The lady next to him was talking excitedly to what he assumed was her significant other on the phone, but Titus could hear the two-way radio in the driver's cab clearly enough to understand brief snippets of what was being broadcast.

It was enough to get an impression of what was going on. Collision at Flinders Lane. Route 58 services towards Toorak detour via Latrobe St.

They had just passed the aforementioned Latrobe St, and they were now firmly in the heart of the Hoddle Grid. So they were trapped.

He looked through the cab door and the windscreen, at the tracks ahead. There appeared to be a full-on conga line at the shunt between Bourke and Collins. He could see figures in hi-vis vests, and an operations car parked on the tracks.

Not good.

He ran through the options quickly as the tram stopped at Lonsdale. The 605 terminus at the curb was empty, nothing in sight. That was out of the question, then.

Before the tram driver had even begun to make the announcement that they were probably going to be stuck here for some time, he had crossed William St, heading towards the bus stop in front of the County Court on Lonsdale.

A bus passed him in a cloud of diesel exhaust, the uneven paintshaker rumble of a five-cylinder engine. Silver Smartbus livery. The 906 to Warrandyte. It would be going straight up Lonsdale. No good.

Right behind it was a 219, another one of Transdev's chaotic blended family of a fleet. He tried to read the early-2000s flip-dot display. A couple of the dots were dead. City, Queen St. He let it pass. It was only going as far as Queen St, at the end of which it would be doing a U-turn.

That was the status of the bus in Melbourne. Two of the most important termini were just U-turns in the middle of the street.

A 220 was coming up behind it. That was his ticket out of here.

***

Fraser looked at the red ink on his essay as he waited for Darvall to arrive. There was a lot of it. A lot of the other teachers had switched to green ink, but Mr Darvall was too old-fashioned for that.

Darvall's office was not far from Room 202, and had a similarly odd roofline. Outside, it was recess. He watched the Year 9s run around. He wished he was one of them.

English had been uneventful, other than the disdainful slap with which Darvall had placed the aforementioned essay onto his desk. "Now you can leave me in peace," Titus had said, as he sat down next to him, before proceeding to stonewall him for the rest of the class. He had wanted to say something to break the silence, but he had no idea what to say, and even if he knew what to say, he had no idea what kind of reaction it would provoke.

Yesterday's events felt like the events of a weird dream. It was so surreal and bizarre and out of the ordinary he still hadn't entirely made sense of it. He had not told any of his friends. He had even less of an idea of what they would make of all this.

He seemed... so lost in his own world. Had he even noticed how much he had been staring at him that whole time?

The door swung open softly. He was expecting a gruff rebuke, but instead a tuft of red hair poked through, followed by the rest of Titus. Fraser briefly wondered if he could read his mind. He wouldn't bet against it.

He seemed to hesitate for a moment before he spoke."Darvall's not here, is he?"

"No. I just let myself in."

"I'll just be a moment. I just came from SAT preparation next door. I just need a whiteboard marker." Titus scanned the surface of the desk. Pencils, pens, fineliners, a Sharpie, but no whiteboard marker.

"You're doing the SATs?" Fraser was not surprised that Titus might have aspirations of studying in America. He thought of his own brother, in Middle Of Nowhere, Ohio.

Titus opened one of the drawers under the desk. Files, paper, correction fluid. No whiteboard marker. "I'm not. But quite a few people I know are, though."

He shut it, then opened the next one down. Then he gave a start and stepped back, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. He shot a furtive glance at the door. "Oh my god. It's the missing page."

"The missing page of what?" Fraser looked on, not sure exactly what he was witnessing.

"The 1990 edition of The Petrovian. Every single copy in circulation has a missing page. This is it." Titus lifted it out of the drawer and held it up to the light, as if to verify its authenticity. "The musical Call Me Deacon Blues, written and performed by our able crew of Edwin Michaelis, Wesley Faure, Winston Lam, and Zach Righetti, was a knockout success..." Titus' voice tapered off. "Holy shit, it's true. It happened. He wasn't kidding."

"What's real? Who isn't kidding?"

Titus was too busy taking a photo of the page to answer. He slipped it back into the drawer, casting another glance at the door, and shut it. "I still can't believe this. It's real. It's actually real."

"What's real?" Fraser was completely confused now. "Excuse me, but what the hell are you talking about?"

"Call Me Deacon Blues," Titus replied, a bit too loudly. "The Steely Dan musical."

"The what musical?"

"The Steely Dan musical," He looked at him. "You've never heard of Steely Dan?"

"I didn't know you were a theatre kid."

"I'm not. I just had one as a mentor when I was in Year 9. You might remember him. Hugo D'Aprano. He was Drama Captain. Tall. Really blue eyes. Gave a lot of speeches at assembly."

"Possibly? Did he have rings on his fingers?"

"Yes."

"Then yeah. I think he used to hang around our house room."

"He was a character." Titus cast a wistful eye over the oval, at the plane trees and apartment blocks on St Kilda Rd, as he thought of that fateful day, almost exactly four years ago. "I wonder where he is now."

***

He had been a fresh-faced Year 9, already somewhat initiated to the arcane rituals of high school but still relatively new to being surrounded by towering hulks several years his senior. His mentor had been Hugo. Blue eyes, dark unruly curls, acne-pocked face, more embellishments on his blazer than John Soane's house, rings on his fingers, and always with those slightly distant grey-blue eyes and that voice. You could never truly tell if he was being deadly serious or not.

He had been sitting alone in the stuffy Chaplin House room on a late summer afternoon, hot sun streaming in from the windows, illuminating the dust motes drifting in circles in the barely-moving air. He'd been on one of the couches in the corner, reading Eminent Hipsters, the memoirs-cum-tour-report of Donald Fagen.

