Units of Fast

The Business of Having a Good Time

“How dare you!” That nauseating little Moomintroll who, with her advanced stage 21st century spastication, and with a little encouragement and torture from her parents - snarled at grandad, through the television for the third time that morning, somewhat taking the edge of his scrambled eggs on toast and making the war-stump of his left leg throb a little more than usual, because he didn’t expect this and doesn’t know what he’s done wrong.

The grandkids sit on the sofa, their feet not touching the ground, although the brother, being two years or so older than the sister, gets them to measure whose toes are nearest the shagpile (I’ve been in a couple, gets boring in the end, all those limbs and stinking genitalia that require no fight, no charm, I always want to talk to the girl with the pretty face but there’s spunk either on it, near it, or in it, and some bloke’s trying to pull my legs apart and I’m trying to stop him in a way that feels like I’m trying to kick my pajama bottoms off) carpet, and then it’s back to their iPads because someone’s telling them something. A message, a video, a million videos, just keep swiping. You fucking better. Now do you understand? Doing nothing? How dare you!

Grandad presses a soft rubber key in the remote that’s built into the arm of his armchair. Nice. The print has rubbed off over the years but he knows it means channel up and up and up and up and stop here. As long as he’s scanning or stopping, he’s engaged, modern happiness, contemporary peace. The information is endless, there’s information everywhere, designed, composed, and delivered at you. There’s information about information. There’s no room left to be bored, to do nothing. How dare you!

Nyala is adding some pages to Moomin.com. She thinks it’s nothing but wonderful that the website quickly degenerates to a sycophantic, lesbian, rimming of author Tove Jansson. “She wrote those books for her children you know, because there was nothing for them to do in Finland” is the line. You’ve all heard it, or words to that effect. She had no children. It’s a lie. She had a male lover, the Finnish Marxist Atos Wirtanen, but decided to get in touch with her roots from The Island of Lesbos or, went to ‘the spook side’ as she called it. But “she wrote it for her children” is what you hear, and it’s better like that, because you bought the book for your children, which is sort of the same. You love them.

Jane loves repeating it at dinner parties, alongside a handful of other urban myths, and a well-rehearsed and tested selection of reliable lines that can cope with the different social abilities expressed in groups. But she won’t reach for the bottle of wine she desperately needs more than life itself because her shirt will ride up and show the ripple of scars on her wrist.

Moomin.com announces pride week in Finland will be starting on the 22nd June 2021, and there’ll be ‘several interesting events connected to Tove Jansson and reading, writing and the Moomins, the Moomin characters initiative to enhance the love of reading and writing.’ Later we’re told the colours of the rainbow’ will be cast over the hometown of Tove Jansson for Pride week.

Grandad strains to turn his body round to tell the grandkids that’s what he done in the war, as images of soldiers and war stuff fails to tempt either kid from their iPads. Nan farts, tells grandad to kick the dog they don’t have, and no one asks why she’s got no hair. She keeps a large china mug of Gin warm between her hands that sit in her lap all day, nestled in a beautiful cream-coloured crocheted blanket she made decades ago. The girl fetches the bottle of Gin when nan gives her the wink because she knows nan will slip her a fiver in the morning when mum comes to collect them, and she likes the smell of the fumes when she pours the drink.

The dullards are having an argument whether their smart-phones should be banned from the dinner party. It’s light-hearted but corners are being fought since light-hearted is what they’ve all worked ‘damned hard for’, and when it’s all you’ve got it acquires value and so you protect it. Giles laughs unconvincingly when he apologises but says his “work is twenty-four-seven. It’s not ideal, but you play the hand you’re dealt, and I can’t risk missing a call.” His phone never rings, but vibrates occasionally, much like Giles. He’s not a doctor or anything, in fact no one knows what he really does and there’s some suspicion from the Smith-Jacksons (who met at CoDA) that he’s a con-man. He has been asked about his profession at previous social events on the street, but he doesn’t ring, just vibrates a bit.

Eleanor, too pretty for words and with a voice that hardens cock, doesn’t get involved. She knows all the ladies there hate her to the bone anyway, and an opinion would surely only make this worse, cause her distress, and harden too many cocks. Her therapist told her to be herself and she lies to him about the progress she’s making with her issues using completely invented examples. He buys it though, because she’s too pretty for words and has a voice that hardens his cock. She lies to everyone else too, because she’s a liar. She’s doing what she’s told, being herself, which the therapist did say to do. The Smith-Jacksons ask Eleanor her thoughts on the subject, with some words being delivered by Mr Smith-Jackson, and some by Mrs Smith-Jackson. “Interesting,” says Giles, drawing unnecessary attention to how uninteresting it was. He’s struck by the bombshell of someone daring to say “I’m bored”. How dare you!

