A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String

by Joanne Harris

  Sam grins. ‘You don’t need to explain. I know exactly what you mean.’

  ‘Really? I had no idea. What do you write?’

  ‘Oh, no, not me. I’m more of a theatre kind of guy.’

  I try to picture Sam on stage, but can’t.

  ‘That’s really more Fred’s cup of tea,’ he says with a glance at Brenda. ‘Writing, poetry, plays and that.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ I tell him. ‘It’s good to have a hobby. And what about you, Brenda?’

  ‘I used to be a dancer.’

  ‘Oh.’ I keep my smile polite. But I can more easily picture fat, barely literate Fred as a writer, or Sam as a thespian, than Brenda Baps as a dancer.

  ‘You shouldn’t judge on appearances,’ she says, as if she has read my mind. ‘Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes, as I’m sure you must already know.’

  And then she goes back to the counter, where, under the guise of rearranging the cakes, she lapses into silence.

  I finish my tea rather slowly. The floppy-haired poet has already gone. Brenda collects the crockery, tidies up the counter, then finally goes to the side door and flips the OPEN sign to CLOSED.

  ‘Might as well shut early today,’ she says. ‘There’s nobody going to come.’

  ‘You’re really going, then?’

  Brenda nods. ‘I’m sorry, love. It can’t be helped.’ Then, an idea seems to strike her. ‘I suppose you could run it yourself, though. I mean, if we could manage the place, how hard can it be for someone like you? All you need to be able to do is fry bacon and brew tea—’

  Somehow I manage not to smile. ‘I don’t really—’

  ‘And you could keep the cat,’ says Sam, his expression brightening.

  I sigh. ‘Much as I like cats, I don’t think that solves my problem.’

  ‘It might. You never know,’ says Sam.

  Which is why, ten minutes later, for reasons that I suspect will prove impossible to explain to my wife, I come home early, without having written a single word, but carrying a tabby cat, which jumps out of my arms when I arrive and heads straight for the fridge door.

  Jennifer is out of the house. I pour a saucer of milk for the cat and head for my study, where I fully expect to sit in barren silence for the next three hours.

  Instead, I find myself writing. The Muse, whoever she is, has clocked in. By four o’clock I have six thousand words and the final piece of my plot-puzzle. No bacon roll, no tea, no toast, but even so it keeps coming. Inspiration, when it strikes, strikes like an express train.

  The cat sits purring under my chair. I almost forget it’s there at all. Only at five o’clock, when my fingers are sore from typing, does it leave its place under the chair and start demanding dinner.

  I give the cat a slice of ham. It purrs appreciation. It is wearing a collar, I see, with its name stencilled on to a metal tag. CALLIOPE, it says. Rather an odd name for a cat; not what I would have expected from simple people like Brenda and Fred. The name is rather familiar – I look it up on the internet.

  As I thought, it’s a classical name; the name of one of the Muses. The page lists all nine Muses, their names, their symbols and attributes. Three of them strike me especially, perhaps because I’ve seen them every day above the door of the Station Café on Platform 5: the tragic mask of Melpomene, the comic mask of Thalia, and the lyre, the symbol of Terpsichore, Muse of the dance.

  Once more, I think of the Platform 5 three. Fat Fred with his air of tragedy; Sam with his cheery, comic face; Brenda, whose claim to have once been a dancer still fills me with incredulity. Of course, it’s a ludicrous parallel. The Muse is just an archetype; a metaphor that represents Mankind’s eternal striving. To imagine that they might be real, able to take on the Aspects of human beings and intervene in human affairs – well, that’s just silly. Isn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that Jennifer might read in a book of short stories written by the kind of frivolous woman writer who happens to like that sort of thing. But I know better. I do not stoop to fanciful plot premises. I study human nature; my inspiration comes from within; from blood and sweat and hard work. This clarity is what sets me apart. I am completely self-aware.

  As for the cat – frivolously named after the Muse of poetry – I don’t suppose it would hurt anyone if I kept it here for a week or two. Not that I would ever believe that it’s anything more than just a cat – but artists are bizarre, you know; creative; superstitious. Some light scented candles. Some pray to their ancestors. Some keep an object on their desk for luck and inspiration.

