The Heart Whisperer (7 page)

‘I've been having some problems in my marriage.' She had to say it twice so he could hear her.

‘You can work on that—' he began.

‘I did everything I could and then—' The music stopped suddenly. ‘I had an affair,' she shouted into the sudden silence. Every head turned in their direction. She flushed and bolted for the door.

Nick caught up with her in the hallway outside. She was tugging her coat off a peg. ‘I'm sorry. I don't know why I told you that.'

‘Have you told your husband?'

A tear ran down her cheek and dripped off her chin. ‘If I did, he'd never forgive me.'

‘If you want to keep your marriage, you have to take that risk. You have to be completely honest with him.'

‘I have to go.'

‘What's your name?'

‘Roisin.'

Nick pushed his card into her hand. ‘Come and see me anytime. On your own or with your husband. No charge.'

‘Do you think this is going to happen a lot?' Nick asked Kelly as they got to her Beetle. This was the third time he'd been recognised this week.

Kelly tossed him the keys and slid into the passenger seat.

‘Do I think what's going to happen a lot?' She crossed her long legs. ‘You and I sneaking off to a hotel for hot sex?'

‘You're kidding me?'

‘Breakfast is not included but everything else,' she gave him a wicked smile, ‘comes free.'

Claire parked Mossy outside the gate in case he got stuck in reverse and sat looking at her dad's house. It looked even worse than it had three weeks ago, on her birthday. The driveway was speckled with dandelion clocks and new shoots of ivy had crept across the living-room window and swallowed up most of the old surgery sign that still hung on the wall above the converted garage.

Mr Cunningham was in the garden next door deadheading his roses. Claire's heart sank. The Dillons had never got on with their neighbours. Her mum used to call them the ‘Cunning Hams'. She got out and walked up to the front door as quietly as she could.

‘Claire,' a voice behind her said while she was rummaging for her keys. ‘Where do you live these days?'

She turned around. Mr Cunningham had walked over to the wall.

‘Monkstown,' she said brightly.

‘Do you have a garden?'

Ray had a Zen pebbly thing going on at the front of the house and she had a scraggy patch of nettles at the back. ‘Sort of.' She shifted her bag to her other hand and scrabbled in her pocket for her key.

‘Really? Would you like me to come around in the morning and jump over your wall and leave a huge turd on your lawn?' Mr Cunningham asked.

Claire stared at him. Was there a right answer to this? ‘Um. No?'

‘I didn't think so.' Mr Cunningham glared at her. ‘But that's what your father's dog does on my lawn, Claire. Every single bloody morning. Maybe you'd have a word with him. He refuses to answer the door when I try.'

Claire's dad didn't like surprise visits but he hardly ever answered the phone and she worried about him more now that he was
retired, so every couple of weeks she pretended that she was just passing and he pretended to believe her.

Sometimes, she just stayed for a cup of tea, but tonight they split an omelette and a plate of Jaffa Cakes, which was all her dad had really eaten for years, and watched TV. They sat through a long report about the impact of deregulation on the European postal system and in between statistics about universal service and uniform pricing Claire thought about all the questions she would never ask him. ‘How did you and Mum meet?' ‘Was it love at first sight?' ‘What did you love about her most?'

Her parents had been married for eleven years when her mum died but they had still been crazy about one another. Her mum would pass her dad's chair and just drop into his lap and kiss him. He would get embarrassed but Claire loved to see them like that.

She remembered music from the record player floating up from downstairs long after she'd been put to bed. Once she crept down and saw her parents slow-dancing in the living room. Her father still had all his clothes on but her mother was barefoot and wearing only a tiny white slip. This was private, Claire understood, like her mum's surgery and the time she woke up to hear her mum giggling on the landing and saw her dad carrying her into their bedroom in his arms.

At exactly nine o'clock, there was a thud at the door and her dad opened it. Dog was so long that he seemed to enter the room in sections, like a bendy bus, carrying one of the leather slippers Claire had given her dad for Christmas in his mouth. He folded himself up on the carpet, dropped the slipper and stared at the television.

