Beyond Carousel

by Ritchie, Brendan

  Nothing seemed to have been touched in the entire terminal and it was starting to freak me out. Maybe Cara was wrong about an Artist community being here. Or maybe there used to be Artists here, but somehow they had left. I just assumed that Lizzy had come to the airport to hang out. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe she had come here to find a way home.

  ‘Hello?’ I yelled. ‘Lizzy?’

  Nothing.

  I took off my bag and paced over to a newsagent. I grabbed a water and riffled through the chocolate bars for something that was close to code. When I turned back around I noticed that a Lufthansa jet was coming in to land on one of the far runways. I wandered over and watched it for a moment or two before my brain did a backflip.

  ‘What the hell,’ I whispered.

  The jet was just about to touch down. The familiar growling of the engines filtered in through the glass.

  I looked around the room for somebody to share my shock, but I was still alone.

  The tyres touched down with a squeak and the spoilers came up. The fucking thing had landed.

  I rubbed my forehead. I was getting bizarro inner flashes from my first big overseas trip. I had gone on Contiki in Europe, then stopped in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. I saw a snow-covered landscape from the window of a plane. A cobbled square with the statue of a man on horseback. Dusk light across a messy, sleeping dormitory. Backpacks shuffling in a line through forest. Each image was vivid and arresting.

  Then I saw myself touching down in Europe at the start of the trip. Leaving Perth I had acted all cool and worldly. Unfazed by the journey ahead. But stepping out of the airport into that frigid, bustling air brought a dread I had no answer for. I wandered, overwhelmed and aimless, until an old guy helped me find a shuttle. Then spent the ride freaking out about all of the people I was about to meet. How they would be young and cool and have stories that I didn’t.

  I shook off these random memories and forced myself to think. What should I do? Go out there? Who the hell could be arriving on a plane? And what about the Bulls?

  The jet slowed and neared the end of the runway. In the last of the daylight I watched as it started taxying my way, before it disappeared, in an instant, into nothing at all.

  I blinked, wondering if I had just lost it in the dark. But I hadn’t. The plane was gone.

  Suddenly something caught my eye at the other end of the tarmac. There were lights coming out of the international terminal. A whole bunch of them. They were torches.

  26

  ‘Your first time at the Auroraport and you saw a full landing. That’s pretty amazing, man.’

  I was talking to a shortish girl wearing overalls and a head torch. There were others behind her that I couldn’t make out in the darkness.

  ‘Where did that plane go?’ I asked, still breathless from my dash across the tarmac.

  ‘It was an aurora,’ she replied, as if it were obvious.

  ‘I don’t get it. I heard its engines and everything,’ I said.

  ‘I know. It was beautiful, wasn’t it,’ she replied.

  I looked past her to the others. They were looking up at the sky and soaking in the air as if there had just been a thunderstorm. There were lights scattered across the upper levels of the terminal behind them.

  ‘Are you guys part of the airport community?’ I asked.

  ‘Never heard it called that before,’ replied a guy I couldn’t really see.

  Some of them were drifting back inside now. It was all but dark and the wind was freezing out there on the tarmac.

  Something touched my leg and I jumped backwards.

  ‘Whoa. Easy,’ said the girl. ‘The ions are intense hey,’ she added, drifting her hands through imaginary water.

  ‘Something touched my leg,’ I replied.

  I felt it again and reached down to find a dog nuzzling me.

  ‘Chessboard?’ I said.

  ‘Nox?’ said a voice out of the darkness.

  I looked up to a torch shining right into my face.

  ‘Lizzy?’ I said.

  ‘Holy fucking hell,’ said Lizzy.

  Lizzy shot out of the darkness and leapt at me with a giant bear hug.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  She buried her head into my chest.

  ‘Way to blind me,’ I said.

  Eventually Lizzy sniffed and surfaced to look at me properly. Chess was hovering by her side.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I replied, a little sharply.

