AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see full blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the previous episode, the undermining of Cymru and the rise of Samantha Panther’s reportorial star. Next, a Vice-Chancellorian fatwah on Dddwwchllyff leads to global slaughter of Elvis impersonator impersonators …

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 30
One of the problems with faking your own death is doing it convincingly enough to be convincing without making it overly elaborate (or dangerous). As a seasoned mimic mimic, Ddwwchyllff had thought it would be an easy task.

On the face of it there were certain advantages to being dead. It kept the tax man off your back (once all that mess with inheritance tax had been settled at least). Being dead also stopped you having to come up with elaborate and implausible excuses for not going to parties and functions that you didn’t want to go to when asked by people who really should know (you) better. Another advantage was that death was a good way to dodge schools of loan-sharks, avoid stampeding herds of debt collectors, and keep swarms of hired killers off your back.

These were the sort of agitated mobs that had driven Ddwwchyllff to his death. The schools and herds had been disruptive enough, but he’d always been able to skirt the schools and give the herds the slip, and he probably wouldn’t have gone to the lengths he eventually did if it hadn’t been for the swarms. The swarms were the thralls of the Vice-Chancelor, who one day had affably demanded that he do a hit job for a generous pre-paid fee, the hit that Ddwwchllyff thought would at last pay off all his debts, the hit that turned out to be too little too late and which had caused the person he’d hit to chase him down the block…

Forthwith he’d learned that the Vice in his usual unclear way had been trying to tell him to kill the person, to hit the target with extreme prejudice, with a knife, a bullet, a sword, a car, a blunt object, a hypodermic needle full of curare, and a falling anvil, not his purse. Worse, it wasn’t legally his purse. Ddwwchlyff, not about to endanger his valuable hands to do the job, had at the crucial moment snatched the closest object, a purse gracing the dainty hand of ‘The Welsh Student’, as the news stations invariably referred thereafter to the alleged robbery victim Rhoda Crwys.

Vice had wanted his money back. But Ddwchlyff hadn’t wanted to give it to him. So, he’d invented a method of carrying all of it on his person (utilizing a piece of paper with triangular flaps that glued shut) and at first he’d simply run away. He was rather good at running, he’d had practice with the debt collectors and so forth, but running from hired assassins was another matter. They seemed to be everywhere. Where were they all coming from? Could they all be minions of the Vice? It began to be old, the running, the scuttling, the dashing, the ducking, the dodging, the veering, the zig-zagging…it was frankly exhausting.

This had led him to the bungled kidnapping attempt. In declaring himself kidnapped, Ddwchlyff hoped the intense police investigation surrounding his missing person would cause the Vice to back off, but the whole operation had fired back. Channel 12 had flashed his picture every half hour under the word -

‘Kidnapped!!!’

and below the photo, the legend,

‘Have you seen me?’

Phone calls were coming in from as far away as Las Vegas, with its large homesick Welsh population paying extra to get Channel 12’s own Samantha Panther. It seemed everyone in the world had seen him at least once. Elvis impersonators and Elvis impersonator impersonators alike were being identified as Ddwwchlyff in bistros and nightclubs from Land’s End to Bangalor. It was hopeless. The police, in co-operation with Interpol, declared it a hoax and went home, wholly unaware of the truth of the pretext.

The Vice-Chancelor did not take it at all well, not well at all, really. His agents were scattered thither and yon and most were too smart to return to the land in which he reigned, preferring to extend their lifespans by sweeping the floors in whichever bistro they’d last followed up a reported sighting. With Ddwwchlyff so recently in the limelight, the Vice was forced to bide his time. He could afford to wait. He had to eat first. Some cakes, perhaps.

Ddwwchllyff’s various stalkers had been dispersed across the globe, a few of his competitors had been eliminated by some of the more bloodthirsty pursuers, and the Vice had been knocked off guard (a new sensation for him since he normally performed knocking off of guards actively rather than experiencing it passively), buying Ddwwchlyff a little time. All in all, not an entirely bad result for a two-day faked kidnapping gig, he autocongratulated.

