Circle of Flight Read Free

started squawking in protest. When we didn’t pay him any attention he tried to climb through into the front, to find out what was going on. We shooed him back.
    We bumped up the other side. I could almost feel the relief of the suspension as the track flattened out and we accelerated to a dazzling fifteen k’s an hour. We drove along the side of the gully, the nastiest bit of erosion left on the property.
    ‘You wanna stop here somewhere?’ Homer asked.
    Obediently, I stopped. Obedience is not my usual attitude with Homer, but sometimes you have to play along to work out what he’s getting at. We sat looking at the view. We could see the house from here, quiet and comfortable in the afternoon sun. A magpie made a clumsy landing on the front lawn and taxied to a halt near a hydrangea bush. Gavin stirred restlessly in the back seat and poked his head between us.
    ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Why are we here?’
    I turned a bit so he could see my mouth. ‘Ask Homer,’ I said.
    He asked Homer but he didn’t get much joy there. He got more restless and then gave up, opened the back door and got out, announcing, ‘I’m walking home.’
    ‘Watch out for snakes,’ I said.
    Off he went, sliding into the gully, eroding a few more clods along the way. His head disappeared. Homer and I sat there a bit longer. Eventually Gavin reappeared on the far side, climbing busily.
    ‘There’s a lot of different ways to get to your house,’ Homer said at last.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Like, if you go along here a k there’s another ford.’
    ‘That’s the truth.’
    ‘It’d be good to take the scenic route more often.’
    ‘Homer, what the hell is this about?’
    ‘If you took different routes all the time, it’d be harder for anyone to ambush you.’
    He said it so casually that it took me a while to realise how sinister his message was.
    ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
    When he didn’t answer I slowly understood that life was not the way I’d thought, that my life had a different shape to the one I’d imagined. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the first time I’d seen it so clearly. It’s hard for my brain at moments like that. The only way I can describe it is that I had a picture of my life as, say, a farmhouse with a veranda and a large chimney, and then suddenly it metamorphosed into, I don’t know, a stainless steel triangular prism sitting on top of a mountain.
    Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Then, so quietly that I surprised myself, I said, ‘Why?’
    He glanced at me, then looked away again, through the windscreen. ‘That raid we went on. To the –’ I’m not allowed to say the name of the place in case anyone finds this.
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘That envelope of papers he gave me.’
    ‘Yeah, I remember.’
    ‘I tipped them out on the floor to sort them out a bit, just, you know, to pack them better, neater.’
    ‘Cos you’re such a neatness freak.’
    ‘Well I wanted them in a bigger envelope where they wouldn’t be –’
    ‘Yeah yeah I know, I’m just kidding, go on.’
    ‘OK, well, first thing I see, well not the first thing, but in the middle of them is a map of your place.’
    ‘My place?’
    ‘A map of the district, with your place outlined, and the house marked, and a line drawn along the route we take over the border, more or less.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘They didn’t have the boundaries of the property even halfway right, but you could see they were picking out your place, the map was to show someone where you live.’
    My body prickled like a thousand funnel webs were walking all over me. I felt as though I were rising in my seat even though I was still sitting behind the wheel.
    Homer didn’t say anything else, just waited for me to do the figuring-out by myself. It didn’t take me long. My place was being singled out, I was being singled out. I felt a spasm in my stomach, like a violent sickness, but I didn’t do anything as dramatic as vomit,