TINA
Don Clampon raised his eyes from the oily confines of his pit and warily surveyed the chaos outside the open tent door that was Everest Base Camp. What had gone wrong?
He sat up slowly, but not, regretably, slowly enough to avoid the sudden piercing return of the headache he'd been nursing since the previous evening. Don fumbled behind his head for the Temgesics, succeeded only in overturning a billy filled with an unspeakable mixture of lentils, egg powder and sultanas, saved from detumescence only by the near freezing temperature, and panicked into getting up.
Squatted awkwardly not far away, obviously in a state of some anxiety, was the expedition's Corporate Liason Officer, Frank Weevil. Startled by the sight of Don Clampon blundering out from his tent he overbalanced backwards, fouling himself still further. That Tibetan fast food he'd eaten in Kathmandu was still ballooning inside his stomach. Was this what was meant by the free play of market forces? He'd been happy enough on the 28th floor of the local office of Perpetual Misadventure, and now cursed himself for the naievety he'd shown at the appearance of two bearded late adolescents in his office on that inauspicious morning. The way in which they'd disrupted the tasteful grey ambience he'd been implementing there, with their shockingly poorly colour co-ordinated fleecy leisure outfits, was, he now saw, but a ruse to encourage his sense of superior sophistication.
And then, through some unfathomable disturbance in the corporate continum, he'd found himself sent to Nepal to oversee what seemed to him the palpably absurd ambitions of Don Clampon and Ron Endon to be the first former gynaecological surgeons to successfully guide an entire class of thirteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirls to the summit of Mount Everest. To manipulate the whole catastrophe, in short, into the publicity spectacle that their vast subsidy required.
'Control freaks,' he sniffed, and his nose went into uncontrollable spasms.
Don turned his nose away in disgust, and pushed the play button on his walkman. It was America, singing:
I don't know why I dun it
Honest, it ain't like me
But I ain't sad now that I dun it
'Cause a baby boy has got to be free
Fond recollections of moral relativism in the fabulous seventies were dispelled as a large rock whistled past his left earlobe.
'Jesus!' he muttered into his beard, flinging himself to the ground, and scuttled behind the Perpetual Misadventure billboard. This had been the erected in the centre of basecamp, from where satelite linkups with New Zealand were made. The memory of the last one caused him to shudder. Below the corporate logo, not noticed until it was too late and clearly visible to three hundred million viewers worldwide, was the scratched graffitti reading: "Ron is a scaly scrotum".
Now, Ron was out there somewhere in the maze of moraine boulders, and he was getting closer. Another rock clanged against the billboard, and Don huddled tighter into a quivering foetal position.
Convinced that he'd been dumped by Mary O'Malley for Don, the linkup had only made public his humiliation. It had been enough, however, to tip him over the edge. Viewers had been treated to the sight of an ashen faced Frank Weevil trying to restrain Ron Endon, the veins bursting red through his thinning, colesterol rich temples, from plunging an ice hammer through the signage, behind which cowered Don Clampon.
Ron hurled yet another stone from up on the moraine and, his rage quenched for the moment, paused to contemplate the futility of his situation. He'd met the principal of St Gayleen's School for Girls the previous summer in Switzerland. He was drumming up interest for a Himalayan speed climbing contest on Everest's north face. She was looking for new venues for the annual school field trip. They had shared a compartment on the train from Zurich to Interlaken, on the floor of which they did something Ron had never done before. In the warm afterglow, the idea had come to him. Or had it been suggested? Now he wasn't so sure.
His thoughts turned to the trudge up to South Col, enlivened by Mary O'Malley's admiration for his 'relentless' calf muscles. The sly little tart. He'd been taken in, he now saw, by her shameless manipulation of her thirteen-year-old naivety. She must have deliberately jumped into that crevasse in the Khumbu icefall. It had been he who had been forced to first organise the rescue and then spend the next hours in that groaning cavern ensuring Mary's wellbeing.
So Don was taller, and had dark curly hair....
Ron glumly surveyed the now near empty camp. Several tents, destroyed in last night's fracas, were fluttering in the breeze. The satelite dish lay cracked and bent on the moraine. A smell of egg powder hung in the air. But where were the sherpas? Where were Mary O'Malley and the other 28 scheming, sexually vindictive schoolgirls? And where was Lee Schweinkopf, alchoholic Vietnam vet, now expedition manager? Somehow, while he'd been hiding out on the moraine after knocking Don unconscious, they'd disappeared.
Some time later. Rising out of the voluptuous leather folds of his easy chair Lee Schweinkopf, freshly shaven and impeccably dressed in a white suit, leant on his cane and ordered another gin and tonic.
'You're sure?' he asked the expedition doctor, Felix Hyman.
'Absolutely. Raging habits. I've been prescribing morphine since day one. Told them it was for the altitude.'
Lee smiled. As a business venture, climbing was never going to cut it. All that New Age self-realisation hype had started to aggravate the shell splinters in his sphincter. This venture ensured a commitment to escort excellence from his staff, based on individual performance-related bonuses. Far from the oxygen deficient heights of the Himalaya, this was what he'd call a level playing field.
– This story first appeared in the Climber magazine, some time in the the early 1990s.