Carousel

by Brendan Ritchie

  Lizzy had told me it was not about the answers. She had meant something else but I clung to this like a crazed mantra as the days ground away to a Sunday somewhere deep into November.

  When it ended.

  Taylor was onto me.

  I wasn’t really surprised. She had a way of summing me up with a glance from the first day we met. Lizzy kind of had this also, but with Taylor you knew that she knew. She held your gaze just a moment longer as if to say ‘Okay, I get it, you’re not actually tired, just sick of talking’, or ‘I know you’re not scared of this so why are you acting like you are?’ It was kind of alluring and intimidating at the same time.

  We were gardening beneath the dome. Lizzy was working away on Pro Tools and Taylor had needed to get ‘the hell away from these musty rugs’. She asked me to help her out with some planting and I had grudgingly agreed. My head swirled with a hundred things I needed to do but I found myself turning soil and planting seeds for vegetables I would never eat.

  It was time to put in a summer garden. The sun swept in long, slow arcs above the dome in the afternoons, drying the filmy bacteria gathered on tiles and peppering our strange population of pots with warmth. We gathered together the remnants of the winter plants, a scattering of rocket and lettuce, some button mushrooms, a few stunted zucchini, and prepared the soil for new seeds. The winter’s gardening had been a bit mishmash but it had confirmed to us that we could grow food if we tried. Taylor was ambitious about summer and had collected seeds for tomatoes, capsicum and sweet corn, determined to do a decent job of feeding us for once.

  I worked hard to clear my mind and focus on the gardening. Edging my way methodically from pot to pot, churning up the soil, adding water and a shake of fertilising pellets so Taylor could come behind me with the seeds. Eventually the process calmed me and my thoughts drifted beyond the current chaos to the distant warmth of girls and travel and beaches.

  When we stopped for a drink, the Fiesta was back in the recesses of my mind.

  ‘What’s happening, Nox?’ asked Taylor, as we sipped on a couple of tropical juice boxes and dangled our legs from the forklift. The fractured glass dome hung precariously above.

  I glanced at her to gauge the question.

  ‘Just gardening and stuff,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re pretty into it,’ said Taylor.

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  I nodded, not sure of her angle.

  ‘It will be good to have some decent veggies this summer,’ I said.

  It sounded pretty fake. Taylor looked at me and nodded.

  ‘Thanks for all of your help with the recording,’ she said.

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Seems like you guys are almost done.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. It can drag out a little at the end,’ she said. ‘But you can take off and get back to your writing whenever you want.’

  I nodded. There was a bit of silence.

  ‘You don’t get creeped out walking back from Myer in the middle of the night?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I’m over it,’ I said.

  ‘What’s the secret?’ she asked.

  ‘What secret?’ I asked.

  ‘To not being creeped out?’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Booze, maybe,’ I joked.

  Taylor smiled a little but she didn’t buy it. She hopped down and stretched. I sucked at the last drops of my juice and joined her.

  We resumed gardening as the sun dipped away. Taylor was stabbing into darkness but she knew it was a small space, and that me and my secrets were in there somewhere.

  Later that night I left the Finns deep into season two of Girls and coasted over to Myer on a jet-black mountain bike. I wrote for just on an hour before getting edgy and heading down a level to pack up some things from my previous bedroom. It was strange hanging out there now. Like a shrine, static and preserved.

  A lot of Carousel felt different now that I knew we would be leaving. I had always thought cities changed as soon as you were on your way to the airport. No longer insular, but a part of the world. A name on a departure screen alongside countless others. Now that was how I felt. I started thinking about the world, having trained myself to ignore it.

  I tried to gauge whether I knew intuitively if my friends or family were alive, like in some disaster film, but again I came up numb. I might have sold this as just a result of time had I not felt the same since we arrived. My strongest feelings were for random things like the pretty blonde girl who had just started work in the café near home. Or the roster at work with my name surrounded by a revolving series of others like Sophie, Dave and Misha. And the lawn at my parents’ place that I knew would be perfect to lie on in the afternoon sun, but had never tried.

