cw: spiders

"How the fuck is "homogenised" a hard word? It's printed on the back of every single milk bottle in Australia." Titus sounded personally offended.

"Well, it is for me." Fraser handed back Titus' essay.

The train pulled into Southern Cross. Two VLocity sets were parked in the nearest V/Line platform. There were quite a few passengers waiting to board, and a bunch of hi-vis vests milling around between the two trainsets.

"What's going on?" Fraser wondered. "Is there something wrong with the train?"

"Nothing. They're just coupling them together." Titus played with one of the straps on his schoolbag. "There was an accident a couple of years ago. They shunted two trains into each other a little too fast and some of the passengers got thrown around a bit. So now there's a rule that they have to get all the passengers off the train before they couple them together. Red tape. Makes the world go round."

They had managed to just make it to the 4:06 express to Eltham. They'd even managed to somehow find a two-seater, just as the doors were closing.

It was a week after the incident in the bookstore. Fraser had invited him to his house. Nominally, he was tutoring Fraser with his English homework, but he couldn't see a scenario where that was actually happening.

The train jerked into motion. There were the distinctive starting jitters as the wheelslip detection struggled to rein in the power of motors, the buzz of excess electrons being dissipated into the ether.

"Feel that? That's the traction control working," Titus explained. There was the cyclical screaming of the asynchronous motors kicking in. The scenery started to really move.

"These things have traction control?"

"Of course. All modern trains do. Otherwise there would just be endless wheelspin and we'd go absolutely nowhere." The windows went dark as they entered the City Loop.

"What are these called?" Fraser wondered.

"This is an X'Trapolis."

"An X-what?"

"Well, that's what the manufacturer calls them." The flanges screeched as the train entered a curve. "Some people call them the X'Trampolines, because they bounce all over the place, and some less kind people call them the X'Craps. It's far from the worst name out there. There's a Swiss company that gives all of its trains suggestive acronyms. Wink. Kiss. Flirt."

"Ew." Fraser watched the emergency lights go past. "So are these things any good?"

"Well, as I said before, they bounce all over the place, they're limited to 90 kilometres an hour because of braking problems, and technologically they're a bit behind, but overall, they're alright, just not brilliant. They just need better shock absorbers. The kicker is that this was made by the same company that makes the TGV, you know?"

"What, like the tram we saw yesterday?"

"Yep. They could have done so, so much better, but instead they give us this shit. They got a bit of airtime about 10 years ago when they got called 'cheap and nasty overseas shit' by one of the union bosses on radio. But they're so Frenchy and so chic so it's all okay, nobody who's actually in charge of making decisions suspects a thing."

Fraser nodded. "Seems like they're selling on brand name."

"All the big companies do. It's how they make money."

They wound around and out of the City Loop, then on an embankment through the inner suburbs. They got a fleeting glimpse of the top of the building where Michaelis had yelled at them yesterday.

Titus spoke up again when they got to Clifton Hill. "Until 1901, this was as far as it went. The bit we just went over hadn't been built yet. If you actually wanted to go to the city, you had to reverse here, turn onto the Mernda Line, turn left at Rushall onto the Inner Circle line, which is now a bike path, join the Upfield Line in Royal Park, and then eventually you'd get to Spencer St."

"That seems kind of inconvenient."

"There was a cable tram where Route 86 runs now." Titus pointed to the left of the train, "Most people got off here and caught that into town instead."

The driver turned on the taps as soon as they cleared the junction at Clifton Hill. The carriage wallowed around on its springs in the manner that underdamped coil-sprung vehicles were predisposed to, bouncing about all over the place but never quite bottoming out. They flashed past a station, a blur of wavy crooked platform markings and blue signs.

"Fuck me," Titus mumbled, almost inaudibly. Fraser leaned over. He caught a brief glimpse what looked a muddy puddle on the opposite track.

"What was that?"

"That's a mudhole. It basically means the track is unsupported. It's just mud underneath."

"How does that happen?"

"Side insertion. Which is basically the track-maintenance equivalent of cleaning your room by shoving everything into a drawer."

Fraser thought about all the times he'd cleaned his room by doing just that.

"Instead of actually ripping up the sleepers and rails and properly relaying them," Titus expounded, "they lift the track up with a forklift or some shit, wiggle the old sleeper out sideways, push a new sleeper in, fasten it to the rail and jiggle it about till it looks good. Extremely dodgy but fast. Basically, it completely ruins the drainage. The whole point of all those little stones under the track is to let water drain away from the tracks as quickly as possible when it rains. Now instead of draining away, the water pools under the track and eventually what you get is a mud hole, kind of like soil liquefaction after an earthquake."

