Carousel (10 page)

The second one from the end. Its door was closed. The guarding gnome stood solemnly outside.

Our bathroom pact had been breached.

I walked straight over to it. The fear still in my feet but threatening to rise up and overwhelm at any moment. The latch was open. I pushed and the door swung inwards.

The cubicle was empty.

I stood there with the toothbrush in my mouth. Minty foam gathering at the edges of my lips. The toilet stared back quietly like a witness claiming ignorance. I held the door open and slid the heavy little gnome back to where he should be. Where he was until somebody moved him.

Back at the bunk my legs jittered with nervous energy. The warmth of the shower had vanished in an instant. Somebody had used my bathroom. If it was one of us they had broken our biggest rule of keeping cubicles gnomed unless in use. This was subconscious now. Not something any of us would forget.

I fought down a violent urge to bolt out of Myer. Any security I felt about the place had vanished. I needed to tell the others. To radio them and talk it through. Not because they would have a solution. But so they would
freak out too, and I would try to rationalise things and calm them down, and in the process calm myself.

But something held me back.

I don't know what it was. Maybe it was the thought of leaving. The cubicle seemed like confirmation that our world would inevitably be smashed open, leaving us hanging outside of fate. Forced to create our identities again like kids out of school.

But my fear of this happening didn't completely eclipse my feelings for the others. These were strong and the de-gnoming left each of them vulnerable.

I picked up my radio.

Before I could talk the speaker crackled and Lizzy screamed.

I arrived down at Dymocks just after Rocky and Taylor.

Lizzy was pacing about anxiously.

‘Rocky, you fuck! What were you doing in there anyway?' said Lizzy.

Rocky shuffled uncomfortably, his hand twitching in front of him. The three of them glanced at me as I walked through the door.

‘What happened?' I asked Taylor.

‘Rocky forgot to gnome a cubicle in Lizzy's bathroom,' said Taylor.

The words left me stunned.

I stole a look at Rocky. He seemed a little confused, but otherwise normal.

‘The gnome was lying on its back outside,' added Lizzy.

She was pumped full of adrenaline.

‘It's hard with my hand,' said Rocky.

The three of us looked at him. It was difficult not to feel for the guy.

Lizzy sat back on the edge of her bed.

‘You just need to tell us, Rocky,' said Taylor. ‘If you can't prop the door just tell us so we know it will be closed.'

He nodded. I sat next to Lizzy and gave her shoulder a squeeze. She didn't respond, instead focusing on the floor and trying to slow her breathing. Taylor watched us.

‘Did you open the door?' she asked.

‘No. I ran the fuck out of there,' Lizzy replied.

‘Okay. I'm going to go open it,' said Taylor and turned to head out of the store.

‘Wait!' I said and jumped up to follow.

‘Jesus, Nox,' said Lizzy, bewildered.

‘I'll come,' I said to Taylor.

She stopped and waited for me. Lizzy and Rocky
were left alone by the bed. Lizzy and Taylor shared a look.

‘Rocky, come with us, yeah,' Taylor said.

Rocky padded over to join us.

We rounded the corner and walked down the corridor to where the words
Named Lizzy
had been scrawled underneath the label
Ladies
, on the toilet door. My pulse thumped through the back of my knees. It took all my control to follow Taylor casually into the room.

Rocky didn't follow.

‘Shit. Rocky!' called Taylor, as the door closed behind us.

She edged back past me to find out where he had gone. I followed and we found him stopped a few metres away by a different door.

‘Come on, Rocky,' she said softly.

Rocky looked confused but followed obediently into the room. Taylor moved bravely over the cubicle and pushed open the door.

I started feeling weird again. A familiar dizziness swept down from somewhere above my head and flooded into my eyes. The layout of the centre swept out before me. A kind of three-dimensional floor plan with colour and texture. I felt myself towering above it on a savage tilt that would soon see me crash inside. I tried
to get my bearings and find somewhere soft to land but swayed backward with a rush of nausea.

‘Nox,' said Rocky softly.

I came to. He and Taylor were looking at me oddly. The cubicle was open and Taylor was retrieving the gnome from the floor.

‘Sorry. I'm still half asleep,' I said.