  I wondered about sex, unsure if my time in Carousel proved that I could live without it, or that I definitely couldn’t. It seemed a distant and arbitrary part of my former life. I made imaginary line-ups of the girls I had slept with and searched them for emotion or resonance. Their faces were blank and gave away nothing. Even Michelle and Heather, who I’d fallen for pretty hard. I decided that I needed to have sex quickly once we were out, not because I felt desperate or lonely, but so I could remember how I felt about it.

  Mainly I worried about whether I would be different to the person I was when I arrived. This seemed crucial and drove small decisions like what clothes I was packing, but also huge ones like keeping Peter’s skeleton a secret. I didn’t feel like I arrived with an identity crisis, but Carousel had sure as hell helped me develop one. I looked at my time inside like it was some kind of Buddhist retreat or volunteer abroad program. Something to be ground-out because the results would be profound and life would open up afterwards. And like some warped Contiki tour, I was determined to make my final night a big one so that the resumption of my regular life wouldn’t suck, at least for a week or two.

  During the recording of their previous album Taylor and Lizzy uploaded a video blog where they were filmed from the seaside studio talking on speakerphone to distant friends and family about their day. I imagined them sitting there telling somebody in Canada about me and the bizarro thoughts I was having, as if they knew everything that came into my head.

  ‘Nox lines up all the girls he slept with and stares at them like every second day,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘Oh my god!’ said the listener. ‘What else does he think about?’

  ‘It’s so random,’ said Taylor. ‘One minute he’ll be looking at his roster at work, then he’ll be volunteering in Africa somewhere. Then he’s wondering whether an Indian guy’s skeleton looks different to a white guy.’

  ‘So fucking weird,’ said the listener.

  ‘I know, right,’ said Taylor.

  ‘How is the recording going?’ asked the listener.

  ‘It’s okay. Kinda different to our normal stuff,’ replied Lizzy.

  I felt increasingly mental.

  I put some music on and skirted around the edges of the room tossing things on the bed where I could decide if they should be taken or left. We had become accustomed to not owning clothes, just wearing them. Now it was hard to determine where my wardrobe started and finished. There was a weird progression evident. The hoodies and jeans of my initial months had morphed into slim chinos and dark pullovers. I liked that I could notice this and carefully selected items to take in the Fiesta that reflected the way I now dressed.

  At eleven thirty I got a wave of sleepiness that curled me up on my old bed for an intense twenty-minute sleep. I woke to an imaginary thump at the back of my head and sat up amid the piles of clothing. My radio was beeping. I had rolled over on it and pressed a bunch of buttons. I switched them off and clicked back toward our regular channel five. At channel two I hit the voices of Taylor and Lizzy.

  I stopped and listened. There was a pause, then talking.

  ‘Mum uses that treatment,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘Really? Okay,’ said Taylor.

  I checked the channel
again. I was definitely on channel two. I had stumbled across their private conversation.

  ‘Is there any left here?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘I don’t know. Probably somewhere,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘What do you think she’s doing?’ asked Taylor.

  There was a long pause, as Lizzy seemed to be deciding whether to answer. I watched the radio and waited.

  ‘It’s like eleven in the morning over there, right?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Taylor.

  ‘She’s still in her gym clothes from earlier in the morning. But she’s chewing on a muffin at home now. One of those big blueberry ones,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘I’d kill for one of those,’ said Taylor.

  ‘The drier is on, and she’s run the sink to do the dishes but forgotten about them now that she’s online,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘What is she looking at?’ asked Taylor and sniffed.

  She sounded fragile.

  ‘Our site. Reading your blog. Checking the tour dates. Working out when she can call,’ said Lizzy.

  Taylor sighed a little in response. There was a long pause and I wondered if that was the end of their conversation.

  ‘You know what he did today?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘What?’ Lizzy sighed.

  ‘Missed like seven pots with the fertiliser,’ said Taylor.

