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 last chapter, Mr E, man of mystery imprisoned in a nearby asylum, carves a teaspoon “out of the only available object available to him – a geologists rock hammer” and uses the crudely fashioned utensil to painstakingly dig his way out. Now back to long flimsy Sunny Quito and good samaritan Rhoda Crwys.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 58

‘rhohhdaaa! it’s meee! sunny quiiitooo!’

Rhoda Crwys stopped. She did, after all, have a little extra time.

‘Rhoda! How are you? Do you happen to have any tape in that ladylike purse of yours?’

Rhoda blushed passively; she hadn’t a violent blood corpuscle in her body. ‘It is rather ladylike, isn’t it?’ she giggled, and gave its hips a twitch. Unsnapping its breasts, she delved into its interior. ‘Transparent, opaque, or translucent?’

‘Translucent, please.’

‘Narrow, normal, or wide?’

‘Normal, I think.’

‘Dustproof, waterproof or fireproof?’

‘Haven’t you got any windproof?’

"Windproof ?? ’’ Rhoda burst into laughter. ‘That’s preposterous!!’

And as if to prove her right, a blast of wind snatched the rolls of cellophane tape from her hands and carried them off over a garden wall, along with the extremely slender enrollment of the Gecko-Roman School of Dental Podiatry.

The only other student of Welsh University dashed up the street after him and after checking that the breasts were firmly re-clasped, she slung her purse resolutely over her shoulder and, after checking to be quite sure the wall would bear her weight, she clambered over it. There lay the rolls of tape in the slanting afternoon sun, and in the shadows they cast across the flagstones lay Sonny Quito. At least she supposed it was Sonny Quito. There really couldn’t be an awful lot of people 10 feet long and 1mm thick. On the other hand, it never hurt to ask. So she did.

‘Are there an awful lot of people 10 feet long and a millimeter thick?’

‘That depends on what you mean by ‘of’.’ Not being a linguist, he didn’t know how right he was. Or how wrong.

‘Of…’ repeated Rhoda, as if thoughtfully. All of a sudden, she remembered her mission: to find the half-truth of what she had determined could be no more than demi-bullshit. ‘Would you care to go on a hunt for a reputed tunnel system with me?’

‘Does translucent come in phosphorescent?’

‘Good! I thought you might! I think you’ll enjoy it!’ And as the tattered Sonny swathed himself , eventually using up all three rolls for added rigidity and ballast, she told him about her thesis, her crude experiments with handmade see-saws, her staggering insight that indeed there must be something to the rumors of ‘underground tunnels’.

Sonny Quito grunted enthusiastically to show his feigned interest every so often, though why the fact of tunnels being underground should be so mindboggling he had no idea – after all, who’d ever seen a groundlevel tunnel?

Nobody –yet.