Dog Handling (6 page)

Just as Liv located the kettle there was a rap on the mosquito net and a blond girl dressed all in pink down to her handbag stood in the doorway.

“Hi. I’m Jo-Jo, Laura’s girlfriend. You must be Alex’s friend.” She put out a pink-nailed hand and reached for Liv’s trembling one. “I saw the light on and thought Laura might be in here.”

“I’m Liv. I think Laura sort of went that way.” Liv pointed, drinking in the pink and longing for some human company. “Cup of tea?” Liv offered as a bribe.

“No thanks. We should go—you know shrinks; they get all agitated if you’re late and start saying it’s Freudian.” Jo-Jo turned and yelled with unexpected volume for someone so pink, “Laura, you ready?”

“Here.” Laura reappeared, kissed Jo-Jo on the lips, and they left. Liv was alone once again but felt slightly more encouraged. Did pebbles on the beach necessarily have to be male pebbles? she wondered. Shame she didn’t even slightly fancy Alex, for then life would be sorted: Alex was pretty and cleaned her teeth more frequently than most men. They got on brilliantly and Liv’s parents adored Alex. Except, sadly, Liv wasn’t rich enough for Alex and they both liked sex with men too much. Double shame. Liv downed her tea and plodded off to fall asleep on the nearest bed, dreaming of the day when Tim couldn’t help himself from calling her and hanging up just to hear her voice on the machine.

When Liv woke up, her throat hurt and her eyes seemed to be clamped shut. There was someone moving in the shadows of her room. She opened her mouth to ask who it was, but nothing came out. Eventually she raised a limb and then heaved open one eyelid.

“Eepppp,” she slurred, wanting to make her presence felt.

“Oh, well done. I was wondering whether to give you a bit of a shove or not. If you’d slept any longer your sleep pattern would’ve been buggered up for days.” The quiet Australian voice seemed to be moving around in the cool darkness of the room. “Suzanne, my therapist, suggested that helping others was a good way of deflecting my own pain and anguish, so I’ve unpacked your stuff and put a white wash in. Do you fancy a boiled egg and toast?”

“Breakfast?” Liv squeaked, marvelling at her ability to adjust her bodyclock so cleverly through what must be at least seven international time zones.

“Actually, it’s teatime. We can have some toast soldiers, too, if you like.”

“Sounds lovely.” Liv shifted her body to ascertain which limb was which beneath the somnolence. Also, she was a bit peeved, because if Laura was going to help Liv, then who was Liv going to help to forget her worries?

“Sorry about last night, but I still get nervous about the counselling sessions. Even though Suzanne’s lovely and I’ve got Jo-Jo to come with me now,” Laura said, pulling back the curtains and drenching the room in bright blue. Sea. Cloudless sky and a glare that sent Liv back under her bedclothes.

“Bloody hell. What was that?” asked Liv. “Some kind of alien invasion?”

“A cracking Sydney afternoon,” said the voice, which, in the light, indeed belonged to the same Laura as last night, though it was hard to see anything much given the green stripes of paint across her temples.

“So the counselling?” Liv tried diplomatically to find out whether Laura Train Wreck was clinically insane or merely brokenheartedly insane like herself. She noticed that Laura was folding Liv’s oldest knickers into a careful pile in a chest of drawers.

“Yeah. Therapy’s getting me through. Only three nights a week now, though, and once on the weekend. And there’s a great telephone hot line that’s stopped me doing something stupid quite a few times,” Laura announced proudly.

“Actually, I’ve just split up with my boyfriend and I’m feeling a bit wobbly myself,” Liv confided. “Which is why I’m here really. Trying to forget about him and find myself or something mad like that. I thought I’d try to work it through myself rather than going to see a therapist, though.” In the blackest moments of the last couple of months it really had occurred to Liv to seek professional advice, but shrinks were surprisingly expensive and when it came to a toss-up between therapy and a pale blue cashmere cardigan it somehow hadn’t been such a hard decision to make. Which had led her to feel, with a surge of triumph, that she just might be on the mend.

