Dog Handling (36 page)

“Bleugh . . . oh, help. Oh no.” Liv puked again and sat back against the cool side of the bath. And as she remembered the look on Amelia’s face she felt terrible. Truly horrible. Liv had been quite surprised, in fact, to find that Amelia didn’t just laugh off the idea of Ben and Liv as a riotous joke in bad taste. Which was usually her favourite kind of joke. She actually looked shocked and hurt. Liv had somehow imagined that Amelia didn’t really belong with Ben at all. She sort of thought it a case of first come, first served, and since she’d baggsied him at eighteen all latecomers could shove off. She’d overlooked the small matter of an engagement ring and a looming wedding. Dismissed them as inconsequential.

“Just because you’re a shallow cow who doesn’t recognise the value of commitment,” Liv mumbled to herself. Then she remembered the episode on the porch. The bottle. Thank god Tim had been there to . . . “Oh god, and what about Tim?” Liv murmured as she flushed the chain.

“What about Tim?” Standing in the doorway of her bathroom wearing the boxer shorts she’d bought him three Christmasses ago was Tim. Smiling.

“Aghhhh.” Liv knew it was a rude reaction but couldn’t help herself. “What are you still doing here? Oh my god, we didn’t . . .”

“Have sex? No, we didn’t.” Of course they didn’t, she realised. I mean, look at the state I’m in. Liv ran her hands through her hair and contemplated another dash to the basin.

“This reminds me of the time you had bad cod in Brighton.” He knelt down and looked at her closely. “Poor you.” Obviously last night hadn’t taken its toll quite so badly on Tim as it had on Liv. She couldn’t imagine how she looked. He smelled like a shower gel commercial. Zing Man.

“Thanks, Tim.”

“My pleasure.” He smiled and handed her a wad of tissue.

“Oh sure, some philosopher must have said that the meaning of pleasure was your ex-girlfriend on a bathroom floor with whisky breath and a dry tongue and last night’s earring all matted up in her hair. But it’s only pleasurable because you’re ecstatic to be rid of her and know that she’s your ex.”

“Oh, come on, Liv. You always get depressed when you’ve been drinking. How about you go back to bed for a few hours?”

“Okay,” Liv conceded, and allowed herself to be picked up like a scrunched-up tissue and tucked back in bed to feel sorry for herself for a while.

An hour or so later Liv rolled over and the earring that had become a hairball skewered her neck. She yelled out in pain and flung the pillow out onto the balcony. Tim was sitting next to her reading the sports section but on call should she turn green or lose a limb to gout or something. And it was nice having him there. Not the sick to your stomach, can’t touch food, grinning like a lunatic nice of having Ben around, but then her Ben situation wasn’t so nice now that he thought she was the spawn of Satan.

Liv rolled over and looked up at Tim. “Do you think I’ve made a total mess of my life?” she asked dramatically.

“I think that’s the bottle talking.” Tim laughed and stroked her forehead.

“It’s nice to have you around, you know. I’d forgotten how comforting it was.”

“Ah, the old-shoe syndrome.”

“Not old-shoe. It runs so deep with you and me, doesn’t it? I mean we’ve shared a hell of a lot, Tim. I’d been pretending that that didn’t count for anything and that I needed to do all this crazy stuff and that it was more important than quiet, easygoing love. But it’s not. I miss it.”

“I’m glad. I do, too. I still love you, Liv.”

“Thanks.” Liv held onto his hand and wished that you could choose who you loved rather than the big hairy perverted hand of fate pointing its finger in a different and stupid direction.

After Tim was sure that Liv was not about to swallow her tongue he had to go and rescue George of the fair eyelashes from the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where he was so bored he’d nearly had a perm in the hair salon. Liv squeezed Tim’s hand one more time for luck and went back to sleep. She slept off the whisky and she slept off her sudden churning anxiety that maybe Ben was just another example of lust and it would all go horribly wrong a week after they’d started going out together. Maybe what she had with Tim was the real thing. Something to be relied upon. Maybe Ben was a complete red herring. The glamorous-looking dessert that would be no good for her in the long run. But then she thought of how she’d feel if she were never to see him again and not be able to work things out between them. No, she was completely in love with him. Potty about him. Which was insane and painful because she’d monumentally stuffed up and may never get him back. She just couldn’t help it. She was mad about him.

