Dog Handling

by Clare Naylor

  “Well, I’ll be a bitch on wheels when Will calls then. Show him I’m not available. At least not that same night anyway,” Liv decided as Alex opened the front door and they fell into the cool shadows of the cottage. Mate leapt up again and tugged at the hem of Liv’s shorts. “Down, boy,” she snarled firmly, trying to muster up a ferocious gaze. Mate stopped yapping for a moment and then looked up at her. “Good boy,” she said much too soon, as he cocked his leg and peed on her ankle.

  “There must be someone you’re interested in apart from Will?” Alex pulled a couple of Cokes out of the fridge and Liv washed her foot and gave Mate the evil eye.

  “Well, yeah, there’s somebody. Ben Parker, for instance. But I don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance with him because not only is he otherwise occupied; he’s occupied by Perfect Amelia, who I wouldn’t even want to stand next to in a bus queue for fear of looking shabby. Let alone make a fool of myself by trying to seduce her boyfriend.”

  “Well, you never know about Will. I mean he might just be really, really busy. I’m sure he’ll call by the weekend,” Alex said. Which Liv supposed was a neat way of avoiding the fact that with Amelia as competition in the race for Ben, Liv was definitely going to be the horse that fell at the first fence.

  Chapter Ten

  If the Phone Doesn’t Ring

  It Can’t Be Him

  By Saturday, a week and still no phone call after her date with Will, Liv was rudely awakened at six o’clock.

  “Oh, god. Surfing,” she croaked as she turned over and knocked the alarm to the floor. Her head puttered to life like an old car on a winter morning. As she was mentally preparing to find her swimsuit and shave her underarms, she remembered, “Saturday. Thank god. Thank god.” She buried her face back in her pillow and let herself drift back to sleep. As the warm early-morning sun was catching her hair and making her relish her lie-in she suddenly sat bolt upright. “Fuck. Saturday. I’m late.” It was miserably true. She’d meant to get up at five o’clock this morning. Not six. She’d promised James that she’d help him drive his stock from some warehouse in the city and bring it to Paddington. Sure enough, the phone rang three seconds later and compounded her general trembliness. She shuddered and ran into the sitting room nursing the shred of hope that it could be Will. At 6:00 A.M. Yeah, right.

  “Yes.” She tried for husky, but it came out homicidal.

  “Where are you? You were supposed to be here at six.” It was James sounding as if he’d already jogged seven miles, breakfasted on smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, and read a spectrum of improving newspapers.

  “James, I’m so sorry. I’ll be there. Now,” she said, pulling on a T-shirt that was lying on the floor. Laura’s? Probably; it was disfiguringly tight and had splodges of Venice on it, but no time to lose. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She’d definitely overdone the frizz-smoothing serum when she’d last washed her hair, she thought as she grasped her lank, greasy locks. And trousers. Trousers? Not a prayer. She found a pair of denim shorts that might have looked good on Naomi Campbell. But only might. Oh well. Key. Wallet. Out the door.

  By midmorning on the stall Liv was flagging badly. She’d given up on life and love and it was definitely showing in her appearance. Like girls who meet a man and mysteriously lose weight and shine. Liv lost two men, gained weight, and became ugly. Her hands were purple with dye from all the crushed velvet she’d had to lug around the warehouse, and her face was a whiter shade of wallpaper paste. James had asked her if she wouldn’t mind sitting in the back of the van and running through the books. He’d said it kindly, but she knew that in truth it just wasn’t good for business to have someone who looked like a Goth who’d been in a smash on the M3 on the way home from a Cure gig in the late eighties as your muse.

  “Liv. Are you still alive?” he asked two hours later as he opened the back door of the van and found Liv doing her sums in the comforting darkness.

  “Sure. It’s a bit hot, though,” she said, gasping for air and blinking like a mole in the sunlight. “Only I’m off for a bit of a sandwich. Shouldn’t be long, but would you mind”—he looked reluctantly at her, wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be better just to close down the stall rather than have Liv peddling his wares for him—“taking over the reins while I’m gone?”

  “Do I look so terrible?” she asked as she tried to catch a glimpse of herself in one of the van’s wing mirrors.

