Escapology for beginners
‘Well,’ I said after dinner, as casually as I could. ‘I’m off to bed.’
‘Bed?’ my mother said, narrowing her eyes. ‘It’s only ten to seven.’
According to the business card Mr E had given me, the magicians were meeting at 7.30 pm that night at a scout hall about half an hour’s bike ride from my house. If I was going to get there without my parents finding out, I would need to be in my bedroom with the door shut and the lights out by seven at the absolute latest.
My original plan was to get into trouble so they would send me to my room. But that would mean I’d need to do something bad enough to get them to punish me but not so bad that they’d want to have a Long Serious Talk about my behaviour. Flick peas at the cat during dinner: not bad enough. Shave the cat during dinner: too far, Nick, way too far.
So instead, I was going to go with the old tired routine.
‘Just feeling a little sleepy,’ I said, doing my best fake yawn which, conveniently, turned into a real one. ‘Today really took it out of me.’
‘Don’t you want any dessert?’ my father said.
‘Dessert?’
If I turned down dessert, I was going to make them suspicious. I do not skip dessert. Never have and never will. If you came to me and said, ‘Nick, for dinner tonight we’re having lime jelly wrapped in chocolate cake dipped in strawberry mousse and deep-fried in doughnut batter,’ I would say to you, ‘Well, that sounds great. What’s for dessert?’
I snuck a peek at my watch. It was 6.53 pm.
‘What are we having?’ I asked.
‘Fruit salad and yoghurt.’ My mother sighed. ‘Your father is making dessert.’
Phew. My dad’s idea of dessert was plain fruit topped with plain yoghurt. Not even good fruits like watermelon or peaches or mangoes either. It’d be the boring ones like apple and pear and banana. I’ve got nothing against a good banana, but a banana is not dessert.
‘No thanks!’ I yawned again, actually starting to feel a little sleepy for real, and closed my bedroom door.
I counted to a hundred to make sure they weren’t going to check on me. I looked at my watch again. 6.56 pm.
I needed to get to work.
Escapology is the art of escaping in the most entertaining way you can. You might be tied up in a straitjacket suspended upside down from a crane or locked in a wooden crate and thrown into a river. I once saw a guy wrapped in fifty metres of sandwich wrap escape in under a minute.
Here’s a simple escape you can do right now. Get a friend to tie a metre-long piece of rope around one of your wrists and then the other so you have a nice long piece of rope between your hands. Now, do the same to your friend with another piece of rope, threading their rope through yours as you do. Once you’re finished, it should look like this.
It looks like the two of you are trapped, right? Destined to spend the rest of your lives bound together. But to escape, all you need to do is take a loop of your friend’s rope and thread it through the back of the rope that is tied around your left wrist, like this:
If you pull that loop over your left hand and then pull the rope tight, you’ll find that the two of you are separated.
Is it a magic trick? No, not really. But, for some reason, magicians love escaping from tricky situations. Maybe that’s the reason I considered myself a master of escaping from my bedroom.
Obviously it would be pretty irresponsible of me to teach you how to sneak out of your bedroom at night. So for any responsible adults who might be reading this over your shoulder I will instead share with you my recipe for organic vegan chocolate cookies.
Have the responsible adults gone?
Good.
Forget that revolting mess of recipe. That was just a decoy. Carob is the root of most, if not all, of the problems in the world today. Here’s the real deal on escaping from your room at night.
The main thing you need to do is make sure that there is noise coming from your room. Parents are really suspicious of silence. If you’re being quiet, they’ll know you are up to no good.
In my room, I made a list of possible ways to make enough noise to make sure my parents didn’t come to check on me.
- Paint cat food on a piano. The cat will spend all night trying to lick the food off the keys, making it sound like I’m practising.
- Fill a blender with belly button lint, sock fuzz or any assorted fluff that might be lying around. The muffled whirring noise will sound like I’m vacuuming my room.
- Attach a broken whoopee cushion to a ceiling fan. As the fan spins, air will rush through the suspended cushion and create the sound of unrelenting farts, giving the impression that I am in my room, busily passing wind.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a piano, a blender or even a broken whoopee cushion in my room. Also, I was supposed to be asleep, not vacuuming, piano playing or farting. So instead, I switched on my clock radio and turned it down low enough that my parents could hear it if they walked past my door but not so loud that they would come barging in telling me to ‘turn that racket down’.
It was just past seven when I slid open my bedroom window, scrambled through and landed in the bushes below. It had been a cloudy day and it was already pitch black outside. Steam puffed from my mouth as I crawled along the side of the house beneath the lounge-room window. I risked a peek inside, where I saw my mother and father watching a boring show about a farm vet. I hated that show. How many times could they watch a guy stick his arm into a cow’s bum?
I held my breath as I passed beneath the window, trying my hardest not to squash my father’s flowerbed. He might not notice me missing but he’d definitely notice if one single petal of his pansies was out of place.
I had never done anything like this before. I was not a naughty kid. I mean, I wasn’t a particularly good kid either, I was just too scared of getting into trouble to do anything really bad. Say what you will about the troublemakers of the world, at least they’ve got guts. I had no idea how my parents would react if they caught me sneaking out. Somehow, not knowing what I was in for if I got busted made me even more nervous. My insides hadn’t settled down since the library and now the butterflies were even worse.
My BMX was beside the house where I’d dumped it. I didn’t have a light for it and my helmet was in the hall by the front door. But I didn’t need them. I was a rebel, a rule breaker. I was one of the troublemakers. I clambered onto my bike and took off into the night.