The Heart Whisperer (16 page)

Claire followed him out through the curtain. ‘Is he going to be OK?'

‘It's a very complicated break. It's going to be a long surgery and he has an irregular heartbeat which increases the chance of complications.'

‘Complications?' Claire repeated.

The doctor gave her a meaningful look. ‘Your father fell the best part of thirty feet, from what I understand. He's lucky to be here at all.'

When she went back into the cubicle, a nurse was slipping a needle into her dad's arm. After a minute, his face unclenched and his eyes closed. The nurse slid a dental plate with four teeth out of his mouth and put it into a ziplock bag, then she took off his watch and his wedding ring and gave them to Claire.

Claire sat on a plastic chair beside the trolley with her phone in her hand. Ray was the first person she had called when she got glandular fever. When she aquaplaned and smashed Mossy into a wall. When Declan told her he was in love with Emma. She stared down at his number on the small screen and then she called Nick.

Nick patted Claire's back and tried to think of an affirmation for being overwhelmed but he couldn't so he just kept repeating, ‘He'll be fine, he'll be fine,' until she finally opened her arms and let him go.

He moved to the other side of the trolley and she told him what the doctor had said. ‘They gave me his false teeth. I didn't even know he
had
false teeth.'

Nick nodded. There were a lot of things Claire didn't know. He stared at the streaked lino and the rip in the flowery cubicle curtain, anywhere except into her panicky eyes. What was he doing here? Why had he ever left New York? If he was three and a half thousand miles away, this could all be dealt with in a phone call.

‘I have to go and get him some things.' She was kneading the buckle of the old man's coat between her hands. ‘Will you stay here with him till I get back?'

He nodded. What else could he do?

The house looked different. Naked, Claire thought, exposed. The heavy swags of ivy that used to cover the exterior walls had been hacked away. The windows looked oddly bare. The old surgery sign had been uncovered. It hung, cracked and lopsided above the garage. A dozen bulging green garden sacks were lined up by the wall like dumpy prisoners waiting to be shot. There was a note Sellotaped to the front door.

‘There have been a lot of complaints re. the state of the garden so I have taken the opportunity to mow the lawn, trim the ivy and put down some weedkiller etc. Brian Cunningham.'

‘Bastard!' Claire whispered under her breath. He couldn't wait till her dad was out of the way before interfering. It took a second before her hand stopped shaking enough to put the key in the lock
and turn it. She grabbed a shopping bag from the hallstand and went upstairs to her dad's bedroom.

The faded swirly navy carpet was still thick on one side of the bed but it had worn away on the other. One bedside table was empty, the other had on it a small travel clock and a pile of books.

The top two drawers in the mahogany built-in dressing table were still full of her mother's underwear and scarves. Claire opened the third drawer and found a clean pair of her dad's pyjamas. She unhooked his plaid dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door and looked under the bed for his slippers and then, with a jolt, she realised that he wouldn't be needing them. His hip was shattered. She saw her own reflection in the dressing table mirror, one hand to her mouth, and forced herself to move over to the built-in wardrobe.

Her dad's things took up a dozen hangers; the rest of the space was still packed with her mother's clothes. Claire ran a finger along the line of wooden hangers, stopping at the things she thought she remembered. The blue cheesecloth summer dress. The chamois leather skirt. The yellow pussycat bow blouse. The red coat with the missing button.

Her father rarely left his room after the accident, but sometimes, when he went downstairs, Claire had taken some of her mum's clothes into her own room and laid them out on her bed. The grey angora jumper and the black wool mini skirt. The dark green pinafore dress inside the red coat. The Aran scarf looped around the neck, the way her mum used to wear it. Claire would lie down carefully beside each outfit and press her face against a lapel or a sleeve and imagine that her mum was really there.

She opened her bag now and took out her father's watch and his ring. He must have stood here with her mother's rings all those years ago, before he put them in the crystal ashtray where they'd been ever since. Claire slipped his ring in beside her mum's and put his watch beside the ashtray on the shelf. She took out the false teeth in their little Ziploc bag. What was she supposed to do with them?

