The Heart Whisperer (24 page)

‘It's like living with a teenage boy.' Oonagh planted her elbows on the bar and her face in her hands. ‘A sixteen-stone teenage boy with a hair transplant and a persecution complex. I have to take Clingfilms' calls in the loo. I couldn't even tell him I was coming to meet you. I said I was going for a bikini wax,' she sipped her wine, ‘not that he'd notice.'

Nick hadn't told Kelly where he was going either. She'd been weepy and edgy all week. Her period was due. For the first time since they'd met, they weren't celebrating Thanksgiving. The turkey he'd bought had been shoved to the back of the freezer. It
was nice to be away from the clenched atmosphere of the house, to be sitting in a dark quiet bar doing something useful.

‘Owen's just stonewalling,' he told Oonagh. ‘It's a very male way of dealing with his upset. You just need to connect with him.'

‘I need to connect him to the national grid and run a couple of million volts through him.' Oonagh signalled at the barman for another drink. ‘Or tell some journalist that we're getting divorced – that might jolt him out of it.'

Nick shook his head and laughed.

‘What are you laughing at?' Oonagh snapped in her off-air accent. ‘
Whaddaya laffin ah?
'

‘Oonagh,' he handed the barman his empty Ballygowan glass, ‘the whole premise of
The Ex-Factor
is that relationships can be saved. How's it going to look if you and Owen break up?'

She sighed. ‘You try acting like you're happily married when you've got Owen Clancy looking at you over his Sugar Puffs like a wounded stag.'

‘Did you try homework? The Two Listening? The Soul Gazing? The Positivi-Three exercise?' Nick had been trying to help Oonagh to sort things out with Owen for weeks, but nothing had worked. They were the most dysfunctional couple he'd ever come across.

‘He doesn't speak to me unless we're on air.'

‘You can work on this alone if he won't co-operate by making a Partner Gratitude List. Come on.'

‘Do I have to?' She sighed. ‘I'm grateful that Owen is twenty years older because he'll always look worse than me first thing in the morning. I'm grateful that he had a hair transplant for me because bald men look like giant babies—'

‘Oonagh!'

‘I'm grateful that he had kids with me even though he already has kids from his first marriage and could have done without any more thank you and …' She put her fingers under her eyes. ‘Now you've made my mascara run.' Her voice was shaking. ‘He's the crankiest old bastard on the planet and I love him.'

‘I know.'

‘But I grew up in a council flat in Ballymun. My mam cleaned
offices so I could go to college. She's not around to see it but this is her dream coming true and I'm not going to let anyone destroy it.'

‘Your father really isn't up to visitors.' Sinead planted herself in the doorway.

‘I was just passing,' Claire said. ‘I thought I'd call in.' Sinead looked at the catering saucepan she was holding as if might contain human remains. ‘It's coq au vin. I thought if Dad had some proper food—'

‘—I've been cooking him proper food,' Sinead said crisply. ‘But he won't eat it.' She stood back, reluctantly and followed Claire down the hall to the kitchen.

The Cunninghams were sitting at the table drinking tea. Claire nearly dropped the saucepan. Did her dad know they were here?

Mrs Cunningham bobbed her frosted head. ‘Oh, Claire! You're the image of your poor mother with your hair like that. Isn't she, Brian?'

Mr Cunningham grunted and cut himself a slice of Battenberg.

‘Brian and Caroline have been marvellous,' Sinead said. ‘Telling me when to put the bins out. Driving me to Superquinn. There's nothing like good neighbours, is there?'

‘Sinead was just telling us that your father isn't making any effort to get back on his feet. It often happens with the elderly. They just give up.'

Elderly?
Claire glared at her. The Cunninghams were at least ten years older than her dad.

‘What's in the pot?'

‘It's coq of some kind,' Sinead raised one thin eyebrow, ‘apparently.' She took the pot into the utility room.

‘I've brought Dog,' Claire followed her. ‘I thought if Dad saw him it would give him a reason to do his physiotherapy.'

‘I can't let you bring that enormous animal into the house. It's not safe.'

‘I'll just bring him in here. We can close the door so he doesn't get into the kitchen.'

