The Last Exam

8:35A.M.

Good morn­ing, ma’am.
Good morn­ing. Take a sit please

There I was, sit­ting on the piano seat on the 5^th floor of Kuching’s pres­ti­gious five-star hotel, the Merdeka Palace. Look­ing out the win­dow, over the Merdeka Square as I took a deep breath, wip­ing my sweat drenched hands over my laps when a lady that looked in her six­ties sig­nalled for me to start.

Can you play for me the scales of D-flat major please?

Sec­onds later, my shak­ing fin­gers were danc­ing along the keys of the D flat major scale. It was not until halfway that one my fin­ger slipped of a black key and the rest of the scale went hay­wire. Damn, what the hell, the keys were as slip­pery ice! Who wouldn’t slip? I had to make out the miss­ing keys in the mess and fak­ingly stamped on the fin­ish­ing D-flat note, only to hear the exam­iner say­ing, ‘Can you play that again for me please?’ How nice of her to give me sec­ond chance but HELL, the sec­ond time was as bad. And worst still, she HAD to give me the hard­est of all scales (at least in Grade 5) — the E-flat minor. Talk about luck.. Argh!

Luck­ily the other part of the scales went smoothly and we pro­ceeded to the first piano piece. That, too, was total crap. It was okay in the begin­ning but I slipped in parts here and there and even stopped halfway search­ing for notes. So, over­all, it was crap. Curs­ing, I went on to the sec­ond piece which was well, OK and the third which was also fairly fine. Whew!

8:45A.M.

Next, it was the oral test where we’re required to sing from mem­ory, clap to the tune, state the time and answer ques­tions, blah blah. The exam­iner politely asked me to stand aside fac­ing away from the piano (stan­dard pro­ce­dure). I shak­ingly stood up and took the left side, which was right in front of her table. A quick glance saw that she gave me 22 marks out of 30 for the first piece. Not very high, yet not very low so I was like, wow.. After that poor per­for­mance, she gave a pass for the first piece. How nice. I glanced fur­ther down and try to make out the marks for the sec­ond piece, which was, if I was not mis­taken, around 26(/30). Not bad eh? And that was all, I wanted badly to look at my marks for my scales, which I pre­sume, would cer­tainly be below the pass­ing mark. But she had a paper over the mark sheet that blocked every­thing below. So, what the hell, here goes the oral test.

8:47A.M.

This may be my last piano exam, hence the title, because I may not take Grade 6 next year, in fear of not being able to cope with SPM. But oh well, so much for the last exam. Hope I’ll pass.