Tall Tales

So, the other night, we were watching reruns of Game of Thrones and there’s a scene in the throne room with Queen Cersei and her hulking mountain of a bodyguard. And this being Game of Thrones, his name is literally Mountain – which is helpful because there are so many hard pronounce names in the show, it’s such a relief when a character gets one that’s a simple, easy to remember.

“Gosh, I’d forgotten how tall he is!” Saffy said, while stuffing her face with popcorn.

“The Mountain?” Amanda asked, currently curled up under a light shawl in the armchair. 

“He’s enormous! How tall do you think he is?”

Amanda pulled out her phone and tapped. There was a pause. “His name is Hafthor Julius Björnsson. He’s…uhm…186 kilos and he’s six feet nine!”

Saffy sat up, and hit pause on the remote control.

“Wait, what? 186 kilos? And six feet what?”

Amanda’s eyes flicked back to her phone. “Six feet nine.”

For days, it’s all the girls have been able to talk about. 

“Six feet nine!” Saffy told Sharyn. “The guy is literally twice your height, Shazz. If you stood next to him, you’d come up to his navel!”

Behind her Coke bottle thick spectacles, Sharyn’s eyes bulged. “Wah!”

“I know! I wonder what meal times with him must be like?”

“He’d probably have to eat ten roast chickens or something,” Amanda said. “I read that he eats six to eight times a day!”

Sharyn sucked in her breath. “Hah? Sicktime a day?!”

“Well, you don’t get to be that size by eating carrot sticks, Sharyn,” Saffy pointed out.

“Wah liau. Then when he go toilet and do number two, how? Must flush tree time, I think!”

The girls fell about and shrieked. Later that evening, Saffy was still cackling at the idea of The Mountain sitting on the loo and doing a dump. “That Sharyn kills me. The things she says!”

Amanda lifted her lovely face to the ceiling and stared into the corner. “But you know…I have to wonder…what…” She trailed off and turned pink. 

Saffy glanced at me, her eyes flicking back to Amanda. “What?”

Amanda hesitated. “Well, you know…He’s so…big. Do you think…do you think everything is in, uhm, in proportion? You know? Down there?”

Comprehension finally dawned on Saffy’s face. Her bosom inflated. “My God, you know, I never even thought of that! Well…I guess he must be. And he’s an ang moh as well!”

Two of Saffy’s ex-boyfriends have been American and Swedish, and to hear her tell it, if they were a statistical sample, Western men are tremendously gifted. Which is also why, apparently, the relationships never lasted very long. “Oh, the whole thing was impossible!” she told her friend Suzanne after she broke up with Matt, the Citbank trader from Dallas. “I literally cannot walk straight the next day! And let’s not even talk about the state of my jaw!” she added with a pout.

Suzanne had been bug-eyed. “Really? Like…how impossible are we talking about?”

Saffy didn’t hesitate. “Like that you tiao you just had with your soy bean drink! Only twice as big!”

And as Amanda now pointed out, Matt had been six foot two and played quarter back in college football. “Imagine someone who is six foot nine!”

“He’d be packing a mutant cucumber!” Saffy said firmly, shaking her head at the violence and damage that could be inflicted by a vegetable that size on a petite five feet seven girl like herself. 

A few days later, at a party, Amanda’s friend Anna brought along her new German boyfriend. I wasn’t there, but apparently, the guy is literally six foot nine, the same height as the Mountain.

“He’s huge!” Amanda reported later. “I got such a neck-strain looking up at him that I finally had to ask him to please sit down. And even then, I still had to look up!”

Saffy frowned. “But Anna is, what, like five feet five!”

“She literally comes up to his navel,” Amanda said. “I don’t know how that relationship is ever going to work!”

“Has she, uhm…” Saffy coughed gently. “You know, tried the salad bar…”

“That was the first thing that crossed my mind” Amanda said. “But there were so many people at the party, I didn’t get a chance to ask! But really, how could she? It would just be anatomically impossible! Oh, speaking of, Anna did say that Johann can only travel in business class and even that is super cramped. He literally can’t fit into an economy seat!”

Saffy says if that isn’t a metaphor for her love life in general, she doesn’t know what is.