‘Time to relax and spend my filthy lucre and enjoy myself, invent something,’ he’d hoped. Ddwwchlyff didn’t really take much pleasure in inventing things. What he really enjoyed was the royalties he made off himself every time he registered a new Gimmick!!™. He had painstakingly over the course of the years with much shrewd wheeling and sharp dealing so forth had acquired full rights to ™ and ©, and was well on his way to patenting® .

But begrudgingly Ddwwchllyff admitted to himself and his confessor Father Patermeister that the Vice never forgave. He might forget momentarily, but the moment something reminded him that he’d wanted Ddwwchllyff dead, the Vice would be vicious afresh and more and more impersonators would be bumped off, eventually leading to a global genocide in which everyone who looked vaguely like Elffys would be marked for extinction. He sat at the kitchen piano, searching for a mood-reflective discordant chord when it struck him: any one of his dead competitors could right now be mistaken for him again, permanently.

He’d only to pick an unclaimed dead Elvis and have someone identify it. He was rather taken aback to learn that they were almost all unclaimed, but while vaguely unsettling it made the job easier. Ddwwchyllff picked a local who’d been playing at CUT! -- the Cymru Underground Theatre! -- when he’d drunk something disagreeable, keeled over, and been left uncollected in the matching green room. Ddwwchllyff and his old pal Wolfcastle rolled the Elvis up in a sheet, not to run afoul of the rug laws, and carried him back to Ddwwchllyff’s uncommonly lovely sitting room. There they propped the stranger at the piano and put a vial of vile liquid conspicuously near to his cold dead hand along with a painstakingly scrawled note reading, in part, ‘Goodbye cruel world!’ (for full suicide note, see Appendix II; for full appendix, see autopsy report, Appendix I).

Then Ddwwchlyff walked over to the small narrow door that concealed his well-organized closet, where he hid while Wolfcastle called the heddlu. They came they saw Wolfcastle identified him they declared suicide went home without even bothering to remove the cadaver. The redundant Elvis – the green one — had been stored in the Walkin’ Freezer, another casual invention of the fertile- minded Welshman.

The next day, Ddwwchlyff continued to live there, only now pretending to be a different man altogether – a rock star who hung out at the Dog and Sledgehammer and told boring stories about faraway places, pretending he’d become rich on his musicianship when he clearly had won the lotto. It was clear enough when he tried to treat them to some of his singing one night, at any rate. Local legend had it that he was worse than Dylan, and local legend had it that Dylan had been pretty bad. Poetry, all right, but singing? and they’d wince as if they’d heard him personally. It was easy enough for anyone to imitate a dead singer or a bad singer. It took a Ddwwchlyff to do an instantly recognizable imitation of a dead bad singer.

Things had gone on quite well for a time. There was more in the Walkin’ Freezer than just somebody doing a stiff imitation of Ddwwchlyff, there was cold hard cash. There was plenty left of the Plenty he’d got for the hit he’d done for the Vice-Chancelor.

Thus he had eventually come to have a dead Elvis impersonator impersonate a dead Elvis impersonator impersonator -- himself, who wasn’t actually dead at all but busy being the embodiment of a fictitious rock star of his own creation. And it had worked out well until it went awry.

It had begun to sour when a man looking much like an Elvis impersonator had visited his house and declared himself to be the true Ddwwchllyff, not dead at all as reported, but alive. Said he’d been away on a retreat in the hinterlands of the Netherlands and had only just returned. Imagine his shock on hearing that a dead body had been found in his house and identified as him! He looked authentically shocked as he recounted the imaginary moment. Ddwwchlyff himself had not found the experience of finding a dead body in his house identified as him to be shocking, but a relief. He was shocked now though, He was being bounced from his abode as an unfortunately misinformed homebuyer by an imposter demanding his alleged house back!

Panicking, Ddwwchlyff had hit him with a bottle of gin, not hard enough to kill him if he’d just been sitting there, but the fool had chosen that moment to stand up so quickly that the combined speed of the descending bottle and the rising head acted in unison to change a simple encounter into a lethal impact. Now the green Elvis had a bogus Ddwwchlyff to keep him company.

But it hadn’t ended there – oh, no, it hadn’t ended there…