The Heart Whisperer (9 page)

Claire was never interested in fame, performing was a kind of disappearing act for her, but Ray had known it was going to happen for him and it had. But what if it didn't happen again? What if the Horses never reformed? What was he supposed to do? Write jingles for the rest of his life?

He put the bucket and spade down and used the light of his phone to take a check on Rocky. ‘Hang on in there, mate!' He took a mouthful of slightly fishy Absolut. The gate to the playground was closed but it wasn't locked. He left the bucket on the path and went in and climbed on to a swing, standing on the seat and looping the chains around his arms, the way he had on the cover of
Special and Different
. All the other Horses had been in the background, out of focus, on the roundabout.

Ray had been a mediocre guitar player but his gravelly voice and his looks made him the perfect front man and Chip Connolly knew it. He'd started ‘No Horses' in ‘98 and they were still going nowhere when Ray joined in 2002. The first thing Ray did was change their name. Two years later, they had a deal, they were touring Asia and Australia, and the music press was calling them ‘The Irish Goo Goo Dolls' and ‘Forty Shades of Green Day'.

As far as Chip Connolly was concerned, he was the talent
and Ray was just the pretty boy. So right from day one, it pissed him off that Ray was the centre of attention, and he found hundreds of ways to show it. ‘Death by paper cuts,' Claire used to call it.

‘Our music is a collaborative process,' he told the NME once. ‘I write the songs and wait for Devine to stop looking in the mirror long enough to sing them.' Ray particularly loved that quote because even though the Horses' second and third singles charted in eleven countries, it was the one song that Ray had written that everyone remembered.

It spent twenty-six weeks in the UK top fifty. It went platinum. It made Smoke Covered Horses famous and then, two years later, it broke them up. It was called ‘Asia Sky' and he'd written it for Claire.

It had come from nowhere when he was on an AsiaSky flight from Tokyo to London after the 2006 Asian tour. The Horses had played twenty-four cities and Chip had made sure that Ray was miserable in every single one. Talking to Claire on the phone was the only thing that held him together. In Tokyo, he had booked himself through to Dublin and she had promised to get rid of Declan Brady for the night and meet him off the plane. At 35,000 feet, the words had come to him so fast that he had to scribble them on a cocktail napkin.

Bangkok and Tokyo

Another night. Another show.

6,000 miles of Asia sky,

That's all there is between us.

Gravity and atmosphere.

Suburban summers, teenage fears.

Friendship that has lasted years

That's all there is between us.

And I'm so glad I'm flying home to you.

AsiaSky takes off into the blue.

Till I'm so high that I can see it's true

The world is small when the world's just me and you.

‘Oh Christ, this is bad,' Chip had sneered when Ray played it. They were back in London, locked into the studio, working on their third album. ‘This is so fucking bad, James Blunt wouldn't even use it to wipe his arse.' He refused to have anything to do with it and Happy and Godot went along with him, the way they always did. So Ray went to Paul Fisher and got the go-ahead to record the song with session musicians. It was the first single from the album and it was the song the fans screamed for on the next tour. Chip used to turn his back when he was playing it. For Ray, that was a cut too far.

When the airline AsiaSky wanted to buy the rights to use the song in their ads, he sold them, just to piss Chip off. It worked. Chip had real tears in his eyes at the emergency meeting in Tarantula Records.

‘You sold us out for a fucking advert! How could you do that? You had no right.'

‘Yes I did!' Ray was lounging on Paul Fisher's leather sofa. He had exclusive rights. Publishing and recording. ‘I offered you guys a split, but you told me where to shove it. Remember?'

Chip leapt to his feet and lunged at him across the glass coffee table, and Happy had to grab him to stop him punching Ray. ‘It's over, do you hear me?' Chip yelled, struggling to get free. ‘I never want to see you again, you talentless fame whore.'

Fisher had tried to get them all to sit back down and work it out but Ray had refused until he had an apology from Chip. He could take ‘fame whore' but he wasn't taking ‘talentless'.

