The Heart Whisperer (20 page)

‘When?'

‘Now.'

Claire's kitchen swam into focus. The empty wine bottle on the table. The dishes she had left in the sink. The pile of laundry waiting to go into the machine.

‘Could we meet somewhere for a coffee instead?'

‘No.' His directness was unexpectedly sexy. A feather of excitement fluttered down her spine. ‘I'll be there in twenty minutes.'

The washing machine was full so she stuffed the laundry into the dishwasher, then she realised that she had nowhere to put the dishes so she just shoved them back, still dirty, into the cupboard. She sprayed perfume everywhere and washed herself at the bathroom sink – she didn't want the pipes to be wailing when he arrived. She put on a brown wrap-around dress and a pair of high black boots and she had just managed to brush her hair and put on mascara when the bell rang.

Shane was leaning on the doorframe when she opened the door. His old Land Rover was double-parked in the laneway. He gave her a fierce look that she mistook, for a few glorious seconds, for passion, then she realised that it was anger.

‘What are you like?' he asked her coldly. He walked over to his car, opened the back door, lifted Dog out and put him gently on the ground.

‘My partner at Barnhill, Patricia Conway, is your father's vet. She saw me faxing this old guy's picture round this morning and recognised him straight away.'

Claire felt a flush creep up her neck into her face. ‘The thing is,' she stammered, ‘Dad had an accident and he has to have a live-in carer and she wouldn't stay if Dog stayed so he told me to bring him to the pound and …'

Shane looked over her shoulder at the patch of nettles by the path. ‘And you don't have a garden, right?'

‘I'm afraid of dogs.'

‘What are you afraid of? That this poor defenceless animal is going kill you? Oh, hang on, that's what you were going to have done to him. You're a pretty good actress, Claire. You had me fooled for a while back there.'

He took a loose page from a notebook out of his jeans pocket. There was a number scribbled on it: 530. ‘You know what this is? It's the number of animals I've had to put down since I started practising. I keep count of every one so I never get blasé about what I do. But I'm not counting this one. ‘This one's on your conscience.'

The hangover was back. It pounded on the inside of Claire's skull while she huddled on the sofa, her knees drawn up to her chin, wondering what to do with Dog. He was pacing back and forth in the tiny kitchen on his huge grey paws, making a high, whistling, whining noise and stopping, every now and then, to lick the floor. Claire got up and edged over to the sink. ‘Stay!' she warned him. His bushy grey eyebrows came together in a kind of frown as he watched her filling a saucepan with water. He waited till she had retreated to the sofa and then lapped it all up and went to the back door and looked out. He was so enormous that he could see the garden through the bottom pane. He looked over his shoulder at her with his sad, orangey-brown eyes.

Claire had been told, at school, that God saw everything, but he must have been looking the other way the day her mum had drowned. She had waited for something really bad to happen to her, something that would punish her for what she'd done, but it never did, so she punished herself. She held on to her guilt as tightly as she'd held on to the swimming ring. It was there now, as Dog folded himself and put his head on his paws and looked at her, mournfully, waiting for her to decide his fate.

‘We both know what you're going to do,' his eyes seemed to say. ‘Why don't we just get this over with?'

‘I don't think I can face this.' Eilish surveyed the heaving crowd beneath the massive chandeliers in the Rococo Bar. She had dragged Claire out to cheer her up. ‘Can we go to Neary's instead?'

‘Someone will recognise me.' Claire had given up going to actors' pubs after she'd broken up with Declan; now she couldn't go because the YouTube clip had made her a laughing stock.

‘La Cave?' Eilish suggested. ‘Someone would need infrared goggles to recognise you in there.'

They sat at the bar in the tiny, candlelit restaurant and ordered two glasses of wine and a cheese board. ‘This is more like it,' Eilish said. ‘I'd rather die alone and get eaten by my own cat than hang around a glitzy pick-up joint waiting for someone to hit on me.'

‘You don't have a cat,' Claire pointed out.

‘And
you
,' Eilish forked some Brie on to a cracker, ‘have a dog. How's that going to work? You're terrified of dogs.'

