The Heart Whisperer (4 page)

‘I still can't believe you went to an audition,' she said now. ‘Details! Gories! Tell me everything.' Claire filled her in on her promise and about blowing Ray off and messing up the audition and having to go back and read with Sam.

‘You did that crying thing?' Eilish gazed at her over the rim of her coffee mug. ‘It's so weird and freaky when you do that! Were they impressed?'

Claire remembered the awkward silence in the room as tears trickled down her face. ‘I think they were mortified.'

Eilish put her mug down and put her hands over her face. ‘Don't talk to me about mortified! Not after this morning.' She had come straight from an extra job.

Claire put down her cup. ‘How did it go?'

Eilish dropped her dark head down on to the table and held up her hand. ‘Picture this!' she said. ‘A corporate video for a chemical company that makes toilet cleaner. To show how fun cleaning toilets can be, some sadist came up with the idea of a flash mob – sorry, a “flush-mob” – of cleaning ladies. So I've spent the morning in a crimplene housecoat and curlers and saggy Norah Batty tights, dancing up and down Dawson Street.'

Claire almost choked on her tea. ‘You're making this up for
Eyelash and Eclair.
' Whenever they were stuck on the extra bus for hours on end, they passed the time inventing a sitcom about two failed actresses.

‘Would I make up a song,' Eilish sat up and looked at Claire from beneath her black fringe, ‘to the tune of “Flash Dance” that went: “What a feeling! Now I'm cleaning!” It was up there with
the time we had to wear those really tight bacteria body stockings and attack the giant tooth in that ad for denture cleaner.' She groaned. ‘You're right, Claire. You have to get out of this extra hell and I'll be right after you. When Holly goes off to uni next year, I'll start going back to auditions too.' She toasted Claire with her empty mug. ‘I'm proud of you!'

‘For doing the worst audition ever?'

‘For finally coming out of the three-year tailspin you've been in since Declan.' Eilish's blue eyes were serious. ‘I'm glad you want to get your life back on track. But don't do it for your mum, Claire. Wherever she is, she doesn't need that. Trust me, I'm a mother, all that mushy malarkey about unconditional love is true. Do it for you.'

The battered black leather sofa in the No Name bar reminded Ray of a jacket he'd bought on the King's Road the day Tarantula had signed Smoke Covered Horses. He'd thrown it into the crowd in the Ruby Room in Tokyo in 2008. He could still remember the scrum of girls who had fought one another to get hold of it. He missed it. The intoxicating thrill of holding a crowd in his hand. Being the one still point in a room gone wild. People who thought cocaine was addictive had never tried fame. Ray still got the double-takes and the second glances, though it was happening less and less, and on the days when nobody recognised him at all, he just reminded himself to enjoy the anonymity because it wasn't going to last. He was going to get it all back and this time it would be on his terms.

He opened his laptop. He'd been hanging around the apartment all day trying to crack a brief for an advertising jingle. He'd thought maybe a change of scenery would help. The jingle thing was just a way of passing the time until Chip Connolly swallowed his pride and they could reform the Horses but it kept Ray out of trouble, for a few hours a day anyway. It wasn't like he needed to work. Between the royalties from ‘Asia Sky' and the fee he was paid by the airline that used it in their ads, he was set up for life.

After he'd moved back to Dublin, a UK jingle company had tracked him down. Sounds Familiar specialised in ad soundtracks for obscure foreign brands. Tracks that sounded like well-known
songs, but not enough for an original artist to sue. Ray, it turned out, was very good at them. He'd come up with ‘Crumbelievable!' for a Canadian stuffing and ‘You Tape my Breath Away' for a Kenyan dental floss. He scanned the brief for King's Cooking Oil, a Tasmanian brand. They wanted something ‘anthemic and emotive'. Didn't everyone? He opened a lyrics database and started a search. ‘Big boys don't fry?' No. ‘It's my party and I'll fry if I want to?' That had possibilities.

‘Hey! It's Ray, isn't it?' A dark-haired girl at the next table was smiling at him. Sounds Familiar were expecting ideas in the morning but she had a mouth like Penelope Cruz and he wasn't going to argue with that. ‘You have no idea how much I love you!' She shook her head. ‘I mean, your music.'

