Carousel (15 page)

‘What about when you got up? Or last night?' I asked.

Rachel looked at me, then the others, as if she was trying to figure something out.

‘Same old,' she replied, and lit up a cigarette.

Eventually we led the increasingly agitated Rachel back to JB's for some TV and a reality that we worried might
break her tiny suburban brain. Along the way we waited as she tried her card on dozens of doors. Even trudging up to the east end to the door she apparently used to use. None of them opened.

I think she began to fully process what had happened to us when she saw what we'd done to the store. We didn't even notice anymore, but I guess to a fresh pair of eyes it must have looked pretty crazy. Our living area took up a huge section in the middle of the shop. All the stereos and DVDs that had once been there were piled up against a wall in a shiny electronic mass. A series of huge flatscreens bordered our enclosure and cut off the draughts that drifted around the centre like wraiths.

‘Shit. You guys have made yourself at home,' said Rachel.

Lizzy, Rocky and I sat on the couches and waited for her to register. Taylor distracted herself in the kitchen area.

‘You've been here for a while, haven't you?' said Rachel, like it was a big fucking secret.

I nodded.

‘And none of youse can get out?' she asked.

We shook our heads. Lizzy glanced at Taylor across the room.

‘How long have you been cleaning here, Rachel?' I asked.

‘Fifteen months. Nine to go,' she replied.

‘Until what?' I asked.

‘Bullshit parole deal is over,' she replied.

I nodded and stole a look at Lizzy.

‘How come we haven't seen you before?' asked Lizzy.

Rachel shrugged. ‘I work the east end. Switched down here a few weeks back. Sick of freezing my arse off in that mouldy shithole.'

My stomach tightened. I'd smelt her bleach down in the food court not three or four months ago.

Rachel took a seat on our couch.

‘Mind you, you guys could be cleaner,' she added.

‘You knew we were here?' asked Lizzy.

Rachel looked at her dully.

‘Hello. It's fucking gnomesville in here,' she replied.

‘Why didn't you come and talk to us?' I asked.

‘None of my business,' she replied.

She flicked through a gossip mag, tossed it aside and flicked through another. We watched her in a kind of stunned silence until she finished that one too and sat back and looked around.

‘Well, it's nicer than my place. And there's no kids around.'

‘You have kids at home?' I asked.

Rachel shook her head. ‘They're with my ex,' she
replied. ‘If he hasn't left them somewhere.'

I held my head and tried to work out what her being stuck in Carousel meant for the kids. Lizzy seemed to be doing the same. Rocky seemed anxious and had barely moved a muscle, instead just swallowing down his cough with a noise that sounded like a small dog.

We weren't adjusting to our new roommate very well.

‘Rachel. We were going to crack open some liquor this afternoon. Are you interested?' asked Taylor, stepping over from the kitchen looking suddenly casual and composed.

It was a good call from Taylor. Getting on the booze couldn't hurt. Judging by Rachel's positive reaction, it may even help. It had been a long time since we drank properly and with all this stuff going down we desperately needed to get outside our heads. No thoughts of tomorrow. No plan for how we would deal with Rachel. No talk about what her arrival meant for our existence in the world.

We just trudged across to Liquor Central with an iPod and some beanbags and reassured Rachel that taking some drinks wouldn't get her in trouble with the law. She seemed pretty paranoid about this. Probably for good reason.

‘Why do I feel like I'm on fucking
Big Brother
all of a sudden,' Lizzy whispered to me as we cracked open our first bottle of vodka and mixed it in with some Deep Spring Lemon Lime.

It was true. Carousel didn't feel real with Rachel around. It felt like an experiment to see how we would handle this new arrival, coupled with all the other shit facing the four of us.

‘Yeah totally,' I replied.

It would pass, of course. Rachel would eventually see what was going on. She would settle into the strange rhythms of the centre. Bring things to our group that we didn't like, and surprise us with other things that we did. We would eventually regain the faux equilibrium we once had, and live out our weirdo lives the best we could.

But not tonight.

Tonight we would drink and convince ourselves that we could be anywhere.

