The Heart Whisperer (17 page)

The rusty yellow skip was half full by the time Claire pulled into the driveway. It was mostly big stuff, a rolled-up rug, a couple of old chairs, a broken electric fire, but Nick should have waited. They were supposed to be doing this together. He was bent over a box of magazines when she entered the old surgery. ‘I thought you said ten?'

‘Did I?'

‘I brought coffee.' She held out two paper cups.

‘I'll take a rain check, thanks.' Nick could have used one but he didn't want to stop. He crushed an empty box and turned to the built-in shelves. He was going though the piles of drug information leaflets, stuffing them into a bag, when something fell on the floor. He picked it up. It was the little plastic anatomical doll. He dropped it into the bag, too.

‘You can't throw that away!' Claire put down the coffees and came over.

This was exactly what he'd been dreading. Claire was sentimental. She'd want to examine every little thing. ‘Fine.' He fished it out of the bag. ‘You keep it.'

They worked in silence. Nick gathered up all the drug samples in a box to be dropped off at the chemist. Claire emptied a drawer full of blank stationery then tackled a shelf of medical directories and textbooks. In among them, she found a library book in a plastic cover –
Couples
by John Updike. She remembered the one time she had disobeyed her dad and opened the surgery door. She must have been about five. It was bedtime and she'd desperately wanted to see her mum. ‘She's busy but she'll come in and kiss you goodnight when you're asleep,' her dad had said. But Claire couldn't wait. She had turned the brass handle slowly and pushed the door open just a crack, and she had seen her mum curled up
on the examination table reading a library book. It might have been this one.

She handed it to Nick. ‘What should we do with this?'

He opened it. ‘It was due back on July twenty-fourth 1984.' He laughed. ‘So the fine will probably run into six figures!' He went back to taping the lid on a box.

Claire watched him out of the corner of her eye. He had laughed so maybe he wouldn't bite her head off if she asked him a question.

Nick could sense Claire watching him, fiddling with that locket she still wore. It was mawkish. He should never have given it to her. The old man had gone to identify the body. Afterwards, he had sat in a chair in the kitchen with his fist clenched, and his face had been empty as if he were gone too. Nick had seen the glitter of the chain dangling from his hand and later he found the locket on the floor and put it around his sister's neck, the way his mother used to when Claire was upset.

‘Do you remember the sing-songs?' she said. ‘We used to sing the “Na na” bit of “Hey Jude”.'

‘Not really.' Nick wrote: ‘Caution! Poison!' on the side of a box. The old man was shy. He'd hated singing but he did it anyway. There was nothing he wouldn't do for
her
.

‘And Mum and Dad used to sing that old song that Johnny Cash does.' Claire was still looking at him. ‘ “If You Could Read My Mind”. It was her favourite.'

‘Was it?' Nick said vaguely. With Claire there had always been two layers. The things they were talking about and the thing they couldn't talk about. He picked up two bags of rubbish and went outside to chuck them into the skip. What he remembered was wanting his mother to be the way she'd been before Claire was born.

He felt the past, like a familiar weight settling over his ribs, pressing down on him, the way it had when he was a child. He stood in the pale autumn sunshine and took lungfuls of crisp air. In for a count of seven. Out for a count of eleven. But the air didn't make it past the hard knot in his chest, the one he thought he had dissolved years ago.

Claire was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sorting through a pile of medical journals, when he went back into the surgery. ‘I'm sorry.' She looked up at him. ‘I know it's hard for you to talk about her. It's my fault.'

‘We've been through all of this!' Nick ran his hand over his hair. ‘It's not your fault. You have to stop re-reading the early chapters of your life.'

‘I heard you saying that on TV.' She bent her head so her hair fell over her face. ‘But it's not as easy for me as it is for you.'

‘I can't do this.' Nick held up his hand. It was grimy, he saw, there were black crescents of dust under his nails. ‘Maybe you need to talk to someone but it's not me. A therapist or a counsellor, OK?'