  “Best not to look, eh?” James said. “You’re usually a beautiful girl, but this morning you’re not far from a bushpig.” He went to ruffle her hair in a display of brotherly affection but quickly pulled his hand away before it was coated in lardy gunge. “A friend of mine’s got a hair salon in Double Bay. I’ll fix you up with an appointment,” he said sweetly, and beat a hasty retreat. “The cash tin’s there. Hopefully it’ll be quiet.”

  Liv thrust her legs into the sunlight and blinked at their terrifying pallor. Not a good look for Paddington Market, which was awash with fresh golden-baked teenage limbs. In fact, probably not a good look anytime. She plonked herself down in the deck chair behind the stall and read the balance sheet with mock fascination. If she emitted unfriendly-enough vibes she might not even have to deal with a single customer. In fact, she watched with a surly expression she’d copied from an Estée Lauder saleswoman as at least six potential customers came, fiddled with the bras, and then scurried away. Doubtless to have a few nightmares about the experience.

  Then she heard another set of footsteps approach the stall. She made a few accountant noises in her windpipe and practised her own modified version of a Uri Geller spoon-bending tactic to make the invader go away. The fact that it made her puce in the face was an added bonus. But the footsteps didn’t beat any sort of retreat, hasty or otherwise. Bugger.

  “Is this Greta’s Grundies?” a man’s voice asked.

  “Yeah. Feel free to touch whatever you like,” Liv growled, a little surprised at the man-buying-bras revelation but without looking up.

  “Great. Thanks,” he replied. God, he had a sexy voice though, she thought. Different from the voices she’d heard recently. She tried to work it out while keeping her eyes fixed on VAT. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Chocolatey voice, she decided. Actually could be any number of other things, like warm-raspberry-jam-on-buttered-crumpets voice or treacle-poured-on-porridge voice, but she plumped for chocolatey. Interesting this, not judging the book by its cover but by what it’s got to say. When she was at Goldsmiths she’d once conducted an outrageously flirtatious phone relationship with the buyer from a trendy Soho hat shop. He was called Simon and Liv had fantasised about how he was the one for her and that there was no way they couldn’t fall in love the second they met. They discovered that they had both been listening to Kris Kristofferson’s “Loving her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again,” alone in their rooms for years. They were passionate about reading in the bath and they both wanted to keep yaks and follow the Inca trail. So no way they couldn’t fall in love. Except that when they met at a PR agency’s Christmas party he had the nerve to have a shiny bald pate, glasses, and a monobrow. So despite thinking that the man fiddling with the lacy knickers six feet away from her sounded like he would have her dribbling lustily in no time, Liv knew that Mr. Chocolatey Voice was actually as hideous a bushpig as she herself was.

  She put her black book and pen down and stood up.

  “Sure, fire away,” she replied as she came face-to-face with Mr. Chocolatey Voice. Alias . . . oh, Christ, well, of course it was going to be, wasn’t it? Alias Ben Parker. No wonder he’d sounded different. She knew him. He was the man who’d told her ten years ago in fledgling chocolatey tones that her hair was as lovely as Belinda Carlisle’s. It had been love then. What was it now? Well, actually, it was acute embarrassment.

  “Haven’t we met before?” Chocolatey Ben asked.

  Liv grabbed a nearby bra and pretended to sniff it, hoping to cover her face. What she wanted to say was, “God, Bill. How
are you? Oh, it’s Ben, is it. Oh yes, now I think I remember. Spain, 1992. Oh yes, of course, France 1991. Well, you’re looking great, Ben. Oh, I am, too? Well, thanks. So how aarrrrrreeee you?” At least that was the cool and casual speech she’d prepared for when she bumped into him, but she had also planned to grow a couple of inches and become lovely before she said it. This morning she was very far from loveliness. And if he didn’t recognise her it would be more than her currently rather fragile ego could bear. “Don’t think so, mate,” she snorted instead, doing her best Aussie impression.

  “You’re not English then?” he asked.

  “Ya kiddin’, aren’t ya? Next you’ll be accusing Skippy the Bush Kangaroo of being a corgi.” She hid her pallid legs behind the stall, thinking that even if her embarrassingly bad attempt to be Clive James made her sound local, then her glow-in-the dark sausage-shaped limbs would definitely give her away as English.

  “Sorry. Thought you were a girl I once knew.” He smiled beguilingly.