When she woke up she still felt that hollow feeling. She saw last night’s dress lying discarded on the floor and decided she was just suffering postparty blues. She tried to count her blessings—how could she not be thrilled with her lot? She was the majority shareholder in a business that, if Tim was telling the truth, was splattered across the social pages of every national, evening, and local paper today and that had even got a mention in Page Six (the breakup of Charlie Timpson’s secret engagement to the blonde in the picture) and was on excellent terms with her ex-fiancé, who had, as Alex predicted, not been able to live without her. Oh, and she got to go round to Ben’s flat this afternoon to discuss why exactly she’d been a bitch on toast and attempted to screw him over. And all that fun stuff.

The only way forwards was to get up and do something about herself, she decided as she headed for the bathroom. As she pulled on a bathrobe and walked across the living room she glanced at the clock. Five-thirty. Couldn’t be. She wandered back into her bedroom and looked at her alarm clock. Five thirty-two. Ben was meant to be four-thirty.

“No!” she yelled, and picked up the phone and dragged it to the end of its cord as she cleaned her teeth over the bath. “Taxi. Thirty-four Sutton Street . . . as soon as possible? . . . Thanks.” She spat out and rinsed her hair under the tap. Then rinsed herself under the tap. There wasn’t time for much else. The taxi hooted in the street outside.

“Bugger. Bugger.” Liv leapt into the nearest handy thing, which was her nightie, and tucked it into the only pair of jeans she had left that fit her. They happened to not do up, so she had to put on a jumper to cover the gaping buttons and the nightie, which smelled strangely of Tim and just a bit of sick.

“Coming!” Liv yelled as she slopped into some flip-flops and grabbed her bag.

“Ben, oh my god, I’m sorry.” Liv ran down Ben’s front path towards him.

He was standing at the front door with a bag in his hand. He looked at the demented sight before him with a frown. “So you were pretty concerned about this whole thing then, weren’t you, Liv, to get here an hour and a half late? Maybe you were hoping I’d have gone, to spare you having to explain what the hell you thought you were doing.” Ben closed the front door behind him and double-locked it. “I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my plane.”

“The whole dog-handling thing, Ben . . . I didn’t mean it. I mean I don’t know what you heard or where you heard it from, but I never stopped liking you. Never stopped wanting you. Just because I tried to manipulate events and—”

“Dog handling? So that wasn’t just some label that James and Dave slapped on it. You really viewed what you were doing to me as training a dog.” Ben looked at her with even more derision than he had last night. If that were possible. He pulled his car keys from his pocket and walked right past her towards the gate.

“It’s stupid, but it wasn’t serious. It was a game, sort of. . . . I mean it was a bit serious but only because I thought you deserved it and then—”

“What I’m really curious to know is how you could allow me to tell you how I felt and how much I cared about you and not say something about all this.” He opened the car door and threw his bag inside. “Or perhaps that was part of the plan, too, was it?”

“Well, not exactly, but . . .”

“Thanks. That’s all I needed to know.” The car door slammed and Liv watched him speed off down the road.

Liv sat down on his front doorstep and rested her head on her knees. She didn’t even have the energy to cry. And neither did she deserve the privilege of crying. She deserved every bit of Ben’s contempt and she deserved to feel this hopeless, because she’d brought it all on herself. Why in hell’s name had she done it? Had it been the power? Feeling desirable again? Why exactly had she not told him? Why had she believed that being deceitful was a means to any end other than misery? She pulled the Biro that was holding her matted locks in place out of her ponytail and grabbed a pizza menu from Ben’s mailbox and began to scrawl a justification, of a kind, until she realised she couldn’t justify her behaviour at all. She was a fucked-up, stupid twit and had got what was coming to her. Which she attempted to convey to Ben in a pleading note until she ran out of ink.

Chapter Twenty-One

You Always Get the Dog You Deserve

L
iv sprinted out of the mouth of South Kensington Tube Station and along Pelham Street, pausing for breath by the phone box. As she rounded the corner onto Fulham Road she came to a halt beside the wedding dress shop. The door trilled open and Liv stepped onto the mat. The whole place made her think of the day she and Alex had seen the sexy Frenchman and his perfect girlfriend. She’d imagined that they had the most perfect love imaginable then. Now that she was a little more worldly and less rose-tinted she thought it more likely that the decree
nisi
would be about to go through soon and Roger would be free to marry the waitress he’d met in Corsica and his perfect girlfriend would be moving to Milan to pursue a modelling career. Still, that didn’t necessarily make marriage a bad idea. And especially not in light of tomorrow’s hastily planned celebration.

