Dog Handling

by Clare Naylor

  Though working in a market stall and flashing her tits wouldn’t have been her career of choice, it was a lot more fun than spreadsheets. She gasped as she slapped the papier-mâché on her skin, but the cold was quite soothing in the outrageous midday heat and so as not to crack the mould she lay down on the sofa. Every ten minutes she knocked on the newspaper, but it wasn’t drying. Eventually she picked herself up and shuffled over to the bathroom and took the hair dryer to her chest. But just as it was setting, just as the newspaper and glue hardened over her bust, Laura walked in the door, trailing a ceiling-scrapingly tall woman. Not wanting to seem rude, Liv reached out to shake her hand.

  “I’m Liv Elliot. Nice to meet you,” Liv said as though having Laura Train Wreck and her friends wander through the house as though it were an art gallery was the most normal thing in the world. Well, it was certainly a regular occurrence. And as she held out her hand the papier-mâché chest fell to the floor, leaving Liv decorated only by a few columns of weather forecast and the cricketing news.

  “I’m Suzanne. I’m a psychotherapist,” the woman replied, and nodded sagely at Liv. A grimace formed on Laura’s brow.

  “Just helping a friend out,” Liv twittered, plunging to the floor and reapplying the cast before it set. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I just have to go and finish myself off.” Liv closed the bathroom door behind her and splashed some water onto her mould to soften it.

  When Liv turned the tap off she heard hushed and urgent tones filtering in from the living room.

  “She’s English,” Laura whispered.

  “I think that girl probably has some issues,” Suzanne muttered. “Serious case of exhibitionism. It’s a power thing, I think. In keeping with the lingerie fixation. The lingerie is about placing a veneer of unattainability between herself and the world outside.”

  “But did I tell you that I think she could be abusing substances, too? It stinks of glue in there. And that talk about finishing herself off. You don’t really think she’ll commit suicide, do you?” Laura asked grimly.

  Needless to say, Liv couldn’t imagine who Laura and the woman were discussing. She presumed that it must be an actress from Laura’s theatre company. Though she couldn’t think why they’d be surprised at an actress being a pathological exhibitionist. Just as long as they didn’t bring her anywhere near the house; otherwise Liv’s position as acting landlady would be severely compromised.

  When Liv finally emerged from the bathroom wielding the perfect impression of her average breasts which James could use to make his bras, Laura and her shrink had gone, leaving Liv free to test-drive the leopard print G-string in comfort and privacy for the rest of the afternoon. Though it wasn’t a comfortable experience at all. She realised at once that if these knickers were for women, the first thing to be done was to remove the sagging pouch of fabric from the front and add it to the back, where a woman was grateful for all the coverage and support she could get.

  “So you’ve met Laura then?” Alex asked as she swept across the airport car park with a slick wheelie suitcase in tow, looking sickeningly tanned and relaxed after her trip away with Charlie.

  “She’s really sweet—all that therapy stuff’s a bit much, though. What happened to her?” Liv asked.

  “Dunno. Charlie hasn’t said. But I guess we’ll worm it out of her eventually. Have you hung out with her much?” Alex walked to the front of the taxi queue and jumped into a waiting car ahead of a dozen businessmen. This was a perk afforded only to those confident few who had never had to suffer the indignity of camel-toe when they tried on their jeans.

  “Nah, she pops up occasionally like a piece of toast, but I haven’t really seen anyone all week,” explained Liv.

  “Well, I’m here now.” Alex gave Liv a huge hug. “Aren’t you glad to see me? Bet you’ve been bored out of your brain,” Alex said as the taxi sped away.

  “Actually, I’ve sort of got a job. And I know I said I’d go sightseeing with you tomorrow, but I’ve got to work,” Liv said, feeling guilty at getting Alex over here on emergency standby and then dumping her.

  “Not tomorrow you haven’t,” said Alex, pulling a couple of badges out of her bag and waving them under Liv’s nose. “I’ve got tickets for the gee-gees.”