Taylor nodded and put the gnome back in place.

‘Are we all sorted?' I asked.

‘Yeah,' said Taylor, walking past me. ‘Weirdo.'

Rocky followed. I glanced at the cubicle, then trailed behind.

Lizzy was back reading in her bed. Taylor moved over to the free side and climbed in under the covers. Lizzy watched her silently, looking neither pleased nor annoyed.

I really didn't feel like hanging out with Rocky, but it seemed like the Finns had decided this for me.

‘Come on, Rock. You hungry?' I asked and waited for him to follow me out of the room. Taylor and Lizzy glanced at me as we left. A hint of thanks in their gaze.

Rocky and I stayed up playing
Mario Kart
and eating stale Doritos until morning. As I wove my tiny machine around the colourful tracks my mind churned with a heady cycle of Fiestas, gnomes and cubicles.
Every so often I would remember Rocky beside me. His body still. Gloved hand clumsily holding the controller. Avatar nailing turn after turn. Eyes dull in the flicker of the screen. Our adopted teenage brother. Chocked full of mystery, now more than ever.

I didn't get a chance to think through the events of that night until a few days later. At Lizzy's suggestion we conducted a kind of Carousel busy bee. Cleaning up the floor beneath the dome where our fledgling garden had been built. Mopping the corridors that we used the most. Tidying up JB's after a winter of eating in and watching TV. Checking that all the toilets were gnomed. I was pretty sure that the season hadn't yet broken outside of the centre but it felt as close to a spring-clean as anything.

Thankfully, due to the size of the centre, we were still able to hide away from our increasingly epic stockpiles of rubbish. Early in our stay we had collected the centre's supply of rubbish bins and liners and created a giant grid inside Big W. In the aisles between bins we had laid an assortment of pest control – roach
baits, ant rid, mouse traps – to keep the place from becoming infested.

The bins had filled much quicker than we expected and we had soon started using anything that was airtight. The environment in Big W was still hygienic; in fact, none of us had seen a single cockroach, something we were pleased about but which didn't necessarily bode well for the situation outside, but we knew it wasn't feasible forever. Like a bunch of cliché politicians, our rubbish management accommodated the present, with a clear disregard for the future.

Luckily we had remained pretty strict with our recycling. Life on earth may be over, but our bottles, papers and plastics were beautifully separate from our food waste and ready for the factory. This meant that Lizzy and I could experiment with our genius idea of using the decomposed slush at the bottom of our first bins to grow vegetables.

Taylor and Rocky watched our stupid grins as we wheeled bins into position beneath the dome and edged the lids open to heavy wafts of weird gases. We decided that the best way to control the smell, and potentially grow something edible, was to top up the bins with soil and wet everything together. With the mini bags of potting mix from Coles already running low this
raised the stakes on our plan and left both Lizzy and me deliberating carefully over the number of seedlings and the position of bins, hoping something would grow in one of them so Taylor wouldn't have us shovelling the soil back out a few weeks later.

The clean-up was a good idea. The collective tasks smoothed over our fractured relationships and gave us all something to concentrate on. Rocky had been particularly active and we were all pleased to see the second brand of antibiotics finally chasing the infection from his hand. The cough remained but that seemed a part of him now.

We spent nights relaxing with beer and stretching out muscles that were sore for the first time in a while.

After a long day on the mop I left Rocky watching TV with the Finns and drifted back to Myer to finish my beer and revisit the cubicle saga.

I coasted through the corridors on a BMX, nursing my drink and passing the stores like houses in a tired and familiar neighbourhood. I tried to stay relaxed as I headed into Myer and trudged upstairs. Discovering the de-gnomed cubicle had changed the dynamic of the place. The familiarity I had worked hard to develop had gone, leaving me anxious and eager to switch bedrooms
to somewhere else in the centre. But with my discovery still a secret, and no really plausible reason to offer the Finns, I felt stuck there until something changed.

And I had no idea if it would. Lizzy's discovery and Rocky's admission had confused the hell out of me. It was hard to imagine Rocky using the toilet and leaving the door closed by accident. Even given the state of his hand this would mean he stepped over a gnome and left the room in a way he'd been drilled not to from day one. We'd all seen him do some pretty bizarro things, so maybe forgetting to gnome a door was pretty possible, even inevitable. But what was he doing in Lizzy's bathroom?