“Oh, counselling’s great, but it’s no substitute for self-help,” Laura recited in fluent recovering victim speak, a language Liv realised she was going to become very familiar with. Soon she’d know her Issues from her codependencies, and she’d be able to verbalise her guilt in no time. See, she’d already learned something and she’d only been in Sydney a day. Or night. Or whatever. God, five minutes with Laura and she’d be all cured. “I’ll tell you all about it over tea.” And with that she was gone, leaving Liv basking in the startling afternoon sunshine.

Liv’s room was a beautiful cream-walled haven filled mostly with the enormous white bed that she was lying in. Next to the bed was a table of candles: jasmine-scented, raspberry-coloured garden candles in terra-cotta pots, and beside that a bookcase filled with film star biographies, a chest of drawers in perfectly distressed blue nestled in the corner, and an antique Indian rug embroidered with giant peonies lay over the uneven white floorboards. All a far cry from her fraying carpets and Picasso posters at home in London.

She shoved back the covers and made her way towards the window, feeling a bit like the old people going towards the spaceship in the movie
Cocoon.
The window was at least the length of Liv’s entire flat in London and opened out onto a little terrace littered with pots of geraniums and lilies. Liv held her breath as she took in the view. A cityscape straight off a postcard: Centrepoint Tower rose high above the mirrored buildings and office blocks; then if she turned her head farther to the right she could see the water bounce diamonds of light back at her. After a few minutes of drinking in the brilliance of the view she pulled an old sundress out of the wardrobe and over her head and made her way into the other room.

“So how do you know Charlie?” Liv asked as she cracked open the top of her perfectly runny soft-boiled egg.

“I was going out with a friend of his. Then we had the most traumatic breakup. I don’t really like to talk about it, but it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Complete bloody carnage. Well, I guess you’d understand. Anyways, Charlie offered me the flat. He’s been fantastic. Even introduced me to Jo-Jo.”

“So do you and Jo-Jo go out together?” Liv asked.

“Yeah, it was pretty much love at first sight. If it weren’t for the fact that you should never rely on another person to make you happy and that it has to come from within, I’d say that Jo-Jo makes me really happy,” Laura related. Liv totted up the money she was going to save on self-help books just by living next door to Laura.

“Have you always lived in Sydney?” Liv asked, bursting to ask about the horrible witch who had dumped her but trying not to sound too much like an ambulance chaser. Certainly the way Laura was talking and based on the few horrific details Alex had shared with her it sounded like the roughest breakup since Romeo and Juliet. In fact, before Liv had even met Laura she had sometimes drifted off to sleep chanting, “At least I’m not Laura Train Wreck.”

“It’s all right, isn’t it, this place?” said Laura, giving Liv her first taste of the Australian knack of playing things down. Elle Macpherson? Yeah, she’s an okay-looking chick. The ninety-degree cloudless weather? Not bad going today. A spider the size of a Shetland pony? He’s a big bloke. Liv would get used to it in time.

“Yeah. At least it’s not Golborne Road in the pissing rain,” mumbled Liv. Which was exactly where she had spent last Saturday night. Walking backwards and forwards in her only item of designer clothing. Which happened to be a Chloe corset designed more for seducing rock stars than prowling up and down wet streets hoping to bump into your ex-boyfriend on his way out to buy a pint of milk and convince him that you were completely over him and now had a full and active social life full of seducible rock stars whom you were on your way to meet at Woody’s. Thank god for Alex and Sydney, was all Liv could think as she looked back on perhaps the worst way she’d ever spent four hours. In fact, looking back made her realise how far she’d come. And not just the gazillion or so miles. She was only thinking of Tim every hour or so now and not every ten minutes. Maybe things were looking up.

“I’m dying to explore,” Liv said, suddenly curious about the city that, until five minutes ago, had existed in her mind as a faded postcard of an odd-shaped opera house and a whole load of men with sunburn and stringy long blond hair. Judging by her view, she was going to have a hard time keeping the promise she’d made to Alex not to explore the best bits before she and Charlie came home next week.

“Well, I’d love to give you the tour, but I’m in the middle of painting Venice, I’m afraid. Maybe tomorrow?”

“Venice?” Liv asked.

“Sure, come and have a look.” She put down her spoon and led Liv into the hut. Propped against a wall was the Grand Canal, Harry’s Bar in the distance, and the unmistakable brickwork of Venice. A floor-to-ceiling city, stretching across the entire room. The bed had been shoved into a tight corner and the floor was strewn with open paint pots and a chaos of brushes. “I’m a set decorator,” Laura said, grabbing a paintbrush and touching up a gondolier.

