Dog Handling

by Clare Naylor

“But sex? Passion?” Liv looked forlorn. “I want to have lunch with a man I hardly know and not wear any knickers.”

  “It’s overrated and chilly. You’ll have a fantastic life with a man you love. Tim is that man. Someone you can trust not to shag the chief bridesmaid. He’ll still love you after childbirth. It may not be passion, but god, it’s the most romantic thing ever. You’ve no idea how much I envy you that.”

  Liv looked back in the mirror. Give or take the odd flower on her bodice, maybe she could be the fancy dress version of a bride at least. The bodice looked passable with her pale skin. A bit of lipstick, and all would be well on the big day. And Tim? Well, he was completely great, really; she’d never thought otherwise or she wouldn’t have been with him for all this time. She just had to learn to appreciate him a bit more. Remember how much she loved his fluffy boyish looks and how cute he was when he fell asleep on the sofa during Friends. And try to imagine how devastated she’d be if he was hit by a bus tomorrow. Anyway, who wanted a man who bought you dagger-heel shoes and asked you to wear them in the bedroom? How awful would it be to have a husband whom women at cocktail parties flirted with as they elbowed you out of the way to try to wrest his mobile number from him? And just what was it with these aftershave-commercial-type men who kissed your neck passionately in front of the mirror as you cleaned your teeth? At least Liv knew Tim loved her for herself. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to stand for her tantrums. To buy her jewels “just because.” He knew his own mind and they laughed together. Curled up deliciously in bed. Knew their respective chopping and stirring roles in the carbonara recipe by heart. That, as a poet must have said, was love. She’d make a beautiful bride, she thought as she eased the zip down on her corset, with maybe a whisper of a diet before the big day.

  “You see, darling, I’ve sampled the soup. Licked the cones. I have lived life. And now I will give myself: my extended, travelled, fulfilled self, to my husband.” Beauty was twirling around the shop like a remake for the twenty-first century of a Doris Day movie.

  “C’est parfait. Parfait.” Delilah was practically panting with the ecstasy of it all. “Roger ees lucky man, non?”

  “It’s been a thrilling affair and it will be a thrilling marriage.” Beauty was the kind of girl who took her luck and flawless looks for granted. Presented with one smidgen of her charms on a silver platter by the tooth fairy, Liv would have evaporated in a puff of I-am-not-worthies. Beauty just frowned at an imaginary dark root on her head. “I love love love him. I swear the second he puts that ring on my finger I’ll just growl with pleasure.”

  “And you just know that Roger will be precisely three-foot-six of mangy, bearded, impotent, but oh, so wealthy arms dealer,” Alex whispered into Liv’s ear as she looked at Beauty with her golden ponytail and Bulgari engagement ring. Liv giggled; Alex was right. So what if Beauty had sampled the soup and licked the cones? She wasn’t likely to be truly in love with the old dog she was marrying. Just bluff. Passionate marriages with wonderful, kind men who were also handsome were just a myth devised by advertising agencies to sell more chocolate.

  Liv pushed all thoughts of breathtaking one-night stands and having Eric Clapton write songs about how wonderful she was looking tonight to one side and concentrated on how she was going to make Tim the happiest husband in the world. And there was always Tantric Sex Counselling and stuff if they ever got really desperate. For heaven’s sake, she hadn’t even resorted to buying exotic undies yet. Much less had one of those conversations that magazines always advised: talk through your fantasies and if you’re comfortable with them feel free to chuck an old scarf over the lampshade and act them out. The only hitch was that Liv’s fantasies usually involved other men: Naked Brad, the in-house photographer at work, various newsreaders.

  “Oh, my god. Look away; look away.” Alex closed the curtain on Liv and began to whistle loudly.

  “What? Why?” asked a muffled Liv, thinking that maybe the arms dealer was just too hideous a sight to behold. Perhaps he’d been maimed by one of his own weapons. Perhaps they’d had to stitch his face on inside out after a mishap with a Kalashnikov. “You know I’m much better at stomaching the gory scenes in ER than you. I can take it.” Liv groped her way round the curtain and stuck her head out. “Fuck me.” She whistled slowly. Before them stood a clearly smitten Beauty but not a beast in sight, only the most divine leather-clad Frenchman that money could never buy. His hair was cropped, black, and ruffled and his criminally blue eyes creased with joy as he watched Beauty emerge in her very small smalls.

  “Darling, you’re not allowed to see me in the dress. Now go away or I won’t marry you at all.” Beauty shooed him away like a gnat; he tossed his head back and laughed.

