. She finds she can close the doors, but the buttons to the tower block still have no effect, even when she uses her key.
When she opens the doors again, a giant worm has appeared. A worm’s face protrudes as big as hers, with a jaw and lips surrounded by a ring of what look like stalagmites of flesh.
“Oh,” the jaws move. “Tut. Tut.” The first metre of the worm has entered the lift and is peering down at the barrel. Clumps of soil are falling into the lift.
“Oi!” Jacqui says. “Careful! You’ll bring that lot down on me.”
“That lot of which you speak is my home,” says the worm. “And you – you with your barrel of black gunk – are a trespasser.”
“Talk to the lift about that, mate. Not me. I pressed ‘7’. Is this 7? No. I don’t bleedin’ well think it is. Minus 99, more like. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
The worm clenches its glistening body. A pulse of muscle ripples along its length as it squeezes itself until it is entirely within the lift, its coils gripped against the back wall, looking down at her.
“I need to return that.” It screws up its face at the barrel. “To the earth, I mean. Not to the giants you stole it from. Moreover, I have something to give you. To take to the surface of what you think of as the world.”
And with that, the worm grimaces with effort and lays a golden cocoon. Jacqui can see wriggling threads beneath its translucent oval ball.
“They’re not what you think,” the worm says. “They’re wires. Wires that make their own electricity.” The worm’s face approaches her. Thank goodness, she thinks, it has no breath. “You can attach them to any device of your choosing and they will power it.”
“Why… why would you give me that?”
“Because I am of the earth, and the earth told me to.”
Thank goodness, she thinks, that it has no tongue. “Well please send my regards to the earth, I’m sure. Can I go now?”
The worm wriggles its massive length back into the hole. This time, the lift takes Jacqui back to the seventh floor. The flat is in darkness. She presses the light switch. Nothing happens.
She hides the cocoon in her bedroom after taking out a single wire by moonlight.
Something is telling her what to do. It might be her intuition, but she is not so sure. She pops the spicy bean pie in the microwave. She bends the two ends of the wire from the cocoon around the live and neutral pins of its plug before inserting it back in the socket.
“Beep,” goes the microwave. All the lights come on in the flat and throughout the tower block. Her mobile illuminates, beginning to charge.
When she presses Start, the microwave whirrs into action.
“Mum,” Jacqui calls out. “Look what I’ve got.”
Tim Kindberg is a writer and digital creative. He is author of Vampires of Avonmouth, a gothic sci-fi novel set between West Africa and the West Country, about a struggle to regain humanity in a techno-dystopian future. Tim is working on Sust, a platform for empowering consumers to shop sustainably based on research funded by the University of Bristol.
Main photo: Martin Booth
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