Dog Handling (11 page)

“So you’re having dinner with Willy tonight?” James asked Liv, who had not wiped the smile off her face all morning. Even when she’d smashed her shin on the door of the Greta’s Grundies van.

“Yeah. I can’t wait. What I’d really like to do is skip dinner and just have him kiss my neck for a couple of hours. I just know that he’ll be an amazing lover. I mean you can tell, can’t you?”

“Pretty much. But you can’t sleep with him tonight, you know that, don’t you?” Dave had just arrived back from a wander around the market clutching a banana smoothie and wearing his Dorothy look—plaits, gingham dress, and red shoes in case he wanted to go home. It was Mardi Gras in a couple of weeks and all the drag queens in Sydney had launched into a frenzy of competitiveness, which meant that Dave now had to shave his legs at least three times a day if he had a hope of being invited to the best parties.

“Not sleep with him? What are you talking about? Of course I’m going to sleep with him.” Liv looked shocked. “Why else would I be going out to dinner with a man?”

“Because you like him and want to get to know him better.”

“Uh-uh. I only go out to dinner with men that I want to sleep with; otherwise you spend all your time worrying that they’re going to kiss you and try to get into your knickers and it spoils a perfectly nice dinner.” Liv was adamant.

“I hate to say this, Liv, but how would
you
know? You might as well have been locked up in a dark cupboard for the last five years for all the experience you’ve had.” Dave slurped on his smoothie and checked his cheeks for stubble.

“I want sex. I haven’t been getting any. Can’t it be that simple?”

“Sorry.” Dave shrugged. “Are you going to explain to her or shall I, James?” James pointed at Dave, but Liv wasn’t prepared to let them talk her out of this. She’d been religious about body lotion all week. She’d be buggered if her new soft skin was going to waste.

“This is about displacement. I kissed Will and felt great because it meant that I could actually fancy someone who wasn’t Tim. I feel liberated. But imagine how great I’m going to feel if I actually have sex with someone else. I’ll be on cloud nine and forget all about the pain and Tim and stuff. I’ll be happy again.”

“Classic rebound, darling, which is all as may be, but you just cannot fuck a man on the first date.”

“Why not?”

“Men are like dogs: you have to train them. If they get what they want straightaway, they lose interest. You can’t give away the goods just like that.” James snapped his fingers to demonstrate how quickly Will would head for the hills.

“Boys, boys. ‘Give away the goods.’ This is the twenty-first century. Now usually I would defer to your better judgement, but I want sex, not everlasting love. So thanks all the same,” Liv insisted as she went off for a wander around the market to ponder the problem of whether painted toenails or nude ones were sexier. Dave and James looked at each other.

“She won’t be saying that when he doesn’t call.” James shook his head ominously.

“Heartache waiting to happen,” Dave agreed.

Half an hour, two smoothies, and one vegetable pasty later, Liv arrived back and tweaked one of Dave’s pigtails, having decided that nude was always sexier.

“I think we’re breaking through. We’re a success.” James started hugging her furiously, kissing her madly.

“You’ve changed your mind and I am allowed to have sex after all. Is that it?” She chucked her cup in the rubbish bin and smiled. “Well, it’s nice to have your blessing. Thanks, boys.”

“Gorgeous, we just had our best-ever customer.” He pointed to the almost empty stall—rows of missing lace undies, a gap where a sequinned bodice had been, and a transparent turquoise bra had vanished.

“Who?” Liv asked, suddenly worried that her own rather unique breast size might just be freaky and not fit anyone else.

“Amelia Fraser. Sydney socialite and general goddess.” He smiled. “She almost bought us out.”

“Amelia skinny blonde leather pants Amelia?” Liv asked.

“More like very little denim skirt, T-shirt v.small and so tight I could tell she didn’t actually need a bra.” He looked into the sky as he recalled the unbelievableness of Amelia, “You know, even though her tits are big enough to make you weep, they’d still stand the pencil test. Amazing!”

“What pencil test?” Liv asked, suddenly diverted and jealous and wishing she had an HB handy to measure her own amazingness with.

But James hadn’t heard. “So do you mean to say you actually know her?” He turned to Liv as he registered what she’d said.

“Saw her at the races on Saturday. She’s got a boyfriend, I know, but I think she’s having an affair with a serf.” Liv smiled, proud that though she’d been in town only a few weeks she had a handle on the gossip.

“Listen, if Greta’s Grundies do the trick for her she can do the dirty with whomsoever she likes. She’s always in
Vogue,
you know. Just hope she spreads the word.”

