"Fraser Hugh Sinclair, get out of bed this instant!"

There was a muffled yell from somewhere deeper in the house. The sound of something solid falling on carpet. Fraser's voice. 

Titus stepped away from the front door. So that was why his first knock had gone unanswered. 

It was just after two o'clock in the afternoon. The tops of the gum trees were dancing in the breeze. He was having one of those periodical light-headed moments when he felt the world was turning, where nothing felt certain. Then everything came back to normal again. 

He had just assumed that this year would pass uneventfully, just like all the ones before. All conflicts would be either easily resolved or conveniently dissipate. Then all this had happened. It felt like the more he thought about it, the less everything made sense and seemed to blend into an amorphous blob. 

This kind of thing had never really been an issue before. He had had many of these light-headed moments before. Doing nothing and letting things sort themselves out had worked with every other major crisis in the past seventeen and three-quarter years. If things didn't make sense, he would just wait until they made sense. 

Now everything seemed to make less sense the further he delved into it. Letting go wasn't really an option, either. He couldn't just stop and hope that everything was ok. Suddenly the anxiety that he had felt in every single interaction became clear. He hadn't really felt it at the time, but now it became blindingly obvious. That was how it was a lot of the time. Thing didn't become clear until weeks or months after the fact, sometimes years. Everything had happened so suddenly. 

How did you tell someone about that? How could you even begin to explain what was going on inside your head?

To be fair he had had some practice for that, albeit not very good practice. For as long as he could remember he had had spirited conversations with people who weren't there. The vast majority of of these conversations were overwhelmingly one-sided: the imaginary other never seemed to have much agency. At the most they might make a slight noise or a somewhat stilted question which would all too conveniently lead on to the next piece of information he wanted to parlay. 

So far this had helped him out in more ways than he would ever admit to, but he felt it had also somewhat stunted his conversational skills. Which had never been brilliant in the first place.

Luckily, some things had managed to resolve themselves, for which he was grateful. It was now the school holidays, and he had some time to reconsider everything. He was also going on weekly running sessions with Fraser. Every Tuesday and Friday he would take the bus to his house and they would go to one of the parks nearby. On the days after they would do a simple recovery jog at home. It had become a neat little routine. 

But some of the other threads of his life were still stubbornly refusing to come together. The search for the musical, which already felt surreal in many ways, had hit a dead end again. The other three were still proving elusive. From what he could gather from the news articles he had found online Winston had tried to fake his own death in some kind of weird life-insurance thing. Information on the other two was even more scant. 

He counted to ten and knocked again. 

***

Lorraine answered the door. She realised that he had been standing there for some time. "Oh, I'm so sorry you had to hear that, Titus. My son seems to think that it's his right to stay in bed for the entire day, now that it's the school holidays." 

Fraser appeared in the background, his hair sticking out in all directions. It had grown. "I'll just be a moment." He disappeared out of frame again. 

"He'll be out soon. He's got a lot of revision to do. If you want to come over and study together, that would be..." 

"I think we only have one subject together..." 

"Any time." Titus only nodded in response. He didn't know what to say. 

Fraser reappeared, holding his running shoes in his hand. His face lit up. Then he saw the expression on his face. It took a few seconds for Titus to register that Fraser might have thought that he wasn't looking forward to the session. There was an awkward silence. 

"I just remembered," he said, breaking the silence. "I forgot to bring your stuff back. Again."

 Fraser shrugged. "Don't worry about it. Let's just go." 

"Shouldn't we do stretches first?"

"We'll do stretches later."

 ***

Titus had chosen this week's running spot. It was a typical creekside bit of greenery, trees sprouting out of a bed of thriving weeds, liberally sprinkled with sun-baked rubbish left by long-forgotten flash floods and passersby. It hadn't rained in a bit and the creek was gin-clear, with a dirt-brown bottom generously lined with rock snot, frothing slightly as it tumbled around stones and reedbeds and algae-encrusted shopping trolleys. The sharp smell of decomposing eucalypt litter formed a bracing undertone to the faintly fetid tang of the creek. 

Somewhere up in the otherwhere they had left behind above the creek gully, there were old ladies watering their prize roses, dads hosing down the family car, little kids having a water fight. It was all dripping through the gutters, draining out of discreet little concrete pipes poking their heads out the thickets of weeds. frothing as it went over little eddies and tumbles. 

Walks along the creek had been a common fixture of his childhood. He had long forgotten the specific places he had been but he had a crystal-clear recollection of the bodies of water that had complemented these places. Ponds, lakes, rills, rivers, reflecting pools, clear water, murky water, fountains, fish ponds, etc, etc. He had always wanted to see something moving in the water. 

