Free Dog Handling by Clare Naylor Page B

that he lived in a cigarette butt–filled garret near the Seine. I imagined living there with him. Sometimes in the dream he’d get irritated because my French vocab was wrong, but it was a sexy irritation; he’d just toss back his hair and then give me a patronising French snog.
    “Anyway, by the time I’d followed him to the square it was so hot that my sundress was sticking to me and my feet were killing. I’d managed not to make him notice me when my mum yelled out, ‘Liv, darling. We’re over here. Come and meet Florence.’ She was so loud that I dropped my
pomme de terre
in shock. God, it was so embarrassing. She might as well have yelled, ‘Put out more flags! The British are coming!’ Everyone stopped and stared. So I was rooted to the spot and when I looked down there he was, Serge, kneeling in front of me, and he picked up my brown paper bag. He lifted it up, looked inside, said, ‘What did you want to go and buy one potato for? Couldn’t you afford a pound?’ And I swear to god he sounded like Brad from
Neighbours.
He was about as French as Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. I thought how can he make French love to me in a contemptuous way if he isn’t French? So it turns out he was born in Woolloomoolloo. And he was holding out my
pomme de terre
in its bag with this hand that was so tanned and so breathtakingly gorgeous that I nearly fainted.
    “Anyway, we went off to have an Orangina and it turned out that he was in the final year of his degree course studying Russian and I forgave him for not being French because he said
merde
like a native and smoked Gauloise Blonds. His name was Ben Parker and his lovely hands weren’t even the best thing about him. He was staying at this place just next to our place, so we agreed to meet up. And when he came round he had this bag of red apples that made me keel over with love.
    “And the rest is pretty much just teen angst. A few walks along Provençal riverbanks, a couple of nights in Saint-Tropez with the others, where we could only afford a glass of house wine between three of us, the fooling around in a barn, and in an abandoned tree house we found on the grounds of this château and then in the back of the hired Renault parked in the drive outside the cottage. And then the summer was over and I thought about him for the whole of my first year of university. Until I met Tim.” Liv pulled her beer bottle from the table and took a swig. Slightly flushed at the memories she thought she’d forgotten.
    “Wow.” Alex rubbed her eyes and looked at Liv. “You were really into him.”
    “In an eighteen-year-old sort of way, yeah, I suppose that I was.” Liv stretched her legs out in front of her.
    “So you never heard from him again?”
    “Nah,” said Liv.
    “But he’s from Woolloomoolloo?”
    “No, actually, he was from Sydney. He was only born in Woolloomoollo because his mother’s car broke down and her water burst there.”
    “Liv!” Alex cast off her jet lag and leaned forward. “Ben Parker lives in Sydney and you didn’t tell me?”
    “Well, as you’d never heard of him until three minutes ago there didn’t really seem to be much point. Anyway, I don’t know that he lives here. I mean he could have emigrated to Utah or anything.”
    “Once a Sydney-sider always a Sydney-sider, so they say,” Alex said enigmatically. “And all the years you were going out with Tim did you ever think about him?”
    “Sometimes. I mean occasionally I would have a dream about him and I’d get the photos out the next day and have a look. Just for old times’ sake. He was the first guy I ever slept with.”
    “God, that is so romantic I want to cry.” Alex sank her teeth into a slice of pizza and looked wistful. “We absolutely have to find him.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, the thought hadn’t occurred to me.” Liv flicked her hand nonchalantly in a way that meant of course she’d thought about it; she was just too shy / nervous / didn’t know how to