Truly Madly Guilty(9)

It had been a relief when she left. It had been disconcerting trying to speak with that small intense face pulling her attention like a magnet. At one point the irrelevant, distracting thought had crossed her mind that Erika’s fair hair was cut in an identical style to Clementine’s mother’s. A no-nonsense symmetrical shoulder-length style with a long fringe cut dead straight just above the eyebrows. Erika idolised Clementine’s mother. It was either a deliberate or a subconscious imitation, but surely not a coincidence.

She saw a sign pointing towards the city and quickly changed lanes just as the GPS woke up and directed her to ‘turn right ahead’ in a plummy female English accent.

‘Yes, I worked it out myself, thanks anyway,’ she said.

The rain started again and she flicked on the wipers.

A piece of rubber on one of the wipers had made its way free and on every third swipe it made a high-pitched screech, like a door slowly opening in a horror movie.

Scre-eech. Two. Three. Scre-eech. Two. Three. It made her think of zombies in a lumbering waltz.

She would call Erika today. Or tomorrow morning. Erika was owed an answer. Enough time had passed. There was only one answer, of course, but Clementine had been waiting for the appropriate time.

Don’t think about that now. Think only about the audition. She needed to compartmentalise, as the Facebook articles suggested. Men were supposedly good at compartmentalising; they gave their full attention to whatever they were doing, although in fact Sam had never had a problem ‘multi-tasking’. He could make a risotto while unpacking the dishwasher and simultaneously playing some good-for-their-brains game with the girls. Clementine was the one who wandered off, picked up her cello and then forgot she had something in the oven. She was the one who had once (mortifyingly) forgotten to pick Holly up from a birthday party, something Sam would never do. ‘Your mother walks around in a permanent daze,’ Sam used to say to the girls, but he said it fondly, or she thought he had. Maybe she’d imagined the fondness. She could no longer be sure what anyone truly thought of her: Her mother. Her husband. Her friend. Anything seemed possible.

She thought again of her mother’s comment: ‘So you’re still going for this job?’ She’d never put in this many practice hours for an audition, even before the children were born. All that self-indulgent whining she used to do: I’m a working mother with two small children! Woe is me! There just aren’t enough hours in my day! In fact there were plenty more hours in the day if you just slept less. Now she went to bed at midnight instead of ten pm, and got up at five instead of seven.

Living on less sleep gave her a not unpleasant, mildly sedated feeling. She felt detached from all aspects of her life. She had no time anymore to feel. All that time she used to waste feeling, and analysing her feelings, as if they were a matter of national significance. Clementine feels extremely nervous about her upcoming audition! Clementine doesn’t know if she’s good enough. Well, hooly-dooly, stop the presses, let’s research audition nerves, let’s talk earnestly with musician friends, let’s get constant reassurance.

Stop it. The endless self-mockery of the person she used to be was not especially productive either. Spend your time focusing on questions of technique. She searched her mind for a distracting technical problem – for example, the fingering for the opening arpeggio of the Beethoven. She kept changing her mind. The trickier option could pay off with a better musical result, but the risk was that she’d make a mistake when she was under pressure.

Was that a traffic jam ahead? She must not be late. Her friends were giving up their time to do this for her. There was nothing in it for them. Pure altruism. She looked at the stopped traffic, and once again she was in Tiffany’s car, trapped in a sea of red brakelights, the seatbelt like a restraint pulled tight against her neck.

The traffic kept moving. It was fine. She heard herself exhale, although she hadn’t been aware she was holding her breath.

She would ask Sam tonight when they were out for dinner if his mind kept getting stuck in the same pointless ‘what if’ groove as hers. Maybe it would open up a conversation. A ‘healing conversation’. That was the sort of phrase her mother would use.

They were going out tonight on a ‘date night’. Another modern term her mother had picked up. ‘What you kids need is a date night!’ She and Sam both abhorred the term ‘date night’ but they were going on one, to a restaurant suggested by Clementine’s mother. Her mother was babysitting and had even made the booking.

‘Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. I think it was Gandhi who said that,’ her mother told her. Her mother’s refrigerator door was covered with inspirational quotes scrawled on little pieces of paper held up by fridge magnets. The fridge magnets had quotes on them too.

Maybe tonight would be okay. Maybe it would even be fun. She was trying to be positive. One of them had to be. Her car drifted close to the gutter and a gigantic wave of water whooshed up the side of her car. She swore, far more viciously than was warranted.

It felt like it had been raining ever since the day of the barbeque, although she knew this wasn’t true. When she thought of her life before the barbeque it was suffused with golden sunlight. Blue skies. Soft breezes. As if it had never rained before.

‘Turn left ahead,’ said the GPS.

‘What? Here?’ said Clementine. ‘Are you sure? Or do you mean the next one? I think you mean the next one.’