Dog Handling (22 page)

As the parade continued, as float after float of overt sexiness was paraded before her, as she watched the guests on the dance floor behind her, the teenagers snogging in the street below, Liv began to feel a bit hot under the collar. She had exhausted her hips and was suddenly seeing the point of a dance partner. She shot a few glances over her shoulder and noticed Ben dancing—not wave-your-arms-in-the-air-and-let-rip stuff but just a bit of hip swaying, a foot here, a hand on someone’s waist there. He was laughing and looked all ease. Alex was right: he was sexier than any man had a right to be. So sexy it was wrong. Especially tonight in his linen trousers and his trademark T-shirt and trainers. Amelia was really getting it together on the dance floor with her modelly mates, but he was unperturbed and seemed happy to just ease around the edges, one eye on the floats and music outside, one on the party. Liv was beginning to feel a bit left out, wishing it were last week again and she had Ben panting at her heels like a dog. I mean here she was totally ignoring him (apart from the sly staring) and she wasn’t having a bit of luck. She looked forward to reminding Dave how wide of the mark he’d been on his dog-handling theories.

She took herself and her drink off to the loo so she could come back in five minutes and reinvent herself in another spot in the room—where nobody had seen her before and she would look like somebody who’d just stepped away from the fray to be alone for a second or two rather than a sad bint who’d been on her own all night. She was about to lock herself in a cubicle in the ladies’ when she heard the door shut behind her.

“Why didn’t you call me back?” She looked around and saw Ben standing there, his back against the door holding off the rest of the party. A tap dripped and Liv clutched her bag and took a hasty look around the loos to see if anyone else was there. They were alone.

“If you don’t ring I can’t call you back.” Liv took a step or two back towards the cubicle. Subtly, but putting the distance between them nonetheless.

Ben was looking closely at her to discern whether she was telling the truth. “I called you on Sunday. I left a message on your machine.”

“Oh. God, well, I’m sorry. I really had no idea.”

“I can’t stop thinking about you.” He didn’t move from behind the door, but she knew that he was about to get much closer than ever before. She could feel her resolve rinsing away, and though she tried to remember what her objections to kissing him were meant to be they, too, seemed to have evaporated. Ah yes. She knew.

“You have a girlfriend,” she said. Almost firmly.

“You’re very busy,” he reminded her while looking at her lips.

“You’re a player and only after one thing and when you’ve got it I won’t see you for dust.” She moved another pace away.

“You don’t want a boyfriend right now.” He moved a pace closer.

“My heart was broken and I don’t want it to happen again.”

“I want you, Liv.”

“Of course you do, because you can’t have me.”

“Can’t I?”

There was a tap on the door behind him and they both froze for a second. Liv opened the door of the loo behind her and motioned for him to go inside quickly. They could swap places.

“What’s going on in there? Open the door,” a woman’s called out shrilly. Liv took over holding the door shut where he’d been standing. Before he moved into the cubicle he touched her cheek. Liv closed her eyes for a moment and then, after he was securely locked in the loo, she moved away from the door and let the woman outside in.

“What the bloody hell were you doing in here? I’m standing out there dying for a pee.” A shimmery girl whom Liv recognised as one of Amelia’s cosy posse burst through the door.

“Sorry. I was just hitching up my tights and didn’t want anyone to come in.” Liv grinned inanely.

“Yeah, well.” The girl looked Liv up and down as though she were just a weirdo and then shut herself away in the next cubicle for a very long and loud pee like a horse. Liv tapped lightly on Ben’s door and he opened it. She joined him and they smiled conspiratorially at each other and locked themselves in.

“Hey, you got any dunny roll in there?” The horse pee girl rapped on the door.

Liv leapt a foot in the air and Ben sent a roll sailing under the partition.

“Here you go.” Liv giggled.

“Ta very much.”

Liv and Ben were now only a foot apart with nowhere to step back to. Liv looked at her feet and then her handbag and Ben’s feet and everywhere except his face. His trousers, she noticed, were made of a particularly lovely rough-hewn linen, probably Italian but then again, maybe Egyptian cotton. And beautifully hemmed.

Meanwhile there was a flush next door. A great deal of primping sounds and teasing of hair into place in front of the mirror and then the banging of the door and silence.

