The Heart Whisperer (5 page)

‘The things we all want from our relationships,' he ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Honesty. Trust. Intimacy. Respect. Then we set time aside, every week, to
work out
together.' He was completely
relaxed now. ‘We need to work out our issues. We need to
strengthen
our communication. We need to
tone up
our intimacy. And we can start right now with the first exercise in the We-Fit programme. It's called “Soul Gazing”.'

Anne and Dermot, the studio couple, were in their sixties and they had looked as if they had just had a huge row. After they'd sat on the sofa and gazed into one another's eyes for sixty seconds, they were still glaring at one another. Nick hoped this wasn't going to fall flat on its face on live TV. ‘OK,' he said cheerfully. ‘Now that you're warmed up, we can move on to our second exercise. “Complimentition”. Did you know that we find fault with our partners, on average, fifteen times a day?'

‘Is that all?' Owen smirked.

Nick held up a stopwatch. ‘This is a competition to outdo one another with compliments. The sky's the limit and you have two minutes. Starting from now!'

Dermot sighed. ‘This is ridiculous.'

‘Just start with “I like your …” ‘ Nick prompted, ‘and add a word.'

Dermot looked at the floor. ‘I like your … dress,' he said grudgingly.

‘It's a skirt and top,' Anne snapped. ‘I like your suit. Which I had to pick up from the dry cleaner's because you didn't bother. Your turn.'

‘I like your hair long like that.'

‘Really?' She touched her thin blonde hair self-consciously. ‘I like your smile. If you just used it more.'

Dermot smiled. ‘I like the way you did the dining room up.'

‘Oh! Well I like the way you do all the little bits and pieces around the house.'

Nick looked at the watch. The hand was halfway through its second sweep.

Dermot looked at the floor again. ‘I like the way you asked my mother to live with us after she had her stroke. I know it wasn't easy.'

Anne nodded. ‘I like how good you were to her, Dermot. You were a lovely son.' Her voice cracked.

Dermot moved along the sofa and put his arm around her. ‘It's OK, love,' he said.

‘Well,' Oonagh fanned the sides of her eyes with her fingertips, ‘you heard it here first. The couples that praise together stay together! Right, Owen?'

‘What? Oh, sorry!' Owen winked. ‘I was distracted by Ita's cupcakes which I hope I'll be sampling after the break.'

‘Are they always like that?' Nick asked the runner who led him across a tangle of snaking cables and out into the corridor after his slot was over.

‘Bitchard and Rudie? Yeah. They fight like cats and dogs on air then they make up,' she made a horrified face, ‘in their dressing room.'

Actors in elaborate gowns and leather jerkins and hose were hanging around in the cobbled courtyard eating breakfast. The crew were buzzing about in their unofficial uniform of black, but it was the guy in the faded jeans and T-shirt that Claire noticed first.

He was tall with longish, light brown, curly hair, and he was standing at the half-door of a stable talking to a huge grey horse. It reminded her of the way her dad used to stand in the garden, before the accident, chatting to his delphiniums and his hollyhocks, persuading them to grow. She was looking over at the guy with a silly smile on her face when he glanced up at her and she turned away quickly and made her way over to the catering table. She was half expecting to hear a bolshy fourth AD yelling at her that this was ‘actors only'. The extras' area was at the end of the long avenue, near the gates, with the generator trucks and the Portaloos.

The Spaniard
was a new Irish-American co-production about the Armada, which was shipwrecked off the west coast of Ireland in 1588. Claire wasn't sure what shepherdesses wore back then but she was willing to bet that it hadn't been as minxy as the woollen skirt and calico bodice she'd been laced into. But who cared about historical accuracy? She had three lines of dialogue today and more to come. She'd get to fill the gaping hole in her CV and she'd even get a credit on IMDB. She poured herself a cardboard cup of iced coffee and reached for a chocolate croissant.

‘Claire Dillon!'

She turned and there, in a low-cut, pale blue and gold velvet
gown with ropes of pearls woven into her long, caramel hair, was Emma Lacey. Described by VIP magazine as ‘the Irish Jennifer Aniston' and by Declan as ‘the woman I've fallen in love with'.

‘Listen,' Emma said, ‘you're not really supposed be in here but if anyone tries to throw you out just get them to talk to me.'

