I sat up on a bench beside the pick’n’mix candy dispensers and chewed on some stale jellybeans. Taylor surfaced a few minutes later. The sparkle had left her eyes. She sat beside me and grabbed a handful of beans for herself. The rain seemed to have eased.
‘Maybe the other side will fall in, too,’ I said, without conviction.
Taylor nodded but didn’t look at me.
She was crying.
I reached over to put a hand on her shoulder. We were sitting a little too far apart for it to be comfortable. After a moment I withdrew. Taylor sniffed and chewed on some beans.
‘Sorry,’ I said, mainly for being crap at comforting her, which I was, but I was also sorry about the roof, and everything else in the stupid centre.
‘You don’t care,’ she said.
I swallowed and looked at her.
‘About what?’ I asked, already knowing what she meant.
‘Getting out of here,’ she said.
I stared hard at the damp and dirty carpet.
‘I just feel numb,’ I said. It was true, but didn’t really explain anything.
Taylor wiped her nose and put the stale jellybeans aside.
She looked at me. I didn’t meet the gaze. I wasn’t up to the intensity that Taylor seemed to whip up out of nowhere. I felt bad for her, stuck here with the rest of us, the only one really trying to get out. She kept up her gaze. She and Lizzy would do this sometimes. As if they thought they could draw emotion from me via sheer force of will. The sweet stale sugar burned in the back of my throat. I swallowed and wiped a couple of tears away.
‘I’m not some mental fan who wants to be stuck in here with you guys forever,’ I said.
Taylor waited for me to continue. I tried to come up with something more to say.
‘I have a family and friends out there,’ I said.
It was the easy answer but Taylor seemed to let up.
‘You’re worried we’ll get out of here and your life won’t have changed,’ she said after a few moments.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ I replied. This was exactly how I felt.
‘I doubt that’s the case, Nox,’ said Taylor, sounding tired.
I felt like such an idiot. Petrified that we hadn’t seen the apocalypse. That the world was okay and going about its business as normal. Having Taylor Finn, and most likely Lizzy, know this was how I felt.
We sat in silence for a few minutes and listened to the distant grumble of thunder.
‘We should watch Happy Gilmore later,’ said Taylor, looking at the Adam Sandler cut-out on the floor.
‘I like Big Daddy,’ I said.
‘Are you serious? Big Daddy is the worst,’ she said. ‘That court case at the end where the dad gives that bullshit testimonial.’
‘It’s funny,’ I replied, shrugging her off. ‘And Happy Gilmore is about golf. Do you like Tin Cup too?’
‘Oh fuck off, do I like Tin Cup,’ she said. ‘Happy Gilmore is awesome. Everyone likes it. Unless you’re a weirdo and prefer Little Nicky or something.’
‘Little Nicky rules. So does The Waterboy,’ I replied, deadly serious.
‘Yeah? And Zohan?’ asked Taylor.
‘And Zohan,’ I replied.
We were both smiling now. It felt good to be talking crap again.
I hopped down and sloshed onto the wet carpet. Taylor followed.
We walked over to the corridor and picked up her tools. Neither of us wanted to continue with the doors today. Instead we retraced our steps back past the dome to JB’s where we warmed up watching old episodes of Friends and waited for Lizzy and Rocky to get bored with the storm.
9
We had been back to assess the hole in the projection roof a few times since the weather had cleared. In sunshine the tiny holes threw brilliant sparkles of light through the long, messy room. They were pretty and alluring, but offered no indication of how we might escape through the gap above. The room definitely only had one entrance, which sounded crazy when Rocky revealed to us how flammable film stock could be. Death via the shitty new Transformers film would be a sad way to go.
