Carousel

by Brendan Ritchie

  Back in the cinema staff room I splashed water on my face in the kitchenette for what felt like ages. I cupped some awkwardly in my hand and swallowed it. My mouth felt numb and furry as it passed over. The spike of cold woke me slightly and I wandered back out into the foyer to wait for the Finns. A tacky gold railing bordered the area and I looked down upon the entrance below. Our garden looked small and sad from a distance. A broken-down relic of our failed society.

  I stepped away and slumped into the console of the Devil Driver game in the foyer. The screen looped with clips of players making turns and driving over cliff-faces. My head started to spin. I turned away and stared at the floor.

  Something was written on the tiles beside me.

  I tried to focus my gaze. The writing was stumpy and familiar.

  It spelled out ROCKY.

  He had written it himself. Adding his name to all the other things we missed and scrawled out on the floor. Sometime before he died. Before he knew he would die.

  I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. If I had gone into the storeroom earlier we would have had a door to get him out. And a car to take him somewhere. I tried again and started to cry.

  The Finns found me a little while later. Bundled up in the console. Inconsolable and mumbling about a garage door. Eventually I calmed enough to spill my secrets. I told them about the terrible smell in the storeroom. About how I had chickened out and left it for months and months, wiping it from my mind before finally going back to discover Peter’s skeleton on the floor. I told them about the wallet and the keys and the Fiesta with nothing in the hatch but some charcoal drawings. And finally I told them about the remote control.

  The three of us headed straight to the car park.

  It was hard to know whether Taylor and Lizzy really expected the garage door to open. My revelation in the Devil Driver console was drunken and confused. I remember their faces close to mine, staring at me seriously as they tried to pull the logic from my ramblings. I must have convinced them enough to try and the tone of our evening altered irrevocably.

  Their faces had brightened when I fumbled my way into the Fiesta with Peter’s keys and showed them the controller. Taylor reached across and pressed it quickly. Then tried again. I told her to wait and held it down deliberately like I had some special touch. Each time we stared at the black void across the car park and waited for the door to open. Each time it stayed silent and closed.

  I dashed back up the ramp and brought down a stack of new batteries. Taylor and Lizzy sat in the Fiesta and waited. The hope already drifting from their tired, drunken eyes. We opened the controller and replaced the battery with a fresh one. Nothing changed. We searched the glove box for another controller but there was none. I took it off the visor and walked it over to the door. Pressing the button over and over until I saw the Finns step out of the car and head back toward the ramp.

  I had waited too long. Once again Carousel had found a way to keep us inside. Taylor and Lizzy turned away from me and trudged up the ramp. I followed them back into Carousel and the three of us slept for the best part of a week.

  25

  I felt flat and lifeless without the trajectory of my secret escape plan. Time went from a delicate, tension-filled entity to something vague and unimportant. I stopped writing and skulked about the centre beneath hoods and sunglasses, doing chores that would help out the Finns but not look like shallow attempts to apologise or regain their trust.

  Summer spread across Carousel like an uncomfortable blanket. The garden sprang to life in random clusters of manic vegetables. They shot upward rapidly before developing patches of stunted fruit and foliage. The air lost its damp and started to smell differently. Not fresher, but without the dankness of the cold concrete enclosure we had become used to in the wet months. Occasionally tiny wafts of the outside would drift past our noses bringing trees, flowers and soil all the way from the hills above the city.

  Taylor and Lizzy finished ‘Posthumous’ and completed their album. Their seventh since starting out as teenagers playing at colleges and cafes. Sometimes they still met in Rugs a Million to listen through the final mixes or discuss how the songs could be played live. But the journey of the album was over.

  I hung out with them in small snatches over breakfasts and television. There was no real grudge or animosity about the Fiesta and our failed escape. Our relationship had drifted beyond that kind of thing to something more permanent. Lizzy and I still exchanged cards on Sundays and Mondays but they lacked the spark they once had. We would read them in private, then file them away like a postcard from the place where you already lived.

  From a distance I watched the Finns carefully and they seemed neither broken nor complete. The album had been important but it seemed like they knew that a void would exist once it ended. Lizzy kept a small grip on the music, toying with the mixes and playing the arrangements out loud. She filled the remaining time with books, reading constantly and widely across Carousel’s selection. I imagined her photographed for some boutique design magazine while she read in sunshine on deckchairs beneath the dome. On stools over coffee and biscuits at Pure ’n’ Natural. In her giant, awesome bed at the back of JB’s.

