WildGame

  MARGO LANAGAN was born in 1960 and grew up in Raymond Terrace (New South Wales) and Melbourne. She has travelled to places around the world, from the Nullarbor Plain to Paris, been to university and worked in factories, kitchens and offices. She gets her best ideas while washing the dishes.

  Margo lives in Sydney with her partner and their two sons.

  WILD GAME

  Margo Lanagan

  Copyright © text Margo Lanagan 1991

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  A Little Ark book

  This edition published in 1998 by

  Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

  9 Atchison St, St Leonards, NSW 2065 Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 9901 4088

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: [email protected]

  URL: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  National Library of Australia

  cataloguing-in-publication entry:

  Lanagan, Margo.

  WildGame.

  ISBN 978 1 86448 446 2.

  eISBN 978 1 74343 216 7

  1. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Ruth Gruener

  Text design by Steven Dunbar

  CONTENTS

  1 The Game

  2 Exit

  3 In Hiding

  4 Mug Shots

  5 Sprung!

  6 Daylight Robbery

  7 The Fun Company

  8 The Pod

  9 The Choice

  10 Heavy Reading

  For Steven and Jack

  1 THE GAME

  It was stuffy and crowded in VideoZone. Macka and Vinnie stopped just inside the door.

  ‘Ah, forget it,’ said Vinnie. ‘I can’t stand hanging round waiting for a game. I’m going home.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Macka.

  A big bunch of high-school guys had turned momentarily from Commando Raid when they came in, because Macka was a girl. Now, because they knew her from school and she was just a kid, they all turned back to watch one guy blasting the enemy’s last defences to bits. The air shook with tame, synthetic explosions and the boys’ cheers.

  Macka edged up behind the group, with Vinnie reluctantly in tow. She craned over shoulders as the scoreboard flashed up on the screen.

  ‘Yep, I’m still in the top five,’ she said smugly. MACKA, with a score of 11565700, was third on the list.

  ‘What a champ,’ said Vinnie, rolling his eyes. His own score, labelled SPEEDY, topped hers by five hundred points. Only BRUCE, with thirteen million, had ever beaten them.

  In just about every game in the place it was the same; the two of them had poured all their pocket-money into these machines in the past six months, and made themselves the best video-game players in Newtown, apart from BRUCE. At the machines where sheer firepower and deadly accuracy were what mattered, Vinnie had the edge on Macka, but anything that required dodging, or finding your way through a maze beset by giants or goblins or any other kind of greebly, was Macka’s strong point.

  And now they were so good it was almost boring. Only BRUCE could beat them, and BRUCE was unbeatable it seemed, whoever BRUCE was. Neither Macka nor Vinnie had ever laid eyes on him. Vinnie reckoned that BRUCE’s score was punched in by the management, to keep the top players playing once they’d conquered everyone else.

  Or to keep their minds off how pointless the whole business of video games was, once you’d mastered it. Because it was pointless. So what if they could hold off twelve computer-generated black-belted karate champions? They still couldn’t disperse a group of spotty-faced boys in dreary grey uniforms to get to a game. So what if they had lightning-fast reflexes? They still couldn’t pound up King Street fast enough after school to beat these older kids who could wag their last free period. So what if they could zap their way through to Phase 40 on Laser Warriors, and pick up fifty extra lives and a full complement of omni-bombs on Stratoquest? They still had to face up to showing their parents (or in Vinnie’s case, parent, singular) those term report cards they’d quickly ripped out of their envelopes that afternoon and slowly folded up again and replaced.

  ‘Hi, Wally,’ said Macka, passing the change window. Behind it, in a small white office, a large baggy-eyed man in a white T-shirt smoked and read the late edition Telegraph Mirror under a fluorescent light. He looked up and nodded at Macka, not smiling.

  ‘I can’t be bothered,’ whinged Vinnie. ‘None of the decent games are free.’

  Macka ignored him. ‘Hey look, there’s a new one!’

