‘I don’t know. What do you guys think?’ she asked.
Before we could answer there was a sharp snap from the upper level. We jumped and looked at the ramp. The light drifting down from the door had gone. Like it was closed.
‘Fuck. Fuck,’ I said.
‘Did you prop it?’ asked Taylor.
I looked around for Rocky but couldn’t find him.
‘Nox?’ she asked again.
‘Rocky?’ I said.
Suddenly he was beside me.
‘Nox!?’ asked Taylor a third time.
‘Yeah I propped it. Come on,’ I said and pulled her and Lizzy toward the ramp.
We forgot the car and bolted back upstairs under the weight of our bags. As the ramp levelled off we turned to find only a slither of light spilling from the centre door.
‘Shit,’ I whispered.
The aircon in the centre had timed out and the drop in pressure had sucked it shut.
We raced over, fearing we had trapped ourselves out. The crowbar had fallen flat with the force of the door. My heart sank at the sight of the mallet head beside it.
Taylor crouched and followed the handle with her torch. The very end was still wedged in the door. She slipped her fingers in the small gap of light that remained. I followed. We pulled backward but it didn’t move. For a horrible moment it seemed like the airlock would be too strong for us. We pulled again. It broke and the door swung open freely.
A moment later we were back in Carousel.
6
We didn’t speak about our venture outside the centre for some days. Taylor’s and Lizzy’s nerves were shot. Mine too, probably. Rocky seemed normal, which was slightly concerning in itself. We had closed the door and trudged back to JB’s, backpacks full of supplies, where we watched Parks and Recreation, ate junk food and were gentle with one another.
When it was really late and we could no longer pretend we weren’t scared to be alone, each of us left JB’s. I walked back to my bed in Myer, too tired to cycle with just a Maglite to guide me. The normally welcoming glow of the fragrance section felt dull and lifeless. I passed giant glowing advertisements with Natalie Portman and Beyoncé like they were old trees in a neglected garden and trudged up the escalator, not bothering to carry any cardboard for the next trip down.
The lights had already timed out to three-quarter dark but I switched off the torch, knowing my way without them. I stopped at the pile of sheet sets bundled outside my bunks. I had only replaced my sheets a few days ago but felt like I could do with some fresh ones again tonight. I grabbed a random bundle and stepped through into my cove.
I made the bed in the murky light and ran over the events of the morning once again. Our failure to break out of the centre was no big deal. Well, perhaps it was, but I don’t think any of us, even Taylor, were really expecting success. I had packed the backpacks as comprehensively as I could, but never felt that my decisions would prove significant.
Even the discovery of the car park was a little underwhelming. We were always finding new places within this sleeping giant of a centre. Some nice toilets next to the Wendys outlet. A new row of video games at a bend in the corridor at Hoyts. The small garden with real plants lining some windows at the back entrance. I guess we could just add the staff car park onto this list and forget about it.
But there had been the Fiesta.
Nowhere else in our limited view of the exterior of the centre had we seen a car. Perhaps if they had been present from the first day, left outside or undercover at the back entrance, another part of our bizarre new world, then the solitary Fiesta might not have creeped us out.
I couldn’t think of a reason why there shouldn’t be a Fiesta in the staff car park. But Carousel had a kind of weird logic that its presence there disrupted. There were four of us. The power remained on. The food supply was abundant. This was the logic we understood. Or if not understood, at least accepted.
The Fiesta left us swinging limply in the realm of fate. It reminded us that, however much we adapted to the centre, our existence remained fluid. We could attempt to break out and set our own agenda. But the reality was that our circumstances were being defined for us, and the Fiesta was part of that.
It also meant that there could be someone else in the centre with us. The thought sent a spike of adrenaline through my arms and I tucked the sheets in hard. Discovering Rocky in Target had been a great thing for us, and him. But there was something sinister about the owner of the small hatchback parked below. All of us had felt it. The way they had parked the car across two bays. As if well aware that the centre was, or would remain, empty. If this person had been here since the first day then they were actively hiding from us, or dead. If they had arrived recently through the fastened door then they were somehow in on the Carousel phenomenon. Either way the Fiesta appeared to spell trouble.
