The Heart Whisperer (39 page)

Dog kept lagging behind and she almost had to drag him the last few hundred yards to the park. She sat on a bench inside the gate and he lay down, closed his eyes and put his huge grey head on her foot. ‘Is this it?' she asked him, put out. ‘Don't you even want to go and wind the swan up?' He lifted his shaggy head and gazed off at the pond wistfully, as if it were Everest and he was a retired explorer who would never make it up there again.

When she got him back home he folded himself up in the corner, put his head on the blue knitted draught snake and went
back to sleep again. He hadn't been himself since the day Richard had tried to get rid of him. Did dogs get colds? She put on the kettle, made herself a cup of peppermint tea then sat at the table and opened her laptop to Google ‘dog flu' but her fingers had other ideas and typed in ‘Nick Dillon marriage break-up' instead.

There were dozens of links. The first one took her to an online edition of an Irish tabloid. The homepage had a shot of Nick pulling a scarf over his face under the headline ‘
TV Doc Pulls the Wool over His Lies
'. She felt a surge of protective anger. He didn't deserve this.

There was a second picture below it of a woman in her seventies with frosted, blonde hair. Mrs Cunningham. What on earth was she doing in a piece about Nick? Claire took a sip of her tea and scrolled down to the second headline.

‘An Alcoholic Mother. A Childhood Marked by Tragedy. A Neighbour Explains Why Life Coach Nick Dillon's Life Is Such a Mess!'

Claire leaped up, knocking over the cup, splashing scalding-hot tea on to her jeans. ‘The
bitch!
' she whispered. The Cunninghams had a long-standing vendetta against her dad but this was going too far. She sat down again and leaned her elbows on the table in the pool of cooling tea. She was so angry that she had to force herself to focus on the words.

‘In the wake of the revelations about his broken marriage, a neighbour in the suburban Dublin estate where Nick Dillon grew up has disclosed details that cast fresh light on his current troubles.

‘Dillon's mother, Maura, a GP, died in 1983, in a drowning accident. But prior to that, his family life had already been shattered by her struggle with alcoholism.

‘ “Dr Dillon was frequently incoherent and abusive,” says Caroline Cunningham, whose house overlooks the unkempt garden of Dillon's childhood home. “It was terribly hard on the children, they were both deeply troubled. Especially Nicholas, who was old enough to understand what was going on.” ‘

Claire couldn't read any more. She picked up her laptop and grabbed her keys. This was slander.

Nick was carrying the old man's lunch tray back down to the kitchen when the front door opened. Over Claire's shoulder he could see one of the photographers, the bald guy, pointing his lens.

‘Close the door!' he said, quickly.

She slammed it, pulled off her green scarf, opened her satchel and took out her laptop. ‘You need to see this.'

Nick shook his head. ‘I know what the papers are saying about me.'

Her green eyes were bright with anger. ‘I'm sorry about you and Kelly but this isn't just about you any more!' She snapped the laptop open, came over and held it up.

‘Seriously,' Nick was still holding the tray. ‘I'm in the middle of something.'

‘Read it!'

He lifted his eyes and scanned the screen. ‘Jesus!' he said, softly. ‘Unbelievable.'

‘We have to do something!' Claire's freckles were standing out in her pale face, the way they always had when she was sick or upset.

Nick felt his knees begin to give. He put the tray on a pile of old telephone books and sat down heavily on the second step of the stairs. ‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Get a printed apology from the paper. We can start by going next door and getting that
horrible
woman to admit that she made this all up.'

Nick stared down at the tired carpet between his knees. The brown and fawn pattern had worn away to the cream plastic weave in the middle of the step. ‘We can't.'

‘Nick, we have to. Please! I know you have your own problems and I'm sorry but we can't let the Cunning Hams get away with this! It's slander. We can go together.'

Nick looked up again. He wanted to put his arms around her, to soften the blow, but he couldn't because he was the one who had to deliver it. ‘We can't get her to admit that she made it up,' he said softly, ‘because it's true.'