  “Me, please. Me, please. Next in line if she doesn’t want you.” Alex panted quietly. “There is a God, isn’t there?”

  “Yeah, and he’s wearing a seventies biker outfit and smells of petrol.” Liv’s bodice was too tight now. She hacked the zip down a few notches and continued staring. “Why is life so unfair?” she moaned. Alex suddenly swivelled round and pulled the curtain over her.

  “Okay, hang on a minute. Let’s just say that even if that fiancée of his was hit by a bus, or even just an old green BMW in the street outside, you are getting married. He’d be mine. You can’t have your cake and eat it.”

  Liv didn’t care. She just wanted another look. She ripped the curtain from Alex and stuck her head out. The girls panted and gawped until the trinity of beautiful people in the corner turned and stared at them in horror. Did such unfortunate people really exist? they wondered as Alex wiped her sweating palms down her thighs, her tongue lolling bovinely next to Liv, whose boobs spilled out of her bodice onto the Fulham Road. The beautiful ones quickly looked away, terrified that such dreadfulness was contagious and having no intention of being afflicted.

  “Cherie, my bike ’e is throbbing in the street outside. I wait there for you. Comme toujours.” Roger pulled on his helmet and creaked through the door.

  “But you just know he’s impotent, don’t you?” Liv ventured hopefully. “I mean all that throbbing between his thighs. It can’t be good for it. Can it?”

  Chapter Two

  Where Was I When

  Everyone Was Sampling the Soup

  and Licking the Cones?

  Liv rang her parents six times before she finally gave up and decided to cut her losses and walk the two miles from the train station to their house. It would give her time to think and work out just what she was going to say to them. To ask them whether they really thought she was doing the right thing in getting married. Shouldn’t it be undying passion or not at all? Liv had convinced herself that her mother would know what was best for her. But her faith in her mother’s ability to help her out suffered a minor setback ten minutes later when she was accosted by last year’s rotting Christmas tree and three empty boxes of Waitrose’s own brand wine in the driveway of their house. Ordinarily Liv would have cleared them discreetly away into the wheelie bin, but she was dying for the loo.

  Seeing the curtains still drawn despite the bright autumn sunlight outside, she pelted round the back of the house in the hope that someone had left a door open for the cats to get in. Liv’s mother and stepfather had no concept of security—Lenny, her stepfather, had worked with reforming criminals for many years and had it on good authority from several burglars that the more signs of life in a house the less likely you were to be broken into. Hence all the neighbours with bolted garages and crooklocked cars were forever having their homes stripped of video cameras and computers. Meanwhile Lenny and Elizabeth, with their open doors and garage spewing lawn mowers and trampolines and unlocked cars with tantalising stereos, had never been relieved of so much as a garden hose. They just knocked on wood occasionally and wondered who’d want their LP collection anyway, much to their smart neighbours’ crooklocked dismay.

  But today the door was firmly locked.

  “Lemme in, quick.” Liv hammered on th
e French windows and crossed her legs. Still no sign of life. The cats were scattered on assorted surfaces, Oedipus on the kitchen windowsill, Tom on the mouldering patio table, and Blair, the youngest, on the mat. Blair had been named in the heady preelection frenzy of April 1997 when Labour seemed like a good idea and before Tony had become Tory. Lenny had subsequently wanted to change her name to Karl, but Elizabeth deemed it cruel to confuse her, so he’d only call her Karl under his breath while breaking open a can of Sheba.

  “I’m dying for a pee. Quick,” Liv pleaded, and looked around the garden for an opportune hedge or bike shed. Then she crossed her legs again; the neighbours were notoriously nosy and it’d be all over the local paper the next week. Lenny and Elizabeth were already a rather unusual addition to the quiet Berkshire street. On a good day they were deemed a breath of fresh air—the Tom and Barbara Goode in a neighbourhood of Margot and Jerrys. But when the good life wasn’t going their way the Margot and Jerrys would huff and puff at the lowering tone of the neighbourhood. After January storms, fence panels lay scattered across the garden for months harbouring entire universes of wood lice; the front wall that Lenny had started in 1983 had never quite seen the light of day, and those who actually ventured into the house left with tales of dislodged bathroom tiles and splotches of paint samples all the way through the house, “And on top of perfectly nice wallpaper, too.” But Elizabeth and Lenny would barely have noticed. They had eyes only for one another and their minds were filled like recycling bins with the economic implications of organic farming and adult literacy issues. To them a splotch of paint sample was as good as decorating the house in Primrose Glory.

