Carousel (21 page)

Each song seemed such a mix of intangible elements. Even with just the two of them playing, the possibilities were terrifyingly endless. But somehow they knew when it wasn't right. And when it was. This seemed vital. Maybe the defining trait of an artist and something I had never considered.

Sitting behind that laptop, flicking through magazines and sipping on juice boxes, I was probably learning more about art than I had ever done.

Taylor and I left for Coles late into the afternoon with ‘Little Low' still quite a way from being down. We took a couple of our favourite trolleys from JB's and wheeled them smoothly through the dim quiet of the southern corridors.

Our radios crackled.

‘Can you guys grab some frozen corn, please?' asked Lizzy.

‘We're out. There's only that pea and corn mix left,' replied Taylor.

‘No cobs?' asked Lizzy.

Taylor glanced at me. I shook my head.

‘Nox says no cobs,' she said.

‘Dammit to hell,' said Lizzy.

We continued on toward the shops.

‘There might be some out the back of Red Rooster,' I said to Taylor.

She groaned. It was a long walk with no guarantee.

‘What about Red Rooster?' asked Lizzy, on cue.

Taylor and I shared a look.

‘We'll check it out if we have time, yeah,' replied Taylor.

‘Thanks. You're the best,' said Lizzy.

We pushed our trolleys through the abandoned checkouts of Coles and worked our way around the store.

The aisles were a strange patchwork of empty and full. We had cleared out the obvious things like canned vegetables and packet noodles pretty comprehensively, but there was still a shitload of rice and pasta. A lot
of it was stale, although oddly still well in code. Our main challenge was to find additions that would offer vitamins and proteins to this stockpile of carbs and keep us from looking like a trio of pasty anaemic teenagers from the
before
segment of some reality TV show.

The confectionary aisle looked pretty ridiculous. We had gutted the place of our favourite items, leaving whole sections of shelves empty but for lonely price tags. Then there was other stuff like liquorice and peppermint chocolate that hadn't been touched and stood on sale, without a hope of being purchased. We all had our strange favourites and Rocky's death left reminders of this scattered throughout Coles. Consumption of the red curry pastes in aisle seven had ceased. As had the Tropical Sunrise shower gel. Taylor sniffed the bright pink liquid and we shared a small smile.

Rocky was all over Carousel.

His words littering the floor. His bikes scattered from one end to the other. Each one pristine and perfectly maintained. His bathroom in the back of Sports Power. A pathway of towels from the shower to the toilet, then back to the sink. Piles of surfing magazines with bikini models strewn throughout. The giant fluffy robe he found in David Jones and sometimes surfaced in at breakfast, a trail of white behind him like a wedding
dress. His Nintendo controller, worn and stained by his awkward, sweaty grip. The radio that chirped with our voices for a week or so before Taylor rose abruptly from the couch to switch it off forever.

And his garden bed.

We had buried Rocky in the only place we could. The rectangular garden bed running lengthways along the windows at the eastern entrance. It was narrow but deep with soil and the only place that real plants grew, aside from the dome. We planted ornamental seeds all across the bed and hoped to hell we had done the right thing by burying him there. So far the bed had remained intact, but nothing had sprouted.

I guess one day it would stop and we wouldn't see him everywhere any longer. But then Carousel still had a lot of mystery. Now Rocky was a part of that.

Taylor and I piled our trolleys with whatever we could and wheeled out of the supermarket for the food hall. It was a bit of a walk to the south-east corner but there was still some daylight left and neither of us felt like lying to Lizzy. We passed the cleaning cupboard that marked our bizarre night with Rachel and swung left through a corridor with Baby on a Budget and The Body Shop. The hall ahead looked tired and forgotten. But for
Taylor's occasional door-checking it largely was.

We had pretty much stopped cooking fast food down here since the deep-frying oils started smelling like they needed replacing. There was probably a simple way of doing this but it seemed like too much effort and Happy Meals weren't really crucial to our survival. Occasionally the storage freezers had some stuff we could use in our regular kitchen so the hall wasn't completely useless. Sometimes we would have a craving for potato and gravy from KFC, or the tiny chocolate mousse packs from Chicken Treat, and would venture down to raid the place. It was very possible that Red Rooster had a giant stockpile of frozen corncobs.

