The Heart Whisperer (6 page)

‘Why don't you get changed into something foxy and come out clubbing with me? Or we could open a bottle of wine and a box set.'

Claire pinched his cracker and took a bite. ‘I can't do that stuff any more.'

‘Why not?' he said petulantly.

She chewed slowly. ‘Because when my mother was my age, she wasn't out clubbing every night or staying up till three in the morning watching box sets.'

‘That's because box sets hadn't been invented.'

‘I'm just trying to be more grown up,' Claire sighed. ‘I wish you'd help.'

Ray looked down at his plate to hide his exasperation. It pissed him off that she was always comparing herself to someone she barely knew.

‘What's with the pout?' Claire laughed. Ray's Liam Gallagher-esque fringe had fallen into his eyes. His bottom lip had a sullen jut. He looked like his own picture on the cover of
It's Not You, It's Me
.

He shook his head. ‘I wish you wouldn't put your mother on a pedestal, that's all.'

‘That's rich coming from someone who spent a good part of the last ten years on his own pedestal,' Claire licked her finger and picked up the crumbs from his plate.

Ray Devine had moved in across the street the summer that Claire turned fourteen, the year that her brother had gone to college in Washington. Nick had promised he'd call every week but the calls got shorter and the gaps between the calls got longer and Claire got the message. She missed him but he had moved on. He had escaped and left her behind.

The house was so empty without him. The friends she had made at school had drifted away when term ended. It rained every single day that summer. Claire spent hours curled up on her bed reading, while the boy across the road spent hours sitting on the wall outside his house beneath the dripping hedge listening to his Discman.

Claire would never have had the courage to talk to a boy who looked like Ray Devine at school but one day, when the steady downpour turned into a monsoon, she pulled on an anorak and ran across the road, dodging the puddles.

‘Excuse me,' she said. His dark hair was plastered to his head. There were raindrops caught in his long eyelashes. ‘Why don't you go inside?'

There was a yell from the open window of the house behind the wall and the sound of a door slamming. ‘I'm cool.' His shoulders were hunched up by his ears.

‘You don't look cool,' Claire said. ‘You look frozen.' She stared
down at his soaked sneakers. ‘You can come over to my house if you want.'

At the door, she bit her lip and waited for the look that she'd seen on her friends' faces the only time she'd brought them home. The mixture of pity and curiosity. But Ray just trudged past her into the living room, his sneakers squelching, his hands tucked into the pockets of his damp jeans. ‘Can we watch TV?'

They sat on the sofa all afternoon watching
Countdown
and
Grange Hill
. After a while, her dad came downstairs.

‘I was just going to make an omelette,' he said. If he was remotely surprised or put out to find a strange boy in his living room, he didn't show it.

They ate, with plates on their knees, watching a documentary about Stephen Hawking, and the next morning Ray was sitting on the wall outside looking up at Claire's window when she opened her curtains. And that was how it began. He was like a brother but one who didn't nag her about her homework or tell her to tidy her room. He was way more fun than Nick had ever been. There was an engaging madness to Ray Devine.

‘Let's cycle up to Enniskerry,' he'd say. ‘Let's skip school and hop the train to Bray. Let's bring stuff down to Lennon's and reverse-shoplift. Let's play sweary Scrabble by the train tracks.'

Nick had never wanted to go the graveyard with her but Ray didn't mind. She'd bring scissors when she went there to trim back the grass from the headstone and she'd always leave something behind. A programme from a school play with her name printed in the cast list. A postcard of the Rock of Cashel she'd bought on a geography trip. A pebble in the shape of a heart. One Christmas, Ray had brought a set of battery-operated fairy lights. Claire could still see the tiny pinpricks of glitter in the darkness when they reached the gate and looked back.

People said there was no such thing as platonic friendship but Ray and Claire proved them wrong. When she didn't have a boyfriend to bring to her deb's dance, Ray had bought a tuxedo in Oxfam and hired a grumpy man in a Mercedes to chauffeur them to the hotel. When she finally did have boyfriends she'd still come home to find him sitting on the sofa watching TV with her dad.