I think this was the thing that concerned us the most. Dymocks was at the opposite end of the centre to where Rocky slept. It wasn't close to JB's or Hoyts or anywhere else he hung out regularly. Plus there were at least four other bathrooms within maybe a hundred metres of Lizzy's. If Rocky really needed to go, there were other options.

Of course none of these questions even touched the issue of my own cubicle discovery. Whatever the hell this meant, and how, if at all, it was connected to Rocky, I had no idea. The simple assumption would be that Rocky was also responsible for de-gnoming
my bathroom. He had a wild night where he roamed, full-bladdered, through all corners of Carousel using select toilets to break the centre's only rule, and scare the crap out of his housemates.

As I lay on the bunk looking up at the ceiling the absurdity of this was enough to make me laugh. But what if it was somebody we didn't know. Someone who had chosen to hide from us. Someone who knew things about Carousel that we didn't. Someone who had now decided to silently, definitively, announce their arrival.

As long as the owner of the solitary Fiesta in the staff car park remained faceless, our imaginations ran in overdrive. This, combined with my cubicle discovery, pushed me dangerously close to the edge of something. My dreams changed. No longer tangible or relevant, they swept out over massive vistas of time and space, dwarfing me physically and emotionally, and leaving me fragile and jittery in the mornings. I was also in constant worry over the safety of Rocky and the Finns. I would mask my relief at their arrival at breakfast, and make up excuses to radio them late at night.

None of this was sustainable. I had to tell the others, but felt I couldn't until I found out more. I told myself this was to protect them from unnecessary stress. And maybe it was. But again I was crippled by the thought
that the news would somehow see us thrust out of the centre. I understood that we had to break out. For Rocky, Taylor, all of us. But every instinct screamed at me to delay.

I stayed up late, bargaining with myself. If I wasn't going to tell the others about the de-gnoming of my bathroom, I had to at least investigate and find out who was responsible. I would kill off my imagination with facts, then decide how to act on them.

I started spending my alone time looking through the centre for signs of another occupant. Lizzy didn't really need me in Rugs a Million anymore, and Taylor and Rocky were occupied with doors and gardening in the dome, so I generally had the rest of Carousel to myself.

It might have been a Wednesday when I headed east toward the back entrance. This was the opposite side of the centre to where the Fiesta was parked, but I didn't think that was relevant. The car was parked randomly and away from any of the labelled bays. This didn't give me a lot to go by, but did suggest that maybe the driver wasn't a storeowner in Carousel, or at least didn't want to look like one. For some reason this pointed me eastward to the cheaper, less permanent stores.

The back of the centre was an area we generally left
alone. It didn't have any real food outlets except for a Wendys where the superdogs and thickshakes were long expired. It was also draughty and cold, only receiving a sliver of afternoon sun. I remembered there being some novelty stores and a Two-Dollar Shop where we found some buckets for waste storage, and also some offices that seemed like a management area. But otherwise it all felt fairly new and unexplored.

I had no method, wandering slowly through corridors, looking for something out of the ordinary in a centre with nothing but. The build-up of dust was really noticeable in the east end. Counters and benchtops held a thick film of grey.

Human skin.

I remembered this from a movie we'd seen recently. They had said that dust was predominantly human skin. Yet here it was in a centre without people. Maybe it was already in the air when we arrived here, and the static centre had since let it drop. The skin of a thousand dead shoppers.

It was easy to creep yourself out in Carousel.

I considered the dust a good thing though. Its heavy build up meant that any disturbances should be pretty noticeable. I started looking at it closely. Noticing how it sat fatly on horizontal surfaces, but also held in
thinner clusters on the vertical. Testing different items, I noticed that dust could be disturbed in several ways. Touching it directly, sweeping past the vertical, creating a soft flow of wind with an arm or leg. I also noticed how it gathered in clusters at the edges of ventilation ducts, on surfaces that were smooth but not slippery. How it would sit, almost invisible, in the cotton of a shirt. CSI Carousel. I ran over snappy lines of dialogue in my head and considered adding forensic drama to my list of sketchy novella concepts.