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, “43a Cwrt Roy Jenkins was what estate agents would call a ‘barn conversion’, just not very typical of the genre. It was in fact a former art studio, lovingly converted into an authentic farm outbuilding.” Read more here…

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 43b

‘Yes indeed! So nice to see you once more. Do come in, please do…’ he responded as he stepped aside and gestured with his right arm for her to move past him. ‘don’t worry about wiping your feet’ he added as she entered his abode. It would have been a well known fact to regular visitors to 43a Cwrt Roy Jenkins that you only had to wipe your feet on the way out. It would have been well know had there ever been any regular visitors to the address, other than the inaniloquent landlady. Schumacher wrestled the barn door shut. As the new visitor entered the living room Mrs Napkins rose to her feet and stared at everyone else in the room. Mrs Napkins was viewing everyone else in the room with a level of disgust matched by everyone else’s expression at the state of the barn interior.

Put out. A term that could equally describe Mrs Napkins’ opinion of what to do with the young lady who had just entered the room as well as it could describe Mrs Napkins’ mood at the moment. She did not like the fact that everyone else had entered her house. It would have been the same reaction had someone, anyone, turned up. She deeply resented Schumacher having another ‘visitor’ as this worthy permanent fixture liked to think of herself.

‘And you must be..?’ Mrs Napkins deliberately left the sentence unfinished and intonated it as a question.

‘Yes, cogito ergo sum.’ Snapped the visitor. She wasn’t about to be condescended by some mad-haired old bat. Being subservient to the Vice in his chambers was one thing but this was something else. She turned to Schumacher who had just came into the main Sty area. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘I see. Good.’ He paused, ‘ Please do so…’

Everyone else in the room glanced over at Napkins as if to say ‘Not with HER in the building’ but less politely and without actually saying it. After. a long, silent period Schumacher finally realized what she had meant.

‘Oh…yes. Ummm, Mrs Napkins, Pam, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind leaving us alone. We…we have some business to discuss and…’, he became less and less steady, ‘…and we’d sort of…well what I mean is that…’.

She was no fool. She was a bigoted racist narrow minded idiot, but no fool. She knew what he was trying to allude to - she just wanted to make him squirm a little more first. Everyone else in the room knew all about the crazy-follicled woman, she was well known to the Welsh University with numerous foreign students residing at one or other of her properties over recent years. Most recently it seemed that almost the entire cohort of the Gecko-Roman Foreign Dentistry department had resided in one of her abodes. Over eighty students all living in houses in the possession of one woman. Mrs Napkins was something of a local ledger, in her own insignificantly small way. Aside from her ability to house vast numbers of students, she was perhaps best known for her outrageously bad ability to misjudge a persons character. Over the years this had lead to her assigning a Birmingham born drug dealer to live with a group of recovering addicts, the placing of a serial sex offender into a house containing six young female undergraduates and the decision to let a member of the local Neo-Nazi group to live with three Jamacian nursing students, a Polish Phd and an Indian MBA. They never did find his body. Each time there had been a minor scandal in the local press but each time wizened old Mrs Napkins had managed to dodge any sense of blame or guilt let alone any criminal proceedings. She had, it seemed, friends in high places, something quite surprising for someone so low down the socio-political food-chain as her. The rest of the local Neo-Nazi organization decided, on the face of it, to disband themselves and both go their separate ways. None of this impressed or intimidated everyone else. She was used to working with the Vice after all.

.............(to be continued)............................................................................

One of the Vice’s vices was one he sometimes shared with everyone else, unbeknownst to him, and that would be his cannabis that he uncharacteristically grew in his bloodslicked office. He had access to the finest Luxumbourgienne soil, and his seeds, he once confided to her in an ear-splitting screech, were a gift from the Prince of Darkness, and This, he shrieked and then lowered his voice, was why these special marihuana plants thrived supernaturally only in the permanent night of his bone-strewn inner sanctum. Whether this was true or just another of his 3-D dddelusions was uncertain, but what was undeniable was that the quality and aroma of the Vice’s chamber pot was incomparable.

That’s why everyone else had completely forgotten why she was in this place.

‘He wants to see you again’ was the important news that everyone else forgot to impart to the tired Schumacher. ‘There was something about a uniform too, he wasn’t at his most coherent I’m afraid,’ she forgot to say.

‘How about a game of poker?’ she asked Schumacher in a questioning manner.

