Beyond Carousel

by Ritchie, Brendan

  Meanwhile Taylor and Lizzy were putting on a belting live rendition of their new album. The instruments and amplifiers here were way better than anything they had in Carousel and the songs sounded dense and awesome. Even Kink & Kink seemed to be into it, albeit in their apathetic, underwhelmed way. It was cool to see Taylor and Lizzy back as themselves for a while, but the music brought with it a heavy wave of emotions and memories from our time in Carousel. Together with the whisky and the heat and the strange girl wedged into the couch next to me, the whole thing felt a bit like a dream.

  After a while Yoshi got on a drum kit and started tinkering away on a series of snares. Taylor and Lizzy stopped playing their songs and tried to jam along with him, but it didn’t really mesh. Sweaty and buzzing, they took a break and left him to it. I joined them to look for a bathroom and we found some pretty disturbing stuff. The toilet looked as though it had been blocked for a long time now. Instead of this, a door stood ajar to an alleyway full of buckets and a smell that was insane. The warehouse still had power, but, from what we could gather, no running water or plumbing. There were also no plants, food or medical supplies. Nothing you might associate with extended survival. These guys had somehow survived living day to day from the very start. It was as impressive as it was sad.

  A silky, wavering voice pulled us back into the warehouse. All of the band were at their instruments now. Yoshi at the drum kit with a mic hovering to the side of his face. The ladies’ leather guy and his thinner version on guitars. Joseph taking himself way too seriously on the bass. And Molly, hovering waiflike below a mic stand, magically transformed, like a thousand singers before her, from nobody to somebody within the space of a note. Their stuff was raw and messy, but then Molly came in over the top and gave it an ethereal quality. Like some winding, backroad trip to a tropical paradise.

  What the hell was happening in the world, I thought. These guys were stranded in the suburbs, the least equipped people to survive in the regular world, let alone one without Centrelink or parents or drive-through takeaway. Yet here they were, almost two years on, still alive, still cooking up kooky, beautiful music for nobody to hear.

  Taylor and Lizzy poured themselves a whisky and sat down to discover Kink & Kink like they might have in a club back in Toronto or Vancouver, or out on tour, or on any night in their pre-Carousel lives. I was happy for them, but felt like the last regular person on the planet. I left my drink unfinished and took a notepad and torch outside.

  There were some milk crates grouped in a small circle by one of the side exits. I sat on one and pulled another over for a desk, then propped the torch on a drainpipe running down the wall. I had written in worse places since we left the hills. Music and light spilled out of the leaky warehouse into the silent black suburb. I wrote about Molly and the band and how they were nothing like the cardboard cut-outs I had envisioned in Tommy’s stories.

  At some stage the vocals dropped from the music inside and a door opened, beaming light and noise into the alley. Molly surfaced with a cigarette and tiptoed over to where I was sitting. There was no time to put away the torch or notepad.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  Molly hovered, somehow unsure of where to sit even though there were milk crates all around her. I pulled one across to the wall beside me. She looked at it for a moment, then sat.

  ‘You guys are good,’ I said.

  Molly smiled, but seemed to have forgotten the music playing inside.

  ‘I love the stars in our new city,’ she said, looking up at the strip of sky above us. The nights were heavy with stars these days. As if somebody had selected them all and hit bold.

  ‘Yeah. I feel like I hadn’t really seen stars before the Disappearance. Except for in a planetarium or something,’ I replied.

  A breeze trickled past us from the east and we both shivered.

  ‘Are you guys okay here?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. We’re great. Thank you for the whisky,’ she replied.

  It felt like we still hadn’t really looked at each other when she slipped off her seat and propped herself on my legs. Her hair flickered around my face as we made out without saying anything else. She tasted of smoke and whisky and the house parties of my youth. We touched each other and wrapped legs around each other and did everything that might normally lead to sex. Then we stopped and Molly dropped her head into my chest and kind of tucked up into a ball. This caught me out a little. I looked down at her, then put my arms around her. She burrowed deeper. Her voice and her music felt a million miles away now. Across from us my notepad blew open. The empty pages flickered mockingly in the wind.

  10

  The morning was blustery hot with the faint smell of bushfire. The Finns and I had been up for hours. Carrying out our routines of stretching, eating and washing the best that we could. The warehouse looked even more dismal in daylight. Like the worst sharehouse you can imagine, without any walls to shelter the mess. Molly, Joseph and co lay comatose throughout the space. I looked over at Molly’s small, mousey face and wondered what filled her dreams. Her parents’ inner-city townhouse. A full fridge and endless wi-fi. The basics of life sorted so that she was free to simply exist and be the artist she wanted to be. Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe she had arrived in the place she had always dreamt of. A society where anarchy reigns and self-expression is regarded above all else.

  Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Molly needed rescuing. It didn’t seem possible that someone could be so unaffected by such a monumental shift in the world. And Molly wasn’t in denial. In a way, she and the band were more accepting of what was happening than anyone we had met. I felt a weird desire to be there when she finally succumbed. To offer her a shoulder and shelter from the inevitable floodlight of reality. To ignore myself because she was pretty and in a band and somehow these things made it justifiable. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be about me, rather than Molly or anybody else.

