Carousel (24 page)

We left the bikes at the edge of the dome and trudged up the escalators to the cinema. The foyer was dry now but evidence of the hole in the roof and the winter rains was all over the carpet. We had propped open the office door after our first visit to stop any build-up of water in the event of a heavy downpour. Since then moisture had seeped down and out, slowly turning the floors from red
to a deep brown, teeming with bacteria. We took light, wavering steps through to the candy bar and led Lizzy upstairs to Projection Five.

We struggled our way up the slippery, collapsed roof until it levelled and Lizzy stopped to gaze upward. Taylor and I followed. If the view from the roof in daylight was unimpressive, at night it was anything but.

The sky was giant and imposing.

There were scatterings of stars and a half moon, but it was the blackness that struck us most. Inside Carousel our sky was a constant shade of dirty white. When Taylor and I had ventured outside previously the overcast skies had mirrored this. But not now. The vacuum of our inebriation sucked in an immense sweep of southern sky and we all remembered that we were part of the universe. Yes, we were tiny and insignificant. But we were also a part of something.

Lizzy sighed and smiled a little. Taylor and I joined her.

We moved carefully along the sunken cinema roof to find the edge where we could look out upon the small vista we had seen previously. Lights greeted us as we approached.

‘Wow,' said Lizzy.

Suburban Perth was vast and black as it spread silently away to the west. Yet amid the darkness there
were small scatterings of light. The warm glow of a hidden porch. Blue light from a petrol station or car yard. An intersection with traffic lights shifting from green to red, awaiting cars that never arrive. The pockets seemed random. Some clustered together, others distant and lonely. Carousel wasn't the only place that was somehow still on the grid.

‘Total zombie apocalypse,' I said.

‘Shut up, Nox,' said Taylor and swigged back some wine.

Lizzy laughed and grabbed the bottle. Taylor and I laughed too. For a moment the three of us were in hysterics.

‘Oh my god. Stop it,' said Taylor. ‘There's a fucking ledge here somewhere.'

We settled and I took out a small packet of expensive cigars I'd found in Liquor Central. I'd cut the end off a couple a while back and shuffled through until I found one that was ready to smoke. I lit it up and inhaled too much.

‘Seriously though,' I said with a cough. ‘What the fuck is going on out there?'

Taylor and Lizzy glanced at me, then each other, and burst out laughing. Lizzy took the cigar from me and tried it out.

‘Mystery, Nox. A city full of mystery,' said Lizzy.

I looked at her, wondering what she meant.

‘I bet Rachel is out there somewhere,' said Taylor. ‘Drinking pre-mix bourbon and watching reality TV reruns.'

‘She'll outlive us all,' I said.

We passed around the wine and cigar in muddled circles, unsure which was ruining the taste of which. I felt bold and stupid and like nothing was off limits.

‘Are you guys stuck on “Posthumous”?' I said.

The Finns shared a glance and seemed to decide that it was okay to answer.

‘You know what it's about, yeah?' asked Lizzy.

I shook my head and felt like an idiot.

‘Someone who is waiting to get famous posthumously, but it never happens because everyone else is dead too,' said Taylor.

Her big, beautiful eyes glazed importantly in the distant lights. Lizzy looked at her sister.

‘Oh,' I mumbled.

‘It has a tricky structure that we're trying to figure out,' said Lizzy.

We stood in silence for a moment and finished the wine.

‘Where is the airport from here?' asked Lizzy, after a while.

I looked up at the sky and tried to get some bearing. The stars blurred and I closed my eyes tightly.

‘Over there,' said Taylor, pointing to our right. ‘Past David Jones. I think.'

Lizzy gazed in the direction of the distant, blocky building. It seemed like something Taylor had already thought about. I watched them both and remembered the conversation I'd stumbled into. Their longing for the jet plane and their mother.

I felt drunk and low and on the edge of something big. I stared hard at the floor and swallowed it down without knowing what it was.

I turned and moved back toward the glowing hole of light in the cinema roof.

‘Careful, Nox,' said Taylor.

