Carousel

by Brendan Ritchie

  It didn’t.

  Rocky kept up with us easily, often holding out his empty cup to signify he was ready for more. I gave up on worrying about him for the night. I got the feeling the Finns had also. Rachel’s arrival reminded us that we had precious little control over the universe right now, and Rocky’s fate was unlikely to be decided by any of us.

  Alarmingly, Rachel seemed to get pretty sloppy after just a couple of drinks. But, to her credit, she seemed to maintain this level for most of the night. She was chatty and told us a bunch of things we probably shouldn’t know about her welfare dodging and sexual partners. Rachel was the type of unfiltered, excessively honest semi-bogan that thrived in reality TV land. She was addictive in the way of a painful back massage. We screwed up our faces listening to her, but didn’t want it to stop.

  Taylor drank harder than anyone. She concentrated on each cup like it was a door she was trying to open. Making sure it all went down, before refilling and starting over. Several times I noticed Lizzy watching her. I think she was trying to gauge how low her sister had fallen. How much the latest disappointment was weighing on her. For anyone else the jovial booziness would have made this impossible to assess. But I got the feeling that somehow Lizzy knew.

  We spread out from the smallish store into the adjacent corridor and watched Rachel bust out dance moves with bottles of pre-mix in both hands. I couldn’t work out whether she was an amazing dancer or an awful one. Her style was interpretive and random and none of us could drag our eyes away. It was kind of beautiful watching somebody so uninhibited fill a room like that. It made me think of kindergarten where I remembered kids proudly announcing their names like kings and queens at the top of tiny playground forts, oblivious or embracing of their scrappy clothing and unemployed parents. Seriously drunk, Rocky joined her and found himself smiling happily as the middle-aged mother ground herself against his skinny frame.

  He remained on the dance floor when Rachel had tired and gave us an amazing hacky sack performance. We had all seen Rocky messing around with the small red sack before, but had no idea of his talents. He kept it in the air forever with a series of kicks and shoulders that had him dancing all over the floor and us in hysterics watching.

  At one stage I saw one of the Finns comforting the other as she cried into her hands on a beanbag. I assumed it would be Taylor who was upset, as she had been earlier, but was surprised to see it was Lizzy being comforted. My heart sunk a little.

  I think she might have been worried about the seriousness of her sister’s drinking. I saw Taylor put her vodka aside and drink some water. This seemed to calm Lizzy and within a few minutes she was back out in the corridor kicking around a soccer ball. Somehow Lizzy had ended up as the middle child in our Carousel family and I suddenly realised how much that must suck.

  Before she passed out on a beanbag, Taylor grabbed me by the jacket for a drunken D & M.

  ‘Nox,’ she said, eyes all glazed and hair falling everywhere.

  ‘Yo,’ I replied.

  She pushed me over to a very specific spot on the floor. We sat and drank a little more.

  ‘You’re awesome, Nox. But you haven’t worked it out,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  She hugged me and spilled her cup out onto the floor.

  ‘I love you guys,’ I said.

  Taylor brushed this off and pushed me on the shoulder like I was the drunk one.

  ‘I’m getting us out of here. And you need to stop. You need to start …’ she trailed off.

  I looked at her and nodded, trying desperately hard to be sober and serious. Lizzy was watching us with some amusement from across the store.

  ‘Nox,’ said Taylor.

  I waited. She had something else to say but she wavered unsteadily and couldn’t get anything out. Arms wrapped around me from behind. It was Lizzy with a bear hug.

  ‘Why so serious?!’ she said in a deep voice, pulling a line from The Dark Knight.

  Taylor looked up through her hair and a flicker of something passed between them. She stumbled to her feet and kissed us both on the head. Lizzy let me go and we watched Taylor fall onto a beanbag and into sleep.

  Her final sentence hung, unfinished and forgotten.

