‘Did you open the door?’ she asked.
‘No. I ran the fuck out of there,’ Lizzy replied.
‘Okay. I’m going to go open it,’ said Taylor and turned to head out of the store.
‘Wait!’ I said and jumped up to follow.
‘Jesus, Nox,’ said Lizzy, bewildered.
‘I’ll come,’ I said to Taylor.
She stopped and waited for me. Lizzy and Rocky were left alone by the bed. Lizzy and Taylor shared a look.
‘Rocky, come with us, yeah,’ Taylor said.
Rocky padded over to join us.
We rounded the corner and walked down the corridor to where the words Named Lizzy had been scrawled underneath the label Ladies, on the toilet door. My pulse thumped through the back of my knees. It took all my control to follow Taylor casually into the room.
Rocky didn’t follow.
‘Shit. Rocky!’ called Taylor, as the door closed behind us.
She edged back past me to find out where he had gone. I followed and we found him stopped a few metres away by a different door.
‘Come on, Rocky,’ she said softly.
Rocky looked confused but followed obediently into the room. Taylor moved bravely over the cubicle and pushed open the door.
I started feeling weird again. A familiar dizziness swept down from somewhere above my head and flooded into my eyes. The layout of the centre swept out before me. A kind of three-dimensional floor plan with colour and texture. I felt myself towering above it on a savage tilt that would soon see me crash inside. I tried to get my bearings and find somewhere soft to land but swayed backward with a rush of nausea.
‘Nox,’ said Rocky softly.
I came to. He and Taylor were looking at me oddly. The cubicle was open and Taylor was retrieving the gnome from the floor.
‘Sorry. I’m still half asleep,’ I said.
Taylor nodded and put the gnome back in place.
‘Are we all sorted?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Taylor, walking past me. ‘Weirdo.’
Rocky followed. I glanced at the cubicle, then trailed behind.
Lizzy was back reading in her bed. Taylor moved over to the free side and climbed in under the covers. Lizzy watched her silently, looking neither pleased nor annoyed.
I really didn’t feel like hanging out with Rocky, but it seemed like the Finns had decided this for me.
‘Come on, Rock. You hungry?’ I asked and waited for him to follow me out of the room. Taylor and Lizzy glanced at me as we left. A hint of thanks in their gaze.
Rocky and I stayed up playing Mario Kart and eating stale Doritos until morning. As I wove my tiny machine around the colourful tracks my mind churned with a heady cycle of Fiestas, gnomes and cubicles. Every so often I would remember Rocky beside me. His body still. Gloved hand clumsily holding the controller. Avatar nailing turn after turn. Eyes dull in the flicker of the screen. Our adopted teenage brother. Chocked full of mystery, now more than ever.
10
I didn’t get a chance to think through the events of that night until a few days later. At Lizzy’s suggestion we conducted a kind of Carousel busy bee. Cleaning up the floor beneath the dome where our fledgling garden had been built. Mopping the corridors that we used the most. Tidying up JB’s after a winter of eating in and watching TV. Checking that all the toilets were gnomed. I was pretty sure that the season hadn’t yet broken outside of the centre but it felt as close to a spring-clean as anything.
Thankfully, due to the size of the centre, we were still able to hide away from our increasingly epic stockpiles of rubbish. Early in our stay we had collected the centre’s supply of rubbish bins and liners and created a giant grid inside Big W. In the aisles between bins we had laid an assortment of pest control – roach baits, ant rid, mouse traps – to keep the place from becoming infested.
The bins had filled much quicker than we expected and we had soon started using anything that was airtight. The environment in Big W was still hygienic; in fact, none of us had seen a single cockroach, something we were pleased about but which didn’t necessarily bode well for the situation outside, but we knew it wasn’t feasible forever. Like a bunch of cliché politicians, our rubbish management accommodated the present, with a clear disregard for the future.
