Truly Madly Guilty

'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.

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 inordinatel

y 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.

'Thank you,' said Clementine.

'You don't need to thank me,' said Sam. 'You don't need to feel grateful. Seriously. Get that grateful look off your face.'

She made her face exaggeratedly blank, and Sam laughed, but she did feel grateful and that was the problem because she knew it was the first step in a convoluted journey that ended in resentment, irrational but heartfelt resentment, and maybe Sam intuited this and that's why he was pre-empting her gratitude. He'd been here before. He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her it would never be quite enough because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive visualisation exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.

'I know I'm not much fun when I've got an audition coming up,' said Clementine.

'What are you talking about? You're adorable when you've got an audition coming up,' said Sam.

She pretended to punch him in the stomach. 'Shut up.'