The chairperson of the Greater Windytown Regional Council, Frangipani Wildflower, walked the walk. On this occasion the walk was the one named in her honour on the concourse leading to the vast entrance to the Eastpac Stadium on Windytown’s waterfront. She was holding the report from the consultants commissioned by the Wire-Wrapper Governance Review Working Party and she was not happy with it contents.
“Smoke and mirrors” Martyrdom Laud-Mare Garrick Darnwell had once said about her claim that annually her council spent eleven million more dollars in Wire-Wrapper than they received in rates, and now the report seemed to confirm his treasonous utterances.
Ms Wildflower was fuming over the inaccuracies in the data used and the assumptions made, particularly as the consultants had not bothered to meet with her people to discuss the details. The report might just have well have been written by Lewis Carroll, she considered.
Meanwhile in Carleton, the Laud-Mare, Kim-Jong Maka, was grinning like a Cheshire cat. All the ducks were falling nicely in a row. He looked proudly out of his office window on to Holy-way Street and noted that it was looking more and more like Pennsylvania Avenue every day, despite the contractors, Newfield’s, taking an age to complete the transformation.
There was no doubt the new Ventilation Centre had an air of Washington’s Capitol about it and over the road the old Moronic Hall, shifted back to make way for the new boulevard and once the site of that pesky upstart Henry Paul’s radio station Tomorrow FU, bore a strong resemblance the White House. Perhaps his council could purchase the residence, he mused, and allow it to be the Laud-Mares abode.
He must check up with his Chief Executive Colon Wrong and find out when the new signs planned for each end of the town proudly declaring Carleton “The Heart of the Wire-wrapper” would be put in place. That he reckoned would be the piece-de-résistance; daffodils were after all, a relic of the past.
His inauguration and the swearing-in ceremony was now just months away.
Meanwhile Ms Wildflower had stopped her power-walking and looked down on Quarterloo Quay just in time to see Windytown’s Laud-Mare Cecelia Wade-Green ride past on her bicycle. Ms Wade-Green gave her a cheery wave which infuriated Frangipani even more. No wonder the good people of Wire-wrapper were wary about linking with Windytown to form a super city, she determined.
Windytown’s daily newspaper The Dumb-Post had recently castigated Ms Wade-Green and her council for falling asleep at the wheel. “Wakey, Wakey” screamed the front page headline after her somnambulant councillors belatedly discovered that somewhere along the line a large number of council staff had lost their jobs and Ms Wade-Green’s new temporary office accommodation was going to cost ratepayers $350,000.
Going to sleep on the job was scarcely going to encourage the hard-working folk in the Wire-wrapper to join forces with Das Kapital, Ms Wildflower conceded.
And yet there were persuasive linkages. Frangipani and her husband owned a substantial dwelling on the outskirts of Graton and Cecelia had a batch nestled in the picturesque bush in the Monger-too-weary Valley. Ironically Ms Wildflower’s council was planning to flood the area to create one of the new irrigation dams and in so doing, blocking the Wade-Greens’ access.
Despite this impasse, to all intents and purposes Cecelia and she were Wire-wrapper people themselves so surely it would be their destiny to rule the roost.
“Over my dead body,” said Kim-Jong Maka.
