Hend: Garth Ilene
Mayor of Hend, Garth Ilene
‘I wanted an estimate, not a heart attack!’
Our old faithful had moved on from unreliable starts, to difficult goes and almost impossible stops.
Bob's grease pit staff gathered around, shaking their heads and wondering if mending the old girl was worth it at all.
Myrtle and I drove dejectedly out of the garage, with the car making charung ka-flutter noises, accompanied by intermittent squeals and grinding sounds.
Heading for the portacabin, we hit traffic, and the engine’s charunging changed tone and eventually vanished altogether. I had gathered just enough momentum to freewheel off the main street into Ballina’s Central Rail Station car park.
‘Don’t stop here, they will charge you an arm and a leg’, Myrtle exclaimed. I had to explain that I wasn’t parking so much as breaking down.
We could almost see the portacabin, behind Clinton’s used tyre storage pound on the other side of the busy road.
Maybe we could take a shortcut?
Two middle aged women, pushing a broken down car across a main town thoroughfare in the morning rush hour, garnered as much attention as you might expect.
Luckily the lads from Clinton’s came to our rescue. With their help we made it to the other side before the police needed to declare a major traffic incident.
We reached our office in one piece. My friend got tired of listening to my doom laden financial woes and left me, still gripping the lifeless steering wheel in our portacabin yard and regretting having spent nearly all the remaining funds filling the useless machine with diesel.
I was startled out of my dark reveries by a friendly thump on the roof.
‘Myrtle says get your skates on, or you’ll miss the train!’ The tyre mechanic grinned.
Running past the amused workmen back to get to the rail station, I wondered how my colleague could possibly have afforded the tickets.
‘I didn’t need to,’ explained Myrtle, as we picked up speed, passing the outskirts of Ballina Central.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out an item of extreme luxury, a gold tipped, first class, all areas travel pass.
My jaw dropped.
‘I’ll have to thank that Reverend Cotterall’, she continued.
‘He gave you a $1000 travel pass?,’ I was astonished. The last I’d heard the good rev was trying to raise $20 to repaint the church hall radiators, after the ‘mums and tots’ crayon melting incident.
‘Oh no, When I told him we were going after Fairbanks he said he’d have a word upstairs on our behalf.’ Myrtle glanced towards the carriage ceiling. ‘The Rev is trying to stop his church being knocked down for the new bypass,’ she explained.
Myrtle paused to pull our flask and packed lunch out of a tatty plastic carrier bag.
‘I found this on the floor in the station.’ she continued, ‘See here, Thelma and Louise Berkhampsted, it’s a family pass, they even look a bit like us in the photos. Just when we needed it most, a proper Christmas miracle!'
My previous amazement turned to alarm, followed by outrage.
‘Which one is supposed to be me, these two are at least ninety?’
Eventually I persuaded my friend that we had to hand the pass in, but agreed reluctantly that it would be more practical to wait until we got back home. It was an effort, but I managed not to imagine the elderly Berkhamsteds fishing in their matronly handbags for the missing travel card and immediately phoning the authorities. I attempted to act casual for the rest of the journey, in order to allay suspicion.
Eventually we rattled into Hend station, and found our way to the agreed meeting venue, at the newly opened West Hend Community Hub and Information Resource.
‘Hello my name is either Thelma or Louise and I want to see Mayor Ilene’, I blurted out with no spaces between the words.
The receptionist smiled politely, and suggested we wait in the lobby. She would let Garth know he had visitors.
A familiar smell of new carpet and old books took me back to happy memories of my childhood.
The hallway in the newly built library had been given over to a display featuring the early history of our region’s colonisation. This was a controversial subject amongst seasoned residents of the area, particularly those with native Ballinian ancestry, so I was surprised at the choice of topic.
‘They're keen on Lancelot Ball,’ Myrtle remarked, staring at a blown up illustration of our founding father handing a string of beads to a smiling group of individuals wearing tribal dress.
I shuffled along uncomfortably to view a poster sized reproduction of a familiar vintage photograph. This image featured the main entrance of Ballina City Hall, with Governor Ball’s marble statue installed in pride of place.
The statue was posed grasping an extremely large bat in his right hand and wearing, what I have always thought of as, a cowboy hat.
Nowadays of course, the ridiculous edifice has been pushed into a dark corner, and hardly even gets dusted.
There followed a series of framed prints of the colonial military. Each scene showed the soldiers being troubled by the same oversized flying mammals.
The rest of the walls were filled with less professional artwork following a similar theme. Red scrawls had been employed extensively to depict gore. Rampaging robots were included in a few examples, but my favourite picture depicted our founding father being devoured by a tyrannosaurus rex.
