Candis Dortha: Mayor of Dudley

My daily mood is best reflected in the patterns I create while squeezing honey onto my porridge. This morning’s cereal featured a daisy, hopeful, fresh and ready for the new year.
A ray of sun appeared through the kitchen window, and for a moment obliterated the distant view of construction cranes on the horizon. I looked happily around my tiny domain, taking in the lovely new mug set that Myrtle had kindly bought me for Christmas, squeezed between the electric kettle and a large new jar of Ovaltine, still sporting its festive bow.

My optimistic glow survived three pairs of tights inexplicably laddering while I got dressed.
Mrs Rorschach, our building’s most irritating resident, received a smile instead of my usual attempt to slide past unnoticed, as we passed in the apartment building lobby. The gasman she had in tow got a nod, as he waved his instrument about.

Even the usual exasperation of the Foulden Road traffic lights failed to dent my mood. My old faithful car had a youthful spring in her shiny new tyres, and my seat failed to slide around  when I took the corners. I patted the dashboard affectionately.



Myrtle was waiting for me when I arrived outside her government sponsored housing complex.
‘Come on, they’re ready to take the photo!’
Sally, a paid helper from the centre, gave me a knowing wink and slapped a name badge onto my coat, then disappeared behind an enormous wheelchair, which on visual inspection looked like it might be jet propelled, with two huge gas bottles strapped to the back.

‘Don’t stare at Les, he’s pretending to be disabled’, Myrtle whispered loudly.
‘He’s got no legs,’ I objected, ‘that’s taking a bit far for pretending isn’t it?’

‘Not that kind of disabled,’ Myrtle’s whisper had become even louder, ‘the kind they want in the papers for the photo. You are putting him off!’.
Les winked at me conspiratorially and I, to my surprise, winked back. New year, new me, why not just go with the flow?

A crumpled photographer was lurking in the gutter, gasping at one of those electronic cigarettes and flirting with the housing complex manager. She wore an oversized gold badge announcing the role, but Mrs E. Blackheart seemed to be leaving the actual work element of the job to Sally, whose badge was a lot smaller and less impressive looking.


 

I posed between Myrtle and a lady who was introduced to me as Alice. She was clutching at a bulging carrier bag.

‘Right then you horrible lot,’ Sally, clapped her hands for attention, ‘everyone look properly ‘umble and grateful for the free trip to the Sewage Plant we’ve been given, and no laughing for this very serious photo!’
Of course everyone did laugh, including Sally, and then Les broke down and chortled more than anyone else.

Evadne Blackheart threw everyone an irritated look, before she and the press photographer claimed the front seats on the coach, then paid her charges no further attention.
Myrtle had assured me that the centre manager didn’t have a clue who anyone was, and it was therefore quite safe to assume the identity of the absent Doris, who had escaped the thrall of government housing and gone to live in a flat in Lumsden street with a nice Rastafarian man.

Most of the short trip was taken up by Sally taking various residents back and forth to the cramped onboard toilet. Les’s wheelchair was too big to clamp into the special grooves in the bus floor, so he had great fun spinning around and ending up in various ladies’ laps.
‘That’s not even his wheelchair,’ Myrtle told me, pursing her lips,’they lost that when he was in the hospital, having more bits cut off.’
 

‘I found this beauty in a hospital corridor, some fool hadn’t chained it up,’ giggled Les, as he whizzed past,’No idea what’s in the gas tanks, could be rocket fuel!’.

Dudley Waste Waterworks was more pleasant than you might imagine. The staff had gone to some trouble planting shrubs in strategic places, and they even had a wildlife garden set up, which was full of birds flitting back and forth, grabbing at peanut feeders and winter berries.

I’m not sure if I felt entirely happy about having my lunch in the Sewage Worker’s staff room, but at least they had shut the windows. However, by the time I had eaten my third, somewhat delicious, salmon roll I was beginning to think that Doris had missed a nice day out.

Mrs Blackheart skulked around, and I noticed her tipping some choice leftovers from the buffet table into a lunch-box, concealed within a shiny expensive looking handbag. However even she couldn’t dampen the mood.

We were supposed to be joined by the Mayor of Dudley for a welcoming speech, but the politician sent her apologies for being unavoidably detained. We didn’t mind, all the more ice-cream for us!

