Trapped

This story hardly paints me in a great light. But it’s real, it happened. I was in Sydney for a church convention. I was staying with my friends, the Henwoods. I was on my own, having come down from Coffs Harbour.

It was a full weekend, and I was catching a train back home on the Tuesday morning. The station was walking distance from the Henwood’s house. They all had to go to work and school that morning. So as a good guest, I said: “I know what it’s like getting organised in the morning – I’ll just sleep in, let you all get away, and then sort myself out after you’ve gone, locking the front door behind me”. Good idea, everyone was happy.

My train wasn’t due to leave until 11am, so I slept in, heard them all leave and then got up. The luxury of having the house to yourself! Thought I would start with a shower. Got into the bathroom, got undressed, and was about to start the shower and thought I would go to the toilet first. Was about to put something on when I realised – hey, I’m in the house on my own, I’ll just duck around the corridor, into the toilet, au naturale. No problem.

Got into the toilet, closed the door. I then heard a sickening sound: the sound of the doorknobs falling off, from both sides of the door. So I’m in the toilet, starkers. One doorknob on my side of the door, but the metal rod in the door is completely flush (flush, good one) within the mechanism of the door. So, how to open the door?

Instinctively, I patted my pockets to see if there was anything I could use. First realisation: no pockets. Not only no pockets; no belt, no shoelaces, no… anything. Not a single thing I could use as a tool to open the door. Unbelievably, I patted myself down again. When you are starkers, you ain’t got nuttin’: I was having trouble recognising the starkness of the dearth of the objects I had to hand.

I looked around the room. It turns out people don’t keep anything useful in a toilet. In fact, there was only toilet paper (useful of course, but not for my current need). A good pair of needle-nosed pliers, even a bit of wire: that would have been useful.

Unless… maybe I could create a mat of criss-crossed toilet paper slide it under the door, push the metal rod (spindle is the correct term) through the door, hope it landed on the toilet paper, hope it would then fit under the door as I pulled the mat back.

One of the things I then learned about toilet paper is that it is maddeningly soft (this is not a problem with toilet paper I had ever thought about before). So as I created my mat of toilet paper: it seemed weak, it seemed unlikely to hold together and it didn’t want to be pushed under the door (it just sort of bunched up).

I stopped and reviewed my options:

1) call out like a lunatic until one of the (fairly distant) neighbours heard me – if they were home. I would then have to explain that I was stark naked in the toilet and then what? Do they break in? Do they call one of the Henwoods home? Do they even know where they work??

2) I could wait all day until the Henwoods get home – 8 or 9 hours in a toilet. At least I wouldn’t die of thirst (yes, my personal options were narrowing as I thought about it). So I wait 9 hours; miss my train; and then what if it’s Mrs Henwood who comes home first? Or their son? This sounded like something that just Mr Henwood and I should work out, it didn’t sound like a problem for wives or children.

3) Option three? There was no option three. Option 1 if it worked, Option 2 if it didn’t. Oh goody.

So, back to the door. I had a doorknob, but that was all. If I could get anything into the door works that would pull the little metal rod out enough, I could then use the doorknob on it, and open the door. But the metal rod was completely and utterly flush with the metal around it.

I don’t know how I did it. With my fingers and one fingernail I worked on that little metal rod. I willed it towards me. After about 10 minutes (nine of which I was petrified I would just push it further in) a little bit of rod came out in my direction. I got it! Hooray. I pulled it out on my side of the door, put it into the doorknob, put that into the door and opened it! Success!

So I finished my ablutions, had a shower, got dressed, caught the train, and got home.

Later, as I was recounting my story to Mr Henwood, he said “oh yeah, that happens all the time, I should have mentioned it….”.