Page 17 of The Typo

To: [email protected]

Date 24 Jan, 11:16

Subject: Outside photography

Me again! Let me clarify my subject line. I’m not referring to photography in the outdoors, but what I’m after is what you do outside your life as a photographer. Hobbies, favourite books, that kind of thing. I’m in an inquisitive mood, plus I’ve recently finished reading an excellent murder mystery series which I’m dying (hehe) to discuss with somebody. My friends and family are either magazine people or further back in the series than me so I’m scouting around for someone to squeal* about it with. Also, when you play the violin, people always assume you can’t have any other hobbies because it’s a thing which lots of people do as their hobby. So, I didn’t want to make the same assumption with you and photography.

Amy x

*To clarify, this involves citing bits of the story and whooping with excitement/fear (delete as appropriate).

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: 24 Jan, 15:45

Subject: Another missive from your Scottish penpal

I’m guessing the storm that you said was threatening has gone ahead and threatened, as our back-and-forth email chat has fallen quiet at your end. Bye bye, internet; bye bye, connection with the outside world. Either that or the penguins at Port Lockroy have staged a coup and decided to get their revenge on the influencer and all those associated with him. I have a vision of them marching across the ice, angrily waving postcards and surrounding the influencer until he agrees to hand over his memory cards. Hopefully as you were an innocent bystander they’ll have let you go, but maybe your continuing silence means you’re being held hostage by them. Sorry things ended that way!

Seriously though, I hope you’re okay and that the storm didn’t cause you any issues. What is the back-up plan if everything goes horribly wrong? I won’t mention the ‘T*****c’ film again, but please, make sure you get on the door if you end up in the water. Hopefully the Vomit Comet is much better equipped and will never have to deal with such an eventuality. Sorry, this is taking a turn to the dark. I’ll move on.

I thought you might like an update on the Edinburgh Zoo penguins. Despite close attention to the webcam feed, I’ve still not spotted any pebble pinching, but maybe they were on their best behaviour because they knew that I was watching and would be reporting back on them, and tales of what they’re up to might reach their cousins in Antarctica. Or maybe they were biding their time because they’d heard the aforementioned cousins had already started the rebellion. Anyway, they and your stories of their counterparts in the wild have inspired me to buy a soft toy penguin for my friend’s baby, Millie. Percy the penguin (excellent alliterative name, don’t you think?) will soon be moving to the other side of the world—Australia, not Antarctica—as my friend and her husband have decided to try out life Down Under for a couple of years. I’m very excited for them, but I’m going to miss them being close to home. Thank goodness for video calls. I’m looking forward to hearing all about their adventures, and I hope they’ll pop home to Edinburgh every so often so they don’t forget what the Scottish weather is like.

Love,

Amy x

PS: Hope you’re making it through the storm okay and that you’re not getting seasick again. Have you tried eating ginger biscuits? Apparently, ginger is meant to help with nausea. I appreciate chocolate is more your thing, but it’s worth a try.

ChapterNine

In some ways, I was quite grateful the exchange with Cameron had fallen silent for the time being. The longer we continued ‘chatting’ with such immediacy, the harder it was to ignore his very reasonable and polite questions about my supposed musical success. I felt bad about swerving his request for a playlist, but I was paranoid about anything which might give me away. I knew that if I didn’t say something soon, he was going to get suspicious, but how could I respond without digging myself deeper into a hole? I also needed to work out how I could explain away what he might or might not find out about me if he did manage to get internet decent enough to do a search. It sounded like the slow, intermittent connection might keep me safe until he returned to port, but when that happened, I knew I would be exposed. My increasingly rose-tinted daydreams about his life among the penguins were the distraction I so desperately needed from my current dreary reality, and I couldn’t bear to think about how I’d feel if our correspondence came to an end.

On top of that worry, I also had to deal with press night for the one-man show. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the theatre critic I’d been expecting didn’t turn up. To my greater despair, another one did show their face, the very last person I wanted to attend. I recognised her immediately from my position lurking in the dark corner between the box office and the stairs up to the main auditorium. I was surprised to see Ottilie Havers covering a theatrical performance, but I guessed with cutbacks in every industry nowadays, music critics would have to turn their hand to other areas of the arts.

As soon as she walked into the foyer, my heart started thudding with anxiety, and I was instantly transported back to two years ago when I’d last seen her, a day it was no exaggeration to say had changed the course of my life. It sounds melodramatic, but it felt like everything that had gone wrong for me stemmed from then. Certainly, all the decisions I had made subsequently were a consequence of what happened that day.

