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73 Three Men in a Lift, Not to Mention the Woman Who Didn’t Get In It was a University function held at the Art’s Centre on the Island. The Arts Centre is a fifteen-minute walk away from the city centre, what the locals call prime-land. This was for some years the most costly piece of land in the world, it is now the third most costly, after Tokyo and London. The city, represented by the Urban Council, had been hankering after such a centre for decades, neither private nor public sector paid any attention, the arts being hardly a lucrative activity. It was finally built because some clever bureaucrat detected an angle of space in between two high-rise buildings which could be made into a triangle. At least it would be a variation on going round and round in circles. It is aesthetically interesting too, it’s like fitting a neat compact triangular Pompidou Centre of a box in between the legs of a sleeping giant. And so the New University had seen fit to mix and mingle with the suave urbanites in their environment instead of holding the reception out in the wilds of the country-side campus. Guests and university personnel alike were arriving in hordes, jamming the triangular lobby, waiting to take the lifts that would take them to higher triangles. Men in dark suits, women dripping in jewels and finery jostled about elbowing their way everywhere. This was twenty-first century civilization where a dissociation of finery from fine manners had firmly set in. Bringing up the rear, about a lift-load away, was a group of four trying to make conversation and visibly straining. I was later to learn that the three men were high-ranking administrators in a university run by administrators and the woman only an academic, and a junior one to boot. The unspoken rationale was that any academic who rose high enough in the ranks would become administrator. Indeed, the administration was the university. Academics were incidental additions 74 as somehow courses had to be offered and students somehow had to be taught. The young-looking man on the left was Petronius Ong, recently Harvard Phd’d and positively glowing, now dean of students in one of the colleges. The one on the right was Aloysius Jing, son of pre-communist Chinese Mandarin, American educated, just returned from Cambridge, U.K., full of praise for “the civilised manners of the English”. The man in the middle was T.S. Tan, president of one of the colleges, who refers to Lord Todd by his first name, etc., etc. The lift arrived. People got out. People got in. As the four neared the lift entrance, it became clear there was only room for three. As if caught in mid-sentence, for a split second facial muscles tensed up and the four shared a blank look. No one actually made a mad dash, they just straightened their backs and looked vague. Then everything happened very quickly. The three men moved towards the lift and just as they did so, the woman took one big deliberate step backwards. It was at this point that she caught my eye and we burst out laughing together. She came up to me as I leant against the counter and explained that that was perhaps the refugee spirit which was so infectious in this colony. Three presumably civilized men couldn’t resist getting into a lift as if it was the last lift available, the last meal, the last boat, the last chance. You’re a journalist, she called to me as she was about to board an empty lift, write about it, make someone laugh! There was a last gesture that struck me as interesting. I wonder if she noticed, perhaps women don’t. That tableau of the lift doors about to close, the three men were standing in a straight line, all three of them held their hands together in front of their trousers, as if protecting themselves. I know, a lot of nonsense has been made of Hitler and his hands-over-his-crotch pose. However, can there really be some truth in man’s fear of castration being the basis for all other fears, including the fear of missing out on a lift? I’ll be damned if I’m going to find out! ...

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