Carousel

by Brendan Ritchie

  I chewed down an energy bar and wrote for two hours before Taylor and Lizzy fired up their amps. The final story I was working on had spilled out rapidly last week and I was currently redrafting and trying to work out if it was awesome or shit. The line seemed ridiculously fine and I was regularly unsure of its position. I reworked some sections and it felt like it might even be finished. Either way I shut down the laptop and wandered downstairs toward the fractured, alluring music.

  Taylor had joined Lizzy in the Rugs a Million studio two days after Rocky died. Their musical animosity was forgotten and they began slowly, gradually putting together songs for an album. Death had a way of returning people to their most simple form of existence. I had seen it as a teenager when my nanna died. The family worked, ate and slept with a diligence that made each process significant and strangely vivid. Everything else, that which filled a life, was suspended and momentarily superfluous.

  For Taylor and Lizzy Finn, existence meant music.

  Initially I had left them alone in this process. What they were doing seemed precious and delicate. There was no talk of what was happening, or any tangible shift in their behaviour. They just drifted over to the studio after long, lazy breakfasts and emerged hours later; sometimes looking wired, sometimes placid and relaxed. After endless months of musical hibernation, Taylor and Lizzy were gradually waking each other and I was anxious not to get in the way.

  During the first few weeks their music crept out into the centre in fleeting and broken snatches. I imagined them catching each other up on the hundreds of riffs and progressions that had been swirling through their heads since our arrival. Lizzy listening to Taylor with a weird sisterly awe as she moved from one riff to another, then another again, as if she had been preparing them in secret for months. Each one raw and fractured, but full of angst as she seemed to single out an emotion and find its truth and irony at the same time. Then Taylor, pacing about the room in a half smile as Lizzy infused it with shifting, magnetic pop from a bank of sounds she’d held secure for months, but had been strangely unable to release.

  Together they would sift through these sounds with a kind of floating diligence. Always exploring, but never without direction. Finding the core of the other’s work without fuss, then building, unwrapping, layering texture until it took on a new but somehow inevitable sound.

  The mysteries of Taylor and Lizzy’s music had become a little clearer when they asked me to come and help record some stuff on Lizzy’s MacBook. I had arrived early and stood rigid at the laptop with my finger hovering nervously above record. Taylor and Lizzy glanced at one another and laughed. I felt a huge gulf of coolness open between us, the Finns on one side, me on the other.

  ‘Nox. Relax a little, yeah. This stuff takes a while,’ said Taylor.

  Since then I had managed to loosen up and we developed a routine where I would turn up in the studio an hour or so after them and man the Pro Tools recording window until one of them nodded for me to hit Record. I’d watch as the guitar or keyboard snaked along the timeline and onto the hard drive where I labelled it and backed it up before they went again. There was some structure in the process and I focused on this and tried hard to keep the gulf narrow.

  Lizzy was sipping on a juice box and watching Taylor run over some chords on her guitar when I arrived. I smiled hello and edged past Taylor to take up my position at the laptop. It was a casual looking workspace now. When I began to understand the pace of the recording process, with its experimentation, multiple takes and long creative discussions, I brought in a bunch of magazines. I would flick through these, semi-interested, but never consumed, trying to give the Finns space for their work without seeming outright bored or uninterested. A book would be too much. As was just sitting at the screen and waiting. Recording an album seemed to require a shifting mix of focus and downtime. Taylor and Lizzy morphed into this seamlessly. For me it took some practice.

  I was starting to see how a song would start out with a riff or some keys and unpack to become a skeleton for something full and complicated. Taylor and Lizzy would have me record this trigger, then play it back as they experimented with other sounds to fill it out. Once they were happy I would record the keyboard and guitar as separate tracks. At some point they would switch to vocals and play all the tracks in a rough mix through headphones whilst I recorded their voices in solitude. This gave Taylor and Lizzy a demo of the song, which they would critique and we would begin rerecording tracks until there were files and files and the Finns made a wordless decision to move on. Everything about their workflow made sense but at the same time it was like nothing I expected.

  Taylor came over to sit beside me. I shifted across and she adjusted some settings on the laptop.

  ‘How far did you run this morning?’ she asked.

  ‘Twelve k,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re a machine, Nox,’ she said.

  I nodded and watched the screen. The program was still a bit of a mystery to me.

  ‘You go past the back entrance?’ she asked after a moment.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, feeling oddly guilty. ‘Nothing is growing yet.’

  Taylor glanced at me and nodded. Lizzy watched us from behind a keyboard across the room.

  ‘Want to do a Coles run with me later?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied.

  She finished with the laptop and joined Lizzy at the keyboard.

  We spent the afternoon recording Lizzy playing keys for a song that Taylor was calling ‘Little Low’. She had written the lyrics and guitar and needed Lizzy to fill out the opening and add to the chorus. After this, the two of them had to work out what they were going to do with the drums and bass.