  ‘That’ll be no good to you, love,’ Wally called out. ‘Brand new today, and already gone bung. Last time I bother with fancy new releases from The Fun Company. I’ll give them bloody fun.’

  He was almost talking to himself, so Macka and Vinnie didn’t bother answering. Macka was walking around the machine, a black unit with a seat fitted inside it, like the Grand Prix game. It looked heavy and polished, and when Macka stepped inside it and closed the little gate behind her Vinnie noticed that the whole thing was shaped like a giant egg, with Macka seated in the pointed end.

  He peered in over her shoulder at the dead screen and the controls. Macka made a baffled noise.

  ‘They all look the same,’ she said, turning up her hands at the row of five large black buttons, almost invisible against the black panel in which they were set. Above each one was a sign, in slightly luminous yellow-ochre, made to look like rough brush strokes.

  ‘I think … I think it’s supposed to be some kind of international language …’ Macka said doubtfully.

  ‘Looks more like something a Martian’d write,’ snorted Vinnie. With every minute that passed, his report card seemed to weigh another kilogram. He tapped his school shoe against the outside of the machine, then stopped, alarmed at the frail noise it made: light and hollow, just as you’d expect an oversized eggshell to sound.

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ said Macka, starting from the left. ‘An X—that might be a “fire” button. Then, that looks kind of like some animal running, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, a kangaroo or something,’ Vinnie said, to hurry her up.

  ‘And that’s obviously a man carrying a boat …’ she went on, blustering through her uncertainty.

  ‘You reckon? Looks like two kangaroos on top of each other to me.’

  ‘I s’pose it could be … And that’s, um …’

  ‘That’s a bunch of grass, of course,’ said Vinnie, glancing up from his fiddling with the complicated door catch.

  ‘You dork, Vinnie—why would you push a button for grass, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t make the game up, did I?’ He peered in at the signs. ‘Maybe it’s supposed to be one of those jaggedy lines like you see on heart machines …’

  ‘And that last one. What do you reckon that is? No sign at all.’

  ‘That must be the Emergency Exit. You know, like when Laser Warriors gets too hot, you can Emergency Exit without losing face. Anyway, it doesn’t work, so why bother trying to figure it out? Wally’ll probably send it back next week, and we’ll never know.’ He started trying to unlatch the door again. ‘How did they put this thing together? I can’t get in!’

  ‘It’s easy, stupid.’ Macka reached over and felt for the catch from the outside, still looking at the panel. The door swung open.

  ‘Hey, how’d you do that? I couldn’t see; your hand was in the way.’

  ‘It was easy; I just—’ Macka’s hand, with Lily Bartolli’s phone number biro’d onto the back of it, came down on the catch an
d touched it lightly. The door unclicked without anything on the catch seeming to move. Their eyes met, Vinnie’s disbelieving, Macka’s holding back laughter, and then the whole side of Macka’s face lit up yellow for a millisecond, as if someone had popped a flashgun at it.

  Macka yelped, ‘It’s working!’ But when she turned back to the screen, it still seemed dead. She pushed all five buttons at once, and the machine uttered a soft, dying growl, so low it was hardly a sound at all. ‘Oo, that sounds nasty,’ giggled Macka.

  ‘Get out, Mack, before the thing explodes.’

  ‘Yipe, you’re right.’ She scrambled out and shut the little door, and the two of them stood looking at the great gleaming thing.

  ‘It’s like a spaceship—a pod or something—from another planet.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Macka was non-committal. ‘Give it a week and it’ll look just as crappy and knocked-about as all the other machines in here.’

  Worse, thought Vinnie, remembering the sound it had made when he kicked it. Any one of those guys around Commando Raid, especially the ones who worked out in the school gym, could put a fist through that shell no worries. And they were the types who’d do it just for fun—and probably get away with it, Wally was so slack.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get home.’

  ‘Nah, I’m going to wait around for a go on Battlezone.’

