Chapter 6

Friday 20 May 2022

The next morning, Larissa had to get a covid test as part of entry requirements to USA, so she was a little late for her first lecture. She’d forgotten what that was like, getting a swab jammed up her nostrils, since she no longer had to do that regularly. Later today she’d find out whether they were going to USA the next day - the trip would fall through if any of them tested positive - Neither Layna nor Larissa would go to USA without their guys, and no point if they weren’t going.

She sat in her lecture learning more about marine biology. Really interesting stuff, and she was looking forward to her practical experience - all lined up for July with a university on the coast of Northern Queensland who thought that having Larissa lecture a few times on emergency vet medicine was a pretty good exchange for letting her handle marine mammals and fish by helping them in their research facility and wildlife treatment centre. Well, and Layna would be coming visit to talk about the environment too. They had adopted the university as their loose base for the Queensland work.

While she did that, she reviewed her presentation. Today she was presenting on her project to the rest of her final year project groups. Her position was a bit of an anomaly for the rest of the students. She’d jumped a year to do it with them, and she didn’t know them, wasn’t part of one of their groups. And her project was more theoretical than the ones they were doing ... but that was because she handled actual animals daily or weekly, something that they hadn’t done. She sat in the project lab with them, working on her cases and data, and they ignored her. Until she started helping them with hard won experience around animal handling. So they’d warmed to her, but still felt of her as an outsider, and all the noise around her and also Layna’s project hadn’t helped her belong to the group, even if most of them followed her obsessively. Hell, most of the uni followed both her and Layna obsessively now. Would she change their opinion today, start to be part of the group? She wasn’t sure. Her task today was to make a clear presentation of her project, what the research question was, how she was going about it, and what challenges she had. It was worth 15% of her overall mark, and she’d put quite a bit of work into it.

Once her marine biology lecture finished, she trooped off to the lecture room for her presentation. She was standing out the front getting her presentation and spreadsheets lined up when Julian walked in. The project work coordinator, a nice guy, but very fastidious, said, “Hey, you’re in the wrong place. This is AM 426 here. Where are you supposed to be?”

Julian stopped, surprised, and said, “I’m supposed to be here, at least, this is where I want to be. Is that OK?”

“Umm. I suppose. Why do you want to be here?” It was sort of a reasonable question, but the coordinator must have been having a bad day, because it wasn’t asked in a reasonable way at all.

Julian said in a serious tone, “I heard about this research, I think it shouldn’t have got ethics approval, so I want to know about it, in case I need to protest about its animal cruelty.”

Larissa nearly laughed out loud. She watched the poor course coordinator nearly have apoplexy. “Throw the bum out,” she cried out loudly. “We don’t want riff-raff like that in here. Next he’ll be telling you he’s some radical YouTuber who’s always getting in trouble around here.”

“Well, if I have to,” Julian said. “I have been known to commit acts of violence on YouTube. Quite famous for it, in fact.” He paused, and Larissa tried to guess what would come next in this game. Then Julian said, “But you know, I’m also kind of famous for giving the presenter a good kissing on Youtube too.”

The rest of the class burst into laughter for that. The coordinator looked around at Larissa in surprise, so she said, “Pfft. Would I kiss this nerd? I don’t think so. He’d have to tie me up for sure.” She turned to the class. “Well, you guys, your call. What should we do? Should I let the guy kiss me and get to this, or do we all throw the bum out?”

The class was split. Some were calling out for a kiss. Some were shouting to throw the bum out. And some were for both. All of them were enjoying this greatly too. At this point, the dean walked in, and everyone shut up.

“What’s all the noise about, Martin?” the Dean asked the coordinator.

“Well, we’ve got this random guy here who walked in, and he’s threatened to assault Larissa, or kiss her. And she just asked the class to vote on whether she should let him kiss her, or they should throw him out.” Larissa was pleased - he was more upset about the kissing bit, as he should be. The university rightfully took sexual harassment very seriously. But otherwise, he was right out of his depth, and clearly not that connected with the student community, or he would’ve known Julian for sure.

“Well, I’m the Dean, so I get the vote,” the dean said. “I vote for a quick kiss, and then he can sit next to me and I’ll make sure he worships her properly as he should.”

The class burst into laughter at that, and Julian walked over and kissed her passionately, and then went and sat next to the Dean.

“Martin, I’d like to introduce my husband Julian,” Larissa said to the coordinator. “He’s also Layna’s lead researcher - you heard of her?”

Ahh, the penny dropped for him. He shook his head, a wry smile on this face. “You guys are all very funny. And brave, making fun of your course coordinator like that. I’ll get you back later. Alright everyone, today is Larissa’s turn, and you better be good after that. She better be good after that!”

Larissa laughed. It wasn’t the coordinator who scored her, it was another prof ... ahh, he just walked in. Right. But it wouldn’t hurt to be nice to the coordinator anyway.

She started her presentation, describing the problem, a cross-sectional study of acute presentations of canine thyroid diseases to the vet rescue service, trying to get a sense of the cost benefit for the three different interventions that they used. She described the kind of data that she needed to answer the question - both data out of the existing records that the vet rescue service had, and then a follow up survey that she’d had to design and send out. An important part of that was ethics approvals and data access controls because this was all protected health data, even though it was pets not humans. She walked the other students through the approvals process, and then the survey she designed, along with the chatty letter that she wrote to go out with the survey request, that the service would then email out to everyone it had records for. If she got a 20% response rate, she’d get enough data. They’d cheated a bit - and she was clear about this - and linked up the service’s ongoing media work with her request for support from the pet owners to try and get the participation rate higher. Then she showed how the survey form helped answer the questions she had to answer. Finally, she walked through the data analysis she was planning to do once the data came back.

