Free The Real Thing by Brian Falkner Page B

right. You’d need a battering ram to get through those.’
    Fizzer was hardly listening. He was watching the way the long chain had dragged across the edge of the centre post when Tupai had moved to the doors, splintering and chipping the wood.
    ‘What’s holding up the roof?’ Fizzer asked.
    ‘A great, big post,’ Tupai said, in a kindergarten voice.
    ‘And if we took the post away?’
    ‘The roof would probably cave in and kill us.’
    ‘Or it might cave in and leave a big hole we could climb out of. And if we stayed by the walls we could probably avoid being crushed.’
    ‘Right,’ said Tupai cheerily. ‘So all we need is an axe.’
    ‘Or a band saw,’ Fizzer said quietly.
    Half an hour later they had succeeded in knocking an edge off the post, about knee height. An hour later it had grown to a small indentation in the wood.
    A chain does not make a very good band saw. Even so, by that night they had a groove about half a centimetre deep.
    They took a dinner break at about six o’clock.
    ‘This is going to take forever,’ Tupai shook his head doubtfully, chewing over a mouthful of cold beans.
    ‘Got anything better to do?’
    By the end of the third day the groove was a deep cut. Tupai had one end of the chain, and Fizzer the other. They sawed away at the post by pulling the chain back and forth between them.
    Progress was faster on the fourth day. The chain now slotted into the cut in the wood, and they didn’t have to spend quite so much time or energy trying to keep it in position.
    Two days after that, they were wholeheartedly sick of cold canned beans, but the post was cut almost to the middle.
    ‘You’d have thought they could have varied the diet a little,’ Tupai complained.
    ‘Hmm.’ Fizzer wrinkled his nose. ‘Give me a box of matches and we could blow our way out of here.’
    It was about noon on the Monday, after more than a week of imprisonment, when Tupai decided he’d had enough.
    ‘I think I can break it,’ he said.
    Fizzer looked doubtful. The post was only two-thirds cut.
    ‘If we push from the cut side,’ Tupai explained, ‘the weight of the post will help crack the timber on the other side. Then we push from the other side, and the weakened post should break.’
    ‘We’ll try it,’ Fizzer agreed. ‘What do I do?’
    ‘Put your shoulder into it.’
    Tupai sat on the floor and placed his feet on the post, just above the cut. Fizzer put his shoulder against the post, a little higher.
    ‘Here goes nothing,’ he said.
    The post creaked and cracked and bent, until the gap they had cut had completely closed. It would give way no more after that.
    They changed sides and pushed back but, despite their best efforts, they could only move the post a couple of centimetres before it sprang back to where it was.
    Fizzer looked doubtfully at the cut, now completely closed up again.
    ‘Maybe we should have waited a little longer,’ he said.
    There was no accusation in his voice, just a simple statement of fact.
    ‘Sorry,’ Tupai said.
    ‘That’s all right mate, we’ll have a break now and make a new start in the morning.’ Fizzer sat down on his haunches and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. ‘Why is it so hard this way, when it was so easy the other way?’
    ‘I think it’s because we’re now pushing against the weight of the wood. I didn’t consider that before.’
    Tupai sat down on the floor again and put his feet back up on the post. ‘Half the problem is that I’ve got nothing to push against. If my back was up against the wall, I’d push against that.’
    ‘I can be a wall,’ said Fizzer.
    Tupai looked at him questioningly.
    ‘I can be a wall,’ Fizzer repeated with conviction. ‘It’s just mind over matter.’
    ‘Worth a crack,’ Tupai said, although he wasn’t sure that it was.
    Fizzer sat back to back with Tupai and braced his feet against the wall of the cellar. ‘I’ll tell you when,’ he said.
    Tupai rested his feet on the post