Dog Handling Part 18

"I still love you, Liv," he said.

"No." She couldn't believe it. Had the world gone mad? "Have you gone mad?" she asked.

"I'm sorry. I really am. I just . . . I just don't know if splitting up was the right thing to do. I still think about you all the time, you know."

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l." Liv walked away from Tim for a moment's breather. "Just give me a minute, will you, Tim?"

She sat on the gra.s.s as he pretended to look around the old lighthouse keeper's cottage. What about the Glamazon? Could Tim really be serious? She also thought extra hard for a second because until that moment she and Tim had been getting on so well. It had been easy, fun, nice, and light, and she knew that even if they were to walk along the beach until they were fifty years old they'd still have something to say to each other, still laugh together. It wouldn't be all fluttery and Ben Parker wonderful, but it would be nice. Was she being mad, being in love with Ben? He still had to chuck Amelia; imagine if he couldn't bring himself to at the last minute. Then she looked back and watched Tim loping around the cottage, caught his profile, the way he smiled at her. And she didn't feel anything. She really wasn't in love with him anymore. No matter how flattering all this was, it was only that. Inconveniently, she was in love with Ben.

"Listen, Tim, I think we should be getting back." She stood up and walked towards him.

"But, Liv, that's why I'm here. I came to get you back."

"You know that's not what I meant. I have a meeting at four o'clock. Anyway, like I said, I don't know that I can ever forgive you for what you did."

"But, Liv . . ."

She remembered the shrine she'd built to him on her dressing table in London and how she'd meditated on his pa.s.sport photo for a whole week in a bid to conjure him up by witchcraft. And he hadn't so much as called her to make sure she hadn't hurled herself under a bus.

"Besides, getting back with an ex is such a cliche. It's like fancying Brad Pitt or being turned on by a man driving a Ferrari. Sure, it happens, but not to people with any taste."

Chapter Nineteen.

It's My Party and I'll Ruin It

if I Want To

Liv knew that her alarm clock was droning away for a reason, but through the fog of sleep she couldn't remember quite why. Not market stall. Even through the fog, she worked out that it wasn't Sat.u.r.day. It was . . . ? What day was it? What had she done last night? Ah yes. Last night she'd had supper with Alex. Pizza. Beer. Not much out of the ordinary. So today was Thursday. No market stall. Ben? No, she hadn't shaved her legs so she knew for a fact that she wasn't planning to see Ben again until the party. On Thursday. Today. Tonight!

Liv caused trauma to every single one of her vertebrae as she leapt out of bed seconds later. It was more a cat on a towering inferno type leap than a cat on a hot tin roof jive. She was up and at 'em. Today was indeed the day when everything receded into the background apart from canapes, c.o.c.ktails, RSVPs, having her hair professionally "done"for the first time in her life, and still making it to the venue on time. It was a displacement wedding. She was about to marry her career. It was make or break for Greta's Grundies. If only three fas.h.i.+on a.s.sistants arrived on their way to a book launch and the waitresses had to take home the canapes wrapped in bacofoil at the end of the evening, then Liv didn't have a job, a future, or an income. If, however, the supermodel snogged the politician in front of the Greta's Grundies' large pink cardboard logo and seven hundred people lined the street outside in a bid to squeeze through the doors of the overcrowded party, then Liv and Alex had a hit on their hands. The latter, of course, was absolutely the dream-come-true-but-first-you-have-to-sell-your-soul-to-Beelzebub so was a bit unlikely. Somewhere in between would be gratefully appreciated.

"Alex." Liv banged on Alex's bedroom door. "Getting up?"

"I don't feel well!" Alex called out.

"Morning sickness? Then have a gla.s.s of water. It's mind over matter," Liv chided as she took a dry handful of Just Right and threw it at her mouth, though most of it escaped to the kitchen floor.

"Laura. You will be finished painting the giant G-string, won't you?" Liv panicked as Laura walked into the dining room rubbing her eyes and still wearing her nightie.

"Sure." Laura sat down on the sofa and reached for the television remote control, flicking on MTV. How could she choose this moment to get over herself and become a normal human being again? How dare she stop obsessing about her work and running round like the cat fresh from the aforementioned towering inferno and instead be as cool as a cold thing?