I finished with the sheets and turned all the lamps out bar one. I slid into bed and pulled a quilt up around my face. The level felt too quiet for me to sleep, so I played some XX on a new iPod and stared at the display chest opposite. I was almost asleep when I realised it was Sunday and I hadn’t given Lizzy a With Regret card.
I lay still and considered whether the day’s events rendered this acceptable. I sighed, knowing that if anything they probably made the card routine even more important.
I dragged myself out of the beautiful warmth and pulled on my favourite grey hoodie and some jeans. Not wanting to clunk around the centre and wake up the others, I went for some quiet loafers. Then I took the Maglite over to the giftware section to find a card.
I had given Lizzy some truly terrible cards over the weeks. Life gets in the way – I’ll make it next time. Or The dog ate my homework … you know the deal. Bordering on delirium, I wasn’t too fussy this time. I went for a card with an illustrated bird flying through a grey urban landscape on the front, with the destination of a solitary birdbath on the back. Inside it said, Good luck in your new oasis, my apologies that I couldn’t make a splash. It didn’t make a lot of sense but I wrote inside, sealed it up and set off to Dymocks.
Lizzy was in her bed reading Burning for Revenge from the John Marsden teen series. She dipped the cover at the soft shuffle of my approach and looked at her watch.
‘Cutting it fine, Nox,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I replied and passed her the card.
She opened it and smirked briefly at the contents. I sat on a sofa beside the bed and wrapped myself in a blanket.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. Bit creeped out,’ I replied. ‘You?’
‘Not really,’ she said.
‘Serious?’
‘I bet the normal demographic for Fiesta owners in Perth is like, female, nineteen to twenty-six,’ she replied.
I smiled a little.
‘You think there’s been a car-full of ladies shopping in Miss Shop all this time?’ I asked.
‘Most likely,’ she said.
‘Wow, they must be shy,’ I said.
‘Shy is fine,’ said Lizzy.
Usually we could go on talking crap like this for a while. Tonight it felt a little forced.
‘How is Taylor?’ I asked, more seriously.
‘No idea,’ she replied.
‘Do you really think there’s somebody else in here with us?’ I asked.
‘God, I don’t know,’ she answered.
We sat in silence for a while.
‘I was thinking about last time we played here in Perth. At that old arts centre,’ she said.
‘In Fremantle. I was there,’ I said. ‘You guys totally ignored me.’
‘We’re famous. Of course we did,’ said Lizzy.
‘Anyway, we were so pumped about hanging out in the place before the show. It’s like this tiny castle, yeah. They pretty much gave us an entire wing to ourselves. I remember sitting in this big room after sound check, drinking a beer and looking up at the awesome ceilings. And Taylor was just wandering through the halls, looki
ng at people’s art projects. Nobody around.’
I nodded.
‘Then we googled and found out the place was built as an insane asylum where they locked people up and dished out shock therapy and shit like that. Both of us got creeped out and spent the rest of the pre-show in a van out the front.’
Lizzy looked at me.
‘Nothing changed in the place except what we knew about it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want that to happen here. I’m not going to let a fucking Ford Fiesta creep me out of the only good stuff about being alive and living in a mall.’
Her eyes were fierce and they were posing me a question. Maybe not a question, but a challenge. The idea of not meeting it scared the hell out of me.
7
Life in Carousel felt pretty normal in the weeks that followed. There wasn’t much we could do about the mysterious Fiesta. If it meant that somebody else was in the centre then it seemed inevitable we would eventually meet them. But we weren’t going to go out looking. They would have to come to us.
Plus we weren’t exactly hiding away or keeping quiet. If anything there was more of a party atmosphere than ever. Lizzy had pulled together some DJ decks and a projector and had taken to turning the dome into a weirdo abandoned club with music mashed to old sci-fi movies. Rocky would coast around on a series of bikes and scooters in a kind of Zen state that belied his entrapment, while Taylor and I would hang out on a couple of deckchairs from Backyard Bonanza, drinking a new region of wine and looking up at the dim twinkle of stars through the distant hole in the dome.
