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, an employee at the big giant vast humongous phone call disservice centre tries to pin his incompetence on Sunny Quito. Now...Quito crosses paths with the deadly Librarian.

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 33

The real Sunny Quito, if there was such a person, was strolling down the street. As he was strolling up the street he’d watched from an ever decreasing distance a man and a woman arguing next to a phone booth. He glanced into a shopwindow featuring a display of Red Italian leather shoes (Geckos, size 9) much like his own, and reminisced about Ecuador and the good old brothel days, smiling in anticipation of surprising his old pal Dddwwchlyff from the good old brothel days. Sunny liked to surprise people; he’d let his old pal Ddwwchhlyff think Sonny was in Luxembourg when he was really right here on Welsh soil. (Of course technically, though he never knew it, he would probably have been on Welsh soil if he were in fact in Luxembourg). He wondered if Ddwwchlyff had any word of any of their other old pals from the good old brothel days; that girl with the broad smile, what was her name? And that really odd girl from Monvoevia, the one with the glass leg and the wooden eye? He reminisced and walked; strolled and recollected; ambled and tried to think of another word for thinking about things from the past. And when he looked up the telephone booth was gone, the man was stomping away and the woman was looking deflated. As Sunny came nearer, a man with a military bearing barged into him, knocking him to the ground, and shot him. The cold senseless violence of the act was incomprehensible. The miserable bastard could have just shot him.

Now Sunny Quito had a bad bump on his head as well as a bad fatal wound.

‘Oow!’ he said, referring to the bump on his head.

His vision was blurring, it was getting hard to make out his life as it flashed before his eyes…or at least as much of his life as he had so far had, given that it wasn’t quite over yet… and out the fog loomed a face, a face he knew, a face from the good old brothel days.

He could hardly credit his dimming eyesight ‘Speak to me Laytah!’ he rasped.

The librarian was stunned. There was definitely something about the man in front of her that intrigued her. Surely this vaguely familiar looking young man was breathing his last. She felt his pulse, it was stronger than she’d dared hope. There was still time to do something. The Librarian glanced quickly up and down the road. A bus! Hauling him to his feet, she casually flung him out in front of it shouting ‘Mind the bus!’ The driver floored the accelerator and the bus was gone, leaving a blizzard of ID cards and a barking dog in its wake.

Sunny Quito died and with him all eighty students enrolled in the Gecko-Roman Foreign Dentistry department. The entire student body, tragically inconvenienced and then killed twice, Sunny Quito had truly been the heart and soul of the programme.

The Organ Donation Service were the first on the scene. Souls they were not equipped to deal with, but hearts were another matter. Next to arrive were the lawyers. In days gone by it was the lawyers who were labeled as ‘ambulance chasers’. How things had changed – now the medical teams would await the call from the legal firms to see whether it was going to be worth their while to bother turning out.

The Librarian was back home within ten minutes, re-inflated by the lucky chance encounter with the intriguing fellow who, though she’d known him so briefly, had reignited within her the embers of a too-long suppressed desire. It had been especially welcome after the run in with the disagreeable chap who’d identified himself as Anser Damiou in the phonecall that she’d lipread looking out through the window of her favorite café from across the street. She’d deflated his booth for him and all he’d done was stonewall her questions without even a pretence at parrying them, despite his evident epee. Foiled again! But the vaguely familiar young man was different. He’d looked happy to see her. It was so strange though. Why had he called her by her long lost identical twin’s name? Or could it be that what he was really saying was ‘Speak to me later?’ After all he did have one of those funny accents; you know the sort foreigners seem to all have.

No, in that case he would have spoken peremptorily, dismissively, arrogantly. His tone had instead been tender, awed, and beseeching. He’d wanted her to speak to him then. Yet, how could he possibly have mistaken her for her long-lost twin? The Librarian couldn’t solve the conundrum, no matter how long she puzzled over it. While she fretted over the mystery, she laid out all the student ID cards he’d been carrying with him when he died. There were hundreds of them. They all bore different names, Igor Beaver, Wendy Windfall, Aloyisious Mahashparahdi, Jones Elizabeth, Donald Reagan, Margaret Fletcher, George Boosh, Shirley Goddam-Clinton, John Middlename Angstrom – but the photos were all of the same student: the young man she’d had the pleasure of terminating just before he would have died at another’s hands. If not the same photo then a photo of the same person in very poor quality disguises. False beards and moustaches, assorted wigs and hair pieces, varying pairs of glasses and the occasional eye patch or stick on wart. This explained almost everything, all the hacked data on student numbers that didn’t add up, the exhausted anxious look on the face of all the student, his monotonous similarity, the skyrocketing increases in European Student Grants being raked in by the University, the controlling shares in shoe stocks and lizard lounges. Yes, she thought, dripping cherry juice onto the cards, it explains everything except that annoying but irritatingly desirable creep, Anser Damiou.

Just then there was a knock at the knocker on the door. She wasn’t expecting anyone, who could it be? There seemed to be only one way to find out (see footnote) – she’d have to take a look.

1. This is a common phenomena, frequently encountered. In truth the infinite potential that abounds both within and beyond the infinite universe means that such a situation is rarely, if ever, the case. The problem, if it is a problem, is one of lack of perceived alternatives rather than an actual lack of such things.