‘Looks normal,’ I said.
‘Do you know where that is?’ asked Taylor.
‘No. I don’t really even know which direction we’re facing,’ I replied.
We looked around for the sun but it was overcast as far as we could see. Taylor leant over the edge and looked down. It was maybe four metres to the adjoining roof. No big deal, but the real problem was what surrounded this roof. An epic platform of steel that I instinctively recognised as David Jones. It had an extra two levels on the rest of the centre. Even if we could get down onto the roof below we would be marooned by these extra floors and likely stuck on a bed of steel,
neither in Carousel, nor out of it. We had come out at the worst possible section of the roof.
‘Typical,’ said Taylor, squinting at the wall of reflective steel.
‘Maybe there’s a way up with a rope or a ladder or something,’ I said.
Taylor sighed and sat down on the ledge of the cinema roof. I lingered for a moment, then sat beside her. She was pensive.
‘I don’t think we’re supposed to get out this way,’ she said.
I looked at her, surprised. This was Lizzy talking, not Taylor.
I kept quiet and the two of us sat in the gentle breeze.
‘I had a date marked,’ she said, eventually.
I waited for her to continue.
‘For when I was going to stop checking the doors.’
‘When was it?’ I asked.
‘A week ago. Just after the plane flew over,’ she said.
‘But you’re still going?’ I said.
Taylor nodded, tossing a twig down onto the roof as if it were a lake in the forest.
‘Because of Rocky?’ I asked.
She nodded again. We were silent for a while.
‘What were you going to do when you stopped?’ I asked with a little apprehension.
Taylor shrugged.
‘Just live, I guess,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of fighting this stupid mall.’
I felt like an arsehole.
‘Sorry for not being with you on this stuff until now,’ I said.
Taylor shrugged this off. ‘There’s no proper way of dealing with being trapped in here,’ she said. ‘Except being scared of getting back out.’
This stung my chest. Taylor looked at me seriously.
‘But I don’t think you are anymore,’ she said.
I held her gaze and wanted badly to agree with her. She looked away. We sat in silence for a while.
‘Lizzy says Rachel couldn’t open the door because we were there with her,’ I said.
Taylor didn’t reply. I don’t think she was ready to consider this possibility.
‘Does Perth normally sound like this?’ she asked.
I looked at her, not sure of what she meant.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
Taylor tilted her head up and listened. I followed.
We sat there for a long while, listening hard to the silence around us. I couldn’t answer her question. There were the obvious absences – things we should’ve been hearing but weren’t. Traffic. Industry. People. But I don’t think Taylor was asking about those. She was asking about something else. Something bigger. The sound of a city was something you only got a sense of so often. I remembered this from when I was travelling. City after city would seem the same. Until suddenly one of them would open up for you to really hear it. Not small things like cars or church bells or beaches. But an orchestra of everything that defined the place like no sight or smell or touch ever could. In the country this would come more readily. You could pull over on a quiet stretch of road and get a place’s sound right away. But cities could be complicated and secretive.
I had heard Perth only a couple of times that I could remember. Once as a teenager on my first trip up the Darling Scarp. The edge of a country-long plateau that stopped abruptly and plunged downward to hang, somewhat cautiously, over the city of Perth below. We wandered from our car to stretch out in the dense summer sun. For a moment I stood alone at the edge of the car park while Mum and Dad unpacked some chairs. I remember looking west to the ocean as a thick swirl of sound drifted up and filled my ears, resonating somewhere deep and specific.
Then again, just last year at night in the city, returning to my car after shopping for music. Standing at the third level of a semi-enclosed car park overlooking the train lines and northern suburbs. I remember hesitating at the door, then walking out to the edge of the building. The city seemed to take a breath, then exhale, releasing a soothing and evocative soundscape upward to where I was standing.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It might be different.’
‘I guess it’s hard without the traffic and everything,’ said Taylor.
I nodded.
‘It still might be different,’ I said.
She looked at me. I think she understood.
‘You don’t write as much stuff on the floor as Lizzy. Or Rocky even,’ I said.
‘I don’t really miss stuff,’ she said.
I laughed and immediately wished I hadn’t. Taylor glared at me for a long second, then laughed also.
‘That sounded stupid,’ she said. ‘I miss heaps of stuff. The internet, getting tattoos, haircuts, fresh fruit, girls.’
I nodded.
‘But mostly I miss being Taylor Finn,’ she said.
‘Of Taylor & Lizzy?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, yeah. But everything else too. I can’t be myself in this fucking mall.’
I nodded.
‘Are you and Lizzy alright?’ I asked, cautiously.
‘Yeah. Whatever. We’ll be fine,’ she said and climbed back to her feet.
We took a final look at the giant obstacle that was David Jones and headed back toward the cinema.
Walking back I had a weird rush of energy or something that I hadn’t felt for a while. I glanced at Taylor.
‘I don’t think Rocky cares how we get out of here,’ I said.
Taylor looked at me.
‘You want to try the dome?’ she asked.
