© 2007 Grant King
The moral rights of the author of this work have been asserted.
All rights reserved worldwide, including resale rights. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-0-9804748-0-0
‘The hypocrite’s hope shall perish’
(Job 8:13)
The adman’s entrance exam
As creatively and convincingly as you can, explain why it is wrong to be a hypocrite. Then, equally creatively and convincingly, explain why it is right to be a hypocrite.
If you can provide a sound, passionate argument for both, you may well be the sort of charlatan who could forge a successful career in advertising.
Sadly – and happily – I was.
1
Abattoir blues
Monday, January 3
Scene: the cattle yards of a Paris slaughterhouse on a frozen meat locker of a morning as a hundred or more animals inched their way forward single file through a corral of tight slaloms towards a door. Many were agitated, some vocally so, baying out as their interminably slow march dragged into a second hour. One of them, a male of the species a third of the way through the run, was particularly anxious as he eyed the door, instinctively knowing what was to come. He was cold and racked with adrenaline, overwhelmed by the desire to bolt, to leap the fences and bash and crash his way to freedom across the backs of others. But he merely bowed his head again, shuddered and shuffled a few paces forward with the rest, confused and frightened.
No doubt he wondered how it had come to this – him… in this corral…headed towards that door. What had he done to deserve such misery? But he knew what he’d done. And he reached into the pocket of a black cashmere overcoat and grasped it tightly in a cold, clammy hand. A one carat diamond ring on a platinum band. He let the ring drop back in the pocket, sucked in a lungful of iced air, looked at the door again, and above it to a sign saying Pilier Nord (North Pillar), and above that, way above that, to the vast splayed legs of the ‘Metal Lady’.
The Eiffel Tower.
Accepted – the analogy of animals to the slaughter is a desperate one, but the only one capable of conveying to you precisely how terrified I was that Paris morning. I was the last person who should have been in a queue of overcoat-clad tourists plodding towards that door. For someone like me, what lay beyond that door was far worse than a knife from ear to ear. I’d have preferred that. That would have done quite nicely thank you compared to what really lay in waiting beyond that door:
An elevator.
Heights and I had fallen out in the early nineties and been on mutual non-molestation orders ever since. Two storeys. That was my limit. Stick me on a balcony anything above that and I became living, quivering proof that we humans are sixty per cent water.
So why was I here? Why did I plan to go nine hundred feet over my jelly-inducing limit? In a word, romance…
When it was built for the 1889 World Fair in Paris, Gustave Eiffel’s Tower was considered by many to be something of an eyesore. Then Americans built Trump Tower. Today that very same Eiffel Tower is regarded as one of the most beautiful manmade structures in the world. Worse, it is up there as one of the most popular places to propose. About nine hundred and five feet up there.
Of course, it’s easy to decide you’re going to ‘pop the question’ atop the world’s tallest romantic cliché in the middle of a European winter when your feet are firmly on the ground and thousands of miles away in an Australian summer. And it’s easy to disguise your cunning plan when you have a year anniversary to coincide with your visit.
The unsuspecting girl at my side smiled up at me through a narrow slit in head-to-knee wool. Determined as I was to conceal my inner turmoil, I manufactured a smile back, a shoddy Third World sweat shop effort at best.
‘We’ll be struggling to make the Louvre today now, monkey,’ she said, the remnants of a North Yorkshire brogue rendering ‘monkey’ more like ‘maun-care’. This accent, while a thing of oral delight to these antipodean ears, was nonetheless somewhat incongruous coming out of what was an unmistakably Italian face. A stunningly beautiful face currently shrouded by a knitted cream Baker Boy hat and scarf combo. She could have been a model, albeit, at only five feet tall, a scale model. She had the Latin looks, the tiny, curvaceous figure, the tempestuous nature, the piercings, and the tattoos. Sadly, there just wasn’t much call for a clothes horse the catwalk equivalent of a Shetland pony. Gabriel Mariabella Hogg, by Austin Hogg, out of Mariabella Hogg. If nothing else, I offered her a half decent surname. Perhaps that would be enough to offset any doubts when I got down on bended knee.
And yes, there were doubts. Not doubts as to our mutual affections; these had been conveyed sufficiently romantically, explicitly and steadfastly to satisfy both of us of a need to punctuate our relationship more for-mally. Or, at least, I thought so. In truth, any official register of our affections had only been discussed in jest or intoxicated. At best such a grand notion had been prodded suspiciously with a stick.
And yes, there were issues. Not of compatibility, but of conformity. Gabriel, you see, came with quite considerable baggage: a feral family of factory farmers I was yet to meet, let alone charm. Hardly the ideal in-laws for an outspoken animal lover like me.