  ‘Wow. That’s totally insane, Taylor,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘He doesn’t care if anything grows. You don’t think that’s a little alarming?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘I don’t know what’s alarming in this place. Why do you always try to attach logic to stuff? It doesn’t work here,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘I just don’t get why he is so fixated on us finishing the album,’ said Taylor.

  ‘He’s a fan, remember?’ said Lizzy.

  ‘I’m not attacking him. I’m concerned,’ said Taylor.

  ‘So am I,’ said Lizzy. ‘But he’s still Nox.’

  Taylor was silent for a bit. I stared at the radio behind big, stupid tears. The Finns were silent for a moment.

  ‘Do you still think mum could have been on that flight?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lizzy. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  More silence.

  I felt gutted for them. I turned the volume down to zero and climbed back beneath the covers. Had I returned to JB’s then I would have hugged them hard and raced them down to the Fiesta and away from Carousel forever. But instead I lay frozen and still, and drifted into broken, shifting sleep.

  24

  The following morning I helped Taylor record the final guitar section for ‘Little Low’ and Lizzy began mixing, having finished the other two songs she had been working on. By midafternoon it was done and only ‘Posthumous’ remained. I watched the two of them as Lizzy shared her news and they confirmed that the album was almost ready. They seemed relieved but a little underwhelmed. I listened hard for any mention of ‘Posthumous’ but it didn’t come up. Instead Taylor pulled out a box of expensive looking wines from Liquor Central.

  Before long they were open and we started sipping and chewing down snacks. Taylor drifted over to play DJ in the JB’s music library and Lizzy and I fired up Mario Cart. Eventually the wine took the edge off my anxiety and I let myself relax for the first time in weeks.

  By the time it was dark the three of us were drunk.

  ‘Come on. You guys said you would take me up there whenever I wanted,’ said Lizzy.

  She wanted to go up onto the cinema roof and look at the stars. Taylor and I had wandered back up there a few times since busting it open. Initially just to make sure we hadn’t missed some obvious way to get down. Then to feel the sun and breathe the air and convince ourselves that we could smell the ocean. Lizzy knew about the roof, but up until now she hadn’t been interested. When I asked Taylor about this she told me Lizzy had been a closet acrophobic from age six when she stranded herself on the roof of their Montreal row house.

  Taylor and I shared a glance. Both of us seemed to think that going up there at night was a bad idea.

  ‘You can see stars from the dome,’ I said.

  ‘What like five,’ replied Lizzy. ‘I want to look around. See what’s out there.’

  Taylor looked at her sister and they shared a glance.

  ‘Alright, fuck it. Let’s go,’ said Taylor.

  She looked at me to see if I would object. I felt warm and a little woozy. My head swirled with emotions but no arguments surfaced. Lizzy grabbed a three-quarter-full bottle of wine and we chose bikes and set out once again into the dark-filled centre.

  The Finns wove in and out of shadow like a pair of wraiths, ambivalent to both good and evil. Behind them I peddled gently, focusing hard to keep upright and make the turns as we rolled though the centre toward the dome and the cinema. The air was cool on my face and I sobered up just a little.

  The dome opened up in front of us. The blue flicker of fluoros merged with the bounce of moonlight from the floor to create a glow that was otherworldly. The Finns fanned out playfully and swung right to circle the garden and gaze upward at the sky. Like kids let out of the house, their faces beamed with energy.

  I followed, not keen to slow too much for fear of falling sideways. I looked at the pots and remembered what Taylor had said yesterday about me not caring if anything grew. It wasn’t true. Even though we were leaving, I wanted them to grow badly. The thought of closing the door and leaving Rocky with a lifeless, empty centre got me lower than anything.

  We left the bikes at the edge of the dome and trudged up the escalators to the cinema. The foyer was dry now but evidence of the hole in the roof and the winter rains was all over the carpet. We had propped open the office door after our first visit to stop any build-up of water in the event of a heavy downpour. Since then moisture had seeped down and out, slowly turning the floors from red to a deep brown, teeming with bacteria. We took light, wavering steps through to the candy bar and led Lizzy upstairs to Projection Five.