But it was always the same boring little fish on the margins of the scummy brown bottom he could see at the margins of the water, which he would later learn were mosquitofish, and that these rather boring mosquitofish which had probably eaten the tadpoles and the native fish he yearned to see. When he leaned in there were sometimes little bugs. But they had the same boring appearance. The only times when this would be even any different was in summer, when the galaxiids came back in schools, their elongated shapes providing some contrast. But they never lasted long and they were very hard to see. 

"They shouldn't throw shopping trolleys in the creek," Fraser said suddenly, which surprised Titus. 

"Actually, it's a good thing," he countered. 

"Surely not." 

"Well, obviously not for beauty reasons. But fish don't like clear open water that much. They like having places to hide. So the shopping trolleys aren't necessarily a bad thing. They don't really pollute, and they slow down the river a bit and give the fish a place to hide. Which are all good things. Rivers need to slow down. That's how you stop floods. They used to think that lining the banks with concrete and making it flow as fast as possible would stop floods, but that actually makes it worse because it flows faster." 

The conversation petered out, and then it was just the strident rhythm of their footfalls. He didn't mind the silence, but he was also keenly aware that other people might not share such a penchant for quiet. He wondered if he should say something. 

They arrived at a bend in the path. On the overgrown opposite bank the foliage of the cotoneasters, plush with ripe red downy fruit, were starting to turn yellow. Next to him, his running mate seemed to be actually taking it in. "It's so beautiful," Fraser said.

Titus had heard this exact phrase uttered many times that the response it stirred within him was almost Pavlovian. He tried to articulate what he was feeling but it wouldn't come. "Oh yeah," he heard himself say. "So much nature." 

"Mm-hmm," Fraser said, not catching the sarcasm in his voice. 

 "Look at all the fucking nature we got here." Titus pointed under the trees. "Here's some stinging nettles, which crowded out the native plants, and there's some rabbit poop left by the rabbits, which nuked the rest of the native plants. And here in the creek we've got some mosquitofish, which ate all of the native fish and the tadpoles, and we've got some lovely rock snot, which has suffocated all the local aquatic plants. and over here there's some cotoneasters, which took out all the native trees. And there's a blackbird, which outcompeted the native birds, and oh look, there's a feral cat, which cleaned up the rest of the native birds. So much natural goodness!"

"Look at this shit. This isn't nature, this is some 19th century English dude's pipe dream. Look at this place." Titus pointed around at the plants. "Those flowers are from South Africa. grass, Kenyan. trees, Europe. Those birds are Indian. Those fish are from the Deep South. It's like the United Nations General Assembly of invasive species going on here."

"What about those?" Fraser pointed at some bright yellow flowers on the banks of the creek, with foliage that looked suspiciously like celery. 

"They're buttercups. I think they're from Europe. They are also invasive, but not as bad as some of the others, because they need shade and a lot of water, so they can't really spread like some of the other plants. Some of which are absolutely insane. Like that." Titus pointed to a cactus. "That's a prickly pear. Once upon a time, these were Public Enemy Number Two, just after rabbits, until cane toads bumped them off. There were whole parts of Australia that were just covered in the things." So they introduced a little moth called the Cactoblastis, from Argentina, that ate the prickly pear, and unlike all the other times with the cane toads and the rabbits when the introduced species just started massacring the local flora and fauna left, right and centre, this time it actually worked and the prickly pear just went away with no fuss. And they've got a nice little memorial for out in Queensland, which I think is the only memorial in the world dedicated to an insect." 

He pointed at one of the buds. "Those taste quite nice, when they're fully grown and go purple. Unfortunately they're green right now, so we'll just have to wait. Apparently you can eat the young leaves as well..."

He nearly choked on his own words finishing the last sentence. Those last few words felt barely formed, flat, no tone. Was Fraser thinking the exact same thing? He had no way of knowing. He suddenly felt as if he was peering down into a vast abyss. He had no idea, really, of how anyone really felt. Suddenly, the possibility that he could hurt someone without even realising it or ever understanding why became very real. 

There was silence between them for a moment. There was only the flowing of the stream, birdsong from above, and the distant tyre roar of a car, and the sounds of running. 

"I don't think people realise how much they've influenced the world around them," Titus continued, after quite a long pause. "There isn't some big divide between nature and us like some people think. It's not so black and white."

They came to a dip in the path, where it almost reached the level of the creek. The ground they walked in was littered with rubbish and other flash-flood related debris, and so were some of the low-lying shrubs and trees which would be submerged in flood. 

They passed a grassy bit overlooking a rather photogenic bend in the creek. "We should have a picnic here or something," Fraser said.

"I don't know about that." Titus' facial expression stayed flat. "That seems a bit unhygenic."

 "What are you talking about?" Fraser looked at the grass underfoot. "This looks fine." 

"You know what happens when it floods, right?"

"What?"

"They let raw sewage run into here." He pointed at a pipe half-obscured in the brush. "To relieve stress on the sewer system."