Hugo had entered the room almost without him noticing. He noted him with a deft movement of his eyebrows. He didn't respond.

Hugo checked the cover of the book. "You're into Steely Dan?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"It's a bit of a weird thing for a Year 9 to be interested in."

"They're my favourite band."

"That's definitely a weird thing for a Year 9 to say." His tone of voice took on something resembling conspiratorial. "Wanna know something?" His greyish-blue eyes were sparkling.

Titus didn't know where this was going, so he just listened with rapt attention as Hugo continued. "I'm not supposed to tell you this... but what if I told you there someone wrote a Steely Dan musical at this school, and they performed it, and it caused a huge scandal?"

"Really?" He had been pretty naive then, and Hugo had that slightly playful tone of voice that meant you never could really tell if he was telling the truth. He always seemed to be taking you for a ride.

"I don't know for sure. It's just a rumour I heard. Just a rumour."

"What was it called?"

"I don't remember." His face took on that conspiratorial look again. "Maybe you could find out."

And with that, Hugo had left, mumbling something about being late to the arts committee or something. He had never spoken of the musical again.

Since then, the legend of the musical had become a constant in the periphery of his life. In the absence of any concrete information, it had blossomed into an obsession of sorts, one of the brief and intense ones that engulfed him from time to time.

Something in Hugo's tone of voice had made him wary of approaching any real figures of authority; he got the impression they didn't want anyone to know, so he went it alone.

He had perused the numerous copies of The Petrovian in the house room, scanning the reports on the drama productions of each year. But nowhere was there any mention of a Steely Dan musical.

***

"So..." Fraser stared at Titus. "They wrote a musical around the songs of this band called Steely Dan."

"Yes."

"And then they performed it, once, and it was so scandalous that the school banned it, suspended everyone involved and scrubbed all records of it from existence."

"Yes. Basically."

"That's...why do we need to find this musical all of a sudden?"

"Why not? What else are we going to do?"

Fraser couldn't really fault his reasoning.

"I need to talk to Hugo," Titus seemed to be talking to himself now. "He'll know about this. I didn't ask him properly before."

"I'll come with you," Fraser said, to Titus' absolute surprise.

"You've never even heard of Steely Dan."

"It sounds interesting."

"A lot of things in life sound interesting," Titus replied, after a short pause. "And very few of those things actually are. You should know that by now."

"I just want to help you."

"I don't even know where he lives." Titus had finally found the whiteboard marker he had been looking for. "What if he lives way out in the sticks, in like, I don't know, Pakenham? Would you still come?"

"I'd go anywhere with you."

Titus' ears pricked at the sound of someone approaching. He didn't seem to have heard what Fraser had just said. "Oh shit, he's coming up the stairs. I'd better skedaddle. Catch ya later."

***

He took the stairs two at a time. Avi was on Year 9 duty in the science rooms, so he was free this lunchtime.

The drama workshop was a mess. Leftover props from last year's production of Much Ado About Nothing were stacked in a corner. Felt-coated theatre blocks littered the floor.

"Hey, it's Biggus Titus!" The voice came from the shadows. Drew Nikopoulos was sitting on a theatre block in the only reasonably neat corner of the room. The Drama Captain badge on the right blazer lapel looked particularly shiny today. Titus suspected he polished it.

He squinted, speaking slowly, putting his face up as close to Drew's as possible. "What's so funny about.... Biggus.... Titus?"

Drew cracked up. "Man, I haven't seen you here in ages."

"Where's the others?"

"They went out for lunch. Some restaurant on St Kilda Rd." 

"That was a nice speech at assembly."

"You liked it?" Drew was fiddling around with a bundle of keys. "You know, that new guy, what's his name-"

"De Silva."

"Yeah. I thought it was something like that. He told me the same thing as I was getting off the podium. He wants to see us perform. That's what we're trying to put together now." There was an excited note in Drew's voice. "If this works out, we might be able to put on a spring production. You know how long it's been since we had a spring production?"

Titus didn't pay that much attention to the drama department, his knowledge of which essentially consisted of whatever Drew chose to rant about during recess. "How long?"

"Five years! Five years of us lobbying Nagy, and he did nothing. He was a cool guy to talk to, but he did absolutely nothing."

Titus studied the keys. One of them was a Volkswagen keyfob. "You got your license."

"Yeah. On my birthday, too. You?"

"I've still got about 80 hours to go. Also, my birthday's not for a while yet."

"You don't even need a license." Drew adjusted his glasses. "You know like, every single public transport timetable."

He groaned inwardly. He knew this would come up in the conversation. "Of course I need a license. How am I going to ban cars forever if I have to rely on public transport?"

Drew laughed at that one. The laugh quickly petered out. "I didn't see you at my 18th."

"Well, the first thing I heard about it was the Monday after."

"I told him to add you to the Facebook group."

"Who?"

"Arthur."

"Well, people forget sometimes."

Drew sighed. He ran a hand through his brown curls. "I was looking forward to, you know, get to know you outside of school." He looked Titus in the eye. "Promise me you'll go to Kevin's 18th."

"Maybe." Titus tried to keep his face as expressionless as possible. He was here on a mission, after all. "You remember Hugo D'Aprano?"

"Yeah. He helps around with the Old Petrovians Troupe productions. I think he lives in Brunswick West now."

"You know the address, by any chance?"

"I've got it here somewhere. Give me a sec." He fiddled with his phone. "Ah. Here. What's this interest in him all of a sudden?"

"He was my mentor in Year 9. I just want to see how he's doing. Just drop in on him on the way home." Titus looked at Drew's phone. Hope St, West Brunswick. He knew where that was.

"I got his number too. You want that as well?"

"I think a surprise house call's more suited to his, you know, character," Titus replied. "Thanks. I owe you one."

"Any time." Drew watched as he let himself out.