Jungle Jag

Start with the boatyard gate

Elisa Duque's print room in Saltbridge is just far enough from the yard crane that a delivery truck can close the view of the water. One day a deckhand put his finger on the printed yard map and asked why he couldn't get to the office from where it said he was standing. There was a fifth fence since the map had been drawn. The harbour's officials had stopped paying for updates because the same offices had occupied the same spaces for years. Elisa walked forty minutes in the rain before she worked out a way for the deckhand to reach the one that closed first.

Her flatmate Mara Lin has used a chart Elisa redrew to work out whether it was possible to reach a lunch room without handing a stranger her boatyard badge. She liked the little dashed line that crossed one warehouse from door to door. The line on Elisa's map says nothing about the smell of stockfish. A person following it could write that in from memory.

Turn behind the rack

Elisa's Jaguar XJC V12 Coupe went to the paddock on the back of a borrowed trailer. While it waited for practice she went looking for a cooler she thought she'd left by the drawbar. One rack stood far enough out from the wall to let her pass, and on the other side she put a boot down beside a little orange pouch. There was a man standing at a partly open cage and trying to lift a stack of sticky trays an inch at a time. He saw the handle of her bag and made room. She helped free one tray and was allowed to keep going when they both discovered they were looking for somebody else's things.

The little pouch turned out to be full of loose fittings. She brought it to the parts table near Orla's chair and got the exact count before anybody opened it because Orla could hear the tall ones drop inside. Elisa found her lunch the next morning on her own doorstep. Mara had set the bag out to save her going back into the flat with wet shoes and both of them had passed it.

Look up at the far post

The Jaguar is a reason to let a route run uninterrupted between two points she chooses in advance. Elisa gets itchy about committing to a line with only one good exit. She tries to read the far post before she enters a turn, then decide when to open the steering before she reaches it. A practice observer once told her there was room to go narrower. She said there was room to stay wide. It cost her two sessions to accept she'd answered a different question in order to keep her favorite route.

Priya Soke was gentler about the walking path Elisa proposed at DGM. Priya pushed a laden cart along it with her and let Elisa decide how much to take out of the cart before trying to get it round the end of the rack.

Leave a space on paper

Elisa wants to be able to run the course with the easier exit and then take the other one well enough to admit it might belong on her map. She has both pencilled in. She also delivered a draft of the footpath with a blank stretch where someone can stand beside a parked car and wait. Mara is coming on Saturday and will ask what the blank stretch is for. Elisa will probably have time to retrieve both their lunches before she answers.