The survey hadn’t gone out - in a couple of weeks, once all the reviews - including this one - were done. But she was close!

“So this is a bit of unique opportunity for us. When is there going to be another student with such a high profile to the pet owners and right of access to the case records, and the context to process the case records and know what isn’t written down? And I’ve got lots of help on this. Martin has really done a great job helping me with the wording, and helping with all the legal compliance stuff, that’s driven me nuts. And the dean is my research lead, and he’s helped me understand the data process. At the start I was kind of afraid of everything, but now I think I see it, and I’m just at the mercy of the pet owners, will they fill out their forms? OK. Any questions?”

She got lots of questions, good ones. The students didn’t get any marks for asking good questions, but they got respect from the other students and lecturers which helped their own performance. A couple of things she said she’d have to go and learn about it, statistics things. Maths - not her strong point. When the students were done, she got questions from the Dean and her lecturer. Most of these she was on top of, but yes, she definitely needed work on statistics. Well, that was clearly going to be what she did on the USA holiday - read stats text books. At least that would solve the sleeping problem! Still, she’d done OK, and when the finished the other students were looking at her with respect - she wasn’t just a pretty face after all. Yeah, none of them had actually said that to her, but she knew they’d thought that.

A few more lectures, and then she was off to the project office to watch this week’s video and for a last planning meeting for the US trip. This had become a Friday afternoon staple for the team - they’d release each week on a Friday afternoon, and they’d all sit and watch the video together, around a cake and some drinks. All of them had some involvement in almost every video, but watching it as a group and then discussing it together was good for their cohesiveness. Larissa didn’t usually join, but today’s video was very special indeed, very personal for Larissa. Last weeks video had been awesome, it was the whales one. Larissa had loved it, out on the boat with Layna and watching the whales, and talking to Josh and a professor about the biodiversity issues around the whale population. Then a sequence she didn’t know about, some local seals playing in an inland waterfall - something that only happened in Kaikoura. Like she had said, it was a puff piece, but it had proved immensely popular by hit count, and Steph had told her that Josh thought he got great value for money. The production had been awesome - the team was really in high gear now, and Larissa was looking forward to see whether they could maintain the momentum.

When she arrived they all crowded around the lunch table. It was getting real crowded in here now, and Larissa wondered what Chez would do about that. Then a couple more partners turned up, and even Xander showed his face. She squeezed up on Julian’s lap, as all the other partners had done.

No, she had to say something. “Chez, do you think Julian’s strong enough to knock that wall down? If he doesn’t, sooner or later it’ll just burst anyway!” There was a burst of good natured laughter for that.

Chez grinned. “Well, we do have to do something, for sure. We thought we had plenty of space, but soon we’ll have Hannah, and at least one more other researcher. So I’ve been talking to the body corporate. They love having us here.” They sure did. The team took turns to keep the entire ground floor and the pool perfectly clean, and they had an open offer to he residents to watch babies while Mum’s attended to moving things in or out of their cars, or to help old people with their shopping. Steph had told her that the other residents had noticed that they were running out of space, and the body corporate had proactively asked if that was a problem that could be solved. “So they’re exploring some creative options, but I don’t see how there’s anything that they can do within the planning rules that will keep us here for more than a few months more. We’ll see. OK everyone, we ready?” Everyone was, and keen for this one. “Marty, you go? You got Hautere there?”

They all laughed for that, now that must of them knew him in person, they knew how hard it was to get him pinned down for non-physical communications. Marty grinned on the screen. “He’s outside under the tractor. He says he’ll actually come in when you stop chin-wagging. He reckons he can get it fixed, tested, and round up the sheep before you get to the video.”

While everyone was laughing at that, Larissa got a message from Tui to her alone.

✉ Tui: Dad’s right here and excited, but he doesn’t everyone else to know
✉ Larissa: Thanks for telling me. We all love your Dad
✉ Larissa: And the rest of you!
✉ Tui: Thanks.

Larissa cast her mind back to the team’s trip to New Zealand. Well, first, there was Marty and Tui’s trip to Melbourne.

They’d come the day after Julian and Larissa and Layna and Joe had got out of isolation, since Layna and Joe had come down the same day. Which wasn’t that much a surprise given what they did together. Layna and Joe didn’t get as sick as Larissa and Julian - hogged all the fun to themselves, Larissa had joked with Layna, who joked back that she was hanging out to end their isolation, before she could no longer walk. That was the kind of covid isolation Larissa had been hoping for, though they tried to make for lost time at the end of it.

The four of them had gone out to the airport for Marty and Tui’s passionate welcome and then all six of them had sat out on Julian and Larissa’s deck and planned the next week. Through the next week, Marty and Tui had good time with Layna and Julian and Larissa’s various families, including a day on Jane’s farm and a visit to Sharon, good time in the office with the team planning the New Zealand visit, and even a few hours to explore the city and an evening at the football, such a very different kind of football than they were used to. And the time in the office had been particularly useful because while they were in Melbourne, two important things had happened. The first was that New Zealand had announced that it was opening its borders to Australians the day before Easter, and the second was that Air New Zealand had called Julian, wanting to sponsor their trip to New Zealand.