The Heart Whisperer (11 page)

The screensaver was a photograph of a kid, a little girl. ‘She's beautiful.' Unlike most people's children, she really was beautiful with a heart-shaped face and a halo of dark hair and the most incredible blue eyes. ‘Is she your daughter?'

Ash nodded. ‘And yours.'

‘What?'

‘Her name is Willow. She's six.'

Ray dropped the phone onto the table. ‘You tracked me down, to tell me
this
?'

‘I had no idea till twenty minutes ago that I was ever going to see you again.'

Ray stared at her and then stared at the door. Imagining himself crossing the sticky carpet, pushing it open, standing out on the street taking a lungful of fresh air. But the whiskey had thickened his blood. He couldn't move.

‘I don't even know why I told you.' Ash put her hand over her mouth. Her dark red nail varnish was chipped. ‘I told her last week that my partner wasn't her real father. She asked me about
you. When I saw you earlier it just seemed like, I don't know, fate or destiny or something.'

‘Destiny?' Ray gave a hollow laugh.

Ash stuffed her phone back into her bag and stood up. ‘Forget we met. Forget I told you.'

‘How do I even know she's mine?' Ray called after her but she didn't turn around and he didn't need her to. There was only one other person he knew with eyes like the little girl in the picture.

Claire's second scene on
The Spaniard
didn't involve sheep or Emma Lacey but she was hoping that it would involve Shane. She spent most of the morning sitting in a shady spot in the courtyard waiting to be called, waiting for him to appear.

At lunchtime she finally saw him, sitting two tables away from her, eating on his own, his light brown head bent over a book. He didn't seem to notice her but she felt hyperaware of him, as if an invisible thread connected them.

When she was driven out to the location, he was the first person she noticed. He was standing by his Land Rover in a jumper and jeans, his tanned arms folded, talking to the first AD. She had just psyched herself up to talk to him when the director called her over to rehearse.

Her scene was short and simple. She had to stand at the door of a cottage and watch the actor who played her father being dragged away by two men. Her only line was ‘He ain't here.' It was all over in four takes, but by then Shane had gone and it would be another five or six weeks before her next day on set.

She felt stupidly disappointed with herself all the way back to the base. ‘Are you coming for a pint?' the wardrobe assistant asked when she was helping her out of her shepherdess costume. ‘We all head up to Johnny Foxes on Fridays.'

All
, Claire thought, pulling on her jeans and her T-shirt and slipping on her sneakers. ‘Maybe.'

Johnny Foxes was halfway up the Dublin mountains. A rambling maze of interconnecting rooms jammed with antique Irish bric-a-brac. Claire finally found the cast and crew in the long bar down at the back. Shane was already there, standing against the far
wall, in front of a display of scythes, talking to a group of rowdy actors. Claire fought her way into the crowd to the bar.

By the time she was served, Shane had moved away from the actors and was wedged into a corner between a rusty mangle and a Singer sewing machine, talking to a woman with her back to Claire. A woman with bare shoulders and a mane of honey-blonde hair. She stood on tiptoe to whisper something into his ear and Claire didn't need to see her face, she knew that it was Emma Lacey. Her heart did a queasy little flip, a kind of physical déjà vu. This was how it had all started with Declan. Little intimate chats, little whispered remarks. Claire put her untouched glass down and pushed her way through the crowd, then out into the corridor. She found an open door to the car park and sat down on a low whitewashed wall.

‘Hey,' a voice behind her said. ‘You're leaving in a hurry.' Shane was standing at the door of the pub. ‘Are you OK? You're really pale.'

‘I'm always pale.'

‘Hang on, I'll get you a glass of water.' He went back into the pub.

She leaned back against the wall. He must have been watching her. He had come looking for her. Her phone buzzed; she slid it out of her pocket and read the text. ‘Just landed. Need to see you. X-ray.'

She texted him back. ‘Can't meet you. In Johnny Foxes—' Then her phone died before she could add an excuse.

‘It's Claire, isn't it?' Shane was back. He sat on the wall and turned to look at her, the shadow of a smile at the corners of his wide mouth. ‘I'm glad to see the sheep didn't leave any scars.'

