Truly Madly Guilty(10)

She kept driving.

‘Turn around when possible,’ said the GPS with the hint of a sigh.

‘Sorry,’ said Clementine humbly.





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.)