Eleanor has her phone in her hand as they ask her, because she was quickly trying to turn it off and hopefully exempt her from the general insinuation of accusation these conversations create in her world. As a liar, she knows she must understand the rules in advance to compensate for what could be a catastrophe later, but got distracted by a Twitter article about a school teacher who gave her class of eleven-year old’’ instructions on how to tie a noose. Eleanor raises a hand briefly. It’s the information era sign language for ‘one moment, I’m having a better time with people, places, or things other to my present situation’ and she’s given more than the usual required and acceptable six seconds to get the gist of the article and turn off her phone because of the cock thing, etc. Once it’s off, she says she’s sorry, as ethereal and enchanting tiny patterns, which look like the tiny golden cogs and wheels from a wind-up watch, slowly leave her mouth, gently rising, before dissolving in the air, leaving nothing but the smell of wild Calluna. “I’ve quite forgotten the topic under discussion”, which is a lie, of course, but it takes a few seconds for everyone to come out from under her spell and get back to the business of having a good time. Giles jumps in, like literally, he’s almost got his feet on the table, slapping his low swinging balls to seize his chance to squeeze some attention from Eleanor. “Isn’t it interesting how the conversation about whether we should ban phones from the dinner party has led to more distraction than the phones themselves?” But no one’s listening as they are all distracted by notifications of some sort they saw while turning off their phones, except for Giles whose various inboxes are as empty as a bottle of whorehouse mouthwash.

Jane feels like she’s going to explode but is saved by Nyala, a quarter African woman (a three quarters white woman, but shhh!) who wears her hair in braids and is clothed, nay, draped in colours from the motherland. The motherland is, of course somewhere in East Dulwich, but it’s Ethiopia or else. So she fills the glass up to the brim, because Jane distracts her. She takes a deep breath and squeaks out, ‘Nyala is a lovely name…’ and Nyala interrupts before jane gets to ask where it’s from to explain it was from a beautiful Ethiopian film star’s name from the 1940s. Everyone else sitting round the table has both heard and Googled this several times before, and found nothing of the sort except it’s a town in Sudan and means ‘mountain goat’. Giles uses the bathroom and takes the time to text this information to Jane, who’s holding her glass out after Nyala’s stopped pouring and the room changes colour since it’s considered so awfully dreadful and uncouth to let clear signals of everyday alcoholism slip out in this postal code. Jane gets her near half liter of wine though. “Why do they make these glasses so big!’ she says, her eyes half closing like she’s already drunk it.

Grandad groans as he cranks his neck away from the horse racing on television, half way towards the children and asks them, (while looking at the framed boomerang on the wall from his and nan’s honeymoon to Australia when the world was a struggle but a pleasure, rather than neither), if they ever stop “playing with those damn things”, the beeps and whizzes now starting to affect him as he knows it irritates the post-chemo, in remission, skinhead, undead, love of his life, since she loves the kids too much to ever ask anything from them beyond the occasional visit. “I never put mine down, unless I’m sleeping, but sometimes I dream about it, or have it playing on the pillow beside me while I sleep.” Says the girl “They should sell sofas with them already in the arm of the chair. That would be sick!” The girl puts hers on the arm of the chair, not stopping from swiping up as she moves it, in case she misses something she doesn’t want to see and has absolutely no connection with beside connection itself. “Yeah, that would be sick!” says the boy. “Sick?” says grandad, letting his strained and painful spine unwind and pull him back to the television. “You like that, do you, vomit?’ And the room changes colour as they all remember last year when grandad had a seizure at Christmas and puked all over the turkey while his eyes went white like a zombie. Nan gives the wink and the girl fetches the Gin from the cabinet and gives her a top up. “Thank you, darling, that dress looks beautiful,” says nan. “The lady across the road gave it to me, but mum said it makes me look fat,” so nan takes a large hit of Gin, the other option being launching it at the wall.

Giles, dressed in the way he imagined Bertolt Brecht would, tops up Jane’s drink since Eleanor completely ignored him, and suggests the reason we spend so much time on our social media is ‘’because 99.9% of the information we’re saturated in from the moment we wake up to the minute we go to sleep is of no use to us, in fact, it….’’ He pauses and chooses the word carefully, “…it..it hurts us; a glowing, humming, endless habitat invaded by an advertising that’s all but swallowed the social space, and we have no real interest in it, or use for it. It’s meaningless, it’s a crisis of meaning, so we’re just scanning, looking for something authentic that actually makes us feel something, anything…without success. The information itself has become the content, and all that makes us feel is empty. They pay designers millions of pounds to make those pages hypnotize you, to keep you looking at messaging, symbols, signals, signs, catastrophic pointlessness that you can’t leave because that’s its function, and it works.” He gives Jane a wink, but she doesn’t see because she’s pouring another half-liter of poison into her face. “Anyone for a cheeky shot or two?” Asks Harriet, to break the silence of a moment of actual reflection. As she’s arranging the bottles and shot glasses on a tray she’s all ‘How dare you! How fucking dare you bring that to my dinner party? That’s two comments away from ‘I’m bored!’ She smiles all her way back, the occasional clink of glass. Three bottles; Grand Marnier, Patron XO Café, and St-Germain Elderflower, two Uzi submachine guns, two fragmentation grenades and a sickle. “I’ve been looking at that St-Germain Elderflower in Waitrose” says Jane, who’s never seen it before and just (extending her neck and squinting) read the label. She doesn’t shop in Waitrose either, she barely eats. Eleanor has the first stirrings of sexual attraction to Jane and doesn’t know why, but as Jane, now suitably lubricated to ‘be herself’ reaches out for the St-Germain Elderflower, almost snatching it from the table and no longer giving a monkey’s fuck about the ripples of scar tissue on her wrists, Eleanor also reaches for it, gently making contact with the back of Jane’s hand, and saying sorry, while Jane is nearly crying, having not been touched with such sensitivity for decades, if ever.

