Chapter 10: Wednesday 14th December

Larissa

When Larissa got to work, they sent her down the back to see Bob for him to check her fitness. “Hey Larissa, how’s the wrist? And your life?”

Larissa laughed, and said it was all fine except for not working and please let her work hard, the socialising was killing her. Bob got her to hold out her wrist and tell him what she’d been doing. While she was talking, he grabbed her hand and twisted. Larissa had some general idea of what he was going to do, and she expected it to hurt a bit, but that hurt more than a bit. Still, she managed to keep talking with just a slight wobble.

When she finished, Bob said, “OK. You can work. That hurt more than you expected, hey?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“Larissa, seriously, don’t push your wrist, OK? If it gets worse, be a good girl, and stop working. We can deal with it today. By the way, you’re not going to pull that trick with your security girl driving again, are you?”

“No. I value my job. Mark will reduce my pay, and I can’t have that.”

Bob laughed. Everyone knew: Larissa paid more to her security team than she earned doing her job. Just another way in which her crazy life didn’t make sense to anyone else. But ok, she’d learnt her lesson - she wasn’t going to get Vi or others to drive again, even if it meant she could get more work done. Anyway, if she didn’t drive for work, she’d forget how to, because she never got to drive otherwise. Other than driving the ride-on mower, which had been fun for a few weeks.

But before she went out on the road, she had to attend the weekly meeting for all the workers. Not all of them could make it, of course, a few were out on the road already or working the late shift, but their shifts rotated so they all made the meeting often enough. She walked into the big meeting room to a raucous welcome from her workmates, and she grinned at them all. Really, she was very lucky with them; they could’ve been super jealous of how things had gone for her, but she’d put real effort into maintaining good relationships with them all, and it had paid off. They were all friends, or at least friendly to her, and not put off from making fun of her. Yeah, this was a place where she belonged.

They had all been waiting for her, and Phil who usually ran the meeting got her come to the door and pointed his phone at her wrist. She’d taken the bandage off in order to work, so the image of her big bruise came up on the big screen at the front of the room, and they all went insane, yelling advice and funny comments and laughing. She grinned at them all and held up her hands for silence.

When they were finally silent, she said, “Hey, it’s really great to be back. Two days without working, and I was dying from social exhaustion! I missed you all! Anyway, here’s a question for you, what’s the half-life of insulin in a human, and what should be the effect of injecting a human insulin syringe into your wrist and hitting a vein?”

She could see them working that in their head - not something they just knew, so they were doing what she had done, falling back to first principles of endocrine physiology and guessing. Except for one of the guys down the back who waved an insulin syringe at her with a smile - obviously he was a diabetic, which she hadn’t known, and he’d certainly just know the answer. A few of them called out answers covering the range of possibilities from dead to just feeling pretty bad for a while. She agreed and said, “Well, I guessed it might be enough to kill me, so I said good-bye to Julian, but it was less than 100 units, so I was fine. Julian was happy about that, hey?”

They laughed, and then she found a seat next to Ruth. The meeting started with the usual: reports from the field. There was the usual mix of crazy and stupid things they’d seen, or people they’d dealt with. One of the late workers had been called to a traffic accident where a kangaroo had gone through the front windscreen and ended up cowering in the back of the car; the driver had tried to pull it out and the kangaroo had kicked him in the head hard enough to send him to hospital. Larissa shook her head - definitely crazy. Another worker reported the sad news that an old lady had passed away; many of them had visited her because both her and her faithful dog were dying from terminal cancer. Larissa wasn’t sure if she’d visited this particular customer - there was a few cases like that running. Then they had a couple of reports about new treatments coming, and one about a new antibody treatment for dog arthritis out there causing side effects they might start running into.

They got a briefing from the CFA about changes to fire requirements for pet stays. Larissa shook her head - hard to believe it was less than a year since she’d been confronted with that disaster. The CFA had just done an audit on all those places and inspected their beefed up fire-suppression systems. Fingers crossed, no one would have to face a mess again like she’d had to that day.

