Dale was telling the truth when he said he was doing this for fun. He’d grown up not far from Perth—which, in Australian terms, meant it was probably a short four or five hour drive away—with his mum and dad. She was a school teacher, his dad was a plumber. An older brother, married, with kids, worked in insurance. His parents, he said, had been out of the country once, to Bali, when they retired. His brother, who he loved dearly, was always slagging him off for liking guys.

  “Mate,” Dale would say, “you bring this up so often I’m starting to think that maybe it’s you that’s gay. You talk about it more than me.”

  “Fuck off, mate. I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “That’s how I started as well.”

  Dale thought he’d be a paramedic but wasn’t in any hurry. He’d get there eventually. In the meantime, he wanted to experience things, before expectations and a career took over. He had spent the past few summers working in children’s camps in America and some outdoorsy stuff with kids in rural communities, a year or so respraying cars in Darwin, and, most recently, some bartending in Perth, which is where he met Alejandro and Stu.

  Alejandro seemed to have resigned himself to working as a waiter for his entire twelve-month stay, in the hope of getting a second year to do the same. Stu was working the kitchen and developing a real reputation for quality cooking. The head chef, a lovely big guy named Greg, told him so. Told him that, if he wanted to, he could really make it as a chef. But that he’d need to get some real experience in some proper kitchens, not just rubbing out a couple specials in between pies and fish and chips and other pub grub. Stu, being nineteen, while genuinely grateful for the compliment, had panicked and quit.

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  Dale, meanwhile, had tried smoking meth one too many times for it to be considered an experiment, realised it was time to either move on or settle down, and the two of them had talked Alejandro into joining them on the Indian Pacific train to Sydney. From there they’d bought a car, a Suzuki Vittara with a welded-on driver’s side door and tint peeling off the windscreen, and driven down to Melbourne, where they stayed with a friend of Dale’s he’d met in America. They had every intention of driving back to Perth, either clockwise or anti-clockwise, but when the car wouldn’t start in the parking lot of a Target they had left it there, booked flights north to Cairns and spent a couple of weeks drinking and partying in the backpacker hostels and looking for farm work when the money ran out.

  Back at the hotel, somebody had finally cleaned up the spilled milk and, with all the doors and windows open, the place didn’t seem quite as bad. It certainly smelled considerably better. Molly and Stu went to the little shop and returned with some rice, a tin of kidney beans, a can of chopped tomatoes and some more sausages. With this and a couple of the flavouring sachets that come with dried ramen noodles, Stu rustled up the nicest meal Molly, Erin or Cammy could remember having since they arrived on the continent. Eating in the hostel in Sydney had been mostly for stomach lining (lots of cheesy pasta) and eating out was so expensive it was usually some sort of fast food they had.

  “What’s your plans for tomorrow?” Erin asked generally to the table.

  “I want to climb the mountain,” said Alejandro.

  “Mate, this time of year, there’s no fucking way. It’ll all be overgrown, spiders, leeches, snakes…”

  “We have these things in Peru.”

  “Cassowaries,” said Stu.

  “Maybe not those.”

  “Although,” said Dale, chunk of sausage poised on the end of his fork, “if the hurricane is as bad as they say, and if it reaches here, this place could be totally destroyed. So tomorrow might be the only chance we’ll have to climb it.” He shrugged, chewed, swallowed.

  “What’s a cassowary?” asked Erin.

  “A velociraptor with feathers,” said Stu.

  “Didn’t all velociraptors have feathers?” said Cammy.

  “Yeah, but cassowaries still exist. And they’ll properly fuck you up. Got claws that can disembowel a man.”

  “I bet there’s drop bears too,” said Molly, who’d been “entertained” several times already by locals with their stories of vicious koalas leaping from trees onto unsuspecting humans and tearing off their faces.

  “He’s not kidding,” said Dale. “You do not want to mess with a cassowary.”

  “And you get them around here?”

  “Sure. But I’ve never seen one.”