The roadworks in the valley had been there for twenty years. They rolled like the land: fill one pothole and the next emerged, a kilometre down. The signs moved down, and the diggers and layers, and down again. By the time they got to the end, the stuff at the start would have fallen through. Underwater springs, they said. Cost too much to fix it permanently. Got to just keep piling it on.

Neil Craw was a funeral director. He believed in permanent solutions. He ran on that platform. He was elected to local council, and given control of a small committee responsible for heritage sites. Craw exploited a couple of legal loopholes and came up with a pot of money. He set people to work, preserving and restoring. Parliament wasn’t happy, and quickly closed off the loopholes to stop anyone else repeating the trick, but Craw got to keep what he’d got. A heritage house was shored up for the future, reopened to the public. An archive was properly staffed. Permanent solutions, muttered Craw. His constituents were ecstatic. A local historian fainted. He was made mayor at the next election.

Look, he said, with a fistful of papers. We can’t do everything. We’re doing too much, poorly. We’re going to cut back. We’re going to cancel certain festivals, some events. Some groups will lose their funding. Three years. That’s my term. Three years, we put these things aside, and we use the money for –

Permanent solutions! shouted the crowd. Craw let his hand fall on the dais.

Exactly, he said.

Craw was true to his word. Funding was slashed. Community theatres tumbled. And Craw worked his way down a list. Progress was slow – necessarily. It took time to do things right. But Craw was canny. He automated, digitised, increased self-service. He made things more efficient, and he used the money saved to fund his horrendously expensive projects. A section of the populace cemented against him, but three years came and went, and the solutions impressed people enough to give him a second term. He opened it by refunding a handful of community groups.

We’ve made progress, he said. These are real, tangible improvements. We have carried a burden for our children, for their children. This is the end of our culture of maintenance. From now on –

Permanent solutions! howled the crowd. A local aged prima donna, her precious theatre refunded, led the crowd in a chorus, rictus grin plastered in place.

Craw came presently to the roadworks in the valley.

Difficult, he said, but much to be gained. Those crews have lived off maintaining that road for –

Twenty-eight years, supplied a councillor.

Nearly thirty years, said Craw. Imagine what we could do with that money. No more fixer upper jobs. We can’t keep putting cement on it.

Pouring good cement after bad, offered another councillor. The room tittered.

No, said Craw. We have to go to the source.

They sent out a contractor to trace back the springs. He took surveying gear, gumboots. He was back a couple days later.

Here, he said, pointing at the map with a grubby finger. Up in the hills. Flows under the road and out into the bay. Craw nodded.

The hills, then, he said.

They took dynamite. People protested, obviously – the environmentalists, the greenies, and the people who hated Craw already. Some more knowledgeable people expressed confusion.

That’s not how you stop a spring, one said to another over dinner. I don’t understand what he thinks he’s going to achieve.

It’ll just come up somewhere else, the other agreed, around a mouthful of salmon.

Craw heard these criticisms and ignored them. He had been a funeral director. He knew how these things worked. They took the dynamite up into the hills, up to the source of the river. They shaped each charge to direct its force down into the earth. They traipsed back a safe distance – a hundred, two hundred metres – and detonated.

Blood and brain vomited up into the sky. It showered down over the trees, pitter patter, and the scent carried on the wind. The water faltered, then stopped. Craw nodded. He returned to his office, and wrote up the papers to release the maintenance crews. Permanent solutions, he muttered to himself.

The crews finished the pothole they were working on, as instructed. The next one did not develop. They shrugged, and moved on to find other work. The road sat in the valley, snaking from here to there, and nothing more.