Dog Handling

by Clare Naylor

  Chapter Three

  Be Careful What You Wish for

  Because You Just Might Get It

  Liv’s bag kept leaping out and thwacking people as she ran full tilt down Westbourne Grove to meet Alex and Tim in the pub. She was feeling much brighter since her weekend of indecision at her parents’. She and her mum had got out the old biscuit box full of pictures and she had looked back over five years of Liv ’n’ Tim until her anxieties had evaporated. Of course he was the man for her. There he was smiling out at her from under his snorkelling mask in the Bahamas; raising a pint of Guinness in a pub in Dublin when they were still students, grinning his crooked-toothed smile as he celebrated Liv passing her accountancy exams. He was, quite simply, part of her. Part of her past, present, and now her future. It had all sunk into place. She put her wedding jitters behind her as she realised how ridiculous she had been to think that vanishing into the sunset with a Frenchman on a motorbike might make her happy. So what if she never had an obituary in the Telegraph describing the nights she’d spent with Noel Coward sipping gin and tonic in Jamaica? Noel Coward was dead. And wanderlust was all very well, but you usually ended up with malaria if you set foot outside the EU, so exotic climes could go take a hike, too. No, Liv had found her milieu. She would be content to be remembered by all who knew her as a wonderful wife and mother, for her very accomplished dinner parties, and for her ability to juggle accountancy with gnocchi making. What more could the modern woman ask for?

  The Bonaparte was heaving with the usual Friday night crowd. In the corner a table of Britpop’s finest downed pints and bangers and mash while the Notting Hill Glossies and home-for-the-weekend supermodels tried to hide their sheen beneath woolly bobble hats and parkas. On a prime table beneath the television set Tim, Alex, and Liv flicked beer mats and shouted to be heard above the din.

  “So I think I’m going to go to Sydney for a month or two,” Alex said as she stirred up her seabreeze with her finger.

  “A month or two? How come?” Liv asked. “Are you going to be back for the wedding?”

  “Yeah, of course I will, sweetheart. It’s just this Australian guy Charlie that I’m seeing. He’s going back on business and his mother has this beach house she hasn’t used for twenty years that I can stay in, so I thought I’d go and finish my thesis in the sunshine.”

  “Don’t like it too much and stay forever, will you?” Liv said. She was used to Alex jetting off at a moment’s notice, but Australia wasn’t exactly a hop, skip, and a jump away.

  “So who’s the new bloke? Is he marriage material?” Tim asked.

  “Marriage?” Alex laughed. “Timbo, I haven’t been out with a man who was marriage material since my father took me to Thorpe Park aged seven. But he is sex in a sports car and owns seven newspapers and three glossies. Oh, and a news network.”

  “What’s he called? I might have heard of him,” Liv asked.

  “Charlie Timpson”—Alex pouted contemplatively—“and his ears are a bit on the flappy side, but he’s sweet as a doughnut and not too dumb.”

  “And quite rich, too?” asked Tim with blissful male naivete.

  Alex gave him her Is the Dalai Lama Buddhist? look and carried on, “There’s some horse race thingy in Melbourne, so we’ll probably go and see that. Should be fun.”

  “So when are you going?” Liv asked.

  “In a couple of weeks. I’m really looking forward to it.”

  “That’d be great—you could meet his family.” Tim smiled brightly.

  “Yeah, right,” said Alex unconvincingly. “That’s not exactly what I have in mind. But I could wear some great sundresses and I could go and check out some of the galleries in Melbourne,” Alex prompted Liv, who nodded and squeezed Tim’s knee affectionately.

  “Sure. Maybe we could even come out for the honeymoon, couldn’t we, darling?”

  Tim smiled blankly up from his pint and nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

  Liv had forgotten Tim’s blankness when they got back to her house later. Also the fact that he had gone as stone deaf as her grandfather at the mention of the Paul Smith suit she’d picked out for him for the wedding.

  “It would be fun, wouldn’t it, going to Sydney on honeymoon? Don’t you think?” she called out as she clambered under the duvet. “And if Alex was there with this new boyfriend—”

  “Um, Liv.” Tim walked out of the bathroom and through the bedroom door still wearing his suit.

  “What? You’re not even undressed yet? Aren’t you tired?” Liv propped herself up on one elbow as she rummaged in her bedside drawer for some vitamin C tablets she’d bought last winter. She had to keep spots at bay if she were going to be scrutinised by a church full of her father’s picky family.

  “Liv, I’ve been thinking,” Tim said calmly.

  Liv called off the hunt and looked up. Tim was perched on the edge of her bed looking like he wasn’t going to be clambering in next to her anytime soon. “Have you now?” she asked, wondering why he was looking so sober after five pints.

  “I think we should call the wedding off.”

  Liv squinted at him, then gave him a sidelong glance. For signs of a joke or panic or silliness. None of the above were evident in either his tone or his expression. “Sorry?” She frowned.

  “The wedding. I just don’t think it’s right. I know that I should have said something before now, but . . . well, I thought maybe I could work it all out in my mind. But I can’t. It’s not that I don’t love you. I do. You’re my best friend and the most important person in my life. But I think we’re more like brother and sister now. I don’t think that I’m in love with you anymore. I’m sorry.”