She tried to think of something clever to say but all that came out was ‘No.'

He looked away. ‘Well, the view out here is definitely better than it was in there.'

‘Yes,' she said. They sat for a while. Claire was used to the quickfire of conversations with Ray. The silence felt awkward and nervy. It made her aware of the sound of her own breathing and the muffled thud of her heart.

She looked out at the witch's-hat peak of the Sugarloaf and the
distant navy ribbon of the Irish Sea and the criss-cross of jet trails in the fading blue sky, then she glanced down at Shane's hand. The band of white on his finger had faded a bit but it was still there.

His glass of Coke was almost empty and she had a horrible feeling that he might finish it and leave before she had a chance to let him know that she was interesting and interested. The best she could manage was, ‘So you work with a lot of animals.'

‘I grew up on a farm. What about you?'

‘I'm not good with animals.'

‘I meant does acting run in your family?'

‘Oh! My dad's a retired illustrator. My mother was a doctor. My brother wanted me to do medicine but it didn't work out.'

Shane put his glass down on the wall. ‘What does your brother do?'

‘He's a life coach. We don't really get on.'

‘Ah!' He looked at her for a second, then looked away. There was another long silence.

‘What about you?'

‘Parents, twin brother.'

‘Are you close?'

Shane looked away. ‘Finn was killed four years ago in a riding accident.'

‘I'm so …' She used to hate it when people said this to her but now she realised there was nothing else to say. ‘… sorry.'

‘Thank you.'

Claire looked at his profile in the dusk. ‘But you still ride. I don't understand. How can you …'

‘It's how I make sense of it.' He rubbed the palms of his hands on his jeans. ‘How did you get into acting?'

‘I used to be good at it.' Drama class had been like a holiday from herself. A few hours when she could lose herself in someone else's problems. She lifted her feet on to the wall and hugged her knees. ‘I'm not sure I'm very good at it any more, though.'

‘You looked pretty good to me.' He was flustered. ‘In that costume.'

She pulled her sleeves down over her knuckles. ‘I'm sure nobody wore anything like that in the sixteenth century.'

He kept his eyes on the view. ‘If they did, I doubt they looked as beautiful in it as you did.'

Beautiful?
Claire had missed beautiful by a series of tiny fractions that added up to a mile. The gap between her top front teeth, the little fleshy bump on the tip of her nose, the blur of her freckles, the obstreperous tangle of her hair. She had always felt awkward, all angles and edges, elbows and knees.

Unless she had a line of direction, she had never known what to do with her hands. She didn't know what to do with them now. She zipped her locket back and forth on its chain. ‘Well,' she said, ‘thank you.' She looked up and he was watching her. She saw his brown eyes move down to her mouth. She could feel his breath on her face. Her face was already tilting back, her eyes beginning to close when the door of the pub opened.

‘What are you two doing out here in the dark?' It was Emma. She wrapped a pink pashmina around her bare shoulders and smiled at Claire. ‘Hello, Claire. How's Ray?'

‘Fine,' Claire mumbled.

‘Claire's boyfriend is the divine Ray Devine. He used to be with that band Smoke Covered Horses. Remember them?' Shane shook his head slowly. A taxi pulled up over the road. ‘Oh!' Emma said. ‘Perfect timing! Bye!'

‘Take it easy there,' the taxi man said.

‘I'm cool.' Ray heaved himself out of the taxi and almost collided with a blonde dressed in pink.

‘Well,' she said. ‘It's the artist formerly known as Ray Devine.'

Ray snorted. ‘It's Emma Lacey. The bitch formerly known as Claire's friend.' He sounded even drunker than he felt. ‘Is she around?'

‘She's by the side door.' Emma smirked. ‘I don't think she's expecting you.'

‘You have a
boyfriend?
' Shane blinked at Claire and then rubbed his chin, hard.

‘No.'

He was already moving away along the wall, putting distance between them. ‘I just told Emma I did because …' She didn't
want to get into the whole thing about Emma and Declan. ‘It's complicated.'

