The Heart Whisperer (3 page)

‘It means “a piggery between two briny places”. And I'm not leaving you here on your own unless you say “yes”.' He began to sing, loudly. ‘I've been to paradise, but I've never been to Meath.' Muckanaghederdauhaulia was in Galway but that didn't scan.

‘OK!' Claire put her hands over her ears.

‘Hey.' He went over and put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. ‘It's over for another year.'

Claire waited till the door that connected her flat to Ray's apartment had closed. She listened to him bounding up the stairs, then,
when she was sure he wasn't going to come back down again, she got up, opened a bottle of wine and found a glass, then went up the three shallow steps and along the narrow hall to her bedroom.

It was still bright outside. She could see a tiny triangle of blue sky tinged with pink at the top of her window but the raised front garden blocked out most of the light. She turned on her bedside lamp and knelt on the floor. She opened the bottom drawer of the mahogany dressing table, took the lid off the box that was inside and spread them all out on the rug by her bed – all the things she had taken from her dad's room over the years. Things she knew he'd wouldn't miss.

The empty Consulate packet. The round wooden hairbrush with a few coppery hairs still caught in the bristles. The glass Opium bottle with the gold and orange lid that still had an oily trickle of perfume in the bottom. The single Aran mitten with the scorch mark on the palm. The cream lace dress with the slippery lining. The stethoscope with the worn green rubber tubing. The tube of Coty ‘Schiaparelli Pink' lipstick. The photographs in their fat little stack, held together with a thick plastic band.

Claire didn't look at photographs much any more, they couldn't be trusted, not even the one in the silver frame she kept on her bedside table. She didn't really remember the day they'd played cricket in the garden but for years, she thought she had. Photographs superimposed themselves over the fragile impressions of her own memories.

The tiny flecks of yellow in her mum's dark green eyes. The way she smelled of Opium and Juicy Fruit chewing gum and menthol cigarettes. The static crackle when she brushed her hair. The contradiction between the serious, preoccupied doctor and the light-hearted, mischievous mother who sometimes came out to play. Who teased and tickled and double-dared. Who sculpted Claire's soapy hair into Mohicans and devil-horns at bath time and scooped her into her lap and sang ‘Clair de Lune' and ‘Oh Claire', making up entire verses when she didn't remember the words. Who would suddenly decide, on a sunny afternoon, to close up her surgery and pick Claire up from Montessori and take her on magical mystery drives.

Nothing compared to that feeling of having her mum, who was
usually so busy and important, all to herself. Claire was the navigator and she was allowed to say which way they went. ‘Left or right?' her mum would say at the end of the street, laughing. ‘Quick, make up your mind!' And Claire would be so excited that she almost felt sick.

Where did they go on those drives? All she had were hazy fragments. A shop where her mum tried on clothes behind a curtain while she sat on a blue velvet stool pressing her fingertips against the brass buttons. The grey ribbon of a country road. A restaurant with a huge gilt-framed mirror where she had a whole banana split to herself. She could still feel the weight of the heavy silver spoon in her hand, see the beads of condensation on the frosted glass dish.

Claire poured another glass of wine and slipped her hand into the Aran mitten. She didn't remember where the other one had gone or how this one had gotten the scorch mark but she had never forgotten the night her mum had come into her bedroom with her red coat over her nightdress and carried her downstairs wrapped in her duvet. The back door was already open and the air outside was a feathery blur of white. There were footprints leading out to a blanket spread out on the glistening lawn. She could still remember the surprise and the heart-stopping beauty of the garden. It must have been the first time she'd seen snow.

They had snuggled together on the blanket, one mitten each, their knees drawn up to their chins, their faces turned up to the whirl of slowly falling snow, catching flakes on their tongues.

It must have been cold but all Claire remembered was the sound of their laughter in the quiet garden. The thrill of being awake in the middle of the night. The feeling that whenever she was with her mum, something wonderful was going to happen.

