Fantasy Dinner Party

‘I’m really sorry.’ He couldn’t bear to look at her and was staring at a spot in the corner of the lift. ‘I’m very glad you had it in your bag. Could have been quite embarrassing otherwise.’

She looked at him with distain. So what he’d done wasn’t embarrassing? ‘I’ll never be able to use it again,’ she said.

Her water bottle, midnight blue with star constellations marked onto it, sat on the floor, forlornly. She grimaced involuntarily at the sight of it.

‘Thanks for averting your eyes,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t big enough. I mean, the capacity of the bottle, not the aperture. I’m not talking about my…’ He began tripping over his words, talking more quickly. ‘I had to hold some back, but getting out what I did has taken the pressure off.’

Aperture! She dropped her head and let out a groan. Bad enough he’d done it, and that she’d heard it, but why must he now talk about it. She opened her handbag, located the blister pack of paracetamol she had hoped was there, popped two from the foil and swallowed them dry.

A long silence.

‘I’ll buy you a new one,’ he said. ‘Soon as we get out of here.’

‘It’s a Swell,’ she said. ‘£27 in John Lewis.’ She sounded matter of fact, resigned, bored even.

‘Why would anyone do that?’ For the first time in the hour of being trapped there together, he showed some emotion. ‘Why would anyone spend £27 on a water bottle? What’s wrong with using an empty plastic one?’

‘Because the plastic perishes and poisons you. Slowly. Miniscule carcinogens build up in the body and eventually take you down.’

‘That’s cheery,’ he said with annoying cheerfulness. ‘Personally, I’d count myself blessed if my demise was down to drinking water from an over-used plastic bottle.’

She and her sisters used to play a game, the opposite of Fantasy Dinner Party, where you had to pick three people, dead or alive, with whom you’d least like to get stuck in a lift. One sister’s nightmare was Anton Du Beke, the very mention of his name made her gag (De Boke, she called him). For the other sister it was Wayne Rooney, she said she couldn’t put her finger on why, but there was ‘something unnerving about those hair implants’. When it came to her, she never played. ‘What’s the point?’ she would say, ‘it’s never going to happen.’

Never say never. Now, too late, she had learned never again to step into a lift with her boss.

Funny thing was that since he asked to relieve himself in her Swell bottle she felt like the boss of him. That falling note as the bottle filled with urine, the sound of his sharp intake of breath as he failed to stop in time and pissed a little on the floor then bent to wipe it with some tissue. Maybe the excess dribble could be wiped clean, but the memory of it could not, not for either of them.

‘I suppose you’ll be telling our colleagues about this when we get out,’ he said.

Word in the office was he read their emails, but now he seemed to be reading her mind.

‘I can’t stop you,’ he said, ‘but I’d be grateful if you kept it to yourself. Discretion being the better part of valour, and all that.’

He was right; she had been planning to tell everyone, to mock him, to enjoy seeing the powerful reduced. But here in the lift they were equals, two humans in a short-term predicament, sharing a small space, living their little lives as best they could.

She bent her knees and slid her back down the wall, careful not to sit near the wiped-up patch.

‘Care to sit down?’ she said, pointing to the space beside her. ‘We could be here for a while. How about a game: fantasy dinner party, you can invite three people, dead or alive.’