Taylor left me her trolley and wandered over to Red Rooster and Chicken Treat. They were almost identical and both had corncobs on the menu. I looked around the hall and tried to think of what else we might want.

My gaze came to rest on Curry in a Hurry.

Suddenly I needed to know what was in that storeroom. It had hung over me like a silent, breathless cloud for almost a year now. Carousel had dragged me over enough coals already. The storeroom was worth a few more.

‘I'm just going to check out the curry place,' I radioed through to Taylor.

‘Sure,' radioed Taylor.

‘Pappadums!' radioed Lizzy.

I left the trolleys and moved over to the small, silent store.

The chubby Indian chef towered over me like a dusty relic. I edged around the counter and glanced apprehensively at the storeroom. The air smelt fine, as it did last time until I had opened the door. I knelt beneath the counter and found the key where I'd left it.

My chest started thumping like crazy. I rose and took a few breaths.

Taylor was still looking for corn. The hall was quiet and dull and looked about as dangerous as the baby store we passed on the way in. Still my heart thumped and I wanted to be out of there. But it felt like I had no choice now.

I took a small step toward the storeroom door, slid the key inside and turned. The door swung inward.

I waited for the smell. It didn't come.

There was an odour, but it smelt similar to the musty scent we experienced all the time in Carousel. Recycled air mixed with dust and the remnants of industrial cleaner.

I stepped forward and switched on the light. It flickered, hummed black for two long seconds, then
sprang to life, illuminating a normal looking storeroom with a small pile of clothing on the floor. The floor was tiled and had a square drain for mopping. There was a large basin for washing up with a small mirror positioned above. A wide storage rack covered the far wall next to the cooktops housing a bunch of spices and pastes, and some huge sacks of rice. An exhaust fan whirred slowly in the ceiling.

I stood in the middle of the room and breathed the air cautiously, as if my eyes might be lying. Maybe the room smelt a little unusual. It was hard to tell with the spices.

My eyes drifted back to the clothes. There was something odd about the way they were lying. Not balled up or folded, but kind of flattened against the floor and stretched out like they were on display.

I inhaled and my hair went rigid.

There was a bone sticking out of the jeans.

Suddenly I noticed slight bulges all over the clothing. I stepped closer and saw a deep black stain on the tiles. I traced it along as it snaked away from the clothes to the drain in the floor. My mouth was dry and tacky.

‘You still in there?' radioed Taylor.

I spun around, half expecting to see her behind me.

‘Yeah,' I radioed.

‘Okay. Well, I have some corn. Let's get out of here,' she radioed.

‘Cool,' I replied.

I quickly stepped over to the rack to grab something so I wouldn't be found out. There was a bunch of red curry pastes. I took a couple in homage to Rocky. As I pulled them away I noticed a small bundle of items on the bottom of the rack. There was a wallet, half a packet of Extra gum and a set of car keys.

I knelt down and opened the wallet. On the licence was a middle-aged Indian man named Peter Mistry. He had a couple of credit cards, a membership at Blockbuster, a loyalty card from Java Juice and zero cash.

I stared at the wallet and tried to make my brain work. What had happened in here?

‘Nox?' radioed Taylor.

I pocketed the car keys, locked the door and got the hell out of there.

Taylor gave me one of her looks and we set off back to JB's. She led, I followed. As we edged back past the dome and into the last remaining daylight I took the keys from my pocket and snuck a look at them. I hadn't noticed before but there was a small label on the biggest key.

It read Ford.

I held onto my discovery like a silent indigestion for the rest of the week. It felt totally wrong to not spill the news to Taylor and Lizzy. I had done this before and swore it would never happen again. But something about this felt personal. Like it was for me to deal with and nobody else. And I rationalised by convincing myself I had nothing much to tell.

