Truly Madly Guilty(11)

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, ‘Ruby!’

‘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.