"It was a wild period, the early 1990s." Titus glanced at the cars waiting together with them for the red light, through the window of the bus, which was gently vibrating with the clatter of the idling engine. "They were making low-floor versions of absolutely everything in Europe. They were cutting old trams in half, they were putting vertical engines in buses, all kinds of wild stuff was going on. 

"Meanwhile, here, it was like the fucking Purge. service cuts, they were getting rid of the conductors, they were withdrawing the W Class, everyone was on strike, it was carnage. And then Jeff Kennett privatised everything..."

They were sitting at the very back of the bus, a grey plastic ghetto of sorts. The light turned green. The window stopped rattling as the idling subsided and 12-litre straight six directly below them roared into life. There was a moment of lag before it was drowned out by the whine of the gearbox, then the rear of the bus pitched downwards, and they were moving.

He felt the body flex slightly as they went through the intersection. The original Custom CB60 was quite an elegant design, as bus bodies went. The interior was light and airy, there were reasonably few rattles, and the exterior styling was easy on the eyes. Then the CB60 C-Max had a bit of the Frankenstein facelift aesthetic to it, and the Evo II was even worse. And then the CB80 was even more of a minger, even if they had managed to sort out the build quality.

"We spent about 20 years riding the wave of the latest European bus technology," Titus continued, eyeing a particularly interesting lawn ornament in a front garden quickly receding from view, "and then they left us in the dust because of this whole low-floor revolution. All the newfangled low-floor tech was a bit too advanced for us. You know, we wanted the accessibility, but we didn't want all the complexity of fancy upside down rear axles or having the entire drivetrain crammed into a tiny cabinet.

"So they came up with this." He gestured at the bus around them. "The O405 Niederflur-Hybrid. A low floor front half welded to the back half of a Mercedes O405, the last old-school Mercedes bus. When this was being built, Mercedes had already debuted the successor to the O405, the Citaro, which was this fancy integral frame fully low floor independent front suspension wonderbus, which is now pretty much the official bus of Europe, and then in the early 2000s they gave us something called the O500LE. They're not bad, actually. You've probably ridden one on the 510. They're just not legend material. They're mostly known for electrical gremlins and catching on fire. I think Perth has had something like 15 of them randomly burn to the ground."

"So why don't we import the whatchamacallit-" Fraser was just nodding along again. They had been talking about nineties bands and somehow they had ended up on this crazy tangent.

"The Citaro."

"Why don't we just import some?"

"Well, it's illegal, because the standard European bus is 2.55 metres wide. The maximum width of a bus under Australian Design Rules is 2.5 metres. Brisbane and Perth have in the past, as demonstrators, but that's it."

"So why don't they change the rules. It's just five centimetres."

"They have to protect the local bus industry. Which is how they can get away with these ridiculous steps behind the back door and interiors which are, no offence, like a plastic cave. It's a shame. Our bus companies absolutely have the skills to make a bus that is as good as anything in Europe. Those double deckers on the Skybus, they're almost completely Australian made, except for the engine and a few other parts. And they're brilliant."

The bus wound around a roundabout and arrived at the foot of a hill. The whine of the ZF slushbox dropped several octaves as it downshifted, followed by the jet-turbine roar of the blown six as it responded to the driver putting his foot down. There was a moment of turbo whistle as the bus crested the hill.

"Most people think that riding a bus is as interesting as watching paint dry, which is highly ironic, because given Transdev's standards of maintenance," Titus eyed a hastily repainted ceiling panel- "we could very well be unintentionally watching paint dry . And also because the only interesting public transport vehicles we have now are buses. We just went through an extinction period from about 2013 to 2017 in which almost all of the interesting and quirky trams and trains died. The Hitachis died. The Chopper Comengs died. The Z1s and Z2s died. The B1s died. Our only hope now, really, is if something weird happens, like a Z Class runs Route 12 or something."

The bus was winding through a part of the suburbs that neither of them had ever had cause to visit. Titus thought back to when he was eight years olds on a family roadtrip, trying to make sense of the world through the limited sightlines afforded by the sole occupant in the backseat of a car, all the while listening to his parents discussing the flatness of the landscape and the lack of culture of the small town they had left behind half an hour ago and so on. Almost all of his childhood had been framed in a similar way, through the windows of a car or a train, the screen of a TV, the mature trees of a leafy suburb, through the awkward gap between school buildings where neither had been placed with forethought for the other.

From the low-slung perspective of the family car, only the occasional creek gully could provide some clue to what lay beyond the neat single-story frontage presented to passers-by. The higher viewpoint that the back of a bus afforded allowed for some further insight, and occasionally, the lie of the land would conspire to reveal a park, an oddly subdivided block, or some other anomaly, embedded in rolling plains of neat quarter-acre plots stretching into the distance.