Another, darker memory came to the surface of her mind and she pushed it down again. A sunny afternoon, six months later on her seventh birthday. Her mum sitting in a garden chair, wearing a yellow summer dress, looking at her over her sunglasses. ‘What is wrong with you, Claire?'

She was still asking herself the same question, twenty-seven years later. She picked up the hairbrush and looked at the coppery hairs caught in the bristles. Each one of them held a DNA
blueprint of her mum, a complete map of who she had been. All Claire had was a dozen memories, but they told her all she needed to know. There was nothing wrong with her mum. She had been perfect.

At seventeen, when Claire was hanging out on the riverbank with Ray, smoking and playing sweary Scrabble, her mum had been in medical school. In her twenties, when Claire was waiting for the big break that never happened and having her heart broken, she had been getting married and getting pregnant and setting up her own GP practice. At thirty-three, she had everything to live for, but hadn't had a proper acting job or a relationship for three years. She was barely scraping by.

The stethoscope was still looped around her neck. She kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the bed, slipped the little metal buds into her ears, slid the cold disc down under the neck of the sweatshirt, beneath her dress, and listened to the stubborn hammer of her heart. She was still here and her mother was gone. It wasn't fair.

When Claire woke up it was getting light again. Her leg was fizzing with pins and needles and her mouth tasted sour and vinegary. She took off the stethoscope, put everything carefully back into the box and closed the drawer and went to the bathroom. Ray must have been down in the night. There was a metal hanger with an FCUK gift voucher pinned to it hanging on the door handle and, beneath it, a tube of salt and vinegar Pringles with a jaunty pink birthday candle pushed into the lid.

She brushed her teeth and took off her make-up. She undressed and put on an old Smoke Covered Horses T-shirt that was hanging on the back of the door. She looked at her reflection in the mirror in the half-light from the hall, but it was her mother's face she saw. The tears she'd been holding back all yesterday came, but they weren't soft tears of sadness or of self-pity, they were tears of shame. Nick was right. How was she supposed to stand at the grave a year from now, knowing that she'd just wasted another year?

It was too late to try to be like her mother. That door had closed a long time ago. But she had to do something. She would give herself twelve months to try to salvage something from the
mess she had managed to make of her life. She had made promises like this before but this time she meant it. She blew her nose and went back into her bedroom and set the clock.

‘Do one thing that scares you every day,' Nick had said. She could start by going to the open casting. It was three years since she'd been to an audition and, right now, she couldn't think of anything more terrifying.

‘Hi, I'm Claire Dillon, I'm with the Lorcan Norton Agency.' She paused, turned to the right, paused, turned to the left, turned back and smiled brightly at two shadowy figures sitting on a sofa in the darkness beyond the spotlight.

‘You've just drifted off your mark there.' Sam, the casting director, was perched on a tall stool by the camera. He looked bored. At least fifty girls had already been in and out of the room since Claire had arrived three hours ago.

‘Sorry!' Claire said, stepping back up to the line of masking tape on the floor.

‘Can you tell us a bit about yourself?'

‘I graduated from the Dublin Academy of Dramatic Arts in 2000. I toured with Broken Bell's production of
Three Sisters
that was runner-up in the Westport Theatre Festival in 2001. I won the “Erin” Best Newcomer for Valerie in
The Weir
in 2003 …'

She could hear the ‘tippity-tap' of someone texting from the sofa. Her faked confidence was leaking out of her like air from a punctured balloon. It had all happened so long ago. Maggie in
Dancing at Lughnasa
. Theresa in
Scenes from the Big Picture
. She tried to sound more enthusiastic. ‘Then I joined Red Rows and—'

‘Really?' Sam looked up. ‘Was Declan Brady artistic director then?'

A flush crept up past the collar of Claire's white audition shirt. She could feel a clammy patch at the small of her back where it was sticking to her skin. She hugged the pages she'd been given to her chest. ‘Yes.'

‘How long were you there?'

‘Three years.'

