Dog Handling by Clare Naylor

brokenheartedly insane like herself. She noticed that Laura was folding Liv’s oldest knickers into a careful pile in a chest of drawers.
    “Yeah. Therapy’s getting me through. Only three nights a week now, though, and once on the weekend. And there’s a great telephone hot line that’s stopped me doing something stupid quite a few times,” Laura announced proudly.
    “Actually, I’ve just split up with my boyfriend and I’m feeling a bit wobbly myself,” Liv confided. “Which is why I’m here really. Trying to forget about him and find myself or something mad like that. I thought I’d try to work it through myself rather than going to see a therapist, though.” In the blackest moments of the last couple of months it really had occurred to Liv to seek professional advice, but shrinks were surprisingly expensive and when it came to a toss-up between therapy and a pale blue cashmere cardigan it somehow hadn’t been such a hard decision to make. Which had led her to feel, with a surge of triumph, that she just might be on the mend.
    “Oh, counselling’s great, but it’s no substitute for self-help,” Laura recited in fluent recovering victim speak, a language Liv realised she was going to become very familiar with. Soon she’d know her Issues from her codependencies, and she’d be able to verbalise her guilt in no time. See, she’d already learned something and she’d only been in Sydney a day. Or night. Or whatever. God, five minutes with Laura and she’d be all cured. “I’ll tell you all about it over tea.” And with that she was gone, leaving Liv basking in the startling afternoon sunshine.
     
    Liv’s room was a beautiful cream-walled haven filled mostly with the enormous white bed that she was lying in. Next to the bed was a table of candles: jasmine-scented, raspberry-coloured garden candles in terra-cotta pots, and beside that a bookcase filled with film star biographies, a chest of drawers in perfectly distressed blue nestled in the corner, and an antique Indian rug embroidered with giant peonies lay over the uneven white floorboards. All a far cry from her fraying carpets and Picasso posters at home in London.
    She shoved back the covers and made her way towards the window, feeling a bit like the old people going towards the spaceship in the movie
Cocoon.
The window was at least the length of Liv’s entire flat in London and opened out onto a little terrace littered with pots of geraniums and lilies. Liv held her breath as she took in the view. A cityscape straight off a postcard: Centrepoint Tower rose high above the mirrored buildings and office blocks; then if she turned her head farther to the right she could see the water bounce diamonds of light back at her. After a few minutes of drinking in the brilliance of the view she pulled an old sundress out of the wardrobe and over her head and made her way into the other room.
     
    “So how do you know Charlie?” Liv asked as she cracked open the top of her perfectly runny soft-boiled egg.
    “I was going out with a friend of his. Then we had the most traumatic breakup. I don’t really like to talk about it, but it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Complete bloody carnage. Well, I guess you’d understand. Anyways, Charlie offered me the flat. He’s been fantastic. Even introduced me to Jo-Jo.”
    “So do you and Jo-Jo go out together?” Liv asked.
    “Yeah, it was pretty much love at first sight. If it weren’t for the fact that you should never rely on another person to make you happy and that it has to come from within, I’d say that Jo-Jo makes me really happy,” Laura related. Liv totted up the money she was going to save on self-help books just by living next door to Laura.
    “Have you always lived in Sydney?” Liv asked, bursting to ask about the horrible witch who had dumped her but trying not to sound too much like an ambulance chaser. Certainly the way Laura was talking and based on the few horrific details