  Even though I’d been to a bunch of Taylor & Lizzy shows and seen the rest of the band, it didn’t click that recording an album without these additional musicians might be problematic. I listened through lengthy discussions over the arrangement of songs as the Finns weighed up leaving out the drums or bass, or playing something simple themselves. They tried the latter on several occasions, and I thought it sounded fine. But it was clear that Taylor and Lizzy knew otherwise. I could see their frustration as they struggled to pull sounds from instruments they didn’t usually play. In these moments I wondered if this was another thing that defined them as real artists. The admission that their skills in one area, despite seeming fine to the rest of the world, were insufficient and couldn’t offer the song what they knew it required. They wouldn’t settle, but it was more than that. They knew.

  Each song seemed such a mix of intangible elements. Even with just the two of them playing, the possibilities were terrifyingly endless. But somehow they knew when it wasn’t right. And when it was. This seemed vital. Maybe the defining trait of an artist and something I had never considered.

  Sitting behind that laptop, flicking through magazines and sipping on juice boxes, I was probably learning more about art than I had ever done.

  Taylor and I left for Coles late into the afternoon with ‘Little Low’ still quite a way from being down. We took a couple of our favourite trolleys from JB’s and wheeled them smoothly through the dim quiet of the southern corridors.

  Our radios crackled.

  ‘Can you guys grab some frozen corn, please?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘We’re out. There’s only that pea and corn mix left,’ replied Taylor.

  ‘No cobs?’ asked Lizzy.

  Taylor glanced at me. I shook my head.

  ‘Nox says no cobs,’ she said.

  ‘Dammit to hell,’ said Lizzy.

  We continued on toward the shops.

  ‘There might be some out the back of Red Rooster,’ I said to Taylor.

  She groaned. It was a long walk with no guarantee.

  ‘What about Red Rooster?’ asked Lizzy, on cue.

  Taylor and I shared a look.

  ‘We’ll check it out if we have time, yeah,’ replied Taylor.

  ‘Thanks. You’re the best,’ said Lizzy.

  We p
ushed our trolleys through the abandoned checkouts of Coles and worked our way around the store.

  The aisles were a strange patchwork of empty and full. We had cleared out the obvious things like canned vegetables and packet noodles pretty comprehensively, but there was still a shitload of rice and pasta. A lot of it was stale, although oddly still well in code. Our main challenge was to find additions that would offer vitamins and proteins to this stockpile of carbs and keep us from looking like a trio of pasty anaemic teenagers from the before segment of some reality TV show.

  The confectionary aisle looked pretty ridiculous. We had gutted the place of our favourite items, leaving whole sections of shelves empty but for lonely price tags. Then there was other stuff like liquorice and peppermint chocolate that hadn’t been touched and stood on sale, without a hope of being purchased. We all had our strange favourites and Rocky’s death left reminders of this scattered throughout Coles. Consumption of the red curry pastes in aisle seven had ceased. As had the Tropical Sunrise shower gel. Taylor sniffed the bright pink liquid and we shared a small smile.

  Rocky was all over Carousel.

  His words littering the floor. His bikes scattered from one end to the other. Each one pristine and perfectly maintained. His bathroom in the back of Sports Power. A pathway of towels from the shower to the toilet, then back to the sink. Piles of surfing magazines with bikini models strewn throughout. The giant fluffy robe he found in David Jones and sometimes surfaced in at breakfast, a trail of white behind him like a wedding dress. His Nintendo controller, worn and stained by his awkward, sweaty grip. The radio that chirped with our voices for a week or so before Taylor rose abruptly from the couch to switch it off forever.

  And his garden bed.

  We had buried Rocky in the only place we could. The rectangular garden bed running lengthways along the windows at the eastern entrance. It was narrow but deep with soil and the only place that real plants grew, aside from the dome. We planted ornamental seeds all across the bed and hoped to hell we had done the right thing by burying him there. So far the bed had remained intact, but nothing had sprouted.

  I guess one day it would stop and we wouldn’t see him everywhere any longer. But then Carousel still had a lot of mystery. Now Rocky was a part of that.

  Taylor and I piled our trolleys with whatever we could and wheeled out of the supermarket for the food hall. It was a bit of a walk to the south-east corner but there was still some daylight left and neither of us felt like lying to Lizzy. We passed the cleaning cupboard that marked our bizarre night with Rachel and swung left through a corridor with Baby on a Budget and The Body Shop. The hall ahead looked tired and forgotten. But for Taylor’s occasional door-checking it largely was.

  We had pretty much stopped cooking fast food down here since the deep-frying oils started smelling like they needed replacing. There was probably a simple way of doing this but it seemed like too much effort and Happy Meals weren’t really crucial to our survival. Occasionally the storage freezers had some stuff we could use in our regular kitchen so the hall wasn’t completely useless. Sometimes we would have a craving for potato and gravy from KFC, or the tiny chocolate mousse packs from Chicken Treat, and would venture down to raid the place. It was very possible that Red Rooster had a giant stockpile of frozen corncobs.

  Taylor left me her trolley and wandered over to Red Rooster and Chicken Treat. They were almost identical and both had corncobs on the menu. I looked around the hall and tried to think of what else we might want.

