The Heart Whisperer (13 page)

‘Of course it will.' Nick was having trouble keeping his eyes open.

‘It didn't for Rory and Niamh,' Kelly said. ‘And it would really help me if we went to a doctor to get checked out, both of us.'

‘But—'

‘I went to dinner tonight because this job matters to you. This matters to me.'

He nodded slowly. ‘OK.'

‘Thank you.' She kissed him on the mouth and he slipped one of the little ribbon straps off her shoulder.

‘If, for any reason, everything isn't OK,' she whispered, ‘I'd like us to agree to start trying right away. Promise?'

‘Promise,' Nick mumbled into the little hollow between her collarbones.

‘You tuck into those olives,' Eilish said. ‘I just need to consult my porn collection.' She rifled through the old-fashioned dresser packed with cookery books then pulled one out. ‘ “Nigel Slater Tarragon Chicken” OK with you? I'll make extra so you can bring some home.'

‘I don't deserve it.' Eilish had a swollen nose, a gash above her eye and a psychedelic bruise running from her eyebrow to her cheek.

She fluffed out her vintage red prom dress. ‘I think it's kind of an edgy look.
Stepford Wives meets Fight Club.
'

‘But what about work?' Lorcan had waived both their fees for the Vitalustre ad and Eilish wasn't going to get any extra work while she looked like this.

Eilish put down the book. ‘Sorted. Greasy Pete needs someone to help out in his catering van.' Claire almost choked on an olive. ‘I'm starting on Monday. Six weeks on location for
Emerald Warriors
. It's some
Rome
-style thing about Irish legends. Don't look at me like that, Claire. I have to work. The money's good. I'll be able to stash away a couple of grand for Holly's uni fund and, to be honest, I'm looking forward to it. Extra work's not the same without you. I miss
Eyelash and Eclair
.'

Her mobile rang. ‘Hello,' she said in a robotic voice, ‘you've reached Teenage-Line. Press one if you think your mother is a bloody cow for not letting you get a tattoo. Press two if she embarrassed you by wearing an orange velvet catsuit to do the shopping in Lidl. Press three …' She sighed. ‘Oh, go on. What have I done now?' She frowned down at the chopping board and then she looked up at Claire.

‘Apparently we're on YouTube! We've had nine thousand hits.'

The clip was called
Desperate Bridesmaids
. It was an out-take from the Vitalustre advertising shoot, cut to the music from
Pulp Fiction
.

‘How did it get there?'

‘Someone must have nicked it when the rushes were being processed.'

‘Play it again,' Claire whispered, through her fingers.

The shot had been slowed down to fifteen frames a second. The bride threw the conditioner bottle over her shoulder and the camera followed it as it headed straight for the red-haired bridesmaid in the pale green dress. She jumped to catch it, her brow furrowing with concentration, her back-combed hair rising up into the air like a wonky halo. And there it was in horrible slo-mo, the look of comic-book surprise on Claire's face as her elbow connected with Eilish's cheekbone and she doubled up on the grass.

Ray was watching reruns of
Modern Family
when Claire put her head around his door.

‘Jesus!' he said. ‘What are you doing up here? I'm working and the frisbee's on the stairs.' Too late he realised that these two statements contradicted themselves but Claire didn't seem to notice.

‘I have to show you something.'

He got up and followed her down the stairs.

Whoever had thought of the
Pulp Fiction
soundtrack was a genius, Ray thought; it turned a moderately funny clip into comedy gold. But mentioning that might be a mistake. ‘Ouch!' he said, instead. ‘Is Eilish OK?'

‘I broke her nose,' Claire said, miserably. ‘Now I'm breaking it all over the internet.'

‘Have you asked your agent to get it taken down?'

‘He's trying to get hold of the Vitalustre people but they won't be back in the office till Monday.' She refreshed the page. ‘It has twenty-nine thousand four hundred and fifty-two views!'

‘Well, you know what they say, “there's no such thing as bad publicity”.'

‘Did they say that when Chip Connolly told that Dutch journalist that you made Ronan Keating look like Captain Beefheart?'

Ray burst out laughing. Nobody made him laugh like Claire Dillon did.