  When she and the others still hadn’t risen by midmorning, the Finns and I gathered out the front to debrief.

  ‘There’s no point in waiting around,’ said Taylor.

  Lizzy and I looked at her.

  ‘You think they will be okay?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘They have up until now,’ replied Taylor.

  We stood in some weighty silence. None of us felt great about the situation.

  ‘Look, they need to get their shit together, but I don’t see how we can really help with that,’ said Taylor.

  ‘We could clean the place up. Try to fix the plumbing. Put in a garden or something,’ said Lizzy.

  She didn’t sound overly keen.

  ‘It would be back looking like this in a week,’ said Taylor.

  ‘Did they mention the Curator?’ I asked. ‘Maybe he checks in on them.’

  Taylor shook her head.

  Lizzy sighed. ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We can’t take them with us. They wouldn’t last a day in this weather,’ said Taylor. ‘Plus we don’t even really know if where we’re going will be any better.’

  ‘It couldn’t be much worse, could it?’ said Lizzy in a mini stand-off.

  I looked out at the dusty, barren street.

  ‘I don’t think they want to come with us anyway,’ I said.

  The Finns looked at me.

  ‘What did she say to you?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘Nothing really,’ I replied. ‘I just don’t think they care about growing a garden or living somewhere better. They want other things. Cred or status or something.’

  ‘To be famous, but still stay unknown,’ said Lizzy.

  Taylor and I nodded. It was true. They were hipster kids trapped in a bizarre ideology where success held a delicate line on the scale of popularity. You had to creep up on it, but never tip over into the mainstream. To be known was to be labelled, and to them to be labelled was to die.

  Taylor and Lizzy hovered in silence and waited, Chess restless by Lizzy’s side. It seemed to be up to me to make
the decision.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

  The Finns nodded and Lizzy put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘We’ll leave our food for them,’ said Taylor. ‘It will keep them off the streets for a while.’

  Lizzy and I agreed and the three of us emptied our bags and left a pile of supplies inside the door for them. Before we left I tore out the pages I had written about the band – actually more so about Molly – the night before, and left them with the food. They read like a review of her and her music and I thought there was at least a chance that it would offer the kind of validation she could stomach. At the top I wrote, On Molly – of Kink & Kink.

  The suburbs changed not long after we left. As if the Kink & Kink warehouse was the final marker on Perth’s outer suburbs. Cautiously we shifted ahead into new ground. There was a swampy nature reserve to the north of us. The bush looked thick and uninhabited. Probably full of Bulls. We skirted around it and got a glimpse of some towers that looked like they might have been part of the airport. Lizzy ignored them and kept on without a fuss. It was hard to tell how much she was putting her sister first in this venture to the city. For Lizzy the airport, operational or not, had always held the strongest link to home. Now we were bypassing it for the second time with no real plan to return.

  By lunchtime we hit another highway, this one bordered by airport hotels and rental car outlets. It was ghostly and exposed. Rather than walk along it we crossed over to some small streets that ran parallel and followed the dirty green signs that now pointed us back southward to the city.

  ‘Is that like the main river?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, and followed her gaze toward the Swan.

  Pockets of shimmering water broke through the trees and houses to the west of us.

  ‘Are there many bridges?’ asked Taylor.

  I hadn’t really thought about bridges.

  ‘I know there are some closer to the city,’ I replied.

  Taylor looked at me for a moment, then nodded.

  We kept onward between the river and the highway and at dusk we came across a racetrack. We walked our bikes through the patchy, overgrown grass of the track, past a series of windblown marquees and an ageing grandstand. The whole place felt sad and not part of a world just gone, but something of another age entirely. Where people rode horses in great circles so that others could dress up, drink and trade money.

  ‘Old World,’ said Lizzy.

  I nodded. It was the term we had started using for places like this that seemed totally normal just years ago, but now felt somehow ancient and strange.

  No breeze had come that afternoon and the night felt as hot as the day. We slept out under a skewered marquee and woke with mosquito bites spread dangerously across our arms and legs. We were inadvertently playing a numbers game where the more bites meant the more chance of a virus. No big deal in our previous lives, but out here things might be different.

  Taylor hovered restlessly as Lizzy and I yawned and fumbled about with breakfast. She was eager to keep moving. As if every minute that passed lessened her chances of finding her painter. Maybe the heat was slowing us down. Maybe Perth was bigger and more sprawling than I remembered. Either way, our progress was slow. We trudged our way forward, then spent the night in a soulless, box-like motel shouting Free Foxtel on every surface. I didn’t feel so bad kicking our way into one of these places. Not like somebody’s house or business. But it was quiet and eerie as hell. We were desperate for our own space, but too scared to spread out into separate rooms. The beds were still made but covered with dust, so we stripped them back and started over with sheets from a housekeeping trolley. Not that we needed any. It was muggy and unsettled outside, and breathless in.