Claire's acting life had fallen, neatly, into three-year time slots. Three years at drama school. Three years slogging around the country doing regional theatre. Three years of giving it what her friend Eilish called ‘socks'. Doing every audition. Trying not to take it personally when she didn't get the job. Trying not to feel threatened when waves of new hopefuls were let loose every summer. Trying to schmooze even though she was terrible at it. Trying to believe that she was still going to get a break.

Then three years with Red Rows Theatre Company feeling as if she'd finally found her feet. Falling for Declan Brady. Sweet, serious, talented Declan, who was five years older than she was. Who had joined all her freckles with a biro the first time they slept together and asked her to move in with him after a month. Who had told her that she was the Irish Isabelle Huppert and cast her as Stella in
Streetcar
and May in
Fool for Love
and Sister Woman in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. And then had an affair behind her back.

Claire should have been used to rejection. All those years of auditions should have toughened her but they hadn't. She had cut herself off from the acting world. Avoided her old friends, stopped calling her agent, passed on auditions. She had spent the last three years hiding out in Ray's basement licking her wounds.

Sam was talking to her. She forced herself to concentrate. ‘Sorry?'

‘I was just asking about TV and film.'

She gabbled her way through her credits. Nurse Bernie, in three episodes of a short-lived sitcom called
Wards and All
. Walk-on parts on
Fair City
and
The Tudors
. A teacher in one episode of
Life Lessons
.

‘That was in, what, 2007? Any more recent TV work?'

‘No.'

‘
Recent
theatre work?'

She was throwing it away. She could feel it. ‘Not really.' She couldn't tell him about the extra work. That was the lowest rung of the acting ladder, a fraction of an inch above jumping out on Japanese tourists on the Haunted Prison Tour or dancing around Samantha Mumba in panto.

‘Do you have a recent headshot?'

‘The thing is …' She heard the desperation in her voice. ‘I've
been out of the picture for a while and I'm just kind of getting back in again.'

‘Well,' Sam looked embarrassed, ‘I'm sure you will. That's it for today. Thanks for coming in.'

Claire tried to keep the disappointment out of her face. She had prepared the dialogue she'd been given, but now they weren't going to ask her to read. ‘Thank you!'

‘Is that your hair?' a woman's voice said from the sofa at the back of the room.

Claire was already at the door. ‘Sorry?' She had spent an hour this morning blow-drying her hair straight but it had started to frizz up before she left the house.

‘Hang on a second,' Sam left his stool and she hesitated, her hand on the door handle, while he whispered to the woman on the sofa. After a minute, he came back. ‘Would you mind reading something for us?'

Claire forced herself to let go of the handle and walk back into the spotlight. He pulled two pages from a thick script. ‘I know you haven't had a chance to prepare but it's only a couple of lines. We'd already cast but the actor's just broken her wrist. It's the shepherdess. I'll read Lady Kathryn.'

Claire nodded.

‘Tell me what you saw, girl!' Sam shouted in a scary falsetto.

‘I saw a Spanish galleon.' Claire stumbled over the line. ‘Out beyond Hare Island.'

‘Have you breathed a word of this to my husband, the Earl?'

‘No, milady,' Claire said.

‘If you do, I will see to it that your family will suffer!'

‘I won't. I swear.' Claire turned the page. There was no more dialogue, just a short line of direction.

‘As the terrified SHEPHERDESS watches LADY KATHRYN gallop away, she begins to cry.'

‘What was the competition like?' Eilish stirred her cappuccino and licked the foam off her spoon.

Claire stared out of the window of Butler's Café. Wicklow Street was splashy with sunshine but she shivered. ‘Usual film audition crowd. It was like a Barbie Doll convention. They were
all about twenty with acres of hair extensions and fake tan. I felt like an ancient crone.'

Eilish let out a horribly convincing cackle.

‘Ancient-er.' Claire sighed.

Eilish cackled again and the man at the next table looked worried. ‘Don't mind us,' Eilish said. ‘We're thesbians.'

Eilish was the only acting friend Claire could bear to see after she had broken up with Declan. Eilish had dropped off the acting radar five years ago, after her husband, Steve, had left her. She'd been too busy bringing up her daughter Holly to take on six performances and a matinee every week.