The last item on the agenda was news to her. Mark stood out the front and announced that next year, they’d be running a mentorship program for new vets. It was part of the Victorian Government program to encourage some kind of jobs - new graduates would get a bit more than minimum pay to sit in the van and watch and learn to help. The best and keenest would stay on and train properly, while others would be helped to find a placement with a country vet business. Everyone was encouraged to take their turn being mentor, and there was a bonus for doing it, though not big. “It may not surprise you,” Mark said, “but we’ve been deluged with applicants. Last time we tried something like this, no one was interested. I’ll leave it to your imagination why things might be different now.”

They all laughed, and Ruth elbowed her in the ribs. She grinned at Ruth, sure. “Anyway,” Mark continued, “we’ll be doing that next year. There’ll be an email describing how to sign up to be a mentor.”

Finally, she was out on the road, and she had a good day. She still suspected that they chose her jobs carefully after everything that had happened, but all they’d admit to is that they didn’t give her any first-time visits if they could reasonably avoid it. At least she still pulled emergency jobs like everyone else, fortunately, because they were what she worked for. Today’s crazy experience was a yet another kangaroo accident; it was on a busy road, a big roo hit by a truck, and it was down in the middle of the road with traffic banked back on either side of the road. Larissa had to shout at the drivers to get them to stop, and then she had to deal with the roo right out in the middle of the road, since it was still in real pain, and doomed. Once she shot it, an enthusiastic driver helped her pull it over to the side of the road. Then she had to shout at the traffic again so she could get back across the road to her van. You’d think that carrying a rifle on your back would be enough to ensure you got listened to, but apparently not.

The other challenge for her day was that everyone wanted to talk to her, ask about her wrist, take her side against that bastard Clyde, or tell her how much they loved or hated Sienna. Wow, Sienna, a modern day Robin Hood - in fact she heard that several times. She put up with it all patiently, and followed her policy, which is that she only signed stuff for little kids or old ladies who lived alone.

Sienna

Sienna met Hamza’s mother Yasmin at a little cafe in suburban Melbourne not far from Larissa’s home. Yasmin was already there, and gave her a nice smile, which was reassuring. In spite of everything, all of what had happened, Sienna was nervous about this, because how this went really mattered to her.

And she knew: Yasmin was very definitely not a fan of Sienna.

And Yasmin was also the real reason that they had kept their relationship low-key for so long. No, secret. There was nothing about their relationship that was low-key for either of them. Sienna had taken one look at Hamza, his dark eyes and incredible body, and smashed with him immediately. But once they were in bed, he’d admitted that he still had his v-card, that it was his first time. That fact had completely flummoxed Sienna; she’d never thought. But she’d got this far, and he was Larissa’s friend, so there was only one thing she could do: forget about banging him for herself, and make it as good as she could for him. And that, and Hamza’s soul that opened to her afterwards: nothing like that had ever happened in her life before. That was the whole thing that Larissa was on about, she’d realised later.

At first, Hamza had wanted them to be secret because of his job. She’d talked him out of that with Larissa’s help - mostly, anyway, but then there was the videos, and all the fierce noise about that. People had tried whatever to get her off balance, including some quite underhanded things. Hell, she was surprised there was no nude photos of her circulating. And then suddenly that was happening too. Hamza had looked at that, and weighed what she said about that, and decided that Sienna needed a refuge. A secret place to hide from all that, and rest, and take the pressure off her soul.

That was his job, his role in life. She visited him in Melbourne twice a week, officially to consult with Larissa or Layna, which she actually did, but really, she met with Hamza. Each time, they did something together, then went to bed for mind-blowing sex, and for sleeping. Hamza was amazingly creative in his choice of the things they did, things she’d never dreamed of doing. Hiking through the national parks around Melbourne. Swimming and fishing in country rivers. Kayaking wilderness estuaries. Sienna just had to turn up and be there. Her experience with him in bed was the same: amazing creativity. And increasingly high quality massages. Bliss.

And through that process, what she had with Hamza had changed from completely entranced to an utterly overwhelming craziness for him and dependence on him, and the sure knowledge that she could depend on him. Love. Real love, for the first time in her life. Her body, her heart, her mind, and her soul were finally fully in agreement on something, and she was not letting go of it.