  As for the Café on Platform 5 – so far, it’s business as usual, though now it is run by volunteers – most of them out-of-work actors, would-be poets and other such folk with time on their hands. I still like to work here, too; I feel it keeps me grounded, somehow, more in touch with my public. I take the cat – it gets restless at home. Besides, the customers miss it.

  And so the Café continues to thrive; and its customers – poets, would-be playwrights, even writers like myself, who appreciate the irony of working in simple surroundings – continue to stay in touch with their Muse over buttered toast and cups of tea and greasy bacon sandwiches.

  The Game

  This story came to me late one night, from that haunted warehouse of stories, the internet. I hope it’s just a story. But part of me thinks perhaps it’s true.

  THERE IS NO fucking Level X. I know because I’ve played it. I’ve been right up to Level 1000, and I swear there’s nothing but the Game in there, no secret message, no special download, no naked chicks or anything, nothing but another screen of numbers and shapes and jumbled crapola that looks like one of those old arcade games, like Space Invaders or Breakout, that style freaks buy for their converted lofts and call it Eighties Retro.

  Of course you don’t talk about the Game. Only losers and quitters do that. Oh, and Charlie. More of him soon. Losers talk about the Game, but they know fuck all about anything. Quitters try to pretend they got there, but you can always tell, somehow. OC – he’s my best friend – says he’s been past 10,000, but that’s just OC mouthing off. No one spends that much time online.

  Still, it was OC who got me playing the Game in the first place. OCD, we call him, because he can never fucking keep still. If it’s not his foot going up and down, then it’s his knee, or his fingers. Tap-tap-tap, like a mouse in a wheel. Still, he’s a good Gamer, faster than anyone else I’ve seen. And he’s the one who told me, way back when it all began, about this Game on the internet, this Game that everyone’s playing.

  It doesn’t look like much at first, he tells me, but it’s addictive. It gets to you.

  It gets to you. Well, duh. No shit. There are brown circles round his eyes, like he hasn’t slept for about a year. I haven’t seen him at school for days. I mean, that’s fucking commitment, right? Maybe he wasn’t mouthing off, after all.

  You got to be serious, he says, otherwise there’s no fucking point. Don’t start if you’re not serious.

  I told him I was.

  OK, man. I’m just saying. Because there’s no website for the Game, there’s only these special URLs. You have to know where to find them.

  Quit fucking around, I tell him. You want me to play or don’t you?

  Course I do, he tells me. I’m fucking showing you, aren’t I? So you start at Level 1, man, and if you get through, and if you don’t quit, then you get the codes for Level 2. And 3, and 4, and so on—

  And what if you don’t get through? I said.

  You’ll know. And he gives me this grin, like someone chewing on a foil wrapper, and his eyes are half closed, but in them I can see all these little dancing lights, reflected from the computer screen. But it only shows you the code once. And it’s only good for twenty-four hours. After that the link expires. And it’s no good trying again from scratch, because the Game won’t let you. You gotta show commitment if you want to get there.

  So – get where, exactly?

  Well, that’s the interesting part,
he says. No one really knows that. No one knows how many levels there are, or if it just goes on for ever. No one knows who wrote the software. Some people reckon it’s a joke. Losers or quitters, all of them. But the real players are all still here. Waiting for the big one.

  The big one, I says.

  Level X. And his voice goes down to a whisper. You’ll know if you get there. Just not when. For some it’s, like, Level 101, and for some it’s Level 1000. I heard some guy got it at Level 12, just a newbie, and suddenly, wham! Level X. Just like that. Lucky bastard. That’s what it’s like. You never know. But that’s the Game. That’s why we play.

  It sounded kind of random to me. But I thought, why not? It’s only a game.

  So – what’s on Level X, man?