‘This is a bit unfair.' He closed his laptop. ‘You know my name but I don't know yours.'

She picked up her drink and moved on to the sofa beside him. ‘I'm Cara, actually.'

‘Cara actually' didn't leave Ray's apartment till half three in the morning. After she'd gone, Ray showered, made a pot of coffee and sat down at his desk then cracked the King's jingle in under an hour. It wasn't a
rip-off
of Westlife, it was a
homage
– ‘Frying without Kings'.

Nick sat up as straight as he could on the overstuffed chair and stared at the winking red light on the huge camera that was trained on his face.

‘I love new challenges,' he repeated to himself. ‘I approach them with boldness and enthusiasm.' His stomach fluttered and then jolted down into his gut. He'd prepared his piece and run over it with Kelly a dozen times. He'd hoped he'd get a chance to talk it through with the hosts but they had only just appeared.

‘Howya, Nick!' Oonagh Clancy leaned down, planting a sticky lip-glossed kiss on his cheek. She sat down on the sofa. ‘Why did nobody tell me he was gorgeous?'

Owen Clancy sat beside her and fumbled with his notes while one girl combed his shock of black hair and another attached a microphone to his lapel.

‘Three, two, one,' the floor manager counted down on her fingers. Oonagh crossed her legs and inflated her chest.

‘Hello.' She gave the camera a dazzling smile. ‘I'm Oonagh Clancy.' Her Dublin accent was gone.

‘And I'm Owen Clancy.' Owen beamed. ‘And you're welcome to OO
in the Afternoon
.'

They sat, smiling at one another while the jingle played.

‘We put the “OOOH” in the afternoon.

We're there for YOU in the afternoon.

We're OO, OO in the afternoon!'

Owen Clancy had already been a newsreader when Nick was still young. He was in his fifties. Oonagh was twenty years younger. She'd started out as a weather girl on TV3 when Nick was living in the States.

The jingle was winding up.

‘We're here from two and right THROUGH the afternoon.

It's OO, OO in the Afternooh-ooh-ooh-oon!'

‘We've got a great show lined up for you, today,' Owen boomed. ‘We'll meet the man who crossed Ireland backwards dressed as a woman.'

Oonagh's smile dissolved, seamlessly, into sympathy. ‘We'll be talking to a young father about his harrowing struggle with bowel cancer.'

‘And later on,' Owen winked, ‘our chef, the lovely Ita Fox, will be sharing her luscious Double Chocolate Cupcakes.'

‘But first,' Oonagh turned to Nick, ‘let's meet our new coach on the couch, radio agony uncle Nick Dillon. Nick will be joining us every week to talk love, lust and making marriage last.' Oonagh beamed at him. ‘Welcome to the show!'

‘Thank you. My coaching is all based on honesty so I have to be truthful and confess that I'm pretty nervous. You guys make this look so easy.'

‘Well, we do it twice a week.' Oonagh patted her husband's head. She leaned over and stage-whispered to Nick, ‘I'd like to do it more but Owen's getting on a bit!'

‘Just wait till I get you on your own,' Owen laughed. ‘You are in so much trouble!'

‘Is that a promise?' Ooonagh swatted at him with her notes.

Owen put his elbows on his huge thighs. ‘So tell us about yourself, Doc.'

Doc?
Nick wasn't a doctor but he didn't want to get sidetracked from the intro he'd rehearsed. ‘Well, I grew up in Dublin but I've spent just over half my life in the States. I went to college in Washington and I worked in human resources in a finance company in New York for fifteen years, but people tend to bring their personal problems to work—'

‘Tell me about it!' Oonagh rolled her eyes.

‘So after I lost my job in the downturn, I retrained as a life coach, specialising in couples. I got married three years ago. So I have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk!'

‘Nick has designed a relationship workout programme to help you,' Oonagh pointed at the camera, ‘and me to get our relationships back in shape. It's called “We-Fit”. After the break he'll be teaching our guest couple how to strengthen their relationship through “Soul Gazing” and a fun game for two called “Complimentition”. Don't go away now!'

She dropped her D4 accent when the camera stopped rolling. ‘Jaysus, you're a natural!' She beamed at Nick. ‘Isn't he, Owen?'

