Chapter 1

Sunday 15 May 2022

“Well, Babe, we have a super big fortnight coming up, how do you feel?” Julian asked her.

Larissa took a deep breath. “It sure is. I think I’m ready. Maybe. You?”

Julian nodded. “Sure, but it’s a lot easier for me. It’s all about you this week.” He paused, and then said, “It’s always about you, Babe, you’re my heart, the centre of my life, and it just keeps getting better.”

“Oh, that’s sweet,” Larissa told him. “If only I was convinced that you’re not just angling for a blow job.”

Julian burst into laughter. “Babe, of course not. You’re awesome and I’d just have to ask if I wanted one. No, I was serious!”

“Well, want one now?”

“Nah, babe. Sure, you could do that, but I’d rather you take your time when we get home, and we can do it right. Anyway, you do that, I’ll have to slow down, and then Thomas and Jane will stop and watch us.”

Larissa chuckled. “I’m sure they’d love that.” They’d just finished having their Sunday evening dinner at Bob’s place, and the whole family had been there, and they’d had a great night. And Isabella had been feeling it tonight, cuddling up to anyone who’d take the time to do it with her, and rubbing herself all over Mason all night. They’d all been in the mood by the end of the night, and Jane had told Larissa as they were leaving that she was going to ‘reward’ Thomas on the trip home. Whatever that meant – could be going naked in the car, though it was too cold for that now, or a blow job, or a quickie. “Hey, I meant to ask. Thomas – is he going as well as Jane thinks he is?”

“Yeah, he is. I mean, his original business plan has been blown out of the water by all the politics, and Bob’s turbo-charged the whole thing big time, but both of them are very happy with how things are going – the prototypes are delivering on his estimates, both for power and margin, and he’s running a nice clean business. Once the election craziness is over, I’m going to propose to Layna that we do a show about what he’s doing.”

Larissa knew that Chez would roll her eyes – more family – but it would happen anyway. “Great. But I think you’re going to be super busy with the election this week.”

“Maybe,” Julian frowned. “I think I’ve done most of what I’m going to do. I’ll do a little more election support, while you’re busy, and Chez might want me to do something more for this week’s video, but I think we’re done with content preparation. Or Dean is going handle it.”

There’d been a lot of changes in Layna’s project after the Peter Nutter video sequence. Possibly the biggest was that on the Monday after the big beach party, a man named Dean got in touch with the project, and asked for a job. He even offered to donate his salary to them. What in the hell, Layna and Chez had said, but agreed to talk to him. And they were very glad that they’d done that too. Dean had a long history as a senior executive for oil and coal companies around Australia – he’d worked his way up all the way from starting as a coal miner in Newcastle, and was on first name terms with many of the coal barons that Layna had just declared were her targets. His teenage children had become more and more unhappy with his career, and so he’d promised them that he’d get out and do something for the environment as soon as they finished school. His youngest son just had, and he’d been casting around on their January family holiday for how to deliver on his promise, and his oldest daughter had introduced him to Layna’s project. And then, when Layna declared that she was coming for the coal barons, and laid out her very civil terms of engagement so publicly, he’d decided he wanted in, wanted to be part of the project, doing research and setting up stories. An assistant to Julian, he said.

Dean’s record was very public, and he’d often been in the press, so Nathan and Suzy spent several days checking him out, and yes, while he’d been a faithful servant to the barons, he’d never lied, or been a party to their excesses. And Julian had spent several hours talking to him, and decided Dean would work out well, so they’d taken him on. He’d arrived the week after, sat at his desk next to Julian, and set about lifting the quality of their work to yet another level. It wasn’t just that he brought his entire contacts list, and that he could call almost anyone in the country, including federal politicians. No, beyond that, he had lifted the quality of their work by mentoring the team to be more thorough in their investigation, more rigorous in their academic standards, more insightful into corruption, and more careful in their presentation; he’d often filter Layna’s script – such as she had – for words that would raise people’s hackles unwittingly. And for Dean, working with young people again, the grand old guy in the team ... he loved it. And his kids did too. And Larissa could see that it would work the same as for the rest of them: they were all completely committed to the project as long as it was doing good, and then it would be a springboard for a career for them. Dean was either going to work for Bob or their uni, she could see.

All that had been super great for Julian, since the ambition of the project had already got well beyond the research he could handle on his own, even with the university backing him up. They’d have taken Hannah on, offered to, but she’d declined and said she’d better finish her PhD, but once she’d written it up ... there was nothing she’d rather do.