18
Taylor and I didn’t mention our time on the roof to Lizzy or Rocky. It wasn’t a conscious decision or a secret. It just didn’t feel like there was much to tell. We had tried a door, surprisingly it had opened, but in the end it led to nowhere. Obviously there was more to it than that, and if Lizzy were to ask I felt like we would be comfortable to tell her, or take her up there. In a way we could be reassured by the freshness of the air and the lack of nuclear fallout or whatever. But even though we had breathed fresh air and felt the warmth of the sun on our faces, at no point did it feel like we had breached Carousel.
I got the feeling Lizzy would have been unenthused anyway. She probably would have looked at us like we were stupid to even try the roof option. ‘Carousel won’t let you just climb off the roof,’ she would say. Her comments about our plans to breach the dome were similar. It started a pretty nasty argument between the Finns on things that seemed to have been simmering for a while. A lot of the stuff was old and from Canada. I didn’t really have a handle on it. Lizzy accused Taylor of acting like an obsessive maniac from the moment they arrived. This upset Taylor a fair bit and she defended her actions as being driven by emotion – something that she said Lizzy used to have, but didn’t anymore.
Whilst the Finns hadn’t really spoken in the days since, the argument seemed to affect Rocky the most. His mood dropped for the first time that I could remember. He was sulky and rarely spoke. This worried all of us and we watched anxiously to see if the virus would take advantage.
Regardless of the compelling nature of Lizzy’s argument, Taylor and I felt we had to keep trying to find a way out of Carousel. With her door-date passed, Taylor seemed keen to have a break from them but take up something similar. We were also eager to be on hand at the dome ever since the Air Canada jet had flown over. There was no guarantee that it would happen again. And even if it did there was no certainty it would have any
repercussions for us. But it did suggest a rumbling of something outside of the centre. This excited us, but also put us on edge. If I hadn’t built my crappy tiki enclosure we may not have seen that jet. Fate was clearly involved, and this suggested that hanging around at the dome for another plane was pretty stupid, but it still felt somehow important.
I held tightly to the bottom of a ladder and gazed up at the oval-shaped patch of sky bordered by the dome. Taylor edged her way toward the top. It was the biggest ladder we had found, but still only reached a third of the way up the enclosure. We had leant it against the wall above the sushi bar and Taylor was getting as high as she could to see if there was a ledge or anything else up there that could support a second ladder.
She stopped moving and my radio chirped.
‘Okay, I’m freaking out. There are like a million spiders up here,’ she said.
‘Is there anywhere we could put another ladder?’ I asked.
‘Sure, but it’s going to be swinging around in open air if it’s the same size as this one,’ she said.
‘Right,’ I said.
I felt her footsteps on the ladder. She was coming down.
We headed back out into the centre to find something bigger. Taylor took the south. I took the east. We’d already been at it all day so we didn’t make a time to meet back.
I took one of Rocky’s bikes from Pure ’n’ Natural and coasted along slowly, looking for a store that might have need for an extension ladder. I stopped off in Best & Less which had tall aisles of discount shoes and an extended warehouse-type ceiling. There were a couple of small ladders, and one of those platforms with three or four steps and a small landing, but nothing that would help us.
I put some Chvrches on the iPod and continued onward. Carousel was sunny and there were several areas where I could roll slowly through a pocket of rays spilling down from an overhead window and feel my skin momentarily warming. I searched through the chocolate bars in a newsagent and discovered the Twix still had a few months of code. I crammed two into my mouth, then took a bag from behind the counter and filled it with bars to take back to the others.
I coasted eastward for a little longer until I reached the tinted glass of Centre Management. It seemed like a long time since I’d ventured inside to search for keys and snoop on the manager’s inbox. On the back of Rocky’s sickness, I felt a sudden wave of panic for the guppy I’d fed last time. I abandoned the bike and paced inside.
It wasn’t cold like my last visit. A gradual rise in temperature had condensed water against the glass leaving the office damp and fetid. It smelt somewhere between an airplane cabin and the inside of an old fridge. The carpet was thick and spongy beneath my shoes.
My hopes of a rescue were raised momentarily. The water in the fish tank looked relatively clean. I scanned for movement or floating fish bodies but found neither. Suddenly I realised that the tank was silent. The aerator had shut down, letting everything in the water settle calmly at the bottom. I lowered my gaze and found the guppy. No longer swollen but lifeless and solemn alongside his tankmates on the dirty garden floor.
‘Shit,’ I said.
I leant back on the counter while the regret swept down to my stomach. The guppy looked pretty terminal on my last visit but I had still left him there without a chance. I lingered there until the moist air made me uncomfortable and I left, deciding to never go back to the depressing beige offices.
I searched for a while longer but couldn’t shake my guilt at leaving Lizzy stranded in JB’s, caring for Rocky. We had shared the load pretty equally so far but today it didn’t feel like it. I swung a turn outside the locksmith and powered back westward with visions of a lonely bedside vigil and the fragile beep of life support.
