AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last chapter, Samantha Panther salvages what’s left of her life. Now, another character bursts upon the scene change. Who? Possibly.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 57

In the maximum security wing of the George Walker home for the Criminally Insane and Marginally Demented, the orderly strolled along the snow white corridor in a suitably orderly manner. He made his way down the passage checking in turn through the reinforced glass viewing panels set into the solid steel doors of each room and pausing only to start again. Taking a left into the RoeDrunner annex he headed for the BhamBee television lounge and the chance to sit back and have a break before once again doing his hourly rounds of the institution’s most special ‘clients’.

The Vice-chancellor had a long standing arrangement with the owners of the facility located in the hills between the east and west of the southern part of north Cardiff: for a small annual fee they would make rooms available for the VC’s most special acquaintances. This hospitality, and the fee that went with it, were enough to stop the Vice from making public a range of uncompromising photographs of the owners in a variety of compromising positions.

Room twelve of Snow White corridor held a client who had been ‘recommended’ by the Vice many years ago. The occupant was one of the oldest clients in the whole building. The staff didn’t know where he’d came from, why he’d ended up there or what his name was. Over the years he’d picked up the name ‘Mr E’ - a light linguistic play on the notion of his identity being largely a mystery. The only person who knew why Mr E was there, where he had been before being there and indeed what his real name was (as the man himself had long since forgotten), was the Vice-chancellor. However, despite not knowing the reason for his extended stay at the secure unit, Mr E did know that he didn’t wish to remain there. To this end he had been cautiously working on an escape plan for several years now (if not longer). He had hatched the idea that he may be able to tunnel out of the institution using nothing more than a tea-spoon. His first problem had been getting hold of a tea-spoon as special ‘clients’ were not allowed such implements. He’d decided his only option would be to fashion a make-shift equivalent from whatever he could get hold of. After many months of secret night-time work E had finally managed to shape such an item out of the only available object available to him – a geologists rock hammer. Armed then with only his home-made tea-spoon, and a seemingly endless supply of time, he then set about setting about the concrete floor to his ‘room’.

It had been a long laborious and lengthy task but finally, on this night, this cold, wet, humid dry night, Mr E was close to breaking through.

Statistically speaking the odds against being able to tunnel through 20 inches of concrete and coming out exactly in line with an old, long forgotten tunnel were millions to one against. It is for that reason that, when he did finally break through the floor of his ‘room’ that the persistent Mr E didn’t break through into an old, long forgotten tunnel.

Instead, due to an oversight, he had managed to break through to the second floor of the three storey building. It was hard to tell who was more surprised about this – Mr E or the old lady whose bed he dropped down onto as he scurried through the hole he’d crafted.

She screamed, but he screamed first. He rolled off the bed and quickly scanned the dimly lit ward for signs of an exit or, failing that, some sort of a way out. At the far end of the long Da FeeDuck ward, to his left, was the very thing he sought: a sign marked ‘ALLANFA’. Up on his feet in an instant, he dashed through the double doors, barely stopping to open them, turned right and hurried along HelmAfud corridor towards the lift, marked ‘Lifft’.

She continued to scream. Only closer now. He could feel her hot screaming breath on his neck. He got into the lif(f)t. The doors glode shut in her screaming face. The device rumbled. The doors glid open. An almost identical scene as the one he’d left presented itself: same glossy white walls, same faux linoleum floor, same screaming elderly patient. The same in every detail except that the cartoon figure taped to the wall behind her was not HelmAfud but BuckSpunny. Quickly the doors clapped shut, the device rocketed upward, the doors snapped open to reveal an almost identical scene as the one he’d left, but this time the old lady screamed somewhat wheezily and the cartoon was Pokey Peek waving a gay trotter at him as the doors rattled closed. Noiselessly, silently, the device must have moved, for when the doors dared open the screaming woman was gasping mostly, and Che Guevara stared dashingly over her shoulder. ‘One more floor should do for her’ thought Mr E, who suffered from delusions of medical training in geriatrics. The thing is, he wasn’t entirely wrong. One more floor should have done for her, but he’d forgotten to consider something…he wasn’t going to be there to find out.

For Mr E suddenly had a plan. He’d make the device descend, and not just descend but descend all the way to the ground floor. It had been a long time since he’d operated one of these babies, but once he began it would come back to him – it would have to. This looked like one of those new hightech jobs – not a lever to be seen, he admired. So how – and why – had it ascended when he entered it? He ran his hands over its sleek interior, and yes, there was a control panel, slightly recessed into a space to the right of the temeperamental door – two columns of round buttons, five per column, each labeled with a different numeral. Some sort of code?