The wooden seat of the swing creaked under Ray's feet. Way off, over the humpy hill of Howth, a plane was coming in to land like a slowly falling star. Ray had been waiting for Chip to say ‘sorry' for three years now. Maybe Claire was right. Perhaps it was time to get Paul Fisher involved. He was flying to London for a meeting with Sounds Familiar on Monday. He'd call into Tarantula, let Fisher him take him out to lunch and ask him to broker a truce. This time next year, he could be back out there.

‘Hello Blackrock,' he called, into the darkness of the deserted park, ‘are you ready to party?'

Claire and Eilish were finishing their second helping of dessert when Eilish's phone pinged. She squinted at the screen. ‘How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.'

‘King Lear is texting you?' Claire grinned.

‘It's Holly. She was supposed to be coming home this evening but she's staying over at her dad's. Again. I've hardly seen her this summer. I've only got one more year before she goes away and she hates me.'

‘She doesn't hate you!' Claire picked up the hand-painted mug that Holly had made when she was seven. ‘She thinks you're the “Best Mum in the Wold”.'

‘What is a “wold” anyway?'

‘I think it's a grassy upland or a hill.'

Eilish sighed. ‘I can't believe that she's the same age I was when I had her. Where did the last seventeen years go?' She stood up and began to clear the table. ‘Promise me you'll have kids, Claire. And that you won't wait till you're forty and desperate and have to call on the services of Ray Devine. I'm sure you two have some kind of agreement about that.'

‘We don't.' They did. It was called the Desperation Clause.

‘God!' Eilish put the plates down again. ‘I've suddenly had a vision of Ray Devine,' she began to laugh, ‘as a dad. Can you imagine him pushing a buggy in his leather trousers and his sunglasses?' She stared at Claire. ‘At a mums-and-toddlers group,' she squeaked, ‘singing “The Wheels on the Bus!” with that pouty look he used to put on in the videos.'

Rocky was lying at the bottom of the bucket. He waved his claw feebly but the fight seemed to have gone out of him. Ray sang the Rocky theme tune, changing the lyrics to ‘The Eye of the Thai Girl' as he lifted him out of the bucket. He put him carefully on to the shovel. As he slid Rocky into the pond, something huge and white detached itself from the far bank and propelled itself over to see what was going on.

It was a huge swan. It unzipped the moonlit water and bore down on Rocky, swiping at him with its beak. Ray grabbed the loose lobster leg and hurled it. The swan whipped around,
distracted and behind it, Ray saw Rocky's claw raised in one last grateful salute before he sank into the water and disappeared.

Nick was involved in a complicated daydream about turning We-Fit into a series of seminars. He missed his turning and, before he realised what he was doing, he was taking the next left and saw, up ahead of him, the green-painted railings of his old school. Suddenly, he was eight years old again. He was rubbing the sleeve of his grey school jumper along the pebble-dashed wall, watching the other end of the road, waiting for his mum's green Citroën to appear, crossing his fingers that she wouldn't have brought Claire. Hoping that she wasn't going to honk the horn and flash the lights of the car when she saw him. Wishing she was like his friends' mothers. That she didn't always have to stand out.

He forced himself to focus on the bumper of the car in front. ‘I put the past in the past,' he affirmed to himself. But affirmations didn't work so well, now that he was back in Dublin.

Kelly had laid the table in the garden. They sat outside eating Parma ham and fig salad and toasted flat bread and shared their day. So far, Nick had managed to keep his promise not to tell her about the Channel 5 show, but it was getting harder every day.

After dinner, Kelly went to work on some mood boards in the kitchen and he took his laptop into the living room to do the prep for the
OO
show he'd put off earlier.

It was a piece on resolving conflict. Kelly had come up with the idea of calling it ‘Fight or Flight'. He typed up a quick intro. ‘Instead of trading insults, imagine you are about to board a flight that's taking you and your partner into your future together. Imagine your luggage in the hold. What parts of your past would you pack? What would you leave behind?'

He stared at the screen but he was seeing himself and Kelly somewhere over Nova Scotia on a plane bound for JFK. Coming back to Dublin had been a mistake. He had grown up here but America was his real home. He missed the anonymity of the city and the contagious optimism of the country.

If he really had a serious chance of landing
Relationship Rescue
, it would be the perfect excuse to leave. The series would
be shot in the UK. Kelly loved Dublin but she'd love London even more. And if the show was a success, if it went Stateside, it would be the perfect stepping-stone back to their old life in New York.

