‘It almost looks like a face,’ Michael said.
‘Yes,’ Patrick agreed. ‘But then, a lot of things almost look like faces.’
They stood silent, then, and looked again down at the table and its vector-sprawl of black texta. Lines covered the green laminate, at points jutting off the side entirely and then returning at an angle into the centre of the tabletop. And yet no lines intersected. It was deliberate, yes; but what did it mean?
‘A plotting of conversational tangents,’ Michael suggested. ‘Measurements of social deviations from the norm. Early drafts for a choose-your-own-adventure novel.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Patrick frowned. ‘Not enough scope. We’re looking for something that would lead us to it in the first place. Something important. Something tangible enough to hold and fire a gun.’
There was little light in that room. The power had been cut and neither of them had thought to bring their flashlights – thinking the whole thing just a five minute in-and-out, a cursory glance at what she had surrounded herself with for all those years previous. And then the kitchen with its cryptic magnetic poetry and strangely geometric scrawls made them stop to open the blinds and get a proper look.
‘This isn’t going very well, is it?’ Michael asked.
‘I think it’s going well enough,’ Patrick said.
Patrick took out a rolling paper and removed the pouch of tobacco from his top pocket, from which he thumbed out a clump and lined it across the paper before rolling and licking it shut. As he raised the cigarette to his lips, patting his pockets now to find the lighter, a single robin – and then another – alighted upon the windowsill.
‘Hey there,’ he said, between the cigarette. ‘Fly birdy. As the bird flies. Maps. This dot,’ he announced, turning back to the table and jamming the cigarette, still unlit, to stand upright at a vertex near the centre, ‘is us, where we are, now. This house. This dot,’ dragging the cigarette to the next in sequence, ‘is Shepparton. And so on – a short distance to Mooroopna, and then here to Tatura, and Dhurringile, and Murchison.
‘Here,’ laying the cigarette to rest, ‘the line tapers, and then begins anew a short distance away. Somewhere on the highway. Come on. Get your jacket on.’
As they walked back out to the car Patrick rolled himself another cigarette, folding it over with one foot in the door and the other on the gravel driveway, looking out into the flat distance. Michael got in the car and started the engine, turning to look up at Patrick as he climbed in.
‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ he said.