  He shrugs. I told you. I ain’t got there yet. But I will. I can tell. I can feel it. I’m close. He grins, and his eyes light up again, bright little sparks like you get from burnt paper, dancing and flickering all the way down. I’ve heard so many rumours, he says. Some people say it takes you to a special site. Some kind of hub for Gamers. Or a place where you can download free porn. Or some kind of top-security site, something to do with the military. There was one guy, a Loser, who swore blind he’d found some kind of portal into another dimension or something, but it all turned out to be bullshit, and anyway, he died a week later, and his parents tried to blame the Game, but everyone knew it wasn’t that, he was into all kinds of crazy shit—

  You gonna show me, or what? I says.

  He looks at me with those weird eyes, and he’s tap-tap-tapping his foot on the floor, the way he does when he’s all wired up. You better not let me down, man. If you quit—

  I’m not gonna quit.

  OK. Sit down. Just do what I do.

  So he logs in. Enters this code. I put in my details, my e-mail and shit. And then, all at once, the screen comes up. No rules, no home page, no warning. I’m in the Game. I’m on Level 1.

  Well, it doesn’t look like much at first. No flash graphics, no artwork at all, just numbers on a black screen, like some piece of Eighties shit.

  I know. It gets better. Trust me, he says.

  So what do you have to do, man?

  Just feel it. Move in. Take control.

  And that’s how I started playing the Game. Three hours later, and it felt like I’d started a minute before. OC was long gone, but at first I didn’t notice. I was on my own PC at home, my folks were downstairs, doing little parent-y things. The numbers on the black screen were moving in some kind of random cascade – except that it wasn’t random at all, you could see that after an hour or two. Grouping the numbers in certain ways, you could make up a picture of something else, something behind the numbers, like trying to tune an old TV. And although there wasn’t a soundtrack or anything, I’d put in my earplugs just as an aid to concentration, and from time to time I could hear something, a whispering, or a rustling.

  It was kind of original. Interesting, even though I didn’t really get what to do. And then it cut off, so suddenly that I wondered if the power had gone, and I cursed for a bit and pressed Refresh, but nothing happened. I checked my PC. It was running just fine. Checked my internet access. Fine. Then I looked into my history file to see where I’d been for over three hours. But my history folder had been deleted; there was no sign of the freaking Game.

  I messaged OC. He wasn’t online. I tried his phone. No answer. So – how the hell was I to know whether I’d got through Level 1? I looked at my watch. It was half past twelve. I’d lost half the evening playing the Game, my homework was a dead loss, and what did I have to show for it all? It occurred to me that OC might have been trying to mess with my mind, but it didn’t seem his style, somehow. So – had I won, or had I lost? Was I still in the Game, or not?

  And then my inbox blipped. Got Mail! The sender was admin@something-or-other, a web address half a mile long, all made up of numbers and hashtags and stuff.

  I opened it. Read:

  LEVEL 1. YOU WIN. 200 KUDOS. PLAY OR QUIT?

  There was a link to each option, underlined in unblinking blue.

  And so I hit PLAY, and waited.

  Ten seconds later, there it was: another link. A URL. I wanted to see what would happen next, so I hit the link. I was back in the Game. No homepage, no Level 2, just those numbers swimming like fish against the deep black background. Just the same as Level 1, except that it all seemed clearer, somehow; deeper, high-def, less grainy.

  Makes no sense, I know that. But that’s the way I saw it; and although I was beat, and had school the next day, I kept on playing anyway, and I swear next time I looked up, it was five in the morning and the light was poking in through the gap in the curtains, and I’d gamed away most of the damn night without even being aware of it, and my head ached like a bastard, and all I could think about, as I looked at the screen once more gone suddenly blank, was this: Did I get through? Am I still in the Game?

  Five minutes later, an e-mail from admin told me that, yes, I was through to Level 3; my kudos was now at 550 and – did I want to play or quit?