***

They left the bus in what felt to Fraser like the middle of nowhere. It had rained the night before. The damp served to bring out all the colours of the muted palettes of low-rise suburbia, the nondescript, squat honey-brick houses, the grey concrete footpath with the blue metal aggregate showing through, the garishly green kikuyu with the unsightly roots showing, the late-model cars with sun-bleached paintjobs, the box brush trees lining the streets, the lantanas and clivias and roses and all the other introduced plants, the smooth brown brick, the beige-painted screen doors, the backboards standing sentinel above garage doors like ersatz satellite dishes.

The sky above was an almost flawless gray colour. It was like the photos and text effects in mid-2000s magazines. Oversaturated. Unnatural.

In his mind's eye Titus saw himself, a miniscule dot on a small part of a huge patchwork quilt of quarter-acre blocks stretching far out, bound together by an intricate web of asphalt, reinforced infrequently by freeways and ribbons of steel rails. Where did the natural start and the artificial end? Were gardens really part of the natural world? Were any of the dodder-choked parks actually nature at all? Every little bit around him had been paved over, tiled, concreted, asphalted, covered with lawn, planted with trees, bushes, shrubs, the manifestation of a compulsion to cover every single surface, to make everything known, to remake the ground in their image, until the original features were just vague suggestions of odd curves in the street grid.

But the ground resisted. It resisted with tree roots and subsidence and groundwater seeps and everything in between. Beneath the sounds of domestic life, a substrate of lilting birdsong and soughing branches still persisted.

***

Titus snapped the shoot off a wormwood bush spilling onto the pavement, crushing it between thumb and forefinger. "Smell that." He held it up to Fraser's nose.

Fraser curled up his nose at the pungent scent. "It smells like hand lotion."

"It's what they put in absinthe. I think about fifty percent of my childhood was just this. Picking off leaves and breaking them up in my fingers and smelling them."

"And the other fifty percent?"

"Putting them in my mouth. That's probably why I'm like what I'm like."

"I wonder what it would be like to be a plant." Fraser looked up at the unceasing grey sky. "Just sit there and photosynthesise."

"Plants do fucked up shit to each other all the time, you know." Titus made an expression that suggested he'd heard this one before. "They just do it too slowly for us to notice. I mean, just look at this nature strip. It's a fucking crime scene." He pointed at the plants around them, one by one. "Murder. Attempted murder. Theft. Theft. Fraud. Manslaughter. Vandalism. Murder again. Fraud." He pointed up at what appeared to be a prematurely balding gum tree on the other side of the road. "Look at that. Robbery. In broad daylight."

Fraser looked up at the gum tree, at the clumps of leaves still left on the bare branches. "How is that robbery?"

"Those leaves don't actually belong to the gum tree," Titus explained. "They're mistletoe. Parasitic. They're probably the reason the tree doesn't have a single leaf left."

Fraser squinted. The leaves did look a bit off, up close, like they were slightly melted.

"People used to think that mistletoe was magical because it didn't lose its leaves in winter," Titus explained. "That's why they came up with the whole kissing under the mistletoe thing. They didn't know it was the fucking plant Dracula. Imagine. You're kissing under the mistletoe at Christmas, and a guy dressed in a tree suit runs up to you, and starts yelling at you, 'Imma let you finish, but that piece of shit mistletoe stole my nutrients.'"

***

There was just a huge hole in the ground where 15 Chapman Avenue should have been, fenced off with cyclone wire. White PVC pipes poked out of the bare faces of earth. There were puddles at the bottom from yesterday night's rain.

Titus had known that something was amiss as they had approached the house, from the conspicuous gap in the rooflines and the tyre marks all over the nature strip. Now he knew why.

They stood silently for a moment, contemplating the tableau in front of them.

"Well, that was a dead end," Titus said, kicking a rock under the fence, towards the edge of the hole. There was a muted rumbling as it tumbled down the edge, then a splash, as ripples appeared in the puddle closest to them.

"Are you looking for something?" They turned around. It was an old, white-haired man with a bushy moustache and spectacles, walking a labradoodle.

"There was a house here, wasn't there?" Titus asked. "With a lot of Christmas lights."

"It's a crying shame." The old man shook his head. "Every Christmas people would line up from all around Melbourne just to look at the lights. There were traffic jams down this street. It's a tradition here on this street, you know. It's a lot quieter where I live."

"Do you know where he went?"