  “Horseracing?” Liv took the bright orange badges and examined them. Judging by the gold trim and little safety pin on the back, they were the business. Royal enclosure. Undoubtedly sitting on the Queen’s lap. Champagne, et cetera. Though she expected no less from Alex, Liv was actually quite looking forward to her first day of work.

  “Well, I suppose I’d quite like to meet Charlie. But I reckon you’d have much more fun if you came to the stall with me,” Liv said, slipping the tickets back into Alex’s bag. “You’re going to love the boys.”

  “What stall?” Alex pulled on her sunglasses and took in the blue sky as the driver went haring down the road.

  “I’ve become a muse.” Liv tried to make her new job as a professional chest model sound glamorous. “This designer, James, wants me to be at the stall tomorrow to be the approachable face of high-fashion lingerie.”

  “Who’s James?” Alex asked as they tore along the Pacific Highway.

  “James is a designer. He’s part of a they. James and Dave. A gay they. I just should be there. It starts at six in the morning.”

  “No way. We need our beauty sleep. It’ll be so much fun at the races. Charlie can give us some money to put on the horses with cute names and we’ll drink champagne until we fall over. That beats standing in the rain on some grotty market stall, doesn’t it?”

  “Correction: Charlie will give you the money. I haven’t done anything to earn Charlie’s money and I’m going to the stall to make some dollars to feed myself. Plus this is Sydney, not Leeds. It won’t rain,” Liv reminded her.

  “So where is he now?” Liv asked.

  “Oh, he’s gone down to Royal Sydney for a round of golf. So have you heard from Tim?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Bastard probably thinks he’s being kind. Well, only a couple of months to go till he’s on his hands and knees grovelling in the gravel on our front path. I promise.”

  But Liv was gone. Until now she’d not really had anything to remind her of Tim. Except of course for the collage of photos she’d pinned of him next to her bed and the Tiffany bean necklace he’d bought for her birthday, which she wore every day, and the fact that she could smell him on the T-shirt she wore at night that she deliberately hadn’t washed yet, though it was beginning to rot just a bit under the arms. Liv wanted to ask Alex if she’d heard any news of him from her network of globe-trotting friends, whether he’d been spied in any Notting Hill watering holes with unidentified blondes. Been seen in tears at the wheel of his car as he waited at traffic lights listening to “Can’t live if living is without you. . . .” But she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She had specifically instructed Alex not to tell her if she did have news of Tiny Tim, so unless she brought up the subject herself she’d never know.

  She bit her lip and wondered if he was wondering what she was up to. Wondered whether he was jealous of the men she was meeting in Sydney (well, he didn’t know, did he, that he needn’t be jealous of James and Dave et al.?), whether he was having piercing pangs of regret at four in the morning, hating being single and devising ways he could win her back. Flowers, chocolates, stalking the aisles in Van Cleef and Arpels looking for just the gem to secure her heart. Yeah, right, she thought miserably. And when exactly was the last time a leopard changed his spots? The guy used to split dinner with her and bought her soap for Christmas. She was lucky to get a beer, let alone De Beers.

  Later the girls ordered a takeaway from Arthur’s, absolutely the best pizza in the Southern Hemisphere, and while Liv looked at glossy perfume ads featuring stunning couples for whom life could not involve more togetherness if they were sewn to each other, Alex leafed through Cleo magazine’s list of eligible bachelors, putting rings around the most pr
omising for Liv before she realised that it was a 1992 issue so most were either married or sagging horribly by now.

  “I don’t fancy anyone else. It just wouldn’t work,” Liv dismissed the bachelors that Alex was waving under her nose.

  “I know, but it’s hypothetical. If you had to have dinner with someone else. Suppose Tim came back to you and you discovered that you didn’t want him back. . . .” Alex ignored Liv’s oh-come-on-get-real look and persisted, “Then who would it be?”