After the band got their record deal and Ray moved to London, Claire thought she had lost him, the way she'd lost Nick, but he called her every week and emailed her and sent her kitsch postcards from every city he played. He'd even written a song about her, which was sweet and kind of embarrassing. It had been Smoke Covered Horses' biggest hit.

‘I can't eat any more of this hippy-dippy shit!' Ray pushed away the plate of hummus and crackers. ‘Do you have any cereal?'

Claire went over to the cupboard and found a box of Strawberry Clusters. ‘Declan's getting married,' she said without turning around, ‘to Emma Lacey.'

Ray still enjoyed elaborate fantasies about killing Declan and Emma for what they'd done to Claire. She'd been in tatters when he persuaded her to move in here three years ago. He tried to keep his voice level. ‘How do you feel about that?'

Claire picked a piece of freeze-dried strawberry out of the box and let it melt on her tongue. ‘Better than I thought I would.'

‘Fuck Declan Brady and Emma Lacey,' Ray said. ‘Steve Soder-bergh is going to see you in
The Spaniard
and put you in
Ocean's Fifteen
and you're going to marry Ryan Gosling and have lots of little goslings and I'll never see you again. Don't do it, Claire.' He slid down on to the floor, crawled across the worn floorboards and grabbed her leg. ‘Don't marry Ryan. I can't live here without you.'

‘You won't have to.' She threw a cluster of toasted oats at him and he caught it in his mouth. ‘You'll be out there on the Smoke Covered Horses' comeback tour, right?'

‘Right.' He got up again. ‘Course I will.'

She gave him a searching look. ‘Any word from Chip?'

‘Not yet. He's just taking his time crawling back.' Ray dusted his knees down and sat down again.

‘Maybe you should get Paul Fisher to talk to him.'

‘Mmmm.' Ray decided to move the conversation along. ‘In other news, my cleaning lady, the lovely Lana, has gone back to Poland to open a pharmacy and marry a badger.'

Claire laughed. ‘Are you sure?'

‘That's what she said. Though I think she meant “a butcher”. I hope so.'

Claire stared into the cereal box. ‘I could do your cleaning.'

‘What?'

‘As part payment for the rent.'

‘What?' Claire insisted on paying Ray five hundred euros a month for the basement flat. He always made sure it went back to her in dinners and lunches, movie tickets and petrol, but he wished she wouldn't pay him at all. ‘Have you lost your little ginger mind? You don't have to pay me rent. I'm loaded. Every time “Asia Sky” plays on the radio I get fifty quid or something. I just resold the rights to the Japanese airline for an obscene amount of money. You are not doing my cleaning. You can make me a cup of tea, though.' He made a swipe for the cereal. ‘No milk, two sugars.'

‘I'd love to,' she said sweetly, ‘but it's Tuesday. So according to The Contract, it's your turn.'

Kelly was due in Deansgrange at two o'clock to check on a kitchen installation. She was queueing for a decaf in Sol on Baggot Street when the rain started. ‘Here we go again!' The barista rolled his eyes. ‘Will it ever stop?'

Three things about Dublin made Kelly mad. The awful coffee. The incomprehensible one-way system. And the way everyone acted as if wet weather was the end of the world. Apart from that, she loved it, unconditionally. She'd loved it from the moment she'd seen it from the plane. She remembered looking out the window at the spread-out city between the patchwork of green hills and the grey ripple of the sea and thinking,
This is where we'll have our family.

She loved the faded city squares and the little seaside villages Nick took her to at the weekends. She loved that she could see the Sugarloaf from their bedroom window and that it was dark enough at night to watch the constellations wheeling across the sky above their tiny garden. She loved the soft vowels and the hard consonants and the way everyone talked to her, as if this was a village, instead of a city. She paid for her coffee, went outside and took off her sunglasses then opened the umbrella she always kept in her purse. She'd grown up in Seattle, she was used to rain.

‘The brilliant thing,' Kelly had told Nick when they'd finally
named the elephant
that was their Tribeca apartment, ‘is that now that we're both freelance, we can live anywhere.'