Claire nodded. She still had the badly photocopied fact-sheet that the counsellor had given her when she was in her twenties.
‘Moving Beyond Survivor Guilt'. ‘The idea that you could have stopped what happened is more attractive to you than the idea that life is random and senseless,' it began. The last page had a list of cheery bullet points. ‘It's OK to delight in being alive! Give yourself permission to be happy. Self-sabotage is your enemy. Don't let it stop you living fully. Think of your life as a gift.' But Claire's life still felt like something she had stolen.

Nick turned his back and began feeding paper into the shredder. ‘Why don't you make a fresh coffee? Let's push on here. I want to get home for lunch.'

Home to Kelly, he thought tiredly, who would want to read him the latest conception advice she'd found on the internet. The house would smell of the Chinese herbs she boiled that were supposed to increase their chances. She had said that trying for a baby wouldn't change them, but it had already changed her. Everything revolved around this baby that didn't even exist. And when it did she might change even more, the way his mother had after Claire was born.

Claire filled the kettle and found two mugs. Nick had been so kind to her for so long, she couldn't resent him because he'd stopped. When she was eight, he used to take her to the cinema in Rathmines every Saturday morning. He was twelve then, far too old
for all the films she wanted to see but he watched them with her.
The Care Bears. The Never Ending Story. The Princess Bride.

She had hated going shopping for shoes and clothes after her mum was gone. He had tried to make it fun. They'd get the bus to Dundrum, buy jeans and sweatshirts and T-shirts and shorts in Penney's and afterwards they'd have cream cakes in Bewley's. Then, when she was thirteen, everything changed.

Claire remembered the day it had happened. She had wanted to go into Dublin to pick out something for her Christmas present. Nick had trailed around Miss Selfridge and A-Wear after her while she flicked through rails of sparkly tops and flimsy dresses.

In Switzer's, he had waited for her outside the fitting room while she tried on a green jersey dress with shoulder pads that she knew he was going to say was too old for her. But when she came out, he wasn't there. She pulled her clothes on and searched the whole floor but he was gone. She had never been in town without him before and she didn't have any bus fare. She got to the bus stop as a bus was pulling over and saw him in the queue. She darted across the road, between the lanes of traffic.

‘What happened?' She had a stitch from running and she was out of breath. ‘Why did you leave me like that?'

He wouldn't look at her. ‘I can't do stuff like this for you any more!' He shoved some money into her hand. ‘You have to start looking after yourself.' She watched him getting on the bus, waiting for him to turn around, to come back and explain. But he didn't so she waited for the next bus home.

Claire put the plastic anatomical doll into the cupboard under the sink. She looked around the kitchen. At the old Formica cupboards, the ancient gas cooker, the scuffed lino, the peeling styrofoam ceiling tiles. This had once been their home, but some day this room would be cleared out too and people would move into this house and start all over again. She hoped that they would be a family and that they would be happy.

The surgery was almost cleared. The last thing to tackle was the filing cabinet. The top drawers were packed with hanging files. Nick pulled them out and handed them to Claire and she dumped them on the floor beside the shredder. The bottom drawer was
jammed closed. He wedged his foot against the desk and jerked it until it opened with a rattle. It contained three empty vodka bottles.

Claire's hand went to her locket. ‘Do you think Dad was drinking when he fell off the ladder?'

‘The ladder was rotten,' Nick said.

‘But—'

‘These have been in this drawer for years.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I put them in here.'

‘But you never drink.'

‘I used to.' He took the bottles out, one by one, and dumped them into a bag. ‘When I was in my teens. I had a lot to deal with back then. Let's not make a big drama out of it, OK? It all happened a long time ago.'

The noticeboard in the waiting room of the ultrasound suite was covered in pictures of babies. They were smiling and crying and sleeping and nursing, and all of them belonged to other people. Looking at them made Kelly ache with longing. All those tiny, beautiful babies had been born to couples who'd had fertility treatment. Every single one of them was a miracle. She looked at Nick. Some day soon their little miracle might be up there too.

It was day sixteen of her second cycle of Clomid. It hadn't worked the first time round but at least she'd had a proper period so she'd been able to time the second cycle properly.

