Anything is Possible

by Hazel Flynn

  However, with the stunt just days away Brett got bitten on the hand by a shark, and the injury was bad enough to land him in hospital. Thankfully he didn’t lose any body parts but he needed stitches and treatment for infection caused by bacteria in the creature’s mouth. It had happened during a feeding session but I knew the keepers wore protective chainmail when they did the shark feeding so couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. Brett, whose love of sharks was undiminished by the incident, explained that the creature in question hadn’t really been attacking him. ‘She’d have done a lot more damage than that if she had,’ he said. He explained that the shark had gone to bite the fish he was holding before he’d had time to get his hand out of the way and part of the bite had penetrated the protective suit. I thought Brett was a remarkable guy and that having him talk about what had happened would be a great way to help the media understand that what I was about to do was not an illusion, it was genuinely dangerous for a number of reasons — including the sharks. But it wasn’t the kind of publicity the Aquarium wanted, so we agreed to say nothing.

  The big day finally came. The first live cross was due just after 6 a.m., with the stunt itself just after 8 a.m. John, Adam and Dad got there at 4 a.m. to set everything up and, attempting to conserve my energy, I joined them an hour later. The bridge and winches were in place and we had time for one quick run-through. We had a lively audience made up of a busload of children from Mum’s school bearing sweet homemade signs plus various friends who had helped us along the way. We put big screens up and had a DJ to entertain the crowd. It was a great atmosphere and the media turnout was excellent. There was a surprisingly large crew from Sunrise, including reporter James Tobin, along with news teams from all three commercial networks, print, radio and online journalists and an international TV news feed. They were reporting it not as a novelty but a genuine historic moment inspired by what Houdini had done one hundred years earlier to the day: it was everything we’d hoped for. (I did, however, have to shake my head at the TV producer’s question, ‘So when he’s down there can we put a microphone on him?’ ‘ Well you could,’ said Adam, ‘but it wouldn’t be a lot of use because he’ll be holding his breath!’)

  I did a piece to camera with James Tobin, who examined the concrete boots and all the locks I’d be putting on to confirm everything was real. Then I got thirty minutes to try to focus my mind and relax my body and then, ten minutes before entering the Oceanarium, I acclimatised to the water temperature using the holding pool (keeping a sharp eye out for the nippy turtle, which had already been moved from the main tank to there). All too soon it was ‘go’ time. Shackled and strapped into the boots I was lowered five metres on the steel plate with the regulator in my mouth still giving me air. Brett and one of his colleagues dived down with me. The second diver took the chains that had been attached to the plate back up so they wouldn’t get in the way of the sharks and rays, while I took my final breaths, handed the regulator to Brett, and began the escape. John was outside the tank talking to James Tobin with Kochie and Mel back in the Sydney studio watching it unfold.

  I used everything I had to control my mind and resist any urge to panic. I forced myself to go slowly and methodically, picking the lock of one handcuff and then the other, then turning calmly through to the padlock which secured the chain that looped around my waist and then ran down to the concrete boots. When that was off I crouched down to work on the three padlocks holding me into the concrete. I tried to keep as upright as possible but when you’re in water trying to pick a lock at your ankle you have no choice but to lean forward. The half-an-atmosphere’s worth of extra pressure on my lungs had been intensely painful when I was standing but now it increased sharply. It was an agonising sensation but I couldn’t let it distract me or I was done for.

  To stop myself focusing on the pain and the cold and the terrible need to breathe I set part of my mind to work on other things. While the foreground of my brain took in the sharks and rays swimming around me, guided my fingers through the delicate task of freeing me and absorbed the readings from my stopwatch to make sure I was on track, I kept part of my brain — the one that would otherwise have been protesting against everything my body was enduring — busy running through the letters of the alphabet and matching them with all the people I knew whose name began with that letter. When I got to Z I moved on to a visualisation exercise, picturing my apartment in minute detail: I’m opening the door. What colour is the door handle? It’s silver. I pass through the doorway and I walk in. What do I see first? There’s a little table in front of me. What’s on the table? There are two picture frames on the left. Beyond that is the couch. What colour is it? How are the cushions arranged? On and on and on, through every item in every room. I still felt those painful and uncomfortable sensations but it was almost as if they were being beamed to me from a distance — I registered them but I didn’t have to respond to them.

  Cosentino family collection

  After my Crazy Cell dropped lock-pick scare I always had at least one extra pick within reach. In this case I had one on a chain around my neck and two on my left wrist, under a specially made wetsuit band. Fortunately I didn’t need them but another, unforeseen problem did arise. I got one of the concrete boot side locks off without a problem but the other just refused to shift. It hadn’t happened in any of my dry-run or swimming-pool training but it was something that happened from time to time with locks. Every time we used one onstage or in rehearsal it was cleaned afterwards and given a spray of WD-40, but just like a regular door lock that is exposed to the weather, they still jammed a little occasionally, and that’s what was happening now, at the worst possible moment.