"Is something wrong, Laura?" Liv asked as she took to her guest list with a pen and began counting ticks next to names.

"I'm fine. In fact, I really am fine. You know, this whole thing between you and Ben has given me closure. I'm really, really well."

"You mean you're better? No more shrink?" Liv asked, astounded yet horrified. Did this mean that Laura would no longer use work as a tool to manage her emotions and so Liv wouldn't be getting her giant painted G-string for tonight's party anytime this side of Christmas?

"I feel fine. In fact, I'm not even going to take a single beta-blocker before tonight's party. Isn't that great? I realise that Ben's just completely ordinary, farts sometimes, gets the odd spot, and has smelly feet bloke. I really like women much better."

"Actually, Laura, that's the man I love you're talking about," said Liv. "But if you go and paint my G-string now I won't hold it against you!" she yelled as she headed for the bathroom before new, chilled Laura had a chance to become a reclining redhead among the bubbles and commandeer the loofah for the day. Right now she looked so relaxed she might just slide off the sofa and evaporate into a puddle on the floor.

Thankfully Alex emerged from the bathroom before Liv could administer any more bossy kicks to Laura's behind.

"Ah, my partner. Thank G.o.d we're in this together," Liv proclaimed as she dragged Alex bodily into the bedroom to help her decide which dress she was going to wear tonight. "Then we have to go to the flower market, then the hall, and make sure everything's in place." They had decided to hire out an abandoned church in Woollahra on the simple grounds that they could afford nothing else. Thankfully all the pews had been stolen so they'd just have to decorate the place with twinkling fairy lights, sweep the floors, and fill it with flowers to achieve their desired champagne-fountains-and-marble-staircases effect. Well, almost. They were also borrowing a few of Laura's old sets of Venice and Umbrian hillsides and Paris by moonlight and other schmaltzy things that looked better than mouldy old church walls. That was if Laura ever surfaced again now she'd locked herself in the bathroom. Only violet wafts were coming out from beneath the door.

"Actually, we're not quite in this together because I'm not quite together." Alex sat on the edge of the bed on the exact dress Liv had just planned to wear and burst into tears. "I dumped Rob!" Alex wailed.

"You did what?" Liv didn't really have the time for a crisis, but this was pretty earth-shattering and potentially party-ruining.

"Late last night. I told him I couldn't marry him because I have to stay with Charlie."

"Why?" Liv sat on the bed beside Alex and put her arm around her shaking body.

"It's Luke-he's won this amazing scholars.h.i.+p to a sports academy in the States. His future's guaranteed. How selfish of me would it be to say he couldn't go just because I love Rob? In time maybe we can be friends. But I've got to do it. For Luke. I'm so proud of him. Just it's a fortune, twenty-five thousand dollars a year for three years. I mean our business is okay, but it's not going to make up twenty-five thousand dollars in the next few weeks, is it? I can't afford to leave Charlie. It's as simple as that." Alex sobbed.

"And you told Rob that?" Liv asked, stroking wet strands of hair back from Alex's face.

"Yeah. And he just left. You know what he's like, Livvy: he's uncomplicated. It had never really occurred to him that I was only with Charlie for the money. I mean Charlie knows that and to him it's not such a big deal, but Rob took it badly. I tried calling him all night, but he wasn't at his flat." Alex burst into fresh tears and clung onto Liv.

The minute Alex was tucked up exhausted and asleep in her bed with her pashmina over her and a gla.s.s of water and box of tissues beside her in case she woke up, Liv scribbled her a little note telling her to rest and sit in the sun for the day and that they'd work it out later. Then she stole Alex's mobile from her handbag and headed off to the flower market, calling her troops on the way.

"Dave, you've heard of Black Monday?" she said.

"I'm a stockbroker, I live in terror," he replied while also selling grain, just in case Liv had insider information she was about to impart.

"Well, today's Pitch-Black Thursday. Please help."