She'd been terrified that the drugs wouldn't work again. She wanted to feel close to Nick but he hadn't been there for her, not the way she'd hoped. She had tried to support him since his dad's fall. He had been busy with his coaching sessions and strategy meetings with Oonagh Clancy so she had organised kennels and painters and furniture and interviewed live-in carers to look after his dad when he came home. But every time she wanted to talk to him about this amazing journey they were supposed to be taking together, he just withdrew. He had been tense since Tom's fall. She guessed it was stirring up stuff from his past but he didn't want to talk about it. He had moved away from her and she wished he'd come back. This was the most exciting thing they'd ever done. She wanted to feel that they were doing it together.

Nick was flipping through a magazine so he didn't have to look at the notice board. The pictures reminded him of Claire, when she was a baby. She hadn't learned to talk till she was two and a half. She hadn't needed to. She'd just grunt and point and he would get
whatever she wanted. He remembered her first real words. They were sitting at the kitchen table, having Sunday lunch and Claire had suddenly said, ‘The bin is on fire.' They'd all stared at her, astonished. And then the old man had jumped up because the bin really
had
been on fire.

Kelly squeezed Nick's hand and smiled at him. Ten minutes ago, she'd nearly taken his head off because he'd driven past a free space in the car park. She had been on a hormonal roller coaster for nearly two months now.

‘I have a really good feeling about this,' she whispered.

‘That's great but try not to get your hopes up too high,' he said quietly. ‘You were so upset when the last cycle didn't work.'

‘You were upset too, right?' She frowned at him. ‘You're trying to have a baby as well.'

‘Of course.'

She sighed. ‘I can't help wanting to be hopeful. There's so much riding on this.'

Nick nodded. There was a lot riding on the Channel 5 show too but he couldn't share that with Kelly. He'd tried to reduce his stress by giving up the weekly slot on Fish FM but Oonagh wouldn't hear of it.

‘It's good for your profile.'

‘It's tacky and—'

‘Nick!' she'd laughed. ‘A two-page feature in
Gossip
magazine about my addiction to nail extensions is tacky, but it keeps me top-of-mind. We want Clingfilms to think you're hot stuff. Unless you're just about to open your bedroom doors to VIP and tell the world that you and Kelly are the new Sting and Trudy, Fish stays.'

‘Let's see.' The ultrasound technician moved her wand. ‘No follicles in the left ovary.' Kelly gripped the edge of the bed and stared at the blurry black and white screen. She couldn't bear to go home with nothing. The image fuzzed up as the wand moved around inside her. ‘But look at this!' The technician pointed at the screen. ‘We have three mature follicles on the right ovary.' She clicked on a dark grey blob and took a screen grab. ‘Twenty millimetres, twenty-two millimetres and twenty-four millimetres.' She smiled. ‘That's exactly what we're looking for.'

Kelly was already down to her underwear by the time Nick had climbed the stairs. She pulled off her pink lace bra, grabbed his tie and dragged him in to the bedroom. He had never seen her want sex so much and he'd never wanted it less. The sight of the cheerful technician squirting lubricant on her wand and the nurse's mortifying instruction to ‘have plenty of intercourse' had not left him feeling sexy. ‘Could we just reconnect before we do this—'

‘Seriously?' She let go of his tie. ‘OK. Sure. What?'

‘Maybe we could meditate together for a bit?'

‘Fine.' Kelly pulled on her dressing gown.

He found his iPod and they lay side by side on the bed with one earphone each, listening to a podcast.

‘Now take another long, slow deep breath,' the spaced-out woman in Kelly's left ear said, ‘and imagine your body is filling with orange light.' She sounded like Kelly's high-school friend Jennifer after she had smoked too much grass. ‘Honey,' she pulled her earphone out, ‘I'm sorry, would you mind if we just skip the starter and cut straight to the main because timing is kinda critical here.'

Nick sat up. ‘I'm just not sure I'm ready.'

‘You're not ready to have our baby?'

‘Of course I am,' Nick began, ‘what I meant was—'

‘Because every month that goes by decreases my chances of conception with or without the Clomid, so I need to know we're on the same page here.'