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, we left the Cornishman “happily engrossed in a three-way conversation about code switching with two Portuguese nuns and a Lebanese-Greek dentist” so that we could recede to Wolfcastle…

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 25
He was having a bad day. It hadn’t even technically be going for that long, the sun only having recently risen and all.

Ddwwchyllff’s line was engaged – what could he be doing at this hour? Surely the call girl wasn’t still there? He’d tried several times in a row and there was no reply. Wolfcastle stepped out of the mobile mobile phone booth© and realised that his inventive friend hadn’t actually told him how to deflate it once finished. That had been another source of annoyance. Yet another soon presented herself.

The Librarian had hurriedly rushed over to take a closer look at what she had just witnessed: namely the instant appearance of what was, as far as she could tell, a fully functioning phone booth. Now she stood a few paces away from the already flustered Wolfcastle.

‘How does it work?’

‘Fuck!’ was the startled and already flustered initial response from Wolfcastle. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.

She had recognized his initial startled outburst for the expletive that it was generally regarded to be; a minor clause, not an elliptical one. She didn’t hold with the view of expletives as being semantically empty though. She regarded them more as emotional utterances than anything. ‘I asked first!’ she insisted in reply to his question.

‘What is this some kind of contest?’ he dismissively turned back to the mobile phone booth© and the problem of deflating it.

‘I said, I asked first!’ she persisted in insisting. Wolfcastle turned back to face her once more.

‘Do you mind? I really am not in the mood for this Miss…?’ She wasn’t going to be suckered into revealing a name that easily.

‘You don’ t know do you?’ (she had decided that her initial question had been sufficiently answered by his general demeanor). ‘Did you steal it?’

‘NO!’ he protested. ‘My friend invented it… He’s an inventor – sometimes at least.’

‘Try opening the release valve’ she offered. She didn’t know that it had a release valve, let alone where it may be located, but it seemed a plausible suggestion to her.

Wolfcastle had composed himself somewhat after the initial shock of her impromptu inquisition. That seemed like a plausible suggestion to him. He looked for such a valve. Luckily, saving a overly long scene where characters get bogged down discussing a relatively minor aspect of the whole story, he did indeed find and release a ‘release valve’. The mobile phone booth© quickly tumbled to the floor with a hissing / gushing noise. Not quite the compact box it had originally been, but certainly a lot easier to transport than the old style rigid phone booths that had been so popular.

‘Look’, began Wolfcastle.

‘At what?’ she retorted.

‘No, it wasn’t a command, it was just a filler, an attention getter, a linguistic device…Look’, he began again, ‘I really am in a hurry OK. Thanks for your help but I have to get going.’ Wolfcastle wasn’t good socially. He had never really felt comfortable with people. Since first being made aware of her presence he’d been careful to keep a distance between him and her, oblivious to the fact that she had been doing the same. Besides, he really did have things to get done and making small talk with a stranger was not something he had time for just now.

For her part, the Librarian recognized a character trait she herself possessed. She too was not a people person. That was one reason why she’d taken to her previous line of work so easily and rapidly. Recognising his rejection for the rejection that it was, she felt an urge. It was a familiar urge, the one that had made her so successful at her chosen career… her previous career that is, not her current one. Fortunately for all concerned, or at least all present, they were at ground level and there appeared to be no busses passing. But then it wasn’t that kind of urge, it was something else.

There was definitely something about the man in front of her that intrigued her. Intrigued her in a way that she had never before been intrigued. She felt herself mysteriously drawn to him but didn’t know why. She could quite put her finger on it – not from that distance and not in public – he might object at such an advanced advance, and besides that sort of thing wasn’t proper behaviour. But then he wasn’t really paying her any attention anyway. It was just like it always was. She sunk back into recalling all the failed failed relationships she’d gotten into over the years. Her shoulders dropped, her face became empty and she slunk back against the nearby wall as the weighty memories of her own social shortcomings weighed heavy on her mind.

In the meantime, Wolfcastle had managed to fold the deflated mobile phone booth© into the approximate size of a small packet. The deflated Librarian was another matter.