She also called James and said the same thing, only he said he'd never heard of Black Monday, but he had a f.u.c.k of a hangover so would gladly come and hang out in a silent, darkened church hall for the day. If she provided him with a can of Diet c.o.ke and an Egg Mcm.u.f.fin he'd be there in fifteen. Result. Liv also called Tim, but he wasn't in his room. She imagined him in his green silk jacket on a Captain Cook Cruise on the harbour with his Glamazon, who didn't know that he also liked shorter, darker, less attractive girls. She left a message telling him where the church was and asking him to pull on some old jeans and come along. Cheeky maybe, but if ever there was an hour of need it was now.

So by the time Liv got back from the flower market with a fieldful of antique roses in the back of Laura's car there was a lineup of unwilling men sitting on the wall of the church, smoking and basking in the suns.h.i.+ne. Well, lineup of three, Dave, James, and Tim, and they seemed to be getting on well, with James using Tim's green jacket as a parasol and Dave and Tim locked in conversation.

Liv screeched the car to a halt and fell out before either could impart incriminating stories about her to the other. "Boys, oh, thank you so much." She ran around the back of the car and opened the boot to unload her roses. "I've got the key. James, will you open up?" Liv handed over the key and James creaked to his feet.

"Where's my Macca, Livvy? You promised."

"I'll zip down to Bondi Junction and get you one in a second. And, Tim? James? Big Macs all round?"

They nodded as they removed the boxes from the boot and carried them along the cracked concrete path to the church. As Liv lurched up behind them under the weight of boxes of fairy lights she wondered if she and Alex had done the right thing in hiring this place. It had only cost fifty dollars and she hadn't seen the inside yet. They should probably have taken Amelia up on her offer of her apartment, but given the circ.u.mstances Amelia might well find out the Terrible Truth and leave them high and dry.

Though it was looking terrifyingly as if they were high and dry now.

"Are you sure this is the right place for your rocking, glitzy party?" Tim asked as he looked suspiciously at the six-foot spider's web obscuring the rotting church doors.

"I think so." Liv was glad she'd given James the key and was about to offer him an extra cheeseburger if he opened the door for them. But thankfully his gla.s.ses were so dark that he couldn't see anything as minor as the bird-sized spider that was waiting menacingly for lunch in the corner of its web. Instead he lumbered straight into the doorway, bouncing back slightly as the web resisted him, but putting it down to bad coordination due to his hangover.

"Ooohh, bit unsteady there," he groaned as he broke through the web and tried to fit the key into the door.

As it creaked open on its hinges and a smell like an old tomb engulfed them, Liv decided this was karma for her affair with somebody else's boyfriend. l.u.s.t had brought her here, to this dark, festering hole, instead of to the camellia-scented Designer's Guild waftiness of Amelia's immaculate apartment. Liv was the d.a.m.ned, Amelia clearly Exalted. With wings.

"Okay, who's going in first?" James said as even his somewhat diminished senses railed against the stench from the tomb. The tomb where they were going to host tonight's party for three hundred of Sydney's best-dressed and most celebrated Clean People. If it had been vampires or smeggy hippies with dogs on string, no problemo. But they were Fas.h.i.+onistas. These were Exalted Amelia's friends in Colette Dinnigan.

"I'm off to McDonald's. Won't be long." Liv backed away from the potential horrors within and sprinted to her car, leaving the boys to deal. Which was presumably what boys were for.

As Liv picked up her three brown bagfuls of burgerish things Alex's phone rang: "We need Vim." It was Tim. "And Domestos. And a kettle to boil water so buckets, too, and cloths. Oh, and, Livvy?"

"Yes?"

"Humane mousetraps. But big ones. For rats," he said gravely. Though he could have said it in a light and trifling way and it would still have had the same effect on Liv's arm hair.

"Okay," she whispered, and hung up. She wasn't in the mood to hear about the vampire bats clinging to the rafters. Or was that what the Vim was for maybe? She made her way to the hardware store across the road from McDonald's and increased their annual profits by a lot.

