Carousel (16 page)

Taylor and I checked Rachel's door. It was locked and cold and gave nothing away. None of us said a word. I felt like I had maybe an hour before my morning-after drunkenness morphed into a severe hangover.

‘I'm going home to sleep,' I said.

I set off down the corridor toward Myer without waiting for a reply.

A few steps later I felt Rocky and the Finns behind me, each carrying their own fragile bodies back to bed. I stopped at Friendlies and took some Panadol Rapids from the shelf, along with two one-point-five litre waters and a handful of energy bars. I wanted to crawl into bed and stay there for weeks. Carousel had been willing me to do so since we arrived. Finally I was ready to submit.

Winter eased during our hibernation in the weeks that followed. It wasn't sudden. Few things were in
Carousel. The mornings were still cold, the light still filtered grey. But the days felt longer and we seemed to lounge about for hours before the lights timed out and darkness crept its way through the centre. Forgotten seeds sprouted in pots and bins beneath the dome as proper sunlight swept across for a time at midday. We watched them curiously as they grew from identical green spikes to form something recognisable. Most powered upward to a height of a few inches before wilting and growing pale due to a lack of nutrients in the generic potting mix. Hardier plants like lettuce, basil and shallots managed to survive, offering us strange salads and a break from the diminishing supermarket items.

I spent long mornings in the bookstores reading with a purpose I hadn't experienced before. I read Hemingway, Coetzee and Murakami. Starting with one title and churning right through the shelf until it was done and I caught my breath with some magazines. I also read a lot of history. Filling gaping holes in my knowledge of World War II, the Space Race and early Australian explorers.

At the end of these sessions I would change into Skins and cross trainers and jog the circumference of the centre, stopping at the dome where the air felt fresh like a forest or a beach. The jogging had stripped me
of a few kilos but I was gradually gaining them back with weight training in Sports Power. I was lean now, but moulded, my body a project that I could focus on to burn through the hours. I carefully searched the centre for supplements that would provide amino acids and protein to my overworked muscles, leaving them tight but defined as the spring took hold.

Long ago, Taylor and Lizzy might have ribbed me for these sudden obsessions. But now we each had commitments that were perhaps irrational but also crucial to our survival in the centre. Lizzy continued to tinker with the studio that had seemed ready for use months ago. She would add another instrument, drape another rug, decorate the already spectacular space to the point where it seemed perfect, before taking something down and starting over. With every week that passed, the idea of her recording in there seemed more and more remote. It had become something else now. A shrine perhaps. She would play anywhere but Rugs a Million. Plugging a keyboard into a socket in the dome while we were gardening, or thumbing her favourite guitar on a stool at Coffee Club.

For Taylor the obsession with the doors still held firm. It had grown into something more than escape. A kind of responsibility or obligation. A groundsman checking the lawns and gardens. An architect building a
huge mental map. Lately she would head out alone with her iPod and a backpack, checking the radio every hour with a double tap before resuming with her work and mystery playlists.

Rocky had stopped joining Taylor on these ventures but for the odd occasion. He was sick and we encouraged rest without great confidence, but with nothing much else to offer. While our hangovers from that bizarro night with Rachel had lingered for a day and a night before drifting into tiredness and rabid hunger, Rocky's had stayed, morphing with his cough to form a weird virus that took the remaining colour from his face and left him placid and couch-bound. During the days we would be reassured by his appetite and eagerness to see us as we dropped in and out of JB's for cups of tea and to pick up things we had conveniently left behind. But at night, in the stale, cool air of the centre his cough would take a hold and each of us would listen carefully as it seemed to lower into his chest and rumble with an echo that made us shudder.

Rocky had something that his body couldn't shake. It gave Carousel a clock that in the past had never existed.

We hadn't seen Rachel since our night in Liquor Central. Our time with her seemed faded and distant almost as soon as it had passed. My mind couldn't
place it as a good memory or bad. The drinking and debauchery had been long overdue, and in a way vital to our existence. Taylor and I had spoken honestly and, although the words had been clouded with booze and time, our connection had been reaffirmed and remained strong ever since. But Rocky had grown sicker that night, and the only human we had seen since arriving had chosen to abandon us after less than twenty-four hours in the centre.