‘Wonderful imaginations, children.’
Mayor Ilene had appeared behind us, unannounced.
‘Ball was a hoot, don’t you think?’
The young man’s refined accent was a strange contrast to the local burr.
‘A hoot?’, Myrtle asked, dangerously.
‘Yes, this giant bat nonsense,’ the Mayor replied, ‘I believe he asked for the statue to be fully clothed and holding the scrolls of office. Rather than just admit the Italian sculptor screwed up due to language problems, he made up this whole story about defeating flying vampire warriors and the like. Then he wouldn’t back down, and started commissioning paintings to commemorate his victory over the fictitious creatures,’ Garth chortled.
Myrtle made the disapproving clicking noise that made those who knew her rather nervous.
‘You’re from Magnasanti, aren’t you?’
The young man laughed to himself and focused on twirling an overlarge high tech watch around his rather slim wrist.
‘I think what my friend means is, the bat story is traditional, and it isn’t polite to ridicule it.’ I offered carefully, into the stony silence.
Garth rolled his eyes.
‘Y’ know I moved here because I was sick of Santi, literally sick. I needed fresh air and open spaces and something to do that made sense to me. Ballina’s my home now, I love it just as it is, eccentricities and all.’ he nodded towards the artwork, ‘ludicrous chaos is better than ordered dictatorship in Magnasanti.’ His smile faded for a moment, but soon returned.
Myrtle looked obviously confused, having set herself up to having one opinion of the young man, she found herself wrestling with contradictory evidence.
Garth gave a conciliatory shrug, ‘Look I’ve got a ribbon cutting for our women’s technical college coming up. FemLegUH! have organised a ‘weep and knit’ circle for lost femininity or some such nonsense. I’d better go and discourage them before the welding students start throwing things. Why not just look around Hend and see for yourselves what we’re doing here?’
With that he shook our hands firmly, then strode out of the building, hands shoved into his combat trouser pockets.
We watched as his strangely familiar long legged bouncing gait carried him out of sight.
Myrtle and I then made our way back slowly to Hend Junction, in a state of puzzlement, and shivering in the icy wind.
The short rail journey to Houston passed without incident, but it was a different story when we exited the local train to make our connection. Large signs advertising engineering works blocked our passage, and eventually we found a company employee who admitted that the next departure would be tomorrow.
This left us in a panic, so we asked around the dwindling crowds for advice on the cheapest place to stay overnight. The consensus was a pub with rooms, down by the brick arches of the east-side railway bridge. The winter sunlight had faded into a grey gloom before we reached our destination.
The front of the establishment was festooned with ‘Under new Management’ posters, and another optimistically announced that they were opening soon. An older sign suggested that ‘Bed, breakfast and evening meal’ was an option. I realised how hungry I had become.
‘Why is this place called ‘The Railway Cutter Man’s Green Arms.’ asked Myrtle uncertainly,’ 'Did the guy get gangrene?
The sign, like the rest of the establishment, seemed to be in a state of transition.
A weary man with a duster was cleaning a chalk written menu off a board.
‘Chef’s off’, he said, ‘you can have two breakfasts, but there’s no beds’.
This did not sound promising at all, I was feeling too tired to find somewhere else, and anyway, I suspected we couldn’t afford the alternatives.
Several workmen were packing up their tools, and a smell of glue wafted out of the door.
One whispered to Myrtle as he left, ‘whatever you do, don’t eat here!’, then held his stomach and winced as he climbed into an overloaded van.
The manager, for this was the position of the duster wielder, asked us for a small amount of cash in advance which he pocketed swiftly, then passed over the keys and told us we could push them back through the letterbox when we left in the morning.
The stairs were completely blocked by decorating equipment, so we scanned around the dusty bar room for somewhere to settle down. Myrtle peeled back an old curtain being used as a dust cover, and carefully checked the upholstery of a dingy looking banquette to reassure herself that nothing nasty would jump out, then threw off her shoes and sat down. I joined her, and we shared what was left of the Ovaltine in our flask.
Despite the warnings I was too hungry to miss a meal so we examined the manager’s ‘breakfast’ tray. It seemed safer to disregard anything which wasn’t sealed in its original plastic. Myrtle coated some wheato biscuits with the contents of a tiny pot of marmalade, and I ate a long life yoghurt mixed with muesli. It wasn’t very filling.
The windows were frosting up, and the room took on an unwelcome chill. How on earth would we survive the night, in the freezing cold and surrounded by builder's mess?
(To be continued)
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