The lift

Source: an original fiction extract.

“At a quarter to six, June stepped into the lift with two shopping bags and a bunch of daffodils. She lived on the seventh floor. A young man in a delivery jacket followed her, holding a cardboard box flat against his chest. He pressed nine and looked at his phone. June pressed seven, although its small square was already glowing. They watched the doors close on the bright entrance hall, each relieved that nothing needed to be said.

The lift climbed with a tired metallic sigh. Behind its scratched mirror, the ceiling light trembled, dividing their reflections into pale, restless fragments. June could hear a bottle tapping against a jar in her shopping bag: a tiny, stubborn clock. Then the floor gave a short shudder. The numbers above the door went dark. In the sudden stillness, the hum she had barely noticed became an enormous absence.

The young man pressed the door button twice. June watched his thumb, then the blank strip where the numbers had been. 'There's an alarm,' she said. He pressed it. A voice answered after a crackle, asked whether anyone was hurt and told them an engineer was on the way. June put down the bags. The man did not put down the box. He was trying to make his phone find a signal, lifting it towards the ceiling as though offering it something.

'Cake?' June asked. He looked startled. She nodded towards the box. 'For my daughter's birthday,' he said. 'I'm late already.' He turned it so she could see the child's name written on the lid. June had assumed he was working. She opened one of her bags and took out a packet of biscuits. He shook his head, then changed his mind. They ate in the dim light while she told him about the time she had made a birthday cake that would not come out of its tin.

When the doors finally opened, a caretaker stood in the gap. The man thanked June before lifting the box carefully through it. She almost said that she had done nothing. Instead, she asked him to wish his daughter a happy birthday. On the seventh floor, June found that one daffodil had snapped. She put it in a small glass beside the larger vase. From somewhere above came the faint, uneven sound of people singing.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the unsettling experience of the lift stopping. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.