"Surely that isn't legal."

"Borderline, I'd say." Titus shrugged. "Metro Trains and track maintenance have an, ahem, interesting relationship."

They sped past another station, then another. The train slowed for the approach to Ivanhoe. People got up and made for the doors. The curved platform rushed past, all wavy asphalt and yellow line.

They stepped off the train, into a sea of brown and maroon blazers. Ivanhoe Grammar and Marcellin.

Titus eyed the buses queuing up outside the fare gates. "Are we catching the bus?"

"We could," Fraser said. "But I think we'll walk."

***

Fraser's house was a white-painted California bungalow, set deep into a leafy front yard.

Titus had felt a faint sense of nostalgia as Fraser led him up the gravel driveway. There had been a California bungalow, once, where his own house now stood. They had been all the rage when that part of Coburg was being developed in the 1920s. It had been knocked down in the 1950s.

Fraser's room was easily twice the size of his own. Clothes were strewn everywhere. A window opened out onto the roof, and the treetops beyond. More clothes spilled out of a half-open wardrobe door. A stack of clear plastic boxes stood next to a bookshelf, each holding a pair of shoes.

"Sorry about the mess." Fraser went to open the window. "It's a bit of a disaster zone."

"It's okay." Titus eyed the shoe collection. "You didn't tell me you were a were-centipede."

"Yeah," Fraser retorted, "that's why I never come to school when it's full moon- aargh."

Titus turned around to see Fraser frozen in fear at something on the windowsill. "What's wrong?"

"There's a spider." Fraser pointed in front of him.

"Let me see." Titus went over. There was indeed a spider. It was a little mottled beige thing, with the tiniest touch of red on its abdomen, which had pinched corners like an old lady's purse.

"It's dangerous, isn't it?" Fraser looked like he'd seen a ghost.

"Hell no. It's just a little crab spider." Titus looked at Fraser's expression curiously. "What are you so afraid of? It must have come in the last time you opened the window." He carefully put his hand out next to the spider, inviting the little critter to crawl on. Spiders were hard to pick up, because of their rather soft bodies. Beetles and other bugs could take a bit of rough handling.

The spider was having none of it. It made for the edge of the windowsill and leapt off. Fraser jumped.

Titus didn't flinch. He just swished his hand under the windowsill. He brought his hand up to the light.

"What the- how did you do that?" Fraser wasn't comprehending what he was seeing. The spider seemed to be levitating in mid-air below Titus' hand, kicking its legs uselessly.

"See? it's got its own bungee cord." Fraser looked closer. There was indeed a very thin thread of silk attaching the little arachnid to Titus' hand. It was rapidly winching itself up by the spinnerets in its abdomen, its tiny legs slicing up the air.

"Just chuck it out of the window." Fraser's hand was already on the window latch.

"It'll just get taken away by a bird. Don't ever just leave bugs on a bare surface." He headed for the door. "Always find some kind of vegetation for them to cling on."

Fraser looked at him in horror. "It could have been pois-venomous." He managed to remember the distinction between poisonous and venomous just in time.

"Well even if it was, its fangs wouldn't be big enough to pierce your skin." The spider had almost crawled up to Titus' hand. He bobbed the silk strand like a yo-yo. The little arthropod went back down again. He moved his hand a little closer to Fraser. "I am a spider, creep up behind ya, promise not to bite unless you're hurting me."

Fraser flinched. "I thought you only listened to seventies stuff."

"My dad makes fun of my daggy taste in music all the time. Sometimes he sends me songs that his students have recommended to him."

"So, like, you're doing your homework and suddenly, an email pops up from your dad, with a link to a Brockhampton song?"

"That actually happened last week, you know." Titus held the spider up to one of the plastic boxes. "Hey there, little fella. These are the UNC Jordan 11s. You like them?"

The spider had almost reached his hand again. He let it crawl on this time. It sat down. "Come on. Let's get this little fella out of here. Show me the way to the backyard."

"How do you know about sneakers? It doesn't seem like your kind of thing." Fraser asked, as they descended the stairs and walked through a corridor, which widened into the living space at the back. There was a large open-plan kitchen to one side and a lounge centred around a fireplace on the other, all of it opening out onto a wooden deck outside through a set of french doors.

