WildGame

by Margo Lanagan

  Macka opened the door just wide enough for him to sidle in, and closed it quickly behind him. The room was dark except for some funny-looking red night-light she’d set up in the middle of the rug beside her bed.

  ‘There it is,’ she said.

  Vinnie snorted—she must take him for a real dope if she thought he’d be tricked by that! He stepped forward to pick up the light, and it gathered itself together and bounced away, then jumped up onto Macka’s bed and faced him, watching him, motionless.

  Vinnie stood stock-still, in shock. The thing had moved too smoothly, too naturally, to be some kind of mechanical creature. But what animal in real life shone in the dark like that?

  He rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s kind of … hard to look at.’

  ‘I know, like watching a TV too close up. Look at the edge of it,’ said Macka.

  Vinnie tried, but he couldn’t quite work out exactly where the animal’s edges were. ‘It kind of shakes, doesn’t it? It looks as if it’s standing still, but it shivers.’ As his eyes got used to the light it emitted, he could just make out the colour and shape of the thing inside what had seemed to be a fuzzy bundle. ‘Hey, it’s kind of cute-looking, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess so. If it weren’t so weird you could say it was cute,’ said Macka.

  ‘Can you touch it?’

  ‘Sure. Like I said, I carried it all the way home. It feels nice. Soft, but kind of electric, too, you know? Here, I’ll pick it up for you.’

  Vinnie could tell from the confident way she moved that she was already used to handling it. He looked at her face with wonder as he put out his hand to touch the animal’s flank. It felt so solid, underneath the thick fur, that he gasped, ‘It’s real!’, at the same time as he felt the energy from it crackle up his arm. ‘Oh, I felt something!’

  ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ grinned Macka. ‘Makes you feel really alert, ready for anything.’

  The animal lifted its head and looked up at Vinnie. Something about its eyes made Vinnie feel uncomfortable about looking back.

  ‘Can I hold it for a second?’

  ‘Yeah, that should be okay.’ Carefully Macka transferred the animal to his arms. It went quite passively, and made itself comfortable against Vinnie’s chest. He stared deep into its fur, trying to focus. ‘It even smells a bit like electricity,’ he muttered. He glanced up at Macka. ‘At least, like what I imagine electricity would smell like. Know what I mean?’

  Macka nodded.

  Vinnie liked the feel of the animal’s weight in his arms, and the fact that it trusted him to hold it. He went to the bed and sat down, lowering it onto his lap and freeing one of his hands to stroke it. At every stroke, that ripple of awareness went up his arm, until he felt he might start to glow himself.

  ‘But what is it?’ he asked Macka.

  She shook her head and sighed. ‘Dunno. All I know is, it’s a female and it lives in the desert, probably in a burrow.’

  ‘How do you know it’s a female?’

  Macka closed her eyes. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that,’ she said with a self-conscious grin. ‘I know because … I saw a male and it tried to jump on top of me—I mean her.’

  ‘No kidding! That’s some game,’ murmured Vinnie, glad that his own embarrassment was disguised by the red light from the animal’s fur. ‘So what does it, she, eat?’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t seem interested in fruit or bread, or in drinking tap-water,’ said Macka, waving a hand at a newspaper spread out under her desk, where a water-bowl, half an apple and a curled-up sandwich were laid out neatly. ‘I tried walnuts, ‘cause I saw her eating these nut-type things in the game, but she didn’t want any of those, either. I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be hanging out for food or anything. I mean, she seems quite comfortable.’

  ‘Yeah, like she knows it’s safe here.’ Vinnie kept stroking, down the animal’s thin neck and across the satisfying hummock of its back. The noise from the front room seemed miles away, it was so totally irrelevant to what was happening in Macka’s room. ‘I don’t really believe this,’ he grinned.

  A laugh burst through Macka’s words. ‘Me neither.’

  4 MUG SHOTS

  The first day of school holidays, especially if it’s a Saturday, always starts off extremely quietly. When Macka woke up, the silence lay across her like an extra blanket. The sound of someone’s dog barking excitedly on the far side of the park only seemed to make the silence thicker and more complete.