  “Oh, it’s divine. Isn’t it Lenny? I could look at it all day,” Elizabeth would marvel for a while at the patch of yellow on top of twenty-year-old lilac and then read a book, glancing up every so often to envisage Primrose Glory wherever she looked.

  “Good god, we thought Oedipus was having another stroke. Come in Livvy.” Lenny opened the French doors in his Betty Ford Clinic T-shirt. A rangy, bearded man who could have passed for the messiah on any day other than a hungover Saturday, he scratched away his hangover and kissed Liv as she hurtled past him to the downstairs bathroom. After much sighing and a minor civil war with the flush on the loo, she emerged smiling and relaxed.

  “I’ll put on the kettle. Your mum’s in bed. Go say hello.” Lenny went to boil the kettle but remembered he’d had to use the cable as a makeshift door handle last week, so he boiled a saucepan of water instead.

  “Black, loads of sugar please.” Liv left her stepfather humming to himself and wandered upstairs to say good morning to her mother. Lenny and Elizabeth had been married for twenty years now, but still, sometimes Liv had a pang of just wanting her mother to herself, of which Lenny was acutely aware. He was an achingly sensitive man who had endured all manner of tantrums and resentment from his stepdaughter until she was in her early twenties and she suddenly stopped struggling and saw his messianic qualities and twinkly blue eyes instead of an imposter who wanted to take her mother away from her and hurt her as her father had done. Liv’s father had left when she was only five; she’d only ever had a cursory holidays-on-Scottish-islands-type relationship with him. Liv had looked after her mother and protected her for so long that it was finally a relief when she relinquished that mantle to Lenny and began to have a life of her own. Liv thought that part of the reason she’d become an accountant was just as an extension of her protective, coping role in life. It was ordered and financially secure, neither of which had been features in her childhood.

  Her mother was at the top of the ramshackle house, behind a door with an old part from a kettle for a handle.

  “Mum.” Liv tramped in and sat on the end of the bed. Her mother’s sleepy blond head rose confused from beneath the sheets.

  “Darling. I thought you were coming tomorrow. Now what’s this big thing you want to talk to me about?” She kissed Liv on the forehead and settled back into the pillows. “If you’re thinking about inviting Aunt Flora, you know I hate, but hate, her.” Liv had come down to her mother’s for precisely this reason. Elizabeth was wonderfully childlike and had absolutely no idea of how to behave in the real world. She had no regard for convention for convention’s sake, and if she thought the wedding was a bad idea then she’d say so with no anxiety that it might provoke frowns of disapproval from elderly relations. To Elizabeth a wedding wasn’t a big deal, just a lot of fun. She wanted to be surrounded by lovely people, Liv’s friends, and Tim, who she thought was the most handsome man since Gregory Peck, and if it had been up to her would just have sent everyone off into the garden to eat barbecued sausages from paper plates as they sat on tree stumps chatting. Liv would wear some old ballet tutu they had lying around in the loft, and the nuptials could have been taken care of by a friend of hers who was a tarot reader. It was all the same to Elizabeth; the children loved each other and wanted to make a commitment—no matter if it was in St. Paul’s Cathedral or her dilapidated pagoda. Liv, however, felt entirely differently.

  “She’s Dad’s sister. We have to have her,” said Liv as Lenny came in with a tray of coffee and some Bombay mix.

  “Thought you might be hungry after the journey,” he said as he laid the tray on the floor, the only available space in the dark and chaotic bedroom.

  “Thanks, Lenny,” said Livvy as she shovelled down a handful of Bombay mix gratefully. “Besides, she’s my godmother, isn’t she?”

  “Dog mother more like. She never even called when you had whooping cough when you were four, Livvy. But it’s your day, petal. If you want her there, then I promise not to pull her chair away when she sits down.” Elizabeth giggled and hugged her mug of coffee. Liv sighed.

  The wedding would also be stressful because Liv’s parents hardly ever saw each other. The last time had been the funeral of a mutual friend and had resulted in the hurling of insults and ham sandwiches at the wake. Even if Liv managed to keep tempers sweet, she still had to cope alone with the decisions on peach or cream napkins and lox or melon and prosciutto for the starter. Her mother had no concept of the etiquette of these matters, and her father, being snob extraordinaire, would forever moan if Liv got it wrong. Perhaps coming home hadn’t been such a great idea after all. Instead of her mother’s insouciance rubbing off on Liv, she’d just sunk further into the mires of misery as she realised that the weight of the world was resting squarely on her shoulders.