And yes, I had to agree – we were going to struggle to make the Louvre today. At this rate, my dying of vertigo-induced panic on the top tier of the Eiffel Tower would struggle to make the six o’clock news.
Early mist had cleared to reveal a clear, pale sky and low, heat-free sun, ideal for tower top views to the horizon if you liked that sort of thing. Most of the people swarming in the Lady’s crotch probably did. Gabriel probably did. I, however, did not and I spent the final minutes of that interminable queue time mentally planning my last words and epitaph.
First floor (187 feet): Altitude 95 Restaurant, souvenirs, novelties, coffees, snacks, mild hyperthermia, trembling, heart palpitations.
Going up.
Second floor (377 feet): Le Jules Verne Restaurant, more souvenirs, more novelties, sweets, chocolates, panic, paralysis.
While Gabriel scanned the Paris skyline for our Saint Sulpice hotel, I scanned the same skyline for planes. She was at the rail. I was at the inner wall. Her limbs were free and easy. I was like a stroke victim battling the sudden onset of Alzheimer’s.
‘Bailey, come see!’ she cried, eyes to a view I had no interest in. ‘I can see the Sacre Coeur!’ Her head turned a little to the left. ‘And the Arc de Triomphe! And the Champs Elysees! It’s amazing!’
Yes, it was amazing. Amazing that the girl I planned to marry was so wrapped up in her own surefooted enthusiasm at altitude, she’d left me to flounder out of the lift on my own with not a cursory look back. While she skipped to the rail, I tottered out like a malfunctioning C3PO and clung white knuckled to the nearest girder as if I was on the tilting deck of the Titanic.
Paris tourism figures show that, excluding locals, Spaniards are the most frequent visitors to the Eiffel Tower, followed by Americans, English and Germans (Australians and my fellow Kiwis are lumped in together at eight). Clearly these people are drawn by the Metal Lady’s legend and the incomparable sights she offers on high. Sights such as le Palais de Chaillot with its great columned wings gathering in the Trocadero Gardens like a pile of fallen leaves; le Champ de Mars parklands like a grass airstrip cutting a straight, green swathe through the middle of Paris.
And le Pathetique Homme de Nouveau Zelande…
I remember very little of my time tottering about that second tier. Nor do I have any clear recollections of the interminable queue for the Top Tier. I said little and saw even less, clinging as I was to Gabriel, head down, eyes shut and shuffling along like some cashmere-clad retard.
Same with our final ascent. Just one terrifying image remains branded on my brain for eternity: a squint-eyed glimpse of steel girders falling to earth one after the other, the tower narrowing, closing in around me like a gin trap, each graunch of metal on metal jangling already raw nerves as it tapered to the tiniest, flimsiest pin prick in the sky.
I crawled out at the top of the stairs and worked my way up a wall to a semi-standing position, nine hundred and five feet above ground. The top top tier of the Eiffel Tower and my worst nightmare confirmed: tiny, open wired, wind swept and, unless I was very much mistaken, swaying violently in a gale. I shut everything from eyes to sphincter and hung on for dear life.
‘Gabriel?’ I cried out in much the way Ray Charles might have cried “Gabriel?” had he known someone named Gabriel and be trying to gauge her proximity to the piano.
‘Yes?’ she cried back from on far.
‘Come here please? As fast as you can.’
I timed it at three-and-a-bit seconds wind assisted before I felt her hand on my hip. Letting go of the wall with one tentative hand I felt around her until I found a shoulder and turned her to face me. Legs splayed, I took both her hands in mine, teetering knock kneed before her like a novice ice skater. I opened my eyes.
‘I’m going to get this over real quick,’ I said through quivering, uncooperative lips. I felt tears brewing. ‘. There’s…a reason I got you up here.’
She knew instantly. The change in her face was as dramatic as our ascent – a slow motion morph into stunned, glassy eyed, open mouthed wonder. A small crowd of inquisitive onlookers caught her eye and she glanced fleetingly away. ‘Don’t you dare get down on bended knee,’ she said.
I stared down at my splayed, stiff legs. ‘I can’t!’
‘Quick then! Do it! Do it!’ she said through her teeth, agitated, squeezing my hands, eyes still flitting from me to the gallery.
‘Gabriel?’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘Will you…’ – I was welling up badly – ‘will you…’
‘Marry you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course, monkey! Do you want to go down?’
‘Fuckin’ oath!’
And with that, the small band of onlookers would have seen the beautiful Baker Boy midget lead the tall cashmere-clad slow person carefully off down the stairs again, one at a time, easy does it. And they may have heard him say: ‘Fuck! I forgot to give you the ring!’ and her say ‘We’ll do it in the lift,’ just before their heads disappeared from view.
Clearly the romance of our Metal Lady engagement would need some fish story embellishment before it was relayed to family and friends.
