When the homemade pipe bomb detonated outside the Council chambers one night shattering the glazed double doors and the windscreens of a couple of cars, I was fast asleep with my dog, Winston, snoring at the end of my bed. That is my story. As God is my alibi. The local Gazette splashed a photo of the damage, including some scorch marks on a brick wall, across the front page. The headline trumpeted: Innocence lost. The caption beneath: The day evil came to the mountains, even though it happened to be night. Really? Evil? A couple of windscreens? Hardly. They ought to look a bit closer to home if they want real evil.
No one disputed that Council, (without the ‘the’), deserved it. That corrupt bunch of inept swindlers. Though who was the culprit? No one knew. The weight of petty bureaucracy had obviously been too much for some poor, disgruntled citizen, worn to a frazzle by red tape. Most of us could sympathise. Of the community’s population of eighty thousand souls, it is said that forty thousand are still suspects. The cops didn’t have a clue. They still don’t.
It was only a small bomb. Barely more than a couple of penny bungers, which are, incidentally, completely legal in the ACT. The windows of the Conference Room barely rattled. They, whoever they were, had placed the device in a Council wheelie bin and parked it right up against the double doors. It was dark. No moon. No CCTV. Plus, no one was injured in the blast. All timed to go off at midnight, when no one would be around. However, the police said that wasn’t the point. Someone might have been injured, and that might have made it a serious offence indeed. The Gazette made it sound like the Crime of the Century. The Mayor, God damn him, said that terror had at last come to the peaceful hideaway of our community. His rhetorical flourishes fooled no one. This was recorded in the minutes without amendment: peaceful hideaway of our community.
There seemed to be no motive for the attack. Just some cranky ratepayer fed up with too many rules and regulations, this seemed the most likely hypothesis. Or perhaps it was a random anarchist hellbent on sowing the seeds of ferment and revolution in the minds of our otherwise calm and rational populace. We don’t have to put up with this anymore. We can take charge of our own destiny. Ka-boom!
Well I am here to tell you that of the forty thousand remaining suspects I am the only one who knows the identity of the person, or persons, responsible for planting the pipe bomb in the wheelie bin. After all these years it is time to come clean. I know who it was. Are you ready for this? It was the Mayor himself. On the face of it this would appear to be some sort of cack-handed modus operandi, for why would the Mayor take arms against the seat of his own fiefdom? Why would he choose to sully his own nest? Let me tell you why.
Revenge. That’s why. The purest and most traditional of motives. Revenge that I, the Deputy Mayor, was about to depose and expose him, once and for all, for the charlatan he truly was. Is. And forever shall be. He had taken money from the Treasury and I had the Documentary Paperwork to prove it. The whole castle was about to come tumbling down.
Dennis Dooley, that upstart conservative, was the Mayor and it is common knowledge that everyone loathed him. Me included. I make no secret of it. I confess to belonging to that happy club. Even thinking about him, with his ferrety eyes, sends my blood pressure skyrocketing. And yet the rate payers kept voting him back. His charisma, which he exploited to the max, was a clever ruse, like Satan’s cloak. A weasel with a gold fang. Perhaps they voted him back in because, underneath it all, he was a laughing stock and they felt sorry for him. A jester. He was as skinny as a whippet, a drover’s dog, if you know that expression, whereas I, I don’t deny it, tend to a demographic of more portly and rotund dimensions. You can imagine what sport the Gazette cartoonist had with us: Fat and skinny had a race / up and down the fire place. The letters-to-the-editor pages were full of sardonic reaction to his latest escapade. He was always quick with a practical joke or party trick, putting on silly voices and so on. Puerile.
Once, in the middle of the night, I received a nuisance phone call which woke me with a start from my slumbers, the old heart ticking like a metronome.
‘Hello?’ I said, my mind befogged with the evaporating mist of dreams.
There was some heavy, asthmatic breathing, that is, apart from Winston.
‘Hello?’
Then a voice. A slow, languorous mock Italian voice, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
‘Mr. Stavros?’
‘Speaking,’ I said.
‘I’m a-gonna kill you.’
‘Hello? Who is this?’
But I knew who it was. The voice drawled the word kill as if it was attached to the hull of a boat – keel.
‘I said, I’m a-gonna keel you. I’m a-gonna keel you dog.’