  “There is no one else.” Liv was defiant. Not only was it bad enough that she was in pieces inside, but she was suddenly being deemed single and therefore suitable fodder for all and sundry to fix up with life’s leftovers. All those blokes who had a “nice personality” or were “perfectly good-looking” were going to be offered up on a plate for Liv to sample. Sadly, the platter was not made up of Tiny Tims or even Wayward Williams or Sexy Simons. Dreg city from here on in, Liv imagined. So best embrace spinsterhood here and now.

  “Okay, then the last person who you fancied before you met Tim. Though you’ll notice that I’m very sweetly overlooking the fact that you’ve had about sixty thousand crushes over the last five years while you were deeply in love with him, which must tell you something.”

  “That was because I didn’t know what I had until it’d gone.” Liv took a sip of her VB and churned with regret and guilt. Surely Tim chucking her was just bad karma for the time she’d imagined what it would be like to have Jude Law lick the inside of her thigh.

  “So before you met Tim,” Alex demanded.

  Liv cast her mind back over the years of bliss and happiness. Unconsciously leaving out the afternoons she’d been bored senseless while Tim played golf, the evenings she’d wanted to go on from dinner to some party and he’d preferred to go home to bed (not that sort of bed, either), the fact that he hadn’t bought her a bunch of flowers for about three years and picked his nose in front of her in a way that suggested he’d begun to take her love and adoration very much for granted. That kind of stuff she edited as she skimmed over the love story to end all love stories.

  “Okay, but I was a baby. It wasn’t really love like Tim and I had,” Liv insisted.

  “Don’t care. Tell me all about it,” demanded Alex as she lay back and listened.

  “He was called Ben Parker. It was sweet. I mean we were really young so it was all kind of puppy love, but . . . ,” Liv protested.

  “From the moment you met him. Just tell me.”

  “It was at the farmer’s market in Aix-en-Provence. I was on holiday with Mum and this troop of Mum’s friends. A few of the families staying at our cottage had piled into a convoy of Volvos and hired Renaults and driven into town. When we got there, all the Sloaney parents wandered off to buy local art at a little gallery and Mum and Lenny got pissed and played boules with these tobacco-stained seventy-year-olds in the square. So all us kids went off to some American bar that had MTV and we were ordering Diet Cokes and trying to score Es from Pascal the waiter. I was feeling pretty ropy after a night on the cognac, so I went for a wander around the market to practise my Franglais. I looked around a few of the stalls and asked the woman who owned one of them if I could have a pomme de terre. But what I really wanted was an apple. Anyway, she stuffed a mucky potato into a bag and just grunted at me. I wandered off not realising and was perfectly happy thinking that I was Emmanuel Beart in Manon des Sources. I remember feeling really sorry for the cockerels in pens and wondered whether Lenny and Mum would agree to take a beige baby goat back home with them if I spiked their vin rouge with Ecstasy.

  “Then I saw this guy buying this huge Brie. He had a perfect French accent and was so tall and beautiful that I almost took a bite of the potato. Anyway, after haggling and swearing he walked away from the stall with his cheese under his arm. I followed him for a bit around the stalls. He had this body that no English boy could ever compete with. Really strong tanned arms and these beautiful long, almost hairless legs. Anyway, I decided that he had to be called Serge and he must be home from the Sorbonne for the summer with his famille. I just knew that he lived in a cigarette butt–filled garret near the Seine. I imagined living there with him. Sometimes in the dream he’d get irritated because my French vocab was wrong, but it was a sexy irritation; he’d just toss back his hair and then give me a patronising French snog.