  ‘I don’t know. We had to leave the Collective. It seemed kinda obvious to come here,’ she replied.

  ‘Why didn’t you come back to the casino?’ I asked.

  ‘I did. Rachel said there was nobody there,’ she replied.

  ‘Wait. You saw Rachel?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. So random. She is totally living in that place,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘I know. I was living next door to her,’ I said.

  ‘No way!’ said Lizzy.

  ‘When was this?’ I asked.

  ‘Like six weeks ago. Me and Chess stopped in there on our way here,’ said Lizzy. ‘We were snooping around the lobby when Chess started barking and Rachel turns up in her fucking bathrobe. No hello or anything, she was just like, “You can’t have a dog in here.” Like it really matters.’

  I was rubbing my head, trying to grasp the idea that Rachel has done this purposefully.

  ‘I was waiting there for months,’ I said.

  ‘She totally blanked when I asked about you,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Rachel is a total weirdo, Nox. You know that. She probably wanted to play house with you in there forever,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘Didn’t you see my note?’ I asked.

  ‘Your note? No. We didn’t see any notes,’ replied Lizzy.

  It didn’t make sense. Nothing did anymore. I felt dizzy and took a few breaths. Lizzy looked at me and welled up again.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Nox,’ she said. ‘When you weren’t in the city we just figured you must have gone home to check on your house or find Tommy or something. Taylor said she screamed that casino down before heading back out to look for me.’

  ‘I got lost in the gaming room. I went in there to find water and my torch cut out. By the time Rachel found me Taylor had been and gone,’ I said.

  Lizzy put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Do you know where she is?’ I asked, suddenly remembering what I was doing there.

  ‘No idea. The beach, somewhere,’ said Lizzy.

  She sounded casual but I could see the simmer behind her eyes.

  ‘We need to find her,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘So we can get back to Carousel before September second,’ I said.

  ‘Why would we go back to Carousel, Nox?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘Because I met the Curator,’ I replied.

  She looked at me carefully.

  Before I could continue there was a shout from behind us. ‘Bulls!’

  ‘Shit,’ said Lizzy. ‘Come on. This place is crawling with those fucking dogs. We need to get inside, stat.’

  She pulled me and Chess back towards the terminal. Others were doing the same. I looked over my shoulder at the dark spread of the tarmac.

  ‘What did she mean, Auroraport?’ I asked.

  ‘The planes aren’t real. They’re just images from our past lives. The atmosphere is all crazy out here. Sometimes particles from the past can ripple through. Kind of like an aurora,’ said Lizzy.

  She was picking up speed and I had to run to keep up with her.

  ‘But that plane was from Germany,’ I replied.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. They’re not flashbacks. They’re memories,’ said Lizzy. ‘Like what we saw in Carousel.’

  ‘Have you seen the Air Canada plane again?’ I asked.

  Lizzy didn’t answer. People were disappearing into the darkness of a building in
front of us. We were the last ones to reach it. Lizzy glanced behind us, then led us around a corner to a door that was propped open with a traffic cone. She pulled it open and kicked away the cone. Chess and I moved inside. As the door shut I heard the scrape of claws on the concrete outside.

  27

  The Auroraport community was more of a gathering than a party. A few dozen random Artists taking refuge in the plush, upper-level lounges of the international terminal. They lazed around, worked on their art and gazed out the windows at the mysterious aurora jets. Most of them had come from the Collective like Lizzy. The leaking gas had slowly driven Artists to all corners of the city. The airport terminals offered food stores, shelter and a whole bunch of convenience items such as eye masks, paperbacks and mouthwash. It wasn’t the worst place to spend the winter.