The porter wheeled Nick's father's trolley along a network of identical corridors, in and out of two lifts, and into the orthopaedic ward. The old man slept through it all. His mouth looked caved in without his front teeth and his unruly grey hair was matted with dried blood. Nick shook his head. What was he even doing up a ladder at his age? Of course it was rotten, like everything else in that house.

A Filipina nurse came and filled in all the gaps that Claire had left. If the surgery went well, the old man would be home in a month, she told him. He wouldn't be able to fully weight bear for another couple of months but, if he made an effort to do his physio, she said, he could make a good recovery.

An effort
. Nick wasn't going to put any money on that.

He left the old man in his bed by the window, went out into the corridor and called Kelly again.

‘I'm so sorry, honey,' she said. ‘My cell was switched off. I was at yoga class. I got your message. How's your dad doing?'

‘It was a bad fall but he'll be okay,' Nick said gruffly.

‘That's such a relief. What about his dog?' Kelly said. Nick had forgotten about all about the dog. ‘Do you want me to find a kennel that will pick him up?'

‘That would be great.' Claire was scared of dogs and she'd only turn the whole thing into a drama.

‘Do you want me to come?'

‘No. I won't be long. I just have to wait for Claire to get back.'

Nick checked his watch. Why was it taking her so long to pack a few things into a bag?

After the call he went to the bathroom and washed his hands. The front of his white shirt was smeared with streaks of Claire's mascara. They made him feel queasy. He knew he was Pattern Matching, overlaying the past on what had happened today, but seeing Claire so needy had rattled him.

He had been ten when his mother died but Claire was barely six. Way too young to understand what had happened. It would slip away from her and she'd be fine for weeks and then the bad dreams would start again or she'd wet her bed and he'd find her curled up on the landing, her pyjamas damp, her duvet wet. He was the one who had to change her covers and find her dry things
and bring her back to bed and read to her until she went back to sleep again.

He had thought that the old man would snap out of it and start looking after Claire, start looking after
him
, but he hadn't. While boys in his class were playing soccer and computer games, he was making Claire's dinner and helping her with her homework and making sure she had a clean jumper for school.

‘Why didn't you go to an adult for help?' his therapist in the States had once asked him. But there was nobody to go to. None of his grandparents were alive. His mother had been an only child. His father had two brothers but they lived in Australia. There were neighbours but they had never been friends. And even if they had been, always at the back of Nick's mind was the fear that, if anyone found out how bad things really were, he and Claire would be taken into care.

Nick sat on a chair beside the old man's bed and stared down at a dog-eared copy of
New Scientist
. He was halfway through an article about astrophysics when he heard a ragged gasp. The old man was trying to sit up. His eyes were wet and his face was crumpled into a grimace of pain.

He had never seen the old man crying before, not even after the accident.

‘It's okay,' he said gently. ‘I think the morphine's wearing off. I'll call the nurse to give you another shot.'

‘No!' the old man groaned. ‘It's fine.'

“Course it is,' Nick said, hearing the hardness in his own voice. ‘Everything's always fine, isn't it?' He picked up the magazine and forced himself to begin reading again.

Claire had already closed the front door when she remembered the dog. She went back inside and opened the kitchen door nervously and jumped back as Dog exploded into the hall in a coat hangery tangle of legs. He hauled himself up the stairs. She heard him thundering around up there, blundering into her dad's bedroom, clattering around the bathroom. After a minute he came crashing back downstairs again and stood in the hall, panting, looking at her worriedly from beneath his tufty white eyebrows.

Her father always spoke to Dog as if he were a person. ‘Dad is at the hospital!' Claire said slowly. Dog put his huge grey head on one side and lifted one big grey paw to take a step towards her. ‘Stay!' she shouted. She backed through the kitchen and opened the back door and he hung his head, trotted down the hall and went out into the garden.

The air smelled of wet grass. The hedges had been trimmed and the lawn had been freshly cut. The wooden ladder had been propped up against the wall behind the chestnut tree.

