Absconding III - Michael Sheridan

Max has learnt how to open the back door through the laundry, and the internal door to the garage.  He has also learnt how to smash through the hooks we have used on these.  It’s a brute force approach.  Jerking hard on the door and ripping the hooks clean out.  He now leaves to go exploring whenever he wants.  I have become fed up with this and we’ve just arrived home with new security chains.  I am now installing them.

I’m starting in the laundry.  Max is playing on a mattress in the adjacent spare bedroom.  He’s wandering in and out to see what I am doing.  He has come and gone a few times now, but because I wouldn’t let him play with the drill, he has mostly gone back to the mattress.  As I’m finishing the chain in here, he’s back.  He wants to get out now.  I pop the chain into place and let him try it.  When the door stops only slightly open, he pulls a couple of times then reaches through.  He unlocks the outer screen door.  He gives the screen a push and it crashes against the wall.  The inner door, however, is still held by the chain.  Not to give up this easily though, he pulls a couple more times, and realising that it won’t go, he tries something else.

It seems like a good time to send a video to Elizabeth, so I get my phone out.  What happens next takes about thirty seconds of video.  I start by showing the chain at my eye level, then pan down to Max.  Elizabeth and I had recently had a discussion (or perhaps an argument) about how little she thinks I do during the day.  Suffice to say, I thought she was wrong.  So, she thinks then that I should tell her about it. 

Okay.

On a side note, she should know better than this.  The last time she told me I didn’t do enough, I put it all on my calendar and then projected the routine out for the next year.  Dishwasher twice a day.  Laundry.  Grocery shopping.  All the regular errands.  By chance we were meeting for lunch that day whereupon she told me she’d had to unfollow my calendar, because she could no longer see hers.  Surprise!

Max turns sideways through the door and slides his body into the gap.  Hips first, then shoulders, then head.  No.  His head won’t fit.  Not quite.  He comes back in.  I send the video.  I go to the next room and get a padlock.  The chain is now locked as short as it will go.  I’ve won this one.  For now.  I send a photo of the padlocked chain.  Next, the garage.  I have another chain for the internal garage door here.

I move to the downstairs hall and Max follows me.  He has now become interested in the spare keys. 

These had been be kept in the draw of my desk in the front room.  Max learnt a while ago how to open locks, so this set of keys were put on a hook behind the front door and far above his reach.  This was my mother-in-law’s idea.  I suggested at the time that it wouldn’t work for long, because I was sure he’d find a way to reach them.  We tried it anyhow.  I am genuinely surprised that it has taken a few months.  Now, today, he has set his mind to it.  It’s taken five minutes.  I snap a photo.  He has upended a wicker basket and is standing on it.  The basket is supposed to store his shoes, in a different room.  It isn’t storing shoes now.  There are shoes everywhere.  He has the keys.  I snap another photo.  And he has used the button to open the garage door.  I snap another photo of him tossing the keys.

The next obstacle to him getting out, is me.  He is doing everything he can to push me out of the way of the internal door so that he can leave.  He knows that he has opened the roller door.  I make it clear that I am not going to move, and I finish installing the chain.  And then I shut the roller.  Remembering the laundry, I’ve made this chain a little shorter, as a precaution.  I send Elizabeth a photo of this chain.  Max gets his wicker basket and stands on it to remove the chain.  This may not be as Max-proof as I had hoped.  That was fast even by his standards.  I pull him down and send him to the stairs.  Rechaining the door, hanging the key and moving the basket back to the room it came from.  And tidying the shoes.

He goes upstairs.  I follow.  He grabs a handful of papers from Elizabeth’s filling cabinet.  He hurls the papers and laughs gleefully.  I pick the papers up and put them where she can make sense of them later.  He is already going back downstairs.  The papers were the decoy.  He's gone to the laundry.  He is standing on top of the washer.  Photo!

The new washer makes its own hot water.  There is no hose now on the hot water tap.  Max has turned the water on.  I move him off and stop the water.  He has left.  He’s in the hall.  He’s got the basket.  He’s got the front door keys.  I hear the garage door go up while I’m still moping the flood.  I arrive in time to snap a photo of the open internal door.  Another of the open garage.  All on the fly as I go.  One photo of his leopard blanket left on a veranda chair.

I walk around the corner hoping to find him hosing in our yard.  But he is not.  He is nowhere to be seen.  A photo anyhow, and then straight around to the neighbour.  I can get a photo of him as he turns their tap on at the front corner before he follows the hose to the backyard.  Camera still in hand, I round the back of their house, and get a photo of him holding their whirling sprinkler aloft.  I’ve been snapping photos and videos in SMS mode.  So, the photos are just feeding straight to Elizabeth.

“Enough”, she texts back.  “I’m too busy for this now.”

I lead Max back home and inside.  Close the roller, chain the door and hang the keys.  Knowing he’ll try again, I let him start.  The last video, that I’ll send her later, is Max on his wicker basket, at full stretch, unchaining the internal door to the garage.

Time for a change of scene.  I lead him to the bathroom and turn the shower on.  He’s happy to play in the warm shower for a while.  For my own curiosity, I measure the height of the keys on the hook and the chains.  All are more than six feet up.  This is not Max-proof enough.  But at least it will slow him down.  Slightly.  For a while.