Free Dog Handling by Clare Naylor

day of work.
    “Well, I suppose I’d quite like to meet Charlie. But I reckon you’d have much more fun if you came to the stall with me,” Liv said, slipping the tickets back into Alex’s bag. “You’re going to love the boys.”
    “What stall?” Alex pulled on her sunglasses and took in the blue sky as the driver went haring down the road.
    “I’ve become a muse.” Liv tried to make her new job as a professional chest model sound glamorous. “This designer, James, wants me to be at the stall tomorrow to be the approachable face of high-fashion lingerie.”
    “Who’s James?” Alex asked as they tore along the Pacific Highway.
    “James is a designer. He’s part of a they. James and Dave. A gay they. I just should be there. It starts at six in the morning.”
    “No way. We need our beauty sleep. It’ll be so much fun at the races. Charlie can give us some money to put on the horses with cute names and we’ll drink champagne until we fall over. That beats standing in the rain on some grotty market stall, doesn’t it?”
    “Correction: Charlie will give
you
the money. I haven’t done anything to earn Charlie’s money and I’m going to the stall to make some dollars to feed myself. Plus this is Sydney, not Leeds. It won’t rain,” Liv reminded her.
     
    “So where is he now?” Liv asked.
    “Oh, he’s gone down to Royal Sydney for a round of golf. So have you heard from Tim?”
    “Not a word.”
    “Bastard probably thinks he’s being kind. Well, only a couple of months to go till he’s on his hands and knees grovelling in the gravel on our front path. I promise.”
    But Liv was gone. Until now she’d not really had anything to remind her of Tim. Except of course for the collage of photos she’d pinned of him next to her bed and the Tiffany bean necklace he’d bought for her birthday, which she wore every day, and the fact that she could smell him on the T-shirt she wore at night that she deliberately hadn’t washed yet, though it was beginning to rot just a bit under the arms. Liv wanted to ask Alex if she’d heard any news of him from her network of globe-trotting friends, whether he’d been spied in any Notting Hill watering holes with unidentified blondes. Been seen in tears at the wheel of his car as he waited at traffic lights listening to “Can’t live if living is without you. . . .” But she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She had specifically instructed Alex not to tell her if she did have news of Tiny Tim, so unless she brought up the subject herself she’d never know.
    She bit her lip and wondered if he was wondering what she was up to. Wondered whether he was jealous of the men she was meeting in Sydney (well, he didn’t know, did he, that he needn’t be jealous of James and Dave et al.?), whether he was having piercing pangs of regret at four in the morning, hating being single and devising ways he could win her back. Flowers, chocolates, stalking the aisles in Van Cleef and Arpels looking for just the gem to secure her heart. Yeah, right, she thought miserably. And when exactly was the last time a leopard changed his spots? The guy used to split dinner with her and bought her soap for Christmas. She was lucky to get a beer, let alone De Beers.
     
    Later the girls ordered a takeaway from Arthur’s, absolutely the best pizza in the Southern Hemisphere, and while Liv looked at glossy perfume ads featuring stunning couples for whom life could not involve more togetherness if they were sewn to each other, Alex leafed through
Cleo
magazine’s list of eligible bachelors, putting rings around the most promising for Liv before she realised that it was a 1992 issue so most were either married or sagging horribly by now.
     
    “I don’t fancy anyone else. It just wouldn’t work,” Liv dismissed the bachelors that Alex was waving under her nose.
    “I know, but it’s hypothetical. If you had to have dinner with someone else. Suppose Tim came back to you and you discovered