‘Well? What do you say?’

‘Dunno. Does it pay?’

‘Call it payment for the ride.’

‘Well,’ he said, suddenly shy. ‘I dunno. Maybe.’

And perhaps it was the promise in that ‘maybe’ that distracted me. I turned to look at his face, greedy to capture its angles, its damage. I never saw the roo coming.

Luckily, I only clipped it; its hind connected with the driver’s side headlight, which immediately went dark. There was a thump and a moment of sickening slow motion as I felt the car veering onto the wrong side of the road, and then onto gravel. I braked, hard. The not-Vauxhall, old but solid, juddered to a halt.

‘Fuck!’ the young man shrieked. ‘What the fuck was that?’

I left the car running, the keys in the ignition.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. I spoke in some ersatz mother’s voice which I hoped would calm the both of us. Smoke rose from the front of the car.

I got out and then he got out, running his hands through his hair.

‘Fuck!’ he said again.

I went to where the roo lay. I’d never been so close to one, never realised how long their claws are, how thick their tails. This one was snuffling, heaving, stinking in the way terrified animals do, as though stink is enough to deter a predator. I stayed at its back, unsure whether it would lash out at me.

‘Shit,’ I said. I sank to my knees.

I looked up at the boy, who came to stand next to me. ‘We can’t leave him like this.’

‘What?’

‘It would be cruel.’

I was fumbling with my phone in the twilight. I switched its torch on and ran the beam over the kangaroo’s dusty dead-leaf coloured body, trying to find what was wrong. There was no visible injury, only the movement of muscle and bone beneath its pelt, the shallowness of its breath.

‘What do you mean?’ the boy said. He was shaking. He couldn’t keep the panic from his voice.

‘You know what I mean.’

I caught his face in the torch-beam. His eyes were wide. The skin on his face was taut. Yes, I thought. I’d love to paint you like this: vulnerable, pale with fright.

‘How? You have a gun or something?’

‘No.’

I leaned over the kangaroo, as far as I dared. I tried to speak in a soothing voice: ‘There, now. There, there. It’s okay.’

The boy’s stink was as strong as the roo’s.

‘I would do it myself,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have the strength. I’d make it worse.’

He paused, swallowed, looked down at his hands.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. I’ve got something in my backpack. I’ll go get it.’