WildGame

by Margo Lanagan

  When she’d finished, she took two more nuts off the bush and ate them, after which she could tell that her animal-stomach was full to bursting. As she licked up the last bits of nut she felt that prickly feeling on the back of her neck again. This animal must live in a burrow, she thought, to be so nervous out in the open.

  She froze at a new sound—a series of approaching thuds—and glanced around, noticing how much clearer the pattern of grasses had become since her meal. Through them, hopping gracefully and singlemindedly towards the nut-bush, came an animal slightly larger than herself, with back legs like a kangaroo’s and a long tail with a reddish tuft at the end held out for balance. Its face was thin, and Macka thought it cute, with its large brown eyes, furred ears and the delicate black arrowhead that crested its forehead and tapered down its nose.

  With it came a strong smell. ‘Phew, you stink! Like an old tom-cat!’ Macka exclaimed, putting a hand over her nose and mouth.

  The animal appeared not to hear her. He must be in the same feeding-frenzy as I was, she thought, watching him wrench off a nut and start gnawing at the contents. She sat very still, aware of a very strong, wordless desire to be invisible.

  The other animal disposed of four nuts, and started on a fifth. Halfway through, he looked up at her. Macka stopped breathing. His eyes were like holes in his head, completely free of intelligence. He’s just a dumb animal, she thought, and the thought stood in her two heads, in the one contemptuous, in the other blindly fearful. As Macka hunkered down in terror, the animal turned and took a flying leap towards her, then jolted to a frame-frozen stop.

  2 EXIT

  The sound dropped out and the smells evaporated. The sensations of being a small animal faded, and there was only Macka, seated in the pod in VideoZone. Outside, all the other games whizzed and crashed. She could hear kids yelling to each other and the clunk-tinnng! of Wally’s cash register. A huge semi-trailer rolled past along King Street, making the windows rattle and the floor shake.

  Macka tore her gaze from the screen and looked out over the little door. The fluorescent lighting seemed dim and bluish after the blaze of desert sun from the screen. Her skin had a taut, burnt feeling, and she was extremely thirsty.

  She glanced back at the screen, where the kangaroo-thing hung, its dark eyes intent on her. Below, on the control panel, two of the signs glowed more brightly than the others, the double-slash of the X, and the man-carrying-the-boat. Or rather, as Vinnie had guessed and as it now became clear, the sign that showed one kangaroo on top of another.

  Macka sat on her hands, glancing from the sign to the animal on the screen and back again. Does that mean what I think it means? she thought. A hot wave of embarrassed horror began in the pit of her stomach and washed outwards, making her scalp creep and her toes curl. ‘Shee-it!’ she whispered. Maybe the machine wasn’t broken after all. Maybe Wally had played it and decided that it was … improper for the school-age kids who were VideoZone’s main customers.

  ‘Well, if I’m right,’ she muttered, ‘I’ll definitely pass on the double-kangaroos, thanks. Wonder what the cross means? Does it just cancel out the other button, or what?’

  Already Macka’s surroundings seemed so normal that she could hardly remember how convincing the sensory impressions of that other desert world had been. But the second she pushed the X button they were back again, and all the stronger—the small, rapid thudding of a heartbeat, the rank smell of the leaping animal, the pin-sharpness of the visuals. She felt her mouth open in a snarl, felt her long hindfeet spring her off the ground and lash out to slash the male’s face.

  He dropped to the ground to one side, her claw-mark below one eye beading with blood. Macka could smell it; it went straight to her brain in an exhilarating whiff. She felt herself to be full of fight, her body all springy muscle. ‘Wow, good on you!’ she cheered her animal self on.

  When the male leapt again, she was ready for him, pressing the X button and catching his shoulder with her claws. He struck at her as he fell, and she felt him unzip a deep wound along her throat. She fell on top of him, and they rolled, each with the other’s shoulder clamped in its jaws.

  Macka saw her own blood pulsing out over the male’s whiskery fawn coat. At the same time as she was admiring the effect—for the computer broke the flow up into thousands of minuscule squares, some glittering, some darkening as they soaked into the pixelated fur—she was realising the danger she was in. Animals as small as I am, she thought, don’t have all that much blood to spare.

