If he’d actually picked up his toys then, it would have been such a miracle that I would have let him keep Meemoo, AIDS and all.
‘Three… two…’
‘Stop counting!’ Luke screamed, and then the dreaded, ‘Sky badger!’
Luke’s fingers curled into that familiar and frightening shape and he came after me. I skipped away from him, tripping over a bucket.
‘One and a half… one… come on, you’ve only got half a second left.’ A part of me must have been enjoying this, because I was giggling.
‘Stop it,’ Gabby said. ‘You’re being cruel.’
‘He’s got to learn,’ I said. ‘Come on Luke, you’ve only got a fraction of a second left. Start picking up your toys now and you can keep Meemoo.’
Luke roared and swung his sky badger at me, at my arms, at my face. I grabbed him round the waist and turned him so that his back was towards me. Sky badger sunk his claws into my knuckles while I wrestled Meemoo out of his other hand.
By the time I’d got Meemoo away, there were three crescent-shaped gouges out of my knuckles, and they were stinging like crazy.
‘I HATE YOU!’ Luke screamed, crying, and stormed inside, slamming the door behind him.
‘You deserved that,’ Gabby said, looking over the top of her sunglasses.
I couldn’t just throw Meemoo away. Luke would never forgive me for that. It might be one of those formative moments that forever warped him and gave him all kinds of trust issues in later life. Instead, I planned to euthanize Meemoo.
If I locked Meemoo in a cupboard, taking away the things that were helping it survive, food, play, petting and the toilet, the AIDS would get stronger as it got weaker and surrounded by more of its own effluence. The AIDS would win. And when Meemoo was dead, it would either reset itself as a healthy Tamagotchi, or it would die. If it was healthy, Luke could have it back; if it died, then Luke would learn a valuable lesson about mortality and I would buy him a new one to cheer him up.
It was tempting while Meemoo was in the cupboard to sneak a peek, to watch for his final moments, but the Tamagotchi had sensors that picked up movement. It might interpret my attention as caring, and gain some extra power to resist the virus destroying him. No, I had to leave it alone, despite the temptation.
Meemoo’s presence inside the cupboard seemed to transform its outward appearance. It went from being an ordinary medicine cabinet to being something else, something… other.
After two whole days, I could resist no longer. I was certain that Meemoo must have perished by now. I was so confident that I even let Luke come along when I went to the cupboard to retrieve it.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So have you learned your lesson about tidying up?’
‘Give it back,’ Luke said, pouting.
‘Good boy.’ I patted him on the head, then opened the cupboard and took out the Tamagotchi.
Meemoo was alive.
It had now lost three of its limbs, having just one arm left, which was stretched out under its head. One of its eyes had closed up to a small unseeing dot. Its pixellated circumference was broken in places, wide open pores through which invisible things must surely be escaping and entering.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Luke, I’m sorry. But we’re going to have to throw him away.’
Luke snatched the Tamagotchi from me and ran to Gabby, screaming. He was actually shaking, his face red and sweaty.
‘What have you done now?’ Gabby scowled at me.
I held my forehead with both hands. I puffed out big lungfuls of air. My brain was itching inside my skull. ‘I give up,’ I said, and thumped up the stairs to the bedroom.
I tried to read, but I couldn’t concentrate. I put on the TV and watched a cookery show, and there was something soothing in the way the chef was searing the tuna in the pan that let my heartbeats soften by degrees.
Gabby called me from downstairs. ‘Can you come and get Luke in? Dinner’s almost ready.’
I let my feet slip over the edge of each step, enjoying the pressure against the soles of my feet. I went outside in my socks. Luke was burying a football in the sandpit.
‘Time to come in little man,’ I said. ‘Dinner’s ready.’
‘Come in Luke,’ Gabby called through the open window, and at the sound of his mum’s voice, Luke got up, brushed the sand from his jeans, and went inside, giving me a wide berth as he ran past.
A spot of rain hit the tip of my nose. The clouds above were low and heavy. The ragged kind that can take days to drain. As I turned to go inside, I noticed Meemoo on the edge of the sandpit. Luke had left it there. I started to reach down for it, but then stopped, stood up, and went inside, closing the door behind me.
After dinner, it was Gabby’s turn to take Luke to bed. I made tea and leaned over the back of the sofa, resting my cup on the windowsill and inhaling the hot steam. Outside, the rain was pounding the grass, digging craters in the sandpit, and bouncing off of the Tamagotchi. I thought how ridiculous it was that I was feeling guilty, but out of some strange duty I continued to watch it, until the rain had washed all the light out of the sky.
(2008)
THE VELDT
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Douglas Bradbury, the descendant of a woman who was tried in Salem as a witch, was born in 1920, in Waukegan, a small, absurdly Norman Rockwellesque town in Illinois. If his childhood was not the best a human being ever had, he quickly made it seem that way to his readers, drawing it into twisted stories that achieve a fine balance between the uncanny, the terrifying and the achingly beautiful. "It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another," he recalled: "You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion." His first big success came in 1947 with the short story "Homecoming," narrated by a normal boy who feels like an outsider at a family reunion of witches, vampires and werewolves. Plucked from the slushpile at Mademoiselle magazine by a young Truman Capote, the story won Bradbury an O. Henry Award. Bradbury lived in the same house in Los Angeles for more than 50 years and wrote right up to the last few weeks of his life. He died in 2012.
"George, I wish you’d look at the nursery."
"What’s wrong with it?"
"I don’t know."
"Well, then."
"I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."
"What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"
"You know very well what he’d want." His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
"It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was."
"All right, let’s have a look."
They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.
"Well," said George Hadley.
They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing’s too good for our children," George had said.