  Rocky crashed out next. He had been sitting upright on a beanbag for a while, his head dipping with sleep every few minutes before bobbing back up to look around and smile. After a while Lizzy slid over and shuffled the beans so that he could lie back more comfortably. A minute later he was asleep.

  I had been pulling myself back from total drunkenness for a few hours, knowing that another quick drink or two would end my night and bring forward a morning that none of us wanted to think about. I walked out of the store and over to the adjacent Mens toilets. Rachel stood at the basin as if she was about to wash her hands, but her drunken mind had wandered. A de-gnomed door stood behind her.

  ‘Hey!’ she said, as if I’d walked into the Ladies.

  I smiled and trudged into one of the cubicles. I started pissing, oblivious to the churning noise I was sending throughout the room. Rachel was still at the basin when I finished.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  She swung her head up and smiled. ‘Drunk,’ she said, defiantly.

  I smiled and leant back against the cool of the tiled bench. Rachel ran some water over her hands. The music coming from the liquor store had stopped and the bathroom felt oddly peaceful.

  ‘Everybody’s dead, aren’t they?’ I asked her softly.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Rachel. ‘The TVs are just fucked.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘The fuck should I know?’

  ‘Why do you keep cleaning this place?’ I asked.

  ‘I do my job. They can’t send me back there,’ she replied, with a flicker of drunken defiance.

  ‘Back where? Prison?’ I asked.

  Rachel grunted.

  ‘Are there other cleaners?’ I asked.

  ‘Geri?’ she replied. ‘Never heard of her.’

  Rocky must have already asked.

  ‘Have you seen your ex or your kids?’ I tried.

  ‘Left his place wide open. Nothing there now,’ she replied, laughing.

  ‘Are you worried about them?’ I asked.

  Rachel ignored this and turned from the sink to look me up and down.

  ‘You guys are artists, hey?’ she asked.

  ‘Taylor and Lizzy are. They’re in a band called Taylor & Lizzy,’ I replied, pretty confused.

  Rachel swayed forward and pushed her face up to mine. Her hands slipped down past my chest to my pants and she rubbed the front of them. I watched it happening, but felt disconnected. Suddenly her hair was in my face and she was kissing me. She smelt like Pantene and her tongue moved in a practised rhythm that belied her inebriation. She fell back against the basin and laughed, waiting for me to follow and continue with things. I was hard and felt like I had to, but something stopped me. I swerved back out into the milky light of the corridor.

  Lizzy was curled up on the last beanbag in the store. I stood above her, and the others, and tried to think of where I should sleep. Rachel wandered across to a softly lit corner housing whiskey and liqueurs. She circled the carpet like a cat, then curled up and fell asleep without a blanket, pillow or anything.

  I left Liquor Central and found myself walking back to JB’s. At one point I realised this was wrong, not knowing why, but certain that I had to go back and sleep with the others. I was shivering in the icy dark of the corridors so I ripped a picnic blanket out of a basket in Kitchen Witch and pulled it over my shoulders. Shortly after I found myself on a couch out the front of Liquor Central. I wrapped myself up and squinted to make out the lumpy outlines of my housemates on their beanbags inside.

  Sleep swallowed me with a darkness that felt immense.

  15

  Rachel left Carousel early the next morning.

  Somehow I knew she had gone. The place felt normal again. Not c
razy and hyper and part of some weird experiment.

  Plus I think I had seen her go.

  I had woken suddenly from a deep, drunken sleep on the thin leather couch. The morning brightness of the eastern end was overwhelming. Immediately I retreated, rolling over and tucking my head beneath the blanket the best that I could. It was too short though. Out of a gap in the top I saw a figure moving down the corridor. Tight, faded jeans and a wash of bottle-blonde hair. Quickly I willed the sleep to take me back.

  The next time I woke, Taylor was tapping me on the arm and telling me we had to go and find Rachel. The four of us searched and yelled through enough of the centre to confirm that Rachel had either left, or was hiding from us and didn’t want to be found. This seemed unlikely so we ventured back to the cleaning cupboard and found it packed away and locked as it was before she arrived. Lizzy also noticed that one of the display MacBooks in the Apple Store had been ripped from its cable.

