Fairy Tale 7 - The Undelivered Wardrobe

Everyone was running around with their heads in a spin.  They were all dressed in their best clothes.  The men were wearing shiny shoes and crisply beautiful tall black hats, and their moustaches were carefully greased and they all wanted to be the great Gatsby.  The women were wearing astonishing scarves and flowing curves of shimmering dresses, and some had coy masks on sticks, and they were all Greta Garbo.  People had arrived in vehicles meeting the highest standards of flamboyance.  The cocktails were divine, the canapés delicious.  The music, lighting, flooring, air quality, temperature, ambiance, unemployment rate, consumer price index and political circumstances were all ideal.

The people were partying hard: recent times had, after all, been very difficult. The worst was now over and it was time to have fun.  Everything could be obtained merely by thinking about it.  Perfectly groomed waiters and waitresses had been summoned.  Jugglers and fire-breathers were waiting in the wings.  Trolleys, screens, chairs, tooth-picks, tree lights, silver spoons, wine glasses in the shape of South American animals, ferrous metals, ambient drones, semaphore monologues – all had been ordered and were on their way.  Worries had been banished.

But suddenly there was a strange noise.

No one could quite describe the noise, either later or then.  Some were perplexed even to have heard the noise, given all the music and hubbub and general cavorting that was afoot.  Perhaps we heard it through our bones, or our toes, or our chests, they thought.  The sound was rusty, cranking, off-balance; it was deep, and underlying, and hidden; it was a sliding rather than a tearing.  It was an ice floe falling, a feather drifting, a change in the wind, an escape clause, a fixture at the very end of the line finally giving way.  No one who heard the noise could remember it, nor would they ever forget.

Things began happening quickly after that.

The vehicles all stopped working.  The bread grew stale.  Farm animals left their enclosures and headed home.  Dust began rapidly to accumulate in the corners.  The drinks that had moments earlier been vibrant were now flat.  Colour leached away.  There was a sensation of hurried footsteps – heading away rather than towards.  People began calling – for another drink, for their partners, for help – and when nothing happened they began turning to look.  They turned, and turned, spinning and spinning, faster and faster.

It got worse.  Things began to fall: trays of drinks, ice sculptures, people.  Small trees.  Roof tiles.  Large panes of glass from tall buildings.    The falling continued: well-respected members of society fell.  Trust in democracy fell.  Key institutions like universities and libraries and the judiciary fell.

No one had been paying attention to the plumbing.  No one had tended to the gutters.  No one had been looking after the kitchen floor, or the window frames, or the lock on the front door, or the small hole in the wall under the cabinet where the washing machine lives, or the plug on the vacuum cleaner, or the latch on the bathroom window, or the little area of rust underneath the front passenger seat floormat.  No one had done any sewing.  For years and years and years everyone had simply pressed a button or said or thought “I want” and a new one had appeared: a new television, a new car, a new partner, a new song, a new kitchen, a new carpet, a new gizmo. A new house.  A new life.

“What happened?!?!” everyone shouted.

They wanted an explanation, and they wanted someone to blame, and they wanted it right now.  It went on for years.  No-one could believe that no-one was responsible; or, better - or worse - that everyone was responsible.  There were endless conversations, there were formal enquiries, there were precocious attempts to pretend that nothing had in fact happened, there were even stories that it had always been planned like this and it was a necessary way of getting from one place to the next.

It was eventually concluded that there had in fact been a precise moment when it had happened – or, rather, when it had not happened.

At the time of the strange noise that nobody remembered and no-one could forget, a man called Wojciech had been driving the delivery truck of a well-known global company to an address in the north.  He had been on the road for several hours already, he was missing his family, he was worried about money and he had heard on the radio that it would soon be raining.

His next stop was to drop off a wardrobe.  It was never delivered.

At 5.43pm an emerald grasshopper landed on the windscreen of his large grey van.   It was a moment like one of those when the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one place causes a hurricane far away.  Wojciech knew instantly and with complete certainty that the time had come to leave.  He headed back to the depot, quit his job and went home.

Wojciech, like everybody else, heard the strange noise; and he, like everybody else, could neither remember nor forget the noise.  Neither he nor anyone else understood that it was the noise of an entire culture slipping over the edge of itself.  The party was well and truly over.