She walked past the shoulder of the car, out of sight, then stopped. She couldn’t go any closer, couldn’t face finding out that it wasn’t dead. It would be soon, whatever. Nothing could have survived the grinding weight of the Land Cruiser. She waited a few moments, alone with the stars and the dark body of the animal, then returned.

          His face was lit up briefly by the interior light, then disappeared as she closed the door.

          ‘Dead?’ he said. She nodded. ‘You checked?’

          ‘Yes,’ she said, too loud. ‘I checked.’

          They drove on slowly. They would be late. It didn’t matter anymore. After a while the kangaroos started launching themselves again, flying across the bows of the car. They sat in silence and he drove on, swerving slightly to avoid them.

          That night he climbed wordlessly into the cabin’s bed and flung himself over so his back was facing her, his shoulder raised up around his ear. She sat on the side of the bed, unwilling to spend a night dreaming of the drive, the flying shapes lit up in the beam of the headlights. She whispered goodnight to his hunched form and stepped out barefoot into the cooling night air. There was a patch of soft grass outside the door and she lay and looked up at the stars until something shifted and she seemed to be looking down at them instead, feeling the whole weight of the world at her back. She stayed looking into the cold distances between worlds until the chill had entered her bones and she was ready to find what warmth she could in his turned back and rigid pretence of sleep.

‘Did you dream of them last night?’ she asked. ‘They were flying out at me all night. Must have hit half a dozen.’ He flinched, as if she had meant to hurt him, but before she could apologise he was gone, out to check the car; she was left watching from the cabin doorway. She could see the sharp white line on his neck where his tan ended, a few stray whorled hairs catching the sun. The curve of his neck tensed as he turned to inspect the front wing where the animal had hit.

           ‘Hit a roo, eh?’ the owner had said when they arrived. He’d been dressed only in an undershirt and shorts, pulled from his evening meal. She’d tried to explain why they were so late. ‘Any damage to the car?’

          They hadn’t thought of that. They contemplated the solid body of the Land Cruiser. ‘Ah no, Toyota, she’ll be right,’ the owner had said. ‘Roo killers we call them, round here.’ He laughed, paused to pick his teeth. ‘Bit of a dent maybe? But she’ll be right?’ The rising inflection of Australia, land of the unanswered, unanswerable question.

          This morning, though, there was no dent. The mark they thought they had seen was just a cleaner streak across the wing of the car where the kangaroo had wiped off the accumulated dust of a thousand kilometres. There wasn’t any blood. The owner laughed again, still in his undershirt, picking breakfast out of his teeth now.

          ‘Car cleaner, that’s a use for them.’ He rolled a phlegmy laugh in his throat. ‘Bit of roo fur gets all the dirt off, nice as pie. You’ll have to hit another one on the other side, balance it up?’ She concentrated on packing up the last of their stuff into the back. The owner was waving, still grinning, as they drove away.