  My planned timing was ten seconds for each lock but the lock in question just wouldn’t open. It was vital that I keep control and not allow myself to panic. But what could I do now? I realised I couldn’t waste any more time trying to force it. I’d already been holding my breath for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds and I still had three locks to go. I moved on to the two top locks, got those off, then went back to the final, jammed one. I tried to stay calm but no matter what I tried that damned lock refused to give. I kept my mind busy with the visualisation while my hands continued to work and finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I felt the click. I worked the hasp open then, still crouched over, lifted the 30-kilogram rear block to free myself completely. I kicked myself up safely to the surface and, three minutes and thirty-nine seconds since my last breath, I filled my lungs again.

  It took me a moment to move from my intense internal concentration and focus on the outside world again. The first faces I saw were Dad’s and Adam’s. They were clapping and smiling with relief and pride. All the hard work, all the hours and the money we had poured in had been worth it. But it wasn’t until I climbed out, they put a space blanket around me to get my body temperature back to normal, and we started to go down to the waiting crowd that the excitement really hit me. I’d done my family proud and I’d achieved something extraordinary. I felt Houdini would have been pleased with the tribute.

  Downstairs Mum folded me into her arms for a huge hug and then I went and did back-to-back interviews. Afterwards the whole family and some close friends went to John and Jilda’s house. We were jubilant. The phone was buzzing continuously with friends and people we’d worked with calling and texting to congratulate me. I was featured on TV and radio news bulletins and news websites throughout the day, and not just in Australia. Adam was periodically checking online and every now and then he’d say, ‘Check it out, British TV is covering it,’ or ‘You’re in The Wall Street Journal!’ For the next week coverage continued to flow in from all around the world. We lost count of the number of stories that ran, but it was covered in the US, the UK, Italy, India and other countries, as well as by every major national media outlet and scores of smaller ones.

  It felt like a massive win for the whole family. This one-time four-minute escape had cost us $25,000 — and it would have been $50
,000 if we’d had to pay for John and Dad’s services, hadn’t called on a ton of favours done and hadn’t been given mates’ rate discounts by many of our suppliers — but just look at the result. The stunt was elaborate and spectacular, it had come off beautifully and it had been picked up even more widely than we’d dreamt. It was exactly the breakthrough I needed.

  Except that it wasn’t. All that applause, all those viewers, listeners and readers translated into . . . nothing. No calls from agents or managers or promoters to say, ‘Kid, I’m going to make you a star,’ or even, ‘You’re interesting, let’s talk.’ I just could not believe it. As it became clear that, despite all the excitement and coverage, Anchored wasn’t going to boost me into the big time, we talked it over endlessly within the family. We could not understand why it had led to nothing at all, except for another call from Australia’s Got Talent. They told me they had overhauled the show, changing the structure and replacing judges, and asked me again if I’d like to audition. Even with no other options immediately presenting themselves it still felt like a mismatch. Come on! I’d just done something as amazing as Anchored and they were asking me to line up and audition with people who’d never done their act in public before? For a second time I said thanks, but no thanks.

  By the time a month had passed our position was clear. We learned a valuable but very difficult lesson from Anchored: huge hype does not necessarily open doors. Even when it’s not just empty hype, when there is a significant achievement behind it, sometimes all the attention and appreciation just evaporate, leaving you standing there wondering what the hell happened.

  The only bookings coming through were, you guessed it, school shows. We hung in there for a few months but something had to give. Adam and his wife had another baby on the way and (thanks to her steady income) a mortgage to pay. It was hard enough for him to be away from home when we went on the road to play schools in distant parts of the state, but doing it for a subsistence wage was no longer an option.

  We sat down with Dad and John to talk about what we should do. As ever, the family’s amazing support and help were there without question. They created a role for Adam in the project development side of the business. He would do that four days a week and come back to work on admin and promotion for the act one day a week. It was a move he had to make, not one he wanted to. But Adam being Adam, even though his heart wasn’t really in it he did a great job. He even went to the trouble of gaining his Diploma of Project Management to bring himself up to speed as quickly as possible.

  I completely understood why he had to make the change but I felt his absence keenly. He was my right-hand man and had been since I was thirteen. Not having him around all the time left a huge hole, in practice terms and emotionally.

  On a practical level I had to find someone to do the school shows with me and I had to take on most of the emailing and mailing and follow-up phoning around that he had done, continually trying to get an agent or manager or shopping centre booker to take an interest. It was too humiliating and amateurish to have to pitch myself in the face of massive indifference so on the phone I pretended to be Adam and talked about myself in the third person. It’s painful to remember how dispiriting it was to have to make call after call after call and continue to sound cheerful and confident while I went through the same story with a different reception intern to the one who’d answered last week. ‘Hello, is that Stephanie?’ ‘No,’ the voice would answer, ‘Stephanie’s not here anymore, this is Lizzy.’ ‘Well I’m calling on behalf of the performer Cosentino. We sent through an information package which apparently couldn’t be found. Stephanie asked me to send another one and I did — did it arrive okay? . . . No? Is there anyone else who might know where it went? I see, you’d like me to send another one.’ I kept a spreadsheet noting down every contact and every frustrating and expensive occasion I had to re-post a package that no-one had bothered to open the first time.