‘It's not funny.' Claire shook her head. ‘I was just beginning to get my acting career back on track. This makes me look like an idiot.'

‘It'll be gone by Monday. Someone will come along with
Fainting Goats 2
or a
Surfing Squirrel
and it'll be history.'

She pulled at her frizzy cloud of hair. ‘Are you sure?'

He wasn't but she looked so desperate that he nodded. ‘Now, you know what you need? You need a Perfect Day.'

‘No, I don't!'

‘Come on,' Ray said. ‘It'll be fun.'

A Perfect Day was supposed to cheer them both up as long as they followed Lou Reed's lyrics to the letter. They had to drink sangria in the park. Feed at least one animal in the zoo. Watch a movie. And go home.

Claire shut her laptop. If she stayed here she'd just be checking the view count every ten minutes. And she'd been trying to get hold of Ray for days. This would give her a chance to persuade him that he had to see his daughter.

Ray spread his jacket on the damp grass in the Phoenix Park and they sat in the wind and the drizzle, drinking mini-bottles of Shiraz by the neck because they couldn't find any sangria in the off-licence and Ray had forgotten to bring plastic cups.

‘I've got a good one for you.' Ray began to sing ‘Rhinestone Cowboy', changing the words to ‘Like a nine-stone cowboy.'

‘You're recycling, Ray.'

‘Maybe. But we haven't had this one.' He pointed at a herd of deer grazing near the obelisk. ‘The antlers, my friend, are blowing in the wind,' he sang in a gravelly Dylan drawl, ‘the antlers are blowing in the wind.'

Two women in their twenties power-walked past with strollers. They looked over and Claire felt mortified. This was knacker drinking, she realised. You could call it a Perfect Day, but that didn't change it.

The zoo was deserted. The wind rattled the Plexiglas walls of the chimps' enclosure and howled through the grasslands where the lions were supposed to be. Claire was wearing Ray's jacket over her own corduroy one but she was still shivering. ‘Can we just skip this bit and go to the movie? I'm freezing.'

‘You know it won't work unless we feed the animals first. I'll just get some bananas.'

Claire huddled on a bench. After a minute, a blonde woman came along with a girl of about ten in a blue bobble hat. They stopped at the meerkat enclosure and the little girl started to read the information plaque out loud.

‘The meerkat is a small ma-mmal belonging to the mon-goose family. Meerkats live in the …'

‘Kalahari,' her mum prompted.

‘… the Kalahari dessert. A group of meerkats is called a “mob” or “clan” …'

Other people's mothers had always been extra nice to Claire. There was always someone wanting to bake extra fairy buns for cake sales or make her costume for the Christmas play. When she was older they tried to draw her out, to talk to her about clothes and boys and periods, but it always made Claire feel awkward and uncomfortable because they were sorry for her.

The woman with the blonde hair and the little girl with the blue bobble hat were standing hand in hand, looking at the empty meerkat enclosure, and Claire saw they didn't mind that it was cold and raining and that the meerkats had all sloped off inside to their heat-lamps. She didn't know which one of them she wanted to be most. The little girl who had a mother or the mother who had a little girl.

Ray had very nearly kissed Claire once, over by the kiosk between the tapir enclosure and the reptile house. It was the day after he'd written ‘Asia Sky'. He'd been up all night, drinking duty-free booze in the kitchen of the flat Claire shared with Declan Brady. She was supposed to go to a rehearsal the next morning but she told Declan she was sick and they had a Perfect Day. Ray had sung ‘Asia Sky' to her on a bench by the kiosk, his voice all
screwed up because he hadn't slept for seventy-two hours. When he was finished, her pale face had turned bright pink.

‘It's shit, isn't it?' he'd said.

‘It's not that.' She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. ‘I'm just a bit mortified because you wrote a song about me. It's a bit, you know,' her narrow shoulders floated up to her ears, ‘
boy-friendy
. It's really good though.'

‘Really?'

‘Really, really good.' He knew from her eyes that she wasn't bullshitting him. And it was just the jet-lag and the relief but he suddenly wanted to kiss her, but he didn't. Because he knew what would happen if he did. The same thing that happened whenever he kissed anyone. He'd start looking for an escape route and when he found one he'd lose his best friend.

