The Heart Whisperer (18 page)

‘We are,' he said soothingly. ‘But I need a minute before I—'

‘Oh!' She smiled. ‘You just lie back and leave everything to me.'

‘What about you?' Nick said when they were finished.

‘I'm good, thanks.' Kelly fluttered her hand as if she were turning down a side order of fries. She pulled her dressing gown on again, slid on to the floor, then swung herself up into a yoga headstand. Her dark hair pooled on the carpet. ‘Gravity is supposed to help the sperm swim in the right direction,' she gasped.

‘I'd better get back to work.' And do what? he wondered. He'd
cancelled all his face-to-face sessions for this afternoon so they could have a romantic lunch before they went home to make love.

‘Nick,' Kelly called after him when he was halfway down the stairs. ‘Sweetie, will you come home early so we can do it again?'

No TV. No emails. No phone calls. No internet. No alcohol. No sex. Not until he'd written a decent song. Ray had made the rules and he was going to stick to them.

The blinds were drawn. The laptop was open. His guitars – acoustic and electric – were tuned. The table was piled with takeaway cartons, pizza boxes and Sapporo cans. The rug was littered with scrunched-up balls of paper and trodden-in Bombay mix.

He had done this before, why couldn't he do it again? He tried to think himself back into the mindset he'd been in when he wrote ‘Asia Sky'. What had made it so special?

He'd been miserable when he got on that plane in Tokyo. Great, he was miserable now. He'd been angry with Chip. Snap! Now he was angry with Claire. ‘
What music career? You're a jingle writer
.' He still couldn't believe she had said that. Even Chip, at his worst, hadn't been that vicious.

He picked up a ball of paper, smoothed it out on the table and read the scribbled lyrics.

‘Time flew like an arrow

To pierce our tomorrow.

I'm left here to wallow—'

He picked up another page:

‘She got an agenda

Put my life in a blender,

Return to sender—'

And another:

‘Too rich, too thin.

My favourite sin.

You have skin.

You smell like—'

‘Like what, Ray?' The voice in his head was Chip Connolly's. ‘Gin?' ‘Vim?' ‘A bin?' He sat biting his knuckles. He needed a drink but it was half past four in the morning and when he'd
made his rules, he'd poured everything in his cocktail cabinet down the sink. He went into the kitchen to check the freezer for vodka. There was nothing in there except the faint smell of lobster and his frisbee.

He crept down the stairs, skipping the step that creaked, and opened the door to Claire's flat. It wasn't her flat, he reminded himself, it was his. He could go wherever he liked. She might not even be down here. She'd been coming and going at weird hours for the last couple of weeks.

He made his way silently to her kitchen and opened her fridge. It was packed with food but there was no alcohol. He cursed and began to search the shelves and, at the back of the cupboard above the sink, he finally hit the jackpot. A dusty bottle of sake he'd given Claire in 2006.

The heat from Ray's laptop woke him up. It felt like it was burning a hole in his thighs. He sat up and the hangover hit him between the eyes, like a samurai sword. He vaguely remembered finishing the last of the sake and then he must have watched a DVD or, he glanced down at the screen of his laptop,
written an email
. Cold fingers of shame crept up his spine. It wasn't just an email. It was
an apology
to Chip Connolly.

‘Hey Chip,' it said, ‘it's been a while. Thinking about a Horses reunion and thought it was about time we buried the old hatchet. Just wanted to apologise for all the shit that went down when I sold “Sky” to the Japs. Sorry, man! I know that cut you up, big-time. Anyway, if you ever want to get together for a jam, you know where I am. Rx.'

Ray put his face in his hands and groaned. It was the ‘x' that got him. That was how he always signed his texts to Claire. It made him sound like a teenage girl.

Claire was at the hospital and Nick was doing a double coaching session so Kelly offered to go to his dad's house to pick up the dog and let the live-in carer in. She had chosen the carer herself. Nick had said it was the kind of thing Claire would be useless at so Kelly had advertised online, made a shortlist and interviewed three women. None of them seemed particularly caring to her but
Sinead, a neat woman in her sixties with a grey perm, seemed to be the most capable.