But still, the only people who even knew were Larissa, Julian, Layna, and Joe. Well, and Carol, of course, who was never that far from her, and who collaborated with Hamza to make the quiet times possible. And Carol’s team, which had grown as the pressure increased.

There’d been some opportunities for them to come out to their families, but they’d both put that off. Hell, her mum knew. No, she didn’t know any details about Hamza, but she knew that Sienna had found a man that had deep meaning. A few weeks before she’d sat down with Sienna and instead of hinting gently, she’d said, “Sienna, I can tell. There’s a man, isn’t there? A man inside your heart. Do you trust us enough to tell me about him?”

She’d known she couldn’t hide it anymore. “Yeah, mum. There is. And I trust you completely.” Actually, that part was a surprise. Who would’ve thought? “But it’s not up to just me, it’s between us. And his family, that’s a challenge. Mum, I love you and you’ll be first, but it’s not that time yet. And it’s good for me, given all the noise, that it’s just us. He’s my safe space.”

That had got her a smile, and when she’d called Hamza after watching Larissa nearly die, she’d said, “Hiz, it’s time. I don’t want to be apart from you in public anymore.” Hamza meeting with her parents had been a joy, a delight. Dinner for just the four of them, and her mum was in love with Hamza, and her Dad approved of him enough to offer him a job in Sydney on the spot. Hamza had known better than that, and had respectfully turned that down. If nothing else, he could transfer to Sydney with his job anytime. But still, the whole evening had just been great, and her parents gave her a giant tick of approval after he went back to Melbourne to work the next morning.

But the idea of transferring to Sydney raised the question of Hamza’s family. Because on the one hand, he really did love his family, and his mum particularly, but on the other hand, they were deeply religious and conservative muslims, struggling to adjust to the way of life in Australia. Hamza had an older and a younger sister, and he was close with both of them. The older sister had accepted the family desires, and married an appropriate Syrian man and shortly afterwards announced the impending arrival of the first grandchild. The younger sister, on the other hand: a wild party chick like Sienna had been, but she worked super hard to keep the rest of the family from knowing the full details.

Surely his parents and older sister were going to hate on Sienna when they found about her. And they had also figured out that Hamza had a girl. He didn’t live at home but they were the type of family that kept a close eye on each other, and they knew: they’d looked in his bathroom. His sisters had hammered him for details, like any normal sisters would, and when he’d refused to say anything, they’d told him that they knew it was dead serious. But when would he share?

So she’d been super nervous when they turned up at the family home to meet them all, a run-down apartment in a tightly packed neighbourhood. But the garden was well maintained - she wouldn’t have noticed that in the past. Hamza hadn’t said anything about who she was, but they’d recognised her immediately, and it’d been half the night before they’d stopped talking about the videos. And they’d at least warmed to her. Except for Yasmin, who just watched, and said nothing. Hamza had warned her about that: unless the visitors were close family, his mum would clam up and hide behind the submissive muslim woman veil. Not literally, of course - she wore a hijab, like the sisters, which didn’t cover her face, but it might as well have. It wasn’t like she was a stay at home subservient mum either - she was a primary school teacher, but still, she said nothing. Then, at the end of the night, when Sienna was politely saying good night to everyone, which included his mum who was hiding in the kitchen, she asked to meet Sienna one on one.

And here they were. Carol found a table at the door, so she could stay out the way, and Sienna took Yasmin’s offered hand, and smiled, and said, “Hello, Yasmin, it’s nice to see you.” Well, she was hoping like hell that it would be nice.

“Hello Sienna. Thank you for coming down from Sydney to talk to me. I really appreciate it.”

Once they’d ordered their coffees, Yasmin said, “So, it won’t surprise you to know that you’re very much not the kind of woman I was hoping my son would fall in love with.”

Sienna took a deep metaphorical breath, and reminded herself that she really needed to be patient, really needed to impress this woman. This was far more difficult and important that all those Bimbo interviews.