“Hi, I’ve come for the wedding dress.” Liv gritted her teeth and smiled at Delilah, who had lost none of her sneering Frenchness. Heaven only knows what she thought of Liv now with her nose peeling with the last of her Australian tan and her surfer physique and a leftover fake tattoo from last weekend’s trip to Byron Bay. Australia seemed a million miles away now as Liv pulled her old coat even tighter around her and reminded herself to buy some mittens.

“Ah, yes.” Delilah pulled out a box and opened it for Liv to examine. Tulle and lace and tissue paper spilled out and all that could be seen of the dress was really the tiny embroidered rosebuds that decorated the neckline.

“That’s the one,” Liv said, and danced impatiently from foot to foot as the assistant packed the dress away and rang up a staggering amount on the till. Liv clutched the bag close to her and pelted onto the street to deal with the next task on her list.

Once outside the shop Liv pulled a mobile phone out of her handbag and tapped in a number.

“Hello. Is that Big Top Tent Hire? . . . Good. My name’s Liv Elliot. . . . Yes, I know I never paid the amount in full, but I wonder if it’s still possible to have the Bedouin one. With the midnight blue stripes? . . . Oh, only green left? Does it look like a tube of Aqua-fresh? . . . Are you sure? . . . Okay, I’ll take it. . . . Yes, same date as before. This Saturday. One-thirty. . . . Thanks very much.” And she thrust her phone back into her bag and crossed those two things off her list. Forget manicures and hairdos tomorrow morning. It was all Liv could do to make sure the guests had something to drink and a vicar to perform the ceremony. Now she knew why she’d been so daunted by all the preparation the first time around. It wasn’t easy.

“Tim called.” Alex yelled from the other room where she was lying on the bed with her feet up so that her swollen ankles didn’t escape from beneath her trousers. “Said could you call him as soon as possible; he needs to firm up the plans for tomorrow morning.”

Liv put the wedding dress down on a chair, unwrapped the layers, and wandered through into Alex’s bedroom.

“Success?”

“Yep.” Liv sat down on the bed and patted Alex’s protruding little tummy. “How are you feeling? You’ll be okay for tomorrow, won’t you?” Liv asked nervously.

“Sure. Just a bit tired. Rob can carry me. If he ever comes back from the pub,” Alex sighed. Pregnancy had made her just a bit tired and emotional and occasionally homicidal, but apart from that she was coping with her expanding waistline quite joyfully.

“So what shall we do for a hen night?” Liv looked around Alex’s flat. Only the remnants of her past life remained. Now it was all boxes and suitcases and the stuff of transitory visitors like Walkmans and baseball caps and old pizza delivery leaflets. Everything else had been shipped out to Australia in preparation for the birth of the Little Bloke, as the bump was known, and Alex and Rob’s new life in the country.

“There’s Scrabble. Monopoly.
ER.
Pizzas and beer,” Alex said.

“Yeah. Last of the party animals, eh?” Liv laughed. “Oh, and I got a message from Mum earlier. Said would it be okay if a couple of the guests crashed here tomorrow night, as our house is full. Mum’s already got camp beds up in the garden shed.”

“Not a problem at all. So let’s start with Monopoly. Then if we feel like it we can head for Stringfellows, pick up a couple of underage lads, ply them with booze, and make them paint our toenails,” Alex suggested.

“Our toenails?” asked Liv, wondering if this was a very sexy thing to do that she’d missed out on.

“But I don’t think I can reach my toenails right now,” Alex lied as she patted Bump.

“Oh, you’re right—it’s much harder to reach your toes than to do thirty Salutes to the Sun every day and half an hour of shoulder stands, isn’t it?” Liv nodded sarcastically. “In which case, let’s skip underage lads. I’ll paint your toenails, and you can hand-feed me pizza. Sound good?”

“Like a hen night made in heaven.” Alex nodded.

The weather on Saturday morning couldn’t have been better for a wedding. In the country Elizabeth woke up early, stepped in a half-eaten packet of biscuits, and went downstairs to defrost the chocolate cake that had been sitting in her freezer since last September.