The woman from The Pet Hotel was already waiting by the front door with Dog. He looked thin and thoroughly wretched. ‘This is the first time he hasn't barked his head off in a month,' the woman said, hurriedly taking Kelly's cheque. ‘He howled the place down and he wouldn't eat. I would have asked you to take him back but I knew you were stuck. He's really too old to be in a kennel, you know. At a certain point, it's not kind to put an animal through that.'

Kelly patted Dog's head. He made a long low moaning noise and buried his head in the folds of her coat. ‘Poor old thing,' she said. Nick was allergic to dogs but she liked them. If they had a boy, she thought, they'd get one of those terriers that didn't shed. There was something about little boys and dogs that went together.

Dog followed her around the house while she checked everything. The surgery was freshly carpeted and smelled of paint. The locker she'd bought in IKEA had been assembled and the hospital bed had been put together. Sinead was to sleep in Claire's old room. Kelly wondered what Claire's friends had made of it when she was growing up. It had a bed, a desk and a dressing table but there were no girly touches. She'd bought new linens, some throws and a rug in soft pinks and greys, and added a velvet chair and a reading lamp.

It was just staging really, but the room looked warm and cozy. It used to give Kelly a thrill to be able to do this, but nothing mattered now except getting her body to do what it was supposed to do. She stood on the landing and hugged herself. Dog was lurking at the top of the stairs, afraid to let her out of his sight. Dogs were supposed to sense when a woman was pregnant, she'd read that somewhere. They picked up on the change in body chemistry. She couldn't feel it, but maybe he could tell that her cells were dividing and multiplying, right now, doing the oldest algebra in the universe. Making a baby.

‘I'm sorry,' Sinead pursed her lips and picked her travel bag up again, ‘but this is not what we discussed.'

When Irish people started their sentences with ‘I'm sorry', Kelly thought, wearily, it always meant that you were going to be sorry.
‘I'm sorry but that rug is too beige.' ‘I'm sorry but I thought your fee included VAT.' ‘I'm sorry but those are not the taps I ordered.'

She put on her most professional smile. ‘But I told you there was a dog at the interview. You said that wouldn't be a problem.'

Sinead folded her arms. ‘That's not a dog, that's practically a donkey.'

‘He's very gentle and I can organise someone to walk him. You won't even notice that he's here.'

The line of Sinead's mouth tightened. ‘An animal like that roaming around a patient who has just had surgery is an accident waiting to happen. This is not about me, it's about the welfare of the patient.'

‘He belongs to the patient,' Kelly began, ‘the patient loves him, but if it's a matter of money—'

‘I'm wasting your time.' Sinead pulled her gloves on. She wasn't bluffing, Kelly saw, and there was no back-up.

‘Please,' she said, ‘don't go. I'm sure we can work something out.'

Claire opened the front door and the ambulance men wheeled her dad up to the porch then carried him into the hall.

‘How are you going to get this thing up those stairs?' he asked.

‘They won't have to because you're in here.' Claire opened the door to the revamped surgery. Her dad looked past her into the neat room, taking in the new oatmeal carpet, the new wall-mounted TV, the hospital bed with its pulley.

‘Who did this?' he whispered. ‘What have you done with all your mother's things?'

‘Most of it was just old medical records, Dad, and—'

‘Is that a thirty-two-inch telly?' one of the ambulance men interrupted.

The other one guffawed. ‘You need your eyes tested. Got to be a thirty-six at least! What do you think, Tom?'

‘Please, bring me upstairs to my own room.' Her dad looked from one of them to the other.

‘You won't be able to walk for months.' Claire bit her lip. ‘How are you supposed to get up and down the stairs?'

‘I can just stay up there.'

‘What if there was a fire?' One of the ambulance men tried to smooth things over. ‘You'd be toast.'

Her dad didn't speak while the ambulance man helped him into the bed, then he turned, awkwardly, on to his side, away from her.

‘I'll just go and get Dog,' Claire said to his back.

Kelly was standing in the doorway. ‘I'm not sure,' she said quietly, ‘that's a good idea.'

