AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, Wong and a very special wolfhair rug, Peppet’s surviving brother Wonce, the Vice, and Snought all have roles to play while most everyone else except everyone else gathers at the Largest Hill house as if drawn by a mysterious force... and NOW – everything else happens, finally, at last!
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 72; Part I

Things began to happen quickly. Single paragraphs bulged with the events of three or four, their contents spilling out onto the floor. Later, no one would be able to say what happened when, or in what order, or to whom. Somebody somewhere sneezed. A dog barked. Everyone else listened intently. Was it him? No, it was coming from the ranch-style attic of the old George Walker, home for Partially ndented and Criminally Not Quite Righ. Professor Erm paused between rungs. There was something missing... what was it? Something to do with a box, yes, that was it – a box. A box filled with hundreds of tiny pieces of oddly shaped colour-splashed pasteboard. But what was it? Erm couldn’t figure it out. It was a puzzle, he thought as the ladder fell slowly backwards. A figure possibly resembling Professor Snought seemed to hurry across the grassy knoll on his way to an apparent meeting with the vice. It was not to be. Wong felt the wolf hair rug with practiced fingers – an unusual feature in any rug, unheard of in wolf hair! Behind the sheltering Buddleia, Wonce Peppet quietly and without fanfare re-opened the case. Sixteen members of a delegation, there to discuss academic opportunities for Arcorgian exchange students, were ushered by somebody else into the office of the ALMIGHTY VICE CHANCELOR OF THE WELSH UNIVERSITY. He was in a bonecrushing mood. Soon there was just a handful of people left. He squished it until they oozed out between his knobbled fingers and trickled down his ghastly carpus. ‘Why is Colonel Wence Peppet malingering behind that concealing shrubbery?’ Snought never inquired of a passing figment of his imagination. It never hurried past him, not avoiding his glance. Well, he’d find out for himself, he would, he would! (He would, were he not already to be found clutching at straws in a concrete and black gold grave.)

It had been an easy matter to track Schumacher hay-foot straw-foot from his barn conversion at 43a Cwrt Roy Jenkins via the short detour through what gave evidence of being a sniper’s nest. From this small revolving windowless room, furnished only with spent shell casings and a stale baloney sandwich, she could see down the road to where Pam Napkins lay lifelessly under a pile of ‘,BEDS!’ Everyone else in the room hopped it over to the scene of the rough justice. Her eyes darted in all directions like a cat. Aha! She glimpsed Schumacher’s red Italian Geckos gliding uphill with a life-size paperdoll and that girl the Vice thought needed keeping an eye on. By the simple yet unexpected expedient of running, she caught them up in time to co-observe Plenty Capable as she rose spitting the last of the gravel out of her mouth with a groan to her full height, which is classified information. Joined by Short Mat, the five went along with him to the house. They weren’t altogether pleased with having been lassoed into this, squeezed shoulder to shoulder and stumbling as their various characteristic modes of walking competed in an ambulatory free-for-all. Short Mat Bowls freed them when they reached the third floor window and ushered them in. ‘Catch and release’ was his motto – naturally.

‘Wolf hair? you say’, Wong said.

‘That’s what I said’, he said.

‘What did you do with it?’

‘I had it made into a -’

‘ – suitcase?’ asked the customs agent, gaping suspiciously at the x-ray monitor.

‘Nothing’

The customs agent rolled her eyes. Likely story, that! She put a silver whistle to her lips and blew the signal for ‘luggage investigator needed’ She didn’t trust those walky-talkies, they were too easily listened in on. It was just a formality anyway; the tourist’s fate was a foregone conclusion. He was turned back, his empty suitcase confiscated. And he’d just bought it at the duty-free in the last country! His return flight would be the last to depart from the tarmac of the beloved Indy, just as the tarmac simultaneously departed from the plane.

‘—and snuck it past the CIA snoops -- in this!’ Ddwwchllyff flourished a long cylindrical tube before their wincing faces. ‘In that? ’ quizzed his interlocutors, stepping back a bit.

‘No – in this!’ He withdrew a long cylindrical roll of blueprints from the tube with a triumphant flourish: he’d never regretted having a grand piano in every room. ‘Inside those?’ the listeners chorused, more doubtfully.

‘No – in this!’ And he unfurled the intricate diagram inscribed at the top in a fine hand with a flourish:
The Totebag Ë ‘A VEHICLE FOR YOUR VALISE’„
‘Or, to be technical about it – in this!’

All eyes turned to the zippered rectangular sturdy black canvas box set on a frame from one end of which projected a retractable handle and from the other a set of short wheels. Ddwwchchlyff demonstrated how the design enabled it to be towed along with great ease. ‘And should it break? Never fear!’ He placed the contraption on top of the grand piano and unzipped it, tipping it so everyone else could see its contents, even at her height.