Luckily we had remained pretty strict with our recycling. Life on earth may be over, but our bottles, papers and plastics were beautifully separate from our food waste and ready for the factory. This meant that Lizzy and I could experiment with our genius idea of using the decomposed slush at the bottom of our first bins to grow vegetables.
Taylor and Rocky watched our stupid grins as we wheeled bins into position beneath the dome and edged the lids open to heavy wafts of weird gases. We decided that the best way to control the smell, and potentially grow something edible, was to top up the bins with soil and wet everything together. With the mini bags of potting mix from Coles already running low this raised the stakes on our plan and left both Lizzy and me deliberating carefully over the number of seedlings and the position of bins, hoping something would grow in one of them so Taylor wouldn’t have us shovelling the soil back out a few weeks later.
The clean-up was a good idea. The collective tasks smoothed over our fractured relationships and gave us all something to concentrate on. Rocky had been particularly active and we were all pleased to see the second brand of antibiotics finally chasing the infection from his hand. The cough remained but that seemed a part of him now.
We spent nights relaxing with beer and stretching out muscles that were sore for the first time in a while.
After a long day on the mop I left Rocky watching TV with the Finns and drifted back to Myer to finish my beer and revisit the cubicle saga.
I coasted through the corridors on a BMX, nursing my drink and passing the stores like houses in a tired and familiar neighbourhood. I tried to stay relaxed as I headed into Myer and trudged upstairs. Discovering the de-gnomed cubicle had changed the dynamic of the place. The familiarity I had worked hard to develop had gone, leaving me anxious and eager to switch bedrooms to somewhere else in the centre. But with my discovery still a secret, and no really plausible reason to offer the Finns, I felt stuck there until something changed.
And I had no idea if it would. Lizzy’s discovery and Rocky’s admission had confused the hell out of me. It was hard to imagine Rocky using the toilet and leaving the door closed by accident. Even given the state of his hand this would mean he stepped over a gnome and left the room in a way he’d been drilled not to from day one. We’d all seen him do some pretty bizarro things, so maybe forgetting to gnome a door was pretty possible, even inevitable. But what was he doing in Lizzy’s bathroom?
I think this was the thing that concerned us the most. Dymocks was at the opposite end of the centre to where Rocky slept. It wasn’t close to JB’s or Hoyts or anywhere else he hung out regularly. Plus there were at least four other bathrooms within maybe a hundred metres of Lizzy’s. If Rocky really needed to go, there were other options.
Of course none of these questions even touched the issue of my own cubicle discovery. Whatever the hell this meant, and how, if at all, it was connected to Rocky, I had no idea. The simple assumption would be that Rocky was also responsible for de-gnoming my bathroom. He had a wild night where he roamed, full-bladdered, through all corners of Carousel using select toilets to break the centre’s only rule, and scare the crap out of his housemates.
As I lay on the bunk looking up at the ceiling the absurdity of this was enough to make me laugh. But what if it was somebody we didn’t know. Someone who had chosen to hide from us. Someone who knew things about Carousel that we didn’t. Someone who had now decided to silently, definitively, announce their arrival.
As long as the owner of the solitary Fiesta in the staff car park remained faceless, our imaginations ran in overdrive. This, combined with my cubicle discovery, pushed me dangerously close to the edge of something. My dreams changed. No longer tangibl
e or relevant, they swept out over massive vistas of time and space, dwarfing me physically and emotionally, and leaving me fragile and jittery in the mornings. I was also in constant worry over the safety of Rocky and the Finns. I would mask my relief at their arrival at breakfast, and make up excuses to radio them late at night.
None of this was sustainable. I had to tell the others, but felt I couldn’t until I found out more. I told myself this was to protect them from unnecessary stress. And maybe it was. But again I was crippled by the thought that the news would somehow see us thrust out of the centre. I understood that we had to break out. For Rocky, Taylor, all of us. But every instinct screamed at me to delay.
I stayed up late, bargaining with myself. If I wasn’t going to tell the others about the de-gnoming of my bathroom, I had to at least investigate and find out who was responsible. I would kill off my imagination with facts, then decide how to act on them.