And of course Sydney, city of sparkle and weather and the like, chose that lunchtime to have one of its downpours. Not sprinkles of pretty April rain like England in spring. Not even the added interest of an electric thunderstorm. Quite simply, it p.i.s.sed down torrents. Elizabeth Street was inches deep in slapping, lapping waves of water. The drains gurgled like the underworld was about to pop out for an Away-Day break. Liv couldn't park the car near the church because she couldn't see if there were yellow lines or not. And by the time she made it back inside, the hamburgers were soup and the brown paper had disintegrated in her hands.

"Sorry, boys." Liv ducked through the church door in trepidation.

"Don't panic, Livvy. I think it'll be okay!" Tim called out of the darkness, but it was too late. Liv had seen it and should have been struck blind or turned to stone, so unspeakable was the sight. A hole in the roof the size of . . . ohhh, a tennis court . . . an Olympic swimming pool . . . something like that. Big.

"Heellpppp!" It was a wail from a deep dark place. Liv dropped the burgers to the floor and they floated away on a slipstream that, had she brought her boogie board along, she could have surfed beautifully. "What are we going to dooo?" she cried.

"We've got a plan." Tim came and stood beside her, seemingly ignorant of the rat that had just run off with his lunch, and looked at the church hall as though it were a house in Hampstead that just needed a lick of paint to make the pages of World of Interiors. "See, what we thought was . . ." He waved his arm around the room and began to describe his vision.

And Tim was right. All it needed was several hours of scrubbing and slopping out water and for the rain to stop and more Vim than you can shake as stick at and the dismissal of the rodent population to the garden of a nearby pub (yes, they had some bad karma coming their way for that one, but hopefully it wouldn't arrive till tomorrow) and a lot of sweeping and just a bit of weeping (James), and there they had it. A work of art. Well, maybe not. Maybe just a church with a few cracked stained-gla.s.s windows and no pews, but still . . . Dave rigged up some electricity (again courtesy of a cable to the local pub and not necessarily legal, but . . .) and Liv scattered her flowers liberally and then at three o'clock Laura arrived with Jo-Jo on the bus with the scenery. And at four-thirty Alex arrived with very puffy eyes and a bagload of scented candles. But she was there and everything was in place, and just as Liv was about to stand on a chair and thank her team from the bottom of her heart and stuff, she remembered. Hair. Five o'clock. Double Bay.

"Bye, guys. Love you all. Couldn't do without you." And she vanished into the humid afternoon leaving her troops without a leader, but all secretly relieved because they'd been wondering all day how they could broach the subject of her hair. Which was, to say the least, not the best.

The evening sun left only a glow on the golden sandstone walls of the church, and after the taxi driver stopped to let Liv and Alex out he wolf-whistled them and they turned and curtseyed to him.

"Good on ya, girls!" he called out as he drove away.

A man walking his dog on the other side of the street got himself into a bit of a huff because while he didn't mind the gays moving into his street if they were professionals and worked in advertising and the like, he did object if they came lowering the tone with their frocks and women's clothing and such. But thankfully Liv and Alex only looked like transvest.i.tes from a distance to shortsighted old men. Up close they were divine. Made in Barbara Taylor-Bradford Land Lingerie Queens of all the knickers they created. They walked arm in arm along the candle-lined path towards the church with their hair high and expectations soaring.

"Do you think there are many people there yet?" Liv asked nervously as a taxi pulled up to the curb and two black-twined women with Dior bags stepped out.

"They might just be going to a dinner party down the road," Alex muttered as they kept walking bravely towards the door of the church.

"No, they're coming here. Help." Liv's kitten heels clicked FEAR in Morse code on the path. "Are you okay now?" Liv asked Alex as the Dior bags shuffled cautiously behind them. Well, they'd heard of some outre venues, but this one? This one took the low-fat biscuit and no mistake.

"I'll survive. Then tomorrow I'll have a nervous breakdown. But Laura was sweet and said some really useful things this afternoon," Alex said, and Liv wished she'd persuaded Laura to have a pyre for her self-help manuals this morning so that they wouldn't be handed down to her best friend. Who would swiftly become her exbest friend if she so much as mumbled the word closure in her sleep. "I forgot to ask you what you thought of Tim and," Alex began, but the Diors had crept up on them and the door of the party loomed large.

