The Heart Whisperer (38 page)

‘Seriously?' Kelly felt a sharp spasm of pain low on her left side.
No
, she thought. She couldn't get her period now.
Not here
.

The man saw her expression change and sighed. ‘Look, if it's that important, I'll do it just this once. You can take as many samples as you need. Just bring them back, OK?'

‘Thanks.' She held her breath as she scribbled her name and address on a pink docket. She had to hold on for just one more minute. ‘Do you have a toilet?'

‘We have eight hundred and seventy-six of them, sweetheart,' he said. ‘Take your pick.'

The staff toilet was tiny with boxes of broken tiles in torn cardboard boxes stacked behind the door. The lino was grubby and there was a starburst of cracks in the mirror above the grubby sink.

Kelly leaned against the wall and hugged herself, rocking her body, trying to hold back her tears. She had her period. She'd known it was going to happen this time and she'd thought that knowing it would lessen the heartbreak, but it hadn't.

She couldn't go back out there and put a brave face on in front of her clients. She texted them to say that she had a family emergency and they could pick up their samples at the desk, then she unlocked the door and hurried to the exit, hoping they wouldn't see her.

The boy was about two years old with a fuzzy halo of fair hair. He was wearing a tiny plaid jacket over a pair of denim dungarees with a picture of a yellow JCB on the front. He was standing just outside the automatic glass doors, watching them open and close with a look of wonder.

‘Where's your mom?' Kelly squatted down beside him.

He pointed at the vacant car park. There was nobody around.
He put his arms out and she hesitated and then picked him up. He was heavier than he looked and his breath smelled faintly of orange juice.

She jingled her car keys with the silver Tiffany's butterfly charm Nick had given her. The little boy laughed and made a grab for it.

‘Let's find your mom. Where did she go? I wonder.'

The boy sucked one wing of the butterfly and frowned, as if he was trying to remember.

Kelly settled his warm weight on to her hip and went back into the warehouse. It was deserted. The couple had disappeared and the cash desk where the man had been drinking his coffee was abandoned.

She went back outside and shaded her eyes. KitchenLand, the warehouse next door, was boarded up and the car park in front of Platinum Furniture was deserted. She picked her way across the littered tarmac to the road and crossed to the other side. Some wide steps led down to a scrubby stretch of grass and, beyond it, to the banks of a murky canal.

The boy jingled her key ring and waved his free hand at some ducks that were bobbing on the water. ‘Ugh!'

‘Duck!' Kelly said. ‘That's right. Clever boy!'

‘Ugh!' He pointed again. The downy velvet of his cheek and the cereal smell of his hair made her feel woozy with longing.

She knew she should bring him back to the warehouse. That must be where his mom was. But he just wanted to see the ducks. She went down the steps. There was a scorched circle burned into the grass where a bonfire had been. The boy had started wriggling in her arms but she held on tight and kept going till she got to the canal.

‘Duck!' She pointed at the bird that was pecking at a crisp bag.

‘Ugh,' the boy said, uncertainly.

Kelly cupped her palm on the warm crown of his head and kissed his forehead. A tear slipped down her face and trickled on to his hand. Then he started to cry too. She bounced him and jiggled him but his wailing only got louder.

‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star,' she sang into the dandelion fluff of his hair, ‘how I wonder what you are.'

He stopped crying, abruptly, and looked at her.

‘You know that song, don't you?' She laughed. ‘What comes next, hmmm? Up above the world so high …'

The little boy picked up a handful of her hair and examined it shyly. ‘Ike-a dimo-din-das-guy,' he sang softly.

Suddenly, Kelly heard voices on the road above them. ‘Jason? Jason!'

Panic hit her behind the knees. She really hadn't done anything wrong but that wasn't how it was going to look. She put the boy down on the grass, making sure he was well away from the canal bank, then hurried along the path and hid behind a clump of bushes. Her heart was slamming against the walls of her chest. How could she just have picked him up and taken him like that? Had she lost her mind?

A security guard came running down the steps followed by a crying woman in a red puffa coat.