  Taylor and I checked Rachel’s door. It was locked and cold and gave nothing away. None of us said a word. I felt like I had maybe an hour before my morning-after drunkenness morphed into a severe hangover.

  ‘I’m going home to sleep,’ I said.

  I set off down the corridor toward Myer without waiting for a reply.

  A few steps later I felt Rocky and the Finns behind me, each carrying their own fragile bodies back to bed. I stopped at Friendlies and took some Panadol Rapids from the shelf, along with two one-point-five litre waters and a handful of energy bars. I wanted to crawl into bed and stay there for weeks. Carousel had been willing me to do so since we arrived. Finally I was ready to submit.

  Winter eased during our hibernation in the weeks that followed. It wasn’t sudden. Few things were in Carousel. The mornings were still cold, the light still filtered grey. But the days felt longer and we seemed to lounge about for hours before the lights timed out and darkness crept its way through the centre. Forgotten seeds sprouted in pots and bins beneath the dome as proper sunlight swept across for a time at midday. We watched them curiously as they grew from identical green spikes to form something recognisable. Most powered upward to a height of a few inches before wilting and growing pale due to a lack of nutrients in the generic potting mix. Hardier plants like lettuce, basil and shallots managed to survive, offering us strange salads and a break from the diminishing supermarket items.

  I spent long mornings in the bookstores reading with a purpose I hadn’t experienced before. I read Hemingway, Coetzee and Murakami. Starting with one title and churning right through the shelf until it was done and I caught my breath with some magazines. I also read a lot of history. Filling gaping holes in my knowledge of World War II, the Space Race and early Australian explorers.

  At the end of these sessions I would change into Skins and cross trainers and jog the circumference of the centre, stopping at the dome where the air felt fresh like a forest or a beach. The jogging had stripped me of a few kilos but I was gradually gaining them back with weight training in Sports Power. I was lean now, but moulded, my body a project that I could focus on to burn through the hours. I carefully searched the centre for supplements that would provide amino acids and protein to my overworked muscles, leaving them tight but defined as the spring took hold.

  Long ago, Taylor and Lizzy might have ribbed me for these sudden obsessions. But now we each had commitments that were perhaps irrational but also crucial to our survival in the centre. Lizzy continued to tinker with the studio that had seemed ready for use months ago. She would add another instrument, drape another rug, decorate the already spectacular space to the point where it seemed perfect, before taking something down and starting over. With every week that passed, the idea of her recording in there seemed more and more remote. It had become something else now. A shrine perhaps. She would play anywhere but Rugs a Million. Plugging a keyboard into a socket in the dome while we were gardening, or thumbing her favourite guitar on a stool at Coffee Club.

  For Taylor the obsession with the doors still held firm. It had grown into something more than escape. A kind of responsibility or obligation. A groundsman checking the lawns and gardens. An architect building a huge mental map. Lately she would head out alone with her iPod and a backpack, checking the radio every hour with a double tap before resuming with her work and mystery playlists.

  Rocky had stopped joining Taylor on these ventures but for the odd occasion. He was sick and we encouraged rest without great confidence, but with nothing much else to offer. While our hangovers from that bizarro night with Rachel had lingered for a day and a night before drifting into tiredness and rabid hunger, Rocky’s had stayed, morphing with his cough to form a weird virus that took the remaining colour from his face and left him placid and couch-bound. During the days we would be reassured by his appetite and eagerness to see us as we dropped in and out of JB’s for cups of tea and to pick up things we had conveniently left behind. But at night, in the stale, cool air of the centre his cough would take a hold and each of us would listen carefully as it seemed to lower into his chest and rumble with an echo that made us shudder.

  Rocky had something that his body couldn’t shake. It gave Carousel a clock that in the past had never existed.