"This isn't some sort of Rocky Gothic Horror party, is it?" the first Dior, who happened to be the chief buyer for an American department store, asked.

"G.o.d, I hope not. McQueen had one last week in London. Never want to see another black olive as long as I live."

The second Dior replied, "By the way, this is the Victoria Loftes show, isn't it?"

As Liv pushed open the heavy door she detected not a whiff of mildew. Merely an overwhelming draft of Annick Goutal scent gracing the a.s.sembled fas.h.i.+on tribe and the low throb of James's dance music.

"Weellllll," said the first Dior ambiguously as Liv and Alex stepped among the fray. The room was now a mission statement for Greta's Grundies: the walls were dreamily awash with views from the Bridge of Sighs, the chestnut trees along the banks of the Seine, and on the back wall above the altar a vision of h.e.l.l, all red and raw and in flames, and the bar was cleverly disguised as a G-string, which you actually had to lean across if you wanted to be served any number of champagne c.o.c.ktails. The little bit of leftover accountant in Liv shuddered as she noticed the beautifully clad young women knocking back the booze as though they'd mistakenly read that you should drink at least two litres of champagne a day, rather than the customary mineral water, for clear skin and thin legs. But they did at least seem to be having an amazing time. Charlie had pulled out the stops and brought along every single member of his polo team and a handful of young squillionaires, so the boygirl dynamic was working out very well. Especially given the high quotient of boys who like girls with thin legs and girls who liked boys to buy them things. The presence of the G-string and alluring red of h.e.l.l no doubt fuelling the erotic ambience and improving everyone's chances of pulling. So far Liv hadn't seen a single person she recognised, but she took that as a good sign.

"Drinks methinks," Alex said as she led Liv towards the bar.

"For sure It's going well, isn't it?"

"It's what the Americans call a f.a.n.n.y b.u.mper," Alex said. "Why don't you go and circulate and I'll bring your drink over."

"Okay," Liv said reluctantly. Circulate? She didn't know anyone and these people probably had no desire to have her crash their conversations about what happened last night at the International or who was dressing Nicole Kidman for the Oscars.

"Liv, this is awesome." It was Amelia, looking stunning. Looking so good that Liv would contemplate taking her home tonight, not to mention what every man in the room wanted to do with her. Her skin s.h.i.+mmered in that damp modelly way that Liv remembered was always described as dewy. Her hair had sheen; she reflected light and beauty like a human sequin.

"You look great," Liv said simply.

"Thanks." Amelia inhaled the compliment. "So what's all this about Rob and Alex splitting up?" Amelia asked without bothering to lower her voice even though Charlie's soap star was standing inches away from them, chatting into her mobile as usual.

"Who told you about Rob and Alex?" Liv asked, thinking erroneously that she was the only person in the world to share in the secret, not just of their breakup but of their affair.

"Oh, you know I knew. I told Alex that he was the best b.l.o.o.d.y catch in Sydney. She's a fool if she gives him up," Amelia said as she scanned the room for the photographer.

"You meant Charlie was the best catch in Sydney, didn't you?" Liv whispered.

"Did I b.u.g.g.e.ry. Jesus, he's got ears like the World Cup. No, Rob's the man; he'll make a great father, too."

"Yeah, but he's not exactly, well, rolling in it, is he?" Liv tried to be tactful, but she thought that Amelia was bright enough to realise why Rob wasn't going to be the husband and father that Alex needed. "And the thing is that Alex has these family reasons for needing to be-"

"You're kidding, aren't you? Robbie not rich enough. Where did you get that from?" Amelia had to hold onto her gla.s.s for support as she shook with laughter.

"Well, he can't make much money as a stable hand, can he?" Liv said, lowering her voice even further as she saw Alex approaching with the drinks.

"Stable hand." Amelia clearly thought this the best joke since Bill Clinton and nearly fell off her heels.

"What's so funny?" Alex approached, a smile stretched across her face, but there were visible signs of sadness; she looked tired and older than usual.

But before Liv could divulge all, Amelia was snapped up by the photographers who wanted to take her picture next to the G-string, so she never got to share her mirth with Alex.