‘Excellent idea,’ Schumacher imparted, picking up a cattle prod and advancing toward Napkins with jabbing thrusts.

This estimible dignitary was shocked! Shocked! Stunned, she reeled out of the conversion, clobbering her head with its Bride of Frankenstein hairdo on the low beam of the chicken hutch hatch on her way out, and leaving a pair of black pointy shoes behind her in the hay.

Everyone else applauded her exit. ‘That was fun,’ she glowed. ‘Now, how about a game of poker?’

At mention of this Schumacher walked over to the only manger in the place and withdrew a battered old suitcase, advertantly knocking a maintenance worker’s uniform to the packed earth.

‘Oh MY!’ he exaggerated, ‘What could THIS be? A UNIFORM? Why did you bring me a UNIFORM.? ‘

But everyone else was already dealing the cards. ‘One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me, and so on down the line.’

Schumacher, realizing the danger was past help, gave up on the plot he’d supposed had been coming to him, put a whisky bottle in front of him on the overturned wagon and another in front of everyone else and they began to ‘play poker’.

Schumacher usually didn’t like playing poker with others, but he liked playing with everyone else. He always won. It wasn’t that everyone else played poorly, and it wasn’t just that he had to keep reminding her of his inventive rules, it was also that she didn’t use a proper deck.

He examined his cards. He had a Merton Smiley, DDS, a Jesus O’Nazareth, Carpentry and Catering, a Good For One Drink at the Dog and Slegehamer, a Lady Benjamin Desktile , a Professor H.O.H. Smithy PhD with a curious rusty stain on it, a Sven Golly’s Theatre Supply and Costume Shop, Sonny Quito prop., and a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

Because everyone else was holding her cards the wrong way round, he could see she had a Wong Numbers, Inc., a Cap’n Joe’s Confidential Investigations, a Micky Mantle, a Bullhorn’s Dilemma Manufacturers, a Fullstop.com: Purveyor of Periodic Charts and one he’d never seen before: a Cardiff Grandma... He couldn’t make out the fine print from where he was; to get a closer look he’d have to invent a rule whereby he won her cards.

Everyone else had already started. ‘I bet you a nickel!’ she crowed, tossing out an American coinage she’d picked up in the C.I.A. It rolled dully across the weathered boards of the wagon and into Schumacher’s lap. She didn’t even know what a nickel was, it was just something she’d heard said once in a United States of American film movie. It had sounded vaguely sophisticated to her inexperienced and easily influenced ears.

‘I see your Wong Number’s and raise you a Cardiff Grandma,’ administered Schumacher archly.

Everyone else was humiliated. Now what would she say when her mum asked her if she’d been raised in a barn? And she would ask, she did every day before making her clean her room before she went out to play hide and seek with everyone else. That might sound a bit odd, but everyone else was a solitary child. She didn’t like the other children her own age, (nine and a half) for they seemed terribly immature, most of them had never held a job in their lives. Maybe she just wouldn’t tell her mum the truth. She was certain if she did she’d get a smart slap upside the head, and she couldn’t hit her mum back the way she could the Vice-Chancellor, who seemed even to enjoy it.

‘Did I win?’ she wanted to know impatiently.

‘No, my child, I’m afraid Cap’n Joe beats your Grandma. You’ll have to give her over.’ He observed the famous pout sprouting on her bottom lip, almost completely concealing her chin which yet could be seen to embark upon its famous quiver, the first step on its brief journey to wails. ‘However,’ he added regretfully, ‘you get your nickel back.’

Everyone else cheered and did a little victory dance round the locale, hopping back and forth over the battered old suitcase.

‘You won that suitcase too, you lucky duck.’

‘Don’t want it’ she obstinated, hopping up and down on it.

‘It’s very valuable,’ Schumacher pressed.

‘How much is it worth?’ she quizzed.

‘Oh, at least two Bob,’ he assured her.

She looked at him suspiciously, looked at the suitcase, leapt off it with all the grace her wispy six-foot frame could muster and skipped over to her remaining huge heap of cards. Pawing through them she took out her prized Bob and Bob, Plastic Surgery and Village Fair Games involving Apples and pushed it over to Schumacher.

‘I have to go back to work now.’

With that she left the barn in a cloud of chaff.

Alone once more, Schumacher looked around and sighed wearily. Everyone else had forgotten the suitcase. Again.