‘What?' Her face tightened. Two high spots of colour came into her cheeks.

‘Mum had a problem,' he said, carefully. ‘She had a lot of problems.'

She backed away from him. Her mouth was trembling, her eyes were filling with tears. He was watching his little sister lose her mother all over again.

‘I'm sorry you had to find out like this.'

‘I don't …' Her voice dropped to a whisper then failed her. ‘But … but … I never saw her drinking,' she said, suddenly certain again.

‘You did.' Nick sighed. ‘You just didn't know it.'

He remembered Claire's first words. ‘
The bin is on fire.
' His mother had stupidly emptied an ashtray with a lit cigarette into it and the old man had jumped up from the table, pulled on a mitten and rifled through the bin until he found it. His mother had laughed at him but people died in fires. It happened all the time.

Nick had crept downstairs at night, for months afterwards, just to pour water in on top of the rubbish. He used to hide her lighters and matches. He sometimes hid her keys too, so she wouldn't take Claire out in the car.

Claire looked around the familiar hall trying to find something solid, something that could contradict what Nick had said. ‘What about her practice?' she said. ‘What about her patients?'

‘Most days, nobody came.'

‘No!' Claire had to get him to understand. What was wrong with him? ‘She was working all the time. Don't you remember? She used to work late every night and at the weekends.'

‘She used to lock herself in the surgery.' Nick shook his head. ‘But she wasn't working.' He remembered the time the old man had to take the lock off the surgery door because she had passed out in there.

Claire swallowed. ‘The bottles we found in the surgery, in the filing cabinet,' she said softly, ‘they weren't yours, were they?' A tear ran down her chin and fell on to her collar. Nick took a crumpled tissue out of his pocket and held it out to her, but she shook her head and let her face fall into her hands. So he sat there, on the second to last step of the stairs and listened to the muffled sounds of her crying, waiting for what he knew was coming next.

‘What about the day of my birthday?' Claire lifted her head.

Nick shook his head. ‘You'll have to ask him.' He pointed at the surgery door. ‘Ask your dad.'

He had his head bent over a crossword. He didn't look up but Claire knew, by his face, that he had heard them talking in the hall and knew everything.

‘Dad?' she said. ‘Is it true?'

He put the cap back on his pen and stared down at the paper for a long time without saying anything. He cleared his throat. ‘I wanted to protect you, Claire. I didn't want to destroy the good memories you had of her.'

She crossed the room and stood in front of his chair. ‘Had Mum been drinking on the day of the accident?'

‘What good is it, going over all this now?' He pressed his lips between his teeth. ‘It was nearly twenty-eight years ago.'

‘You have to tell me,' she whispered.

He put his hand over his mouth so she had to lean forward to hear him. ‘She had an alcohol level of two hundred and ten milligrams in her blood.'

‘Tell me what that means.'

He looked up at her, his grey eyes rimmed with red. ‘It means “yes”.'

A bald man with a camera tried to take Claire's picture through the windscreen of the car. She accelerated out of the driveway so fast that he had to jump out of the way. Loud, gaspy wails escaped through her mouth. She was crying so hard that she could hardly see where she was going. She clipped the kerb as she turned on to the Milltown Road, there was a yelp from the back and a grey blur filled the rear-view mirror. It was Dog. She hadn't wanted to leave him at home on his own. She had forgotten that she had him with her. He was clinging to the seat by his claws but she couldn't slow down. She had to get as far away from the house as possible. If she stopped, the past would catch up with her.

Dog managed to squeeze himself through the gap between the seats and climb into the front. He loomed over her and tried to lick her face, then he curled up in the passenger seat and put his
head on her knees. She tangled her fingers in the fur on the back of his neck and drove, only taking her hand away to change gear.

When she got to the end of the road, she didn't know where to turn. Left or right? She remembered how she used to navigate when her mum took her on magical mystery drives. Tears ran down her face and dripped onto Dog's ears and he twitched them away. Claire drove and drove. The suburban streets gave way to the dual carriageway and then she was on the N11 with the witch's-hat peak of the Sugarloaf ahead of her, silhouetted against the fading afternoon sky. She drove on past the turn-off for Ashford and then Rathdrum, and it was only when she saw a sign for the Beehive pub that she finally realised where she was going.

