Listening to the Glass Bead Game

It was an adaptation of the Herman Hesse novel, late night on the radio and it was keeping me company as I finished off a piece montee for a wedding buffet. A grand way of saying I was making a cake look nice, carefully trimming and scraping the layers to look like a series of wheels of cheese. I remembered the excitement in their voices when they suggested it, how so many weddings were having stacks of cheese as an alternative to cake, so could I make them a cake which looked like that but was still cake and I said sure, smiling, the couple were a few years younger than me, and the joy if it all was still evident, I’d guessed that they hadn’t organised much else for the wedding yet, and was glad I ‘d seen them early on in the process.

I enjoy listening to stories when I cook, particularly if it’s something that requires concentration, the low background hum of a voice or voices, just out-competing the buzz of the kitchen’s strip-light helps me work. I can’t do phone-ins, there’s something about the sound of people with something on their mind which makes me want to stop and listen, find out what it is that exercises them. I can’t work to that. Conversely, in my days as a line-cook, I needed loud, driving music to push the service forward, but here, on my own, a story was perfect.

The story seemed to be concerned with people who play an unknowable, unguessable game, which was as much as I could work out from the half heard murmurings as I carefully cut veins into the cake which would later resemble a mature Stilton. There was something about a music master, and an argument about faith, but the whole thing remained pleasingly opaque, white noise to set against the process of inscribing a short arc with the canelle knife.

I’d phoned him to wish him a happy birthday for the next day earlier in the evening, knowing it was going to be a long night, and knowing that tomorrow I was going to be too busy.

“It’s not my birthday tomorrow,” he said “it’s the fourteenth.”

“It’s the twelfth” I said, momentarily confused, I’d been thinking about how to wrinkle icing in such a way as to make it look like the surface of a Brie de Meaux.

“Today is the twelfth, yes. Tomorrow, therefore, is the thirteenth. My birthday is, as it has always been, the fourteenth.”
I blustered something about not knowing what day it was and of course I knew and sorry but I was going to wish him a happy birthday anyway all the time avoiding saying the unsayable. Because he wasn’t well. Hadn’t been for a while. We never talked about it. We talked about football and work.

“Aren’t you going to aske me then?”

“Ask you what?”

“Idiot. Ask me how I’m doing”

So I asked, I didn’t see that there was any way I could avoid doing so. And that was when he told me that it was hopeless and over and weeks not months so I did what any normal person would do and slid to the floor whilst burbling inanities about how he was a fighter and he’d beat it. Sitting on the stockroom floor lying with insane cheerfulness. This, I think, irritated him more than getting his birthday wrong.

“No. I won’t. I’m fucked.”

And that was pretty much the end of the conversation, we exchanged some rote postscripts about speaking soon and I made a too hearty joke about not cancelling Christmas plans just yet and he, very quietly, and with feeling, said that I was a cunt. And I said I wasn’t it was just a lot to take in. Then he said he was sorry that this was difficult for me, he, on the other hand was having a whale of a time and I said now who’s being a cunt violin time is it and he laughed.

I sat there for a while before I got back to work. I remembered when, as children, we’d broken into an abandoned garage and, climbing in through the window had landed on some sheets of a substance which cracked and puffed and turned to dust as we landed on it, great choking clouds. I wondered if it was that, then, or something else. I wondered why, even now, I couldn’t remember the date of his birthday. Then I started trying to remember everyone’s birthdays and realised I didn’t know any of them. And then I started going through the year month by month, trying to pin them down, I began to formulate plans for carelessly and artlessly asking other family members, resolving to note them all down. I didn’t think about him. I very carefully didn’t think about him.

It was some hours later when I finally finished up and sent my sleeping wife the text to let her know not to worry, I was on my way home. It was the curiously soothing poetry of the shipping forecast that accompanied my washing and sterilising of the surfaces and equipment, Forties, Cromarty. The adaptation of the Glass Bead Game had long since finished. I wondered what the rules were.