The Heart Whisperer (42 page)

The first week, she could still get him to eat. Half a smoked mackerel. A few slices of salami. A bowl of yogurt. But his appetite gradually dwindled away to nothing. She was supposed to hide his steroid tablets in a spoonful of peanut butter or a lump of pâté but he just sniffed the spoon and put his head down on his paws, so she had to wedge his jaws open with one hand while she pushed the tiny white pills down his tongue and into his throat. He looked slightly alarmed, but also impressed, as if this was a trick he'd taught her. Afterwards, he licked her hand to thank her. How had she ever been scared of him? she wondered.

He spent most of the day lying on the rug in the living room with his head on one of her winter boots or his favourite draught snake. She had told her agent that she was going away for a couple of weeks so she could stay with Dog. She sat on the sofa with her bare feet tucked under him, losing her mother again.

She unpacked her memories one by one and turned each one over in her mind, in the light of what she knew now, and let the truth float up to the surface.

The night her mum had woken her and they had sat for hours in the garden in the snow. That sickening clench in her stomach on magical mystery drives. The evening she'd crept downstairs and seen her mum dancing in her slip in the living room, with her arms draped around her dad's neck. The silence when Claire pressed the disc of the old stethoscope to the door of the surgery and listened.

‘You mustn't disturb your mum when she's busy,' her dad had said.

Claire had built her own life around the certainty that her mum was perfect, then she had hated herself for failing to measure up. And nine months ago, on her birthday, she had given herself one last year to be like someone who had never existed.

She tipped her box of mementoes on to the sofa. The empty perfume bottle and the dried-up stump of lipstick. The yellowing lace dress, the single Aran mitten with a scorch mark on the palm, the hairbrush with the few copper hairs still caught in the bristles. She pulled the worn rubber band off the stack of photographs and let them fall through her fingers on to the floor. They pooled around Dog on the rug. She picked one up, then another, searching them for some sign of what she knew now. But the woman in the photographs looked as carefree as she always had. She was still keeping her secrets. Claire felt a rush of anger which broke and dissolved into a flood of protective love for this beautiful, flawed stranger who she could never know.

Claire stared into the chill cabinet for a long time and then she called Eilish. ‘How do you know when a chicken is really good?'

‘It has a halo and a saintly smile on its beak?'

‘I'm serious. I need to find a good one. Dog hasn't eaten anything for nearly three days.'

‘Maybe you should just get him a fresh cod from the chipper. Dogs love fish.'

‘I think that's cats.'

‘Roast cat. He'd eat that.' Eilish was on constant mood-lightening duty. ‘You catch one. I'll cook it.'

‘Please!' Claire said. ‘I'm freezing here.'

‘Just go for the one with the plumpest thighs.'

Claire was deliberating between two when she heard a familiar voice.

‘Saoirse, what a lovely name. Are the poussins free range?'

She turned around and there was Richard, with his back to her, talking to a girl in a Superquinn uniform.

‘These ones are.' Saoirse handed him a pair of pathetically small chickens in a styrofoam packet. As he reached out to take them, his cuff rode up and Claire saw his wrist.

‘Your Rolex!' she gasped.

Richard turned, surprised. ‘I bought another one,' he said, hastily, as he tried to pull his cuff down. ‘In Weir's.'

‘They didn't have any in Weir's!'

His face began to flush.

Claire took a step forward. ‘You pretended Dog had eaten it so I'd feel bad and get rid of him, didn't you?'

‘Calm down.' Richard held up the poussin packet, like a shield. A tiny trickle of blood escaped from the plastic and splashed onto his sleeve.

‘You bastard!' Claire reached into the cabinet, grabbed the nearest chicken and hurled it at him hard. It hit him in the stomach with a wet thud then landed with a crack on his foot. It was an extra-large chicken with very plump thighs.

Richard yelped and fell back against a picnic display. Packets of paper cups and plates and straws rained down around him.

‘Are you OK?' Saoirse asked.

‘No!' Claire said. ‘He's a liar and a control freak and he tried to kill my dog.'

The assistant looked horrified.

‘If my toe is broken, you'll pay for it, Claire!' Richard had slipped off his moccasin to massage his foot.