Grandad is dead. Nan sits in the front room with her mug of gin and the children look at their iPads. “She’ll be here in a minute” says nan, referring to Jane who has just woken up in bed with Eleanor in a room she’s never seen before. She pulls on her clothes, trying not to give Eleanor a reason to stop pretending to still be asleep and dashes out of the door and into the street, where she recognizes at least it’s the same street as Harriet’s house, and can see her blue Toyota across the road. At first, she thinks she’s got away without a hangover, but in truth she knows she must have gone to sleep about an hour ago and is still very drunk. She gets in her car and starts the ten-minute drive to her parent’s house to pick up the kids. “Is grandad going to be OK?” asks the girl. “Not really” says nan. “But like even when you’re dead you need people to look after you” says the girl looking up from her iPad for a moment to look at the empty chair that sits a meter away from and facing the television.

The boy walks over to the chair and lets his fingertips drag slowly over the rubber buttons of the remote set into the upholstery . He presses the red button and the television plinks into activity, he walks back to the sofa. “I think he’d like that” he says.

Jane fills the car with petrol, grabs a brightly coloured magazine from the rack for the girl and a little toy helicopter for the boy. In four minutes, she’ll be calling the roadside recovery company number in her phone after drifting off and wrecking her car as it scraped along the metal barrier that prevented her driving down a fifty-foot verge. She only woke up when she struck a post of some sort and it turned the car ninety degrees, the engine screaming with nowhere to go.

Giles’ phone vibrates, and his boss gives him instructions to pick up lady from the side of the M5. He needs to get there quickly because the recovery vehicle is ready to take her vehicle away, and he needs to take her home. It’s company policy not to leave customers waiting by the side of the road alone.

Jane is initially so happy to see Giles, but Giles is not happy to see Jane. Not only did Jane fail to respond to any of his charms at the dinner party, but she done the off with Eleanor, who also failed to respond to his charms. She also now knows he works as a recovery driver and not an accountant, lawyer, PR, or interior designer like the rest of the successful, professional people he shares a street with. He inherited the property from his parents, who got lucky on the pools, premium bonds, or some other proto-lottery luck-tax hoo-hah.

However, still dressed in her short blue skirt, white shirt, and heels, he can’t pretend he wouldn’t like to drive off down a quiet country lane and privilege her with some of his moves. Jane holds her handbag, the toy helicopter, and the somewhat damaged but still colourful magazine in her lap and tries to control her breathing.

Jane thanks Giles, signs some forms, and gets out of the vehicle at the bottom of the thirteen-floor block of flats. Giles also gets out, makes a performance of the auto-locking, and starts walking to the lift. “It’s policy to accompany the customer to the door, anyway, I want to make sure you’re OK.” Jane almost asks for a copy of the policy to see if this is indeed the case, but the doors open and they step into the pissy, claustrophobic lift, Jane slowly edging into the corner and Giles adjusting his penis as it fills with blood. Jane presses number six and the ancient cables and motors wind them up six floors and the doors shudder open. “Ladies first,” says Giles, causing Jane to have to squeeze past and thank him for it. They knock on number 36 and the sound of children running makes Jane smile. The door opens, “Grandad’s dead” says the girl, while playing a game where you have to redecorate a room by winning different pieces of furniture and other interior items. “My boy plays that game,” says Giles, and they all walk into the front room. “Your father died in his sleep Jane, he’s in bed if you’d like to see him.” Without taking her eyes from her mother, Jane tosses the magazine at the girl and the helicopter at the boy. “Who’s that?” says Nan, looking at Giles, and Jane is interrupted by Giles who describes himself as “Just a friend helping out”. Jane – turning down Giles’ bizarre offer of joining her – goes to see her dead father. “The Moomins, what’s that? And why’s it all tatty?” says the girl.

Jane spends about ten minutes with her dead father. She looks at his stump more than ever before because she knew he didn’t like people staring and she’d never really seen it, not for long anyway. “I love you, Dad, I always loved you. I guess it’s just me, the kids, and the witch now.” She leans over and kisses his forehead, stroking a few stray hairs from his forehead. “Are you ready yet?” Shouts Giles “A man’s got to earn a living and all that. Isn’t that right, kids?” “What’s a gay pride” asks the girl. “Haha, you’re a gay!” says the boy, and with tears in her eyes, Jane remembers how sweet and innocent Eleanor tasted.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

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