We’d often talk of how we might scale the long, curving walls to reach freedom. The top of the dome was three storeys up and made predominantly of glass. Without cleaning, the glass had developed a greenish film that looked slippery as hell. If a rope could be somehow thrown up to catch on the top, and the weight of the climber was not enough to pull the whole structure down, scaling the slippery exterior would probably result in you breaking your neck in the sweet fresh air of freedom.
Drinking away to Lizzy’s maniacal performances led to more bizarre ideas involving catapults and skate ramps.
I was getting through a lot of reading, more than I ever have before, and started thinking about working on a few short stories to see if that was something I might want to do. I kept quiet about the focus of my reading, leaving Taylor and Lizzy with something to gossip about in their now banal lives. I think that gossip was one of the things they missed the most. Their lives pre-Carousel seemed pretty full and there were always things to discuss regarding other bands, touring venues, girlfriends, shopping, haircuts. The list was long and constantly updated.
One night Lizzy actually started writing a list of the things she missed on the floor. Taylor and I frowned upon this initially as it seemed to go against our pact of keeping a clean and tidy centre. But then Rocky drifted over and tagged HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS in massive cursive letters outside Smiggle. It gave him one of the biggest smiles we had seen and somehow made the whole thing okay.
I kind of liked it now. Maybe not the writing so much, but discovering what the others had done. Walking down to Pure ’n’ Natural for breakfast and noticing a huge B outside Myer, then following it along until it spelt out BEACH.
One day I stopped outside JB’s and noticed a tiny, beautiful word scribed in the corner. I couldn’t stop staring at it. It said Mum.
Taylor continued working her way around the centre checking the doors. The events surrounding the car park didn’t seem to put her off. She was happy with the routine and hopeful that one of the thousands of doors would swing open to reveal some sunshine and a logical reason for us being here.
Generally I thought it was best for all of us to assume this would never happen and get on with living as best we could. I don’t think it was resignation or giving up. You just couldn’t think of Carousel with normal logic or it would do your head in.
I started to notice that Rocky was looking paler than normal and slightly flabby, despite his thin frame. He was always on a bike but with the smooth floors and new tyres, riding around the centre didn’t really require any effort. So I goaded him into doing some daily exercise to keep him, and me, in some kind of health.
We tried a bunch of things before settling on a hybrid form of indoor soccer played in a rectangular arm of the central corridor that was kept vacant for exhibitions, charity car raffles and school performances. It was pretty normal for a shiny new car to be parked in centres like Carousel with a desk in front selling tickets for a chance to win. But, for whatever reason, there was no car there when we arrived. I often wondered what we might do if there was. Whether one of the windows could be smashed through instead of rebounding whatever we threw at it. Or just how quickly we could get around the place. I’m sure Rocky had thought about this too. He seemed to like cars. Or maybe just anything with wheels. The idea of him racing around the narrow corridors in a new Commodore was pretty frightening.
We had taken a rubberised beach net from Sports Power and set it up at the back of the rectangle, which was walled in to give any stage that was erected a single frontage. The walls kept the ball from straying off into David Jones too often and we had a few pretty intense half-court games of one on one.
At around lunchtime on a Friday I found myself open with the ball rebounding nicely off the side wall for a shot on goal.
I hit it flush, but offline. The ball smashed through the glass of the Sussan store adjacent. A crunching noise rang through the centre.
Rocky and I stood still and stared at the glass. Both fighting down the heavy dose of guilt that would come with this type of thing outside of Carousel. A few seconds later our radios chimed.
‘Are you guys okay? asked Taylor.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ I radioed back.
‘Is Rocky with you?’ asked Lizzy.
I looked at Rocky and nodded to his radio.
‘Nox smashed the window at Sussan,’ he said, ratting me out.
‘Nice one, Nox,’ said Lizzy.