‘Now hang on just a moment. You leave my dog out of it,’ I said, but the caller had hung up. Click.
I went back to bed, my cheek hot against the pillow.
How did I know it was Mayor Dooley making this childish, menacing phone call in the middle of the night? I simply put two and two together and decided it was. Intuition. Unfortunately the police said intuition wasn’t enough for them to go on. They needed evidence. I said it sounded like the sort of silly party stunt Mayor Dooley had been known to carry out before, at community events and the like. There was a precedent. Who else would have known that I had a dog? I was more upset by the threat to Winston than I was to my own person. Small town politics no less passionate for being small. As for Mrs Stavros there is nothing to be said but that I appreciate her taking Winston every second weekend, even though I know Winston doesn’t want to go. He has a weight problem.
On another occasion, also at night, (you can see how a pattern is developing), the voice at the other end of the line belonged to Foo Man Chu. This I know because the caller needed to remind us both of the fact.
It said: ‘Mr. Stavros?’
‘Yes. Speaking,’ I yawned.
‘Mr. Stavros, I Foo Man Chu. I kill you.’
‘I beg your pardon. What time is this?’
‘Shut up Fatty Boom Bah. Or I keel you.’
Of all the – I did not know what the caller’s being Foo Man Chu had to do with anything. Why would he tell me his name? I should have thought to record him, physical evidence, but before I could act on this the caller hung up. Nevertheless, I concluded that Mayor Dooley was again up to his old tricks.
Let it be said that I, Nicholas Stavros, Deputy Mayor, and Dennis Dooley, Mayor Elect did not see eye to eye, politically speaking. We were on opposite sides of the political divide. I was yin to his yang. He was Jekyll to my Hyde. Or is that the other way around? It all stemmed from the time when I, as a young Councillor, had the deciding vote as to whether to block a development proposal in which a member of the Mayor’s family was found to have a Vested Interest. So I blocked it. It would have been good for the Community, but bad for the Environment, so without hesitation I put the kibosh on it. You should have seen the look on his face. Apoplectic, I think is the word. Crimson as a beetroot. His response had to be struck from the minutes. All F-this and F-that.
Thereafter as a matter of principle I voted against every proposal he brought before Council, (Council sans article), just to get under his skin, like a pebble in a pilgrim’s shoe. It wasn’t all a one-way street, however. He did the same. Every suggestion I made in terms of Civic Improvement he shouted down and voted against. In this rather unseemly way we danced our political two-step.
When I proposed we build bus shelters so the school kiddies could have somewhere to shelter from the rain while waiting for the bus, he vetoed the motion. He didn’t care if the kiddies got wet. A year later, a bad flu season notwithstanding, when he made the same proposal on similar grounds, I voted against it. When I nominated commissioning a public sculpture to encapsulate pride in our civic founders, he led the nay campaign. The cost, etcetera. The fact that I knew the sculptor personally would have saved money on the tendering process, but did he listen? Not on your nelly.
Another of my brainwaves was to suggest that all Council Employees be given instruction as to how to administer First Aid, a sensible, Community Spirited idea you might have thought, but did that one get up? No. When he suggested extending the opening hours of the local Swimming Pool I said no. No and nein and non. Tit for tat. It’s a wonder anything got done at all. The municipality stagnated. The cartoonist in the Gazette showed Fat and Skinny bickering over a picket fence that was falling into disrepair, the dollar signs floating off into the sky like pigeons. It’s also no wonder that the other Office Bearers of Council, the Treasurer and the Communications Officer and their Peers grew thoroughly sick of our rivalry. They formed a separate Faction to vote down anything we motioned. Council was at gridlock.
The Italian and Chinese personas were nothing if not signs of a diseased mind. A split personality if ever I heard of one. Surely this was all the circumstantial evidence the police needed. Last July, for instance, we were in attendance at the Opening of a new public lavatory in the Municipal Gardens, which cost the rate payers nigh on four hundred thousand dollars if you please. For a toilet! Dooley was wearing his Mayoral Robes and Golden Chains. What a show off! Clothes maketh the monster. He made an ingratiating speech. I was hovering like Francis de Groot in the background. Dooley cut the ribbon with a pair of pinking shears. Snip. The medals hung on his chest like the coins of an exotic disease. There was polite applause. Flashbulbs. The toilet was declared Open. No one wanted to be the first to use it. So I took the bull by the horns and went in to execute my business, thus Christening it in the Name of the Municipality. That was the moment, sitting there, abluting, listening to the hum of voices outside, I came up with my Brilliant Idea. When I emerged Dooley was furious. Why was I always trying to drag the limelight away from his moment of Civic Triumph? Well what else was the building for? For once I was glad it was his name on the plaque affixed to the tessellated wall, a mural which showed the likeness of a bird common to our district. People began to charge into the toilet like it was the Shrine of Lourdes. Pristine no more.
