During the break, the cellist hangs back and watches me loosen my bow.
‘What’s that?’ He points to Monkey, whose head is sticking out of the shoulder rest compartment in my case.
‘Oh, him.’
‘Your childhood doll or something?’
When I don’t respond immediately, he says, ‘Aren’t you a bit old for that?’
I open the concert, just after 1 pm. I use more bow, tucking long phrases into one stroke. For the double stops, I am careful, hesitant about the intonation. Relax on the pressure. Later, the conductor tells me I was too soft. ‘Fuck you.’ If only I were bold enough.
I walk to the Conservatorium to see Banks.
I knock on his door and let myself in. He’s sitting at the piano, marking a score with a pencil.
‘It went well then?’
‘As well as it could. I made it to the end, at least.’
‘Tremendous.’
He has never used that word.
‘I won’t stay long,’ I say. ‘I need to work on those excerpts.’
‘Why don’t you play a little?’
‘The excerpts?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not really ready with those yet.’
He smiles weakly. ‘Never mind. I’ll prepare for my next student then.’
He stands and gestures to the door.
Outside, I look back at him. But he has already turned around.
4
I miss Chinese New Year celebrations. My mother does not call to remind me. Intentionally or not, I tell her there is a concert on that evening. She doesn’t ask more questions.
A week later, in mid-February, she visits me in Newtown carrying a jar of home-brewed jasmine tea, her signature brew. She inherited the recipe from her mother, a native Taiwanese farmer, who got it from her mother, who got it from her mother, and so on and so forth.
Sitting on the edge of my couch with her knitting, she’s making a woollen cover for my violin, a new year’s gift.
Mike and Jacob’s pepper-sprinkled canvas rests on the wall beside her, unacknowledged. Warm blue sunlight. A rectangle of light on her forearm. Body erect, eyebrows drawn in dark coal, hair moulded and secured with hairspray. I wonder what she looked like at my age.
My mother doesn’t know about my latest interaction with Banks. I don’t tell her. Perhaps she wants to forget our history too.
I massage my wrist.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. It’s just a bit sore again.’
It’s been a long time since my mother sat in a practice session. When I was a child, she was always around, watching, her face fixed in permanent anxiety. I grew used to her uneasiness. She’d even make me wait while she went to the bathroom. Each note had weight and significance. Each note had to be interrogated. She would watch me closely as I played, as though in a trance. Every time she heard something she didn’t like, she’d clap her hands, just once, and make me do it again. It annoyed my sister, Rebecca, who didn’t play an instrument—but she was beautiful and that made all the difference. I got used to the sudden explosion of claps. Do it again. Do it again. Now, my mother sits still and does not make a sound.
Part of me wants her to go away. After what I did. After what she did. All those years.
Since I took up the violin again at the beginning of university, my mother has become more animated. She calls at least once a week. Without the violin, we had very little to talk about. Perhaps it was welcome news that her prodigy daughter was making a comeback.
I fumble a tricky chromatic ascend and take a pencil to mark in fingerings.
She sits up, rests the needles in her lap, a question hanging off her lip.
‘Are you sure you’ll be satisfied with an orchestral role?’
Christina Lin, formerly Christina Wang, loves to push people. It’s a subtle form of emotional manipulation she inherited from her father. That’s probably what she’d say if anyone asked.
I keep playing, ignoring her fixed gaze. I’ve learned, only recently, that just because a question is asked doesn’t mean you have to answer it.
After a while, my attempt to perfect the Mozart ends in sheet-music-crumpling fury. I do it slow. Then at tempo. Then slow again.
I move on to the Brahms. Run through the high registers faster than the recommended tempo.
‘Slow down. It’s allegro, not presto.’ My mother’s hands are frozen on her lap.
‘I’m just getting my fingers automated.’
‘I thought you stopped doing that years ago. I never knew you to be so lazy.’
‘Maybe I am lazy.’
She stands and grasps my hand, performs a detailed inspection. ‘Are you using the cream?’
I pull my hand away and walk into the kitchen to pour some tea. She follows.
‘What’s all this mess?’
I’d forgotten to wash the dishes from last week’s casserole dish, which cost me two hours of practice time to make. It was good though. Mike and Jacob said they’d pay me in artwork if I made it again.
My mother unbuttons her cuffs and folds her sleeves back.
Despite my protests, she puts on an apron, slips on gloves, and begins to wash up.
During the week, she volunteers at a soup kitchen and occasionally helps the local church with bookkeeping. Her life is filled with small tasks. Mine is filled with practise, rehearsals and performance. Banks had a theory that everyone is born with a special frequency we either find very early on and stay with or move away from the older we get. My tuning went off when I was fifteen and I’ve spent the last seven years trying to find it again.
‘Do you think you’ll get into the SSO?’ my mother asks, wiping the floor with a tea towel.
‘I don’t know.’
When the floor is done, she walks out the front door and returns half an hour later with two bags of food. She spends the next hour chopping potatoes and apples. From the lounge room I can hear the thwack of knife on board. Her nasal humming of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.
‘Are you hungry?’ she calls. ‘It’s almost done!’
I sit at the dining table. She serves me a bowl of barley soup, then a plate of her potato, egg and apple salad with mayonnaise.
I lean across the table and give her arm a squeeze.
She smiles. All those years we toured together, she didn’t cook a single meal. She takes a seat next to me. ‘Quick now, before the soup gets cold.’
5
On Sunday, Olivia hires a lecture hall at university to practise. We want to feel the sound of our violins in a large hall, to test the decisions we’d made about where to slide up the fingerboard and where to slide down, whether our bow changes are suitable. Ensure that the fingerings we’d marked out in the music are the most appropriate in a space similar to the concert hall where we will be auditioning.
It’s the first time I am back since graduation. I studied English literature; four years of my life I don’t remember well. I always knew I would return to the violin. Or, rather, I knew it would come back to me. It was unavoidable, like the rain. Before that happened, I wanted to escape the world of music and live among ordinary people. Ordinary, unambitious people. English literature majors are ordinary. Floaters. Wanderers. White. I wanted to surround myself with people to whom I could feel superior.