Truly Madly Guilty (4 page)

chapter five

The day of the barbeque

Sunlight flooded the kitchen where Clementine ran on the spot in her pyjamas while her husband Sam yelled sergeant-major style, ‘Run, soldier, run!’

Her two-year-old daughter, Ruby, also in her pyjamas, her hair a tangled blonde bird’s nest, ran alongside Clementine, bobbing about like a puppet on a string and giggling. She had a soft, soggy piece of croissant clamped in one pudgy hand and a metal whisk with a wooden handle in the other, although nobody thought of Whisk as merely a kitchen utensil anymore; Whisk was fed, bathed and put tenderly to bed each night by Ruby in his/her (Whisk’s gender was fluid) tissue paper-lined shoebox.

‘
Why
am I running?’ panted Clementine. ‘I don’t like running!’

This morning Sam had announced, with an evangelical look in his eye, that he’d developed a foolproof plan to help her ‘nail this audition, baby’. He’d been up late last night getting his plan ready.

First she needed to run on the spot for five minutes as fast as she could.

‘Don’t ask questions, just follow orders!’ said Sam. ‘Lift those knees! You’ve got to be puffing.’

Clementine tried to lift her knees.

He must have Googled
tips for your orchestral audition
and tip number one was something delightfully trite like:
Exercise! Make sure you’re in peak physical condition
.

This was the problem with being married to a non-musician. A musician would have known that the way to help her prepare for her audition was
by taking the girls out this morning so she had time to practise before they had to go over to Erika’s place.
It’s not rocket science, soldier.

‘Two minutes more!’ Sam studied her. He was unshaven, in his T-shirt and boxers. ‘Actually, you might only need one minute more, you’re not very fit.’

‘I’m stopping,’ said Clementine, slowing to a jog.

‘No! You mustn’t stop. It’s to simulate your audition nerves by making your heart rate go up. Once it’s up you have to launch straight into playing your excerpts.’

‘What? No, I’m not going to play now.’ She needed to spend time meticulously
preparing
her excerpts. ‘I want another coffee.’

‘Run, soldier, run!’ shouted Sam.

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She kept running. It wouldn’t hurt her to do some exercise, although actually it was already hurting quite a lot.

Their five (‘
and three-quarters
’, it was important to clarify) year old daughter, Holly, clip-clopped into the living room, wearing her pyjama pants, an old ripped
Frozen
dress and a pair of Clementine’s high heels. She put her hand on her jutted hip as though she was on the red carpet and waited to be admired.

‘Wow. Look at Holly,’ said Sam dutifully. ‘Take those shoes off before you hurt yourself.’

‘Why are you both … “
running
”?’ said Holly to her mother and her sister. She hooked her fingers in the air to make exaggerated inverted commas on the word ‘running’. It was a new sophisticated habit of hers, except she thought you could just pick any word at random and give it inverted commas. The more words the better. She frowned. ‘Stop that.’

‘Your father is making me run,’ gasped Clementine.

Ruby had suddenly had enough of running and plopped down on her bottom. She carefully laid her piece of croissant on the floor for later and sucked hard on her thumb, like a smoker in need of a drag.

‘Daddy, stop making Mummy run,’ demanded Holly. ‘She’s breathing funny!’

‘I am breathing funny,’ agreed Clementine.

‘Excellent,’ said Sam. ‘We need her breathless. Girls! Come with me! We’ve got an important job to do. Holly, I told you, shoes off before you hurt yourself!’

He grabbed Ruby up off the floor and held her under one arm like a football. She shrieked with delight as he ran down the hallway. Holly ran behind, ignoring his directive about the shoes.

‘Keep running until we call for you!’ shouted Sam from the living room.

Clementine, as disobedient as Holly, slowed down to a shuffle.

‘We’re ready for you!’ called Sam.

She walked into the living room, half-laughing and breathing heavily. She stopped at the doorway. The furniture had been pushed to the corners and a solitary chair stood in the middle of the room, behind her music stand. Her cello leaned against the chair, the endpin jammed firmly into the hardwood floor, where it would leave another tiny hole. (They’d agreed to call the holes ‘character’ rather than ‘damage’.) A queen-sized bedsheet hung from the ceiling, dividing the room. Holly, Ruby and Sam sat behind it. She could hear Ruby giggling.