James got back to work flushed with excitement, and Liv craned her neck around the other stalls, wondering if maybe she could pick up a tip or two on being a goddess by watching Amelia Fraser.

“Lush boyfriend, too, though. Can’t think why she’d want to fool around with anyone else. He’s very sexy in that ‘could be queer’ kind of way.”

“He’s not queer, James. Take my word for it.”

“I’m not taking the word of an ingenue on anything. Come back to me when you’re all grown and maybe then I’ll listen,” James mused, and began to sketch a new G-string with the inspiration of it all.

Liv contemplated telling them exactly how she knew but was too caught up with the fact that Ben Parker had been here just minutes ago—she wondered if he’d left a chewed bit of gum behind or something she could take home for a keepsake, but not a relic in sight. So she pushed Ben to the back of her mind and focused on a magazine article telling her how to drive her man wild in bed. “Only revision,” she told James when he asked her how she’d managed to reach the age of twenty-seven without such a necessary life skill. At least when the time came for Ben and Amelia to get divorced she’d be prepared, Liv reassured herself as she memorised one particularly complicated twist-and-squeeze routine that might well change her life forever.

Chapter Nine

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

T
he restaurant that Liv and Will had arranged to meet in was a classically Australian affair—tucked behind a pub—but nonetheless, the food in all these joints was worthy of a Michelin star and you didn’t have to put up with stiff waiters trying to shove napkins down the front of your shirt. But as she sat waiting Liv suddenly realised that she couldn’t even slightly remember what Will looked like. She knew vaguely that he was stocky and un-Tim-like but not much else. Darkish hair, ish-ish nose, but that was about it. She hadn’t a clue. So it was just as well that with her dark hair and still stupidly pale skin she stood out from every other golden six-foot blond girl in the restaurant and he could identify her should he, too, have forgotten.

“Liv, you look great.” Will strode across the restaurant and was far too competent to have forgotten her. “Am I late? Have you been here ages?” he asked as he kissed her very comfortably on the lips.

Good, no messing around. I like that, thought Liv.

“I only live round the corner, so I was here before I knew it.” Liv smiled.

“Good. Now I figure that because we don’t really know each other it’s going to be awkward for about an hour and then it’ll be okay,” he said as he reached for the wine waiter.

“Okay.” Liv shrugged. This was nice—a straight-talking, to-the-point man. Couldn’t have been further from . . . oh, she wasn’t going to even think about Tim, was she? No. And she didn’t want to. Who wanted some shilly-shallying, polite tiptoer through tulips when Will told it like it was in that rather disarming war-correspondent way?

“Red or white?” he asked as he scanned the menu. “Or champagne. Let’s start as we mean to go on.”

And so they went on. And on and on. Chatting about pretty much everything, laughing properly at each other’s jokes, discovering that they’d both had a penchant for break dancing as fifteen-year-olds, and Liv kept stealing glances at Will and though he was just as chubby as she’d remembered, just as not-her-type—in fact, not many people’s type really in the looks department—there was definitely something about him. And when he’d taken her hand and put it palm-to-palm with his and looked into her eyes and talked about the incompatibility of life in war zones and finding the woman of your dreams, she’d almost volunteered herself: “Fear not, not-so-fair William, for I’m here. And your luck’s in tonight, because I’m insta-bride—I’ve still got a ring at home and actually a whole bloody wedding planned, with a cake in my mum’s freezer and a Bedouin tent and Carpenters tribute band because I couldn’t quite bring myself to cancel it because I was in such a state of denial.” Except of course she didn’t say this, because the next thing she knew they’d polished off the poached pears in cardamom syrup, he was kissing her neck outside a bar on Oxford Street, they were three margaritas up, and it seemed unimportant because it was so clear that they were destined to be together. Oh, and it was rude to talk with your mouth full. So instead of discussing wedding plans they kissed a lot.

“Come back to mine?” Will asked as they walked and kissed and stopped occasionally for something a bit more heavy-duty by someone’s garden wall on their way back to his house.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Liv mumbled, remembering what James had said about first dates. Would Will think she was easy? He pressed himself against her, making her feel as sweet and salty as a margarita inside. “Yeah, okay.” Liv was persuaded, her decision owing just a bit to the blood rush to long-forgotten places.

He laughed and brushed her hair back from her face and looked at her. “You’re very cute, Liv.”