Claire's mum used to climb that tree, kicking off her shoes, swinging herself up, gracefully, as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Later, when Claire was big enough, she used to climb it too. It was where she used to hide, when she was upset and she didn't want Nick and her dad to find her. She would scramble up into the tent of leaves and disappear.

Dog circled the garden slowly, stopping to sniff every leaf while Claire looked up at the roof and down at the grass, trying to figure out where her father had landed when he fell. He had been lying out all night. He would still be there if Dog's barking hadn't annoyed the Cunninghams.

‘Good dog,' she whispered. Dog lifted his head and looked at her warily. ‘Good Dog.'

One evening, when Claire was sitting by her dad's bed in the stuffy ward, he reached out and took her hand. She stared down at the wrinkled skin over the blue veins on his wrist, his swollen knuckles, his thickened nails. It was the first time he'd held her hand in twenty-seven years. It was probably just the morphine but in those awful days after his operation, it felt like a sign.

The surgery was supposed to take three hours but took eight. The surgeon had to insert a seventeen-inch pin in her dad's femur to hold the shattered bone together. He had lost a lot of blood and had to have a transfusion. Claire sat on a plastic seat in the foyer of the hospital all day, afraid to even go outside to put money in the parking meter in case something happened.

For the first week she spent every minute she was allowed to in the ward. Nick made excuse after excuse not to visit but she juggled visits between auditions, bringing Jaffa Cakes he didn't eat and books he couldn't read. She had seen more of him in the last three weeks than she had in the last three years.

It was strange to see her dad away from his solitary life, being chatted to by cheerful nurses and teased by the tea lady. It made her wonder if maybe he could be part of the world again, instead of cut off from it. She looked at him now, propped up in bed, with the
Irish Times
spread out on the cover; his eyes had an out-of-focus morphine glaze. ‘Do you want me to read that to you?'

He sighed. ‘You should go now, Claire. I'm fine.'

Fine was a bit of an overstatement but the worst was over. He was beginning to learn to walk again using a Zimmer frame. In just two weeks, he'd be allowed to go home.

Nick stood in the hall and looked up the stairs at the faded wallpaper that was worn away at hand level, the chipped wooden banisters and the dust motes that swirled in the weak light from the landing window. He hadn't set foot in the house for years but nothing had changed.

‘I have moved on from my past,' he said out loud. ‘I live in the now.' His voice sounded thin and unconvincing in the empty house. He picked up a roll of bin bags and went into his mother's old surgery. He had been allowed in here sometimes when he was very small. He remembered sitting on his mother's lap. The way her long hair tickled the back of his neck. She'd shake the anatomical doll she kept on her desk so that all the tiny plastic organs fell out and help him to slot them all back into the hollow body. But that was before Claire came along and everything changed.

The old man wouldn't be able to climb the stairs for months so the surgery had to be made into a bedroom for him. If it was up to Nick, the clear out would have been done by the handyman Kelly had organised to paint the room and lay the carpet, but Claire had insisted on doing it herself and he knew if he left it to her she'd agonise over every little thing and it would take forever.

He'd arranged to meet her at ten but he'd come an hour earlier. With any luck, he could get most of it done before she arrived. He pushed past boxes full of books and bags of old clothes and set up his portable shredder on his mother's old desk, elbowing a pile of medical journals out of the way to make space. He shook out a bin bag, held it under the windowsill and swept everything in. Dried-up pens and rusty paper clips and paperweights with drug company logos. A plastic ashtray with tear-shaped scorch marks in the bottom. He shook his head. A doctor who smoked at work. It was hard to believe now.

He moved on to the desk and began to go through the drawers quickly, tossing prescription pads and patient files into a pile for shredding and binning the rest. In the bottom drawer he found a printed flyer for a nativity play he'd been in when he was seven. He had been a reindeer who, for some reason, had been present at the holy birth. He'd worn cardboard antlers and a brown
polo-neck and a painted table tennis ball cut in half for a nose. He remembered the old man in the front row with Claire, who must have only been four, on his knee. His mother hadn't turned up. He had looked for her in the audience, knowing that his father would say, if he asked him, that she couldn't come because she had to work.