Rachel's existence built on a mystery of which we had long since lost comprehension. I had spent hours at the foot of Lizzy's bed talking through the parameters of Carousel without ever managing to map the world. Rachel's arrival confirmed that life existed outside of the centre, although she offered little concrete information about this, or none that we could remember. Our memories of the night with her were clouded and we cursed ourselves for the level of our drinking. We remembered that she was on parole for something, and that her job as a cleaner here was somehow a part of that agreement. The fact that she had honoured this parole duty and kept turning up to clean an abandoned shopping centre, despite whatever it was that had happened in the world, suggested that Rachel was a little mental, but also pretty keen to stay onside with
the law. Until she found out we were trapped here and seemingly decided to never return.

It was difficult to know what all of this meant for the four of us in Carousel. Taylor and I fought pretty hard to keep our situation somehow rationalised. We both knew that there was obviously some crazy stuff going on. Maybe even something fantastical. I was trapped in a shopping centre in suburban Perth with Taylor and Lizzy Finn, after all. But we still weren't keen to accept the notion that we would never be free of the centre, and that freedom wouldn't hold a world similar to the one we remembered, with some answers as to what the hell we were doing in here.

Lizzy had been more accepting of our situation from the beginning. She never believed Taylor could force a door open, or that somebody had locked us in here maliciously. Lizzy saw the mystery of Carousel for what it was and didn't waste her time labelling it as anything else. There was defeat in her perspective, but in a strange way it also held the most hope.

The fact that Rachel could exit the centre alone, but not in our presence, was particularly unnerving. Maybe this was a coincidence. Or maybe she just swapped cards on us. But it also seemed possible that someone, somewhere, may have stopped Rachel from letting us
out. This wasn't exactly a reassuring thought, but it kind of aligned with Lizzy's idea that our entrapment in the centre wasn't arbitrary, and could even be seen as some bizarro protection against the apocalypse – if there actually was one.

But then why was Rachel so eager to get back out there? Her kids were the obvious answer. She'd told me that they had disappeared somewhere with her ex, and probably the rest of the city. But maybe they were still out there somewhere. Even the remote chance of reuniting with them meant she couldn't risk staying in Carousel. I got that.

But maybe Carousel wasn't the type of place you wanted to stay in anyway.

This wasn't something the Finns and I chose to discuss. However, our diminishing food supplies and Rocky's mystery illness made a decent case for it. Rachel seemed a little strange, maybe even outside of the context of whatever was happening in the world, but her desire to get the hell out of Carousel and not come back was seriously unnerving. Rachel was a survivor. Somebody that had probably been knocked down continuously throughout life, but had kept pulling herself up and struggling onward. She had an instinct that a lot of people didn't. And this instinct had told her to leave.

In the angsty aftermath of Rachel's visit, and the ongoing concern over Rocky's sickness, the Finns and I made an effort to keep some lightness in Carousel. I had pulled a barbecue into the dome and started constructing a tiki-style ‘outdoor' area ahead of the warmer weather. There were bamboo torches in Backyard Bonanza, and a trashy party goods outlet in the east end had fake lanterns and plastic decorations. With these in position against a wall near the sushi bar I began shifting in some outdoor furniture.

Rocky and I discovered a kind of hand-operated forklift a while ago, out the back of Bonanza. With a large platform on wheels and a handle that could be pushed or pulled, it quickly became a favourite around Carousel. I loaded up a couple of deckchairs and set out westward to the dome.

Lizzy crossed through an intersection on her mountain bike ahead of me. I didn't think she saw
me but a few seconds later she re-emerged around the corner and coasted my way. She was wearing her favourite pea coat from David Jones and some cherry-red boots. I continued to haul the chairs behind me.

‘Whoa. Nice one, Nox,' said Lizzy, circling behind me.

‘The best they had,' I replied. ‘What you up to?'