Kelly was so caught up in what she was doing that she didn't hear Nick come into the kitchen.

‘Hey!' He put his hand on her bare shoulder.

She jumped. ‘Nick! Don't creep up on me like that.'

‘Sorry.' He put his arms around her. ‘Are you OK?'

‘I'm fine. It's just PMT.'

Nick had been hoping they could take a long shower and make love but this wasn't a good sign. ‘Why don't we do a Chakra Connection? That'll relax you.'

‘Sure.' She wriggled out from under his arms. ‘I'll finish up here and see you upstairs in five.'

She waited till she could hear the sound of running water from the bathroom then she opened her laptop again and cleared her browsing history.

Nick put a finger on the crown of Kelly's head and she put her finger on his head. His hair was still damp from the shower. She stared into his eyes and wondered whether her Dundrum client's budget would stretch to Farrow and Ball paint. Elephant's Breath for the walls in the living room. Stony Ground for the skirting boards. Roman blinds. They'd hide the half-finished block of apartments on the other side of the street.

Nick moved his finger to her throat chakra and Kelly touched his Adam's apple lightly. It was sandpapery. He needed a shave. And she needed to get a bikini wax. She made a mental note to book one. She wondered if she had enough basil to make zucchini soup for tomorrow's supper.

Nick's hand drifted down to her heart chakra and she let her hand drop down onto his chest.

‘Other side!' he whispered.

‘Sorry!' she whispered back. If there wasn't enough fresh basil, she thought, she'd just use dried.

‘Hey,' Kelly said as they drove down the tree-lined avenue to the river walk, ‘what are you grinning about?'

Nick kept his eyes on the bumper of Rory's 4x4. ‘I was just thinking about that trip we took up to New England to see the leaves.' He'd been thinking about the email Oonagh had sent him, this morning. Clingfilms had seen the tapes. They loved Oonagh and Nick's ‘co-presenting chemistry'. They wanted to meet. It was probably just as well that Kelly had organized this walk in Powerscourt. He was so excited that, if they had been at home, he might have just blurted it out.

Still, his spirits sank at the thought of the next few hours. Niamh's heart was in the right place, but Rory was a pain in the arse. He had told Nick once that he'd cut his own balls off rather than go to a couples coach. ‘If I'm going to be emasculated,' he'd snorted, ‘I'd rather do it myself.'

But Rory didn't look like an ad for masculinity right now, squatting by the back door of his parked Lexus, trying to persuade his toddler to get out of the car.

‘Come on, sweetie,' he pleaded. ‘Daddy drove all the way. All you have to do is take one ickle step.'

Linh peered down at the ground. ‘Dirty!'

‘They're just leaves, pumpkin.' Niamh wrung her hands. ‘Do they have autumn?' she whispered to Nick. ‘In Vietnam?'

‘I wouldn't want to get
my
feet dirty if they were that pretty.' Kelly pointed at Linh's sparkly pink shoes. ‘Tell you what? Why don't you let your daddy give you a piggyback?'

Linh looked at her imperiously from beneath her razor-sharp
fringe, but she put her arms up and let Rory swing her up on to his shoulders and they set out along the riverbank.

‘You would not believe how heavy this child is,' Rory said to Nick, as if the weight of his daughter, like the square footage of his house and the size of his legal practice, was index-linked to his own importance.

Nick exhaled his irritation and imagined inhaling the beauty around him. The sunlight dappling the river, the silence of the woods, the squirrel darting down a tree trunk and crossing the path ahead of them.

‘Doggy!' Linh shrieked, breaking the silence. She pummelled Rory's head with her tiny fists. ‘Down!'

‘It's not a dog,' Rory lifted her down but he held on to her arms. ‘And it might have fleas.' She sank her teeth into his hand and broke free.

‘Ouch!' Nick said.

Rory hid his wince under a smile. ‘The funny part is Linh means
gentle spirit
.' He watched her chasing the squirrel. ‘It's just the terrible twos.'

Wasn't she three, now? Nick remembered Kelly saying she'd dropped over a birthday cake. ‘So how are you two coping with parenthood?' They looked exhausted, as if they hadn't slept for years.