Les kept us all entertained with his jokes and tricks. He had a fake glass eye that he kept in his pocket, and this was used in many different ways to cause shrieks and hilarity amongst our party.
‘He used to be a solicitor,’ Myrtle nodded towards the ongoing chaos, ‘course he had to give it up, they retired him early.’

‘Health reasons I suppose?’
The retired solicitor had just hidden himself under the buffet table, and was tittering away as he startled the stragglers finding some room for more food, by tapping them on the leg with the glass eye.
‘Oh yes, that as well, health,’ my friend said, laughing to herself.

It was a little cold touring the water settlement tanks. I was hoping that we could skip to the end and get back on the warm bus. However, the waterworks chief was a thorough man who was evangelical about sewage treatment, and wasn’t prepared to shortchange us.
Maybe some karmic intervention led to the dunking of Mrs Blackheart in the smelliest of the open tanks. It was a stroke of fortune that the photographer captured the moment, only moments before he had been leaning over a safety barrier and smoking a small cigar.

Mayor Dortha had now arrived, and threw open an access door rather suddenly, thus catapulting Alice and her bulging carrier bag into Les’s lap. This triggered the turbo function of his new wheels. Meant for hill climbing the  impressive machine was quite capable of acting like a snow plough through a whole crowd of people, causing a ripple effect which carried Evadne to the edge. Even then, she may have clung on, if it hadn’t been for the cigarillo being wrenched from the photographer’s hand, and landing next to Les’s gas tanks.



No real injuries were sustained, thankfully, but the bus trip back to Ballina Central felt somewhat fraught. Every one of us smelled appalling. The coach windows were left open, but the only thing that this achieved was to circulate the odour more equitably, so no one could escape the stench. I couldn’t wait to get home and bin my outfit, it was totally ruined.

Les had lost one of his chair wheels in the explosion, and being partly propped up by a mega-cube of adult diapers, was unable to scoot around. It felt like the party was definitely over.

Then Alice managed to block the bus toilet by using her own personal supply of soft and fluffy toilet tissue, which she carried with her in that bulging carrier bag. The Complex Manager was absolutely furious, as now our progress was slowed to an intermittent snail’s pace by needing to stop every few minutes or so for comfort breaks.



Back at base, Mrs Blackheart busied herself extending the poor helper’s shifts, so they could hose down those residents unable to manage by themselves.
 

I decided to leave the car and walk, rather than take the chance of staining the upholstery. It was quite dark. The LED powered street lighting only lit a small pool of pavement, but some sort of orange glow in the distant sky helped once I neared the centre of town.
I imagined I was seeing an elaborate shop front light display that I simply hadn’t noticed before. The fire engines racing past should have given me more of a clue, but I was so much concentrating on not tripping over uneven paving slabs that I mentally filed that information away to be dealt with later.



Mrs Rorschach’s voice was what finally pierced through my torpor.

‘I said to them, you won’t find gas waving it about round there, you need to poke it right into the piping. I’ve reported that leak thirteen times, you check my phone records!’.

The soot covered woman was surrounded by a group of law enforcement officers.
A burly police woman wrapped my neighbour in a blanket, muting the rest of the complaining under the thick khaki fabric.

By various means I found myself in an official vehicle, wrapped in the same style of blanket, and being transported back to the sheltered housing complex, because when asked for the address of a friend or relative I had been quite literal in my answer, without thinking it through.

Evadne Blackheart was leaving the building when we arrived, obviously on her way home, having substituted her ruined skirt suit for  a cleaner’s overall and baggy tracksuit bottoms. She noticed the police van, then spotted the Doris badge which was still attached to my coat, and sighed in exasperation.
‘Not another one wandered off!!’

The manager grabbed my arm roughly, and propelled me through the lobby before the policewoman could explain, then forced me down an internal corridor, until we reached a room marked ‘Doris’.



I was pushed inside. Then the lights were switched off from the outside, and the door locked before I could say a word..
‘It’s for your own good,’ she shouted through the keyhole, before flip- flopping away in her make-do rubber shower sandals. I reached into my coat pocket to retrieve a handkerchief to dry up the sobs, but found instead a crinkly envelope, which was very odd, because I definitely hadn’t put it there.
 

The pitch black of the room was relieved a little, as my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, but the door was firmly locked no matter what I tried. I simply had to come up with an escape plan, and before that find something to wear that didn’t smell of sewage!

To be cont…