‘I'm sorry,' Saoirse whispered to Claire. ‘I'm afraid you'll have to pay for that as well or take it with you.' They looked at the chicken, lying on the tiled floor, then at Richard, who was limping away, with one shoe on and one shoe off, and then they both began to laugh.

‘Any word from Claire?' the old man asked. Nick shook his head. He'd been expecting her calls but they hadn't come. He wished he
had the energy to call her himself, to try to help her through all this, but he could barely get himself through the day.

‘Are you going out?'

Nick hadn't been planning to. Every time he left the house, someone had a go at him. He understood why everyone was angry. Why the girl at the checkout in Tesco had called him a fraud and why the man who was digging a hole in Baggot Street had climbed out of it just to shout at him and why a nice old lady in a Mercedes had rolled down her window at a red light and flipped him the bird. But understanding didn't make it any easier to deal with. ‘Do you need something, Dad?'

‘I was wondering if you were going to the shops. I thought, you could just call in on Claire to see if she's OK.'

‘I think she just needs some time. She has a lot to process.' Nick picked up the tray.
Process
, he thought sadly, was too clinical a word to describe what went on in the big, messy engine of a person's heart.

‘I need the prescription for these painkillers filled again.'

Great, Nick thought. That would give the woman in the pharmacy another chance to glare at him. ‘Okay.'

‘You might pick up a couple of lamb chops,' his father said. ‘And some potatoes.'

Chops and potatoes?
Nick raised an eyebrow; that was adventurous. His father hadn't eaten anything except omelettes and Jaffa Cakes for twenty-seven years. ‘Anything else?'

The old man stared at the floor. ‘I told her I'd take you and Claire away from her if she didn't stop but I couldn't do it. I thought it would kill her if I did that. It was my fault that she got so bad.'

‘It wasn't anyone's fault.' Nick sighed. ‘It's a disease.'

‘What about what I did afterwards?' the old man said, quietly. ‘What about leaving you and Claire to look after yourselves? Is cowardice a disease too?'

Nick dumped the dishes into the sink and ran the hot water over the empty plates. This morning the old man had asked for bacon and sausages and he'd just eaten the Tesco lasagne that Nick had
been planning to have for lunch. He'd have to make himself an omelette, he thought. He couldn't face the supermarket again.

His phone rang and he retrieved it with a soapy hand. ‘Nick, I need to talk to you.' Oonagh's voice took him by surprise. It was her professional television voice. ‘Tork tu yo' instead of ‘tawk-ta-ya'. This was the first time she'd called since the papers had revealed that his marriage was in trouble.

‘Oonagh, I've left a dozen messages for you. I just wanted to say how sorry—'

She cut across him. ‘Can we meet for coffee in an hour?'

‘I'm not sure meeting is such a great idea. I'm still getting a lot of flak when I go out in public.'

‘Three o'clock? Pasta Tosca?' There it was again, Oonagh's fake TV twang. ‘Posta Tosca?'

Nick had shot down her dream job. He supposed that he owed her a chance to rip him apart.

Oonagh was sitting under the awning outside the restaurant. She was wearing a skin-tight red dress and no coat, even though it was a chilly afternoon. Nick guessed she must be going someplace afterwards.

‘You don't want to put up with the abuse we're going to get if we stay out here,' he said. ‘We'd better go inside.'

She frowned but she got up and followed him and he found a table at the back. He went to the counter and ordered coffees from an Italian waitress who seemed blissfully unaware that she was serving Ireland's most hated man.

‘So, “no skeletons” and “happily married”.' Oonagh shook a sachet of sugar. ‘That's what you told Curtis.'

‘I know. And I lied. I want to apologise to you again, for everything.'

‘It doesn't matter.' She was sitting up very straight the way she did when she was on-screen.

‘It does. I completely undermined the credibility of the
OO
show and it's my fault that you won't get to present
The Ex-Factor
. You were really straight with me about the problems you were having in your marriage but I didn't have the decency to tell you I was having problems in mine.'

‘Nobody's perfect.' She fluttered her eyelashes and gave him a dazzling smile.