‘He'll have to go back to The Pet Hotel.' Claire sighed when Kelly explained that the carer wouldn't stay unless Dog went.

‘They won't take him. They said he's too old.'

‘I don't want him going to kennels,' Claire's dad said to the wall. ‘Bring him to the Cats and Dogs' Home.'

‘The pound?' Claire stared at his back. ‘You don't mean that!'

‘You're
not going to take him. Nicholas is allergic. I'm not leaving him in a cage for six months. At least this way someone might give him a proper home.'

But this was his home, Claire thought. Dog and her dad were inseparable. ‘You need to think this through.' She wished he would turn around to face her. ‘You don't want to make any decisions you might regret.'

‘All I want,' he said in a small, broken voice, ‘is to be left alone.'

Nick had just spent a double session with a couple who were on the verge of breaking up. He had managed to get them to commit to living in the same house for another week, but it hadn't been easy and now he felt utterly drained.

‘Just do what the old man wants,' he told Claire. ‘At least this gives the animal a chance to be re-homed.'

Claire looked at Dog, who was curled up nose to tail in the corner of the kitchen. He was trying to make himself disappear but he was too huge to pull it off.

‘Nobody's going to take an ancient dog that looks like that,' she whispered. ‘They'll put him down, after three days. I saw a programme.'

‘Look, are you going to do this or not?' Nick's voice was sharp.

‘I'll do it,' she said quietly, and hung up.

Nick sat staring at the phone. Why did she always bring out the worst in him?

After the accident,
he
had been the one taking Claire shopping for clothes. There was nobody else to do it. The old man was barely able to leave the house.

They usually went to Dundrum, but when she turned twelve, Claire started wanting to go into town and he'd gone with her, until that day just before Christmas, when he was seventeen. It had started out OK. She had dragged him around every bloody girly shop on Grafton Street. She'd disappear into the fitting room and come out in half a dozen different dresses, and he was supposed to tell her which one was the nicest. He hadn't a clue. To him, she looked best in what she always wore, T-shirts and jeans.

‘This is the last shop, promise!' she said when they went into Switzer's. She disappeared into a fitting room with an armful of clothes, and he was waiting outside, trying to decide whether they'd go for a pizza or a burger afterwards, when he felt a hand on his back.

‘How old are you?' It was a saleslady with a blonde perm and glasses and she was glaring at him.

‘Seventeen.'

She nodded. ‘How old is that little girl in there?' She pointed at the fitting-room curtain.

Nick flushed. ‘She's thirteen.'

She folded her arms. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.'

Nick was so angry that when he opened his mouth to explain that Claire was his sister no words would come out. Five or six other women were looking over now.

‘Look at the guilty look of you!' The saleslady shook her head. ‘Get out before I call security.'

So he did. He just walked out and left Claire there. He knew she'd panic when she came out and found he was gone but he was too humiliated to go back.

The closest animal pound was Rathfarnham. It was only four miles away but the idea of being in an enclosed space with a dog even for a short time made Claire feel sick with anxiety. She wanted to call Ray but wouldn't let herself.

Kelly put some ham on Mossy's back seat and Dog climbed in stiffly but he didn't even look at it, he wouldn't take his eyes off the house.

Claire opened the driver's door and edged carefully into the seat. Her back tensed and she waited to feel his breath on her neck, but he just sighed and folded himself up, nose to tail, on the slippery leatherette behind her.

‘Stay!' she said as she drove slowly up Hawthorn Drive.

The fuel needle was hovering just below empty, which either meant that Mossy would go for another fifty miles or else that he would conk out at the next set of traffic lights, so Claire decided to stop in Blackrock for petrol. Dog lifted his big head and stared out, bewildered, at the brightly lit forecourt. Claire felt like the woodsman going into the woods to kill Snow White.

She went inside and queued for the till. She couldn't take him to the pound. Maybe she could find an estate where kids lived and let him out, but it was kids who had tied him to the shopping trolley all those years ago. She stood at the window, looking out at the car, trying to think of a way out of this. Then she saw it. The wooden sign outside the house on the other side of the road. ‘Barnhill Veterinary Surgery'. She could pretend Dog was a stray. Somebody would take him home.