“Thank god for that. I thought she’d never go.” Liv laughed.

“So where were we?” He put his hands on her arms and she did feel stupidly small and pathetically lacking in willpower.

“It was never going to happen,” she said quietly.

“Exactly.” Ben nodded and then leaned down to kiss her, his hands tightening around her arms and his body moving next to hers. “Let’s go outside.” He had been kissing her hard and she, this time, had not been resisting.

“Outside?”

“In the street. It’s buzzing out there. And it’s pretty rank in here.” He took her hand and kissed her one more time for the road. “Come on.”

Liv was glad she hadn’t revealed to him that having sex in a loo was actually one of the things on her list of Experiences I Must Have in Life. Along with dancing in public and Ben Parker. So she figured it didn’t matter too much if she skipped just one of her things to tick off just for tonight. Didn’t want him to think she enjoyed doing rank.

Ben laced his fingers through hers and led her out of the fire escape down some back stairs onto the street. They’d totally bypassed the party and Amelia and, thankfully, hadn’t crashed into anyone on the way.

“Aren’t you afraid we’ll get caught?” Liv asked rather naively. The look he gave her told her that this might be precisely the thrill he was looking for. Instantly Liv knew that this was probably not the path marked “Love and Romance 13⁄4 miles.” This was the hot, sticky, slippery slope to momentary thrills and feeling like shit tomorrow. But whereas unbaked Liv would have hesitated on the street corner, thought of Dave’s wise words, and said thanks, but no thanks, the half-baked version of herself felt the balmy evening envelop her, took one look at Ben’s face, thought screw tomorrow, and followed him through the crowds.

The parade was in full swing and with each float that passed another disco hit filled Liv’s head. She was happy to be jostled by the crowd with their whistles and cans of beer and shrieks of excitement and she couldn’t help but dance along as she and Ben stared upwards to see more camp than several hundred rows of tents grinding and pouting away. Every so often Ben would rest his hands on her waist as he stood behind her and she could feel his knee brushing the back of her legs. She was absolutely beginning to get the point of Cocksucking Cowboys by now. They fuelled her on her journey. Even if she didn’t know her destination, as she was so tipsy. But just as she was getting into Barry White rasping “Hang On in There, Baby,” Ben put an arm around her waist and led her away from the throng and onto a quieter street.

“A bit of peace and quiet at last,” he sighed as they strolled past the darkened, silent houses in Paddington, smelling the jasmine and enjoying the warmth of the night until the noise of the crowds drifted away.

“Absolutely,” Liv said. Though suddenly she missed the buzz. It had matched her mood, the energy that was still bristling through her. She was still high from earlier, and part of her wanted to keep dancing and moving. Still, here was Ben. All to herself. Couldn’t really complain.

“I don’t know what it is about you, Liv, but since you arrived I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. I mean truly, I have never been this distracted by anyone. There’s something different about you. . . .” He stopped and turned to her, pushing her hair gently back from her face. She was looking slightly blankly at him. “Oh, I know that sounds like a line, but it’s not. . . . It’s like you’re not even aware of how great you are and—”

“Ah, you see, I have a theory on this.” Liv moved around to the other side of the tree and began to pull the leaves off it. Then the odd twig. Breaking it up into pieces. “Ha, look, I’m pulling apart this poor tree. Anyway, the thing is . . .” And she was away. Straight off the starting block her mouth was running the 100-metre sprint in Lycra shorts and very serious trainers. Fuelled by the booze with fluorescent go-faster stripes. Liv talked. And how. “What you have to understand, Ben, is that I was with my old boyfriend for years. I mean ages and aeons and practically generations—almost since Victorian times—and so I’m not exactly what you’d call experienced with men and I know that I’m not supposed to admit this, especially to you, but I think that what you like about me is this quality that—”

“It’s a kind of innocence,” Ben said as he watched her carve her name on the tree with her fingernail.

“Totally innocent. I mean really, how many people have you slept with in your life, Ben?” she asked as he rested against the tree and began to stroke her shoulders. “Actually, don’t answer that, I don’t even want to know, but the point is that I’ve slept with . . . well, not many, and if I were to tell you how many then actually you might—”

“You’re talking complete rubbish.” He was holding her hands and standing a breath away from her.