  We hadn’t seen Rachel since our night in Liquor Central. Our time with her seemed faded and distant almost as soon as it had passed. My mind couldn’t place it as a good memory or bad. The drinking and debauchery had been long overdue, and in a way vital to our existence. Taylor and I had spoken honestly and, although the words had been clouded with booze and time, our connection had been reaffirmed and remained strong ever since. But Rocky had grown sicker that night, and the only human we had seen since arriving had chosen to abandon us after less than twenty-four hours in the centre.

  Rachel’s existence built on a mystery of which we had long since lost comprehension. I had spent hours at the foot of Lizzy’s bed talking through the parameters of Carousel without ever managing to map the world. Rachel’s arrival confirmed that life existed outside of the centre, although she offered little concrete information about this, or none that we could remember. Our memories of the night with her were clouded and we cursed ourselves for the level of our drinking. We remembered that she was on parole for something, and that her job as a cleaner here was somehow a part of that agreement. The fact that she had honoured this parole duty and kept turning up to clean an abandoned shopping centre, despite whatever it was that had happened in the world, suggested that Rachel was a little mental, but also pretty keen to stay onside with the law. Until she found out we were trapped here and seemingly decided to never return.

  It was difficult to know what all of this meant for the four of us in Carousel. Taylor and I fought pretty hard to keep our situation somehow rationalised. We both knew that there was obviously some crazy stuff going on. Maybe even something fantastical. I was trapped in a shopping centre in suburban Perth with Taylor and Lizzy Finn, after all. But we still weren’t keen to accept the notion that we would never be free of the centre, and that freedom wouldn’t hold a world similar to the one we remembered, with some answers as to what the hell we were doing in here.

  Lizzy had been more accepting of our situation from the beginning. She never believed Taylor could force a door open, or that somebody had locked us in here maliciously. Lizzy saw the mystery of Carousel for what it was and didn’t waste her time labelling it as anything else. There was defeat in her perspective, but in a strange way it also held the most hope.

  The fact that Rachel could exit the centre alone, but not in our presence, was particularly unnerving. Maybe this was a coincidence. Or maybe she just swapped cards on us. But it also seemed possible that someone, somewhere, may have stopped Rachel from letting us out. This wasn’t exactly a reassuring thought, but it kind of aligned with Lizzy’s idea that our entrapment in the centre wasn’t arbitrary, and could even be seen as some bizarro protection against the apocalypse – if there actually was one.

  But then why was Rachel so
eager to get back out there? Her kids were the obvious answer. She’d told me that they had disappeared somewhere with her ex, and probably the rest of the city. But maybe they were still out there somewhere. Even the remote chance of reuniting with them meant she couldn’t risk staying in Carousel. I got that.

  But maybe Carousel wasn’t the type of place you wanted to stay in anyway.

  This wasn’t something the Finns and I chose to discuss. However, our diminishing food supplies and Rocky’s mystery illness made a decent case for it. Rachel seemed a little strange, maybe even outside of the context of whatever was happening in the world, but her desire to get the hell out of Carousel and not come back was seriously unnerving. Rachel was a survivor. Somebody that had probably been knocked down continuously throughout life, but had kept pulling herself up and struggling onward. She had an instinct that a lot of people didn’t. And this instinct had told her to leave.

  16

  In the angsty aftermath of Rachel’s visit, and the ongoing concern over Rocky’s sickness, the Finns and I made an effort to keep some lightness in Carousel. I had pulled a barbecue into the dome and started constructing a tiki-style ‘outdoor’ area ahead of the warmer weather. There were bamboo torches in Backyard Bonanza, and a trashy party goods outlet in the east end had fake lanterns and plastic decorations. With these in position against a wall near the sushi bar I began shifting in some outdoor furniture.

  Rocky and I discovered a kind of hand-operated forklift a while ago, out the back of Bonanza. With a large platform on wheels and a handle that could be pushed or pulled, it quickly became a favourite around Carousel. I loaded up a couple of deckchairs and set out westward to the dome.