  “Can we give you a hand making the invitations or anything, love?” asked Lenny as he settled down on the bed. Liv thought of the look of horror on her father’s face as he opened an invitation to his only daughter’s wedding that had been crayoned with a lettraset and had Prit-stuck glitter wedding bells on. Perhaps not.

  “I think maybe I’ll just go to a printer’s actually, Lenny. Probably cheaper in the long run.”

  “In which case, we’ll make the cake, won’t we?” Elizabeth turned to her husband proudly, obviously having forgotten the fact that her fairy cakes had been rejected from Liv’s school fete three years running. In the end, she had to send tinned peaches to the nonperishable stall instead.

  “Mum. Lenny.” Liv took a huge breath in. “Do you think that perhaps I’m too young to get married?” There. She’d said it. Her lungs visibly deflated.

  Her mother and stepfather took in the question for a long moment, then in unison said, “Oh, of course not, darling.”

  Then her mother added, “I was your age when I had you.” Something Liv was only too aware of.

  “Exactly,” Liv volunteered cautiously.

  “Well, you’re beautiful, darling. And so far as I know not pregnant yet?”

  “No. Not pregnant. But, well, you and Dad . . .” God, it was like getting through to someone snorkelling in the Solomon Islands on a mobile phone. “I just wonder if I shouldn’t ought to live a bit more first. Maybe, you know . . . just a bit.” Liv had thrown caution to the wind, she’d lain her life and destiny in her mother’s lap more fir
mly than the time she had whooping cough.

  “Well, darling, if you think so. Perhaps then you’re right. What did you have in mind?” her mother asked as she collected spilled bits of dried spicy pea off the duvet cover.

  Well, sleep around a bit, find out if I really do like oysters or if it’s only because Tim says they’re so wonderful, discover whether I could design a hat that somebody wanted to wear. Live a life worthy of an obituary in the Telegraph. Be involved in a political sex scandal that would justify my appearance on Desert Island Discs. Join the French Resistance if it’s still around. Be a latter-day Joan of Arc. That kind of thing.

  “Dunno really,” Liv mumbled.

  “Livvy, you know that whatever you decide to do, Lenny and I will support you. If you want to ask your dog mother to the wedding, or your father for that matter, then I promise to be civil. But if you want to call the whole thing off, then I’ll be here with chamomile tea and a large steak.”

  “A steak?” Liv was puzzled.

  “Well, to put over the black eye that Tim’s going to give you.” Her mother could barely control her laughter.

  “And a packet of frozen peas for the bruised shin that his mother will give you.” Lenny joined in the hilarity.

  “What about your father? Well, he’ll just disinherit you . . . that is, if the mean bugger’s left you anything in the first place.”

  “All right. Very funny.” Liv sulked into her now-cool coffee. “I happen to think it’s quite a serious matter, guys.”

  “Oh, darling, I know. But you’re young. Divorce is easy these days. Just don’t fret about it. Tim’s a dreamboat; he’ll be a wonderful husband. But if you want to dally a bit more, then do. We love you no matter what.”

  Liv pouted a bit. She wanted a braying, bossy mother in a body warmer and knitted socks to tell her to marry Tim or the family would disown her, put her up for adoption. Or she wanted a militant feminist mother who would leave stickers on light switches and bathroom cabinets imploring her daughter not to enter into the exchange of property and shameful exploitation of womanhood that is marriage. Did she get either? No. What Liv got was a big, loving liberal kiss on the cheek that was the same one she’d been given when her mother and Lenny told her they’d still love her if she went to Aberystwyth instead of Bristol. If she dropped out of her A levels and became a hairwasher in A Cut Above in the High Street. If she decided to give up six years of piano lessons because her teacher smelled of parma violets. Just as long as she was happy and not hurting anyone else Lenny and Elizabeth were fine. In fact, if she weren’t so practical and capable Liv would probably be in therapy right now declaring Tough Love on her parents for turning her into a well-adjusted adult at the age of seven. Crying because if she hadn’t spent her life being so grown-up she might not be in this mess. She’d have been thrown out of the Groucho Club for getting diabolical on cocaine, had at least one trip to an STD clinic, and have taken up a promising career in something underpaid and pointless like fashion journalism. There, it was all their fault. Liv scowled over the Bombay mix and longed for the wasted youth she’d never had.