“I know; I’m sorry. I think maybe I’m a little high. Shall I shut up?” she asked through a haze of cocktails and fresh air.

“Just give me a minute,” said Ben as he moved in closer and began to kiss her bare, burned shoulder. “Or two.” And he kissed her neck.

“Okay,” she conceded, and closed her eyes just for a moment.

“Too much bloody Chardonnay, I reckon. I’ll be fine. Just need a gulp of fresh air.” Back on the roof terrace Amelia waved the horse-peeing friend away, and picked up her handbag before heading down into the street.

“Where do you reckon Ben’s got to?” murmured one of the glossy posse when she was out of earshot.

“I saw that English girl in the dunny. You know, the one with the market stall.” Horse pee raised her eyebrow and the glossy posse decided they wouldn’t want to be the English girl with the market stall when Amelia got her hands on her.

“Oh, and this one, the one just below my shoulder blade. This one’s from the time when I was seven and I fell off a dustbin.” Liv and Ben had progressed to an intimate history of each other’s scars.

“It’s shaped like a boomerang.” Ben smiled and ran his finger over the shiny white mark on Liv’s back. “In fact, you are my boomerang. You’ve come back to me, haven’t you?”

“Oh, that feels lovely.” Liv shuddered. “Can you do that with your tongue?”

“I guess so,” Ben said gamely, but he was beginning to worry that Liv looked a bit unstable on her feet. He’d seen her knocking back a few cocktails and they were pretty ferocious. And now she was being unusually flirty with him. He had wondered for a moment if perhaps she wasn’t better off tucked up at home in bed. Then he looked at her warm, soft shoulders, the smooth skin on her arms, and the curve of her elbow, which he particularly loved. And he carried on kissing her. After all, he went out with Amelia; he was used to manic, insane women who talked complete nonsense and never shut up. So he began to press his lips against Liv’s scar. To kiss her shoulders. To ease the straps of her dress down and move his knee between hers.

Amelia stepped out into the street and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her Marc Jacobs bag. As she lit one and took a deep drag a small group of worse-for-wear revellers nearly crashed into her. One of the young women half smiled at Amelia, not sure if she knew her from her feng shui evening class or if she’d seen her on the television but knowing that she knew her all the same. Amelia smiled back and stepped out onto Oxford Street with a tentative strappy sandalled foot. Last year a friend of hers had slipped on half a hamburger at Mardi Gras and broken her ankle. Then she’d put on loads of weight because, obviously, you can’t exercise when your leg’s in traction and you have to eat hundreds of poached eggs in hospital. Amelia was very cautious of foot.

“Wouldn’t go down there, love. Never guess what we’ve just seen,” one of the men laughed over his shoulder as Amelia made her way down a back street into Paddington.

Amelia took another lung-crushing drag on her cigarette and then tossed it to the ground and squeezed it underfoot. “I bet I would,” she mumbled as they walked off. “I bet I bloody would.” She forgot all about soggy hamburgers and marched, her bag clinging onto her shoulder for dear life, towards the scene of the crime.

Chapter Fourteen

Pets Win Prizes

L
iv woke up and began to wallop herself around the face. She could feel a giant mosquito perched on her right cheekbone.

“Get off. Go away.” She slapped away until it had to be dead, then lifted her hand from her cheek to witness the gore in a satisfied way. She looked at her hand. It wasn’t a mozzie at all. It was a spiky, glittery false eyelash. Ugh. And she’d just completely given herself a headache by whacking her face like that. She leaned over to pull a pillow from the other side of the bed to hide from the glare of the Sydney weather. Instead her hand hit skin. Unmistakably skin. Human. She slowly turned her head, wondering if maybe she hadn’t just got what she’d prayed for at her Tim altar all those months ago. To wake up and find that it had all been a dream, they were still engaged, and he was lying next to her in bed. But as she opened her eyes she realised that no, her prayers hadn’t been answered. Well, not the Tim one, anyway. But maybe another one. Had she, she tried to recollect, ever prayed to see Ben Parker wearing reckless ruby lipstick with the sibling of her glittery eyelash stuck above his left eyebrow while lying buck naked in bed next to her? Not specifically, she thought. But maybe in one of her dirtier, more daring moments this scenario might have crossed her mind fleetingly. Anyway, the point was it had come true. Thank you, God, for answering my prayers.