I started spending my alone time looking through the centre for signs of another occupant. Lizzy didn’t really need me in Rugs a Million anymore, and Taylor and Rocky were occupied with doors and gardening in the dome, so I generally had the rest of Carousel to myself.
It might have been a Wednesday when I headed east toward the back entrance. This was the opposite side of the centre to where the Fiesta was parked, but I didn’t think that was relevant. The car was parked randomly and away from any of the labelled bays. This didn’t give me a lot to go by, but did suggest that maybe the driver wasn’t a storeowner in Carousel, or at least didn’t want to look like one. For some reason this pointed me eastward to the cheaper, less permanent stores.
The back of the centre was an area we generally left alone. It didn’t have any real food outlets except for a Wendys where the superdogs and thickshakes were long expired. It was also draughty and cold, only receiving a sliver of afternoon sun. I remembered there being some novelty stores and a Two-Dollar Shop where we found some buckets for waste storage, and also some offices that seemed like a management area. But otherwise it all felt fairly new and unexplored.
I had no method, wandering slowly through corridors, looking for something out of the ordinary in a centre with nothing but. The build-up of dust was really noticeable in the east end. Counters and benchtops held a thick film of grey.
Human skin.
I remembered this from a movie we’d seen recently. They had said that dust was predominantly human skin. Yet here it was in a centre without people. Maybe it was already in the air when we arrived here, and the static centre had since let it drop. The skin of a thousand dead shoppers.
It was easy to creep yourself out in Carousel.
I considered the dust a good thing though. Its heavy build up meant that any disturbances should be pretty noticeable. I started looking at it closely. Noticing how it sat fatly on horizontal surfaces, but also held in thinner clusters on the vertical. Testing different items, I noticed that dust could be disturbed in several ways. Touching it directly, sweeping past the vertical, creating a soft flow of wind with an arm or leg. I also noticed how it gathered in clusters at the edges of ventilation ducts, on surfaces that were smooth but not slippery. How it would sit, almost invisible, in the cotton of a shirt. CSI Carousel. I ran over snappy lines of dialogue in my head and considered adding forensic drama to my list of sketchy novella concepts.
But, from what I could see, the dust in the east end was stable and undisturbed. The costume stores and locksmiths sat dormant and steadfast. These were stores that were used to being quiet. They didn’t seem to miss people like Live or the Apple Store did. My presence in them was neither welcomed nor despised. Another window shopper, showing fleeting interest, but holding a separate agenda.
Centre Management was a series of nondescript shopfronts in a cul-de-sac leading away from the back entrance. The glass was tinted and there was a list of stickers identifying who could be found inside. I pushed open the heavy glass door and stepped into the coldest room in the whole freezing complex. I shook out a shiver and looked around the reception area. It was all pretty bland. A desk with a computer and a secret stash of gossip magazines. A couple of chairs for people waiting. A fish tank bubbling away with a solitary guppy anxiously circling the corpses of his tankmates. Doors leading to several offices and a kitchenette.
I sniffed at the stale, dank air and stepped around the desk to drop a bunch of fish food into the tank. The guppy gulped at it eagerly. I watched him and considered a rescue. There was a dreaded bulge at the back of his stomach that seemed more buoyant than the rest of him. It had him tipping dangerously upside down whenever his swimming slowed. I didn’t like his chances and spread some extra food across the surface. At least he wouldn’t go hungry.
The offices looked the same bar one, which was bigger and had its own couch and sitting area. I decided that this must be the manager’s office and worthy of some poking around. Inside I loaded up the computer and fished through some drawers. I found applications for liquor licences. Several giant-size Snickers bars. Unopened letters from a local politician. A packet of menthol cigarettes. A calculator. No master key or secret escape button.
