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, Wolfcastle and the fatal Librarian find a dead Ddwwchllyff. Now, we are introduced to Rhoda Crwys, Welsh student…

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 36
When we look back on the decadent Cardiff of the time, we tend to envision the city as a beehive of illegal activity, populated by poseurs, assassins, rug pushers, fabulously corrupt officials, exotic alien earth smugglers. We can not help but imagine the local pubs filled to the brim with ghost student, while the busy Bureau de Change exchanges foreign exchange students to labour in the subterranean foreign exchange student exchange centers deep beneath the city streets. And we will perhaps never comprehend the true extent of the Awful Business©. From our modern perspective it might seem that everyone was involved in some nefarious plot. But this was not the case. Yet.

Because there was one person who knew nothing of any this. She had no time for anything but her research and the thing was, it wasn’t adding up. What if she did it wrong. Had she really asked the right questions? Perhaps she should rephrase them. Had she time? Or should she re-check the numbers again first. Would further historical research show the reason for this? Maybe she hadn’t gone back far enough, what if she went back 20 years instead of ten. But she already had extended it once, from five years to ten. Naturally she had checked the scientific angle, and as she understood it there was no explanation for her findings. But then, she wasn’t a scientist, was she? She could have got it wrong . Ought she ask the professor yet again? He didn’t seem to understand, actually. Maybe she could ask the Librarian. But she didn’t seem quite right in the head, she’d seen her staring at people talking quietly on the other side of the library, moving her cherry-red lips silently to herself. But the Librarian was said by the University web-site to be ‘quite good with research type things’. No, she didn’t suppose it wouldn’t do any actual harm to ask the Librarian.

This uninvolved citizen’s name was Rhoda Crwys. In a nod to her femininity she had adopted a slight lisp, and pronounced it Rhoda Crwydd. She had not watched the news for the past five years. She’d not had time. She was a real live Welsh student at Welsh University, though they did treat her like a foreigner with all those double language signs as if she didn’t speak English like everyone else. Insulting, really. Not that she had time to be insulted, really. Her precious thesis was in crisis, and with her adopted lisp this translated into something unspeakable. The point was that until she resolved this unexplained phenomenon she was stymied. The past eight months had been a monotonous round of requests for meetings with lecturers who might help answer the question that had ceased to be intriguing and was now more like chronic dandruff. There were fewer rounds of actual meetings, and the regular back-up calls to the lecturers who’d not answered her calls as yet. Then another revision of what she’d got so far, and then another run through of the pertinent statistics, with the same impossible answer, sparking another round of requests with the same lecturers and an ever growing pool of new ones she’d just thought of that might…

She was a long-legged short girl of medium height. With slender fingers, thin ears and a narrow outlook on life. She had a lazy eye, an idle nose and indifferent teeth. This then, was Rhoda Crwys, and would be for quite some time…not that she had time.

(to be continued...)