But birthday was a better word for it, because telling yourself first birthday could remind you of when you were a kind of celebrity at rock-star level, but too young to enjoy it. When you got born you were immediately good news. When anyone saw you they smiled. They gave you stuff. They wanted to hold you and protect you and be kind. You could dress like a mental patient and not utter a sensible word, but that was OK, that was cool, that pleased people and they purely wanted to know more about you and find out your needs. If you messed up then somebody else washed away your problem and you only had to be and that was enough to satisfy. You being you was a bloody treat for anyone who caught it.
One is the age of automatic celebrity.
Who wouldn’t want a share of that?
One is spotless and has no baggage and can do no harm. It has only the ghosts of things to come — each one of them carrying a happy promise.
She didn’t, in the usual way of things, enjoy thinking of the future — the future had an unmanageable shape.
But when you were one, you had this big, noticeable, smiling future — it was right there for you, straight ahead and held to be inviting. You had promise and it wasn’t meant to disappear, not until you were older. You were a promise. To others as much as to yourself.
A nudge of emotion started to seethe up from her feet and she hoped that the early dog walkers didn’t come too near and notice her slightly crying. The Hill was a chatty area, you might not get away with tears — you’d have to protect yourself against enquiries.
Really, she ought to head home and get warmed and out of her pyjamas. Outings undertaken with wellingtons and a coat over pyjamas were viewed as an acceptable morning practice in many households around here. The Hill didn’t judge. Car jaunts of an evening could use the same dress code. If you had a car. She didn’t any more. And there was work soon and something else before and she had to get ready in a number of ways and the bus schedules had become mainly theoretical of late, which meant she had to be responsible and set aside more time for journeys. She should shower and make ready and chase straight off to be where she should and then onwards to do her job and serve a purpose.
This was another good thing to have in mind: she was employed and her employers found her useful and wanted her to keep appearing as agreed and paid her and provided a workforce kettle and mugs — free to all staff — and encouraged community-building traditions, like the rota that meant each last Friday in the month someone had to bring cake.
It occurred to her that the pressure of her approaching turn as a bringer of cake was OK.
But, then again, it was a pressure.
When a cake failed it ruined the mood for the whole of the office and finished the month sadly. Success in the cake area was therefore important.
She’d have to buy one, because she couldn’t bake, not reliably. Baking the cake, anyway, would invite hysteria. If it was a dreadful cake from a shop, you could blame the shop. Your own dreadful cake — people have to be polite about it, but they don’t want it and you being around in the aftermath of your rotten cake provision means that co-workers have to sneak off and ditch their slices. Then you’ll end up catching sight of binned cake wrapped in paper towels, but still obvious, or cake troubling pigeons on the window sills, or anywhere really, it would depend on how resourceful your co-workers at GFH were, and the more resourceful they were, the more energy they’d have to waste in jettisoning your disaster which was your fault and the entire mess would be so deeply humiliating that it didn’t bear considering.
So she shouldn’t consider it.
She should acknowledge instead that it wasn’t a big deal and she was being melodramatic.
Nevertheless, she’d been testing shop cakes once a week to be sure she’d avoid catastrophe. How good they were depended quite depressingly upon price. She wanted a relatively cheap cake. She also wanted a cake that felt innocent and as if some experienced relative’s hands had formed and finished it — plain but delicious and heartfelt. She wanted to give people something kind and simple.
That wasn’t available.
The cheap cake was horrible. The expensive cake tasted of greed — of greedy bakers.
She couldn’t win.
Who knew cake was such a bastard?
It wasn’t the major issues that tripped you up — glorious suffering and mayhem were oddly easy to discuss. You could similarly try not to be embarrassed or pursued by your very many inadequacies. But ridiculous, obsessive anxiety about virtually nothing: that was shameful and so you didn’t mention it and so it festered.
I am letting myself be harassed by eggs, butter, sugar and flour.
She should buy chocolate for Gartcosh Farm Home. Chocolate cake.
Chocolate always worked.
A cake could be nasty, commercial, impersonal, slightly toxic — if it was chocolate, it worked anyway. This was some kind of rule.
Foolproof.
Perhaps.
You couldn’t be absolutely sure, because maybe it would be possible to make the people at GFH finally tired of chocolate. It was a bit of an open goal when it came to providing treats and so it occurred very often.
She shouldn’t be boring.
She shouldn’t trash a path to joy for everybody.
She shouldn’t ruin chocolate for everyone forever.
Jesus, this was hard.
Cake was hard.
No.
She was out of the park now and on her way back to the flat — her strides fast with patisserie-related tension.
No. This is crazy.
She paused at the kerb, as if being cautious about suddenly appearing traffic, although no sign of any such thing was even distantly approaching.
I cannot be bullied by cake. Not even real cake — by theoretical cake.
She sniffed, frowned, stepped into the empty road.
What I should do is get a chocolate and another one …
No.
NoChristfuckshitforshittingfuckssake.
I mean, really.
What she should do was not think about it.
Starting now.
Not think about chocolate cake without traces of nuts.
And no gluten.
And no alcohol.
Organic chocolate.
Chocolate that helped starving villages and put orphans into schools, that built the schools, that saved lives and nourished communities and made strong women sing and wise men love them.
No one could argue with that.
Although there was no need to fuss or think about this. Not about cake.
It was just a fucking cake.
Which should be chocolate.
Why the hell were they all so demanding?
Making people bring cake. Which sadist thought of that?
Not that it wasn’t a good idea.
It was nobody’s fault but her own that the prospect of cake provision could burrow a hole through her head within seconds and let all the sense drop out, have her imagining accidents: choking, allergies and sickness, these swiftly followed by her sacking and destitution, homelessness, begging and death.
Just a cake.
Just the threat of a cake.
So don’t think about it.
She should move herself forward to something else.
She should pick one of her shiniest, best things. Pick a warm thought, a true one.
I will meet you.
She opened her gate, walked up the path to her front door and undertook to ensure that while she waited for the doubtful bus and then something unpleasant beyond it and then work — she did like her work — she could have that promise, kept safe.