‘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.