‘Jason!' The woman sank on to her knees and wrapped her arms around the boy. Her eyes were streaming and her face was streaked with wet mascara. ‘Don't ever cross the road on your own again!'

Kelly was standing by the Beetle when she remembered her keys. As she turned, she heard the whoosh of the electric doors and saw the security guard hurrying across the car park towards her with his fist clenched. She stood, with her head bent, waiting for him to arrive, already hearing the accusation in her mind. ‘Are these yours?' His fist opened and he held out the silver Tiffany's butterfly key ring.

‘Oh my gosh, yes!' she said. ‘I went for a walk down by the canal and I must have dropped them on the grass.' She took the keys, dropped them, picked them up again then tried to open the door with shaking hands.

‘A little boy who got lost found them. It's your lucky day.'

Kelly managed to open the door and sink into the driver's seat of the car before her legs gave way. ‘I guess it is.'

Nick lifted the old man's legs one at a time and pushed his feet into a pair of trainers. He had finally agreed to see the
physiotherapist. She was going to come every other day for a few weeks to make up for the sessions he had missed.

‘The only reason I'm doing this,' he muttered to Nick, ‘is so that you can go home, Claire can bring Dog back and I can get back upstairs.'

Nick was only half listening. He had made his mind up to tell Oonagh that he had to pull out of
The Ex-Factor
and whatever happened, he was going to do it. He hadn't taken any more painkillers since the night of the storm. He couldn't believe that he'd let himself slip into that habit. He felt a twist of shame in his gut. He of all people should have known better.

The physio was in her mid-twenties and South African. She took off her hat and shook out her blonde hair, releasing a breath of the same citrus perfume that Kelly used.

Nick wanted to close his eyes and pretend that she was standing here in the hall with him but he forced himself to speak. ‘I was just heading out.'

‘You on TV today?' The physiotherapist smiled.

He shook his head. ‘Radio.'

‘You have a real gift for helping people. That's pretty special, you know.'

Nick felt so ashamed that he had to look away. ‘I hope you have a gift for helping people too,' he said. ‘Because my father is not looking forward to this. Do you mind letting yourself out?'

‘Are you sure it's OK for your father to be on his own?'

He swallowed. ‘I'll be dropping back at five to check on him.' If she knew who he was, he didn't want her to know that he was living here.

‘I just feel like I've lost him,' the caller said.

Dom smirked. ‘Have you looked down the back of the sofa, Mary?'

Nick ignored him. Maybe he couldn't do anything about the mess of his own life but the physio had been right, he did have a gift for helping other people. It was the only thing he had left. ‘Don't mind Dom. Go on, Mary.'

‘Well, he's just away so much. I'm here with the kids and he's
off in Singapore or Koala Lumpur. When he gets back we barely have anything to say to one another any more.'

Dom chortled and clapped his hand over his mouth.

‘That's something. Start with that,' Nick said. ‘Just say to him, “I feel we have nothing to say to one another.” That's the beginning of the conversation. There's an exercise I often use called—'

‘Let us know how you get on,' Dom managed to gasp. ‘And we'll be back with more problems after this break.' He slipped his headphones off and collapsed on the desk laughing.

Nick glared at him. ‘What's so funny?'

‘She said “Koala”,' Dom snorted. ‘Like the bear!'

Tara, the producer, came in and whispered something to Dom, who nodded and shot Nick a sly look. ‘Back on air, Doc.' He put his headphones on again.

‘Welcome back to “Problem Solved” with our agony uncle, Nick Dillon. We've got Caroline on line two. She's been holding for a while. What do you want to ask Doc Nick, Caroline?'

‘Well,' the woman said, ‘I'd like to know how he'd deal with a man who is a cheat and a liar.'

Her voice sounded strangely familiar and Nick began to wonder if she'd called in before. ‘Are you talking about your husband, Caroline?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I'm talking about you. You put yourself out there like some kind of guru who can fix other people's marriages, isn't that right?'