  Liv wanted to hang herself with the bra. After she’d hurt him very badly with a few metres of knicker elastic. “Yeah, well, wrong chick, sorry. Did you wanna buy something?” Liv saw James approaching from the other side of the market. He was carrying two cups of coffee and a large pizza box, obviously feeling guilty about making Liv a pariah. Only he mustn’t come anywhere near here right now and give her childish game away.

  “I’ve been advised that Greta’s Grundies are just what I’m looking for.” Except he wasn’t looking at anyone’s grundies. But she could have sworn he was looking at her chest, which was dangerously unhinged in Laura’s minuscule T-shirt. He was probably considering alerting the emergency services.

  “Then feel free to look,” Liv said, her accent dropping slightly as she panicked about how best to avert James from his path. Ben gave her a lingering puzzled look before averting his gaze to Liv’s personal favourite—a velvet-trimmed corset.

  Liv stepped into “distract James” mode: She tried to wave him back with her eyes, but he merely hurried even more, knocking his pizza box into a baby snuggled in a papoose on his mother’s back.

  Go away, Liv mouthed when she was sure that Ben had his nose buried in underwear, but James simply hurried up and piled his box and coffees onto the cash table.

  “What is it, gorgeous? Are you ill? You haven’t been looking well all day.”

  Liv kept her mouth firmly shut and just shook her head. She gave James a thumbs-up sign and smiled broadly. Then she picked up a coffee and smiled like Marcel Marceau. Hmmm, thank you for the coffee, the smile said.

  “Liv?” James shoved her down into the chair and looked at her with concern.

  “Can I help?” Ben piped up from behind the stall. “I didn’t think she was well before. Looked a little green and breathing heavily.”

  “No, she’s always that colour. Must say she did seem to have the power of speech when I left, though.” James felt Liv’s forehead and was about to attempt to take her pulse. God, bugger off back to the other side of the stall, Ben Parker, and let me look like a cow’s backside in peace, why don’t you? Liv thought. Now what was she meant to do?

  “I can take her to the emergency room if you like. I mean you’ve obviously got a stall to look after. I’m doing nothing this afternoon.” Ben smiled winningly, the bastard.

  And as he did so, James suddenly took in that he was a very edible young man, vaguely familiar-looking—and buying female smalls, too. Maybe this could be the beginning of a beautiful, if adulterous, friendship. “Oh she’ll be right. Just drinks too much. These pommy sheilas can’t take their grog.” He waved a dismissive hand over Liv and turned the full wattage of his smile on Ben, “Now, sir, what size can I help you to? Large, I’d imagine.” He smiled, looking Ben up and down.

  But Ben was too busy trying to work out how the Aussie sheila he’d just been talking to was actually English Liv. “Yeah, Large is fine, thanks,” replied Ben absentmindedly, making James’s Saturday. Liv picked up her figures and hastily plugged numbers into the calculator, making up imaginary sums and faking looks of concern at the total amount.

  “Liv, can you hand me three ones and a twenty from the cashbox, darling?” James asked, not taking his eyes off Ben, who was now clutching a brown paper bag full of man-sized lingerie and staring at Liv, who handed over the cash and carried on doing her sums.

  “Thanks so much; erm, that’s great,” Ben mumbled as he turned and walked away through the market, looking around just once to make sure that he hadn’t imagined that whole encounter.

  “Well, I think that one’s truly in the bag, both metaphorically and literally.” James grinned as he fingered the crisp $100 bill that Ben had handed over. “He’s certainly hot enough to pitch my tent.”

  “What are you talking about?” Liv asked, slamming down her calculator. “How dare you put your sex life before my health!”

  “Oh, darling, I knew you were faking it just to get that gorgeous beast to drag you off to be hooked up to a drip.” James gave her a tart look. “But isn’t he Amelia Fraser’s fella? Jeez, there’ll be a great big fat scandal when I tell the blokes at the Albery about him.”

  “He’s not gay, so get over yourself. And for your information, I don’t need to fake illness to make him drag me anywhere,” Liv said, albeit unconvincingly. The way she looked today, the only place anyone would drag her was to the recycling plant.

  “Oh yeah?” James smiled, his hands on his hips. “Dying to hear this one. And he does wear women’s undies, by the way.”