I waved a hand to say that I'd heard. The Finns chatted away behind me as I edged reluctantly back down into Carousel.

Back in the cinema staff room I splashed water on my face in the kitchenette for what felt like ages. I cupped some awkwardly in my hand and swallowed it. My mouth felt numb and furry as it passed over. The spike of cold woke me slightly and I wandered back out into the foyer to wait for the Finns. A tacky gold railing bordered the area and I looked down upon the
entrance below. Our garden looked small and sad from a distance. A broken-down relic of our failed society.

I stepped away and slumped into the console of the
Devil Driver
game in the foyer. The screen looped with clips of players making turns and driving over cliff-faces. My head started to spin. I turned away and stared at the floor.

Something was written on the tiles beside me.

I tried to focus my gaze. The writing was stumpy and familiar.

It spelled out ROCKY.

He had written it himself. Adding his name to all the other things we missed and scrawled out on the floor. Sometime before he died. Before he knew he would die.

I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. If I had gone into the storeroom earlier we would have had a door to get him out. And a car to take him somewhere. I tried again and started to cry.

The Finns found me a little while later. Bundled up in the console. Inconsolable and mumbling about a garage door. Eventually I calmed enough to spill my secrets. I told them about the terrible smell in the storeroom. About how I had chickened out and left it for months and months, wiping it from my mind before finally going back to discover Peter's skeleton on the floor. I
told them about the wallet and the keys and the Fiesta with nothing in the hatch but some charcoal drawings. And finally I told them about the remote control.

The three of us headed straight to the car park.

It was hard to know whether Taylor and Lizzy really expected the garage door to open. My revelation in the
Devil Driver
console was drunken and confused. I remember their faces close to mine, staring at me seriously as they tried to pull the logic from my ramblings. I must have convinced them enough to try and the tone of our evening altered irrevocably.

Their faces had brightened when I fumbled my way into the Fiesta with Peter's keys and showed them the controller. Taylor reached across and pressed it quickly. Then tried again. I told her to wait and held it down deliberately like I had some special touch. Each time we stared at the black void across the car park and waited for the door to open. Each time it stayed silent and closed.

I dashed back up the ramp and brought down a stack of new batteries. Taylor and Lizzy sat in the Fiesta and waited. The hope already drifting from their tired, drunken eyes. We opened the controller and replaced the battery with a fresh one. Nothing changed. We searched
the glove box for another controller but there was none. I took it off the visor and walked it over to the door. Pressing the button over and over until I saw the Finns step out of the car and head back toward the ramp.

I had waited too long. Once again Carousel had found a way to keep us inside. Taylor and Lizzy turned away from me and trudged up the ramp. I followed them back into Carousel and the three of us slept for the best part of a week.

I felt flat and lifeless without the trajectory of my secret escape plan. Time went from a delicate, tension-filled entity to something vague and unimportant. I stopped writing and skulked about the centre beneath hoods and sunglasses, doing chores that would help out the Finns but not look like shallow attempts to apologise or regain their trust.

Summer spread across Carousel like an uncomfortable blanket. The garden sprang to life in random clusters of manic vegetables. They shot upward rapidly before developing patches of stunted fruit and foliage. The air lost its damp and started to smell differently. Not fresher, but without the dankness of the cold concrete enclosure we had become used to in the wet months. Occasionally tiny wafts of the outside would drift past our noses bringing trees, flowers and soil all the way from the hills above the city.

Taylor and Lizzy finished ‘Posthumous' and
completed their album. Their seventh since starting out as teenagers playing at colleges and cafes. Sometimes they still met in Rugs a Million to listen through the final mixes or discuss how the songs could be played live. But the journey of the album was over.

I hung out with them in small snatches over breakfasts and television. There was no real grudge or animosity about the Fiesta and our failed escape. Our relationship had drifted beyond that kind of thing to something more permanent. Lizzy and I still exchanged cards on Sundays and Mondays but they lacked the spark they once had. We would read them in private, then file them away like a postcard from the place where you already lived.