The Mayor approached me like Frankenstein’s Creature. In his hands he held a length of the ribbon he had just Ceremoniously Cut. He stared maniacally into my eyes as, with exaggerated gentleness, he wrapped the ribbon about my neck and slowly tightened, as in an Act of Simulated Strangulation. Now what else was that bit of ribbon but evidence? Luckily I was able to release myself before he choked me, and the Mayor, snapping out of it, laughed it off for the cameras. What a lark. Fat and Skinny in bed on their wedding day, a garter wrapped around Skinny’s thigh. However I could see it in his eyes, like a rabid monkey, there was murder and mayhem in them.
Him and his ludicrous old Chains. That cloak! One evening I stayed back in Chambers. Nothing unusual in that. I had to add some finishing touches to a proposal to make Kerb-and-Guttering compulsory in Rural Areas and make rate payers fund the infrastructure. See? Civic Improvement, that’s all I care about. I needed to find a clause in the relevant statute, and so went into the Conference Room. I don’t know why. The copies of the legislation aren’t kept in the Conference Room which is a chamber dense with atmosphere and gravitas.
There were the Robes and Gold Chains draped over the Mayoral Throne. A picture of Her Majesty the Queen hung above it. I dare say they’ll get around to changing it one day. In some disgust I snatched them up and threw them about my shoulders just to see if they might fit. They did. It was a feeling as of coming home. It was a feeling of invincibility. The Chains with their symbolic medallions jingling around my neck. Mayor Stavros. It had a certain ring to it. I paraded, as on the catwalk. I was just about to perch on the high-backed chair with its green velvet cushion when the doors swung open and who should be standing there but Dooley himself. Without his official clothes he was helpless. The electricity in the air rose a volt or two.
‘Take those off at once,’ he thundered.
‘I shall in my own time, Dennis.’
‘Don’t you Dennis me. Take them off, or I shall have you charged with fraud and embezzlement and impersonating a Mayor.’
‘How much does a set of these cost?’ I asked, meaning the Chains.
‘That is none of your concern?’
‘They must be valuable.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Is this real gold, do you think?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
I took them off, not because I was intimidated by his threat, but because of my respect for the Office to which I had not been Democratically Elected.
‘One of these days, Mayor Dooley,’ I said, ‘I shall take these from you.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ he said, smoothing down the Robes with his hand as if they were soiled.
Which brings me to the latest debacle in this sad and sorry local history. Fat and Skinny duking it out in a boxing ring. Not long after the Incident with the Mayoral Robes Mayor Dooley moved a motion to instruct all Council Employees in the delivery of First Aid in the event of an emergency. The minutes note that I demurred. Quite right. I would not be party to such a foolish notion. What was the point of garbage truck drivers moonlighting as paramedics? Or gardeners delivering premature babies in the street. It was a waste of Council Resources when Kerb-and-Guttering was so vital. It went to the vote. All those in favour? Aye. All those against? Nay. Any abstentions? On this occasion, however, the Mayor had the numbers and the motion was, can you believe it, carried.
As a consequence we all had to sit through a laborious three-day staff development marathon on how to improvise a sling out of an old rag, how to treat a person for jellyfish stings – here in the mountains! CPR. Choking on peanuts. Snakebite. Splinters. In addition we were taught how to use the brand spanking new Defibrillators in case of Cardiac Arrest. God forbid, better safe than sorry, the instructor said. We each took a turn to polish the paddles, apply them to the chest of a legless mannequin.
‘Clear,’ we cried, then zap! All of us ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ like kids on cracker night, the smell of electricity in the air. The second and third days the Mayor did not attend the course, but conducted, as he later explained, a snap audit of the building, including my office. In fact the audit was only of my office.