Claire's shock gave way to childish anger. ‘I've got a part!' She thrust out her two pages of script. ‘I've got lines.'

‘Oh!' Emma peeled off one long kid leather glove. ‘I thought you were with the extras. Milo Daly told me he'd seen you lurking in the background on
Forensic
.' She looked down at Claire's costume. ‘Are you a milkmaid?'

‘I'm a shepherdess,' Claire said.

‘I'm Lady Kathryn. We're in the same scene. It'll be just like the old days.'

The old days, Claire thought, which ones? The days at drama school when Emma had acted like her friend or the days when they were rehearsing
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
when Emma kept ‘borrowing' Declan for script consults over coffees and drinks and then decided to keep him.

Emma must have read her mind. A flush of colour rose into her cheeks beneath the ivory mask of her make-up. Good, Claire thought. She had dreaded bumping into Emma again but she wasn't the one who should feel embarrassed.

‘You can't begin to imagine how hot it is inside this huge dress in all this heat.' Emma looked away and pretended to fan herself with her glove. ‘I'm so glad I decided to go for a winter wedding next year.' The word hit Claire like a punch in the stomach. ‘Oh!' Emma turned back with a sly little look. ‘You do know that Declan and I are getting married?'

What Claire knew was that Emma always had to win and that this time she wasn't going to let her. ‘Of course,' she said coolly. ‘Congratulations!'

‘What about you, Claire? Where are you living these days?'

‘Carysfort Square.'

‘In one of those Georgian houses?' Emma looked surprised. ‘On your own?'

‘With Ray.'

‘Ray Devine.' Emma's small mouth fell open a fraction. She had
tried, all through their twenties, to get Ray into bed. ‘You two are together now?'

Claire couldn't resist it. She nodded. ‘We are.'

‘Excuse me.' A girl with a walkie-talkie was standing beside them. ‘Emma, the first AD needs a word.'

Claire watched Emma picking her way across the cobbles. They were getting married. She tried to imagine Declan in a morning suit walking down the aisle of a church but his face was out of focus. She could hardly remember what he looked like any more. She scanned herself for pain but instead there was an unexpected feeling of lightness. She had been dreading this for three years but now that it had happened, she didn't have to dread it any more.

The location was a few miles away on a hillside above Avoca. Claire was shown to her first position on a grassy lane and she waited beneath the shade of a tree by a wooden gate while the crew buzzed to and fro setting up the generators and dolly tracks.

‘Got everything you need?' a runner asked Claire as she hurried past and she nodded. It was lovely to be essential instead of extra.

An old Land Rover pulling an open trailer packed with sheep bumped down the lane then parked up, and the guy Claire had seen in the courtyard climbed out and walked over.

‘You're Claire, the shepherdess? I'm Shane and these are yours.' He nodded at the sheep. ‘Someone will be along to let them out just before the camera turns over.'

Claire had forgotten that there would be sheep. She looked at their strange bony faces protruding through the bars of the trailer and shuddered. ‘Never work with children and animals, that's what they say, isn't it?'

He looked at her. Beneath his heavy brows, his eyes were so dark that they seemed to be all pupil. He was older than she'd first thought and taller. He frowned. ‘Why do they say that?'

‘I suppose because children and animals can't act.'

‘Ah.' He nodded. ‘That explains it.'

‘What?'

‘Why I like them so much.'

He leaned his arms on the gate, hooking his foot on the bottom bar, and looked away from her across the field. His light brown
hair came down below the collar of his T-shirt. His arms were tanned and he had a scatter of tiny scars on his hands. There was a faint white band on one finger of his left hand as if he'd worn a ring and taken it off.

Claire felt she had to justify herself. ‘I had a bad experience. I'm scared of being bitten.'

He turned around and looked at her again, then lowered his voice. ‘Watch out for the one at the back with the yellowy eyes.'

Claire whipped around and stared at the trailer. They all had yellow eyes.

His face cracked into a grin that lit his eyes, then he turned away and looked across the field again.

They stood there listening to the clunk and stutter of a starting generator and the sound of a plane passing overhead. After a while, a 4x4 with a horsebox pulled up on the other side of the field and Claire saw Emma in her elaborate gown getting down from the passenger side.