On the computer I snooped through the private folders of the potentially deceased manager. Again, nothing unexpected. Without the internet I couldn’t refresh the email account, but the existing inbox was still pretty interesting. There was a lengthy exchange between Cathy, in whose seat I was sitting, and a potential shop owner named Mike from Ra’s Emporium. Mike sold Egyptian ornaments out of Victoria Park but wanted to relocate into the centre. Cathy reiterated that they had received his application but no spaces were currently available. Mike wasn’t able to accept this and asked Cathy to remove the lowest-paying existing tenant and offer him the space at a slightly higher price. Cathy had explained several times, in a polite yet businesslike tone, why this wasn’t possible and suggested he tried the Southlands complex or wait for a vacancy. Mike wasn’t happy. In his final email he confusingly called Cathy a capitalist anti-Semite and threatened to curse the centre. Ironically Mike signed off every email with Kindest regards to you and your family. Maybe Cathy should have listened.
There was also a brief email from Centre Security. It contained an update on the installation of some new security cameras in the car parks. We had often thought that the security department might give us some answers on our situation, but had been unable to find their offices in the centre. For a fleeting moment I thought they might have been in with the management but this wasn’t the case. I searched through Cathy’s folders for further correspondence with Security but found nothing of note. Frustratingly their email signature didn’t reveal their position in the centre either.
Back in reception, I found a rack of keys behind the desk. I shook these into my pocket without much hope and left the icy room behind. We had a massive stockpile of unlabelled keys already and none of them had proven very useful. The most exciting discovery was when Taylor found one that opened the Giant Claw vending machine and we freed the stockpile of cheap stuffed toys.
I slipped some coins into a vending machine next to Best & Less and drank a Solo. We were actually running low on coins at the moment so vending machines were a bit taboo. There were notes all over the centre, but no use for them. Coins on the other hand got us gameplay on the video games in Hoyts. Wash cycles in the laundromat beside Coles. And the chance to validate a hypothetical parking token and get the hell out of this place.
I drained the can and lay down on a couch beside Wendys to listen to The National. The centre was different with a soundtrack. The emptiness filled and it felt possible to think about people that I used to know. It gave my imprisonment a momentary context. I felt alive in these moments. Like I had as a teenager in a pot-filled garage with Rage Against the Machine. Or in bed with Heather while Soko played on Triple J. But Carousel really amplified the comedown at the end of the song. It was deathly quiet and still. A great big emotional vacuum. This kept my music listening limited and selective.
‘Hello? Nox?’
It was Lizzy. She sounded bored and a little annoyed. I lifted my radio to reply.
‘Yeah. Hi,’ I said.
‘What were you doing?’ she asked.
‘Sorry. Listening to music,’ I replied.
‘Who?’
‘The National.’
‘Trouble Will Find Me?’
‘High Violet.’
‘Nice.’
She was silent for a moment. Then we both tried to radio at the same time.
Static.
‘Sorry,’ I said, getting through a moment later. ‘Are you still in Rugs?’
‘No. The Apple Store. I need a new iPad,’ she replied. ‘Where are you?’
‘Just riding around,’ I said, having prepared for this question earlier.
‘What are we going to eat later?’ she wondered out loud.
‘I can’t eat any more refried beans for a while,’ I said.
‘Oh. You too?’ she asked.
‘What? No. I’m just over them.’
There was a little silence.
‘You love that Apple Store,’ I said.
‘Yeah. It’s rad. I’m pretty stupid though. I keep checking to see if the iPhones have been updated.’
I laughed but forgot to radio this through.
‘What else you doing? Surfing the net?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I wish,’ she replied.
The internet had been down since our arrival. This bummed out Rocky and me but we were used to it now. For Taylor and Lizzy I think it was still like a phantom limb.
‘Maybe we could have a pizza,’ said Lizzy.
Lizzy often suggested this but we had long since used up the frozen bases and none of us had bothered to learn how to make a dough.
‘Yeah,’ I said, noncommittal.
There was some more silence. Radios weren’t really designed for Taylor and Lizzy’s kind of rapid-fire, mindless chatter. There was a delay that provided an opportunity to shape questions and answers. Plus the act of pressing a button to speak placed an inherent importance on the message.
Carousel Page 8
