He and Erica hadn’t found much either, he told me: a few coins, gold as well as silver; a packet of cigarettes with two stale ones left rolling around inside.

Keeping the grass on the verge short is one of our regular jobs. So is weeding. So is scooping up the flung and flattened bodies of kangaroos and wombats, and the myna birds and magpies and crows whose wings still catch the wind though their bodies have been pasted into the bitumen.

We’re supposed to check the pouches of the native animals we find. It’s always Curtis who does this, putting on a pair of gloves and stretching out the pouches while Erica and I stand by making dirty jokes. Sometimes he finds something still alive. We call the wildlife service, which sends a carer to pick them up.

Curtis doesn’t have to sit with those animals, but he does. He wraps them in the towels he keeps in the truck.

‘Most of them won’t make it,’ Erica says.

‘I know,’ Curtis replies, but he does it anyway.

That day, after cleaning up the accident, we were sent further north. There are crops of opium poppies up there. They look pretty in the springtime, the poppies – the flowers bloom so white and so thick they look like frost.

We’d been sent to mow the grass along a section of road that had poppy fields rolling out on either side. There’s less security than you’d think around those fields: just some wire boundary fences, and signs that say Danger! Lethal! The crops are supposed to be patrolled, but I’ve never seen any guards.

Curtis claims to have eaten the resin that comes from the poppies. He says he went in once and got away with a whole bunch of seed pods rolled in his shirt.

It would be easy enough to do. Sometimes we’re so close you could reach an arm through the fence and touch the flowers.

Curtis says what you do is make cuts in the pod and wait for the latex to ooze out. And when it does, you keep waiting until it turns thick and brown-black, and then you roll a little bit into a ball between your fingertips and eat it.

‘What’s it like?’ I asked.

‘It’s like being dead,’ he said. ‘In a good way.’

Curtis told me that when he’d finally come down he realised he’d been lying still on his unmade bed for sixteen hours. He’d heard his housemates calling, but hadn’t been able to answer. He’d been too far away, drifting outside his own mind, his own body. He said he’d never been happier.