‘I'm sorry,' her dad said, ‘he has to watch the news.'

‘Why?' Claire shuffled along the sofa to get as far away from Dog as possible.

‘I've never been able to figure it out but even when I'm upstairs he comes up at six and at nine and makes me come down to switch it on.' Her dad changed channels as the intro ended and the camera cut to a newsreader with an impassive face and a helmet of blonde hair. ‘I think he has a soft spot for Anne Doyle.'

Claire brought the plates out to the kitchen and went upstairs to wash her hands. The door to Nick's old room was open. Her dad had moved his drawing desk in here after Nick went to the States. There were hundreds of old storyboards mounted on stiff boards and stacked around the wall. Claire picked one up. It showed key frames from an ad for soup. Eight beautifully drawn illustrations of a family sitting round a dinner table, the boy and the girl smiling, the dad waiting with his spoon in his hand, the mum ladling soup into his bowl.

Her own mum had hardly ever been there at dinnertime. She'd go into her surgery first thing in the morning and sometimes she was still working when Claire went to bed. ‘You'll see her in the morning,' her dad used to say. It was agony knowing that her mum was in the house but not being allowed to see her.

Sometimes, Claire used to make her own hospital in the hall in front of her mum's surgery door. She'd line her dolls up and cover them with toilet-paper sheets. Her mum had given her an old stethoscope to play with and she used to press the silver disc against the door, trying to hear her mother's voice. Once her dad came in from the garden and found her there. He squatted down till he was at her level. ‘You know what private means, don't you?' he asked her quietly. ‘It means you're not allowed to disturb your mother when she's busy.'

‘I know.' As Claire tugged the stethoscope off it caught in her hair. ‘But I miss her.'

He untangled the stethoscope, carefully. ‘I'm planting sweet peas and I need someone to talk to them nicely so they'll grow.'

‘I'm too busy,' Claire explained, ‘with my patients.'

He looked at her dolls. ‘I think they're asleep. Maybe you could leave them just for a minute.'

‘Maybe.'

Her dad took her hand and they went out into the garden. She remembered how tall he had seemed then. The scratchy feel of his gardening glove. The way the bright sunshine made her eyes squinty. A robin flew down and perched on the lowest branch of the chestnut tree.

‘You know what he's thinking about?' her dad asked her.

‘Worms?'

‘He's thinking that your finger is just the right size to make a hole for a sweet pea seed.'

He took her finger and showed her how push it into the damp earth. When she pulled it out, there were little black crumbs of soil stuck to her skin. He shook a seed into her hand and she dropped it into the hole. ‘Now we have to think of the right thing to say to make it grow.'

Her dad had gone up to his room when Claire came out of the bathroom. ‘Bye, Dad,' she called as she passed his closed door.

‘Safe home now,' he said. It was what he used to say to Ray, when he was going back across the road to his house. ‘Say foam!' Ray still said to her sometimes, and it always made her smile.

She went downstairs and found her jacket in the kitchen. Her dad had slipped an envelope with a hundred euros into the pocket. ‘For your birthday,' he'd scribbled on the flap. She went back out to the car and switched on her phone before she started the engine.

Five texts from Ray, two missed calls from her agent, one voice message.

‘Lorcan here. I was putting together some headshots for a hair care ad and I stuck in one of you and you've been picked as a featured extra. Somebody up there seems to be looking after you.'

‘I'm not a machine.'

The man sitting in the cream armchair opposite Nick had shredded a Kleenex tissue into a hundred little pieces. ‘I can't spend eight hours with the kids every day and just flick on the adult switch when you walk in the door. I don't work like that.'

‘You don't work at all!' his wife shouted. ‘I'm the one who's chained to a desk for ten hours a day while you're at home fucking finger-painting.'

Nick held a hand up. ‘I don't think either of you can hear one another right now. If you can't seem
to listen
, what you have to do is
Two Listen
. One of you talks for two minutes. One of you listens and repeats, word for word, what's been said. Then you swap over.'

By the end of the session, it had all come out. All the little
resentments first and then the underlying pain. His shame that he wasn't the breadwinner. Her fear that she was going to miss seeing her kids grow up.