“Thanks.” She wanted to add that he was cute, too, but as he wasn’t she’d have had to qualify it with lots of stuff about great personality and quick mind and fantastic sense of humour because he so clearly wasn’t an oil painting and he must know that. Still, it didn’t detract from his confidence, which was so magnetic that about six minutes and forty-five seconds later Liv was lying naked on his bed as he trailed his hands over her breasts. Blimey. You’ve come a long way, baby, she thought to herself as she reached for Will’s love handles and completely began to see the point of chubby boys.

The Walk of Shame. God, how Liv loved it. All the mornings she’d looked enviously at girls she’d passed on the street as they shuffled along in crumpled skirts and high heels and crushed-but-happy hair on their way home from some wanton encounter in Shepherd’s Bush. And now it was her turn. She knew everyone would think she was a cheap little slut, but this was a novelty for Liv. She’d spent five years being Miss Sensible Knickers and she was damned well going to wring every drop out of her night of raunch with Will. She’d had a fantastic fuckfest, some real headboard-crashing, knicker-melting sex, and she was going to savour the moment. She meandered her way home along Oxford Street and tried to do fairy steps just to make it last: her eyeliner somewhere about her ears, a little cut on her lip, her nose all peeling from stubble burn but the rest of her glowing. No more expensive face creams required, either; she’d forgotten how sex made your skin gorgeous. No matter that her T-shirt was on inside out because she was cruising the Walk of Shame past the people waiting at bus stops and couples sitting in cafes picking at sun-dried-tomato muffins. Past the joggers who should learn alternative ways of firming the inner thighs. She smiled smugly. Ah, her hormones soared with the late-morning sun as she thought gratefully of Will. Never had a man been more wonderfully useful, she mused as she examined a scratch on her arm and a bruise on her knee proudly. Wounds of love. She smiled dramatically and wondered what she’d ever seen in Tim and his mundane ways. Better to be shagged senseless by a war correspondent once than a lifetime of the same old, same old know what’s coming next. What a boring concept forever is when you have last night, she decided.

And so Liv’s grin lasted until about Tuesday afternoon. Two and a half days of postcoital daftness, which included smiling even though her bank threatened to cut off her credit cards and laughing in the face of all her white clothes being mutilated by a rogue pink sock in the wash. And then she began to wonder why the phone hadn’t rung. What exactly had happened to the man who’d turned her world upside down and pushed Tim to a dusty corner along with her Duran Duran albums and lock-up diary of 1995?

“Perhaps he’s gone to Bosnia again,” Liv mused to Alex as she pulled on her swimsuit with one hand and cradled the phone with the other.

“Erm . . . no . . . Charlie saw him at The Royal last night,” Alex said reluctantly.

“Playing it cool?” Liv tried again, though she hadn’t got Will down as the playing anything type. He was way too up-front for that.

“Probably, I’m sure,” Alex reassured her.

“Okay, well, we’ll talk about it later. I’ve got to dash to my surfing lesson—do you want to come along and watch?” Liv asked as she grabbed her towel and some factor 37,000 sunblock.

“Oooh, please. I’ll just go and oil myself up.” Alex hummed. “See you there in twenty.”

“I can’t stand up!” Liv yelled to the man who was standing up on a surfboard three feet away.

“Just kneel to begin with. Then you’re away!” Justin hollered back.

Liv got onto all fours. “It’s no use. I can’t!” she called. “It’s just so bloody embarrassing.” She looked around the beach and at the small group of Japanese tourists who’d abandoned their sunbathing to watch her learn to surf on the sand. Not a wave in sight. “Can’t we just go into the sea and do it?”

“Unless you can sort yer balance out here, love, you’ll be batshit in the water.” Justin came over to Liv and started to pick up her legs and rearrange her arms. She’d enrolled in the surf course a couple of weeks ago after she’d spoken to Fay, who had asked her what mind-altering, character-building things she’d been doing since they last spoke. What could she say? I drank too much in this great restaurant in Surry Hills last night. I discovered a fabulous cheese called King Island Vintage Cheddar, which is now enjoying a new lease of life around my midriff. Oh, and yes, I spent an entire evening flicking through Laura’s back issues of
Vogue
and
Cleo
looking for pictures of Ben Parker and his girlfriend Amelia Fraser. And at the time her night of lust with War Zone Will, now Missing in Action Man, hadn’t even been a glint in her eye, so she’d had nothing to divulge on the jackeroo front. So she improvised and said she’d enrolled at Surf School. It came out of her mouth as she watched a cluster of pigeon-chested teenagers run fearlessly into the ocean with their boogie boards on
Home and Away,
which was on the telly at the time. She had no intention of really doing it, but her conscience finally got the better of her and the next morning she had signed up for a twelve-week course before she could say “dumb idiot with no sense of balance.”