With this off the cards, and the Ford Fiesta fading from our minds, we shivered through our first grey and mindless winter in Carousel. There was no shortage of heaters in the centre, but with such large areas to keep warm, we still found ourselves hanging out in coats and jackets. Taylor and Lizzy refused to wear any kind of ugg boot. They were ‘so trashy’ and the wool inside was like ‘walking on top of some poor animal’. I tended to agree that they were pretty trashy, but we were living in Carousel so in a way it kind of made sense. Rocky had taken to wearing a black pair that came halfway up his shins. Combined with his skinny jeans and oversized hoodies it gave him a mythical look akin to a character out of Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings. The Finns and I often avoided making eye contact when Rocky surfaced in the morning for fear of flat-out laughter.
Not that the rest of us were looking our best either. Taylor’s and Lizzy’s hair was a constant source of angst. They would begrudgingly trust one another to perform trims and treatments in one of the boutiques. More often than not they would be unhappy with the results and sulk around the centre beneath a hood for weeks. Cutting Rocky’s and my hair was a much simpler exercise. I was currently getting around with one side of my head shaved close, along with the back, while the rest was left longer to produce a pretty deliberate edgy look that seemed way out of place in Carousel.
I tried to look at the style as part of a new artistic persona. I was writing regularly. Churning out poetry full of thinly veiled explorations of entrapment and confinement. I had also started, and abandoned, several novellas based on my angsty teenage years, my first year at university, or anything else that I could pull from something I was reading and adapt to fit my own history. I had no real sense of their success, but they all felt pretty fake after the first few pages and I wasn’t able to commit to one over the other.
I also started experimenting with the clothes I was wearing on long ventures throughout the centre. During one of these I found a brown leather jacket in Live. It was the type of thing that I would never normally consider wearing because it was so obvious. You didn’t just happen to throw on a leather jacket, you chose to wear one. Even if it looked good, this decision was somehow significant, and the kind of thing I usually avoided. But I liked this jacket. It felt natural and fitted my slightly longer arms and thinnish torso perfectly. After a few trips back to the store I decided to take it.
Taylor and Lizzy noticed me wearing it immediately. I did my best to act natural and play it down, but figured there’d be some comment flung my way. But there wasn’t. Until almost a week later when Taylor stopped and looked at me seriously.
‘You look fucking awesome in that jacket, Nox. With the hair and shit,’ she said, and turned away without adding anything further. I nodded and nearly broke my face holding in a smile. The compliment left me feeling more fragile than any criticism ever could.
Now that Lizzy’s studio was just about ready for action I decided to learn how to work the recording gear so I could help her out some more. It was mostly done on a computer program but we had also set up a small mixing desk to control the sound coming in. A lot of the time I just stood around listening to loops on headphones, playing with dials and quietly revelling in how cool it was to be hanging around a rock star in their studio. Lizzy had a whole bunch of stuff she had been tinkering with. But oddly nothing that was ready to lay down.
Taylor and Rocky had added gardening to their daily tasks. The four of us had watched a couple of movies recently that depicted post-apocalyptic stories of survival. They seemed a long way removed from our lives in Carousel, but still made us realise what a shit job we were all doing of staying alive.
The obvious way of remedying this seemed to be growing some food.
So, as winter set in, we all ventured to Backyard Bonanza and piled every pot we could find into trolleys, along with dozens of packets of seeds for lettuce, carrot,
sweet corn and whatever else we had been craving. Unfortunately they didn’t have soil so we had to cart this from Coles, who kept small generic bags of potting mix in the pest control and electrical aisle.
We filled the pots and set them in a neat circle beneath the dome where they would at least get some sunlight.
Many of the pots had remained barren. Trying to grow stuff like tomatoes and sweet corn inside a shopping centre in the middle of winter had proved overly ambitious. But other stuff like rocket and mushrooms had gone crazy. It was probably one of the most exciting things we had done in Carousel. Eating a rocket salad, or some mushrooms in a pot with powdered butter, or even just walking past the small pocket of green below the dome made us feel like we weren’t just sitting around, eating our way through a shopping centre. With the garden, and the doors, and the music and the writing, we were doing something more than just existing.
Something that was probably keeping us alive as much as anything.