The following night was the scheduled debate as to whether (motion one) Council ought to expend Funds on a Bicycle Path through the more picturesque parts of the Municipality. The Mayor was Opposed to this idea, as it would entail cutting down an avenue of established plane trees which were, in fact, what made it picturesque. He argued a dreary soliloquy. The tone of his speech, frankly, gave me indigestion. I could taste my dinner all over again and disliked it for a second time. Ayes to the left, Nays to the right. For once I agreed with the Mayor. I too was Opposed to the Bicycle Path, but I wasn’t going to let him know that. Therefore I abstained.
Then, under the title of Other Business, Mayor Dooley lodged an Extraordinary Motion. He proposed that the Deputy Mayor’s position be declared Vacant as there was an outstanding investigation into the alleged misappropriation of Council Funds for the purposes of commissioning a duplicate set of Mayoral Chains. It had been filed under Miscellaneous Expenses. There would be no duplicate set of Mayoral Chains, not while he was Mayor and had breath in his body. I cried out – I would never stand down, never, but this was out of turn. He then sought leave and set about playing the tape of his Home Message Service with the strange voice cackling:
‘I’m a gonna keel you.’
He played it several times. Well, that could have been anybody’s voice. What were they all looking at me for?
When, according to Proper Procedure, I arose to present my Defence and Counter Claim – the duplicate Chains were merely a safeguard in case anything should happen to the originals – They were in my office for safekeeping. I could see the eyes of the other Councillors roll back in their heads. I could feel the pulse in my throat going like the clappers. Sweat beaded on my forehead. How dare he! What an outrage! My legs dragged like anchors as I made my way to the lectern. My jaw tight as a ligature. I was sweating inside my suit like a suckling pig. Just as I was about to open my mouth to respond to this calumny I felt the tell-tale tightness in my chest. Heartburn. It swelled suddenly to an almighty pain. Spasms shooting down from my shoulder to fingertips. I toppled. The lectern collapsed under my weight, my head hit the floor, and the last thing I remember was Mayor Dooley in his crow’s robes standing over me, shouting: ‘Quick! The paddles!’
Darkness.
Then someone turned on a light and I found myself in a hospital bed some considerable time later. Diminished and weak. There were substantial whiskers on my cheeks. A nurse in blue scrubs came in to fuss about me, checking dials and drip bags and cannulas.
‘Ah you’re awake. You’re the lucky one, aren’t you.’
The quick thinking of the Mayor had saved my life. How galling. I could not stand his obsequious fawning after my welfare. He arranged for Council to send me flowers. He even took Winston into his own home and gave him food and shelter. There was nothing I could do but Recover. Slowly I emerged from Darkness into florescent Light.
As part of my recuperation Council insisted I take a holiday. Some Time Off. Relax for once, instead of worrying so much about others. I fretted over what might happen to the Vacant Deputy Mayor’s Chair in my absence, but the Treasurer assured me it would remain Vacant until my return, until I had made a full recovery and reached a decision about my political future. She would continue to note my Apologies in the Minutes.
I took their advice. What else could I do? Mayor Dooley would look after Winston. I went on a holiday to Canberra. Many people would say that Canberra is hardly the place for a relaxing, recuperative holiday, but why not? I wanted to sit in the Parliamentary Gallery to see how the big boys and girls played the game. Besides, fireworks are legal in Canberra. I bought four cases of big bright red penny bungers, the large ones, (they’re cheaper by the hundred). From a Plumbers Supply Store I purchased a piece of PVC piping, commonly known as an S-bend. I had been Born Again. The world was bright and green and fresh. Did I not say earlier in my epistle that Mayor Dooley was the culprit behind the mystery bombing. Well he was, in a way. He brought it on himself. I see this as clearly as I saw the Light of Heaven when the paddles went zap! I am merely the Helping Hand of Destiny. Every waking moment is a bonus, and some of the sleeping ones too. I have been saved for better things. Immune from the Common Law of Man, there is nothing they can do to me. I’ll show them. Ha! Saved for better things. Ha ha! Saved For Better Things.
Mark O’Flynn has published two collections of short stories, White Light, (Spineless Wonders) and Dental Tourism (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020). His novels include The Last Days of Ava Langdon, (UQP, 2016), Grassdogs (Harper Collins, 2006) and The Forgotten World (HC, 2013). He lives in the Blue Mountains.