‘Claire!' She looked up and saw Ray weaving his way unsteadily towards them, supporting himself on parked cars. ‘Why is your phone switched off?' He sat down heavily on the wall and slung his arm around her neck then buried his face in her hair. ‘Oh Christ,' he moaned.

‘Ray.' She tried to push him away but he was a dead weight. ‘What are you doing here?'

Shane was on his feet.

‘Please!' Claire said. ‘Don't go! You don't understand.'

‘I think I do,' he said over his shoulder.

‘Claire, wait!' Ray staggered after her, trying to catch up, but she was already at the car. She got in and started the engine then rolled down her window. ‘Don't ever do that again, Ray.'

‘Do what?'

‘Act like you own me!' Her eyes were narrow and her mouth was set in a straight line. She crashed the gear lever into first. Exhaust fumes billowed around Ray, turning his stomach. How many whiskeys had he had? A dozen?

‘Something really fucked-up has happened.'

‘Get off the car, Ray!'

He thumped on the sagging soft top. ‘I'm trying to tell you something. Paul Fisher wants me to apologise to Chip Connolly.'

Claire revved the engine.

‘And I have a daughter!'

Ray was trapped in the dressing room of the Happy Go Lucky in Tokyo. He could hear the roar of the crowd as the band walked out on stage. The door was locked. He slammed his fist against it over and over but it wouldn't open. ‘I'm supposed to be out there!' he shouted. ‘Let me out!' But nobody could hear him over the thunder of applause as the Horses began to play their first number.

When he woke up, the sound of applause was still in the room. It was the rain, he realised, hammering on the fire escape outside. His T-shirt was soaked in sweat. He groaned, turned over on his back and lay there, looking at the ceiling, but all he could see was the face of the little girl on Ash's screensaver.

Someone couldn't just get into a lift with you and drop a bomb like that. That sort of shit only happened in the fucking soaps. He wasn't ready to be a father. He was still a big kid himself. He'd spent the last ten years sidestepping anything that lasted more than a couple of weeks. How the fuck had this happened to him? He pushed his thumbs into his eyes until he saw red fireworks in the dark behind his eyelids. And why couldn't Claire leave him alone?

She had been angry with him the other night in Foxes but she'd been like a broken record since. ‘Did you get Aisling's number?' ‘When is she moving over to Dublin?' ‘When are you going to see the little girl?'

Ray didn't have the answers to any of these questions, except the last one. He wasn't ever going to see
Ash's daughter
because that's what she was. She had nothing to do with him.

Claire's whole life was built around worrying about her
screwed-up father and making excuses for her uptight brother and trying to live up to some crazy idealised version of a mother she'd never even known. But family meant nothing to Ray. His parents had been too busy trying to tear one another apart to care about him. Music was what he had instead of family, and that's what he had to focus on.

He had to forget he'd even met Irish Ash, just like she'd told him to. He had to keep well out of Claire's way until she stopped giving him a hard time and left him alone. He had to either write another ‘Asia Sky' or swallow his pride and call Chip fucking Connolly. Paul Fisher's door was still open but it was closing fast.

Claire lay listening to the rain. It rattled on the metal fire escape and drummed on the wheelie bins and pinged off the rusting patio heater in her overgrown garden. Ray had bought the heater for her thirty-first birthday. His daughter would have been three then. All the time they'd been staying up drinking cocktails, taking off on road trips, behaving like teenagers, Ray had been a father. Claire tried to imagine a child with Ray's cheekbones and his incredible eyes. She had lost her mother and now this girl, this Willow, was about to find her father. There was a sort of cosmic rightness about it all.

She had tried to explain that to Ray but first he had refused to listen. He wasn't answering her calls and the frisbee had been on the stairs for days now, even though she was sure he was up there on his own.

She turned on her side and looked at the clock. Four a.m. She wondered if Shane was lying awake listening to the rain. She closed her eyes and she was back in the dusk sitting on the low wall outside Johnny Foxes. She saw his eyes move from her eyes down to her mouth. He'd been about to kiss her and then Emma had come out and she'd been caught out in that stupid lie. Before she'd had a chance to fix things, Ray had barged in. Now it would be weeks before she saw Shane again to explain, and even if she could he would think she was a fool for lying to Emma, and he would be right.