Lizzy played DJ on the iPod as it grew dark and we worked our way confidently through the first bottle, and onto another. She played a bunch of great artists: The Smiths, Arcade Fire, PJ Harvey – later in the night even a bit of Taylor & Lizzy. Taylor pretended to ignore it, while Lizzy and I watched Rachel to see if anything
about the catchy songs and the identical Canadian twins drinking with her would register.

It didn't.

Rocky kept up with us easily, often holding out his empty cup to signify he was ready for more. I gave up on worrying about him for the night. I got the feeling the Finns had also. Rachel's arrival reminded us that we had precious little control over the universe right now, and Rocky's fate was unlikely to be decided by any of us.

Alarmingly, Rachel seemed to get pretty sloppy after just a couple of drinks. But, to her credit, she seemed to maintain this level for most of the night. She was chatty and told us a bunch of things we probably shouldn't know about her welfare dodging and sexual partners. Rachel was the type of unfiltered, excessively honest semi-bogan that thrived in reality TV land. She was addictive in the way of a painful back massage. We screwed up our faces listening to her, but didn't want it to stop.

Taylor drank harder than anyone. She concentrated on each cup like it was a door she was trying to open. Making sure it all went down, before refilling and starting over. Several times I noticed Lizzy watching her. I think she was trying to gauge how low her sister had fallen. How much the latest disappointment was
weighing on her. For anyone else the jovial booziness would have made this impossible to assess. But I got the feeling that somehow Lizzy knew.

We spread out from the smallish store into the adjacent corridor and watched Rachel bust out dance moves with bottles of pre-mix in both hands. I couldn't work out whether she was an amazing dancer or an awful one. Her style was interpretive and random and none of us could drag our eyes away. It was kind of beautiful watching somebody so uninhibited fill a room like that. It made me think of kindergarten where I remembered kids proudly announcing their names like kings and queens at the top of tiny playground forts, oblivious or embracing of their scrappy clothing and unemployed parents. Seriously drunk, Rocky joined her and found himself smiling happily as the middle-aged mother ground herself against his skinny frame.

He remained on the dance floor when Rachel had tired and gave us an amazing hacky sack performance. We had all seen Rocky messing around with the small red sack before, but had no idea of his talents. He kept it in the air forever with a series of kicks and shoulders that had him dancing all over the floor and us in hysterics watching.

At one stage I saw one of the Finns comforting
the other as she cried into her hands on a beanbag. I assumed it would be Taylor who was upset, as she had been earlier, but was surprised to see it was Lizzy being comforted. My heart sunk a little.

I think she might have been worried about the seriousness of her sister's drinking. I saw Taylor put her vodka aside and drink some water. This seemed to calm Lizzy and within a few minutes she was back out in the corridor kicking around a soccer ball. Somehow Lizzy had ended up as the middle child in our Carousel family and I suddenly realised how much that must suck.

Before she passed out on a beanbag, Taylor grabbed me by the jacket for a drunken D & M.

‘Nox,' she said, eyes all glazed and hair falling everywhere.

‘Yo,' I replied.

She pushed me over to a very specific spot on the floor. We sat and drank a little more.

‘You're awesome, Nox. But you haven't worked it out,' she said accusingly.

‘Sorry,' I said.

She hugged me and spilled her cup out onto the floor.

‘I love you guys,' I said.

Taylor brushed this off and pushed me on the shoulder like I was the drunk one.

‘I'm getting us out of here. And you need to stop. You need to start …' she trailed off.

I looked at her and nodded, trying desperately hard to be sober and serious. Lizzy was watching us with some amusement from across the store.

‘Nox,' said Taylor.

I waited. She had something else to say but she wavered unsteadily and couldn't get anything out. Arms wrapped around me from behind. It was Lizzy with a bear hug.

‘Why so serious?!' she said in a deep voice, pulling a line from
The Dark Knight
.

Taylor looked up through her hair and a flicker of something passed between them. She stumbled to her feet and kissed us both on the head. Lizzy let me go and we watched Taylor fall onto a beanbag and into sleep.

Her final sentence hung, unfinished and forgotten.

