But I was reminded of Dan’s advice just a few months later, when I happened to meet a few pretty interesting gift horses, and sometimes even had to work out what to do with their mouths – if I should kiss them, scrutinise them, grab a towel and wipe them down? I was often given gifts that summer, free advice, free rides, and in all cases these gifts were most completely understood not as magic freedoms, being hurled around the world, but always as the leavings of complicated creatures, some of whom wore costumes that concealed their intentions.

There was no hiding in our house, and Dan had not been wrong to want me outside of it at least some of the time. It was a townhouse on Park Street between Lygon Street and Sydney Road, with a half-view of the fountain at the north end of the park, the hesitant edge of dirt tracks and bike-lock-beringed light poles, the thin-grassed area that guarded its vast, green, jogging innards. Behind the sloping balcony, through two windows that clunked, were my room and Dan’s room, and downstairs was the kitchen and the weedy little yard.

The house was long and narrow, with large bedrooms and loud floors, and I always had the feeling, moving up those shaky stairs, of stepping up and down the house’s secret central organ, an old muscle that wasn’t going to take it anymore.

It was a slow tram into Carlton, and a quick walk to Barkly Square, where I’d recently decided to shop at the tactical hours of dusk and dawn, so I had more chance of running into people from uni and engaging them in friendly conversation.

I was definitely not a shut-in. I had this thought all the time. I was just a guy standing in front of a door and almost never opening it, because I’d finished my assignments, and swot vac, and exam block, and also because my youth allowance was at its most effective in funding a life spent quietly indoors.

I thought the Barkly Square idea was clever and inspired, and it wasn’t until I voiced the plan to Dan that I realised these were not the main qualities it signified.

‘Making friends at dusk and dawn,’ he said. ‘Like the humble mosquito.’

Possibly because it was met with this response, I never enacted the mosquito plot.

I ramped up my showers as spring stretched on, I read a lot of books; I discovered a dark red at the Mediterranean Wholesalers that cost four dollars even but was absolutely good. I drank on the balcony in the drowsy light of dusk, which was sticking around later and later, an orange presence reaching from the eights into the nines.

Everything smelled like jasmine and looked like jacarandas. The clocks added their hours. Then one Saturday morning I woke up to a text that turned out to have substantial repercussions.