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, Sunny Quito and Rhoda Crwys stumble upon and walk on by Pam Napkins’ body. Now, the number of characters per chapter picks up! Sunny, Rhoda, Samantha, Lassie, Schumacher, Erm, Capable, young people, Short Mat, Madame Pom de Terre -- and someone named Ddwwchyllff...
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 66

Finding oneself has long been a pastime enjoyed and labored over by many members of the population. Often it comes as a result of many years of profound soul searching and introspection. The pursuit of religious, spiritual or chemically induced clarity is another method of finding oneself. Sometimes it can come out of the blue – waking in the middle of the night with an almost overwhelming sense that everything just might be alright and that it will all work out for the best. Not often does finding oneself come as a result of arriving home after a long trip abroad visiting old friends and making new ones. But this was indeed the situation into which the former freelance translator was plunged one morning.

He was not a fool. He was aware that things were conspiring against him, that moves were being made and plans prepared, someone wanted him inconvenienced. A few weeks away in the German Alps was just the sort of thing to throw people off the scent. For one thing the German Alps were widely unknown and for another thing they were bloody hard to find. He had holed up in a little log cabin just below the snow-line, kept himself to himself and quietly slipped out of view.

It is often said that a week is a long time in politics, but in a barren wooden shack in a cold Alpine getaway it’s still only seven days. Still, as the seven day periods had passed in turn, and suspecting the beginnings of a mild dose of cabin fever (if not a full blown dose of said syndrome), the real Ddwchyllff, if there is such a person, was ready to return to civilization. Civilisation and his luxuriously deceptive house. But first, he would stop off in a quiet lowland village and call in on an new old friend.

And so it was that Ddwwchyllff came to pass through the bottom half of Germany (when viewed from the top) and into the sleepy conurbation that locals knew only as Wormeldange, there to find the somnolent object of his visitation snoozing profoundly in a comfortable chair by the fire. He smothered the flames with an afghan that was handy by. Had he not arrived when he did, Madame Pomme de Terre might have become just another careless candle use statistic. The afghan whined and licked its silky ember-singed coat.

In the ascending elevator, Lassie barked twice, harshly, gruffly, a drill sergeant giving orders. Having cleared her throat, she began to sing an old border ballad in dialect.

‘What is it, Lassie?!’ Samantha prodded her.

Pausing to reward ace reporter Panther’s painful probing with a snarling slash of her archetypal canines, the movie star renewed her plaintive ululating lament.

Ddwwchyllff was just being himself when he stopped at his old colleague’s residence in Wormeldange, so the old trouper may be forgiven for not recognising him immediately. Not only had the young Welsh-Bangladeshi doffed his Presleyan raiments and garbed himself in a traditional Welsh souvenir teatowel patterned with leeks and daffodils, he had also aged. As had she. In fact, she may have died. He checked her pulse. No. She wasn’t dead. Dddwwchllyff chuckled. This had always been the climax of her act – playing dead.

‘Still at it, eh, old girl? That’s the spirit!’ He lifted the almost empty Hamilton’s™ Gin bottle, only then noticing the sodden message it had anchored down: ‘In a trance -- DO NOT DISTURB.’ The hell with that! He disturbed it down to the last drop, shaking it onto his tongue. Glancing around the modest pie de terre, he wondered what the poor old dame lived on. A peek in the icebox confirmed his supicion. He was soon fixing himself a salad of fresh smoked salmon and raw cherrystone clams on a bed of alevut leaves, romancing a snifter of Connoisseur Brandy™, listening to Channel 12 TV from Wales. It was running a news story about a missing reporter whose microphone, equipped with GPS and capable of acting as a transmitter if swallowed with saltwater, had been located. Why or how she had found or been carrying sea salt and water in this underground location remained unexplained -- studiously ignored, in truth. What was exciting was that the reporter, or her microphone, seemed to be trapped far beneath the current surface of Caerdyff, and one or the other was apparently in great distress. Given the sensitive nature of her equipment and the need to immerse it in brine and peptic acid to activate its multi-tasking features, it could go either way, maybe both.

