Lowell Cree, Mayor of Bachrein
 

I will say this for Myrtle, she isn’t easily thrown. After I fell through a ceiling panel and landed in a heap next to her breakfast table, she did not, as I might have done, scream or make a fuss.

The large dining hall in Boll Road Sheltered Housing Unit is a noisy room, with gingham-aproned attendants hurrying around, mopping up spills, and clanking dishes. Thankfully, my unusual method of arrival did not attract as much attention as it might have done in a less chaotic space.
My friend leaned over, grabbed a steaming bowl of porridge from a passing trolley, and pushed it across the formica table in my direction.

‘We wondered where you’d got to,’ Myrtle commented, passing me a very sticky bottle of squeezy honey. I untied one of Doris’s large pink brassieres that I had wrapped around my knees, and utilised this as a shield against the drips, which had congealed on the outside of the tube. My friend watched me create a nightmare Jackson Pollockian landscape on top of the sludgy oatmeal.



‘Your flat has burned down,’ Myrtle offered, as a distraction from my bleak creative process.
I considered many responses, but went with ‘I know’, as it was brief but covered most of the bases.
The Simnation Times was pushed across the table, not my friend’s usual read. The paper was folded to display regional news and events. I spotted the small byline and tiny image of the apartment fire. For some reason it took me longer to notice that the section’s much larger article, with colour photograph, featured yesterday's coach trip, with myself front and centre, being sprayed by sewage, and Evadne Blackheart loop-di-looping over the safety railing behind me.

‘They won’t put that in the newsletter,’ chuckled Myrtle.

The American tan, xxxxl sized tights I’d found at the back of Doris’s drawer were pooling around my ankles, now that I had removed my home-made knee pads, and I felt uncomfortable in every way possible.
Random thoughts rebounded around my brain like a painful game of pool. The exorbitant building maintenance fees which had left my bank account yesterday. I doubted I would get good value from that outlay. Small trinkets that I had treasured, all burned to ash. My favourite lavender blouse, left on my bedside chair to remind me to sew up the loose button, gone along with the rest of my clothes.

Tears dripped off the end of my nose.
Myrtle passed me a tea-towel, which she had found on the floor. I wiped the table with it.

‘No good sitting around here getting worked up, a bit of fresh air will do us good.’ My friend suggested, then grabbed the pink sleeve of the voluminous coat I was wearing, and by degrees, steered me towards an open window.
I was already upside down in the shrubbery outside, before I realised her plan.

The cheery morning DJ blasted out when I turned the key to start the car engine.
‘Wake up Ballina, it’s going to be a sunny day!’.
I scowled at the intruding cheerfulness, but complied with Myrtle’s directions, and we found ourselves in the busy outskirts of town, heading for the river.




Mary’s Snax N’ Brew, tucked in beside our local ferry terminal, was a great deal nicer on the inside than I had imagined. The peeling paintwork and rusty corrugated iron of the exterior had discouraged me from entering previously.
There was much to approve of in the neatness of the sausage rolls, lined up with parallel precision in the hot cabinet, and the framed five star health certificate on the wall was a great comfort.
I almost apologised as I handed over my flask. It had been rolling around in the rear footwell of the car and was rather grubby.

‘There wasn’t time to swill it out properly,’ I whispered meekly, but I needn’t have worried, the proprietor had obviously seen much worse.
It felt like a form of therapy seeing Mrs O’Hanlan produce a pristine bottle brush from out of a sterilising cabinet, and with this, several squirts of catering style detergent, and a steady stream of scalding water restore the receptacle to a hygienic state. She even sandpapered off the spot of rust that had developed on the base.
‘I’m making it with full fat milk, you look like you need building up a bit.’
Fighting back the tears at this unexpected kindness I scooted outside, hugging the freshly made Ovaltine as if it were an old friend.

Both Myrtle and the car had vanished. My brain didn’t feel equipped to deal with this conundrum, so I stood staring at the parking spot where I had left it. A truck pulled up behind me, and a familiar voice rang out.

‘Get in, we've got a lift!’
There was something vaguely familiar about the tattooed driver.
‘It’s Karl from Finska,’ Myrtle exclaimed, ‘he showed us round, remember, his son’s a footballer?’
I nodded vaguely as I was hauled into the second passenger seat, my legs dangling.

‘Your car’s in the back of the truck, we only need to pay pedestrian fare on the ferry now, and he’s driving right through to Bachrein. We can be dropped off!’ Myrtle couldn’t have grinned more if she had won the lottery.

I found the journey a distraction from my inward churn of worry. The ferry trip was as crowded and stressful as always, but once we disembarked in Beesley, snow capped mountains appeared on the horizon, with the tranquil prospect of open spaces ahead.
The wild landscape of the Ballinian heights really did seem to put things in perspective somehow. Karl was not a music fan, so the radio was silent, and we enjoyed watching winter birds and even a deer in the distance. The twisty and steep final climb was hair-raising, but our driver inspired confidence. I tried not to look at the rusting vehicle parts scattered in the shadowed depths of roadside gullies.


