‘Relax,’ Tom says somewhere in that darkness. ‘The car would have dried overnight.’

His voice, as disembodied as the thunder, seems to have Kenny surrounded.

‘Yeah – streaked like a fucking zebra.’

‘You worry too much. Live a little, for Christ’s sake.’

His friend is right, Kenny knows. They could have joyridden the dusty back roads till dawn and still had time to clean the car; his parents are not due back till late the next day. ‘It’s my neck,’ he says. ‘Not yours.’

Tom isn’t listening. ‘Take the old zebra for another gallop,’ he mutters somewhere, and chuckles again, pleased with himself. ‘Take the old zebra back out on the savannah . . .’

‘Just empty the fucking ashtray before you get out,’ Kenny says.

There is no anger in his words; the obscenity comes as naturally as music, a necessary rhythm.

‘Say please.’

‘Just do it.’

He climbs from the car and walks out from beneath the house into the October light-and-sound show. The humid weight of the impending Wet presses down upon him, squeezing an answering wetness like a kind of juice from his skin, but he is beyond the discomforts of heat and sweat. The dark night air carries powerful scents: a cusp-mix of Wet season and Dry, dust and imminent rain. The thunder is constant, a rumbling sound horizon. Lightning flashbulbs the darkness, alternating night and day. The first rains are surely no more than hours away, although they have seemed no more than hours away for weeks. Tom’s voice, at his shoulder, startles him. ‘Drink?’

The sherry flagon is offered; Kenny waves it away. Tom takes a swig before speaking again.

‘This is just a tease,’ he says. ‘Foreplay. The Wet is still a week away.’

‘Bullshit. It’s going to piss down any second.’

Mention of the various liquids – rain, sherry, piss – seems to increase the pressure in Kenny’s bladder. He vaults the low back fence and walks to the edge of the small cliff above the beach. Lightning flickers with special intensity on the far side of the harbour – a distant fireworks, embedded in banked cloud. Perhaps the Dry has already ended over there. More lightning; the mudflats below are revealed, hidden, then revealed again, the low-tide line half a mile out. Tom materialises at his side; they unzip and send two long, steady arcs of urine over the edge of the cliff and down into the darkness of the mangroves. Years before, it would have been a simple contest – higher, further; contests mostly won by Tom. Now, sixteen years old, sweet-and-sour sixteen, Kenny is finding words more useful weapons. ‘It’s a lightning conductor,’ he says.

‘What is?’

‘Piss, stupid.’

The idea strikes them as hilarious; they laugh convulsively, their streams becoming broken, scattering showers.

Tom leans back and aims his cock near-vertically. ‘Way to go!’

The dare is unpunished by the heavens. Kenny vaults back over the fence, grabs the garden hose, twists on the tap and aims the gushing water at his friend.