Celebrations

They gave me a slab of beef in commemoration of my birth, though I could not remember the exact date. Lit candles were plunged into the raw flesh, where they hung at awkward angles and dripped hot wax onto the tender meat.

We sang a tuneless song, “Your Anniversary”, that one of them had composed. He had brought along a sheet of complex notation but none of us could comprehend it, so our massed voices created an unpleasant discord. He hammered pointlessly at a broken piano and we eventually limped to a conclusion.

Three boxes lay discarded at my feet, the contents held aloft for an unwanted photograph that would be briefly stapled into a home-made photograph album. Like all things, it would be lost in a fire, or a flood, or thrown away to make room for more, newer undesirables.

I had told them that I loved music. I received a punctured bagpipe; a torn squeezebox; a framed painting of a sousaphone, worn in a disorganised manner by an overweight Austrian.

It was the best birthday ever.