  “Anyway, by the time I’d followed him to the square it was so hot that my sundress was sticking to me and my feet were killing. I’d managed not to make him notice me when my mum yelled out, ‘Liv, darling. We’re over here. Come and meet Florence.’ She was so loud that I dropped my pomme de terre in shock. God, it was so embarrassing. She might as well have yelled, ‘Put out more flags! The British are coming!’ Everyone stopped and stared. So I was rooted to the spot and when I looked down there he was, Serge, kneeling in front of me, and he picked up my brown paper bag. He lifted it up, looked inside, said, ‘What did you want to go and buy one potato for? Couldn’t you afford a pound?’ And I swear to god he sounded like Brad from Neighbours. He was about as French as Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. I thought how can he make French love to me in a contemptuous way if he isn’t French? So it turns out he was born in Woolloomoolloo. And he was holding out my pomme de terre in its bag with this hand that was so tanned and so breathtakingly gorgeous that I nearly fainted.

  “Anyway, we went off to have an Orangina and it turned out that he was in the final year of his degree course studying Russian and I forgave him for not being French because he said merde like a native and smoked Gauloise Blonds. His name was Ben Parker and his lovely hands weren’t even the best thing about him. He was staying at this place just next to our place, so we agreed to meet up. And when he came round he had this bag of red apples that made me keel over with love.

  “And the rest is pretty much just teen angst. A few walks along Provençal riverbanks, a couple of nights in Saint-Tropez with the others, where we could only afford a glass of house wine between three of us, the fooling around in a barn, and in an abandoned tree house we found on the grounds of this château and then in the back of the hired Renault parked in the drive outside the cottage. And then the summer was over and I thought about him for the whole of my first year of university. Until I met Tim.” Liv pulled her beer bottle from the table and took a swig. Slightly flushed at the memories she thought she’d forgotten.

  “Wow.” Alex rubbed her eyes and looked at Liv. “You were really into him.”

  “In an eighteen-year-old sort of way, yeah, I suppose that I was.” Liv stretched her legs out in front of her.

  “So you never heard from him again?”

  “Nah,” said Liv.

  “But he’s from Woolloomoolloo?”

  “No, actually, he was from Sydney. He was only born in Woolloomoollo because his mother’s car broke down and her water burst there.”

  “Liv!” Alex cast off her jet lag and leaned forward. “Ben Parker lives in Sydney and you didn’t tell me?”

  “Well, as you’d never heard of him until three minutes ago there didn’t really seem to be much point. Anyway, I don’t know that he lives here. I mean he could have emigrated to Utah or anything.”

  “Once a Sydney-sider always a Sydney-sider, so they say,” Alex said enigmatically. “And all the years you were going out with Tim did you ever think about him?”

  “Sometimes. I mean occasionally I would have a dream about him and I’d get the photos out the next day and have a look. Just for old times’ sake. He was the first guy I ever slept with.”

  “God, that is so romantic I want to cry.” Alex sank her teeth into a slice of pizza and looked wistful. “We absolutely have to find him.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, the thought hadn’t occurred to me.” Liv flicked her hand nonchalantly in a way that meant of course she’d thought about it; she was just too shy / nervous / didn’t know how to go about tracking him down, and anyway, if she did and he was married with three kids, then her only pipe dream, the only m
an she had dared hope she might be able to love as much as she’d loved Tim, would be shattered and she’d have to kill herself.

  “Listen, Livvy, you are a beautiful girl. I’ve watched you so sad these past few months that at times I didn’t think I could bear it anymore. Now here we are and the sun is shining and you’ve made nice friends and you’re starting to smile again. I want to see you have fun. You came here for adventure, not to dwell on some hokey tosser who just may or may not get his act together. One day.”

  “Hmmmm.” Liv shrugged meekly. But she had to admit that feeling the sun on her face and laughing with the boys had made her feel just an inch or so better.

  “You know what? You deserve to have your rocket fired, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been a dutiful daughter, a high-earning accountant, never been fat, addicted to drugs, or promiscuous in your life. You’re halfway round the world now and I think you should give it a go.” Alex was now sitting on the back of the sofa looking fired up and excited. It was like watching footage of Eva Peron.