  We struggled our way up the slippery, collapsed roof until it levelled and Lizzy stopped to gaze upward. Taylor and I followed. If the view from the roof in daylight was unimpressive, at night it was anything but.

  The sky was giant and imposing.

  There were scatterings of stars and a half moon, but it was the blackness that struck us most. Inside Carousel our sky was a constant shade of dirty white. When Taylor and I had ventured outside previously the overcast skies had mirrored this. But not now. The vacuum of our inebriation sucked in an immense sweep of southern sky and we all remembered that we were part of the universe. Yes, we were tiny and insignificant. But we were also a part of something.

  Lizzy sighed and smiled a little. Taylor and I joined her.

  We moved carefully along the sunken cinema roof to find the edge where we could look out upon the small vista we had seen previously. Lights greeted us as we approached.

  ‘Wow,’ said Lizzy.

  Suburban Perth was vast and black as it spread silently away to the west. Yet amid the darkness there were small scatterings of light. The warm glow of a hidden porch. Blue light from a petrol station or car yard. An intersection with traffic lights shifting from green to red, awaiting cars that never arrive. The pockets seemed random. Some clustered together, others distant and lonely. Carousel wasn’t the only place that was somehow still on the grid.

  ‘Total zombie apocalypse,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up, Nox,’ said Taylor and swigged back some wine.

  Lizzy laughed and grabbed the bottle. Taylor and I laughed too. For a moment the three of us were in hysterics.

  ‘Oh my god. Stop it,’ said Taylor. ‘There’s a fucking ledge here somewhere.’

  We settled and I took out a small packet of expensive cigars I’d found in Liquor Central. I’d cut the end off a couple a while back and shuffled through until I found one that was ready to smoke. I lit it up and inhaled too much.

  ‘Seriously though,’ I said with a coug
h. ‘What the fuck is going on out there?’

  Taylor and Lizzy glanced at me, then each other, and burst out laughing. Lizzy took the cigar from me and tried it out.

  ‘Mystery, Nox. A city full of mystery,’ said Lizzy.

  I looked at her, wondering what she meant.

  ‘I bet Rachel is out there somewhere,’ said Taylor. ‘Drinking pre-mix bourbon and watching reality TV reruns.’

  ‘She’ll outlive us all,’ I said.

  We passed around the wine and cigar in muddled circles, unsure which was ruining the taste of which. I felt bold and stupid and like nothing was off limits.

  ‘Are you guys stuck on “Posthumous”?’ I said.

  The Finns shared a glance and seemed to decide that it was okay to answer.

  ‘You know what it’s about, yeah?’ asked Lizzy.

  I shook my head and felt like an idiot.

  ‘Someone who is waiting to get famous posthumously, but it never happens because everyone else is dead too,’ said Taylor.

  Her big, beautiful eyes glazed importantly in the distant lights. Lizzy looked at her sister.

  ‘Oh,’ I mumbled.

  ‘It has a tricky structure that we’re trying to figure out,’ said Lizzy.

  We stood in silence for a moment and finished the wine.

  ‘Where is the airport from here?’ asked Lizzy, after a while.

  I looked up at the sky and tried to get some bearing. The stars blurred and I closed my eyes tightly.

  ‘Over there,’ said Taylor, pointing to our right. ‘Past David Jones. I think.’

  Lizzy gazed in the direction of the distant, blocky building. It seemed like something Taylor had already thought about. I watched them both and remembered the conversation I’d stumbled into. Their longing for the jet plane and their mother.

  I felt drunk and low and on the edge of something big. I stared hard at the floor and swallowed it down without knowing what it was.

  I turned and moved back toward the glowing hole of light in the cinema roof.

  ‘Careful, Nox,’ said Taylor.

  I waved a hand to say that I’d heard. The Finns chatted away behind me as I edged reluctantly back down into Carousel.