“Committee starts in five if you need the loo. I’ll wait before I start.”

I don’t want to wait for you but I know bladders are shrinking with age and I don’t need the loo now even if I will in a moment. Janine sloths to the loo with an exaggerated swagger that doesn’t get her as far as it looks like it should. She’ll become a crow, I know it.

Stewart hugs the wall as he works his way toward the stage steps. The piece of metal, that connects one chair to another, snags and interrupts the comfort of his linen trousers. Bugger.

He doesn’t feel the eyes of people watching him climb the stairs like he used to. Besides, they are all in conversation that is surprisingly inspired pre-10AM but the 60 plusses burn bright in the morning and won’t be awake for long.

A final group enters through the swinging grey laminate doors to sit on the new metal legged assembly chairs that have superseded the Monoblocs.

“Cliff-Martins is in order and let’s not waste a Sunday.” The talking doesn’t cease but enough eyes stare at the continued chatters and they begin to close up.

“I’m not a time waster. Handing over to you, Chestle. Do what you do, young man.” He speaks outward to the crowd and a chair scuttles in response. “Will our young man take the stage?”

Chestle is newly forty-six and has a crescent bald spot wrapping his crown. Everyone is painfully aware of the sound of moving. Each unadulterated step is heard as Chestle moves up the stairs that hug the right of the hollow assembly hall stage. St. Junes is always happy to host assuming that biscuit wrappers are dealt with and whatnot. No one is disillusioned about how the £700 raised for the chairs helped out.

Eyes begin to significantly lighten and focus toward the speaker. There is a sense of attraction to the rising straight edge man despite him and the coordinator being unremarkable.

“Sit, all” Nobody is standing, but they continue to be engaged. He speaks into the laminated paper produced the evening prior.

“We’ve spread the word for three weeks since introducing the first bill with the new system. My laptop is in the car so I’ll try to figure out the rest of the bills people put in. As it stands… three people have submitted notes”. One note from a denizen of the public footpaths, eternally anti-car who wished to dig the eyes out of every driver that side eyed him on his Brompton but settled for sending in a note that supported pedestrianisation a hundred metres around the Barclay city centre. His childhood fantasies of Ted Kaczynski still made him feel alive.

The second reticent bastard wished people would “sit and shut it when Chestle starting speaking” while the third “wished Chestle would sit down and shut it”. The same apologetic wrote and signed the former, after writing the latter in haste, through the nearsight correcting upper portion of his tigerfold glasses.

“Make sure not to sign off your comments. I encourage you to write them but let’s maintain anonymity where possible-”. The crowd stirs as they grasp at the implication but Chestle remains dutifully unbothered centre stage. He half believes they will all become crows like Stew says, and crows chirp Stew does say. Crows will chirp when they’re not busy chirping. Besides thinking that really, crows caw, he doesn’t find Stew’s belief concerning the crowd to be particularly convincing. Janine has only now felt strong willed enough to come back to the Committee after finding a fibre source she likes that can cool down her IBD, keep her from the GP and hopefully the toilet. I think she needed to tell someone but I didn’t expect it while locking my car. Stew will say she was busy chirping. He flips to the next, somehow dogeared, laminate card.

The squat of characters in the hall were a picture of the town. Or they were at least the people who cared to make things happen. If the committee was going to have any effect in Barclay then this bunch were going to vote about it. But school assembly hall bureaucracy was a bitch and needed just the man like my young man Chestle to take the reins from me and cut through the noise.

Stewart sat picking at a hangnail after delivering his introduction. Three weeks prior he had decided to sit on the second row. His seat was snapped up by some faceless nape meaning that now his new spot was left of two bald, sun-scalp spotted regulars that bickered and- chirped. The two men, always in talks, were only trustworthy as a pair. While each man’s claims came off suspicious and unfounded, when they naturally disagreed with each other, their combined conversation felt trustworthy.

“I hear him” Stew monotonously made known.

“Hear what?” Len asked.

“Shush- He’s probably hearing something” Douglas added.

“Yes. I am. The speaker- barely.”

Stew’s light blue crosshatched, buttoned-up, short sleeve dress top was undone to the third button and loosely tucked around his stomach into chino three-quarter lengths. A breeze not cold enough to chill swept over Stew’s chest hair from the window that Derry kindly screwed open with the “bastarding pole”. An overall feeling of annoyance works its way through the hind of his jaw and up into his brow.