We found keys in Carousel all the time. They held some excitement to begin with. After all, we were trapped in a centre with a thousand locked doors. But months of failure had left them dull. There were piles of them around JB's, most probably untested, most probably useless. There were even car keys among these. Spare sets left under counters and in desk draws. But none of us considered them significant.

The fact that someone had died in the storeroom was shocking, but also not totally unexpected. Carousel was cavernous and had been a boarded up fortress for well
over a year now. So far we had survived this, but Rocky hadn't, and who is to say that others hadn't joined him, either silently away from us, or before we arrived. It was easiest to assume that the centre only existed in its current state since we found each other inside, but maybe not. Maybe it had been a gateway to some mysterious parallel dimension for years before us, and, like colonisers of a weirdo civilisation, we were only just now discovering the horrors of its past.

For all we knew there could be hundreds of bodies throughout Carousel.

These possibilities offered flickers of explanation, but nothing that would stick. I knew instinctively that the body was significant. The wallet empty of cash. The storeroom key outside of the room, rather than in with the body. The skeleton positioned conveniently above the drain. The exhaust fan silently draining the room of gas as it decomposed.

And the licence.

Peter Mistry was a middle-aged Indian man. I had never seen anybody but pasty-white teenagers working at Curry in a Hurry. It seemed way too clichéd to think that he was an employee or manager.

It sounded stupid but my main fear in telling the Finns was that it might disrupt the album. Something important
was happening in that trashy rug store. I could sense it. But more importantly, in spite of their cool, experienced demeanours, I think Taylor and Lizzy could too.

None of us were any closer to knowing why we were here. In a way the horror of Rocky's death seemed to confirm that it was all random. There could be no rationalising the slow death of a teenager from legionnaires in a modern shopping complex. But on the other hand it was terrible to think of him, and us, as simple victims of circumstance. Surely something that could result in this kind of tragedy must have a weight in the universe.

Taylor and Lizzy's album couldn't justify Rocky's death, or our imprisonment, or whatever the hell it was that was going on outside of Carousel. But unlike anything else we had done since our arrival, it felt like a part of this new world. It was born out of circumstances that didn't exist prior, and maybe would never exist again. And the music sounded different. Like it already resonated even though it was still fractured and incomplete. Like it couldn't have emerged out of any other place and circumstance but this one. Not a concept album, but somehow a concept of its own.

It had also been a saviour. In the most clichéd way that music saves a tortured artist from drugs, it had
saved the Finns, and maybe me also, from a grief that may have overwhelmed us. We weren't really cut out to deal with Rocky in life, and by no means in death. Those first few days after we took him to view his last storm were like nothing I had experienced before. Living felt dangerously arbitrary and it seemed like nothing Carousel could offer would ever make things okay. In a normal world you would take on more shifts at a job. Or build a temporary obsession with something on TV. Or have sex with somebody you met at a gig and treated you like everything was normal, because you didn't tell them it wasn't. And eventually the sadness would fade into numbness, out of which other emotions could emerge. But not in Carousel. It seemed entirely possible that here we would be forced to live out the rest of our days in sadness.

But the Finns had found their music. And that had kickstarted my work on the short stories. And it seemed like their purpose would be enough for the three of us.

So long as it was protected.

There may have been deeper psychological reasons for not pulling Taylor and Lizzy into my dilemma once again. Taylor might have tied my innate secrecy to a weird fear of actually leaving Carousel. I had felt this before, quite powerfully, and in a lot of ways I still
felt scared. But I think it was a different fear now. And maybe not as irrational. I could trace some of it back to logic. This gave me some comfort, and it made my decision to go back to the staff car park alone seem slightly less insane.

The Carousel ghost train was in motion again. This time I wasn't going to ride it around for days, jumping at every turn. I was getting off and turning the lights on to find out what the hell was going on.

I stayed up late on the couch with the Fiesta keys stuffed deep in my pocket. Lizzy drifted off to her corner of the room early with a book and half a glass of wine. Taylor remained with me until twelve. We watched
Drugstore Cowboy
and the start of
Teen Wolf
before she sat up and stretched, then shuffled off to bed. I stayed on the couch for the rest of the movie to ensure the Finns were asleep.