  Then things began to present themselves to her brain, like flashbacks to bits of dreams. She remembered the background of noise from the front room to which she’d fallen asleep last night. And Vinnie’s visit, and why he’d come. She shifted uneasily, and felt a weight on her feet like a curled-up cat.

  ‘So you’re still here,’ she said to the ceiling.

  She’d half hoped the animal might disappear overnight. But then she would have worried about how it had escaped, whether it was okay, whether it would turn up at some inconvenient time and place, demanding to be explained.

  She propped herself on her elbows and looked down at it. In the dim light from the curtained windows it looked solid enough, its fur standing out around it in a back-lit shimmer. Its head was up and it looked at her for a second, then raised a hindpaw and began fiddling with one ear. When it scratched itself she felt the vibration through the bedclothes.

  ‘I hope you haven’t got fleas,’ Macka muttered, swinging her feet to the floor. She shivered, and quickly changed out of her pyjamas and into jeans, a yellow sloppy joe and a pair of thick red hiking socks. Then she sat at the foot of the bed for a long while, looking at the animal and stroking it. It was addictive, that stroking, with its little warm rushes up her arm, and the rhythm of it seemed to set her mind going somehow.

  Macka was not a morning person—she normally stayed woolly-headed and puffy-eyed until at least ten o’clock—but as she sat there, the only person awake in the whole house, she felt that if she were to wake up any further she’d turn inside out with the intensity of it. For the first time in her life she could understand why people got up before sunrise for a run. If you were fit—and Macka wasn’t, particularly—you must feel this itch to burn off energy.

  ‘I mean, look at me,’ she said, watching her red-socked toe tapping the floorboards impatiently. The only things that were keeping her sitting there were the smoothness of the animal’s red-brown fur and the gleam in its dark eye that seemed, if not actually friendly, at least contented and comfortable. That, and the disgusting mess downstairs from the night before. The front room she could ignore, but if she wanted any breakfast she’d have to face the kitchen at least.

  She stood up abruptly and crossed to her desk, pulled open the cupboard and rummaged around among the old exercise books and dead pencil-cases and screwed-up papers.

  ‘There you are.’ She hauled out the Polaroid camera she’d got last Christmas. There were two shots left. She flung back the curtains, and immediately the room looked a hundred times bigger, with the green sprawl of the park outside. The light that flooded in had a greenish tinge, which made the animal seem an even richer red against the cream quilt.

  Macka unfolded the camera and peered through the viewfinder, moving close until the animal filled the frame. Clack, went the shutter, and then the camera wheezingly cranked out the picture.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe this is just a waste of film. Maybe you won’t show up, like a vampire doesn’t show up in a mirror.’

  While she waited for the picture to develop, she tidied her bed, and absently started going through the desk cupboard again, piling the rubbish up around the overflowing waste-paper basket.

  The photo was a good one; the animal looked a little bit more focused than in real life. Macka felt as if she were getting her first proper look at it; pinned down on paper it no longer played tricks with her eyes.

  ‘Look, that’s you,’ she said in a pleased voice, holding the picture a couple of centimetres from the animal’s
nose. It leaned forward to give the photograph a suspicious sniff or two, before settling back on the quilt.

  Macka took a second photo, of its head and shoulders. ‘There,’ she said, admiring it. ‘Now if I lose you I’ll have something to show the searchers.’ She laid the photographs on her desk and cleared a space around them, and soon found herself sorting through all the junk, tossing lolly-wrappers and empty biros towards the basket.

  ‘What am I doing?’ she said, pausing with an old study diary in one hand and a handful of newspaper clippings that had never made it into her Social Consciousness scrapbook in the other. ‘There’s enough tidying-up waiting downstairs, for heaven’s sake. Not to mention breakfast. And I’m starving,’ she added, glaring at the animal as if it were personally responsible.

  She managed to balance most of the rubbish on top of the basket, and to make it downstairs without dropping more than a stray scrap of paper here and there. She scooped them up on her way back with the empty basket.

  ‘Now you stay put,’ she told the animal, a bit unnecessarily. ‘There’ll be a bit of banging around going on downstairs, but don’t take any notice of it. Nothing’s going to hurt you.’