  She bit, and scratched with fore-and hindclaws, and kicked at him with all the strength of her strong hind-limbs. Each of her attacks worked in a limited way. Scratch after superficial scratch opened up on him, and once or twice she managed to kick herself clear of him. But he had done her real damage with that first slash of his, and no matter how hard or how rapidly she pushed the X button, she found she couldn’t injure him in a similarly sensitive spot.

  The entire screen was beginning to darken, little by little, and the rapid heart-thumping seemed slightly less emphatic, to Macka’s ears. The other animal’s smell had a strange effect on her brain, slowing her reactions and disturbing her vision, and the knowledge of the male’s superior strength made hope seep out of her along with the blood.

  Flustered, exhausted, Macka scanned the buttons as she continued to defend herself by X-ing. Fighting wasn’t working, but she’d rather her animal died than be forced to mate against her will. The grass button was obviously going to be no use, and as for running—well, she’d seen how quickly her enemy could move about. Her clumsy hopping wouldn’t put much distance between them.

  Still, it was worth a try. She hit the running-animal button and the X simultaneously, and her animal gave a flurry of kicks and darted away across the sand. Macka hit the run button repeatedly at high speed, as if she were effecting a mass 360-degree slaughter in Laser Warriors, blasting all enemies off the Home Planet. She ignored the pricking of the tussocks, concentrating on an all-out, as-the-crow-flies escape effort.

  The screen began to darken visibly, and as Macka closed her eyes and blindly ran, she felt the heat and the smell of the pursuing animal roll up behind her in a wave, right on her tail. Her eyes snapped open. The screen was a fuzzy, jerking mass of muddy green and sour red. Her hand came down on the button on the far right—the one with no sign. The screen went black, the sounds and the smells disappeared, and a deep, mechanical groan resounded inside the pod.

  ‘Help! What have I done now?’ squeaked Macka. ‘I guess I’ve lost. Though he didn’t catch me, in the end. Or did he? Was I just not quite in time?’

  She stared into the depths of the dark screen. Right at the centre, a few pixels lit up and began to pulse. A thudding sound accompanied the pulsing, and a smell even more disgusting than that of the animal that had chased her—a raw smell, like ammonia, that seemed to peel off the inside of her head as she breathed it in. Nearly choking, she clutched her nose and mouth, and had to blink the water out of her eyes to watch the bright patch spreading on the screen.

  It grew larger as the thudding grew louder and the smell stronger, and finally was recognisable as a face, scowling in concentration, framed in brown, shoulder-length hair and with a hand held over the mouth. A blue mark extended from knuckle to wrist.

  ‘Hey, that’s Lil Bartolli’s phone number! That’s me!’ Macka laughed in disbelief and pointed to her image, which laughed and pointed back at her as it continued to grow. She pulled a few faces at it, which it obediently mimicked, and peered around in the darkness for the camera that was recording her.

  ‘Poo, what a foul smell!’ she cried, and the face on the screen glared at her distastefully. It was growing too big now, expanding with each thud that shook the pod. It was slightly larger than life, and wherever the camera was, it was zooming in on Macka’s mouth. In gruesome detail her lips leered up at her. She parted her lips and her wet teeth gleamed out at her, and her tongue reared up monstrously. She laughed, and the laugh was r
eturned to her, amplified and distorted. ‘Yuk!’ she yelped, covering her ears.

  Something soft, smelly and obviously in flight leapt out of the screen and hit Macka in the chest. She was too surprised and winded to yell out as it fell heavily into her lap and tried to keep on running, scrabbling in the folds of her school tunic.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the Commando Raid crowd begin to break up, and some of the guys turned and started to come towards the pod. She scooped the whatever-it-was under her jumper, where it went limp and quiet, as one of the older boys drew near.

  ‘G’day, Macka. What’s this one do?’ he said, peering in the window. Then he stepped back onto the toes of the guy behind him. ‘Shit, what’s that smell!’

  Macka shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There must be something burning out inside it.’ Come to think of it, there was a sort of lightning-struck edge to the stink. ‘Wally says it won’t work, and I certainly can’t get any sense out of it.’