‘I don't know.' She had decided to keep Dog till her dad got better. Last night she had barricaded him into the kitchen with a chair and this morning she'd locked him out in the garden. She was too scared to take him for a walk in case he bit her when she was putting on his lead.

‘You're better off with an old canine than you were with Ray Devine. At least he isn't raiding your fridge in his pants.'

Claire didn't want to talk about Ray.

Eilish touched her scar with her fingertip. It was beginning to fade. Her nose was still swollen but the bruises around her eyes had gone. ‘I'm sorry about Shane,' she said. ‘But if he was in
the middle of a messy marriage break-up, then maybe it's just as well.'

Every time she thought about the lecture he'd given her, she cringed with shame. She was dreading seeing him on
The Spaniard
; thankfully she didn't have another call-out till November.

‘I know it's hard at the moment,' Eilish was saying, ‘but this is going to be your year, you promised, remember?'

‘Can we not talk about me for a bit? How have you been coping with Greasy Pete in the Van of Death?'

‘I spent two days scrubbing the van out. It's spotless now and Pete is actually quite nice. Plus Holly appreciates me way more now that I'm only around at the weekends.' She shook her empty glass. ‘Want another?'

‘Just water.'

Claire hadn't told Eilish about the bottles in the filing cabinet. Poor Nick. He'd been so young and under so much pressure. Something had to give.

Claire had finally worked up the courage to take Dog out for a walk. She held her breath while she put his lead on then herded him into Mossy and drove him to Dun Laoghaire pier and walked him all the way down and back. Apart from the fact that he steamed up all the windows in the car then peed on every inch of the pier, it had been OK.

He was curled up in the back of the car when her phone rang. She pulled Mossy over to take Lorcan's call. ‘Good news! The YouTube clip is coming down.'

‘Thank God!' Claire drew a smiley face in the dog-breath condensation on the windscreen. ‘I was starting to think it was going to ruin my career.'

Lorcan laughed. ‘There's even better news. The Vitalustre people are shooting a new advertising campaign.'

‘But they just shot an ad.'

‘They're binning it. The
Bridesmaids
clip has boosted sales. They're going to shoot three new viral-style spots and release them on YouTube. They want you to star in them.' Claire stared
at the smiley face. ‘And they're offering to pay you a flat fee of twelve grand.'

The cute blonde in the denim shorts and stripy tights stuck her gum on the side of her can of Red Bull and put on the headphones.

‘OK, lads,' she said in a squeaky little voice, ‘I'm good to go.'

Ray stared at Donal, the sound engineer. ‘I asked for a Lady Gaga sound-alike, not a Tweetie Pie impersonator.' The Mocca Place demo Ray was recording was supposed to be with Sounds Familiar by this afternoon; he didn't have time to screw around.

Donal grinned. ‘Hold your fire. OK, Gemma, let's go for a take.'

She opened her mouth and a wave of sound hit him. Her voice was incredible. It was ‘Poker Face' – well, almost.

‘Come and try, come and try, come and try Mocca Place! Mocca Place!'

What Ray wanted to do right now, he thought, watching Donal mixing the demo, was to hang out with Claire, to sit on her lumpy sofa watching
Deadwood
or playing sweary Scrabble, or to go for gimlets in the No Name bar, but he couldn't and that was her fault. She was the one who'd forced him to see Willow and seeing Willow had caused that terrible row. He'd said some awful things, he was willing to admit that, but he was done with apologising. That grovelling email he'd sent to Chip had used up his lifetime supply of ‘sorries'. Claire had been pretty harsh herself. If she wanted to make up, she knew where he was. A few feet above her stubborn little ginger head.

Two hours later he was in the No Name bar with Gemma and she was giving him a lecture about the music business. He had started out bigging her voice up, telling her that he had a couple of record company contacts, but pretty soon he realised she didn't need any encouragement. She already had an ego the size of a cruise liner.

He sipped his fourth gimlet and listened to her banging on about her MySpace strategy, managing fan databases and trading tracks for re-tweets. Why was this session singer talking to
him
as
if he was the wannabe? Only one person at this table had gone platinum eight times and they weren't wearing tiny denim shorts.