Our makeshift lounge room in JB Hi-Fi seemed to expand by the week. We now had a variety of couches forming a large u-shape facing our favourite flatscreen. There were two glowing space heaters beaming up at us from in front of the screen, and a big square coffee table from Freedom, floating like a messy, urban island in the middle. It was strewn with a constant supply of DVDs, magazines, books, snack foods and dinner plates.
As the days grew colder we found our desire to venture to other places within the centre diminishing. We now cooked and ate in JB’s most of the time. We wheeled in a little gas cooker and a microwave and cleared off a table full of discount CDs for a prep area. Dishes were problematic as they required plumbing and the closest available was at the Coffee Club island. So Rocky and I constructed a kind of giant dish rack similar to those at Ikea restaurants and the four of us would take it in turns to wheel it over to the Coffee Club dishwasher once it was full or started to smell festy.
I glanced away from the TV and looked over at Rocky working through the dishes inside the island. He opened the dishwasher, releasing a wave of steam into the air. He coughed, holding his gloved hand up to his face. Rocky had developed a raking dry cough early in winter that he had been unable to shift.
‘Do you think that steam is bad for his cough?’ I asked the Finns, who sat on a couch adjacent.
They followed my gaze to Rocky.
‘It’s warm. Shouldn’t it be doing him good?’ said Taylor.
‘He needs echinacea. But I can’t find any more that’s in code,’ said Lizzy.
‘Have you seen his hand lately?’ I asked them both.
They nodded. Despite regular bathing and a chemist full of supplies, Rocky’s hand still hadn’t healed. He now walked and rode with it cupped in front of him like he was holding a tennis ball or asking for change. None of us knew what else we could do.
‘There is a bunch of antibiotics at Friendlies. I found a book that says most of the penicillin stuff works the same,’ said Lizzy.
‘You want to just flip him some pills and see how it goes?’ asked Taylor.
Lizzy glared at her.
‘We might have to. If we miss a dressing, or he gets some dirt in there, he could get blood poisoning or something,’ I said.
We were silent. None of us wanted to go down this path, but the alternatives were too frightening to get our heads around.
Rocky wheeled the big floating dish rack back over to us.
‘Alright, fine,’ said Taylor. ‘Rocky, have you ever had penicillin before?’
Lizzy sighed. Rocky left the dishes inside the door and carried his hand back to his spot on the couch.
‘Amoxicillin. For my throat,’ he replied.
Taylor and I looked at Lizzy. She shrugged.
‘We’re going to give you some antibiotics for your hand,’ said Taylor.
‘Are you allergic to anything, Rock?’ asked Lizzy.
‘Don’t think so,’ he replied.
‘You’ll have to stay off the booze for a bit, yeah,’ said Taylor. ‘No more Tia Maria.’
Rocky smiled. I couldn’t help but laugh. Somehow Taylor was both the funniest and most serious person in Carousel.
‘This episode is shit,’ said Rocky, looking at the TV which was aglow with our latest fad, nineties cult series The X-Files.
‘Call of Duty?’ I asked, referring to our gaming setup at the other side of the store.
Rocky nodded and we left Taylor and Lizzy alone on the couches. They watched us go.
We played for a few hours before Rocky was tired. I left him to sleep on the couch, covered in blankets and away from moisture. We took any chance we could to get him out of his damp and dingy tent at Camping World. I gave Taylor and Lizzy a wave and strolled out into the frigid, lonely centre.
It was Sunday and I’d already chosen a card for Lizzy earlier in the day. I picked up a bike I’d left at Pure ’n’ Natural and cycled it over to Dymocks. Lizzy’s bed lay tucked cosily into an aisle between Travel and Self Help. It looked warm and inviting. Lizzy was one of those people that always had a comfy looking bed, or found the best spot to sit on a train, or the best table in a restaurant.
I left the envelope beside her pillow. It contained a new short story I had written about a kid who took the wrong bus after school and rode it all the way across the city.
I started putting snippets of my writing in with the letters about a month ago. I was pretty sure Lizzy was reading them, but so far she hadn’t said anything. I don’t know what I wanted to happen. I guess for her to tell me they were good. But I wasn’t sure if this even mattered. Right now just putting them inside and having her say nothing felt fine.
