Week 4 / Tuesday

Alison’s plane landed very early on Tuesday morning, and a limousine dropped her off outside their place just after 6am. Larissa was waiting for her and showed her inside. In person, Alison was just what she expected: fit, beautiful, and perfectly presented, even after her flight.

After the normal pleasantries about the weather and covid, Larissa asked her about her flight. “Oh, it was great! I slept most of the way after leaving Hawaii.” Uhh, right. “And I had a good breakfast just before we landed.”

“Great. So will you get through the day, or do you need to sleep?”

“I reckon I’ll be right.”

Then Larissa explained how their day was going to go, and Alison realised just how weird this was for Larissa – Alison was the first person she’d met from outside of Australia for months, and she’d just waltzed in now the borders were open, and Larissa was in a full-on emergency mode due to covid, while Alison was just on holiday.

“Oh,” Alison said when she realised all that. “Is it a problem that I’m here today?”

Well, it kind of had been. She’d had to clear this with Mark himself, and even Mark had said ‘hell, no’ at first, but then he’d thought about it for a couple of days and said yes. Larissa figured he’d spoken to Bob about it or something, and there was something in it for the service, because everything had been easy after that.

“No,” Larissa said, “it’s nice for us to know that there is a normal out the other side. And I’ve done it myself.” She explained about going on their honeymoon. “So you have to wear a mask all day, and it’ll be fine. I’ll just introduce you as a friend who’s watching me for the day.”

Alison shrugged. “I can deal with a mask. But I need some advice – what should I wear? I don’t want to stand out, just blend into the background.” Larissa knew the answer to that: vet rescue uniform. There was a chance she’d have to change it too: Alison wasn’t supposed to touch anything, but Larissa could see she was going to find that irresistible. She got Alison to change into her most boring undies while she was changing, but Alison didn’t have anything boring. Well, she was game to borrow some sports ones from Larissa, and they were close enough that they fitted.

Alison did yoga with them – they weren’t naked this time – and then she used Julian’s ebike and they rode to Larissa’s work. Once Alison had signed all her legal agreements, Larissa loaded up with uniforms, armoured herself up and they hit the road in her van.

Their first few jobs were routine pet care, fur balls, minor scratches, arthritic dogs. Larissa looked at where they were going and wondered whether Mark was fiddling her schedule – she’d visited some families, a lovely old woman she’d seen before, a kindergarten and a family with covid. Alison stayed in the van for that one. What next? Alison scored a bunch of rowdy batchelors all working from home, and then Larissa did laugh, next stop was her favourite brothel. Angel wasn’t there, but a friend she’d met was, and that friend took a break from her exercise routine and talked to Alison while they watched Larissa look at their dog. That blew Alison’s mind altogether, and it was one place she didn’t try to take a picture of for her Instagram story line.

The next job was more interesting – some kids walking in the bush had found a wounded koala. Larissa parked as near as she could get, and they had to load up with kit and walk a few hundred metres to the koala. “You can take your mask off for this,” Larissa told Alison; they were outside and the day was starting to get quite warm. Larissa didn’t get to take her masks off, though – the service policy was quite clear about this.

She approached the koala carefully – koalas weren’t big but they were strong enough to hurt you badly. But this one wasn’t going to be – it was in significant pain from a serious shoulder injury. Straight away Larissa knew that the koala had been attacked by a dog; the injury pattern was clear, though the injuries weren’t that extensive. She figured that meant the dog had been interrupted by its master and whoever it was had just left the koala there to die. She sedated the koala for Alison’s safety, and gave it a careful inspection. She found lacerations and bleeding around the shoulder and clearly there were some bones broken, so she cleaned the wounds and coated them with antiseptic. She didn’t see any evidence of additional internal damage, but it was hard to tell. Time to get on the phone.

She consulted Healesville Sanctuary who said they’d take the koala to care for it and then she consulted dispatch – how to get it there? Given the shortage of frontline workers, they said that one of the office staff would take it out there, they’d let her know when they’d see them. She loaded Alison up with her kit, picked up the koala, and carried it back to the van. Hard, back breaking work on any day, let alone a hot day with an N95 mask on. No, she couldn’t do it, and she stopped to take her PPE off. Really, it was too wet with her sweat anyway. Bob would understand – his instructions were to preserve PPE as much as possible, but everyone understood that there were limits to everything. At least she could drink now, and she drank as much water as she could. It was stinking easier to wee than drink while she was working.