"In the same way that taxi drivers in poor countries know about expensive cars," Titus replied cryptically, as Fraser opened the door to the backyard. He carefully deposited the spider on a clivia in a terracotta pot on the deck. It crawled onto one of the orange blooms and disappeared among the petals. "That's their natural habitat, you know. They hang around flowers." He looked around the yard. Most of it was taken up by the deck and a swimming pool. Beyond, there was the floodlights and black netting of a tennis court in an adjoining yard, and the hulking masses of the neighbouring houses.

He spotted a tin shed, hidden in the dappled shade of a magnolia tree. "I wonder what's there."

"I don't go in there." Fraser said, quietly.

"Why? Spiders?"

"Yep."

Titus nodded. "Fair enough. Redbacks do love tin sheds. They love warm places."

Fraser eyed the cobwebs covering the door. "Are those redback webs?"

"Nah. Not sheltered enough. He pointed under the eave of the shed, where there was a slight gap between the roof sheet and the wall, coated in spiderwebs. "There's one living right there."

"How can you tell?"

"Easy." Titus ran his hand over the web. "If it feels kind of like fishing line, it's a redback web."

Fraser blanched. "Careful."

"Relax. You have to try very hard to be bitten by a redback. They're very shy. You'd have to physically drag one out of its web, which is very hard." Titus undid the latch and opened the shed door. A large, glossy black spider crawled out, disappearing into a crack in the concrete paving.

Fraser stepped back. He felt his heart skip a beat. "A redback."

To Fraser's surprise, Titus had stepped back slightly as well. It took him a moment to regain his composure. "That's not a redback. It's a Steatoda," he said, probably more smugly than he intended to come across as. "Redbacks are matte black with a red butt stripe."

"It looked exactly like a redback."

"Identity theft exists in the animal world too, you know." Titus looked into the shed.

"I haven't been in here much since Dad started his new job in Singapore." Fraser said. The interior of the shed was exactly as he remembered it. A workbench, tools, the smell of old paint.

"How long ago was that?"

"Three years ago. He works for a bank. They transferred him there when he got promoted."

"Does he come back often?"

"Every month." Fraser's eyes widened at the sight of something on the dusty workbench. "The sandwich press. I've been looking for that since forever. I thought it was somewhere in the house."

***

They lay on the roof of Fraser's house. The dim glaucous sheen of the Australian bush surrounded them, the same greyish pall that had captivated the artists of the Heidelberg School a century prior. Not too far away, there was the clickety-clack of a train attacking the grade up to Eltham.

"Favourite colour?" Fraser had decided he was taking the sandwich press to school tomorrow.

"Unpainted stainless steel," Titus replied.

"Dogs or cats?" Fraser wondered when Titus would give him a straight answer to a question.

"Chickens."

"I thought you'd say that." Fraser shifted his position slightly. "Favourite movie?"

"Grave of the Fireflies."

"We should watch it together," Fraser suggested.

"That's probably not a good idea." Titus breathed out. "It's a pretty sad movie. You'll cry."

"I like sad movies."

"It's probably not a good idea," Titus reiterated, a little nervously. He glanced at the gold Casio on Fraser's wrist. "I should get going." He shuffled himself into a sitting position on the lichen-covered roof tiles.

"Did your parents-"

"No, no, no. They wouldn't mind at all. I-" Titus hesitated for a moment. "I just don't really get invited to other peoples' houses."

"I just thought they might be kind of strict."

"A lot of people at school think that, you know." Titus stared at the sky. "I think it started off as a rumor and then it just became established fact. You know how things go. They kind of just let me do what I want. They've kind of given up. They wonder why I don't go out more. They're as confused as I am. They'd probably be really happy to know what I'm doing now. They're just kind of tedious people, you know. They have to know everything. Where you're going. The weather forecast for the next seven days of the place you're going. Who you're going with. What their parents do. What their great-great-great-grandparents' third cousin once removed did. Sometimes it's easier to just lie and say that nothing happened. Although that doesn't always work either, because my mum has a sixth sense."

"My mum's working late tonight," Fraser said.

"I'll stay, then. I'll text my mum later." Titus watched a wattlebird take off from a tree across the street.

"I'll order a pizza." Fraser suggested. "Is capricciosa okay?"

"It's fine."

"I just wish I could be you." Fraser stared at the ever-so-slightly moving clouds up above. "Just spitting facts about trains and saving spiders every day."

Titus' facial expression didn't change. "I wish I could be you, too, you know, sometimes."