Dog Handling (8 page)

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 promising 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 man 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.

“Actually, I’ll give fat a miss, Alex.” Liv smiled, secretly wondering whether Ben still had those legs that she’d fantasised about through many an applied maths lecture or whether . . . ? Well, she supposed he did still have his legs. At least, she hoped so.

Chapter Seven

The Stripper Wax

W
hen she woke up in the cottage on the beach the next morning it was all Liv could do to stop herself from galloping into the ocean in her nightie as Alex lay flat out on the water bed. It looked so cool and inviting as the sun rose and a huge tractor trailed across the sand preparing the beach for the hordes who’d descend on it later with their factor 25 and bottles of Volvic. Liv managed to restrain herself for the poor tractor driver’s sake and put on a swimsuit first. She pulled an ancient Missoni one from the back of the laundry cupboard in the bathroom and squeezed into the string bottom and crocheted top. In fact, she might have to borrow this for the boys to copy as a Greta’s Grundies prototype; there was no reason on earth why they couldn’t launch a swimwear collection, too. They’d be on the market stall now without her, she thought guiltily, then remembered that according to Fay and Alex she was meant to be one of life’s doers rather than an observer, so banished the regret and ran across the sand hiding her bottom with her hands.

The water was fantastically cold and, apart from a cluster of surfers farther out, there was nobody else to be seen. The air was milky and warm and Liv just lay on her back and let the waves bob her up and down, her hair plastered wet to her shoulders and her toes peeping up out of the water. Last night she’d gone to sleep thinking that she would never be able to lean over and run her fingers through Tim’s blond hair again. But this morning she knew there was absolutely nowhere else in the world she should be right now. She even took time to remember how full Ben Parker’s lips were.

“You might think that looking at the sky is a bit soft, Alex, but I tell you it was awesome.” Liv shovelled her hips into a cerise shift dress that Alex had demanded she wear.

“It sounds great. Now we have to work out how we’re going to get Ben Parker’s phone number,” Alex said as she cast off her bathrobe and stepped into her linen dress.

“Like I said, he’s probably married.” Liv didn’t want to get her hopes up just yet. “And I’m not really over Tim. The last thing I need is some rebound fling.” She poured herself a glass of mango juice from the fridge and felt the warm sun trapped under her skin and realised that even though she’d only been on the beach an hour she’d managed to burn slightly. But right now she didn’t care. Worrying about an ageing neck and wrinkles was not her bag today, she decided, and reached into the fridge for a bite of cold pizza.

“It’s ten o’clock, by the way. What time were we meant to be at the racecourse?”

“Oh, not for ages. Which is perfect, because I’ve got a bit of a treat lined up for you,” Alex said as she picked up her handbag. “Come on; let’s go.”

“No way. Nope. Nope. Not on your life,” Liv hissed under her breath as Alex took her seat in the waiting room of the beauty salon.

“It’s the most wonderful thing you’ll ever do to your body. Once you’ve had one you’ll be hooked; I swear,” Alex said as she shoved Liv towards a woman in a white coat who was wielding a little display card with pretty pictures on it. Until Liv looked closer.

“Choose one of these for me, darlink.” The woman handed Liv the laminated card. On it were six different pictures, which were not pretty . . . six bikini lines in various states of undress, the Mohicana, alias the Stripper Wax, and a multitude of others that Liv was just too prudish to spend more than a second studying, but one was undoubtedly called the Japanese Porn Star and would have made for a very chilly time inside anyone’s knickers. Blimey.