So this was what Sam was so excited about. He’d set the room up to look like an audition. The white bedsheet was meant to represent the black screen which the audition panel sat behind like an invisible firing squad, judging and condemning, faceless and silent (except for the occasional intimidating rustle or cough and the loud, bored, superior voice that could at any moment interrupt her playing with, ‘That will do, thank you’).

She was surprised and almost embarrassed by her body’s automatic visceral response to the sight of that lonely chair. Every audition she’d ever done rushed back into her head: a cascade of memories. The time there was only the one warm-up room for everyone, a room so astonishingly hot and airless and noisy, so crowded with extraordinarily talented-seeming musicians, that everything had begun to spin like a merry-go-round, and a French cellist had reached out a languid hand to save Clementine’s cello as it slipped from her grasp. (She was a champion fainter.)

The time she’d done a first-round audition and played exceptionally well except for a mortifying slip-up in her concerto, not even in a tricky passage; a mistake she’d never made in concert and never made again. She’d been so crushed she’d cried for three hours straight in a Gloria Jean’s coffee shop, while the lady at the next table passed her tissues and her boyfriend at the time (the oboist with eczema) said over and over, ‘They forgive you one wrong note!’ He was right, they forgave her the one wrong note. She’d got the call-back that afternoon, but by then she was so spent from all that crying, she played with a bow arm so fatigued it felt as limp as spaghetti, and missed out on the final round.

‘Sam,’ she began. It was sweet of him, it was really, really sweet of him and she adored him for doing it, but it was not helping.

‘Hello, Mummy!’ said Ruby clearly from behind the sheet.

‘Hello, Ruby,’ said Clementine.

‘Shh,’ said Sam. ‘No talking.’

‘Why isn’t Mummy “playing”?’ said Holly. You didn’t need to see her to know she was doing her inverted commas.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sam. ‘We won’t give this applicant the job if she doesn’t play, will we?’

Clementine sighed. She’d have to go along with the game. She went and sat on the chair. She tasted banana. Every time she did an audition she ate a banana in the car on the way in because bananas supposedly contained natural beta-blockers to help with her nerves. Now she couldn’t eat bananas at any other time because they made her think of auditions.

Maybe this time she could try real beta-blockers again, although the one time she had she hadn’t liked that cottonwool mouth feeling and her brain had felt kind of blasted clean, as if something had exploded in the centre of her head.

‘Mummy already has a job,’ said Holly. ‘She already
is
a cellist.’

‘This is her dream job,’ said Sam.

‘Kind of,’ said Clementine.

‘What’s that?’ said Sam. ‘Who was that? We didn’t hear the applicant talk, did we? She doesn’t talk, she just plays.’

‘That was Mummy,’ said Ruby. ‘Hello, Mummy!’

‘Hello, Ruby!’ Clementine called back as she rosined her bow.

‘Dream job’ was maybe excessive (if she were dreaming, she might as well be a world-famous soloist) but she very, very badly wanted this job: Principal Cellist with the Sydney Royal Chamber Orchestra. A permanent position with colleagues and holidays and a schedule. Life as a freelance musician was flexible and fun but it was so cobbled together, so fragmented and bitsy, with weddings and corporate gigs and teaching lessons and subbing and whatever else she could take. Now that the girls were settled in school and day care, she wanted to get her career back on track.

She already knew everyone in the string section of the SRCO because she often played for the orchestra casually. (‘So you shouldn’t have any trouble getting this job then, right? Because you’re already
doing
it!’ her mother had said last night, cheerfully oblivious to the fierce competitiveness of Clementine’s world. Clementine’s two older brothers were both working overseas, as engineers. Ever since university, their careers had moved forward in a logical, linear fashion. They never wailed, ‘I just feel like I can’t engineer today!’)

Her closest friends in the orchestra, Ainsley and Hu, a married cellist and double bassist, who would be part of the panel sitting behind the screen deciding her fate, were being particularly encouraging. Rationally, Clementine knew she had a shot. It was only her debilitating audition phobia that prevented her making her perfect life a reality. Her terror of the terror.

‘Preparation is the solution,’ Sam had told her last night, as if this were groundbreaking advice. ‘Visualisation. You need to
visualise
yourself winning your audition.’

