Going Up

Going Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 9, 2015

The traffic lights at Labouchere Road flipped to orange and I slammed on the anchors. The car in front sped across the intersection. In the distance I could see cars choking the freeway on-ramp.

“This could take a while,” I said to my three noise-makers in the back, but they were busy singing out of tune to the radio.

Up ahead, I spotted the block of flats I lived in as a four-year-old. I flipped up my sunvisor and counted up four floors to single out the two bedroom apartment Mum rented us after her divorce.

Time had forgotten the five-storey brick box at No. 89 Mill Point Road. All around it, towers of penthouse apartments were drinking in river views. Our 1960s apartment block squatted on the corner, a dumpy brown eyesore.

I studied our fourth floor balcony – a square envelope of concrete jutting out from an expanse of peanut-coloured wall. I could still make out the mulberry-coloured arches painted on the walls at ground level, a clumsy trompe l’oeil stained by the sprinklers with bore water. The umbrella tree in the carpark had grown ten-fold, its flower spikes still catalogued in my mind as giant pink starfish.

Staring at that old building, I was swept away by a flush of early memories. My brain delivered up a snapshot of our flat’s doorbell. It sat just shy of a four-year-old’s straining fingertips, a tantalising square of shiny silver mounted to a green door. I could replay the strangled ‘ding-dong’ of its tuneless chime. I mentally re-traced the swirls in the green carpet on our landing. My mind summonsed the enormous fire hydrant bracketed to the wall beside the lift.

The lift!

I suddenly remembered the lift; could feel again my excitement at being allowed to press the button to summons a ride. The lift announced its arrival with a ‘ping!’ The metal door jolted sideways, vanishing into the wall to reveal a tiny Aladdin’s cave.

Our elevator liked to land where it pleased, forcing me to hop up or jump down to board. I could still recall the tummy butterflies as I contemplated stepping over the two-inch gap between lift and landing. One stumble and I thought I’d fall through the crack and plummet to the lobby. Small girl would be squashed flat by a 2000-pound box. (My brain, enjoying this game, served up a grotesque tableau vivant of the rat Mum once steamrolled with our car.)

Our lift was designed to carry eight people but could only comfortably transport one. It became cramped and awkward with two passengers; incommodious with three. Adult options were limited: stand side by side, shoulders rubbing, or one behind the other, heel to toe. I jammed myself next to the control panel, securing the coveted job of button-pusher.

I tried to identify the smells of the various residents spoiling my ride. Perfumes were stiflingly pungent or sickeningly sweet. Other peoples’ clothing smelt fusty or dank, or reeked of sweat or B.O. Sometimes, Mum got out one floor early and took the stairs.

Later, having conquered my lift-paranoia, I appointed myself elevator-astronaut. Over and over I drove that lift-rocket, cruising down to the lobby then blasting off for Flat 12 on the fourth floor. It mattered not that it was quicker to walk up the stairwell, because I was the pilot in charge of five buttons. (Truthfully, it was only four, because the fifth button was still out of reach.)

Back on Labouchere Road, the traffic lights turned green and my consciousness rejoined the present. As we inched towards the freeway, I wondered if other peoples’ first memories are as equally pedestrian as mine?

The following day, I prodded a girlfriend to tell me her first memory. In vivid detail, she described for me a vignette from her childhood growing up in the Wheatbelt. She remembered being clad in a nappy playing with a toy washing machine on the lid of their septic tank. Her overwhelming feeling, she said, was of the warm sun radiating off the tank, and being absorbed in her domestic idyll, washing her doll’s clothes.

The pair of us were certain our first memories were real, not imagined or distorted by time.

So the next morning, I drove back to my old block of flats in South Perth. A friendly painter allowed me into the building. Climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, I discovered Apartment 12 still had its square doorbell. Bolted to the wall was the very same fire hydrant, (though smaller than I remembered) and the still swirling green carpet.

But unlike me, my beloved lift-rocket had not grown up or moved out. It still had its metal door and faux-timber panelling. Aged 47, I rode that lift up and down – twice – just for kicks, and revisited the favourite scenes from my life, aged four. My job now is not to forget them.