  We hadn’t found anywhere with power or running water since the warehouse. Lizzy and I had climbed to the top of the motel to see if there were any pockets of light in the surrounding suburbs. The view wasn’t exactly panoramic, and we found nothing. An Artist-free zone.

  Still the highway kept on southward. Occasionally we would get a glimpse across the river to the city. At the conclusion of each lightshow, it had remained black and mysterious. No towers of light or giant mining logos. But now, during daylight, it seemed grey and steadfast, and no different to any other day.

  The only stores we passed were service stations, where cars were still attached to bowsers. We pillaged tepid water, Gatorade and whatever else we could stomach without cramping too badly.

  As the sun finally dipped into a murky bank of storm clouds we settled on a narrow high-rise of self-contained apartments peering east or west, depending on your budget. I volunteered for the sofa, hoping that the Finns would crash out early in the bedrooms and I could sit up and write. Taylor stayed up for a while and the two of us played Bullshit by torchlight with a deck of cards from the bedside table. At first it felt forced but after a few hands we got into it and had a couple of laughs.

  Taylor gathered the cards for one final hand. She started working away on her longwinded shuffling routine.

  ‘How was it hooking up with a girl again after all this time?’ she asked.

  I hadn’t spoken to either of the Finns about making out with Molly, but somehow, as always, they seemed to know everything about me.

  ‘It was weird, mostly,’ I replied.

  Taylor nodded. ‘It’s been almost two years. That makes sense,’ she replied.

  ‘Actually a little while before that,’ I replied, for some fucking reason.

  ‘Oh really? How come?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Bad timing, maybe,’ I replied. ‘I guess I was kind of in a rut before Carousel.’

  ‘Not writing much?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t been writing at all.

  ‘I finished uni and was just working. Not going out much,’ I replied.

  ‘Because of that Heather girl?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe. I haven’t really thought about it.’

  Taylor rolled her eyes.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Come on. We were stuck in a mall with nothing to do for like forever. Don’t tell me you didn’t rehash every single tiny event in your life a thousand times over,’ said Taylor.

  ‘Nope. That must just be you I guess,’ I replied.

  ‘Fuck off, Nox.’

  We both smiled and Taylor was finally ready to deal the cards.

  ‘What about you and this painter girl?’ I asked, without thinking.

  Taylor looked at me carefully.

  ‘Do you think we might run into her somewhere out here?’ I backtracked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Taylor, casually. ‘Tommy said the more time that passes, the less people he sees,’ said Taylor.

  ‘What do you think is happening to everyone?’ I asked, slightly alarmed.

  Taylor shrugged.

  ‘It took us so long to get out of Carousel,’ said Taylor. ‘For a while people were probably looking around, trying to figure out what the hell happened. But eventually people start to accept things. They settle down and find a place in the world. Whatever the hell it looks like.’

  I looked at her. Taylor was a realist and right on the mark with most things. Probably this, too.

  ‘Do you think we’ll have to do that one day?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably,’ she sighed.

  ‘Where would you want to live?’ I asked.

  Taylor looked through her cards and thought about it. ‘The beaches here are pretty awesome, yeah?’ she asked.

  ‘I guess,’ I said.

  ‘So we’ll find a house right out front of the best one. Wire up some solar panels. Grow a garden. Teach ourselves how to surf,’ said Taylor.

  I felt like crying and had no idea why. Taylor looked at me curiously.

  ‘Yeah?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. Totally,’ I replied.

  We finished the game and Taylor left for bed.

  I had willed myself awake and wrote steadily for
an hour or two about some of the things we had seen. The real Stuart hovered at my shoulder with a steady critique of every line. Was he even a writer? I hoped he was a weirdo puppeteer or something as opposed to some world-famous novelist that I had cheated out of his place on the ark.

  At some point I had stopped writing and fallen asleep. I woke to Chess nuzzling his wet nose in at the base of my neck.

  ‘Chess!’ whispered Lizzy harshly.

  I opened my eyes to find her huddled by the glass door to the balcony. Lightning licked across the hills in the distance. Chess dipped his head and padded back over to join her.

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The room was pitch-dark. Lizzy and Chess were silhouetted by a weird purple glow somewhere to the east. It could have been the rising sun, but it felt too early for that. I pulled on a hoodie and joined them on the floor. Lizzy gave me a brief smile and turned back to catch the flickers of lightning. The thunder was soft, but constant. Storms seemed to run the entire length of the hills.

  It was hard not to think of Rocky. He and Lizzy used to love watching lightning. A storm in the hills had been the last thing he saw in Carousel. Now that we were out in the world we had discovered that there was a name for people like me and Rocky. Patrons. Sheltered not by intention, but by fate. The old world had been cruel to Rocky, and the new one not much better. I felt an anger rising that for once I didn’t feel like swallowing.

  ‘Rocky would have loved this one,’ whispered Lizzy.

  Lightning pulsed across her delicate, elven face.

  ‘I fucking hate the Curator,’ I replied.

  Lizzy looked at me, surprised.

  ‘Don’t you?’ I asked.

  Lizzy shrugged. ‘He’s probably just a regular dude.’