Peter Hollywood
The Welcome Centre
THE WELCOME INFORMATION CENTRE WAS NOT THE SORT OF PLACE TO HAVE REGULARS; but it did. Normally it was tourists. Visitors: poured off coaches, having just disembarked from teetering cruise ships tethered now to the docks at the waterfront. Or emerging, rumpled, from taxis. Or intrepidly appearing, humping back packs and rucksacks, hunched under glistening ponchos. All bundling through the smoothly automated, shining doors. These visitors would glean some local information, which Lisa and her colleagues readily dispensed from behind the smooth and shining counter, while issuing the free maps of the city. Then the tourists would be on their way, venturing out into the city and its environs, and rarely return, unless it was to purchase tickets for a sightseeing tour or the Opera House. But, although not the sort of place you’d think of having them, there were the regulars. The elderly man, for example, who appeared on an intermittent but regular basis, and whom they quickly got to spot from behind their chrome counter. He would shuffle up to them and leaning forward enquire in a loud, cracked voice: –
Parades! There any parades today?
Lisa, if the one approached, knew by now how to handle this enquiry. She would turn simply to a colleague and play-act in the fashion that had become customary to them now: –
Ruari; you rang the Parades Commission this morning, didn’t you?
–
Yes, Ruari would reply. And they said there were no parades planned for today.
issue 9