  She closed the door carefully and thumped downstairs again. In the kitchen she switched herself into whirlwind mode, gathering, scraping and stacking dishes and setting them up in ranks by the sink in cleanest-to-dirtiest order. She filled the sink and dumped in the scummy glasses to soak. She squirted cream cleanser all over the kitchen table and scrubbed it to within a millimetre of its life. Gummed-on patches of food that had been accumulating all week resisted and then gave in. She swept the grey-green lino floor, then attacked the washing-up as if she were going for a speed and noise record. She was hacking away at some blackened spaghetti at the bottom of a battered saucepan when Phil came in from his run.

  He took one of her squeaky-clean glasses and made up some Staminade, then leant his sweaty little frame against the fridge while he drank it, watching her.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said when he’d drained the glass.

  Macka stopped scrubbing for a second. ‘Houseful of pigs,’ she muttered, with a vague wave at the production-line of dishes, gleaming wet on her left and greasy and food-encrusted on her right.

  ‘You can talk,’ said Phil, mildly jeering. ‘Your room’s not exactly the neatest in the universe.’

  ‘Yeah, but only I have to look at my room. I don’t make a mess where other people have to fall over it all the time, like Mum and Dad do. And all their mates, their stinking, smoking, drinking—’ She broke off at the sound of the front room door opening, and went back to chipping at the saucepan.

  ‘Morning, Clint,’ chirped Phil, as a tottering ghost of a man with screwed-up eyes passed the kitchen door on the way to the bathroom.

  ‘Orrgh, don’t scream at me, kid,’ cringed Clinton. ‘I’ve had a hard night.’

  Phil crossed the kitchen and put his glass at the end of the production-line. ‘Want a hand drying?’

  Macka looked up at him, bug-eyed with surprise. ‘Sure! You feeling okay?’

  ‘Do I look sick?’ Phil stretched himself to his full height, which was about an inch shorter than Macka’s, and flexed his biceps smugly, glowing with good health.

  Macka snorted. ‘Pretty sweaty, but not sick, no.’

  Once Phil had hunted out a clean dishtowel and started doing Poison impressions, yelling made-up lyrics into the glasses as he dried them and periodically crashing to his knees on the floor, it was pretty hard for Macka to stay mad; she just had to laugh.

  ‘Mum and Dad are trying to sleep, you idiot!’

  ‘They won’t hear me. They were up until about four o’clock or something; they’ll be dead until lunchtime.’

  ‘Slobs,’ said Macka in disgust.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Phil gave a little, ashamed laugh. ‘Hopeless, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re useless—it makes me so mad! How long have they been on the dole?’

  ‘Since Dad left Grandpa and Grandma’s farm, so … seven years.’

  ‘Geez!’

  The two of them shook their heads in amazement, and continued with the dishes in a disapproving silence.

  Then Phil said, ‘I sort of wish they’d get up and do something, but then I think “What would they do?” I mean, they’ve got no sort of skills. The only work Dad ever did was picking fruit and digging ditches, and Mum was just a student. She can’t type or do anything useful! She can’t even cook, for god’s sake!’ he added, peering into the depths of the spaghetti saucepan.

  Macka grinned. ‘Yeah, don’t you sometimes wish—’

  Phil broke in. ‘I wish Mum was like Grandma—’

  ‘Yeah!’ laughed Macka.

  ‘—and she cooked those roast dinners with the spuds without lumps and the baked pumpkin and afterwards the caramel pudding with ice-cream, yeah!’ Phil collapsed across the table with his arms outstretched.

  ‘—and always dressed really neatly, in proper clothes, and everything so clean!’ said Macka, gazing out the window at the broken paling fence that blocked the view of the park. ‘Like, you go to her cupboards and you know where everything is, and there are no cockroaches or old jars of mould and no horrible smell of damp and dirt—’ Macka had to stop; she could feel tears preparing to jump into her eyes.

  ‘And Grandpa goes out every day and he’s always doing something, you know? He’s always got just a bit too much to do and he’s always really rapt when you go out and help him, do a bit of wood-chopping or the mowing or something. He makes you feel like you’re really useful.’

