The walk of shame.
No, it is not what you think. I’m not in a party frock at eight o’clock in the morning walking home with my knickers in my pocket and a broken heel on my shoe. No, that’s another story for another time. This story of shame even crosses cultural divides.
It starts with a taxi ride in China…….again. This time I am not being kidnapped but I’m being cooked alive in the back seat. In the taxi with me is a Norwegian colleague, our Chinese agent and a talkative taxi driver. He is also the worst kind of taxi driver too, you know the kind, the type that cannot keep an even speed, they always have to pump the accelerator pedal…………..at any speed. You always feel like you are lurching backwards and forwards in your seat. After a while it begins to be very irritating and you start suggesting, out loud, that the driver should put the cruise control on or find another career as the drummer of a band.
Anyway, I’m in the back seat of this old taxi with my colleague and we have no air conditioning and no air vents. It’s about thirty-eight degrees outside on a bright sunny day and we are baking. Inside the car it’s a tad warmer than the sun. Opening the windows does not help because the humidity is intense. So we sit there stewing for two hours. If we were in a car park, someone would have smashed the windows and rescued us. When we finally arrived at our destination we are done, finished, lifeless. The sweat rings under my armpits have merged and reach all the way down to my socks. How we made it through the meeting I have no idea. But this is only half of it because now we have to make the same journey back to Shanghai.
Arriving back at the hotel, still dripping in sweat, I long for a shower. As I undress I decide not to put my knickers and socks in the laundry, No, they were only fit for burning. I see my naked reflection in the huge bathroom mirror and notice that every hair on my torso is matted together in sweat. My crotch area is the worst. It looked like a sunburned Tor Heyerdahl (famous explorer) sitting on the Kon Tiki raft, winking at me whilst wearing a polo neck sweater. Careful not to step on my baked gonads, now dragging on the floor, I walk across the magnificent shiny marble floor. I step over the weighing scales I had got out that morning but was not brave enough to try, and turned on the shower. Turning on the shower should not be the start of my humiliation…..but it was. There were two shower heads on my shower unit. One overhead in a fixed position and one mounted halfway up the wall, on a hose, that you can use to rinse those “special” places. Stunned would be an understatement. The ice-cold water, instead of falling gracefully down from the overhead shower, shot out from the flexible hose head directly at my face and chest area. I couldn’t breathe, such was the shock of cold water, and I instinctively started scrambling backwards. Unfortunately, the marble floor was now wet and more slippery than Teflon. I remember seeing my feet level with my face as I slipped and fell violently to the floor. To add to my misery, my left buttock landed on the corner of the weighing scales, which flipped upwards and smacked me in the back of the head before crashing back down onto the marble floor. Worse still, the ice water still continued to rain down on me which, if I try to see any positive in this, hid my tears.
The next morning, I had to check out early and this was the beginning of my walk of shame. The L shaped bruise on my left buttock was causing me to limp, just as if I had a broken heel on my shoe, so it was not even a dignified walk of shame. It is bad enough being overweight but why-oh-why does the cosmos have to conspire against us fatties? As I am finishing checking out in a busy hotel lobby it seemed every noise stopped, including dozens of conversations, all at the exact same moment, producing an eerie silence, just as the hotel staff member finishes my check out procedure by asking, “Is there anything else?”
I could feel all those stares, from everyone in the lobby, burning into me as I slowly walked out the hotel. My answer, which was the only sound to be heard, was “I broke your weighing scales.”