From a distance I watched the Finns carefully and they seemed neither broken nor complete. The album had been important but it seemed like they knew that a void would exist once it ended. Lizzy kept a small grip on the music, toying with the mixes and playing the arrangements out loud. She filled the remaining time with books, reading constantly and widely across Carousel's selection. I imagined her photographed for some boutique design magazine while she read in sunshine on deckchairs beneath the dome. On stools over coffee and biscuits at Pure 'n' Natural. In her giant,
awesome bed at the back of JB's.

After the album Taylor stopped trying to open the doors. Instead she turned to gardening. She pulled out every book and magazine she could find on the subject and built a reference library in milk crates at the entrance to the dome. She cultivated lumps of steaming compost in black rubbish bags and turned it through soil to infuse it with nutrients and offer fuel to struggling plants. Our diets improved significantly with foods like cherry tomato and eggplant that we hadn't eaten fresh forever. But Taylor didn't just grow vegetables. She grew flowers and succulents and weird looking plants I'd never seen before. She wasn't just gardening to keep us alive. The dome was a place of life now and Taylor gravitated there whenever she could.

The summer also brought life to Rocky's garden bed at the east entrance. His bed was now covered in a scattering of ground covers. Some areas were dense and vibrant, others were wispy and gentle. Taylor carefully planted other things in there too. Pockets of colour and life. It was my favourite place to sit now. I would wander down after breakfast for long yoga sessions before the heat of the day reached in at us from outside. Or to listen to one of my iPods. Each one packed with music I had painstakingly loaded to my iTunes via
CDs from JB's. A lot of stuff I hadn't heard before. I took the time to lie down there and discover new artists, occasionally stumbling onto a band like Camera Obscura or The Mountain Goats that I couldn't imagine having lived all these years without.

I also listened to Taylor & Lizzy. The new album that had yet to be named, heard or played, but which Lizzy gave to me casually one afternoon a few weeks back. It was dense and moody but jumped into my ears with a vibrancy that floored me over and over again.

I was lying on my back listening to ‘Little Low' when Lizzy emerged into the sunshine of the eastern end. I sat up and hit
Pause
like I'd been caught doing something I shouldn't.

‘Hey,' she said.

‘Hi. What's up?' I replied.

Lizzy shrugged and sat down next to me on the couch.

‘What are you listening to?' she asked.

I hesitated for a moment, but couldn't lie to her.

‘Taylor & Lizzy,' I confessed.

‘Finally,' she said.

I smiled, but quickly realised she was serious.

‘I listen to you guys all the time,' I said.

‘Really?' Lizzy asked. ‘Whenever I ask you it's always something else.'

I thought about this and realised it was true.

‘I think I was just embarrassed,' I said.

Lizzy sighed and shook her head.

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘I didn't realise you cared.'

‘That our last remaining fan has stopped listening to us?' she said.

‘Oh, okay. I get it,' I said.

We sat in silence for a bit.

‘The new stuff is pretty amazing. I think,' I said carefully.

‘Really?' asked Lizzy, and looked at me.

‘Yeah. I don't really know how to explain it,' I said. ‘It's like nothing I've heard before. But it also kind of feels like it's been in my head forever. Like some distant childhood memory that resurfaced to tell me something important.'

Lizzy smiled and looked away.

‘We could totally write that on the cover,' she said.

I smiled and looked at her.

‘Does it feel weird having finished it?' I asked.

Lizzy took a breath, then shrugged.

‘Until it's played somewhere, or listened to by people, it's just a bunch of files on a computer,' she said.

I nodded and kept quiet to see if she wanted to say anything else. She didn't.

We stared at Rocky's garden in calm, slow-moving silence.

‘Taylor's gardening is fucking spectacular,' I said.

‘Yep,' said Lizzy.

We stayed there for a while until an idea swirled out of the soupy mush of my brain.

In order to broadcast something on an AM radio frequency you need several things. A power source, a transformer to modulate the electrical signal, a tiny square thing called an oscillator to turn the modulated signal into radio waves, and preferably somewhere high to send them out via an antenna. And of course, some audio.