Isabella Braeden, Mayor of Feilubin


Urban legend suggests that the price charged per hour goes up a hundred dollars per floor in the Eagle Corp Business Services Tower.
Horatio Chiseler, declared by Myrtle to be decent for a legal type, rented offices in the lower levels, so my elevator trip was short, and his fees were simply unaffordable, rather than astronomical.

Even so, I had signed up for the ‘thirty minutes focused sessions’ rather than a more luxurious hour, to discuss the finer details of my insurance dispute. This brevity caused problems in itself, as the advisor made up for lack of time with rapid delivery. More than once I had found my mind rebounding from the dense jargon, and caught myself immersed instead in envious desire for the simple, yet pampered, life of Chiseler’s pot plants. I managed to pull myself away from the polished green shininess of a particularly fine specimen and forced my brain to focus on the anxiety provoking information being presented.



‘Their accusations against you are obviously ridiculous, but all they have to do is spin this out and bammo, you are out of funds.’ my advisor stated, as kindly as possibly.
The current topic of conversation revolved around a spurious claim that I had left a clockwork timing device in my apartment, and therefore I was clearly a terrorist who had blown up the building myself. A few scorched fragments of gear wheels, and gaffer taped components were enough to support this fantasy. The previous incendiary incident at Dudley Sewage works was also brought up.

It was a wonder that I survived the drive to Boll Road Sheltered Housing Complex, my mind was whirling.
‘They think I blew up the building with that cuckoo clock Arnold sent me!’ I yelled furiously, as my friend climbed into the passenger seat.
Myrtle’s burgundy hat turned towards me sympathetically, but her actual head seemed less interested in my revelation than I had anticipated.

‘It’s blackmail, pure and simple.’ I spluttered on, unregarded.

Maybe her feet were hurting. I reminded myself to be understanding just in case.
‘The choice is to be penniless, or a criminal or..’ but my angry outburst seemed to freewheel to a stand-still, pitted against this unexpected lack of comment.

I watched as my friend’s coat sleeve reached for the seat belt, but I was unconvinced by the slim, pale hand which accompanied it.
If it were not for the usual difficulty my passenger had stretching the safety device across her ample torso I might have suspected another one of her silly crash diets, like the time she fainted in a swan pedalo on the park boating lake, and the medics had to paddle out in a plastic pirate galleon to see to her.
 

 

We reached the traffic queue for the Foulden Road Junction, and Myrtle did not relate the anecdote about her Mother ripping up the first set of traffic lights that appeared here, because they were ‘flashing on and off through her bedroom window’.
This was really worrying. Some days I drove the long way round just to avoid hearing this tale one more time.

 

I glanced sideways, but my friend was staring out of the passenger window, so I was unable to read her expression. I spent the next few miles reviewing my memories of the last few days. Could I have offended her in some way, or was she ill with some awful disease and was working herself up to telling me about it?

I slammed my foot on the brakes in frustration, and also to avoid a Government Utilities Maintenance van which had made a reckless U-Turn right across my path.

‘Did you see that, I ought to report it, driver wearing dark glasses in this weather?’
The vow of silence by the occupant of the passenger seat remained intact.

I ground my teeth and decided she could be like that, and see if I cared, I was quite able to be just as awkward if I put my mind to it, and decided to ignore Myrtle, and anything she did for the rest of the journey.

 

We got as far as the Deighton by-pass before my resolution was tested past the limit. I could see in my rear mirror that some sort of van was dangerously hopping forward through the fast moving traffic. I managed to keep my mutterings about unsafe commercial drivers under my breath, but when the vehicle cut right across my path and caused me to swerve violently off the road into a lay-by I shouted a few things out loud that would have had me confined to Miss Simmons detention room in my high school years.

 

My friend, however, seemed wholly unconcerned about our near miss, and was more occupied retrieving something from the footwell, and then with stuffing the found items down the front of her bulging Houndstooth Macintosh.
Toilet rolls? I looked more carefully. The clip on earrings, the inevitable blue beads, all these were present and correct, but …?
“Alice!! What on earth is going on??.’ Some sort of bewildering body swap appeared to have happened.
Myrtle’s pal passed me a note.

 

‘Dear (the name was illegible due to the missive being written with a failing biro, I assumed the note was addressed to myself)
(There followed a heavily embossed scrawl which had apparently revived the pen, but my correspondent kept the rest brief, obviously in case her writing implement let her down again)
Alice=Me today
M’

The rest of the drive to Feilubin passed in silence, with me nervously looking in the rear-view mirror in case any more white GUM vans were thinking of doing something unpredictable near-by.

 

The turn off to Feilubin seemed to take us back in time, the roads were surrounded by fields, and even the farmers seemed ancient, but not quite as old as their outdated agricultural equipment. A few gulls squawked miserably around a rubbish tip, and then we dipped down into the tiny town.

Mayor Braeden’s Mayoral mansion had a definite colour scheme. It was as if an explosion had occurred in a paint factory which confined its range to shades of the colour pink. In case the effect lacked enough punch, a range of pink hued wallpapers and matching curtains had been applied to complete the look. 

 

Myrtle had obviously coached Alice into looking like a sound recordist. She held the microphone out at the correct angle, and tapped at buttons convincingly. Her expression of polite interest was maintained at all times, unlike Myrtle’s tendency to lapse into irritated boredom at the slightest provocation.