  As difficult as that was, the emotional effect of Adam’s absence was so much worse. From my very first public performance dancing at the school assembly he had been there for me. We spent most of our waking moments together and had each other’s backs no matter what. Triumph, disaster, boredom, thrills: we’d experienced it all together. Sharing the experiences made the highs richer and the lows more bearable, but now that was gone. All I could do was hope there was some way the act could fund his full-time return, as unlikely as that seemed.

  For a while our friend and crewmate Ben did the school shows with me. When he moved on to do other things I found a theatre tech-in-training called Stacie who took over. We were strictly just friends but because there was no money for separate rooms we had to share a twin room, just as Adam and I had done. The couple of hours a day when I was doing the show were great and Stacie was a nice person and good to travel with but I felt like I’d gone backwards in such a major way. A decade earlier I’d been doing the exact same thing: two school shows a day and eking out a tiny budget to cover costs. Back then it had been an adventure, the beginning of an apprenticeship. I’d assumed that if I put in the effort my career would follow an upward trajectory. Now I’d toured nationally, played hit shows in Asia, done an amazing stunt and been lauded by media around the world and yet here I was, still doing my laundry in the sink of a shared hotel room after playing a school hall.

  Even an eternal optimist like me couldn’t stay hopeful forever without some encouraging signs. Fortunately, I had one to keep me going. The TV exec turned manager Chris O’Mara arranged for me to meet some of the people at the TV production company Beyond Entertainment. They had bought the rights to the format of a show originally made in Israel called The Inconceivable. It starred a magician called Nimrod Harel who performed mentalism tricks involving ‘mind control’ and hypnosis, as well as staged illusions and stunts. They were keen to make a local version and I seemed to be the perfect presenter. The company had a great track record of producing hit shows, including Mythbusters, and if anyone could get a deal for an Australian version of the show they could. They flew me up to Sydney three times, for pitch meetings with decision-makers at each of the three commercial networks. The format of the meeting was that they would play a showreel of the Israeli version, explain me and my credentials and then I would do some mentalism effects (explained at the end of this chapter) and some card tricks.

  The first meeting was with the Ten Network and they loved the idea — so much so that when I got back home Beyond sent a bottle of fine champagne with a note of congratulations. The other meetings had already been set up and we went ahead with them. Nine was ‘sort of maybe kind of’ interested and Seven didn’t want anything to do with the show. Executives at both networks said they thought I was too ‘odd’ or ‘different-looking’ to be acceptable to Australian television audiences. I thought they were wrong but who cared what they thought when Ten was so keen, right? Unfortunately, the timing was not good. Ten was entering a period of major corporate upheaval, plummeting share price and mass layoffs. Pumping money into untried shows was off the agenda so it was bye-bye to a local Inconceivable.

  Three minutes and thirty-nine seconds since my last breath, I filled my lungs again.

  At this point even I started to think I should just stop banging my head against a brick wall. My family all shared my frustration to some degree but Dad was the most concerned about my future. He knew how incredibly hard I had worked, in fact he said to me, ‘You know you could have put in half the amount of effort and been twice as successful by now in almost any other career, don’t you?’ I couldn’t argue with that. The problem was that there was no-one I could point to who had achieved what I was aiming for — no star Australian magician. If I’d been an actor or a musician or comedian still battling along and hoping for my big break I could have given him Hugh Jackman or Sia or Tim Minchin as examples of people who had plugged away for years before making it big. But there was no-one like that in my field and I knew that, as supportive as he was, a part of Dad was wondering if the su
ccess I was aiming for was impossible, just a mirage.

  A small lifeline came through in the form of a contract to perform at Westfield shopping centres around Melbourne. It was just a few bookings here and there at first — in order to land more and get the really good, big centres I had to prove myself . . . just as I had done when we were starting out in shopping centres eight years earlier. I really wasn’t sure how much of this kind of grind I had left in me. But as hard as it was, I wasn’t ready to quit yet. I’d come too far and given up too much to let go now. And despite all the discouragement, I still believed. I believed in the power of magic to reach people and I believed in myself.

  Before he’d gone to work for Dad, Adam had been trying to set up another tour and now I continued with that. This tour would be about as far from Threshold as you could get. I couldn’t afford to mount something with grand illusions and big escapes and the crew to match. This would have to be a one-man show consisting purely of close-up magic and mentalism. Everything had to fit into the trailer and I’d have two techs to help me set up. Doing close-up magic in Threshold worked because we had two large projection screens on either side so that even people at the back of those big theatres could see everything. This time round I could only afford one smaller screen in the middle, but the venues were so small that wouldn’t matter. After having sold out 1000-plus-seaters last time around, I was reduced to calling the managers of 250-seat venues trying to convince them to book the new show, which I’d named ‘Distortions’.