  Vinnie looked at the cluster of absorbed kids around the Battlezone machine. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Nope, I’ll wait,’ said Macka, scrabbling around in her schoolbag and taking out a scuffed paperback. ‘I’m not in a hurry to get home.’ She looked very meaningly at Vinnie.

  ‘I’d rather get it over and done with,’ said Vinnie, shifting his bag onto his other shoulder and trying to look decisive.

  ‘Okay. I’ll call you tonight, hey?’ Macka was already heading for one of the tacky grey plastic seats that were bolted to the floor in positions of maximum uselessness and minimum comfort.

  She sat down and watched Vinnie go. Poor guy. His mum would really hit the roof over all those Ds and Es. Macka could imagine her in the kitchen, the report in one hand, the other flailing the air as she poured great dollops of hysterical Italian over Vinnie’s stooped shoulders.

  At least Macka didn’t have to deal with that, though the alternative wasn’t so hot either. Her mum and dad would pick up her report, carefully disguising their boredom, and read out bits for each other to laugh at. And at the end her dad would say airily, ‘Well, never mind, Lou—I’ve always said school wasn’t the best place to get a proper education’, and she’d fume off to her room wondering why on earth they bothered sending her there if they didn’t want her to learn anything! Why didn’t they let her stay at home and waft around the house all day, the way they did?

  She did have a room now, which was something to be thankful for, even though sometimes her mum and dad’s friends from the ashram in India, or the kibbutz in Israel, or worst of all, the Seventh Age Ranch in California, were allowed to invade her floorspace. Macka’s parents were always providing a place to ‘crash’ for people they’d met in their travelling days. And crash they did—duck-down sleeping bags, duty-free bottles, woven Nepalese passport wallets and all scattered through the Rudges’ house. There were two of them in residence now—sleeping in the lounge, thank goodness—two massive Canadian men who filled the nights with song and beer and the days with their hangovers. Macka shuddered.

  She stuffed the library book back in her bag—she hadn’t really intended to read it. She looked around VideoZone in disgust, at everyone’s backs, at Wally slobbing behind the glass, making as little effort as possible for anyone who wanted change, at the Skill-tester piled up with cheap, bland-faced teddies of synthetic plush. It was a depressing place, and the grotty carpet, throbbing fluoro lights, pulsing screens and synthesised noises made her eyes and ears feel tired.

  Dragging her bag by one strap, she wandered back to the new game and walked right around it again. She ran her hand over the surface, and enjoyed the sensation. It was neat the way whoever had made it hadn’t tried to jazz it up with rap-graffiti lettering or airbrushed robotic monsters or anything; the plain, slick black was nice enough.

  She peered in the window at the dead screen. Then, just as she was about to turn away, it flashed on, a flat, dull yellow.

  Macka waited, expecting it to flash off again, as it had when Vinnie’d been there, but the yellow light remained, and the signs on the control panel began to glow. It was like a challenge. Of course, Macka couldn’t resist it.

  She touched the catch on the door, which sprang open. It must be heat-sensitive or something, she thought—but why couldn’t Vinnie open it? She shrugged, dropped her bag and climbed into the pod, into the seat that was so much more comfortable than Wally’s grey plastic numbers.

  The screen stayed blank yellow—there was no ‘PLEASE INSERT COIN’ instruction, no flashing display of the way the game was played. Weird.

  Macka sat back. Timidly she reached out and pressed the button under the bunch-of-grass sign.

  There was a soft thump, like the noise the needle made landing on one of her parents’ old records, and a crackle, like the needle settling into a groove. Hmph, real hi-tech, thought Macka.

  She kept her eyes on the screen, but it was the sounds, and something else, that caught her attention first. It was as if the walls of the pod, and of VideoZone, and of all the buildings along King Street, fell back, and endless empty distance flowed in to take their place. No, not empty; Macka closed her eyes for a second to concentrate, and heard a tiny, far-off bird-cry. She felt, rather than heard, the press of a slight breeze.