"That's gross." 

"It's very outdated. Our sewer system is 150 years old, you know. But, you know, that's the price you pay for being a first adopter. Same problem with our train network. There's nothing really wrong with it. It's just old and broken." 

"But wouldn't the fish die?"

"It's just eels and carp down there, both of which are fine with shit water quality. The real problem comes later, when all the nutrients in the sewage cause the algae to grow too much which takes out all the dissolved oxygen in the water. But then they can come out of the water and gulp air if they need to. You know, eels can even go over land if they need to."

"Carp are not from here, right?" 

"Yep. They didn't want to be stuck with crappy little galaxiids, and eels were just way too powerful for gentlemen anglers. You know, that's the dream. Lots of nice rivers and lakes filled with lots of nice dignified fish for nice dignified gentlemen anglers. Which is why they introduced the trout and the redfin and the carp." 

"So why doesn't anyone fish here?"

"Dunno." 

"So all of this goes underwater when it floods." Titus pointed up at the tree cover. "See all the junk stuck in those tree branches? That's how high it gets." 

"Wow." Fraser looked up in amazement. "In other words, about once every few years, this place gets drowned in sewage up to that tree over there."

"Well..." Titus counted on his fingers- "There was a big flood in 2004, and then there were a couple when the drought broke in 2010. Then there was one in 2013, I think. I know this is probably really boring." 

"It's good having someone to talk to." Fraser said. "Usually I just listen to music when I run and you know, that gets boring after a while. It's interesting. Knowing all this about creeks and stuff. This could be a documentary series. The secrets of the creeks. Creek secrets."

"It's not a secret." Titus sounded indignant. "None of this is a secret. Anybody can go on Wikipedia and learn about this stuff. Most of the secrets in the world aren't secrets because they're hard to find, they're secrets because nobody can be arsed to look for them. Like that fuckin' musical we were looking for." 

"How's that going?" 

"Well-" he began to say. Then he stopped suddenly as if he'd heard something. He was looking towards the middle of the creek. "Did you hear that?" 

"Hear what?" Fraser looked at his running mate. His eyes had glazed over. He was staring into an indeterminate point on the horizon. He was looking almost trance-like into the distance, like he had forgotten that there was another person standing next to him. 

"Be quiet. Be really really quiet." 

Fraser held his breath as told. He had kind of caught on by now that getting told to be quiet by Titus was probably not a command to be taken lightly. 

There was a dull bonk, reverberating over the surface of the water, swallowed up by the vegetation. Then silence. 

"That," Titus said, is a pobblebonk frog. Also known as a banjo frog, because they kind of sound like a banjo."

There was another bonk. And another, emanating from a different spot, on the other bank of the creek.

"Can you see them?" 

"I think they live in burrows. Anyway, you're not meant to look for them, because that disturbs their habitat and spreads diseases and makes them sick. What you're meant to do is record their calls, and then you send it off to the scientists and then they use that to figure out what types of frogs there are." 

They had slowed to a walking pace. Normally this change in routine would have thrown off Titus but today he was too distracted to care. He was browsing the bush like a bookshelf, glancing over the branches, pushing his hands into the growth.

"What are you doing?" 

"Just seeing if there's any animals here," Titus said, as if it was a natural thing. "Just a habit from when I was little." 

"In the bushes?" 

"Where do you think animals hang out? On the bare ground? No. I mean, there are some animals that are adapted that kind of thing, but for most of them, it's like running naked across a minefield while in full view of about 15 enemy snipers. If you see a bug crawling across open ground, that means that something is seriously wrong, most of the time." 

He noticed something bright through the bushes. He began pushing through. Not sure what was going on, Fraser followed him instinctively. 

They burst through the bushes into a clearing with a perfect view of the creek, sheltered on all other three sides by thick brush. It was obvious that an effort had been made to clean up, but the remnants of a picnic still littered the margins. Napkins, plastic cups, shards of brown glass, the vinegary smell of decomposing fruit. Titus was reminded of the fancy-dress picnic from Sidetracked. 

"Wow." He picked up a small container half-filled with dark red paste. "That was one fancy picnic that took place here. They had a fucking cheese platter." He waved the container at Fraser. "This is quince paste."

"Just leave it. Come on. Let's go."

"Leave it? Are you out of your mind? We've got to clean this up."

"Nobody is going to see it." 

"I see there's more than one person struggling with object permanence into their late teens." Picking up a discarded plastic bag caught in a thicket of lantana, Titus began stuffing the rubbish in. "Come on." 

"It's not Clean Up Australia Day, is it?" 

"Every day is Clean Up Australia Day, if you really think about it," came Titus's curt reply. "How bad do you think it would be if they only emptied the bins on Clean Up Australia Day?" 

Fraser decided not to argue.