Lizzy shrugged and slowed down to roll alongside me.

‘It's your birthday soon,' she said.

I nodded. Birthdays were touchy in Carousel. They confirmed the passage of time. Plus we'd pretty much taken anything of interest from the shelves, making gifting problematic.

‘Still no writing?' she asked.

‘Not really,' I said.

In truth I had been writing at night quite a lot but hadn't included anything in with Lizzy's cards since our discussion of the kid on the bus story.

‘You gotta get onto that, man. We'll be out of here one of these days and you could have a bunch of stuff ready to publish,' she said.

Both ideas seemed pretty ridiculous.

‘Is it true that we're out of vitamins?' I asked.

Lizzy nodded solemnly.

‘There's some zinc left. And some D's,' she said.
‘Just random stuff.'

‘We have to grow more vegies,' I said.

Lizzy nodded. The gardening wasn't working out as well as we'd hoped.

‘Remember last summer at the dome? All those bugs dropping down on us?' I changed the topic.

Lizzy shuddered. ‘Yeah, but the stars were awesome. And your tiki stuff is going to rule,' said Lizzy.

I nodded and we rounded the corner toward the dome.

The following afternoon the four of us sat on deckchairs amid shredded sunlight and sipped on limey cocktails mixed by Taylor. The temperatures still seemed pretty low outside and the massive concrete slab that was our home would need a few good months to thaw out from the winter. So our deckchairs were adorned with rugs rather than beach towels and none of us were keen to reveal our pasty-white shopping centre skin. Rocky lay tucked deep within a hood, sipping his mocktail through a long straw and looking up at the sky. Lizzy read a book, while Taylor and I hid comfortably behind our sunglasses.

I hadn't thought about what we actually had to cook on the barbecue when I wheeled it across from Bonanza.
Other than the occasional can of beef and vegetable soup or frozen chicken nuggets we were effectively rendered vegetarian these days. In the end all we could think of were some puny mushrooms from our garden and a packet of frozen wieners Lizzy found in Wendys. It was rough losing food as a topic of conversation. In the beginning Taylor and I had chewed through a heap of time reading copies of
Gourmet Traveller
from the waiting area of the surgery and thinking up meals we could make with our abundant food stocks. Now food was just something we needed to find enough of to survive.

When the sky turned from blue to pink I sizzled our tiny meal on the giant hotplate and Taylor made up one of our weirdo salads. We were still picking away at the food when the sky deepened to navy and a triple-seven jet flew over.

It was easy to forget that Carousel was just a couple of suburbs away from the Perth airport. With the runways flowing north–south, it was also beneath the flight path for what was once a shitload of air traffic heading in and out of the state. Either by accident or some hair-brained plan the hole in the dome offered a regular and unobstructed view of the belly of these planes, accompanied by the shattering roar of their
engines. Or at least it had until we arrived.

During our first few days each of us had thought we'd heard the sound of distant planes. I had imagined a fleet of domestic arrivals converging on a city in chaos, runways without controllers, terminals without staff, too far into their fuel to divert to anywhere else in the giant, sprawling state.

But those had been nothing like this. The deep growling stopped us dead.

‘What the fuck is that?' asked Taylor.

She didn't wait for an answer, instead dropping her plate and walking out of the tiki enclosure towards the garden. Lizzy and I followed. We gazed up at the dusky sky even though it was impossible to tell which direction the noise was coming from. Only that it was getting louder.

‘It sounds like a plane,' said Lizzy.

Taylor tried to reply but her words were drowned out. Plants started to tremble slightly at our feet. I looked around, wondering if a tidal wave was about to smash into Carousel and sweep us away to join the rest of the world.

The growling grew louder and louder. The noise was intense. Suddenly Rocky was beside me.

There was a tiny pause before a plane thundered
across our dome. All grey steel and flashing lights. For a moment the giant undercarriage completely blocked the sky.

A second later it was gone and the sound hit us with its full force. We covered our ears and turned away from the direction of the hidden craft. We were facing south.