‘Well …' Shane straightened up. ‘Time to go. You guys be good now,' he said to the sheep as he passed the trailer. He sauntered slowly back up the lane, his hair catching the sun as he passed out of blocks of shadow and into the light.

Something beneath Claire's ribcage yawned and stretched. ‘Ah,' she thought, ‘so you're still in there. You survived after all.'

‘Thank you,' Kelly gazed into Nick's eyes, ‘for sharing.' They were sitting cross-legged on their bed Two-Listening. Candles flickered on the windowsill. Whale music played softly in the background. She waited for a particularly loud whale to finish before she went on. ‘What I heard you saying is that the OO show has given you a sense of purpose and that you love the idea of helping people you've never even met.'

Nick squeezed her hands. ‘Thank you for hearing me. Do you want to share?'

Kelly was getting pins and needles in her foot. ‘Not tonight, honey, but I think that Clancy woman is right.' She waited for some dolphin clicking to cease. ‘You're a natural in front of the camera.'

A single strand of Kelly's dark hair had come loose from her
silver barrette and fallen over one bare shoulder. Nick tucked it behind her ear. ‘I couldn't do it without you.'

Claire froze. Over the frantic hammering of her heart she heard it again. The squeak of the middle step that led down to the kitchen. There was an intruder in her flat! She got out of bed, pulled on a sweatshirt, grabbed the rainstick and crept quietly down the narrow dark hall. There was the shadowy silhouette of a man in the kitchen. The fridge door creaked open and the light came on. There was Ray wearing a Banksy T-shirt and pair of white boxer shorts, peering into her fridge.

‘Jesus, Ray!' She came down the steps and switched on the fairy lights. ‘I thought you were a burglar!' Even after all these years, it was still odd to find a person who she'd seen strutting around a stage in front of twenty thousand people at large in her kitchen.

‘I need cheese.'

‘I don't have any.'

‘Sweet dreams are made of cheese!' he sang. ‘Who am I to diss a Brie?' He was rummaging at the back of the fridge. ‘What's going on in here? What's all this healthy stuff?'

Claire had decided that if she was going to get back into acting, she needed to get healthy. She was too broke to join a gym but she could ditch the takeaways and the drinking on week nights.

Ray waved a smoked mackerel. ‘Who first looked at one of these and thought “Let's smoke him”?' He took the lid off a tub of hummus and sniffed it suspiciously.

Claire sighed and sat down. ‘You can't keep wandering down here in the middle of the night. What if I was in bed with someone?'

Her mind flashed back to the shoot. After the director had called a wrap, when the crew were packing all the gear away, Shane had swung himself up on to the huge grey horse that Emma Lacey had been riding. Claire had always thought that the whole sexy-man-on-a-horse thing was an awful Jane Austen cliché but watching him galloping across the field to the horsebox she had changed her mind.

Ray put the hummus on the table and opened the cupboard. ‘If you were in bed with someone that rainstick wouldn't be in your
hand, it would be on the stairs, according to the rules of The Contract.'

The Contract covered everything from who controlled the remote control to who got the last Rolo. There was a Jolie Sub-Clause that obliged Claire to accompany Ray to every Angelina film as long as it wasn't animated and a Non-Exclusivity Rule that allowed either of them to blouse out of an arrangement if they got a better offer. The Do Not Disturb Protocol obliged Ray to leave his frisbee on the stairs if he had someone round. Claire was supposed to do the same with her rainstick but it had spent most of the last three years under her bed.

Claire had unpacked a box of acting books and they were scattered all over the tiny sofa. Ray grabbed a copy of a Lorca play and tucked it under the rickety leg of the table to stop it rocking, then he sat down on one of Claire's rickety folding chairs and spread some hummus on a cracker.

He loved Claire's pokey kitchen with its ancient gas cooker and open shelves of mismatched crockery and strings of fairy lights. Well, it was his kitchen, really. He'd bought the house after ‘Asia Sky' went platinum. His loft-style living room upstairs had a modular sofa and a forty-two-inch TV and twenty grand's worth of recording equipment. His kitchen had poured concrete floors and polished steel units and a huge black glass light fitting that reminded him of a hovering insect. But he felt more at home down here, sitting on one of Claire's uncomfortable sofas, watching her tiny temperamental TV, trying to plug the draughts with her collection of knitted draught snakes.