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, the singular Schumacher a.k.a. et al, becomes his own man. Now Ddwwchyffll, as himself, hears voices.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapte® 68 of 73

Ddwchyllf turned from the window abruptly, snapping his eyes away from the fog. The fog. It seemed it had always been there. But how was he to be sure? He’d only just arrived there himself and had no way of knowing if, prior to that occasion, there had been any fog there at all. It was all, he thought to himself, very complex and quite perturbing.

‘You always did like gazing out of windows’, said a voice, ‘even as a child’, it added in a tantalizing manner.

Ddwchyllf didn’t look round, but kept on gazing through the steadily Revolving Window™. A child. Yes, times of yore, it was all coming back to him now. As a child he had always been tense, always concerned and anxious with all manner of trivial worries. It was a situation that hadn’t been helped by the long lonely trek away from the family home. That was all a long time ago now though, being so tense was all in the past. Sure he hadn’t been imperfect back then, but he’d moved on and grown up – not necessarily in that order – he was much more progressive. He had become Europe’s best Elvis impersonator impersonator. He was almost nearly famous, and yet he just yearned for simple times, times he came to view as perfect.

‘I said you always did like gazing out of…’

‘So you came back then(?)’ Ddwwchylff spoke, interrupting the voice, continuing to gaze at the fog, and unsure whether he had actually asked a question. The voice had stepped on its own lines and drowned him out. Not missing a beat, Ddwwchylff repeated his line: ‘Eh?’ Now he’d asked a question.

‘So you came back then(?)’ the voice picked up the strand.

‘What else could I do? When I heard Madame Pomme de Terre warbling that old lullabye my mother used to sing –’ Ddwwchyffll broke off mid-sentence, trying to think of a polite but more accurate word than ‘sing’. ‘—recite to me, I had to come back.’

‘So,’ a second voice noted, ‘your parent or legal guardian had learnt it from her parent or legal guardian who’d learnt it from her parent or legal guardian, and thus back into the faraway mists of distant time.’

‘It’s amazing that she predicted that if you ever heard the song again after you left Bangladesh to come to Caerdyff as a small boy –’

‘With a battered suitcase!’ the first voice reminded.

The second voice glared at it. ‘As I was saying -- that if you ever heard it again, it would mean that Cymru – Wales – was about to sink.’

Ddwwchylflf enlightened them further. ‘The source of the prophecy was said to be a descendent of the folkloric wolves that built Caerdyff , a certain Nostrildamus *.

‘Wolves raised by clowns founding cities! Bollocks!’ This from a third voice indistinguishible from the second , a voice full of cherries.

‘It’s a fact, actually.’ The master of the house spun around from the Revolving Window™. ‘It’s the absolute truth.’

‘Rubbish!’ adjudged Miss Casselberry explosively, misting him with cherry juice.

‘Historical fact,’ Ddwwchylflf reasserted, his normal state of rest reasserting itself.

‘Complete fabrication! A legend hastily concocted by the ancient inhabitants of Cymru to compete with the Romans’ pride of zoological diversity.’ The cherry-lipped Librarian waved off the bag of fruit the call girl was proferring to all. ‘No, thank you, I have my own.’

Wolfcastle cleared his throat. He was not superstitious **, he avowed, but Ddwwchlyff’s story of the dreadful premonition had gibed with certain anomalies he’d noted as a freelance geological analyst for ARCORGI in Ordzhonikidzevskaya. ARCORGI had been watching the landmine industry closely for a chance to muscle in on the cashflow. Then came the rumours that Wales (Cymru!) had been secretly using hydraulic technology to bring some form of liquid up from below the surface. This speculation was based on heat sensing satellite photos which revealed what certainly seemed to be a vast pumping system under Cardiff, a sprawling web of conduits extending out from the geological feature exhibiting the highest altitude. Atop that rise, Wolfcastle realized with a small shock on viewing the pixelated images, stood his old friend Ddwwchllyff’s manor, and possibly his old friend himself. If the liquid turned out to be valuable, his old friend was standing on the equivalent of a goldmine = in imminent danger of not standing much longer. ARCORGI preferred to place inconvenient people between a bullet and its otherwise unimpeded course first and sign contracts later.

However, in a cunning manner befitting such an important task, samples of the pipework had somehow been smuggled out, and senior freelance geological analyst Wolfcastle had gotten the highly coveted job of testing them. The results, he reported, showed that the pipes had not been used for thousands of years and showed no trace of any mineral of the slightest value. What he did not report was the large quantity of folical matter of a canine origin in the samples: dog hair. No, not dog hair – wolf hair…

*Fully-owned subsidiary of Uncle Scam’s not-for-prophet puppet government (http://unclescam.org)

**Nor was he supercilious, superficial or superadiabatic.