She held her breath as she took the turn and kept holding it as she followed the narrow road between the hedgerows, past tall trees that must have still been saplings when she was a child. She was half hoping that she wouldn't be able to find her way, but there was a sign at the next crossroads. The automatic barrier at the entrance to the car park was closed and she pulled over beside it.

The wind hurled a gritty handful of sand at her face as she opened the door, then it tore at her hair and pulled at the hem of her coat. The shock of being here again stopped her tears but her breath was still coming in broken gasps. She leaned her elbows on Mossy's sagging roof and looked up the track towards the dunes. The sky above them was low with gathering clouds. It was four o'clock on a March afternoon and it was already getting dark. What was she doing here?

She wanted to get back into the bright yellow Yaris. She imagined herself driving away, turning on the radio, going home. But instead she walked around and opened the passenger door. Dog stuck his head out and lifted his nose, sifting the scent of the sea air. One of his ears blew inside out and Claire turned it the right way round again. He licked her cheek then he climbed down stiffly and slipped through the gap at the end of the barrier as if he'd been here a hundred times before.

She watched him for a minute then she stepped on to the track, though her heart was hammering against her ribs as if it was
trying to break out. Dog crossed the tarmac car park and disappeared through the gate that led through the dunes.

Claire hurried after him, stopping in the lee of the pebble-dashed wall of the public toilet to catch her breath. She had the same sickening feeling of foreboding that marked the beginning of one of her nightmares. ‘Dog!' She wrapped her coat around her and ran to the gate. He was a long way down the sandy path, heading for the sea.

‘Dog! Come back!' she yelled, but he disappeared between the dunes and she had to follow him, fighting her instinct to turn around with every step.

Then, through a gap in the dunes, she saw it. The beach where her mum had died. It was as she remembered it except that the sparkling blue sea was almost black today. The long golden strand was grey. The white walls of the ruined bathing hut were covered in layers of graffiti.

In front of the hut, Claire could see the exact spot where her mum had set out their picnic rug. She put her head down and trudged across the sand towards it. Her lungs were burning by the time she finally sat down and hugged her knees to her chest.

Everyone had known. Nick, the Cunninghams, her mother's patients. And Claire had known too, not that her mum was drunk, not that, but that something was wrong. That was why she had been so wretched the day of her birthday. Why she hadn't wanted to go for a drive. Why she had wanted her dad and Nick to be there.

‘You're safe now. You can stop crying,' her mum had said when she'd pulled her out of the sea, but Claire hadn't felt safe. She'd been scared ever since they got into the car, that something bad was going to happen. And then it had.

There was a loud crash from the old surgery. When Nick got to the door, the table was lying on its side and the old man was crossing the room, on one crutch.

‘None of this would be happening if you hadn't come back,' he said. ‘What are you even doing here, Nicholas? When are you going to stop running away?'

Nick stared at him. ‘You're talking to me about running away?
The man who's been hiding upstairs for nearly twenty-eight years.'

The old man limped past him into the hall. ‘I'm going back up there now.'

‘Go right ahead.' Nick picked up the table and set it back on its feet. He listened to the heavy thud of the crutch as his father dragged himself up step by step. Somehow he made it to the top. The bedroom door opened and when Nick heard the familiar sound of it closing, something snapped. He bounded up the stairs and tore it open again. ‘This is your solution to everything, isn't it? Do nothing.' Nick never shouted. A part of him, detached, was listening in amazement.

The old man was collapsed on the bed. His face was grey, his forehead clammy with sweat. He had one arm shielding his eyes.

‘We could have been killed in a car crash or a fire. I could have lost my eye that day that I fell. Claire could have drowned the day of the accident too. But you did nothing. You knew Claire blamed herself for what happened and you did nothing about that either. You let her think that she had the perfect mother and you made me go along with it.'