Truly Madly Guilty Read online

  '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.

  '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.'

  He caught her wrist and pulled her to him in a big bear hug. 'We'll work it out,' he said. She breathed in his scent. He'd washed himself with the girls' No More Tears baby shampoo again. His chest hair was as soft and fluffy as a baby chick. 'We'll get there.'

  She loved the fact that he said 'we'. He always did this. Even when he was working on some renovation project around the house, a project where she was contributing absolutely nothing except staying out of the way, he'd survey his work, wipe his dusty, sweaty face and say, 'We're getting there.'

  Unselfishness came naturally to him. She kind of had to fake it.

  'You're a good man, Samuel,' said Clementine. It was a line from some TV show they'd watched years ago and it had become her way of saying, Thank you and I love you.

  'I am a very good man,' agreed Sam, releasing her. 'A fine man. Possibly a great man.' He watched the little Holly and Ruby shapes move about under the sheet. 'Have you seen Holly and Ruby?' he said loudly. 'Because I thought they were right here but now they seem to have disappeared.'

  'I don't know. Where could they be?' said Clementine.

  'We're here!' trilled Ruby.

  'Shh!' Holly took games like this very seriously.

  'Hey, what time is this afternoon tea at Erika's place?' said Sam. 'Maybe we should cancel.' He looked hopeful. 'Give you a full day of practice?'

  'We can't cancel,' said Clementine. 'Erika and Oliver want to, how did she put it? She wants to discuss something.'

  Sam winced. 'That sounds ominous. They didn't use the words "investment opportunity", did they? Remember when Lauren and David asked us over for dinner and it was all a ploy to try to get us into their bloody environmentally friendly washcloth business or whatever the hell it was?'

  'If Erika and Oliver offered us an investment opportunity, we'd take it,' said Clementine. 'We'd definitely take it.'

  'Good point,' said Sam. He frowned. 'I bet they want us to join them on a "fun run".' He put Holly's inverted commas on the words "fun run". 'For a worthy charity. So we'll feel obliged.'

  'We'd slow them down too much,' said Clementine.

  'Yeah, we would, or you would. My natural athletic ability would get me through.' Sam frowned again and scratched his cheek thoughtfully. 'Oh jeez, what if they want us to go camping? They'll say it's good for the children. Get them outdoors.'

  Erika and Oliver were childless by choice, but although they had no interest in having children of their own they took an active, rather proprietary interest in Holly and Ruby. It was almost as if it were good for them, as if it were part of a systematic approach they were taking to being well-rounded, self-actualised people: We exercise regularly, we go to the theatre, we read the right novels, not just the Man Booker shortlist but the Man Booker longlist, we see the right exhibitions and we take a real interest in international politics, social issues and our friends' cute children.

  That was unfair. Probably monstrously unfair. Their interest in the children wasn't just for show, and Clementine knew that the reasons they kept their lives in such tight, tidy control had nothing to do with competitiveness.

  'Maybe they want to set up trust funds for the girls,' said Sam. He considered this, shrugged. 'I could live with that. I'm man enough.'

  'They're not that kind of wealthy,' laughed Clementine.

  'You don't think one of them has some terribly rare genetic disease, do you?' said Sam. 'Imagine how bad I'll feel then.' He winced. 'Oliver looked kind of skinny the last time we saw them.'

  'The marathon running makes them skinny. I'm sure whatever it is it will be fine,' said Clementine distractedly, although she did feel a mild sense of unease about today, but that was probably just the audition, already tainting everything, creating a permanent undertone of low-level fear for the next ten weeks. There was nothing to be frightened about. It was just afternoon tea on a beautiful sunny day.

  chapter six

  A kid in a shiny wet black raincoat stood poised on the edge of the ferry, a coil of thick heavy rope looped over one arm. Sam watched him from his seat by the ferry window. The kid squinted through the torrential rain to see the wharf emerging in the grey mist. His young, unlined face was cove
red with raindrops. The ferry rolled and pitched. Cold, salty air filled Sam's nostrils. The boy lifted the noose at the end of the rope and held it high like a cattle wrangler astride a horse. He threw it, snagging the bollard first try. Then he leaped from the ferry to the wharf and pulled tight, as though he were dragging the ferry to him.

  The kid looked like he was no more than fifteen and yet there he was effortlessly snaring a ferry wharf. He made some sort of signal to the ferry captain and called out, 'Circular Quay!' to the waiting passengers with their umbrellas and raincoats, and then he wrenched the gangway from the ferry to the wharf with a serious metal bang clang. The passengers hurried across it onto the ferry, shoulders hunched and huddled against the rain, while the boy stood tall and fearless.

  See, now, that was a good honest job. Wrangling wharves. Herding office workers on and off ferries. He was only a kid, but he looked like a man, standing there in the rain. He made Sam feel soft and doughy, sitting docilely in his damp wool trousers, his pinstriped shirt. The kid probably hated the idea of an office job. He'd say, 'No way, I'd feel like a trapped rat.'

  A rat pushing a lever to get cheese. Like those old experiments. Yesterday Sam had sat at his desk like a rat using his little finger to push the letter p on his keyboard and his thumb to push the spacebar, over and over, with a space in between each p, until his screen was filled with nothing but p p p p p p p p. He did that for maybe twenty minutes. Maybe even half an hour. He wasn't sure. That had been his biggest achievement at work yesterday. A screen filled with the letter p.

  He watched the group of passengers streaming onto the ferry shaking their umbrellas, their faces grumpy and over it before the day had even begun. The kid probably didn't realise that a white-collar worker could spend a whole day in his office doing nothing, literally sweet fuck-all, and still get paid for it. Sam felt himself break out in a cold sweat at the thought of how little he was achieving at work. He had to get something done today. This couldn't go on much longer. He was going to lose his job if he didn't find a way to focus his mind. He was still in his trial period. They could sack him without too much paperwork or stress. At the moment he was getting away with it because of his team. He had four tech-savvy, everything-savvy twenty-somethings reporting directly to him. They were all smarter than him. He wasn't managing them, they were managing themselves, but that couldn't go on forever.