 

‘Anytime, yaaah,’ Karl waved from the high cab dismissing our thanks, and we took time to look around the large hill-farming village where we had been conveniently deposited, complete with our old faithful car.
Away from the freight trucks’ diesel clouds, the air tasted clean and cold.

The Mayor of Bachrein, Lowell Cree met us at the end of his driveway. He was emptying the mailbox.

‘F****** Fairbanks again!’, took the place of a greeting, he waved a stash of brown envelopes under my nose. Each one had a Ballina Central Government postal stamp.

‘Health and safety concerns, I tried to tell that lanky t**t, they go too fast these lorries. The roads aren’t up to it.’

We agreed, they definitely were not.

‘Lack of adequate fencing in community gardens, that’s a new one.’ The Mayor scanned to the end of a lengthy document, then sighed.
‘You see that?’ Cree pointed to a row of cabbages, on the opposite side of the road, perched above a precipitous slope, ‘There was a b****y fence there last week. It’s those trendy wood-burning stoves I blame. That hippy lot buy them then they don’t want to pay for the fuel.’
The Mayor grabbed my, or should I say Doris’s coat, even though I tried to hang on to it, and threw it over a motorbike he had parked inside his hallway.

‘Cup of tea ladies?’ our host asked, Myrtle pursed her lips.


 

The one-story house breathed ‘single man in need of a cleaner and or decorator’. Greying underwear hung unevenly across the radiators, motorbike parts filled the cushions of any available seating, and a curling stack of magazines held up an old fashioned stereo system, which was blasting out vintage heavy metal. To my relief, Myrtle located the off switch.
 

Lowell pulled a tea-pot out of a grim looking cupboard. He lifted the lid and stared inside, but was displeased with whatever he found in there.
‘I don’t get visitors, as a rule,’ the Mayor explained, unnecessarily.


‘I’ve missed seeing you’ said Lowell, looking directly at Myrtle. ‘Why are you living in that awful place when you could be with me, in your own home?’
I stared at Cree, not able to process his change of tone or remarkable question.
My friend was cycling through a selection of emotions, and settled on outrage.
‘My place is awful, at least it is clean there!,’ she retorted, bristling with anger.
‘I’ve let things go,’ agreed Cree, surveying the room.

‘Even the curtains have gone mouldy’. I couldn’t see my friend’s face as she had turned to inspect the kitchen, her mood was indecipherable. This was bewildering.

Myrtle shook her head. ‘I knew this was a mistake.’

There was an unbearable tension in the room that was only broken when a mouse ran across my foot and I shrieked louder than a train whistle.

As we were leaving, Mayor Cree grabbed my wrist, ‘Let me know if she needs anything, Myrtle’s not as…’ he struggled for the words, ‘she needs an eye kept on her, that’s all.’

Half way down the mountain I pulled off onto some flat grass by the side of a hairpin bend. It seemed like a good idea to wait for the traffic to die down before we attempted to descend the rest of this treacherous route.

A convenient rock offered itself as a perch, and we sipped our Ovaltine by the car, nibbling out of date chocolate biscuits, watching the trucks almost jack-knife as they took the bend.


 

Debris had been swept into the kerb, loose loads were obviously a hazard on this route. Myrtle kicked at a broken piece of plaster.

‘I thought it was a bit of one of those gnomes, I’m seeing them everywhere now.’ she commented.
‘Oh!,’ For some reason this interruption of my internal deliberations prompted me to remember the letter I had found in my pocket, the night before. I handed the envelope to Myrtle.

She ripped it open and read out loud.

‘Dear Myrtle and Friend,
We have examined the gnomes’ heads in great detail, and cannot find any mechanism which would cause the odd behaviour of nearby electronic equipment.
We will continue to investigate, but we are totally flummoxed by the situation.
Forgive the subterfuge in getting you this note, as we are being watched all the time now,

Best Wishes

Stacy and Theo
Mayors of Furlanija and Guinee

‘Why does nobody remember my name?’, I complained.
Myrtle rolled her eyes, ‘Who gave you this?’. I couldn’t answer, but I knew it wasn’t before the coach trip, as I always checked my pockets before travelling, in case I forgot my handkerchief.
My friend put her head in her hands, and thought hard. Then she reached into the car and pulled out today’s Simnation Times, in order to study the ridiculous photo. 

‘Mayor Dortha!,’ she exclaimed, ‘Of course, she must have slipped it into your pocket just after she popped out of that hatchway.’
‘Yes, and I didn’t notice because of all the exploding sewage.’ I suggested, dryly.
‘Furlanija, Stacy's patch that’s just next to Dudley, they must be friends.’

The light started to fade as we resumed our trek home, or in my case, trek back to Doris’s vacant bedroom in the Sheltered housing complex.
As we passed the sign telling us we were leaving Bachrein, my friend stared around for a while.
‘People go mad in places like this, middle of nowhere,’ she offered, ‘not like the town, always something going on to keep your mind occupied.’
I kept my questions for later, the day had already been overwhelming enough.