  “We used to be lovers.” She tried an insouciant flick of her hair, but it wouldn’t budge. Her coup de theatre was short-lived, as James laughed out loud.

  “Yeah, right. So why didn’t he recognise you?”

  “As a matter of fact he did. I just pretended not to be me so that on another occasion I can wow him with my wit and beauty. Today, as you’ve astutely pointed out, I’m neither witty nor beautiful.” Liv slunk back into her chair and contemplated exactly where she was going to begin with this transformation that would stop Ben Parker in his tracks and make him marvel at how he could ever have forgotten Liv Elliot.

  “Not witty?” James laughed. “You’re hilarious, Liv. If that bloke’s not a tranny, then why did he buy fourteen pairs of Large knickers?”

  “That I don’t know. But they’re definitely not for Amelia Fraser,” said Liv, thinking that perhaps as good a place as any to begin a transformation was her back end, which would have resided comfortably in each of Ben’s fourteen pairs of knickers. Then she decided that she wasn’t sharing a single thing more with James. And certainly not the secrets of her love life. Not that she’d had one for a whole week, but just in case, well, just in case one happened to strike her down. Like the flu.

  “Oh, come on, sulky chops. Tell me what’s wrong.” Dave had just finished his Mardi Gras rehearsals and was looking as spectacular as ever in his Ursula Undress outfit complete with dagger. He and Liv were sunning themselves in front of the stall. “Is it because James didn’t believe that you and Ben Parker had ever smooched?”

  “We didn’t smooch; we had sex. Heaps of it in the hay.” Liv pouted as Dave sat on the deck chair next to her. “But that’s not what I’m miserable about.”

  “What is it, sweetie?” He lit a cigarette and tuned in to listen.

  “Why hasn’t Will called me?” Liv bit back a tear. “Am I so awful?” She’d been holding it in since Wednesday and was trying to look on the bright side, but there was just no escaping the fact that a man she didn’t even think was particularly attractive didn’t fancy her. Her ego was fragile right now and the last thing she needed was to be rejected again.

  “Liv, you didn’t even fancy him very much. You talked yourself into it because you needed a rebound flingette. For heaven’s sake, you told me that by Monday you’d decided that you’d been deluding yourself and that the sex was only about a six and that you suspected he was self-obsessed. Now, a week after he hasn’t called, you
think he’s the most amazing man alive,” Dave reminded her.

  “Yeah, but even though he wasn’t good enough for me it still hurts that he doesn’t want me.”

  “It’s not you he doesn’t want. It’s just that I did warn you, didn’t I?” Dave stroked the tear away from her cheek and took her hands in his big one.

  “You told me not to sleep with him, but surely that can’t have been the problem.”

  “Liv, my love, I know it sounds Victorian, but you gave away the goods too soon. If you want a man to beg, you have to treat him like the dog he is.” Dave lit a cigarette and began to ponder the problem. “There are a few rules when it comes to men, or dogs, for the purposes of this conversation, and the sooner you learn and use them the better.”

  An hour later Dave was half a packet of cigarettes down and Liv’s legs were char-grilling dangerously in the afternoon sun, but neither really noticed, as they were very much involved in the principles of dog handling.

  “Okay, now you’ve got the gist, I want you to repeat the dog-handling basics to me.” Dave flicked his ash on the floor and watched Liv closely, hoping for great things from his new star pupil.

  Liv sat up straight and took a deep breath. “The first thing to remember is that men are exactly like dogs. They pant and salivate and like to sniff your bottom and basically have loving hearts, but they have to be trained if you’re ever going to get the best out of them,” Liv began.

  Dave nodded encouragement. “For example?”

  “For example, if a dog drops a ball in your lap he wants you to throw it so that he can play. If you hold onto the ball, the dog will not go away. He’ll look at you expectantly for a second, and then if you still don’t throw it, he’ll sit down and wait. If you continue to hold onto the ball, he’ll raise the stakes and lie down and pant. If you hide the ball in your pocket, he’ll come closer and sniff you and then stare at you for hours in a heartbroken way. So that when you finally toss the ball for him he’s so excited he runs around and barks and can barely contain himself. By playing this game with him you’ve made him a happy, fulfilled dog.”