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, Lassie howls a folkloric public advisory translated by ololygmancer Mme Pomme de Terre. Coming up next, the Vice subundercogitates suppressed unpleasantries; also - the notorious Schumacher, et al.
The Cardiff Grandma ©hapter 67

‘You people! Useless! Absolutely bloody useless!’ The Vice was in the midst of another of his rants. He yelled at the large TV screen some more. ‘You are meant to do what I tell you. You are meant to bend over backwards for me. This is pathetic. I don’t know why I even bother.’

He paused for breath, his angry mood making his cheek flush a deep red blue colour. He went on pounding his fists in rage, ‘Heads will roll for this…heads will bloody well roll I say!’ The TV camera perched on the end of his large wooden desk shock and wobbled as he thumped his hands down.

He composed himself, slightly. ‘Well? Go on then, roll your heads! That’s it, side to side. Come on, we’ve done this a hundred times before.’

It was nearly time for the VC’s latest Tele-conference-yoga class to come to an end. Before long the satellite alignment would pass. In a dozen or twelve distant locations assorted yoga pupils or the VC all rapidly threw their heads and necks around and around in a circular motion.

‘OK people that’s all for this week. Now don’t forget…RELAX more!!!’ He clicked a switch and the camera and TV screen went off.

Relax more. Good advice indeed, but not something the VC found he could do lately. Things, strange things, had been happening. That wasn’t so unusual as for the most part it was the Vice who ordered and paid for the vast majority of strange things to occur. What was strange was not the things happening but the who they were happening to. He was disturbed to hear of the untimely death of his old colleague Mrs Napkins. Sure everybody died in the end, and in Cardydd that usually happened at the VC’s say so, but he’d explicitly said so that Napkins was to be saved. It smelt of an amateur cock-up, looked like a honest error, but there was something else to all this. Something he just couldn’t quite put his finger on. The Vice rolled most of the possibilities around and around his mind. Distracted momentarily he VC reached down his smartly tailored trouser leg in response to a sudden dermatological irritation that had caught his attention. He was feeling low.

Outside of the Vice’s world the violent passing of Mrs Pam Napkins did not pass totally unnoticed. It was very much noticed by several eye witnesses who saw her corrupt life so permanently punctuated. And it was heard by a few ear witnesses who weren’t actually looking that way at the time but were nonetheless close to the scene. The Heddlu were called, much to their annoyance. It wasn’t that they had anything better to do but they just didn’t fancy all that questioning and statement taking that procedure dictated should ensue at these times.

After the event, if not sooner, the news quickly filtered back to the VC’s inner sanctum. He was not what anyone would describe as happy when he heard. Napkins was no friend, a man like the Vice could afford not to have friends, but she was useful at times… and besides she still owed him money. Typical of that woman, he thought to himself, to go and having herself assassinated just to avoid paying up.

But her death wasn’t the only odd thing that had been going on. There was all that activity in the lower south side of the east quarter of the city, all of those extra shopping carts getting pushed about by Wong’s people. Was Wong expanding his Rug pedaling ambitions again? Was he seeking to muscle in on the VC’s lucrative people and dog smuggling rings? If so it simply couldn’t be tolerated. And then there were the reports from south Devon about unusual goings on going on. Then the news from the continent. What with the gossip about buses and the hearsay on the topic of an incident at the George Walker home… These were strange times indeed and the Vice was not happy with what had been transpiring, not happy at all.

In fact the Vice was still feeling a little low. That was always depressing. It half awakened bludgeoned memories of that idiot Schumacher and his unsatisfactory work on the token environmental impact report for the Ministry of Earth on the theoretical consequences of a hypothetical rapid expansion of the soil industry on the discovery of postulated large undiscovered veins of dirt. How could he, he, the very Vice-Chancellor of all he surveyed, have ever thought the flash lawyer type would be capable of concocting data, falsifying results, skewing conclusions? Was it the shoes? The leather briefs? Imagine, if you will, the Vice’s extreme displeasure when confronted with a one hundred thirty-eight page spinebound white paper speculating exactly how low the University would go should there be an explosion of landmines of the sort projected in the hypothetically theorised abstract instance in the proposed study. He threw the book at the lawyer.

‘Get this alarmist drivel out of here before I inconvenience you myself, you execrable excrement!’ he screeched, ‘ Just who do you think you’re working for??’ He spun round and eyed the doctor owlishly, his head revolving 180 degrees. ‘Do the whole thing over, Schumacher! And tell me what I want to hear this time – or else!’

What had that report said? The Vice sank bank in his chair. This depressed him further. Twinges of anxiety flickered through him. If only everyone else were here to fetch him some cake and tea. Not that she would.

Doctor, lawyer, beggarman, thief, Tinker, Taylor, Indian Chief, yes, Schumacher had been them all in his time. Not on his own time, no, but don’t think he’d got paid for the overtime – Hah! that would be the day! Thanks to the ongoing never yet successful attempts by time-mangaement managers to manage to get more time than twenty-four hours into a day, every working person in Cymru was told to do all their work and all the work of all the former workers who’d been declared redundant and emigrated to Luxembourg to work as landscapers.
Welsh landscapers were a bit of a stereotype there these days, and a whole genre of jokes in poor taste had sprung up around them like the uniquely Welsh gwelltglas grass growing under their feet everywhere they went, which was everywhere. This phenomenon was attributed to seedpods stuck in the old sod on the soles of their gumboots, but the true source of the intruder supplanting the sleeker Luxembourghian biota wasn’t Welsh wellies -- it was Wales itself.

Schumacher was ignorant of what happened to the Welsh workforce after they were scaled back, he only knew he’d been asked to play far too many roles with far too few props on too small a stage with too little time between scenes and a ridiculously small dressing room. He’d frequently been forced to play opposite himself, quickly putting on and taking off glasses and fake beards, shifting from basso to soprano, crouching to appear shorter, then standing on tiptoe to tower over himself. But he couldn’t keep up with it any longer, he’d started to step out of character, never to return in some cases. That girl in the big giant humongous telephone number finding exchange, for instance. Who’d care if she disappeared? And the Pinesnifters or Pinesnippers, or whoever they were? What purpose did they really serve? The German student? A lousy footnote. They were a waste of his talent. Schumacher was no run-of-the-mill ham actor – he was an artiste. No one could play the ham like he. Unfortunately, there were no parts for a ham in this production. Everything but, it seemed. The hell with it, he decided, resuming the daddy-longed lope he did so well, from here on in, he’d be Schumacher and Schumacher alone.