  Liv continued to frown. Was she meant to say something? She swallowed and stared at Tim, who was looking at her steadily, awaiting her response. “Right. Well. So you’re not in love with me then?” she whispered. Her body began to shake as though she were very, very cold.

  “No.” Tim was suddenly a stranger. Not fluffy, snorkelling, beer-guzzling, bad joke–telling Tim. She didn’t know this serious man in a suit who claimed not to love her. Or want to marry her. “I think I should go,” he said, and stood up gravely.

  “Excuse me?” Liv finally said, her voice cracking. “You sit there and tell me you don’t want to marry me and then think you’re free to go?” She shook her head as though someone had just slapped her hard across the cheek. “Somehow I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t know what else there is to say,” Tim said, his composure slipping so that for a second he looked like her Tim again. Not the imposter who had just shattered her world.

  “We can start with why,” Liv uttered as Tim sat back down on the bed and ran his hand through his hair.

  That had taken the better part of a night. The uncontrollable sobbing and sleeping pills had taken about a week. Alex had cancelled all her bikini waxes and trips to the library and appointed herself clearing-up-the-tissues monitor and running-out-to-the-shops-to-buy-more-whisky girl. Alex had also been the one to call Fay and tell her that Liv would be taking a bit of unofficial compassionate leave and was the one who slipped all the vital platitudes to Liv as she huddled under the duvet.

  “You know that this is what you wanted deep down. It’s just that Tim’s a bloke and he was ruthless enough to do it, whereas you’re a woman and you’re too kind. Anyway, he did play golf and somewhere that has to make him an incredibly dull fuck really, doesn’t it?”

  “But I love him. How could I not have known what I had until it had gone?” Liv wailed plaintively.

  “Remember Roger, the beautiful biker frog in the wedding dress shop?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there are loads of Rogers out there. And let me tell you another thing: Men always think the grass is greener; they always think that once they’re free life will just be one big bloody pitcher and piano full of women with big breasts and small underwear who want to shag them senseless. Then what happens is that they discover that not only is the grass n
ot greener; it’s mud on the other side of the fence. Then in three months’ time when you’ve moved on they come back with their tail between their legs and stalk you and beg you to have them back and marry them.”

  “Oh god, is that true? Please let it be true, Alex.” Liv sat up in bed. This was the only glimmer of sunlight on her horizon right now, and it had to be true.

  “Always. But the thing is, Livvy love, that women cope and men mope. When he does drag his soggy golf bore of a tail back here you’ll have moved on. You’ll have Roger in your bed and butterflies in your knickers and you’ll say, ‘Tim who?’ when he rings your doorbell in the middle of the night and begs to be let back into your life.”

  “But he’s the only man I could ever, ever love. What am I going to do now? I’m never going to meet anyone again.”

  Alex forgave Liv these needlessly pessimistic thoughts as this was her first real heartbreak. Absolutely everything that Alex had said about grovelling men steeped in regret was true. It was simply that Liv had to live through the intervening three months of hell before the stalking began and she was forced to remove the batteries from her doorbell and serve a restraining order on him. “Damn that bloody ruthless bastard,” muttered Alex as she dropped Rescue Remedy onto Liv’s tongue and handed her another tissue.

  And, sadly, it didn’t make Liv’s pain any easier to bear when she remembered that she, too, had wanted to head for the hills and sand dunes and sunset and whatever other horizon her imagination had on special offer on that particular day of the week. She knew that it was all for the best somewhere very deep down inside her, but right now it was buried beneath all her dreams of Tim-style babies and a life signing her cheques as Mrs. Timothy Evans. She couldn’t get past regret. Regret that she hadn’t appreciated him more when he’d been around. Regret that she hadn’t noticed something was wrong when sex had gone from tepid to somewhere-as-exciting-as-plucking-your-eyebrows a couple of months ago. As Tim had sat on the bed, everything he said had been true and was really just an echo of Liv’s own thoughts: they had lots of other things to do in life; they should live a little more first, perhaps travel; the passion had just ebbed away; they were better friends than lovers. All that stuff she totally agreed with. Just why was it him who got to say it? “Ruthless bastard,” she sobbed again.

  Chapter Four

  You May Have Been Dumped on Your Ass

  by Your Rat Bastard Boyfriend,

  but Life Goes on, Baby

  Alex was also right in another respect: women coped and men moped. Within a fortnight Liv was back behind her desk at work with a packet of Handy Andies in her fist and barely a tidemark on her finger where her engagement ring had been. She had decided to throw herself into work and become an index-linked businesswoman. For the fourth day in a row she’d been the the first person in the office.

  The office came to life in instalments—a few designers who either had dreamed of a hat so fantastic last night that they just had to get to work on it straightaway or hadn’t made a decent headpiece for months and who were fuelled by hatter’s-block anxiety, were the first. Then an intern whom all the nongay designers and men in the postroom fancied. It was always that way with work-experience people. Limbs, hair, pouty lips, beautiful husky tones. It didn’t matter if they were male or female. They’d grace the photocopy cupboard with their sublime presence for two weeks, then evaporate. When it came to new recruits, fully paid up members of the staff, there were always a great deal of spots, chipped teeth, and personal hygiene problems. What happened to all the beauteous youths? Liv wondered miserably. It was a metaphor for life. It all just crumbles and gets ugly. (Her body may have been sitting upright behind her desk, but her heart still felt as though it were being trampled under a herd of migrating buffalo.)