A few weeks later, on the phone, he'd added a ‘One Kiss Clause' to The Contract. It meant that if they did kiss, even once, they had to try being a couple for three hundred and sixty days. Claire had thought it was the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard.

Ray waited until the official-looking guy in Pets' Corner had turned his back and then slipped a HobNob to the pygmy goat. ‘Result!' He grinned at Claire. ‘We have fed the animals in the zoo. Now we can get out of the rain and go to the movie or we could cheat and watch one on Apple TV. What would Lou do?'

‘Ray.' Claire took his arm and steered him towards the café. ‘We need to talk.'

‘I just wonder,' Claire picked at the monkey sticker on her place mat, ‘if you're having some kind of a mid-life crisis.'

‘You think I'm going to die when I'm sixty-six? Thanks a lot.' Ray was trying to catch the waitress's eye.

‘You've been locked away upstairs since London pretending that this little girl doesn't exist …'

Ray opened the menu. ‘I don't want to start something I can't finish.'

‘How can you not be curious?'

Ray opened the menu. ‘You of all people should know that I'm not father material.'

‘Ask me what I'm doing on Sunday,' Claire said.

Ray squinted at the starters. Why did they have to make the print so small? ‘Hitting me with more emotional blackmail? You tell me.'

‘I'm going to pretend to be passing by my dad's house and I'm going to practically force my way in so I get to see him. This is my father who never taught me to tie my shoelaces or to ride a bike. Who never came to a single parent/teacher meeting or a sports day or a school play.'

Ray's dad had never done any of those things with him either. As far as Ray knew, he hadn't listened to a single song he'd ever recorded. But Ray didn't care. That was the difference between him and Claire. He had left his past behind. She was still stuck in hers.

‘When I was small, I used to have terrible nightmares.'

Ray sighed. ‘I know.'

‘I used to drag my duvet across the landing and curl up outside my dad's door. I didn't knock or go in. Just being closer to him stopped me being afraid.' Claire remembered the honeycomb print the carpet left on her cheek. The ribbon of light where the door met the floor. The faint sound of the BBC World Service and the scratch of the Rapidograph pen he used to sketch.

‘My dad is not father material, Ray,' she looked up at him with those steady green eyes. ‘But he's still my father. Nothing can change that.'

Ray closed the menu. ‘I'm getting semantic satiation. And that's not an appetiser, Claire, it's what you get when someone repeats something over and over and over again.'

‘Will you just see her once?'

‘If I do, you have to swear that you won't hassle me about this again.'

‘I swear!'

The letter ‘P' on Claire's laptop had been broken for months now so she had to compose her email to Lorcan without ‘p's then copy and paste them in afterwards, one by one.

‘Dear Lorcan, I a_ologise for _estering you about this but can you _lease s_eak to the _eo_le at Vitalustre about the YouTube cli_? I am ho_ing it can be taken down as soon as _ossible.'

The clip had three hundred thousand views now and Claire was a national joke. She couldn't go into her local petrol station because the guy behind the counter kept throwing things for her to catch – toilet rolls, packets of Jaffa Cakes, tubes of Pringles. Worse still, the clip kept coming up at auditions. This morning, a director had gone off into a long rant about copyright violation and completely forgotten she was in the room.

‘What about copyright violation?' Claire said, when Lorcan finally got around to reading her email and called her.

‘The copyright belongs to Vitalustre and they don't want to take it down. It's free advertising, Claire.'

‘What am I going to do?'

Ray had hoped that Ash would be hard to find but it took him less than a minute to track her down on Facebook. Aisling Glennon. Her profile picture was a
Mad Men
cartoon of a vamp in a tight red dress with a cigarette holder and a cocktail glass. Her information was private but he sent her a message with his phone number in it.

‘I think we were both pretty upset the day we talked in London. If you're back in Dublin, it would be good to meet and talk again. R.D.'

Four days later, she called him. She was back in Dublin but she wasn't happy to hear from him. Eventually, he persuaded her to meet him for a coffee. She was pretty hostile, but Ray laid on the charm and, eventually, she thawed very slightly. And when he said he'd like to see Willow she said she'd have to think about it.