When I arrived back, Lizzy and Rocky were happily sipping soup and watching Gossip Girl. They glanced at me curiously as I caught my breath and tried to act casual about my panicked return. I wandered over to the kitchen area and drank some Mount Franklin. After a moment Lizzy joined me.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. Just hot,’ I replied. ‘I went to check out those management offices looking for a ladder. It’s like a sauna in there.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Just closed up and moist. Maybe there’s something wrong with the air conditioning,’ I replied.
Lizzy nodded. I finished the water and watched Rocky lying on the couch.
‘Kind of smells like Rocky’s old bedroom in Camping World,’ I added.
‘Shit,’ said Lizzy after a moment.
‘What?’
‘I need to check something,’ she replied. ‘Stay here with Rocky.’
‘Okay,’ I replied.
Lizzy grabbed her radio and took off out the door.
I sat pensively on the couch with Rocky and waited for Lizzy to return. We watched almost a whole episode before she walked back in with Taylor by her side. They were carrying a plastic bag from the chemist. Lizzy sat beside Rocky while Taylor poured a glass of water.
‘Rocky, I think you might have this thing called legionnaires’ disease. It’s a bacteria that hangs around leaky old ventilation systems like the one in Camping World. The good news is that antibiotics can fix this. We just have to find the right one,’ said Lizzy.
I looked over to Taylor who was scanning the labels of several boxes of pills.
‘I had those,’ said Rocky.
‘I know, Rock. We’re just working that out,’ replied Taylor.
She sorted through the boxes until only two remained. Lizzy read each label carefully and selected a variety called Rifampicin. She popped two pills free of the case and Rocky swallowed them without argument.
My head was spinning.
Legionnaires.
I’d heard the name on news stories and remembered Mum stressing about the hygiene of hotels I had booked for trips away to South-East Asia. Lizzy’s instincts were probably right. Carousel’s ventilation systems had gone more than a year now without cleaning or servicing. They were probably crawling with weird bacteria. It would be no surprise if Rocky had been exposed to some of this in that musty tent in Camping World. I couldn’t remember the focus of the news stories but had a horrible feeling that they had only made the television because people were dying.
JB’s felt flat in the wake of this short burst of drama. We tried to relax and remind ourselves that even the right pills would take time to work. With both Taylor and I back, Lizzy wandered off into Carousel with her guitar and some pretzels. Taylor drew up a chart to indicate when Rocky needed to take his next dose of Rifampicin and when we might consider switching to the second option. Eventually she put this aside and the three of us watched the television in silence.
After four days on Rifampicin Rocky’s health seemed to spike. I came back from a morning run to find him casually sipping on a juice box and wandering through the DVD aisles. Taylor was on shift and we shared a tiny smile at his sudden improvement. A few minutes later Rocky returned with a couple of B-grade nineties horror films.
‘Hey, Rock,’ I said.
‘Hi, Nox,’ he replied.
‘Rifa going okay for you?’
He nodded and knelt down at the media player.
‘You here for breakfast?’ asked Taylor.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Might stick around and watch some of this stuff.’
‘Cool,’ she said and rose off the couch. Rocky seemed better, but there was no way we were leaving him alone yet.
‘Maybe I’ll go and find my mysterious sister,’ she said.
‘She’s at the dome,’ I replied.
‘God. Really?’ said Taylor.
I nodded and smiled a little. Lizzy had started hanging out at the dome a lot since the plane flew over. Suddenly keen on tending the gardens or getting some sun. They were pretty transparent excuses to be there in case another plane flew over. But none of us could blame her.
Taylor wandered out to find her, and Rocky and I ploughed through two
pretty terrible DVDs, Katie Holmes in both of them. At the end of the second Rocky switched the TV off, leaving us in silence. This was weird. It suggested he wanted to talk properly. Something Rocky and I had done maybe twice since we met.
‘Pretty crap, hey,’ I said, looking at the back of the DVD case.
‘Yeah,’ he replied.
Rocky seemed comfortable and relaxed. I felt like the awkward teenager.
‘You seen any of those Hitchcock films?’ I asked.
‘Psycho and The Birds,’ he replied.
I nodded and put the case down.
‘Do you want to see your family again?’ Rocky asked, seriously.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Of course, Rock. Don’t you?’
‘My mum and Grace. Danny works nights so he’s usually sleeping,’ he replied.
‘He’s at the security company, yeah?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘My real dad is in Sydney.’
‘Do you guys talk on the phone much?’ I asked.
Rocky shook his head. ‘Picture messages sometimes. Of his cars,’ he said.
I sat in silence for a moment and thought about this.
‘How many girls have you had sex with?’ he asked.
‘Shit. I’m not sure, Rocky,’ I replied.
He smirked.
‘I haven’t lost count or anything. I just haven’t thought about it for a while,’ I replied. ‘Ten maybe.’
‘I had sex with Geri twice,’ he said.
‘That’s awesome, Rock,’ I said, feeling genuine but probably sounding otherwise. Rocky didn’t seem to mind.
‘We went down on each other the second time,’ he added.
‘Cool,’ I replied.
We were silent for a moment.
‘I got into Laneway twice and Southbound once,’ he said.
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