  She tapped into her voice mail hoping that there would be something from Tim: a trembling message of regret. “Sorry, I went to the doctor today and was diagnosed as having temporarily lost my mind, but I’ve got some antibiotics and the wedding’s back on. I’ve realised that carbonara sauce just isn’t the same without you.” Instead she got:

  “Message One.

  “ ‘Liv, babe, it’s Alex. Just to remind you that you’re gorgeous.’

  “Message Two.

  “ ‘Liv, darling, it’s Mum. Hope you’re feeling better, pumpkin. As I was taking the compost out this morning I suddenly thought: Catherine Zeta-Jones. Now she may have been heartbroken years ago by that Blue Peter person, but look at her now, lovely black hair and Hollywood at her feet. And there he is spinning the wheel of fortune on afternoon telly. Do you imagine that if she were Mrs. John Leslie she’d be on the cover of my OK magazine this month? I don’t think so. So there you go, love. It all comes out in the wash.’

  “Message Three.

  “ ‘Hi, Liv, it’s Alex. Just arrived in Sydney this morning. I can’t tell you how blue and beautiful it is. Charlie’s mum’s house is amazing. You’d love it. The guys here are incredible, too, in case you were contemplating a bit of cone licking or whatever it was you were talking about the other week. I miss you, sweetheart, and I hope you’re well. I’ll call you at home this evening to check in. Love you lots. Bye.’ ”

  For a split-milli-barely-counts-at-all second Liv thought of the men in Sydney. In fact, she thought of one in particular. But god, that was ten years ago. Ben Parker had been her one and only holiday romance. The love of her life. The man who when she was eighteen she was going to marry and have kids and dogs with. Her family had gone with a group of other families with teenagers to Aix and stayed in the most enormous low-ceilinged farmhouse with a mosquito-infested lake in the woods nearby. The adults would stay up till midnight imbibing the local brews and playing boules while the teenagers either sulked in their rooms or, in Liv’s case, experimented with hash and heavy petting in the ramshackle outbuildings of the farm. Ben Parker’s parents had been staying in a mill up the road, and on their last night, as the rain poured down outside and clung to the jasmine, Liv and Ben sheltered in a barn and they probably had sex. Though she’d never quite been sure if this was the night she lost her virginity or not, because either the fine Moroccan was dope or Ben wasn’t having quite an effect upon her. She still had the occasional dream about his very wonderful lips and surfer’s legs teasing her into a frenzy of adolescent passion.

  Liv’s heart did a whistle-stop tour of a life ahead—it came in flashes. Liv going out to visit Alex and the pair of them drinking margaritas on a beach. The sunlight on her face making her strong again. Ben Parker kissing her in the surf. The two of them holding hands in front of the Sydney Opera House. But of course there was Tim, too. Tim watching the whole thing and being made sick with jealousy. Tim thinking how beautiful and have-backable she looked. Tim scuffing the knees of his Paul Smith wedding suit as he crawled around on his knees in abject misery while she touched Ben’s taut tummy and then accidentally trod on Tim. I’m losing it, she snapped at the whistle-stop tour and jumped off the bus.

  “Liv, are you okay?” Fay was standing behind her looking at the tepid lemon tea Liv had spilled all over her desk.

  “I’m sorry; it was an accident.” Liv hastily mopped up the tea with her shirtsleeve and reached for her lavender oil to apply to her temples for calm.

  “Liv, I’d like a word if you don’t mind,” Fay said, examining Liv’s disarray: spreadsheets and how-to-win-Tim-back strategies pasted damply to her desk with Liptons. Even though she knew her work was up to scratch, Liv felt slightly nervous as she followed Fay into her office. Perhaps her pink eyes were proving an embarrassment during meetings. Or Fay had decided to put a curfew on trips to the loo, which still, despite the bottle of Rescue Remedy and hip flask of Saint-John’s-wort that Liv was averaging a day, amounted to around three an hour. Which was quite a lot of wasted work time, given that each trip involved a snotty sob on the loo seat, the bashing of her head against the wall, a liberal splash of cold water on the face, and a pause to wonder if Tim would have stayed had she not
had a balding patch on her right eyebrow.

  “Take a seat,” said Fay as she closed the door softly behind her. Unaccustomed to such time wasting as sitting down and closing doors on Fay’s part, Liv felt mildly claustrophobic and nervous. She perched perilously on the edge of a low filing cabinet in an attempt to defuse the situation. “The sofa’s all yours.” Fay wafted her hand in the direction of the butter-soft suede objet d’art and swivelled her own chair to face Liv. “How are you feeling, Liv?”

  “Getting better every day. Really. I’ve almost forgotten about the whole thing. And I’m sorry about the mess out there—I just got a bit light-headed. I came in early and haven’t had breakfast yet.”