Nick could tell they were afraid that the ceasefire would disappear as soon as they left the room. It happened. So he gave them three We-Fit assignments. Affirmations to say alone and together. A massage exercise. A questionnaire to fill out and share.

‘Thank you,' they said together, as they left.

‘It was a pleasure,' Nick said and he meant it. Nothing beat fixing other people's problems. It was the best feeling in the world.

Coming to live in Ireland was supposed to reduce her stress levels, Kelly thought as she closed her laptop, not increase them. She had spent the morning trawling around three architectural salvage yards trying to find a Belfast sink. She'd driven to Rathmines to pick up some fabric samples. Then she'd taken the M50 out to IKEA to return two rugs a client had rejected.

It was great that Nick's business was finally picking up because she was ready to take a break from all this. She closed her laptop, curled up on the sofa and switched on the TV to catch Nick's slot on the
OO
show.

Every time Kelly picked up an Irish magazine, Oonagh and Owen Clancy were plastered across a double page spread talking about his hair transplant or her body issues but the only body issue Oonagh seemed to have today was that she was wearing another dress that was at least one size too small.

‘So! Let's cut to the nitty-gritty, Nick.' Oonagh was purring. ‘What about sex? I mean, does it matter?'

Kelly felt a tiny twinge of possessiveness. Nick looked at Oonagh levelly. ‘It depends. If you're having sex, it doesn't matter much. If you're not, it matters a lot.'

Kelly grinned. That was what she loved about Nick. He was just so straight down the line.

She had so nearly not met him that it scared her. Her roommate Haru had booked a self-help seminar called ‘Your Future Starts Here', then she'd caught flu and given her ticket to Kelly instead. It was way over on West 34th Street and it turned out to be a lot
of New Age waffle about how you create your own reality and how the only thing to fear is fear itself. Kelly planned to leave at lunchtime and kill Haru later.

‘Let's do a little exercise before we break up,' the facilitator said. ‘I want you to walk up to someone in the room and ask them any question as long as you're a hundred per cent sure the answer will be no.'

Kelly was seriously tempted to walk up to her and say, ‘Can I get a refund?' when a guy came over and stood in front of her. He was older. Five or six years at least, and he wasn't her usual type. He looked Irish with those freckles and that sandy hair, but half the people in New York looked Irish so it was a surprise when she heard his voice.

‘Will you have dinner with me?' It was the accent that did it.

‘Um,' she said, looking into his eyes. They were warm and brown and direct. ‘OK.'

He laughed. ‘You were supposed to say “no”.'

‘Ask me something else.'

‘Do you have any idea how pretty you are?'

‘No,' Kelly lied.

She watched now while Nick taught the guest couple how to Hug Until Close and then do the Chakra Sexercise. Even Owen, who had been gazing at his fingernails since Nick started to speak, looked interested.

‘
Do
try this at home,' Oonagh beamed to camera when he'd finished. ‘Thanks to our coach on the couch, Nick Dillon. And thanks for all your calls saying how much you're enjoying We-Fit. Coming up next, Coco the psychic cocker spaniel and a disturbing report on human trafficking. Don't go away now!'

‘Can you hang around?' The production assistant caught up with Nick in the corridor. ‘She wants to see you on her own after the show,' her eyes widened, ‘in their dressing room.'

A little ribbon of anxiety unravelled in Nick's stomach. He'd thought his slot had gone well but maybe he'd been wrong. ‘I am calm and relaxed,' he told himself. ‘All is well in my world.'

‘Word of advice?' The runner made a face. ‘Don't sit on the sofa.'

The room was tiny and chaotic. The dressing table was
cluttered with make-up bottles, empty paper cups and plates containing half-eaten snacks. Oonagh was sitting on the arm of the sofa, eating Ladurée macaroons out of a box. She was biting each one in half then dropping the other half into the bin.

‘New diet,' she mumbled in her off-screen accent. ‘Half the calories. Half the fat. Sit!'

Owen's suit was thrown over the only chair so Nick had no choice but to sit on the sofa beside her. He lowered himself down gingerly.