“This is amazing. What’s the play?” asked Liv.

“Death in Venice. . . .
It opens at the opera house tomorrow night, so I have to push on.” Laura was unable to resist getting back to work. Within moments all talk had ground to a halt and she hummed away to herself as she mixed some more brick colour. Liv tiptoed back to the cottage.

As Liv finished off her tea, leaning over the balcony, she was beginning to remember all those stirrings she’d had: Roger, Ben Parker, any old random bloke on the tube. Yes, the sap was definitely rising. I mean was she just going to abandon all those dreams she’d had of wearing no underwear to lunch and having sex in the afternoon just because Tim didn’t want her? Absolutely not. No, the time had come to boot the accountant from her soul and get kicked out of nightclubs for raucous behaviour. Bugger Tim. Liv’s life was about to take off so dramatically that she’d turn into one of those women who never seemed to have a pair of clean knickers so she had to turn yesterday’s inside out. Well, she didn’t literally hope for this because it might be a bit foul, but theoretically she dreamed that she’d be so busy being socially indispensable that knickers would be the last thing on her mind.

The only problem was she didn’t really know how to kick-start this knickerless social whirl. Given that she knew nobody in the city save a linguistically impaired cabby and Laura Train Wreck. There was always the option that she could just leave it up to fate. Perhaps she should be Zen and take to the streets and see if she bumped into Ben Parker or a similar candidate for fun and love to end all love. Someone to have sex with on sheepskin rugs while eating pomegranates. Not that there was anyone similar to Ben Parker. She slid into a reverie and wondered what he was doing now. Maybe he really was in Sydney. Certainly his parents had lived here. And let’s face it, who in their right mind would want to leave? And if he did live here and was, let’s just say, girlfriendless, then he, too, might be wandering the streets in a similarly Zen-like manner. Though in her experience men with spare time on their hands tended to make plans involving beer, not destiny. So what did one do in a strange city without a car, map, or friend? She would get dressed first. Something fun and sexy. She pulled on her shorts and some great flip-flops decorated Carmen Miranda–style with fake cherries that Tim happened to think hideously tacky and set out in search of Sydney and herself. Well, she had to start somewhere.

Actually, the only place she could think of to go was to the local shop for a pint of milk. Until Alex arrived, that might actually be the sum total of her social life. But it was definitely a start. Liv walked out onto the street and stopped to pick a flower of jasmine from the tree in a jaunty fashion. Had she been in New York or Paris she’d have simply walked in the same direction as the best-dressed person and followed the neon lights. But there were only lots of frangipani trees, a man walking a dog, and some temperamental streetlights. She just went the opposite way to the man with the dog, knowing that wherever he was she didn’t want to be and also that if she followed him either he’d accuse her of being a stalker or she’d step in his dog’s poo with her flip-flops on. So she walked up the hill past a street of beach houses all similar to her own, some done to fabulously rich banker standards, others more dilapidated and run-down, but all variations on a theme and most painted all ochres and umbres and sandstone colours, with the odd pink or cobalt blue thrown in. There were a few cars parked on the streets and the occasional cockroach scuttled underfoot, but otherwise there was no sign of life.

The uphill became a downhill and the road wound until Liv found a buzzing intersection and a fluorescent-lit supermarket glaring out at her. She wandered in and found the fridge, thinking she may liven up her night in by buying a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, too. She had hoped that she might inadvertently wind up on some beachfront bar sipping a pina colada that matched her flip-flops, chatting to an eclectic bunch of locals—maybe a shark catcher with leathered skin. Most definitely there’d be a lifeguard and a bikini-clad waitress who’d tell her the best place to get your tarot cards read and the hippest beach to spread your towel on. But Rainforest Crunch was the next best thing.

“Just gorgeous. Where did you find them?” Liv looked up and saw a six-foot man smiling down on her. Wearing a polka-dot dress and a black wig. He was pointing, with a nail that put even Alex’s French manicures to shame, at Liv’s foot.

“My flip-flops?” She smiled. “Little shop in London.”

“Well, they’re very special,” he commented, and eased his corseted waist and pneumatic bosom up to reach the top shelf for a bottle of wine.