  ‘Give us a go,’ said the boy, taking hold of the door catch and wiggling it this way and that. ‘How d’ya work this?’

  ‘Just touch it, lightly,’ said Macka, both arms clasped under the weight in her jumper.

  He ran his hands over the catch and poked it and prodded it, but nothing moved. Finally Macka, annoyed and just a bit frightened by the machine’s whims, adjusted her bundle and unsnapped the catch herself.

  ‘How’d you do that?’

  Macka clambered awkwardly out the door, all hunched over to protect or disguise the lump in her jumper.

  ‘You pregnant, Macka?’ one of the other boys jeered, and all four of them snickered.

  ‘No, I’m taking a friend’s pet back to her tonight, and the cage’s broken,’ said Macka, feeling heat flow up across her face.

  ‘So that’s what smells so terrible!’ One of them leant over and sniffed the front of her jumper, then pretended to choke. ‘Putrid! What is it?’

  Good question, thought Macka, her brain reeling. ‘It’s a … a kind of jerboa-thing. A big jerboa.’

  ‘Gissa look. Come on!’ A boy patted the lump. ‘We won’t hurt it.’

  ‘No, it gets frightened easily. It’ll scratch me to bits if I bring it out into the light.’ The animal convulsed under the jumper. ‘See? It’s petrified. I’d better take it home—I’ve hung around here long enough as it is. It’s probably starving.’

  ‘Come on—let it out for a run around.’

  ‘Don’t be cruel—give it some fresh air.’

  ‘Does it eat Cheezels?’

  The four of them crowded around her.

  ‘No way,’ she said firmly. She hung on tightly to the animal and somehow managed to pick up her schoolbag and sling it over her shoulder. ‘It’s bad enough I’ve broken the cage without losing the animal as well. Have a bash at this game, will you? See if you lot can make any sense of it, ‘cause I’m stuffed if I can.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said the biggest boy, kicking pointedly at the unplugged cord on the carpet. ‘Might have been an idea to turn it on, hey Macka?’

  ‘Geez, I’m not that dumb. One of you must have kicked the plug out accidentally just now, ‘cause I was getting pictures, and sounds, and …’ And smells? No one would believe that. ‘And scores, and everything. Plug it in and have a go.’

  They looked at her sceptically, but when the biggest guy turned back to the machine they all lost interest in teasing her, and while they were taking it in turns to try to work the catch she scooted out the door.

  It was incredibly noisy outside, with the peak-hour traffic roaring past out of town, its flow punctuated by giant semi-trailers. A passing bus stirred a blast of grit into Macka’s face, and she screwed up her eyes and swore. The animal had gone completely still, presumably with terror. ‘I guess you don’t get noise like this where you live,’ she muttered to it.

  It was starting to get dark. She hurried up the street, darted across King Street at the lights, and ducked up the lane to the park which rose, green and peaceful, to the church and the cemetery behind their walls of warm, graffiti-patched sandstone.

  Skirting them, she passed the new swings, a large rectangle filled with bark chips and those coloured rockers and slides made for really little kids. She rushed past, but then stopped abruptly, her heart going a mile a minute. The city was spread out below her with all its lights beginning to shine; down there at the edge of the park she could see her own house, the front windows full of yellow light.

  She walked slowly back to the swings. The animal was quite heavy for its size, and her arms were aching from carrying it even that little distance. She sat down on the end of the slippery-dip and pulled out the neck of her jumper to look inside.

  ‘Oh great, you glow in the dark. It’s going to be real easy trying to keep you out of sight,’ she said in dismay.

  After a moment the animal sat up and stuck its narrow head out the neck of the jumper. Macka pulled her head back; she hadn’t forgotten how well it could scratch. But it seemed only interested in having a look around. Its nostrils widened to catch a whiff of the breeze, and its fine reddish-grey ears twitched about actively.

  In the gathering darkness it looked more and more unearthly. ‘Anyone can see you come out of a computer,’ said Macka, her face reflecting the rusty glow of its fur. If she focused hard on the very edge of the animal’s nose she could see the way it was stepped; a zig-zag line that gave the impression of being straight only when not looked at directly. And her eyes grew tired trying to distinguish separate hairs on its head; it was undeniably furry to look at, but closer inspection showed an ambiguous pattern of squares that swam about erratically when it moved.