"I haven't the faintest clue. As I said before, I don't live here," the old man said, as if trying to prove he was not to blame for what had happened. "I don't know the gossip around here. All I know is that it was very sudden. One day he was here, watering the garden, and the next day he and his family were gone."

"His family?"

"He had two kids. I saw them sometimes, playing on the front lawn. A son and a daughter."

"What are they going to build here?" Fraser wondered.

"It's going to be a multistorey apartment complex." There was a wistful look in the old man's eyes. "With an underground carpark. That's why they dug this massive hole. The other residents are up in arms, as you might imagine. Well, I must be going. Come on, Brian." He tugged at the leash. Brian followed along willingly.

Titus and Fraser were getting ready to leave, too, when there was a flash of white behind them. Titus turned around, just in time to catch the rapidly retreating posterior of a Volkswagen Golf with red P-plates, heading down the street. The brake lights turned on as it slowed and turned left into a side street. "I saw the same white Golf when we went to the bookstore. And I'm almost certain I saw a white Golf when we went to visit Hugo."

"There's white Golfs everywhere." Fraser looked down the road. "It's probably just a coincidence."

***

The light turned amber. The bus driver floored it. The five-cylinder Scania donk responded with the trademark flatline grumble.

They were going home via a different route. Titus had assured Fraser it would be faster.

They managed to make it through the intersection just as the light turned red. Panels rattled. They saw double briefly. Not a soul on the bus flinched in the slightest. This was business as usual.

"I'm sorry I dragged you this far just to look at a hole in the ground." Titus said. "We probably shouldn't have used information from 2013."

"I'm so hungry," Fraser mumbled, by way of reply.

"You can wait until you get home," Titus replied, automatically.

"There's no way I can wait till then."

Titus checked his phone. It was nearly one o'clock. He had not factored lunch into his plans. He suddenly felt guilty.

He looked out the window. The quarter-acre blocks had been replaced by cookie-cutter apartment buildings. A beige faux-stucco slab of shopping centre loomed on the other side, ringed by carpark on all sides. They were slowing down. The bus driver was getting ready to turn left. They would get off at the next stop.

***

The food court was crammed. Babies screamed and made messes, to the horror of the other people. Tall drink canisters and paper bags and burger boxes surrounded them, the cardboard paraphernalia of suburban mass consumption.

Behind them, there was a fig tree which looked like it was ready to burst out of its tanbark-lined planter box-cum-prison and run for the nearest creek gully.

"Do you worry about what other people think?" Fraser asked, through a mouthful of burger.

"I used to." Titus had already finished his food. He had always been a quick eater. Luckily, he had brought The Dogs Of Riga along with him in his backpack. "All the time. But then I realised it was kind of futile, you know. Everyone already thinks I'm a weirdo, anyway."

"Fair enough."

"Why do you ask?"

I don't know. I just feel..." Fraser searched for the right word "...stuck."

"What, you're just a goofy, easygoing, quasi-sensitive kind of guy and everyone thinks you're some kind of evil jock? Just because you hang out with the lads?"

"Yeah. Basically."

"Well, you need a rebrand," Titus replied, half-jokingly. "And for that, there's only one solution. Drew Nikopoulos face mask."

"He hates me, you know."

"Yeah, he doesn't forgive stuff that easily. He still remembers the time I accidentally punched him in Year 8."

"I was such a dick in Year 8," Fraser recalled. "I did so much dumb shit."

"I think my friends laugh at me behind my back," Titus said. "Sometimes I get there and they're laughing and as soon as they notice me the laughing stops. I mean, they probably do it kind of uncomfortably. They'll probably be joking that I'm listening or something. They'll think of something mean and then they'll be like, 'Oh no, that's a bit harsh, we can't say that.' I don't know, it's almost a bit hilarious."

They sat silently for a while, each thinking about what the other had said. Fraser returned to eating.

Something caught Titus' eye. A group of people roughly his age had finished eating and were heading across the food court, heading for the rest of the mall. The ringleader was tall, lanky, with an unruly mop of red hair. Just like him.

Titus watched, transfixed. The other redhead seemed to be telling a joke. Every movement of his exuded confidence. He felt a twinge of jealousy.

Then the guy turned around, and for the first time he got a good look at their face. For a moment, they locked eyes.

His sucked in a breath. He felt like he was looking into his own eyes.

Then his döppelganger just kept on walking with his group of friends, like nothing happened.

Titus immediately looked next to him. Fraser didn't seem to have noticed. He was still eating, oblivious to what had just happened.

The group had disappeared from sight. They had probably taken the lifts to another level of the mall by now.

He tried to make sense of what he had just seen.