Truly Madly Guilty

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.