‘And now, live, we hope, on Channel 12, with the bloodchilling moans emanating from some unmapped, uncharted, unplotted location, our own on-site reporter Samantha Panther with this exclusive.’

An eerie howling noise filled the airwaves in the already claustrophobic flat. Madame Pomme de Terre stirred gently. She was mumbling something, louder now.

‘But why?’

At this point in Plenty Capable’s reading of her notes of that fateful foggy night, she stopped abruptly.

The young man and woman and stared at the world-renowned jazz detective in anticipation, but were disappointed. He must have had the mole removed. The legendary hearing organs above the brawny shoulders of the hard-chested barrel-boiled shamus sensed the youngsters’ disillusion as an audibly nasal sound, something like ‘awww’. Well, they’d no reason to give up their dreams.

‘Don’t worry, it will grow back,’ the sleuth guaranteed. He would be as good as his word: hard-eyed and tough-chinned as he looked, Short Mat Bowls was also a sport*

‘Erm…’ the missing professor said absently. All eyes swiveled his way, some filled with adoration, some with loathing, one with wild fear – or was it?

‘It depends on what you mean by ‘grow back’.’ Erm was having a moment of lucidity – he pursued the idea across three continents, including Denver, on six different jets. At least he supposed they were different – but how different were they really?

It was fiendish!

Madame Pomme de Terre had lifted her jowls from their resting place on her sternum, was verbalizing in a singsong chant, but Ddwwchllyff could barely make out her words above the howling din of the television and he instinctively switched it off. Madame Pomme de Terre switched off simultaneously. For the second time that night, he checked her pulse and again it was perceptible. He shrugged and turned the set back on. The televised howling and Madame’s singsong chanting both instantly blared into life. He turned it off. The room fell silent. On. Howling and singsong chanting. Off. Silence. On. Howling and chanting. Off, on, off, on, off, on – fascinated, he watched as Madame Pomme de Terre alternately went from crooning to slack-jawed sleep in the space of a split second. He left her on and drew closer, cupping a hand round his ear the better to hear her – if only he hadn’t given that Capable woman the prototype of the Elffys Ear Trombone® !

It was fiendish!

Whilst the once Cornish linguist dwelt on the fiendishness of it all, Ddwychlyff leant in closer to Madame Pomme de Terre’s ancient lips, Short Mat reassured the young people, Lassie continued to howl and Peppet hurried down the foglit back alleys of Caerdyff in the opposite direction from Rhoda Crwys and Sunny Quito, but all this was unknown to Schumacher as he strode along on his stiltlike legs in his red Italian leather shoes (size nine). He didn’t even know how he’d got his shoes back. He distinctly recalled having traded them in for a cleaning lady’s plimsoles along with his best ruffled shirt and black sharkleather pants.

There was a lot Schumacher didn’t know, he didn’t know more than most people forget. He got most of his information from everyone else. That reminded him… That Cardiff Grandma card he’d won off her… He reached into the vest pocket of his trenchcoat and felt around. No, not there --this pocket, maybe? No. His wallet? No!? Scheize!** With a growing sense of panic, he searched all available pockets, even one of a passerby…and there it was! Shoving the Indy short stay car park attendant to the ground, he stood and dusted off his knees, put the card in the trenchcoat pocket as he should have in the first place, and stepping storklike over the attendant’s uniform, Schumacher took up his striding where he’d left off, completely in character and at one with himself. He was heading for higher ground, but he had one more stop to make.

Schumacher was minding his own business when a few moments later a shot rang out.

*Interestingly, the Talpidae family say the same of the mole, warmly describing her as “an individual exhibiting a sudden deviation from type beyond the normal limits of individual variation usually as a result of mutation especially of somatic tissue” (Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.).
** Scheiße!