He had been going to bring her home but now he just couldn't face it. When she finally took a breather to go to the bathroom, he asked for the bill and checked his phone to see if Sounds Familiar had listened to the demo yet. He had one new email. It was from Chip.

There was an address and a date and a time and there were just two words.

‘You're on.'

If Chip Connolly hadn't turned down the rights to ‘Asia Sky', he could, Ray thought, have been able to afford something a bit more rock ‘n' roll. He knocked on the door of the tiny terraced house and Chip's wife, Helena, opened it. She was a Welsh girl with long, dyed red hair and she was the only Horses fan who had turned Ray down for Chip, which was probably the reason Chip had married her.

She looked up at the sky. ‘Thought there'd be pigs doing a fly by!' she said.

‘Never say never!' Ray shrugged.

‘Go on through, the boys are out the back.'

Ray walked through the cluttered kitchen, past a dozing toddler strapped into a buggy and out into the back garden. There they were, the band that had played the Bowery in New York and headlined the Beierenlaan Fest in Rotterdam and caused a riot at a Tokyo TV studio. They were standing at the door of a garden shed with mugs of coffee, eating chocolate digestives.

‘Looking good, Ray!' Happy grinned then looked flustered when Chip glared at him.

‘You too.' That was a lie. Ray did look good in head-to-toe black and RayBan Aviators. The other Horses looked like a convention of geography teachers. Happy had put on two stone. Godot's hair was receding. Chip's ratty little face was lined and he was getting a potbelly.

If the Horses were going to re-form, Ray thought, there were going to have to be a few serious changes. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and followed them into the shed, which
stank of creosote and engine oil. Two microphones, a drum kit, a keyboard and a couple of amps had been squashed in between a lawnmower and a sawhorse.

‘So,' he folded his arms and leaned on a lawnmower as casually as he could, ‘what's been going on?'

Chip turned his back and plugged his guitar into an amp and Happy began to jabber nervously. Chip had a two-year-old son and was a stay-at-home dad. Godot had eighteen-month-old twins and was back working in IT. Happy was a rep for a pizza franchise, which explained the weight gain. His girlfriend was due in three months. ‘What about you?' Happy jammed another digestive into his mouth. ‘Kids?'

An image of Willow staring up at the stuffed giraffe in the Dead Zoo floated past Ray's eyes, then disappeared. ‘Nope.'

‘Explains why you look so good. Either that or you have a portrait in the attic.'

‘A portrait of Michael Bublé,' Chip said over his shoulder. ‘So what have you been up to, Raymondo? Apart from jingles for breadcrumbs?' He strummed the intro to Gnarls Barkley's ‘Crazy' and began to sing ‘Gravy!' ‘That's one of yours, isn't it? I do love that one.'

‘Glad to hear it!' Ray snapped. He had been man enough to say ‘sorry' but that didn't mean he had to take any of Chip's shit.

‘Are we going to jam or what?' Godot slipped his bass over his shoulder and Happy squeezed himself in behind the drum kit. Ray took off his shades and put them on top of a plastic box labelled ‘drill bits' then stepped behind the mike.

Chip went straight into a rusty version of ‘Wish You Were Her' and the lush wave of sound from his guitar, the deep, gut-quivering punch of Godot's bass and the kick of Happy's drums hit Ray behind the knees. He'd missed this with every cell in his body. He grabbed the mike, closed his eyes, opened his mouth and began to sing.

They segued straight into ‘Get Your Coat' and then ‘It's Not Me, It's You'.

‘It's not me, it's you.

You want him, then join the queue.

They stick to him like Superglue.

We're through. And it's not me, it's you.'

They played four tracks from the first album, three from the second and two from the third. Ray threw himself at the words as if he was drowning and they were saving his life.

When they took a break, Ray took out his laptop and balanced it on the sawhorse.

‘Something you want to share with us?' Chip sneered. ‘Another “Asia Sky”?' Ray shrugged. ‘No? Well, I've got something.' Chip began to play a melody on his old red Stingray. Godot joined in. Happy picked up his sticks and Ray had to stand there, like a moron, while Chip sang the lyrics.

‘You threw away what you had before.

You got to face it or waste it.