  My gaze came to rest on Curry in a Hurry.

  Suddenly I needed to know what was in that storeroom. It had hung over me like a silent, breathless cloud for almost a year now. Carousel had dragged me over enough coals already. The storeroom was worth a few more.

  ‘I’m just going to check out the curry place,’ I radioed through to Taylor.

  ‘Sure,’ radioed Taylor.

  ‘Pappadums!’ radioed Lizzy.

  I left the trolleys and moved over to the small, silent store.

  The chubby Indian chef towered over me like a dusty relic. I edged around the counter and glanced apprehensively at the storeroom. The air smelt fine, as it did last time until I had opened the door. I knelt beneath the counter and found the key where I’d left it.

  My chest started thumping like crazy. I rose and took a few breaths.

  Taylor was still looking for corn. The hall was quiet and dull and looked about as dangerous as the baby store we passed on the way in. Still my heart thumped and I wanted to be out of there. But it felt like I had no choice now.

  I took a small step toward the storeroom door, slid the key inside and turned. The door swung inward.

  I waited for the smell. It didn’t come.

  There was an odour, but it smelt similar to the musty scent we experienced all the time in Carousel. Recycled air mixed with dust and the remnants of industrial cleaner.

  I stepped forward and switched on the light. It flickered, hummed black for two long seconds, then sprang to life, illuminating a normal looking storeroom with a small pile of clothing on the floor. The floor was tiled and had a square drain for mopping. There was a large basin for washing up with a small mirror positioned above. A wide storage rack covered the far wall next to the cooktops housing a bunch of spices and pastes, and some huge sacks of rice. An exhaust fan whirred slowly in the ceiling.

  I stood in the middle of the room and breathed the air cautiously, as if my eyes might be lying. Maybe the room smelt a little unusual. It was hard to tell with the spices.

  My eyes drifted back to the clothes. There was something odd about the way they were lying. Not balled up or folded, but kind of flattened against the floor and stretched out like they were on display.

  I inhaled and my hair went rigid.

  There was a bone sticking out of the jeans.

  Suddenly I noticed slight bulges all over the clothing. I stepped closer and saw a deep black stain on the tiles. I traced it along as it snaked away from the clothes to the drain in the floor. My mouth was dry and tacky.

  ‘You still in there?’ radioed Taylor.

  I spun around, half expecting to see her behind me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I radioed.

  ‘Okay. Well, I have some corn. Let’s get out of here,’ she radioed.

  ‘Cool,’ I replied.

  I quickly stepped over to the rack to grab something so I wouldn’t be found out. There was a bunch of red curry pastes. I took a couple in homage to Rocky. As I pulled them away I noticed a small bundle of items on the bottom of the rack. There was a wallet, half a packet of Extra gum and a set of car keys.

  I knelt down and opened the wallet. On the licence was a middle-aged Indian man named Peter Mistry. He had a couple of credit cards, a membership at Blockbuster, a loyalty card from Java Juice and zero cash.

  I stared at the wallet and tried to make my brain work. What had happened in here?

  ‘Nox?’ radioed Taylor.

  I pocketed the car keys, locked the door and got the hell out of there.

  Taylor gave me one of her looks and we set off back to JB’s. She led, I followed. As we edged back past the dome and into the last remaining daylight I took the keys from my pocket and snuck a look at them. I hadn’t noticed before but there was a small label on the biggest key.

  It read Ford.

  22

  I held onto my discovery like a silent indigestion for the rest of the week. It felt totally wrong to not spill the news to Taylor and Lizzy. I had done this before and swore it would never happen again. But something about this felt personal. Like it was for me to deal with and nobody else. And I rationalised by convincing myself I had nothing much to tell.

  We found keys in Carousel all the time. They held some excitement to begin with. After all, we were trapped in a centre with a thousand locked doors. But months of failure had left them dull. There were piles of them around JB’s, most probably untested, most probably useless. There were even car keys among these. Spare
sets left under counters and in desk draws. But none of us considered them significant.

  The fact that someone had died in the storeroom was shocking, but also not totally unexpected. Carousel was cavernous and had been a boarded up fortress for well over a year now. So far we had survived this, but Rocky hadn’t, and who is to say that others hadn’t joined him, either silently away from us, or before we arrived. It was easiest to assume that the centre only existed in its current state since we found each other inside, but maybe not. Maybe it had been a gateway to some mysterious parallel dimension for years before us, and, like colonisers of a weirdo civilisation, we were only just now discovering the horrors of its past.

  For all we knew there could be hundreds of bodies throughout Carousel.

  These possibilities offered flickers of explanation, but nothing that would stick. I knew instinctively that the body was significant. The wallet empty of cash. The storeroom key outside of the room, rather than in with the body. The skeleton positioned conveniently above the drain. The exhaust fan silently draining the room of gas as it decomposed.

  And the licence.

  Peter Mistry was a middle-aged Indian man. I had never seen anybody but pasty-white teenagers working at Curry in a Hurry. It seemed way too clichéd to think that he was an employee or manager.