After years of hard work and dedication to my musical craft, I’d finally got my big break, the chance to perform on the hallowed stage of Usher Hall, probably the most famous concert hall in the city. I had been one of only five musicians selected after an extremely competitive process to perform under the banner of ‘Are these Edinburgh’s future stars?’ I should have known the answer to that question was no. Although I’d played in front of an audience countless times before, this was going to be the biggest one yet, and in the days leading up to the concert, something within me had switched. Instead of looking forward to what was an amazing opportunity, I had started to dread it, frightened by the amount of expectation on me, and terrified that I was going to let everybody down. I practised every minute available, setting my alarm earlier and earlier so I could get in an extra few hours of rehearsing rather than wasting precious time on sleep. And when I did allow myself to drift off, I dreamt about being late to get the train to the concert, or losing my violin five minutes before I was due on stage, and so woke up feeling even less rested than before.

My growing angst wasn’t helped by the amount of interest in the concert around the city. One day when I knew I should have been practising, we were all required to do interviews with the local media. The other musicians in my cohort had loved every minute of it, thriving on the attention, and confidently fielding questions like the pros they were about to become. I on the other hand saw my own growing doubts about my abilities reflected in every question. I had stumbled through the answers, convinced that the reporters could see right through me, and were pitying me as the obvious odd one out, the weakest player of the bunch.

The final rehearsals had passed in a fog, and then the night of the concert arrived. I was so knotted with nerves that I had spent the afternoon throwing up over and over again until there was nothing left, and my body ached. I arrived at the concert hall feeling weak and pathetic, channelling the little strength I had left into trying to put on a confident front, but I was certain everyone could see through me and recognise me for the phoney that I was. I had been hanging on by a thread, but I was at least hanging on.

And then, as I was shakily applying my makeup, the news had reached me. The whisper that Ottilie Havers was in the audience had spread like wildfire backstage, crew and fellow soloists practically quivering with anticipation that the woman who styled herself as Scotland’s most influential musical tastemaker was here. It was no boast. A good review from her could send a person’s career to another level. Conversely, if she didn’t like you, she would not hold back in providing feedback with what she termed to be ‘radical candour’. She didn’t do social media, but her reviews would instantly get posted there and invariably go viral.

Everyone knew her presence was a massive deal, but instead of accepting that this was just another part of the process, I’d felt even more crushed by the expectation and pressure. By the time it was my turn to go on stage, my limbs were literally trembling, such was the state of anxiety I’d worked myself up into. It was as if everything I had ever worked for had been building up to that moment, all my dreams resting on that one performance.

I stood in the centre of the stage, the glare from the spotlight turning the audience into a hazy blur. I felt dwarfed by it, wiped out by the seemingly endless trek to my performing position. I lifted my violin to my shoulder, the wood of its polished neck fragile between my clumsy fingers, and my mind had gone blank, as if someone had pulled the plug out and I’d completely powered down. I could no more have played ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ than the ‘Allegro’ from Beethoven’s ‘Violin Sonata No. 5’ which I was actually meant to be performing. The seconds stretched out endlessly, the dull roar growing in my head as I struggled to catch my breath. I could feel the audience exchanging glances, could almost hear their unspoken exchanges, ‘What’s the matter with her?’ and ‘Poor girl, she obviously can’t hack it.’ For a moment, I contemplated turning on my heel and fleeing the stage, running until I’d escaped through the fire exit and disappeared down the street. In retrospect, I wished I had. But then someone coughed, and another person rustled their programme, and somehow, I managed to put my bow against the strings and start playing.

Muscle memory alone got me through to the end of that piece, although for me it passed in a blur. But I knew it was not a performance to be proud of. My arm was shaking throughout so the bow kept juddering along the strings, definitely not the kind of vibrato the music called for. And although a few bum notes could have been forgiven, the ‘completely soulless performance, lacking in depth’ as Ottilie Havers later wrote could not. The words had leapt out of the review, burning themselves onto the back of my eyes, forever ingrained as that voice in my head which still reminded me of my failure. She had seen what I had tried so hard to conceal—that I wasn’t good enough, and never would be.

Nowadays I could appreciate the favour she had done me that night. She’d given me a much-needed reality check: she’d said what had to be said. She’d jolted me into accepting the limits of my meagre talent, and forced me to reassess my priorities and choose a more sensible path. I hadn’t looked back. However, despite the fact that she had saved me from no doubt much more heartbreak in pursuing a pointless dream, it didn’t mean I relished having to see her now.

But that was my job. The staff at the Variety were relying on me. And now I needed to somehow persuade this oh-so-discerning critic to write a glowing review of ‘My Crap Life: A Memoir in Five Acts’. What chance did I stand when even the name of the show provided reviewers with the perfect adjective to describe it?

I summoned my courage and marched towards her trying to convey an air of confidence, all the while praying she didn’t recognise me.

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