The Mayor seemed unconcerned at any rate. We were at least three chapters into  ‘Isabella My Life and Works’, while sitting on a frilly pink sofa, drinking Ovaltine out of dainty pink china cups.

‘Spoils the taste,’ I imagined my friend saying, and her ghostly intervention was correct, it did.

 At least the extended tedium of the Braeden’s recollections had calmed my nerves and I could now sip the drink without rattling it against the saucer.

 

 

‘So moving on from my early childhood achievements, I was sent to Dr Swaroffski’s residential school for gifted children. That is where I met the young Neil Fairbanks you understand,’

Amidst a vast ocean of droning on, Mayor Braeden had suddenly produced a wavelet of interest.

‘He was totally in awe of his Mother, and hid under the bed when she visited. We had to tempt him out with a tin of sardines.
Of course Hilda Fairbanks practically runs Magnasanti now, she is the power behind the throne, as it were. Her software business bankrolls the whole economy as far as I understand. I think it says a lot that Neil took his Mother’s name, rather than that deadweight father, Mortimer Green, what a total klutz that man is, and so much shorter than he appears in the newspapers. I suspect they stand him on a box for the photo ops.’

 

Mortimer Green, the photo which appears regularly in the Simnation Times.

Mortimer Green, as snapped by a Magnasanti Citizen.
 

 

The rest of the self aggrandising speech, promoting the expanding remit of FemLegUH, her single handed heroic rescue of Feilubin from the horrors of a progressive school system, all passed me by.
Fairbanks had parents, and what a pair they sounded! I couldn’t wait to get back home, and find the frustratingly absent Myrtle to give her the news.

Saying Alice was quiet on the way home is as redundant as saying the wind in Ballina is a bit windy today, but there was an intense quality to the quiet which differed from the trip out.
Apart from an occasional glance over her shoulder at the road behind she was very still and seemingly thoughtful.

I was tempted to turn on the radio to interrupt the silence, but something held me back.
Eventually a fresh idea seemed to occur to her, as she sat up straight and tapped my knee for attention. We were approaching the Deighton roundabout but she pointed determinedly at the side turn to a 24/7 petrol station and convenience store.
My puzzlement was abated when she hopped out of the car and headed towards the customer comfort facilities. I could see the shop manager glaring at me through the glass window from behind her counter, so I decided to enter the convenience store and buy the smallest price item available, so as to qualify as a genuine patron.

While I was queuing with the heavily discounted tiling grout, I saw a familiar white van slide into an empty space next to the tyre pressure checking facility. It could have been my imagination, but both the occupants seemed to be staring at my car through their inappropriately dark sunglasses. I could hardly concentrate enough to pay for my shopping.

With Alice back in the passenger seat, I made to rejoin the road, but she indicated that we should drive round the back of the shop. As soon as we were out of sight of the van, she hopped back out of the car, after grabbing a large handful from the foreign coin collection that had been skidding around in a recess on the dashboard. Why was she fiddling with the payment tower on the car wash?
Acting like a character from a spy novel, Alice then bobbed up and down trying to peep through the gap in the buildings, eventually she was satisfied, and waved me into the empty bay.

 

I wasn’t happy at this development as I hated these noisy machines with their semi-violent brushes and gushing water, but my collaborator had not yet confirmed the wash program. Then a great many things happened at once.

The nose of the white van poked around the corner, Alice hit a big green button, then flapped her arms frantically for me to drive straight through before the program started. She squeezed down the side of the monstrosity and leapt back in the passenger seat.

The pair of government maintenance engineers saw their quarry escaping and accelerated into the path of the oncoming brushes.
Realising their mistake they tried to back out, but the hinge of the emergency exit gate was trapped shut by a fat pink quilted toilet roll, identical to those last seen in the chintzy visitor’s cloakroom at the official mansion in Feilubin.

 

An error siren blared out as foam, water and brushes swirled in a maelstrom of misused programming. Wax, water and a tidal wave of suds flowed from the machine.
The last we saw of the suspicious occupants was two pairs of sunglasses pressed up against their windscreen, which was rapidly disappearing under a blanket of foam.

Alice calmly smiled and clutched her carrier bag of toilet rolls in triumph as we cruised back to Ballina Central.

 

When I dropped my substitute partner off at Boll Road, Myrtle was just arriving back at the Centre, wearing her best coat. She claimed that she had been to get her ears dewaxed and was therefore unavailable for the trip, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye.
In any case, Sally has one of those electric things that pumps warm water out, and she does all the Boll Road residents for free. I couldn’t see Myrtle throwing away good money just for a bit of soft carpeting and a string quartet playing over the speakers at the private centre.

I was really cross, if she hadn’t wanted to go she could have just told me surely? 

However things fell into place that evening, when Lowell Cree rang me in the portacabin.

He wanted to know in detail what Myrtle had thought of their day out together, specifically had she said anything good about him?

 

Hesitating, I managed to come up with ‘well she didn’t say anything bad,’ which was sort of honest, and seemed to reassure him at least.
I wondered how this attempted reconciliation might work out, it was certainly food for thought. It seemed a little selfish, but if my friend upped and moved to Bachrein I would actually miss her very much. Maybe she was, as she had said before, simply keeping her options open? There was nothing to do but wait and see.