Fin had persuaded Neil to help him build the course. This hadn’t been hard. Fin had told Neil that he needed his help, and then simply not waited for Neil to reply. This was an easy trick to pull on Neil because he always took so long to reply to anything. Sometimes he could take two or three days just to answer the simplest questions, like ‘Do you need a haircut?’ or ‘Would you like a burger for dinner?’.

‘This is going to be the best mud run course ever,’ said Fin as he unrolled his plans to show his friend. ‘There’s going to be a mud launcher, mud twisters and a mudfall.’

‘What’s a mudfall?’ asked Neil.

‘It’s like a waterfall,’ explained Fin. ‘Only with mud.’

Neil nodded as he looked over the diagrams. ‘That’s a lot of mud.’

Fin grinned manically. ‘I talked to the head of Bilgong Mining. They’ve got two thousand tons of dirt they dug out of their tin mine. They’ve been looking to get rid of it, and now they’re going to give it all to me.’

‘But that’s just dirt,’ said Neil. ‘You need mud.’

Fin waved his hand dismissively. ‘All I need is a little rain and it will be sorted.’

Neil scowled. He lived on a farm with his grandmother, the Cat Lady, so he knew from experience that rain was tricky. When it didn’t come, it didn’t come for ages. But Neil was a boy of few words, and there was no way he could explain the dynamics of climatology to his friend in monosyllables, so he decided not to bother.

‘I just need to tell the mining company where to dump the dirt,’ said Fin. ‘They’ll do that after the mine closes for the day, when their trucks aren’t needed.’

‘So what are we doing?’ asked Neil.

‘We need to tell the construction crew how to build the obstacles,’ said Fin.

Neil looked at the blueprint. The obstacles seemed to involve massive machines.

‘I got the ideas from Leonardo da Vinci,’ explained Fin. ‘He came up with some awesome military designs for cannons and catapults. And he only had sixteenth-century technology. We’ve got computers, power tools and earth movers, so it should be a cinch.’

‘Is this safe?’ asked Neil, pointing to a particularly nasty-looking mud cannon on the plan.

Fin shrugged. ‘There was nothing in the competition rules that said the design had to be safe. If the course was safe, it wouldn’t be challenging. Will you help?’

‘Why me?’ asked Neil.

Fin looked at his friend. It was only a two-word question, but Fin understood all the implied meaning. Why did he ask Neil – a barely verbal, short boy with chronic vertigo to help? ‘I didn’t want to ask my family,’ said Fin. ‘They always ruin everything. Or takeover everything. Or hijack everything.’

Neil looked at him expressionlessly. He didn’t even blink. Fin felt like Neil was looking directly into his soul. He was going to have to tell the truth.

‘Plus,’ said Fin. ‘I don’t have any other friends.’ Fin realised this wasn’t just true for Currawong. It was true for life. He hadn’t had proper friends when he had lived in the city either. There had been the other boys from the chess club and the D&D club, but they weren’t really ‘friends’. They were just like-minded people who enjoyed correcting each other.

Neil didn’t say anything. He nodded once, which Fin understood to mean a blanket acceptance of everything Fin had proposed. Neil didn’t have any other friends either.