The apartment was just one of a whole herd of elephants that had stampeded through their lives after Nick had lost his job. There wasn't time for him to build up a private business and they
couldn't afford to pay $4,000 dollars rent on her salary. The problem was that neither of them wanted to live in New York if they couldn't live in Manhattan. They sat by the Hudson on a hot summer evening playing Second Guesses where one person had to guess what the other one wanted.

‘Boston?' Nick asked her. She shook her head. ‘Chicago?'

‘Think farther away.'

‘San Diego?'

‘Farther again.'

Nick laughed. ‘Farther away than San Diego,' he pointed out, ‘is Mexico.'

‘I'm thinking Dublin.'

Nick stared at her for a long time. ‘Are you sure?'

‘It would be a fresh start and it's what I'd love, if you think we could be happy there.'

Nick curled his fingers around hers. ‘I think we could be happy anywhere.'

Nick had meant what he said that day by the river but, sometimes, over the last year, he'd regretted saying it.

Starting a coaching business in a recession hadn't been easy. For the first few months he'd only had a trickle of clients. Then he started doing an agony uncle slot on Fish FM to build his profile but nothing much came of it. Now, after only two appearances on TV, his phone was ringing off the hook. This week, he'd been booked solid for private coaching sessions. If things kept going like this, he could seriously think about giving up Fish.

The radio slot hadn't worked out the way he'd hoped. Most problems just couldn't be solved in one minute. Dom Daly, the host of the show, treated the slot as a joke, and maybe it was just Nick's imagination, but since his two TV appearances he had been trying to make a fool of him.

This morning, along with a couple who were constantly bickering and a man whose fiancée was a compulsive liar, Nick had a caller who said that her boyfriend had ‘a reptile dysfunction' and then hung up.

‘Seeya later, alligator!' Dom laughed. ‘Any advice, Doc Nick?'

‘If Miriam thinks her partner has a serious problem,' he said patiently, ‘she should tell him that.'

‘Come on. There must be things your wife doesn't tell you.'

‘No,' Nick said. ‘We don't keep secrets from one another. We—'

‘Going to have to cut you off there, Doc. That's all we have time for on “Problem Solved” today. The next song goes out to you and your lovely wife.'

It was ‘Shiny Happy People' by REM.

It was pouring when Nick left the studio. He made a dash to the Drury Street car park, taking a short cut along King Street. It took him past the old Mercer's Street Hospital. It was an apartment block now but it still made him feel queasy, this pretty Victorian building. This was where his mother had been taken after the accident. He hurried past the doors, clutching his wet car keys in his clenched fist. How could he have thought that he could make a fresh start in a place that was so full of memories?

‘Change partners!' the dance instructor yelled.

‘I'm not changing you.' Nick kept one hand on Kelly's shoulder and the other on her narrow waist as the music started again. He looked at their reflections in the mirrored wall. The ordinary-looking guy with close-cropped sandy hair and the heart-stoppingly beautiful brunette smiling up at him. Dom at Fish was right. They were shiny, happy people.

‘You look Brazilian in that dress,' he shouted over the sudden blare of salsa music.

Kelly gave him a mischievous look. ‘I look Brazilian out of it, too.'

‘You're full of surprises.'

‘I have another surprise for you,' she grinned up at him.

‘Change partners!' the instructor called, again.

‘Later!' Kelly mouthed over her shoulder as she danced away with a man in a grey jumper.

Date Nights were Kelly's idea. One night out every month devoted to romance and honeymoon sex. She did the planning. Nick never knew whether he was going to wind up at a Thai
cookery class or a French film or in the private steam chamber of a spa. He watched her now, dancing gracefully away from him and wondered what else she had up her sleeve.

‘Hello.' A woman in her thirties with lank blonde hair was standing in front of him and he took her in his arms. ‘I think you're amazing,' she yelled over the music, ‘on TV.' He spun her round and she landed, heavily, on his foot. ‘Sorry!' To his surprise, she looked as if she was going to cry.

‘It's OK,' he said.

She shook her head and pulled away. ‘I thought it would help if I could talk to you but it won't.'

They juddered to a halt and stood still in the circle of spinning dancers. ‘What is it?' Nick asked her. She was taller than Kelly, they were almost eye-to-eye but she wouldn't look at him.