‘Sorry. I know it’s your favourite,’ I replied.
‘Are you cleaning up the glass?’ asked Taylor.
‘We’re talking to you,’ replied Rocky, deadpan.
I smiled.
‘Thanks, Rocky,’ said Taylor. ‘Maybe you can once we’ve finished, yeah.’
‘We’ll do it now,’ I said.
‘Hey, when you’ve quit screwing around come down to Kitchen Warehouse. We’re making soup,’ said Lizzy.
‘Okay, cool,’ I replied.
The ball had made a jagged hole halfway up the front window. I didn’t know if this was unusual, but it looked pretty fragile. We gathered the glass on the floor into a messy pile and I left to find some gaffer tape to run in a cross over the window like I’d seen on TV. The Two-Dollar Shop only had cheap looking masking tape so I trudged down the hall and around the corner to Dick Smith.
When I arrived back Rocky was standing still, looking at his hand. A steady flow of blood was streaming from his palm onto the floor.
‘Shit, Rocky. You cut yourself?’ I asked, putting the tape on the floor.
He nodded and kept focused on the blood. I took his wrist and gently turned it over to look at the wound. A coin size chunk of glass was sticking out of the fleshy part of his hand.
‘Fuck,’ I said.
I looked at his face. It seemed calm, as per usual. I kept a hold of his wrist and reached over to grab a thin scarf from a rack nearby.
‘I’m going to take it out, okay? When I do, can you put this scarf in your hand and clench it into a fist?’
Rocky glanced at the scarf for a moment.
‘Can I have a blue one?’ he asked.
I looked at him, then at the beige scarf in my hand.
‘Mum has that one,’ he said.
‘Yeah, of course,’ I replied and reached back for a blue version.
I put the scarf in Rocky’s good hand and took a firm grip on the glass. I hesitated for a second, then pulled upward. Rocky gave a
small shudder as the glass slid slowly out of his flesh.
It was a fucking iceberg. The glass inside him more than double the size of that outside. I stared at it, slightly astounded, until I realised that Rocky hadn’t clenched the scarf in his hand. Instead he was watching the increased flow of blood run down his pale fingers.
‘Rocky! The scarf,’ I said.
He came to and limply clenched the scarf. It quickly turned red.
I used the gaffer tape to circle his hand and stop the bleeding until we could get to Friendlies Chemist. When it was secure and the pool of blood on the floor had stopped expanding, I radioed Taylor and Lizzy and prepared for a blasting.
The three of us spent an hour or so in the kitchenette at Friendlies dealing with the wound. We realised quickly that it probably needed stitches but none of us were physically or mentally capable of performing this. So for a half-hour we just cleaned and disinfected and thought through our options.
Eventually the bleeding had almost stopped so it was plausible that keeping the wound dressed and clean would eventually see it scab over and heal. The trouble was that the gash was right in the middle of Rocky’s hand, so any movement would open it up and restart the bleeding. We settled on a large swab of cotton padding, wrapped tight to his palm by gauze, which we taped over with medical adhesive. It was large and a little clumsy and we could see it coming off within hours unless Rocky stayed still.
Scanning the long fluorescent aisles, Lizzy found a kind of hessian glove used to exfoliate dead skin. When she arrived back in the kitchenette wearing the glove and a manic smile, Taylor and I thought she had lost her shit. But, to Lizzy’s credit, the glove made for a perfect outer barrier to Rocky’s makeshift bandage. It kept all the dressing in place but still allowed his skin to breathe underneath. Taylor popped open a couple of Panadol Rapids and gave them to Rocky for the pain. She put the remainder of the packet in his shorts along with dosage instructions. Rocky listened, but had shown no real sign of discomfort throughout the process. Before long he had drifted back to JB’s.
I met Taylor and Lizzy at Kitchen Warehouse a little while later. They were hovering over a pot of soup simmering on a small portable gas burner at the back of the store. I sat sheepishly on the bench adjacent. Neither of them could look at me.
Carousel Page 5