  There were also those who had been in the terminal for a long time now. Lizzy introduced me to a photographer named Kirk who had lived there since completing his Residency at an airport hotel just weeks after the Disappearance. Kirk had spent almost two years photographing the aurora jets and working in a darkroom he had built in a room designed for drug searches. Others had joined him in the months that followed. They had been drawn to the airport by sightings, rumours and the far-flung possibility of escape. Some had stayed, captivated by the phenomenon and fuelled with inspiration for their art. As well as Kirk’s photography, Lizzy showed me giant abstracts painted onto the walls of the lounges and a room full of sound recording gear and editing equipment where two engineers had been capturing audio of the aurora jets and turning them into epic scapes.

  Lizzy and Chess had reached the Auroraport from the south a bit over a month ago. She told me how they had arrived at sunset and camped out in a nearby hotel, watching for signs of the Bulls.

  They were easy to find.

  With dusk the meaty frames surfaced in ragged clusters along the fringes of the airport. Moonlight bouncing off their dirty white coats. The empty streets and bushland echoing every snarl and wheeze. They seemed to have an uneasy truce with each other. Food was scarce now and it was better to hunt things like cats and kangaroos as a pack. That first night Lizzy had heard them chase and corner something in one of the car parks. She shivered when she told me of the noises she heard next.

  At the height of the following day she and Chess made their dash into the terminal.

  ‘I got here at dusk,’ I said, disturbed by her story.

  ‘You were lucky,’ replied Lizzy.

  We were siting in a corner of the Qantas lounge that Lizzy had made into her room. It had the long sweep of a cushioned bench for a bed. Two armchairs – one for reading, another for Chess. There was an acoustic guitar and some notepads by the dining table between them. The whole area was partitioned off from the rest of the lounge with the temporary construction barriers that were once used to hide the extension work in the growing airport.

  I looked around at her place, then out at the long stretch of the lounge. Its transformation was drastic.

  ‘When I was in the domestic terminal, it seemed like nobody had been in there since the Disappearance,’ I said.

  ‘Because it’s not sealed. The Bulls can get in there,’ she replied.

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said.

  Lizzy nodded.

  ‘Lucky for you they get spooked by the aurora jets,’ said Lizzy. ‘Sometimes that’s how we know one is about to happen. The Bulls start to whimper, or suddenly there’s none of them around.’

  ‘Wow,’ I replied.

  ‘You know we hadn’t seen a jet for nearly two weeks before you got here? Bulls have been massing from all over,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘But we can get past them, yeah?’ I asked.

  Lizzy looked at me closely.

  ‘I think you better tell me about this Curator business,’ she said.

  I nodded and thought about where I should start.

  ‘I was doing a food run in Victoria Park. It’s east of the casino. Kind of on the way to Carousel,’ I began.

  Lizzy fixed onto me and listened as I recounted my meeting with Ed at the hotel. I tried to take it slowly and give her a good sense of the guy. When I finished she sat back and opened a packet of M&M’s. She picked out the blue ones and thought the whole thing over.

  ‘I know it sounds mental. But I just have a feeling he might be right. I really think we should go back there and see,’ I added.

  Lizzy glanced at me.

  ‘If you think about it, everything kind of adds up. How those taxis dropped us at Carousel. How we could only get out of there once we finished our projects. How every other Residency we’ve seen has had power and food and art supplies. It just seems too engineered for it not to have an end point, don’t you think? Two years gives Artists time to create something big. Something they might not have done otherwise. It’s what residencies are meant for.’

  I was rambling now and Lizzy put her hand up for me to stop.

  ‘Nox. It’s cool,’ she said. ‘We can go back to Carousel.’

  ‘Serious?’ I asked.

  Lizzy nodded.

  ‘I know Ed. We were on a bill together a few years back. If anybody could figure out what was behind all this it would be him.’

  ‘Okay great. Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘But we’ll have to wait for another aurora jet to get past the Bulls. It’s too risky otherwise,’ she added.

  ‘When do you think the next one will arrive?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody does,’ replied Lizzy. ‘Kirk says there are usually more jets towards the end of winter than the start. So hopefully it will be soon.’