As I left I noticed a shelf lined with cards from previous Sundays. It was chocked full. It struck me how many weeks we had seen in Carousel already. Once winter was over it would be almost a year. I wondered seriously whether there would be enough With Regret cards to last us the distance.
Walking back to Myer I fantasised about the owner of the Fiesta. Lately it felt like the only thing I thought about. She was in her twenties. A little older than me. The soft, rounded face of a girl I’d been to high school with. She was always warm. Tucked up in track pants and a red pullover. Sitting on my bunk listening to Bon Iver. Sipping on a smoothie at Pure ’n’ Natural. On the couch beside me watching old Hitchcock films.
I would fight her out of my mind, then quickly bring her back again. There was comfort and distraction in the fantasies. My imagination had always been strong enough to make something feel tangible, at least temporarily. I convinced myself that these moments were worth the comedown of reality that followed. Plus they turned the Fiesta into something I wasn’t afraid of. The girl was stronger than any of my nightmares, pushing them away somewhere deep and controllable. I began to bank on her for this.
I stood motionless under a hot shower for a half-hour to warm myself after a day of shivering. The air was frigid in Myer and the bathrooms were the coldest part.
I cycled through towels and dried and dressed in the tiny steam-filled cubicle to delay the cold. Then I hopped about at the mirror, brushing my teeth and assessing how my hair was growing out. Until I noticed the cubicle.
The second one from the end. Its door was closed. The guarding gnome stood solemnly outside.
Our bathroom pact had been breached.
I walked straight over to it. The fear still in my feet but threatening to rise up and overwhelm at any moment. The latch was open. I pushed and the door swung inwards.
The cubicle was empty.
I stood there with the toothbrush in my mouth. Minty foam gathering at the edges of my lips. The toilet stared back quietly like a witness claiming ignorance. I held the door open and slid the heavy little gnome back to where he should be. Where he was until somebody moved him.
Back at the bunk my legs jittered with nervous energy. The warmth of the shower had vanished in an instant. Somebody had used my bathroom. If it was one of us they had broken our biggest rule of keeping cubicles gnomed unl
ess in use. This was subconscious now. Not something any of us would forget.
I fought down a violent urge to bolt out of Myer. Any security I felt about the place had vanished. I needed to tell the others. To radio them and talk it through. Not because they would have a solution. But so they would freak out too, and I would try to rationalise things and calm them down, and in the process calm myself.
But something held me back.
I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the thought of leaving. The cubicle seemed like confirmation that our world would inevitably be smashed open, leaving us hanging outside of fate. Forced to create our identities again like kids out of school.
But my fear of this happening didn’t completely eclipse my feelings for the others. These were strong and the de-gnoming left each of them vulnerable.
I picked up my radio.
Before I could talk the speaker crackled and Lizzy screamed.
I arrived down at Dymocks just after Rocky and Taylor.
Lizzy was pacing about anxiously.
‘Rocky, you fuck! What were you doing in there anyway?’ said Lizzy.
Rocky shuffled uncomfortably, his hand twitching in front of him. The three of them glanced at me as I walked through the door.
‘What happened?’ I asked Taylor.
‘Rocky forgot to gnome a cubicle in Lizzy’s bathroom,’ said Taylor.
The words left me stunned.
I stole a look at Rocky. He seemed a little confused, but otherwise normal.
‘The gnome was lying on its back outside,’ added Lizzy.
She was pumped full of adrenaline.
‘It’s hard with my hand,’ said Rocky.
The three of us looked at him. It was difficult not to feel for the guy.
Lizzy sat back on the edge of her bed.
‘You just need to tell us, Rocky,’ said Taylor. ‘If you can’t prop the door just tell us so we know it will be closed.’
He nodded. I sat next to Lizzy and gave her shoulder a squeeze. She didn’t respond, instead focusing on the floor and trying to slow her breathing. Taylor watched us.
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