They had also taken on an animator, which they’d been planning to do already. Larissa thought of him briefly. Blake was the most unusual guy she’d met, she figured. Even counting all the crazies she met through work. Blake started the same day as Dean, so she’d popped into the project after Uni to meet both of them. Dean had been exactly what she anticipated, but Blake ... he was as camp as you could be. Very obviously gay, and he wore that as his identity on his sleeve, that was for sure. Even his voice ... it was weird, and unusual. Raspy, but soft. “Sucked too many dicks,” he’d joked to Larissa the first time he’d met her. That was just fine with her – she liked sucking dick too, she told him – and she invited him and his partner around for dinner so they could get to know their new team member. They came around and went for a swim and had dinner on their deck on a Friday night.

On the beach, she was amazed to see, Blake slipped and lost his camp persona, and he and his partner were just normal guys; even his voice switched. No one watching them would have a clue they were gay. Especially since they pretended to have their tongues hanging out looking at her. But she knew better – it was Julian they were lusting after. She asked Blake about it over dinner – what was with the camp thing? He shrugged and said both were part of him, but the camp persona was something he developed in school, when he realised that even the guys that gave him a hard time about being gay – not that many these days – weren’t bothered when he owned it. Yeah, owning it, Larissa understood that, and owning it and being honest about it meant he got less of a hard time. So it was something he turned on and off without thinking about it. He agreed that he should turn it off at the project – he’d slipped into that mode at the project because he was so desperate to be part of it – what a place to work! And his animation skills were astonishing to Larissa, so she told him it would be much better to be his normal self, and no one would care.

She was wrong about that: someone did care. Toni started dropping to the project once a week after school to do any odd jobs they had for her, whatever they were, and one of the tasks she’d declared was hers was that she was determined that she was going to turn Blake and his guy straight enough to do a threesome with her, and that was a running joke whenever she was in the office. And Larissa understood that – Blake and his guy were prime stud material. Isabella had met them, and greatly enjoyed Larissa’s sad proclamation that ‘the best guys aren’t even a little bit straight, Isabella.’

“Yeah, Dean will do that. So just door-knocking? Which electorate are you going to focus on?”

“Not sure. Chez will tell me. Probably Flinders.”

The whole election thing had been a total surprise to Larissa, the way it played out. She’d had that conversation with Layna back at the start of March, expecting business as usual: political campaigns ignoring the environment, along with passionate and rowdy protests that failed to achieve anything. So had Layna. But something very different had happened. A bunch of independent candidates were running that represented (claimed) mainstream Australian values – “true-blue” – but with a strong concern for the environment – “green” – along with a commitment to fixing corruption in politics. They called themselves the ‘teals’, and they had solid funding from a billionaire, no less. The environmental movement - at least the part Layna was connected to - had a leadership meeting in early March and decided that rather than protest, they were going to join the wider movement and be part of the political campaigns and advocate for change inside the process. The time was right, based on the polling.

So no protests. Instead, Layna had done videos with several of the independent candidates, and encouraged all her Australian followers to join in: campaign for change, encourage people to vote how they feel. She’d made videos documenting the really passionate ground game going on for the environment. From what Larissa could see of the campaign in the media, there was never any discussion about the issues the independents were campaigning on – the corporate media was uniformly antagonistic to the independents. But discussion with actual voters told the project team something quite different, and they were expecting that the government was going to lose because of climate change.

They had four electorates around them Julian could campaign in. Their own electorate was a sure bet to vote against the government, so Julian hadn’t done much in that one. The next one south, James and Sophie’s electorate – that was the same. To their north, an independent was running against a well-known government member, and while Julian wanted to support her, she had an awesome ground game going. So mostly, Julian had been putting his time into the electorate called Flinders, further to their south, where the government was expected to win – too many retirees who would vote against the interests of the young, and with the government.

The media weren’t really calling this, but as far as Larissa could see it was true: she didn’t know anyone her age who’d consider voting for the government, and almost all the old people she knew would vote for the government, since the government was pursuing such an anti-young agenda. The swing voters were parents of older kids, trying to deal with their own innate financial caution but also feeling their offspring’s fierce anger at the financial hand they were being dealt – primarily in the cost of education, the cost of housing caused by inter-generational theft, and above all, the way the government was wrecking the economy long term for the benefit of the billionaires now with regard to climate change.

So Julian had mainly campaigned against the government. Larissa had, a little bit, but she had to be careful; she couldn’t do that in her role as an employee of the vet service, and Mark had explained the rules to her in person, since she was not only his most famous employee but also he know just how much she hated the government for its climate stance, since he did too. She’d been careful, but she’d found being that careful tiresome. How important that had been had been hammered home to her when the CEO of Guide Dogs Victoria - someone she actually knew - had been suspended from her position when she’d been exposed in the media for campaigning for the government in her role. So this time she’d stayed home and done the housework while Julian went out and changed the world. And Alan and Fiona were out there too.