  Macka carefully touched the top of the animal’s head, between its ears at the widest part of the dark arrowhead mark. A tingle ran up her fingers—she couldn’t tell whether her own nervousness and astonishment had caused it, or some kind of electronic energy from the animal. Whatever it was, the animal didn’t move, didn’t try to bite her. It wasn’t warm, either, however red and fuzzy it looked; it felt as if it were exactly the same temperature as her fingertips—a bit chilly, in fact.

  ‘Oh, crikey, where am I going to put you?’ Macka moaned softly. ‘And how am I going to feed you? What do you eat? We don’t have anything like those yummy nut-fruit things out here in the real world …’

  The animal sat in her lap, undisturbed by the sound of her voice, looking alertly at the city lights. Macka suddenly felt suffocated by the weight of responsibility that had landed on her. A lousy report card and a creature from another dimension, both in the one day! It was too much to handle.

  But she had to handle it; she couldn’t just leave the animal in the park. A dog would get it for sure, or the wild kids who rampaged around here at night, spraying graffiti and knocking over the tombstones in the churchyard. She had to keep it safe somehow—after all, she was the one who had got it into trouble in the first place.

  She hooked her jumper over the animal’s head, and it snuggled down against her. ‘Weird. Definitely, very weird,’ she said blackly, and stood up. A faint warm glow showed through her jumper now. She took an extremely indirect route home across the park to avoid a couple of people and their dogs.

  At the back gate she let herself in with great care, praying that her parents had some music on and wouldn’t hear the catch click. She needn’t have worried. As she sneaked the back door open, a burst of laughter came from the front room—her mother’s tinkling, her father’s a sort of thin braying, and the two Canadians’ big and burly-sounding. Then her younger brother Phil’s voice piped in, saying something at which the Canadians roared again.

  Oh good, a party. Just what I need, for once, thought Macka. She tiptoed through the kitchen into the hall, and was halfway up the stairs by the time her father threw open the door of the front room, yelling some supposedly amusing remark over his shoulder.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Lou,’ he said when he saw her. ‘Didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘I cam
e in the back,’ Macka said, keeping her back to him. She shifted the animal to one arm and casually put her other hand on the stair rail.

  ‘Come and join the happy throng, why don’t you?’ said her father. He kept moving, headed for the kitchen for fresh supplies of beer, no doubt.

  ‘Yeah, I might, in a minute.’ She thumped up the stairs and along the narrow passage to her room where she shut the door and leant against it with a dramatic ‘Phew!’ She locked it by wedging a sandshoe under it, closed the window tightly, turned on the light and pulled the curtains shut. Then she dragged a blanket up over her unmade bed and gently deposited the animal at the foot.

  ‘Hullo, you,’ she said nervously.

  The animal sat up in a very kangaroo-like posture, resting on its haunches with its forepaws together at its chest. It sniffed the air, turning its head to left and right, but didn’t seem in the least afraid.

  ‘This is my burrow,’ said Macka, glancing around and wondering how her room looked to a computer-generated marsupial. Her father always said it looked as if a cyclone had hit it, but Macka liked the chaos, liked having a place where she was free to make a mess, and to leave it once it was made. Right now the floor was covered with schoolbooks and folders and loose pages of notes from when she’d been cramming for exams last week. Fat lot of good it did me, she thought bitterly, remembering the report card.

  The animal watched as she scooped up the notes and piled them into a top-heavy mess in the waste-paper basket. Then she stacked up all the books under her desk, out of sight. She brushed her hands together in a business-like way. ‘Well, that’s another term totally wasted.’

  She knelt by the bed and eyed the animal. It regarded her brightly. It had almost invisible whiskers, hardly more than slight quivers in the air around its nose.

  ‘I don’t suppose you talk?’ Macka asked hopefully. ‘That’d be neat.’

  Another burst of laughter floated up the stairs and along the passage. The animal lay down, looking over its haunch at her. She started as it raised a long hindfoot and scratched behind one ear.