  Well—

  No point going to school today, I told myself as I hit the link. I might as well call in a sickie, I thought; get some rest, do my homework, have a shower and a bite to eat and write the day off before it began. The decision made me feel better at once. My folks would believe me if I told them I was ill. In those days, I rarely played hookey. And so I went on to Level 3, and finished at noon, shagged out and limp, but richer by 680 kudos and all set to link with Level 4—

  So that’s how it began. The Game. The fucking fabulous, pointless, addictive, soul-eating, life-sucking, beautiful Game. Not as intense as the first time. I learned I had to pace myself. Be a good boy during the day, then log on in the evenings. Otherwise, my folks would have guessed that I wasn’t quite myself any more. At school or at home, I lived the Game. I ate and drank and dreamed the Game. And when I wasn’t playing the Game, I went into websites and chatrooms and message boards and discussion groups, trying to find out whatever I could about who had designed and written the Game, who was still playing, who had quit, and most especially about Level X, which some believed was a pot of gold and others thought was a crock of shit.

  In those days, I was a believer. A born-again player of the Game. Like OC, whom I still saw occasionally, and who sometimes talked to me online (that is, when he wasn’t playing the Game), I believed in kudos, and Level X, and the fact that we were doing something more than just burning out our retinas for the sake of a bunch of pixels.

  Level 16, 15,000 kudos, and I was just getting started. What’s more, I’d begun to think I knew where I was going; that somewhere in that mess of numbers and shapes there was an answer beginning to emerge. I guess that’s what we all think – at least, until the moment it hits, the moment of truth, you might say.

  Mine was last month, when Charlie died. Some kind of a brain incident, they said; apparently he was an undiagnosed epileptic. He was also a classmate of mine – I said a classmate, not a friend. In fact I’d always hated him, and not just because he was bigger than I was, or because he was good at sports, or because he had perfect teeth, or even because he’d bullied me since both of us were still in shorts.

  No, I hated Charlie because Charlie claimed to have reached Level X, and everyone believed him. Except OC and me, of course. We knew Charlie was full of shit. For a start, he didn’t look like a hard-core Gamer. His skin was too clear, his hair was too clean, his homework results were way too good, and he had that fresh, outdoorsy glow that comes with sex, fresh fruit and sports, and being in the open air a lot.

  Girls liked Charlie – and he liked them. That was why he played the Game. Just to pick up chicks at school. Not my idea of serious. Which was why OC and I were so supremely pissed off when we heard the rumours going round: that Charlie had scored on Level X, and that now he was selling the Game.

  That’s right. Selling it. Guys like Charlie don’t give stuff away; they know how to marke
t themselves. And last week, Charlie was selling the Game to a crowd of hopeful wannabes, spilling secrets like they were trash, totally disrespecting the ones like OC and me who kept our mouths shut and stuck to the rules, and never said zip to anyone.

  Jesus. You should have heard him. The Gospel according to Charlie. Everything was out there, though more or less inaccurate; how you could move up the levels by looking behind the number screen; how you could earn kudos, and how (this was a new one to me) actually spend your kudos on stuff—

  Spend it? How? said OC.

  You have to feel it, said Charlie. To look behind reality. To understand that all this – he waved his hand vaguely in the air – is really nothing but numbers and pixels stacked together to make it look as if something’s there. In fact, there’s nothing but space out here. No you. No me. Just space, man. Like quantum physics or something.

  At this point Charlie’s bullshit got a little harder to follow. OC tried to get him to explain, but Charlie clammed up suddenly, playing coy and saying, I gotta be careful – say too much, all kinds of bad shit could go down.

  What kind of shit? I was curious.

  He grinned. His teeth were a dazzling white. If I tell you that, he says, then you’d be in the shit as well. Besides, only quitters and losers blab. You want to watch what you ask for.

  The next thing I knew was OC and me, getting high in my room that night, eating chocolate-chip cookies and flipping from chatroom to bulletin board, trying to figure out ways to get back at Charlie – just for being a smug bastard, I guess, but mostly for bringing the Game into disrepute. Then we were on the Game again – we never could keep away for long – and I maxed out on Level 29 and earned another 4000 K, but this time when the inbox blipped and the message came in saying I’d come through, there was another choice to make:

  LEVEL 29. YOU WIN, it said. 100,000 KUDOS. SAVE OR SPEND?