Claire opened Mossy's back door and Dog poked his long snout out and sifted the air. An expression of pure joy crossed his hairy
grey face. He made a noise like an espresso machine and tried to lick her face.

‘If you're happy now,' she grinned pushing him back, ‘wait till you see Dad!'

The grin was still on her face when she opened the door of the old surgery but disappeared when she saw her dad. Slumped awkwardly in the armchair in front of the TV, he looked more like an invalid than he had even straight after the operation. The TV was switched on but he was staring at the floor, chewing his lip, his pale face clenched with pain. She put her hand to her locket. ‘Dad.'

He turned to look at her. His chin was unshaven and there was a greyish stain on the front of his dressing gown. ‘What have you done to your curls?'

‘I had my hair straightened for a job. It's so good to see you. I brought you some coq au vin.' She perched on the edge of the bed. ‘You need to start eating proper food and taking your painkillers so you can do your physio. And Dad,' Claire picked at a thread on the bedspread, ‘I brought Dog.'

He stared at her. ‘What?'

‘He's in the utility room.'

As if on cue, Dog let out a plaintive howl.

Her dad flinched. ‘I told you to bring him to the Cats and Dogs home.'

‘I couldn't, they would have put him down. I'm going to look after him until you're well enough to walk him again.' Her dad covered his face with his hands. ‘I thought you'd be pleased.'

His voice was muffled and broken. ‘The only thing that would please me is if you'd get rid of that woman, Sinead, and help me up the stairs to my own bloody room.'

When Claire opened the door of the utility room, she found Dog lying beside the saucepan with a glazed look in his eyes. He had demolished the coq au vin. He'd even eaten the tinfoil lid.

‘At least someone enjoyed it.' Sinead stood in the doorway, watching Claire clip on his lead.

‘Don't let anyone into this house unless Dad invites them,'
Claire glared at her. ‘Especially not the Cunninghams. Is that clear?'

Sinead's mouth was set in a thin line. ‘Crystal.'

Nick and Claire never had friends over to the house but, when Claire was fourteen, she'd asked him if she could have a sleepover.

‘It's a bad idea, Claire, but you can do what you like.' He had been distant since the day he'd walked away from her in town. She knew that he had applied to go to college in America in the autumn and it felt as if part of him had already gone.

She had invited Amy Kelly, Lucy O'Donnell and Ruth Kinsella but she knew, from the moment she opened the door and saw them looking past her into the shabby hall, that it had been a mistake.

Everything was wrong. She saw her bedroom through their eyes and she felt ashamed of how bare and boyish it was. There was a horrible skin on the top of the hot chocolate. There was no open fire to toast the marshmallows.

The girls took tiny sips of their chocolate and left it. They nibbled round the edges of the marshmallows and put them back on the plate. Claire had bought a set of sparkly nail varnish at the chemist and they painted their nails but the atmosphere was flat and awkward. Then Amy got up and went over to Claire's bedside table.

‘Is this your mother?' She picked up the photograph in the silver frame, the one of her mum playing cricket in the garden. The other girls got up and went over, bending their heads over the picture.

‘She's so pretty!' Lucy sighed.

‘Her hair is the same colour as yours, only it's straight.' Ruth pulled away the scarf that Claire had draped over the lamp so she could see it better. ‘She died, didn't she?'

‘What happened?' Amy's eyes were shining with curiosity.

Claire was still kneeling on the rug. She moved a marshmallow from one side of her mouth to another. ‘It was an accident,' she mumbled.

‘What kind of accident?'

She shook her head.

Ruth came over and hugged her. ‘Claire doesn't have to talk about it if she doesn't want to.' After a minute, Amy and Lucy came and hugged her too and she was enveloped in a cloud of watermelon lip-gloss and the biscuity smell of other people's hair.

‘Your mum was a doctor, wasn't she?' Amy wouldn't let it go. ‘Did she work in a hospital?'

‘No. She had a surgery downstairs.'

‘Can we see?' The flatness was gone from the room now and the air was charged with anticipation. Everything else had been a disappointment and there were hours and hours to fill before they went home. Claire wanted to say ‘no' but she couldn't.