  I checked the date on the barman’s watch for the thousandth time.

  ‘Do you have any idea where Taylor might be?’ I asked.

  Lizzy shook her head.

  ‘We had a pretty big fight. All I know is that she was heading to the coast with Sophie,’ she replied.

  ‘Is Sophie the painter from Carousel?’ I asked.

  Lizzy nodded.

  ‘I can’t believe she found her,’ I said.

  ‘So Tommy told you about the painter in the city too?’

  I looked at her and nodded, sheepishly.

  ‘You two suck,’ said Lizzy.

  She took a handful of M&M’s and tossed the remainder of the packet on the table.

  ‘Sorry, Lizzy. I guess I just didn’t want to rat on her or something,’ I said. ‘I’m sure that wasn’t her only reason for wanting to go to the city.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she tell me? Did she think I didn’t want them to get together or something? It’s so mental,’ said Lizzy.

  I didn’t have an answer. Lizzy stopped chewing and we both sat in silence for a while.

  ‘I just can’t get it out of my head,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘When I arrived in the city. After two days locked away in some repulsive toilet block. Then a bunch more racing around trying to find you guys in a total panic. I finally stumbled into the Collective and there was Taylor having brunch with her girlfriend. New jeans. New haircut. She was even wearing makeup. Fucking makeup!’ said Lizzy.

  I watched her and listened.

  ‘I know she had been looking for us. And that she had only arrived just a day before me with the same smoke inhalation and everything. But seeing her so relaxed and happy like that. Knowing that this was why she wanted to leave the hills. Nothing to do with you or me or the Curator,’ said Lizzy.

  She stared out the window.

  ‘I couldn’t speak to her,’ she added.

  ‘For how long?’ I asked.

  ‘A while,’ said Lizzy. ‘Until just before she left.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘She apologised. Again. Then screamed at me to grow up. I screamed back. I wanted to tell her I forgave her. Or that there was nothing to forgive or whatever. But she called me jealous. So I stormed the fuck out of there, went straight up onto the stage and started playing our new album.’ />
  Lizzy took a breath.

  ‘We made this pact way back when we were kids. That we would never perform a Taylor & Lizzy song for a crowd unless both of us were playing. Even if it’s just some backup vocals or a shaker or something. It always had to involve the two of us. That way our partnership would never be in question. The music would always need both of us,’ said Lizzy.

  I could almost see Taylor’s face looking up at the stage as her sister launched into the album. Eyes wide and resolute. Skin bristling as a crowd began to gather.

  ‘They left that afternoon,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lizzy,’ I said.

  She blinked and looked at me.

  ‘Do you think we will find her in time?’

  ‘Of course,’ I replied.

  I don’t think either of us felt confident. But at least we were back together.

  That night we stayed up late and planned our path to the ocean.

  28

  Lizzy and I were packed and ready, but the aurora jets just wouldn’t come.

  Instead a series of wicked cold fronts blew in from the west, reminding us that winter still held a grip over the city. The temperature in the terminal dropped and the Artists shuffled about beneath coats and Qantas blankets. There was a relaxed, ski-lodge vibe to the place. The days were long and quiet and you didn’t see much of anyone as people worked away on their art. But at night candles and voices would spring up throughout the lounge as people welcomed others into their faux lodgings to share food and chat over bottles of duty free.

  Lizzy seemed at home there, as she did wherever she happened to be. But I also noticed things about her that I hadn’t seen in Carousel. She could talk to just about anyone without even trying. Artists weren’t necessarily the best communicators. I had been to a stack of gigs where singers would finish songs full of rhyme and eloquence, then struggle to string a sentence together as they thanked the crowd. But Lizzy had it down. She was disarming and found a way through to even the most stilted and awkward of Artists in the terminal. With Lizzy they relaxed and became unusually responsive. I wasn’t sure if it was part of her celebrity, or the opposite of this. Either way it seemed like she had been here with these people for years, not weeks.