Read Online The Heart Whisperer by Ella Griffin - Free Book Online

wall.
    â€˜Monkstown,’ she said brightly.
    â€˜Do you have a garden?’
    Ray had a Zen pebbly thing going on at the front of the house and she had a scraggy patch of nettles at the back. ‘Sort of.’ She shifted her bag to her other hand and scrabbled in her pocket for her key.
    â€˜Really? Would you like me to come around in the morning and jump over your wall and leave a huge turd on your lawn?’ Mr Cunningham asked.
    Claire stared at him. Was there a right answer to this? ‘Um. No?’
    â€˜I didn’t think so.’ Mr Cunningham glared at her. ‘But that’s what your father’s dog does on my lawn, Claire. Every single bloody morning. Maybe you’d have a word with him. He refuses to answer the door when I try.’
    Claire’s dad didn’t like surprise visits but he hardly ever answered the phone and she worried about him more now that he wasretired, so every couple of weeks she pretended that she was just passing and he pretended to believe her.
    Sometimes, she just stayed for a cup of tea, but tonight they split an omelette and a plate of Jaffa Cakes, which was all her dad had really eaten for years, and watched TV. They sat through a long report about the impact of deregulation on the European postal system and in between statistics about universal service and uniform pricing Claire thought about all the questions she would never ask him. ‘How did you and Mum meet?’ ‘Was it love at first sight?’ ‘What did you love about her most?’
    Her parents had been married for eleven years when her mum died but they had still been crazy about one another. Her mum would pass her dad’s chair and just drop into his lap and kiss him. He would get embarrassed but Claire loved to see them like that.
    She remembered music from the record player floating up from downstairs long after she’d been put to bed. Once she crept down and saw her parents slow-dancing in the living room. Her father still had all his clothes on but her mother was barefoot and wearing only a tiny white slip. This was private, Claire understood, like her mum’s surgery and the time she woke up to hear her mum giggling on the landing and saw her dad carrying her into their bedroom in his arms.
    At exactly nine o’clock, there was a thud at the door and her dad opened it. Dog was so long that he seemed to enter the room in sections, like a bendy bus, carrying one of the leather slippers Claire had given her dad for Christmas in his mouth. He folded himself up on the carpet, dropped the slipper and stared at the television.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ her dad said, ‘he has to watch the news.’
    â€˜Why?’ Claire shuffled along the sofa to get as far away from Dog as possible.
    â€˜I’ve never been able to figure it out but even when I’m upstairs he comes up at six and at nine and makes me come down to switch it on.’ Her dad changed channels as the intro ended and the camera cut to a newsreader with an impassive face and a helmet of blonde hair. ‘I think he has a soft spot for Anne Doyle.’
    Claire brought the plates out to the kitchen and went upstairs to wash her hands. The door to Nick’s old room was open. Her dad had moved his drawing desk in here after Nick went to the States. There were hundreds of old storyboards mounted on stiff boards and stacked around the wall. Claire picked one up. It showed key frames from an ad for soup. Eight beautifully drawn illustrations of a family sitting round a dinner table, the boy and the girl smiling, the dad waiting with his spoon in his hand, the mum ladling soup into his bowl.
    Her own mum had hardly ever been there at dinnertime. She’d go into her surgery first thing in the morning and sometimes she was still working when Claire went to bed. ‘You’ll see her in the morning,’ her dad used to say. It was agony knowing that her mum was in the house but not