Out-and-Out Liars, Part 2, Fallacy. Hilary,Tenzing, (Chapter 1, Part 3)

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Bartholomew Mayhew typed his account number and sort and security code into the appropriate fields and pressing enter sent one thousand and thirty pounds sterling into the ether, a small part of an inheritance bequeathed him from a recently deceased aunt. The airfare to Mongolia was understandably steep as Bartholomew  at thirty-seven, unmarried white, middle-class, well-educated, unemployed and in the prime of travelling life, had only made the snap decision to visit that distant country that morning over breakfast cereal while reading an article in the Guardian about the Nadam festival he thought he might like, peak fare and short- notice notwithstanding.

Bartholomew sat back in his large swivel ergonomic chair and read, 'Confirmation of your flight registration will be sent to your email address’. He loved this part and anticipated  finding a new message in his In-box with the barely muted joy of a child opening a present at Christmas. He made a cup of tea in his galley kitchen, briefly staring out of his second floor flat window to watch a new ex-local-authority Chinese resident negotiate the racial pot-pourrie of local authority children in the play area below, and sighed a sigh of gratitude that he, as a council tenant did not have to pay the high-rent and astronomical service charges of those arrivals who could not yet tell the difference between a council and country estate.

Returning to his laptop Bartholomew Mayhew exited Skyscanners typed yahoo in the URL field and navigated the mouse to mail in-box and scrolled up the fifty or so  ‘Confirmation of registration of flights, hotels, cruises, Adventure trekking, Trans-Siberian Express' notifications his gaze stopping at an unopened message immediately before the topmost still in bold letters. He shuddered.

‘Hello Barthe, Barth here. Having a wonderful time in Nepal.  Reached  camp IV this morning. (see attachment). Exhausted but exhilarated. Great to be here. Best line ever. Thanks Mate.

L

Barthe.

P.S  wish you were here!

Bartholomew Mayhew looked about him with hyper-vigilent dread as though some chink in the curtain permitted prying eyes while a secret part of him scanned illicit porn. The photo revealed a long line of tethered climbers,  several hundred meters long,  snaking up to what must be Mount Everest. Curiously Barthe never appeared  in these holiday snaps himself...always  the same. The message was dated  9/05/2013 and there was a three day gap between the last announcement of Barthe’s arrival in Kathmandu accompanied by a picture outside the American Express building in Joanna Lumely Square and this latest missive. Again, in this picture , there it was again.  Bartholomew had checked his travel itinerary to Nepal and previous destinations a dozen times and they all coincided with the merry notification of arrival, along with a photographic first impression from...himself.  Bartholomew checked the current day’s date in the bottom right-hand corner of his computer screen. 09/05/2013.

With unlimited disposable income and time he had begun spending an increasing amount of this time online generally and on travel and hotel comparison sites specifically. At first long weekends within the European Zone was all he dared allow himself and he quickly established that budget airlines delivered him far short of the desired destination, and furthermore the intricacies of whether it would be cheaper to travel with an empty bladder on some of the more assiduously grasping carriers fatigued him. He became deft at speed-reading reviews of previous travellers on the hospitality and hygiene of various European guest houses and developed an internal barometer for rating at a glance.  Once he had purchased flight and hotel reservation, the research part of the adventure,with the aid of Google Street Map, had been so thorough that by the time he was due to pack he felt he had already visited every nook and cranny of Prague, Amsterdam, Vilna and Crakow and felt that the actual reality of Prague, Amsterdam, Vilna and Crakow would pall compared to Google Map's detailed civic voyeurism.

Bartholomew’s bank statement  testified to a steady trickle then fitful flow in the direction of Atol protected long-haul flights, four and five star establishments, an opera reservation in Vienna, and increasingly, his quarterly statements began to itemize travel and residence in more exotic destinations; open-jaw tickets testified to flights with  Singapore Airlines, resurfacing with TWA, another resurface with Aeroflot with a return flight with Quatar Airways.  A sense that he was doing something wrong harangued him, vaguely; technically his carbon footprint was impeccable.  His aunt's money had not been gifted to feed flights of fancy, she would have reprimanded her nephew severely, but she would have been livid to the core to discover that these flights of fancy were in fact...well, flights of actual fancy; over fifty empty individual airoplane seats around the world were directly connected to the piles of unused E-tickets strewn about Bartholomew’s Mayhew’s grubby abode.

Having not left his flat in over five years Barthelomew was disconcerted to discover one morning, that someone else had not only assumed his identity but was enjoying the holidays he had, albeit impulsively, booked for himself. Who was this usurper that made him feel like he had discovered himself among the lascivious faces on a Thai orgy website? Why did this adventurous Doppelganger’s post scriptum,’ Wish you were here’ deride his sense of his own impotence? Surely the photos would give some clue to the identity of the man who so readily assumed his place, a reflection in a shop front, or in sun-glasses. Of course Bartholomew never once considered the possibility of giving up his addiction to ghost travel. He did however, in an attempt at revenge begin re-routing his Dobbleganger to war-torn destinations at a slight further cost. This resulted in emails of increasingly obsequious gratitude accompanied by yet more images, all with the same indelible theme. Yet what was it about these perspectives that linked them all?

Bartholomew settled himself in his chair with the determination of a Star Trek fan faced with a week of re-runs and proceeded to chronologically upload each and every attachment to photo gallery. There was the Vienna Opera  House’s impressive baroque façade, here a pleasure boat docked in Singapore harbour, another outside a Lamasery in Bhutan, a gallery of Third World images in wastelands with only a water pump or shack in view, and one of a severely bombed airport with what appeared to be the last flight out in the fore-ground. Bartholomew scrutinized the more recent images from Kathmandu and Mount Everest, and suddenly remembered a recurring hitherto incomprehensible sentence. ‘Best line ever’.

Bartholomew Mayhew, ignoring his own glaring weak spot, had discovered his Doppelganger's Achilli’s Heal. He had overlooked the language difference due to its similarity and read the word ‘Line’ as some esoteric jibe. His eyes floated along the images until he now saw clearly what he had failed to observe. The perspective of the photographer, in each and every image, was from one whose sole Weltanschauung or world-view was taken by someone who loved standing in queues. The ambitions of The Man in the Queue had clearly been exercised  variously in queues for cruises, entertainments, adrenline sport, reaching maturation in queues for bread and water in war- and drought-ravaged continents, all seemed now a mere prelude a rehearsal even for what would prove to be his Doppelganger's final photo taken at 27.000 feet at the end of the longest queue in the world snaking  several hundred meters long on The Hilary Steps up towards the summit of Mount Everest.