Owen was fiddling with his mike and pretended not to hear.

Claire hadn't spoken to her agent since she'd walked away from Red Rows. At some point, she'd been passed on to his assistant Brenda, who handled extra work. She'd promised herself that she'd call Lorcan every single day this week but it was four o'clock now and she couldn't face being fobbed off by Brenda again.

She'd spent the previous day in RTE as an extra on
Fair City
and she'd been going home to have an early night but Ray had persuaded her to go out for ‘one drink'. They'd ended up in Copper Faced Jack's till three in the morning drinking way too much cheap white wine and talking rubbish.

She was going to have to develop some self-control if she didn't want to let her promise slip away before she'd given it a proper shot. Ray only worked for a couple of hours a day so he had plenty of time to play and he was too damned good at it.

He'd book tickets for a movie he knew she wanted to see or a
boat ride to Dalkey Island or a restaurant in Howth and then he'd claim it was too late to cancel. He'd talk her into driving to Sligo or Clare in a day. Once he produced her passport when they arrived in Rosslare and they ended up on a ferry to Le Havre. At night, he'd drag her off to Cassidy's for pints or to an obscure band in Whelan's or to a comedy club he'd heard was brilliant. If she refused to leave the house, he'd appear at her door with a pitcher of frozen margaritas and a DVD. It was like living downstairs from the Devil.

She poured herself another coffee and arranged herself and her hangover carefully on the uncomfortable chaise longue in the living room with a plate of toast balanced on her lap and switched on the TV, then jolted upright as her brother's face filled the screen.

‘It's too late to make up for what we didn't have when we were children,' Nick was saying to the camera. ‘We have to stop rereading the early chapters of our lives and start over with a blank sheet of paper.'

Their dad didn't die of a broken heart, the way people did in stories. He just sort of disappeared. He stopped whistling while he shaved. He stopped eating proper meals. He stopped reading Claire stories and taking her around the garden to help him talk to his plants. He stopped going to work. The graphic design company he worked for sent briefs to the house by courier instead and he stayed up all night in his bedroom sketching illustrations and storyboards for TV ads.

He'd shuffle downstairs red eyed, exhausted, to make breakfast for Nick and Claire. Sometimes their plates would still be on the table when they came home from school.

Claire remembered a pair of shoes that pinched from September to Christmas because her feet had grown a size. Dust bunnies the size of hamsters under her bed. Her Care Bears duvet cover flecked with damp spores because her dad had put on a load of washing and forgotten to take it out.

Little by little, Nick took over. He buttered Claire's bread on both sides and put a separate triangle of Laughing Cow cheese, which was what she liked, into her lunchbox. He made her fried egg and spaghetti hoops and Findus Crispy Pancakes and Vesta
Chicken Supreme. He reminded her to do her homework and checked to see that she had clean clothes for the morning. He combed out the tangles in her hair. When she was seven and he was eleven, he had seemed to love her more than anyone in the world.

She lowered the volume and looked at his face on the screen. His white American teeth looked too bright in his pale Irish face. He had two deep horizontal lines on his forehead and a thinner vertical one between his eyes. There were tiny threads of silver in his sandy hair. He was still her brother but he was a stranger.

Her phone began to ring. She rummaged around the sofa, looking for it.

‘Three years of radio silence and then suddenly you're calling me every day?'

‘Lorcan!' Claire shot up, knocking her toast on to the rug. ‘I don't mean to stalk you. I just wanted to let you know that I'm ready to start looking for proper acting work again.' Her voice was husky from shouting over the music in the club the night before. ‘I won't turn down extra jobs for the moment but I'd like to in the long-term because—'

‘Claire, slow down.'

She couldn't. She had to get it all out before she lost her nerve. ‘—Because the thing is, I have a plan. I've given myself a year to get my acting career back on track. So if there's something, anything at all, then please put my name forward.'

‘Are you available for a day's shoot next Wednesday?'

She caught her breath. ‘What?'

‘And for another five days spread out over the next nine months?'

‘Yes!'

‘Good. Because you've been cast as a shepherdess in
The Spaniard
.'

‘What do we write,' Oonagh asked Nick after the break, ‘on this blank sheet of paper?'