Nick was confused. He had been expecting tears and fireworks. ‘You're being really kind about this. Way kinder than I deserve.'

‘Well …' She stood up. She hadn't even touched her coffee. ‘Thanks for meeting me. I have to go.' She stood up and glanced around as if she was looking for someone.

They'd only been here for five minutes but it was pretty big of her to have met him at all, Nick thought. He put some change on the table and they walked out into the street.

‘Thanks,' he said, ‘for being so incredibly understanding about
The Ex-Factor
. Do you know what you're going to do? Do you have a Plan B?'

She put her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him with a dreamy expression, then she kissed him hard on the mouth. She pulled away. ‘I am the queen of Plan B, Nick. You take care now.' She hurried away, surprisingly quickly, in her towering red heels.

Nick wiped a smear of lipgloss off his mouth with the back of his hand and stared after her. ‘What,' he thought, ‘was that all about?'

‘Howya, boss!' a bald man in a sheepskin jacket said, stepping into the street to pass Nick. He looked familiar but Nick couldn't place him. He nodded then turned away quickly in case the man decided to have a go.

Nobody was going to come and question Kelly about taking the little boy. The security guard had been right. It had been her lucky day.

The bedroom looked like a squat. The duvet cover was stained. There was a puddle of pasta sauce on the pale green rug. The baby clothes she had unpacked at Christmas were strewn around the floor. Things were even worse downstairs. She hadn't loaded the dishwasher or done a wash for weeks. She was going to have to tackle it.

She pulled off the wrinkled cotton nightdress she'd been living in and ran a shower. She soaped herself, washed and conditioned her hair and shaved her legs. She put on clean grey sweats then went back into the bedroom, sat on the padded blue velvet stool
and plugged in her hairdryer. Then she sat there staring at her pale face in the mirror. What was the point of drying her hair and putting on make-up and cleaning the house? Who was she doing it for? She didn't care about any of it and Nick wasn't here.

She went downstairs with her hair still wet and took the last carton of home-made courgette soup out of the freezer. It was labelled and dated in her own neat handwriting. There was even a little ‘v' for vegetarian. Every time she had cooked for herself and Nick, she had made extra to freeze. She'd been living on these meals for weeks now. Eating risotto for breakfast and Thai curries at three in the morning.

While the soup was warming she collected a pile of unopened post from where it was lying in the hall and dumped it on the kitchen table. She pulled out an envelope and tore it open. It was a Christmas card. She stared at the photograph of Rory and Niamh on the front. Linh stood between them, beaming, waving a sparkler like a wand. ‘Merry Xmas!' it said, ‘from our family to yours!' She stuffed it quickly back into the envelope and tossed it away.

She opened her laptop and stared at the dozens of emails in her inbox, then composed an ‘out of office' reply and shut it again. She sat at the table eating the soup while she listened to her phone messages. Most of them were from clients, a few were from Niamh, there were at least a dozen from Nick. She skipped through them without listening. The last message was from Paul-ine, the woman whose garden she'd fallen in. That day felt like a hundred years ago now.

‘Hello, Kelly. I'm not hassling you about the estimate for the extension or anything. We probably can't afford it anyway! I was just worried about you that day when you were here. Hope the Clomid is doing its job and not driving you too crazy. Call if ever you want to talk or even scream. I understand what you're going through.'

Kelly's hand hovered over the call-back button. Then she imagined what Pauline would think if she had seen her crossing the road with the little boy. She pushed her bowl away, went upstairs and got back into bed.

Dog couldn't stand up. Claire tucked a towel under his hindquarters and hoisted him up on to his feet and they made their way, slowly, out into the garden. He stood blinking in the watery sunshine, for a moment, sniffing the air, and then his back knees folded beneath him. He looked up at her, confused. His pupils were tiny black blurs in the hazy yellow irises of his eyes.

‘This is good,' she said, ‘let's just stay out here for a while.'

She went back inside for a rug and some cushions. She thought that maybe after he'd had a rest he'd be strong enough to get up again, but after an hour he was still there. She lay down beside him, face to face. His mouth was slack, his nose was dry and the fur on his face was clumped and dull.