  She opened her eyes to the empty screen. The air in the pod felt dry enough to tighten her skin, and it smelt wild. It was country air, not city airconditioning. And desert country, not farmland. Does sand have a smell? she wondered, trying to pin down what was convincing her that she was low to the ground, breathing the air off sparse-tussocked sand.

  ‘Hoo-ee,’ she said softly, and breathed in great lungfuls of the hot air. ‘Brilliant effects,’ she muttered as she stared at the screen, ‘but what about a picture, guys?’ She pushed the grass button again.

  Straight away, the screen’s blank yellow began to break up, pixel by pixel. It gradually dissolved until only a few grains were left, like stars glinting, on a black background. There was a pause. Macka tapped a toe on the floor of the pod—for someone used to the adrenalin bursts and the continuous cut and thrust of Laser Warriors, this was creakingly slow.

  Then things began to happen on-screen, though Macka couldn’t feel sure she knew exactly what. Mists and masses of a burnt red colour and of spindly silver-green appeared and floated, sliding irregularly from side to side. She threw her eyes out of focus, and strangely enough that seemed to improve the picture. The red was red earth, the green, tussocks—the scent of both grew very intense, and she also began to smell something else, vegetable and sweet, that made her mouth water. She strained her eyes to see, and the image swung left and right as she glanced to either side.

  ‘Yum,’ she said firmly to herself, partly because of the delicious smell (she’d had nothing to eat since her Mars-bar lunch) and partly because this was all a bit nervous-making. The effects were too realistic—maybe some malfunction was intensifying them—and she didn’t feel quite in control.

  There was an uncomfortable feeling on the back of her neck, and somehow she knew that it was the sky, more endless than the desert, bright and cloudless and full of threat. She was aware of wanting to flee—where to? underground?—but the sweet smell was irresistible. She tried to work out in which direction the smell was strongest, screwing up her eyes and steering the screen image from left to right in a slow pan. Yes, there was a point where it grew stronger, she realised, swallowing saliva.

  But while she could glance around in any direction she liked, she couldn’t simulate moving forward in the same way, simply by wanting it to happen. That must be what the
animal-running button’s for, she realised. I must be being some kind of animal—this kangaroo-thing—just like I am a racing-driver in Grand Prix. She gave the button a quick push, and the green and red patterns jerked suddenly and halted. She pressed it a couple more times, reluctantly, as the jerking made her stomach jolt. In fact, the whole business of trying to focus and control the screen image was making her feel seasick.

  One jump at a time, stopping frequently to glance about and sniff, she managed to steer herself towards the smell. A straight course was impossible—if she tried to hop through the tussocks she got a nasty prickly sensation all up the front of her body and across her face. It was frustratingly clumsy for someone who prided herself on her smooth passage through the intricacies of Gremlin Castle, but the reward was the strengthening of that smell. It was maddeningly wonderful—like all your favourite fruits and nuts rolled into one—and Macka’s belly gave a longing growl.

  At last, just when she was about to tear herself away from the game to go to the vending machine, the source of the smell appeared at the edge of the screen. The waves of scent were so strong they seemed to ripple out visibly from the scraggly bush, from which nuts hung like Christmas decorations, a shiny red-brown. Macka hopped herself up to the bush and, almost instinctively pressing the grass button, saw the animal’s narrow paws reach up and knock a nut from its stem. It took a lot of un-focusing and casting about on the ground to find it, and in the end Macka closed her eyes and sniffed her way to it, using small hops. Then, with a succession of grass-button manoeuvres, she managed to get the nut to her mouth and crack open the thin shell.

  She heard her human stomach give a welcoming growl, and felt the weird sensation of a second stomach, slightly behind her shoulder-blades, releasing digestive juices as she took a mouthful of the nut. For a few moments the taste took over, living up to all the expectations its scent had created—sweet and nutty, juicy but substantial. She couldn’t think of anything else except gnawing every scrap of the meat out of the shell. ‘Oh, this is brilliant!’ she giggled to herself.