He pulled up the PCR run he’d set up that morning and set about fiddling with the settings until he was happy with the threshold and the R2 of the standard curve registered above 0.99. Confident in the plots he exported the raw data to Excel and began separating the samples into their respective treatment groups. Half an hour later he had a graph and a couple of P-values of below 0.05. He sat back and smirked. “Fuuuuck.” The chains of the swing tightened around each other.
That first day passed without further event, save for an hours break at a creek for lunch. I would be another fortnight before we could properly recuperate at the end of the voyage. In this time the entire convoy of families had no choice but to get to know each other. Floods, droughts, plagues, fires, and failed crops would have to be endured together. Marriages, funerals, birth and anniversaries would all come and go with an unspeakable amount of work between. They would establish a new community; a new society. The insuperable bond between man and the earth would emerge and flourish to the point where it would no longer be discernable one from the other, but a single, symbiotic entity.
Karl had been vice-president of the student guild, forming a coalition with the slightly less left leaning campus Labor party that saw him, as leader of the smaller, distinctly leftist Greens, hoisted into a position of not little power (insofar as student politics has actual power).
Karl wanted to avoid these stereotypes. While he sympathised in part with the socialists, he was wise enough to realise that such ideology couldn’t work in the real world. His personal manifesto was in a state of perpetual flux. Even so, like-minded people seemed to gravitate towards him like moons to a planet. He certainly gave the impression of such at university open days, where he’d stand out like a modern day giant surrounded by little impressionable freshers wanting to join a cause an ideological shift away from the right-wing dogma of their middle-class parents. If he had the self-confidence to match his formidable intellect he would have been a danger to any impressionable fresher. As it was he was tearing himself up with Leigh.
Leigh had found herself in Karl’s orbit by dint of her half-hearted involvement in the campus Labor party. It had happened as something of an accident that she found herself elected to a general seat on the student guild council. It wasn’t through any machinations of her own, but through an unforeseen clerical error with the candidates list. The list of pre-selected candidates had been decided weeks in advance, but as so often happens on campus its submission had been put off until another time as the third slab of Emu Bitter was delivered up the stairs to the party room. As the time approached someone finally realised that the form hadn’t been submitted. Seeing as the original was stained with beer and melted chocolate and the electronic copy was on somebody else’s computer, it was hastily transcribed and run down to the guild office. It was during this transcription that Leigh’s name was inserted several places higher on the ballot, and seeing as the ordering had been correctly signed off on by 2 members of the party executive it couldn’t be amended. So Leigh found herself bored witless at weekly sittings of the guild council, debating the merits of condemning the actions of Japanese whalers and declaring the campus a safe harbour for refugees.
But for while their relationship was far from smooth, you couldn’t really blame Leigh. They were both as bad as each other. Which is probably why they found themselves in that situation. Happily for her she found a source of amusement. It was these jabs and ripostes that led her to anticipate the otherwise dreary meetings, and before long she found herself in his flat, naked, after several hours debating the merits or otherwise of the Northern Territory Intervention.
Now he was working part time in the anatomy and histology dungeons of the Science faculty as he trod water waiting for his friends to finish their PhDs. He hadn’t given up on his politics however, it was just that there weren’t too many full time jobs to be had working for Greens, being as they were a minor political party. He had however managed to snag a part-time job as a staffer for a local Greens politician, who was grooming him as her successor in State parliament.
At the other end Yoshi, Piers and Leigh discussed the use of statistics in research, apparently not noticing the other conversation. Seven empty jugs teetered in a stack the middle of the table. And that was with Yoshi not drinking due to a bet with Marshall that he couldn’t last a month without booze, with the loser having to fill all the empty tip boxes in the lab for the next month. It was a bet neither wanted to lose. It had been a fortnight so far.
They kept chatting and joking away, with Karl and Leigh doing their best to ignore, or at least be civil with each other for the sake of their companions. They were smart enough to realise that if they were outwardly hostile the others would be somewhat uncomfortable, and they would risk alienating themselves and being excluded from future plans. Instead they raised the white flags of truce and tried as best they could to ignore their own personal situation and contribute to making the evening fun and involving for everyone.
Yoshi was most definitely on the side of slowing down, being as he wanted the company to drag on as long as possible. He knew that if they chose to fast track their night he would be the one left standing, sober, with the prospect of a lonely night in front of the TV or computer. He tried to be persuasive, but in the face of this Marshall dug his own heels in with the expressed aim of making Yoshi’s night a living hell; trying to get him to get drunk via the age-old medium of peer pressure as a way of preventing himself from having to spend the night alone. Leigh for one was up for more incessant drinking. She was in the post-breakup mood of drinking to annihilation to forget about her problems. Just for the sake of pissing Leigh off further, Karl voted for slowing down and enjoying the night.
So the deciding vote came down to Piers, with both sides vociferously pleading their cases. But as much as he wanted Yoshi to suffer for causing past humiliations, he couldn’t bring himself to endorse the pursuit of hardcore drinking. He had given his brother, Alby, his word that he would go to his bands album launch that night in Northbridge, and he couldn’t in good conscience go against his word. His parents had always instilled in him a sense of honour. If he gave his word he couldn’t rightly go back on it.
Piers’ decision was not at entirely adverse to the whims of his friends. Marshall had fond memories of him from days spent bumming around Piers’ house, while the others had met him once or twice at 2am in bars in the city. From what they could remember through beer goggles his people were exactly the type of people you would want to be associated with on a Friday night. He was something of a linchpin in the local arts and music scene; one of those people that can be counted on to know where the action is and to formulate plans as to how best to reach the potential of the night. And, Piers assured them, some of the women his brother hung around with were rather easy on the eye.
In the intervening time between the tavern and the gig it was decided to head into the city to hunt for food in what locally passed as some sort of Chinatown. Leigh wasn’t too keen either on slowing down her drinking or going to see live music. Plus she was of the opinion that ‘eating’s cheating’, so she decided to leave the boys to their own devices.
It was as though they were now presented with a second chance for making the night right.
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