She reached up to switch on the landing light but Amy stopped her. The girls giggled and bumped into one another on the dark stairs. Claire put her hand on the surgery door. This room still felt out of bounds though it had been eight years since the accident.

The girls pressed around her in a jittery knot and stared into the surgery. Pale moonlight leaked in through the broken Venetian blind. Her mother's desk and examination table had already been eclipsed by junk. Cardboard boxes of books and bags of clothes. A bicycle without a saddle. A broken electric fire.

‘It's spooky,' Lucy breathed.

‘I'm getting goose bumps,' Amy whispered.

Claire was getting them too. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end and her throat was dry. Part of her wanted to see her mum's ghost but another part of her was scared. What if she was angry?

She saw the shadowy figure in the old swivel chair just before Amy screamed. Then the girls were pushing past her, shrieking and squealing.

‘Sorry, Dad,' Claire said softly. ‘I didn't know you were in here.'

He sighed. ‘I just came in to sit for a while. Go back upstairs to your friends now.'

But after that, they weren't really her friends any more and Claire never brought anyone home again except for Ray.

She hauled Dog back to the car. He clambered in and collapsed on the back seat in a blissful food coma. She drove carefully so she
wouldn't wake him. The longer he slept the longer it would be before he woke up and realised that he wasn't going home.

Claire woke with the feeling that she was being watched. She opened her eyes and saw a huge grey, whiskery chin looming over her head.

‘Out!' She pointed at the door.

Dog's eyebrows came together as he looked at the door then at her and then at the door again.

‘Oh,' she sat up, ‘you want to go
out
out.'

She pulled on a sweatshirt then followed him down into the kitchen and opened the back door. He brushed past her as he went out but she was used to him now. He picked his way down the path, stopping to sniff enquiringly at some weeds. It was a beautiful November night. The garden glittered with frost and the moonlight was reflecting on the tiny glittering facets of quartz in the garden wall.

This was the one thing Claire liked about looking after Dog. She got to see things she normally wouldn't. The sky turning pink before a five o'clock sunset. The last few yellow leaves clinging to the trees in the park. A cloud of starlings dissolving and reforming in the sky above the pond. She had promised herself, back in June, that she'd try to be healthy. She had hardly exercised for years but now she was taking a long walk every day. Maybe she'd keep doing that, after he was gone. But where was he going to go? What was going to become of him if her dad really didn't want him back?

There was someone in the garden. Ray could hear them crashing around. He jumped out of bed and lifted his bedroom blind. He'd left it down for weeks now because he was ignoring Claire. He thought now, that he was having some kind of complicated hallucination. There was a huge dog in her garden. If she saw it, she'd freak. He forgot the row. He forgot that they weren't speaking. He pulled on a pair of jeans, yanked up the sash window and climbed out on to the fire escape.

‘Hey!' he shouted. ‘What are you doing down there!'

The dog was squatting in the nettles looking up at him, wearing a tragic expression like a martyred saint.

‘How did you get in?' Ray hurried down the metal stairs.

A girl in a sweatshirt with bare legs and long, straight hair appeared on the moonlit path. It was Claire with different hair. ‘He lives here.'

‘That's news to me.' Ray had reached the bottom step.

‘I'm sorry.' She tugged her sweatshirt around her and looked up at him. ‘I should have asked you if it was OK for him to stay. It's only temporary.'

She looked different without her obstreperous halo of curls. Sophisticated, slightly intimidating. ‘What have you done with your hair?'

‘It's a twelve-week blow-dry thing.'

They stood in an icy pool of moonlight, Ray bare chested, Claire bare legged, their breaths coming and going in tiny white clouds in the frosty air.

Ray peered at the dog lurking in the nettle patch. He had a beard and whiskery sideburns and a bizarre tuft on the top of his head like a wonky wig. His dark grey legs had an extra curly layer of light grey fur that made him look as if he was wearing dog trousers. ‘Hey! It's him! Your dad's dog!'

‘I'm looking after him till Dad gets better.'

‘Better at what?'

‘Dad had an accident,' Claire pulled at her sleeves, ‘six weeks ago. He won't be able to walk for a while.'