Dialogue: Don't go to the loo without a nail file

By PAMELA WADE

Until yesterday, I would have agreed with you that it's the loss of trust in a relationship that affects your subsequent outlook on daily life in a manner second to none.

But that was before my daughter managed to lock herself in the bathroom. The ensuing saga brought home to me that there is nothing more fundamental than the loss of trust in a doorknob.

We breeze unthinkingly through doorways all day, every day, and take entirely for granted the operation of the latch, but the failure of this simple mechanism has the power to reduce us to basics.

There's nothing like being stuck, helpless, on the wrong side of a door for stripping away our intellectual and technological advantages and putting us on the same level as the family pet.

Suddenly you regret your impatience with that incessant scratching at the door and the plaintive miaows, and experience a wave of empathy with all those creatures not blessed with opposable thumbs.

Fellow feeling with the lower orders of the animal kingdom was not, however, my 11-year-old's first reaction, which was briefly alarm, escalating immediately to panic, followed by deepest despair. Amy had been here before, you see - or, rather, just down the hallway in the toilet, where two years earlier she had also had a doorknob fail on her.

When you've found yourself weeping and clinging to not one but two obdurate doorknobs before you've even hit puberty you can be forgiven a touch of paranoia.

On the first occasion, we learned that the common domestic doorknob is a classic example of over-engineering, built to withstand the fiercest onslaught, and would not be out of place on any one of the doors that Frodo and company are seen regularly cowering behind.

It was an act of sheerest optimism to have expected the nail file to have any effect, but it was still a surprise that neither the hammer, nor, amazingly, the electric saw could inflict more than the merest scratch.

The door proving impregnable, the only option was to break in through the window. I shall skim over the details of this procedure, apart from noting that louvres stuck in their brackets with epoxy glue will indeed stymie the most determined burglar; and that when easing size-14 hips through a size-10 window edged with jagged glass, the last thing you want to notice, as you pivot on the windowsill before sliding headfirst over the cistern, is that no one has thought to put the lid down.

Keen to salvage something positive from the experience, I seized that opportunity to show Amy how a catch was constructed and, more importantly, dismantled. So when, yesterday, I had stopped reeling from the deja vu, I was confident that the bathroom scenario would soon be sorted.

And, yes, thanks to her deft use of the indispensable nail file, the knob was popped off in short order, but that was as far as Amy could go. The rose was screwed on too tightly and after scrabbling at it vainly for some time she slumped, whimpering, to the floor.

It was only a fleeting moment of weakness: she soon rallied, bravely pointing out through the door that the bathroom was an infinitely superior place to be trapped in than the toilet. There was space, carpet, heat and, best of all, makeup, a mirror and a radio. Wombs don't come much more comfortable than that.

Quick action was required to prevent total regression. The ladder was fetched, the window opened, and I sprang lightly through to the rescue. Except that the rose was on too tight even for me to unscrew. In either direction.

Do you, in moments of stress, ever doubt a lifetime's custom and experience? When faced with an immovable nut, are you ever overwhelmingly tempted to test whether this particular thread in fact goes the other way, even though, in doing so, you know you run the risk of tightening it further? It's a matter of faith: right for tight. Believe it.

One more word of advice: the thing with the credit card is a total fiction. You've seen it done a hundred times on television, and every time the latch slipped out of the hole with a satisfying click. In real life, however, all that happens is that the magnetic strip gets wrecked, and the people at the bank laugh at you.

It was getting late and the time for finesse was over. The hinge pins were knocked out, the door lifted out of the way and Amy was set free. But we walked out of that bathroom changed people.

We know that we live on the edge, and that the one certainty in life is that it's only a fool who goes to the loo without a nail file.

* Pamela Wade is an Auckland writer.