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 previous episode, Wong offers Wolfcastle his support. “It hadn’t been asked for and Wolfcastle had been somewhat embarrassed at the time. What was he meant to do with the old man’s surgical truss?” And now, back to the librarian…

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 18B
Across town the librarian was coming to the end of her shift. She’d lipread the international business news and was waiting to see what the new weather girl had to mouth for herself. Lipreading wasn’t something she had to do out of necessity. It was purely a hobby. She approved of silence. That’s why the library job had appealed so much. Ideally she’d have gotten that job overdubbing the pauses in foreign films but they claimed she didn’t have ‘enough experience’. They gave to job to some ‘actress’ with a media studies degree. Who’d have known she’d fall under a bus on her way to work that first morning?

By the time the Channel 12 weather forecast was over she’d just have time to observe the sports headlines and print off the latest version of her research on the university’s printers before she handed over to the morning shift. There weren’t many perks to the job so she was determined to get what she could out of it. She’d have to be quick though. That nosey cow from the short loan section had nearly caught her last night. She was always sniffing around the place. Such a bloody annoying habit, it was like working with one of those sniffer dogs they have at airports. Like that, only with less interesting conversation and poorer personal hygiene.

Why she was bothering to do research on the university’s printers was a misleading matter. She’d meant to print off the latest copy of her research using the university’s printers but had made a simple lexical-selection error. Being a librarian she’d researched her own some-time language problem. Frampton’s definitive ‘Basic Advanced Complex Psycholingistic Pathology and Visual Spatial Awareness for Beginners’ had proven most informative on the subject. She had concluded that it could all be safely written off as a side effect of the loss of depth perception previously mentioned and never referred to again.

Her research currently ran to over 25 pages of text. She’d been working on it in every spare moment for weeks now. It wasn’t hard getting spare moments in her job. Another perk. At 5.37 in the morning there were never many students in the library. Just the usual faces – homesick Asian students up late again to link up with family and friends via the internet. And that was the point: Where were all the students? According to the current student record database, that she’d managed to hack into only last night, there were over 30,000 students enrolled at the university. Thirty thousand. Thirty for every square mile of Luxembourg…and growing. Yet in her job in the library she only ever saw the same faces. Or at least the similar looking faces. Something was going on and she wanted to find out what. It wasn’t out of some great desire to uncover a scandal or right whatever social unjustice may be occurring. No, there was something else. She was sure that somewhere, probably somewhere close, someone, probably someone close, was making a killing… and if there was any killing going on she wanted to be involved.

Her research had shown that a new student was enrolled at the Welsh University on an average of one every 45 minutes. It was a startling piece of information. By rights there ought to be over 32,178 students, so where were they? At the same time, by tracking the annual reports and financial records, she’d discovered a huge increase in funding coming in to the University as a whole and one department in particular.

As the last page of her dossier was wound out of the printer she quickly bundled all twenty five pages up and headed off towards the photocopier. She was too cautious to make two full printed copies, that might get her unwanted attention. But she had to make a second copy of the document – she was a librarian after all.

Tapping in the staff code to the photocopier, she set the machine to do its task and in the meantime dipped in to the biscuit tin next to the kettle which the employees could freely use to make themselves drinks during their shifts. As the machine whirred away she picked up an early edition of the Cardiff Post and placed it in her bag to read later. Then she began to think : for a job with few perks there sure where a lot of fringe benefits.