Rocky crashed out next. He had been sitting upright on a beanbag for a while, his head dipping with sleep every few minutes before bobbing back up to look around and smile. After a while Lizzy slid over and shuffled the beans so that he could lie back more comfortably. A minute later he was asleep.

I had been pulling myself back from total drunkenness for a few hours, knowing that another
quick drink or two would end my night and bring forward a morning that none of us wanted to think about. I walked out of the store and over to the adjacent Mens toilets. Rachel stood at the basin as if she was about to wash her hands, but her drunken mind had wandered. A de-gnomed door stood behind her.

‘Hey!' she said, as if I'd walked into the Ladies.

I smiled and trudged into one of the cubicles. I started pissing, oblivious to the churning noise I was sending throughout the room. Rachel was still at the basin when I finished.

‘You okay?' I asked.

She swung her head up and smiled. ‘Drunk,' she said, defiantly.

I smiled and leant back against the cool of the tiled bench. Rachel ran some water over her hands. The music coming from the liquor store had stopped and the bathroom felt oddly peaceful.

‘Everybody's dead, aren't they?' I asked her softly.

‘Bullshit,' said Rachel. ‘The TVs are just fucked.'

‘What happened?' I asked.

‘The fuck should I know?'

‘Why do you keep cleaning this place?' I asked.

‘I do my job. They can't send me back there,' she replied, with a flicker of drunken defiance.

‘Back where? Prison?' I asked.

Rachel grunted.

‘Are there other cleaners?' I asked.

‘Geri?' she replied. ‘Never heard of her.'

Rocky must have already asked.

‘Have you seen your ex or your kids?' I tried.

‘Left his place wide open. Nothing there now,' she replied, laughing.

‘Are you worried about them?' I asked.

Rachel ignored this and turned from the sink to look me up and down.

‘You guys are artists, hey?' she asked.

‘Taylor and Lizzy are. They're in a band called Taylor & Lizzy,' I replied, pretty confused.

Rachel swayed forward and pushed her face up to mine. Her hands slipped down past my chest to my pants and she rubbed the front of them. I watched it happening, but felt disconnected. Suddenly her hair was in my face and she was kissing me. She smelt like Pantene and her tongue moved in a practised rhythm that belied her inebriation. She fell back against the basin and laughed, waiting for me to follow and continue with things. I was hard and felt like I had to, but something stopped me. I swerved back out into the milky light of the corridor.

Lizzy was curled up on the last beanbag in the store. I stood above her, and the others, and tried to think of where I should sleep. Rachel wandered across to a softly lit corner housing whiskey and liqueurs. She circled the carpet like a cat, then curled up and fell asleep without a blanket, pillow or anything.

I left Liquor Central and found myself walking back to JB's. At one point I realised this was wrong, not knowing why, but certain that I had to go back and sleep with the others. I was shivering in the icy dark of the corridors so I ripped a picnic blanket out of a basket in Kitchen Witch and pulled it over my shoulders. Shortly after I found myself on a couch out the front of Liquor Central. I wrapped myself up and squinted to make out the lumpy outlines of my housemates on their beanbags inside.

Sleep swallowed me with a darkness that felt immense.

Rachel left Carousel early the next morning.

Somehow I knew she had gone. The place felt normal again. Not crazy and hyper and part of some weird experiment.

Plus I think I had seen her go.

I had woken suddenly from a deep, drunken sleep on the thin leather couch. The morning brightness of the eastern end was overwhelming. Immediately I retreated, rolling over and tucking my head beneath the blanket the best that I could. It was too short though. Out of a gap in the top I saw a figure moving down the corridor. Tight, faded jeans and a wash of bottle-blonde hair. Quickly I willed the sleep to take me back.

The next time I woke, Taylor was tapping me on the arm and telling me we had to go and find Rachel. The four of us searched and yelled through enough
of the centre to confirm that Rachel had either left, or was hiding from us and didn't want to be found. This seemed unlikely so we ventured back to the cleaning cupboard and found it packed away and locked as it was before she arrived. Lizzy also noticed that one of the display MacBooks in the Apple Store had been ripped from its cable.