It was disloyal of her to think that one didn’t ‘win’ an orchestral audition and preparing for one was not in the same league as, say, preparing a PowerPoint presentation about sales and marketing plans for a new anti-dandruff shampoo, as Sam’s last job had required him to do. Maybe it was the same. She didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine what people actually did in office jobs, sitting at their computers all day long. Sam was peppy right now, he was leaving for work each day looking very
chipper
, because he’d just got a new job as marketing director for a bigger, ‘more dynamic’ company that made energy drinks. There were lots of twenty-somethings at his new office. Sometimes she could hear their drawling speech inflections creeping into his voice. He was still in the honeymoon stage. Yesterday he’d said something about the ‘forward-thinking corporate culture’ and he’d said it
non-ironically
. He’d only started a week ago. She’d give him a grace period before she started teasing him about it.

‘Can I go play on the iPad?’ said Holly from behind the sheet.

‘Shh, your mother is auditioning,’ said Sam.

‘Can I have something to eat then?’ said Holly and then, outraged, ‘Ru
by
!’

‘Ruby, please stop licking your sister,’ sighed Sam.

Clementine looked up and tried not to think about how the sheet was attached to the ceiling. He wouldn’t have stuck thumbtacks in their decorative ceiling, would he? No. He was the sensible one. She picked up her bow and positioned her cello.

The excerpts were on her music stand. There had been no real surprises when she’d gone through them yesterday. The Brahms would be fine. The Beethoven, okay, as long as she phrased the opening convincingly.
Don Juan
of course, her nemesis, but she just needed to put the time in. She’d been happy to see the Mahler: fifth movement of Symphony No. 7. Maybe she’d play Sam the Mahler now, keep him happy, and make him think this was helping.

As she tuned, she heard Marianne’s German-accented voice in her head giving her audition advice: ‘First impressions count! Even when you are tuning! You must tune quickly, quietly and calmly.’ She felt a sudden fresh wave of grief for her old music teacher, even though it had been ten years since she died.

She remembered a time when she’d started to panic because she’d felt she was taking an inordinately long time to tune and she’d thought she could sense the impatience emanating from the other side of the screen. It was in Perth, and she’d had to carry her perfectly tuned cello across a quadrangle in the most extraordinarily searing heat and into a frosty concert hall.

All auditions had a nightmarish quality to them but that one had been particularly traumatic. The monitor had asked her to take off her shoes before she went on, so that her high heels couldn’t be heard clicking across the stage and give away her gender. He’d also suggested she try to avoid coughing or clearing her throat as that too could give away her gender. He was kind of obsessed with it. As she’d walked onstage one of her stockinged feet had slipped (Black stockings! On a forty-degree day!) and she’d shrieked in a very gender-specific way. By the time she’d finally tuned the cello, she was a mess. All she could think about as she quivered and sweated and shivered was how much she’d wasted on flights and accommodation for an audition she wouldn’t get.

My God, she hated auditions. If she got this job she never, ever wanted to audition again.

‘Ruby! Come back! Don’t touch!’

The bedsheet suddenly fell from the ceiling to reveal Sam sitting on the couch with Holly on his lap and Ruby sitting on the floor, looking both guilty and thrilled at what she’d achieved, the sheet pooled around her.

‘Whisk did it,’ said Ruby.

‘Whisk did not do it!’ said Holly. ‘
You
did it, Ruby!’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Sam. ‘Relax.’ He gave Clementine a wry shrug. ‘I got this idea in my head that we’d do a mock audition every Sunday morning after breakfast. I thought it would just be fun and maybe even … helpful, but it was probably a bit lame, sorry.’

Holly climbed off Sam’s lap and went and pulled the sheet over her head. Ruby climbed under with her and they whispered to each other.

‘It wasn’t lame,’ said Clementine. She thought of her ex-boyfriend Dean, a double bass player, who was now playing with the New York Philharmonic. She remembered practising for him and how he’d cry ‘
Ne-ext!
’ and point to the door, to indicate her playing wasn’t up to scratch, and how she’d burst into tears. ‘Fuck, this self-doubt of yours is a bore,’ Dean would yawn. Fuck, you were a pretentious twat, Dean, and you weren’t even that good, buddy.

‘I’ll take the girls out for the morning so you can practise,’ said Sam.