Nestled inside lay a smaller replica of the whole affair. Amazed, his audience gathered closer, asking questions all at once: ‘Does it come out?’ ‘Is it bulletproof?’ ‘Does it come in plaid?’ ‘Does it seem to be getting darker in here?’ ‘Or is it me?’

‘Yes, yes, no, yes, maybe’ Ddwwchlyff economised. He lifted the smaller replica out of its receptacle as Wolfcastle, never without his torch, ignited it carefully so as not to scorch his sleeve and ensconced it. Ddwwchlyff watched him with a certain degree of envy. Wolfcastle did these things as if born to them.

The only difficulty was, he’d fired up the receptacle instead of the torch. ‘Ahem!’ the inventor implied.

Wolfcastle, seeing his error, quickly smothered the flaming prototype and instead ignited his vade mecum, the common torch, and held it aloft. ‘As if born to it,’ observed Ddwwchlyff inwardly.
Meanwhile, the Librarian had taken it upon herself to become frustrated at the slow pace of events and opened the smaller replica. A sarcastic gasp arose from everyone else ‘Another one but smaller yet!’

She wasn’t impressed but others were. Oh yes, indeed. Others were.

Time was petering out. The old Bangladeshi slowly poled the boat back towards Luxembourg, forsaking his hope of reuniting with his son. He’d only Di’s word to go by that it was his son anyway. He felt no qualms about the girl Samantha either, although admittedly he’d not got his hands on her long enough to feel much of anything about her and if he could have he wouldn’t have gone for the qualms.

People that were boys and girls back then would one day tell conflicting stories of those last few moments, but all agreed that Samantha Panther was a real lady (not transgendered as some revisionists, transgendered ones, would have it). ‘Samantha Panther,’ the oldsters would sigh in admiration, ‘was truly to the manor borne.’ It may have looked like that through the eyes of a child nowhere near the scene, but what really happened was that once Lassie had shown her how it was possible to slip between the bars of the window by pushing through face first and being a dog, Samantha had given into despair. After a few wallowing seconds, this unaccustomed emotion gave way to a new emotion. Not new new, but a change from the other. This one was icy cold resolve encapsulated in the words ‘I’m going to kill that bloody animal for leaving me here.’

She looked desperately about herself for something, anything, that might aid in her escape. Ill-fitting as they’d always been, her eyes fell upon a pipecutter. The patient craftsperson painstakingly replaced them for her. ‘Where did you come from?’ Samantha interviewed, surprised, her ever ready pad and pencil in hand. The pipecutter pointed a finger upward.

‘Same to you, asshole,’ shot back the reporter with a like gesture.

The kindly pipecutter repeated the digitation con brio. It was then Samantha realized the artisan had only the one finger, probably due to mishaps on the job. ‘Oh,’ she rectified and looked up to the hole in the roof it was signaling. Soil was seeping in around the edges. The aperture was far too high to reach without something to stand on. She grabbed a chair. It didn’t budge. She crazily yanked at every furnishing she could see in the near total darkness outside the ring of light coming through the crumbling lacuna overhead. ‘Bolted down’ she realised, ‘Just like my ferret.’ This memory renewed her fury at the faithless self-saving celebrity brute. She had to get out of there, find Lassie and kill her doggy ass. Then, an on-the-spot autopsy would reveal her much missed microphone.

Her new-found friend had been busy whittling away at some hardened clay and now handed the result to Samantha. It was a pipe, but what a pipe! The stem was carved with intricately graven bowls and the bowl was incised with elaborately carved stems. The whole thing was almost three metres long; leaned against the fast-deteriorating situation on the ground above, it served as a ladder much as Jack’s beanstalk had in its day. Halfway up it, Samantha remembered she hadn’t thanked her mysterious saviour. Turned and look down at the timely presence. ‘Thanks!’

The pipecutter’s eyes twinkled merrily, as if to say, ‘Just find the ‘effing dog, and when you do, kill it.’

Samantha needed no encouragement. Five minutes later she was slogging through the streets of Cardiff in waist deep water, following her prey. The overtaking of Lassie was an ugly scene when it happened. The animal, submerged but for her nostrils, was swimming for Largest Hill out of pure instinct rather than logic and book learning, and persevered in her dogged pursuit of that goal despite being slowed down by the presence of a large reporterly hand twined in her neck fur trying to shove her under the waves. Thus, had any of tomorrow’s aged raconteurs been there to witness the attempted perricide, they might be forgiven for thinking they were seeing a smartly dressed woman with movie star teeth being carried along on top of the water to the part of Ddwwchlyff’s mansion still visible above the turgid tide. They cannot be forgiven for pretending to have been there, however, especially those Eskimos.