  ‘I know. Not like here.’

  ‘You’re being useful,’ Phil said off-handedly. ‘I’m being useful.’

  ‘Yeah, but no one’ll notice it,’ said Macka, careful to avoid recognising the compliment.

  There was a brisk knock at the front door. Phil and Macka looked at each other. Phil pulled a mystified face and went out.

  Macka remembered the animal with a start, almost as if it had beamed a message directly into her brain. What was she going to do with it? Vinnie’d really worried her last night, with his talk of how it didn’t belong here, how she should put it back into the game.

  ‘But what if it doesn’t go back?’ she’d said.

  ‘Worry about that when it happens,’ he’d answered in the sensible voice that irritated her so much. ‘You have to at least try. I reckon it’s cruel to keep it out here. It won’t eat anything—it’ll probably just starve to death. Gruesome.’

  Yeah, he was right, Macka admitted to herself. She’d have to take it back to VideoZone, in her schoolbag or something.

  ‘Morning, Lou. How’re things?’

  Macka looked nervously over her shoulder, then relaxed and grinned. ‘Hey, what are you doing here, Ol?’

  Her uncle grinned back. He had Phil in a gentle headlock and was propelling him into the kitchen. ‘Just checking on you. I guess there’s no chance of getting a word with your mum?’

  ‘She’s asleep,’ squeaked Phil, giving up the struggle and dangling hopelessly from Ol’s elbow.

  Their uncle Oliver was a bit taller than Macka, chunky and fit-looking. He wore khaki shorts and a frayed white shirt rolled up to the elbows, and hefty walking boots. Macka always ribbed him about his nice legs—they were brown and strong, and had golden hair springing up all over them. He looked as if he were just about to stride off into the bush; even his eyes were that gumleaf-grey-green colour.

  ‘I thought it might be a mistake, calling on the Rudges before noon on a Saturday. Still—’ he released Phil and grabbed the dishtowel ‘—you guys look pretty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’

  Again the image of the animal appeared in Macka’s mind’s eye for a second. She gave Ol a half-grin and started scrabbling around under the suds for the knives and forks.

  ‘How’re you going? I won’t ask how’s school.’

  ‘School’s great,’ said Phil, hoiking himself up onto the kitchen table and swinging
his legs.

  ‘Bull it is,’ said Macka. ‘Anyway, we’ve just broken up, so let’s not talk about it,’ she added quickly.

  ‘What, more holidays? Every time I see you kids you’re just starting or finishing holidays. You’ve got it good, haven’t you? Best leave provisions in the workforce!’ He dried an ice-cream container and put it upside down on Phil’s head.

  ‘Ol!’ Macka exclaimed. ‘Now I’ll have to wash it again! He’s been running—there’s all sweat and gunge in his hair—’

  ‘Is not,’ Phil said mildly, tossing the container back into the sink. A splosh of suds hit Macka’s front. Ol picked up an egg-whisk and started drying every wire so slowly and carefully that Macka could tell his mind had drifted off the job.

  ‘What do you want Mum for?’ she said, to snap him out of it.

  He gave her a thoughtful grey-green look. ‘I want to offer her a job.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Phil. His legs stopped swinging.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Macka said. ‘She couldn’t work to save her life. We were just talking about how hopeless she is, her and Dad.’

  ‘What sort of job?’ said Phil.

  ‘Very boring, really. Clerical stuff in our office. Putting things in envelopes, a bit of typing, some phone-answering. Oh, and sorting a pile of papers into some kind of filing system. Nothing special, but it needs doing, and we might even pay her. If she’s lucky,’ he added, glancing sidelong at Macka with a little grin.

  ‘Mm, sounds like a bit of a drag,’ said Phil.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Macka, surprising herself. ‘Better than slobbing around here all day. How long’s it for?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. A month at least, and probably more. With the new magazine we’re putting out, and the Reptile Register and the Snakes Alive programme, things are getting a bit out of hand. The more of that type of work Trish can take off my shoulders, the more research and writing I can do—which is what I really want. I get fed up with the paperwork. I wasn’t meant to sit behind a desk all day.’

  ‘Know what you mean,’ said Macka sourly.