We live on an island that most people try to leave. It is bisected by a single, nearly straight highway, which connects two towns that call themselves cities. You can go a while without passing anyone on that highway. When it’s dark, people drive with their high beams on. They only turn them down at the last second, when they’re about to pass you. Sometimes they don’t turn them down at all and the night goes blind-white for a moment as they flash past.

We left the depot and drove a couple of hours up the highway to where the crash had taken place. The mood in the truck was cheerful. Not because the driver in the other car hadn’t died, although he hadn’t; the airbags had deployed, and soon enough we’d all be sneezing out the fine powder that spent airbags leave over everything.

No – we were excited because petrol stations are where people tend to lose stuff. Things left on top of a car, things that slide off the dash and out an open window. Wallets, phones, cash, sunglasses. We’d found a prosthetic leg once, wearing a white sneaker that looked brand-new.

The agreement we have – me, Erica, Curtis – is that whatever we find we split evenly. Pirate’s rules, that’s what Erica calls it. One man, one share. It means that when someone accidentally rides the mower over a loose twenty-dollar note and the fragments shoot out in a bright orange burst, we all lose $6.70 or thereabouts.

Sometimes we talk about how we might strike it rich one day; find a suitcase full of cash, or diamonds, or bars of gold bullion.

‘You never know,’ I say. ‘It could happen.’

‘How good would that be,’ says Curtis.

I snap my fingers. ‘I’d be out of here like that.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ says Erica.

By the time we reached the scene of the accident, the cops were gone, the ambulances were gone, the driver was gone.

We surveyed the scene: tyre marks bending and stuttering across the white lines of the road, bluish glass that turned to crumbs rather than shattering. A hubcap, a mirror.

It wasn’t the worst I’d seen, not by a long shot. Even so, I had to hose the blood off the road and into the weeds that lined the highway.

‘You’re fertilising them, you know,’ Erica said. She nodded towards the foaming blood-water mixture and the tangled spread of gorse and boneseed and Spanish heath that was already soaking it up.

I wasn’t sure if she was joking. But it made me imagine all those weeds by the side of the road shooting up and thickening and flowering. It made me think of something we’d been taught: a weed is any plant that grows where it isn’t wanted.

‘Find anything?’ Curtis asked when we were back in the truck.

‘Nah. You?’