Nick stared at Dom. Behind him, in the control room, Tara was glued to the window, watching him with undisguised glee. ‘I never said I was a guru—'

‘What about your own marriage?' Caroline cut him off. ‘If you're so great at sorting out other people's problems, why aren't you living with your wife?'

‘I'm not sure I know what you mean,' Nick stammered, but he had placed the voice now. It belonged to Mrs Cunningham.

‘I think you do, Nicholas. You've been living in your father's house since before Christmas. We see you every day, sneaking in and out like a thief, hiding your car in the lane. Then we see you on the television, telling the whole country how to make their marriages work. Who do you think you are?'

Nick had to shoulder his way past half a dozen photographers at the gate of his father's house. He held his scarf over his face but he could hear the whirring of camera motor drives as he fumbled with the key and let himself in.

The physiotherapist was just coming out of the old man's room when he opened the front door. She picked up her bag and took her jacket off the coatstand. ‘I heard you on the radio,' she frowned. ‘Your personal life's your own business but that woman was right – you have no right telling other people how to solve their problems if you can't solve your own.' She opened the front door and closed it behind her.

Nick went upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. The window was open and, as he leaned over to close it, a bald man poked his head out from the hedge below and took a picture. He leaned on the sink and let the wave of despair break over him. He knew how he was going to look in that picture. Like a guilty man who had just been found out.

Malachy MacDaid had once been regarded as one of Ireland's finest actors. He was in his seventies now and had played everyone from Macbeth to Mephistopheles. Claire felt star-struck just sitting across the table from him in the tiny sound booth. ‘I suppose that I'm the camp potato,' he said to her in his marvellous voice. ‘And you're the sexy strawberry. Do you do a lot of these radio advertisements?'

Claire shook her head. ‘It's my first one.'

‘It's not the Bard of Avon, my dear, but five hundred euros for an all-station package? That's more than you'd get paid for a week treading the boards on the stage.'

They slipped on their padded headphones. ‘OK, let's go for a read,' a voice from the control room said.

‘Call me a fussy spud but knobs of butter just don't do it for me,' Malachy lisped. ‘So why don't you open my jacket and smother me in Killoran Double Cream?'

Claire attempted a husky Marilyn Monroe whisper. ‘I'm a
berry
juicy strawberry. So why don't you tug off my stalk and dip
me
in a bowl of Killoran Double Cream?'

Malachy was right. It wasn't Shakespeare but it was all over in fifteen minutes.

She helped Malachy into his coat then found his scarf for him. When she was picking up her bag she noticed that he'd left his newspaper behind and ran up the steps to the street after him but he was gone. She decided to walk over to the café on the corner of Mespil Road to treat herself to a coffee as she had half an hour left on her parking meter.

She found a free table, curled up in a leather armchair and
opened the paper. Looking out at her, from page eight, was her brother's face. It was one of his publicity shots. His arms were folded and his head slightly tilted back with a smile that was entirely at odds with the headline.

‘
Relationship Coach Hides Secret Separation from Wife.
'

Claire put her coffee down. She had suspected that Nick's marriage was in trouble and here was the proof.

‘He is paid hundreds of euros an hour to advise couples on relationship issues. He claims that his simple techniques can save any marriage. But the shocking truth is that TV's Coach on the Couch, Nick Dillon (37), no longer lives with his wife.

‘The couple are thought to have separated last year when Dillon left the townhouse he shared with stunning American, Kelly (30) and moved into the Milltown home of his retired father.

‘Dillon had just landed a contract to co-present a new UK relationship reality TV show but the shocking revelations about his own personal life may now put him out of the running.'

Claire closed the paper. Poor Nick. He tried so hard to have a perfect life. Kelly was everything to him. Kelly and his work. How would he survive without them both?

Dog rolled over on his rug and groaned when Claire slipped on his lead. He didn't want a walk but if she stayed at home she knew she'd just spend the next hour Googling Nick to see what else had been written about him. Walking was good. Every time she felt angry with Richard, she just put her coat on and got out of the house. Every step she took put another little piece of distance between her and him.