Her next call was to a hobby farm, a sheep having difficulty giving birth. In high summer? Crap. Well, it was going to be one of those days. She arrived to find a tween girl, left alone with the animals while her parents went to work, who showed her a sheep in distress on their back lawn. She’d done a few of these with Ruth back in spring, so she knew what to do, and she quickly realised that she was dealing with a breech presentation – the lamb’s tail was in the birth canal. “Well, this will be entertaining for you, but not so fun for me,” she told Alison. She gave her arm a thorough disinfecting, then coated it in lubricant. What she had to do now was simple: push her hand into the sheep’s uterus, reorientate the lamb, and then guide it through the birth canal. Alison helped hold the sheep still. Sounded so simple, but it was physically demanding, and quite a stressful thing to do, and she was messy and sweating like a pig before she was done. Then, with a rush, the first lamb came out. She gave it to Alison to put it on the ground where the mum could lick it and got her hand back in straight away, get the next lamb lined up right. It was, so she helped it out and gave that to Alison too. Hand in again, and she confirmed: done. Then cleaning up, more disinfecting, and she could enjoy that there was new life, and she’d brought it into being. What a lovely feeling, and Alison was really feeling that, she could see, she had a very broad smile on her face.

“That’s just amazing! Oh wow, how did you know to do all that?”

Larissa explained. Lots of hobby farmers around the outskirts of Melbourne. Real sheep farmers – her granddad, who first taught her the ideas, though he never let her do it – they did this for themselves, but hobby farmers didn’t know how, shouldn’t try. So she’d done this a few times before. Not in high summer though, so hot! Her next mask had disappeared at some stage during the procedure. Why was the sheep even delivering in summer? Mongrel sheep, who knew what breed or how it was managed, Larissa explained. Then she turned to the tween girl, who still had an awed look on her face, and explained what to look for through the day, but the lambs should be fine – they were now suckling happily from the mum.

“Well, this is why your boring undies,” Larissa told Alison. She stripped her uniform off, washed her arms and legs with a hose, and put a new clean one on. Alison was messy enough that she decided to change as well and copied Larissa.

Two calls later, and one koala lighter, Larissa arrived at a car park for a major shopping centre, to check out a report that someone had left a dog in their in a car. Someone waved her over to where there were people clustered around a car. She hopped out, checked the situation out, and shot Alison a concerned look; the station wagon was dark, extremely hot, and the little dog in there wasn’t doing well. In fact, she was surprised no one had broken into the car already – they said they were waiting for centre management to find the owner. Well, her job: she used her axe to completely destroy the back windscreen of the car. Sometimes, her job did include real fun bits.

But the dog, once she got to it ... not good. It’d been too hot too long, and it was completely dehydrated. She did what she could – cooling the dog in the back of her air-conditioned van and getting a drip in as quickly as she could, but it never looked good. She was in the middle of that when the family came back, completely oblivious to the emergency until they found their back window smashed. They had two daughters around nine and seven who bawled their eyes out while Larissa tried to save their special puppy, but all too soon it stopped breathing. What a mess; a screaming match between the parents followed, about who should’ve remembered it was in the back of the car, and all the time their two little girls were looking on and howling in grief.

Larissa wasn’t sure quite what would’ve happened if the police hadn’t finally turned up. She sat in the van waiting for the police to take her statement, and dealt with Alison, who’d never had to deal with anything like that. Finally, Alison calmed and said, “I don’t know how you can cope with that.”

Larissa explained, and said, “Yes, it is hard sometimes, and very sad. I have a pet die a few times a week. Usually, it’s not so heartrending as that one, those poor little girls. But it’s always sad. And as Ruth told me, we get the good with the bad. The bad’s pretty bad, but the good, it’s amazing. Those lambs, right?” Alison smiled about them. “What I know for sure, why I can deal with this, is that I know that I matter. I’m often the only chance they have. Whatever it is stops with me.”

Right there, she knew that Alison had got it, learnt what she’d come looking to know.

Alison’s attitude changed after that, and Larissa could feel it. She put her phone away, and stopped instagramming and snapchatting the good bits, and focused on being fully engaged with what they were doing. No matter what it was. As per usual, Larissa started doing more farm work in the afternoons – dispatch left it till later in the day because it was messy and smelly, and today she was in the mud with chickens and pigs and sheep. Alison did it all with her, no longer smiling at her own bravery; instead, she was focused on the animals she was seeing.

After the pigs, they were particularly filthy, and when Larissa dunked herself in a pond and then changed her uniform on the side of the road, Alison did it too. Still smelly afterwards, but tolerable, though her last customer, an elegant woman in a power suit with a sick poodle, looked at them and wrinkled her nose in disgust. Alison giggled all the way out to the van and burst into laughter once there were seated. “I’ve never been so happy to stink in my whole life. You don’t know just how much she was like my step-mum. Just amazing.”

Larissa grinned at her. They’d had a whole day in the van together talking, exchanging life stories and talking about their hopes and aspirations. And Alison’s family might be drowning in money, but they were still drowning like all the other families she knew and finding emotional and mental health was just as hard as for any other girl.

Well, Larissa was done for the day. “What do you think?” she asked Alison.