  After the album Taylor stopped trying to open the doors. Instead she turned to gardening. She pulled out every book and magazine she could find on the subject and built a reference library in milk crates at the entrance to the dome. She cultivated lumps of steaming compost in black rubbish bags and turned it through soil to infuse it with nutrients and offer fuel to struggling plants. Our diets improved significantly with foods like cherry tomato and eggplant that we hadn’t eaten fresh forever. But Taylor didn’t just grow vegetables. She grew flowers and succulents and weird looking plants I’d never seen before. She wasn’t just gardening to keep us alive. The dome was a place of life now and Taylor gravitated there whenever she could.

  The summer also brought life to Rocky’s garden bed at the east entrance. His bed was now covered in a scattering of ground covers. Some areas were dense and vibrant, others were wispy and gentle. Taylor carefully planted other things in there too. Pockets of colour and life. It was my favourite place to sit now. I would wander down after breakfast for long yoga sessions before the heat of the day reached in at us from outside. Or to listen to one of my iPods. Each one packed with music I had painstakingly loaded to my iTunes via CDs from JB’s. A lot of stuff I hadn’t heard before. I took the time to lie down there and discover new artists, occasionally stumbling onto a band like Camera Obscura or The Mountain Goats that I couldn’t imagine having lived all these years without.

  I also listened to Taylor & Lizzy. The new album that had yet to be named, heard or played, but which Lizzy gave to me casually one afternoon a few weeks back. It was dense and moody but jumped into my ears with a vibrancy that floored me over and over again.

  I was lying on my back listening to ‘Little Low’ when Lizzy emerged into the sunshine of the eastern end. I sat up and hit Pause like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hi. What’s up?’ I replied.

  Lizzy shrugged and sat down next to me on the couch.

  ‘What are you listening to?’ she asked.

  I hesitated for a moment, but couldn’t lie to her.

  ‘Taylor & Lizzy,’ I confessed.

  ‘Finally,’ she said.

  I smiled, but quickly realised she was serious.

  ‘I listen to you guys all the time,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ Lizzy asked. ‘Whenever I ask you it’s always something else.’

  I thought about this and realised it was true.

  ‘I think I was just embarrassed,’ I said.

  Lizzy sighed and shook her head.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise you cared.’

  ‘That our last remaining fan has stopped listening to us?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, okay. I get it,’ I said.

  We sat in silence for a bit.r />
  ‘The new stuff is pretty amazing. I think,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Really?’ asked Lizzy, and looked at me.

  ‘Yeah. I don’t really know how to explain it,’ I said. ‘It’s like nothing I’ve heard before. But it also kind of feels like it’s been in my head forever. Like some distant childhood memory that resurfaced to tell me something important.’

  Lizzy smiled and looked away.

  ‘We could totally write that on the cover,’ she said.

  I smiled and looked at her.

  ‘Does it feel weird having finished it?’ I asked.

  Lizzy took a breath, then shrugged.

  ‘Until it’s played somewhere, or listened to by people, it’s just a bunch of files on a computer,’ she said.

  I nodded and kept quiet to see if she wanted to say anything else. She didn’t.

  We stared at Rocky’s garden in calm, slow-moving silence.

  ‘Taylor’s gardening is fucking spectacular,’ I said.

  ‘Yep,’ said Lizzy.

  We stayed there for a while until an idea swirled out of the soupy mush of my brain.

  26

  In order to broadcast something on an AM radio frequency you need several things. A power source, a transformer to modulate the electrical signal, a tiny square thing called an oscillator to turn the modulated signal into radio waves, and preferably somewhere high to send them out via an antenna. And of course, some audio.

  It took me just a morning to establish that Carousel had all of these elements.

  Like television, mobile networks and the internet, radio didn’t reach us in Carousel. It was just static on both AM and FM. Not the type of random messy static that if you listened to carefully you might discover some distant voice. This was a constant shower that matched the snow on our TVs and made it clear that nothing was getting through.

  I flicked through a couple of tech mags in the newsagent and discovered that there were a few things that could block radio waves, but none seemed to be present in Carousel. I also read that a radio signal could pass through some pretty crazy shit such as a fully-grown elephant and a nuclear submarine. It seemed more likely that radio waves were no longer being broadcast in Perth or Australia, rather than being blocked from Carousel specifically.

  This should have been pretty alarming, but all I was thinking was that it seemed fairly possible that I could broadcast Taylor and Lizzy’s new album.

  Rather than fill them with false hope, I set about testing this out in private. There weren’t really any useful books on amateur broadcasting in Carousel. Radio was old technology and it seemed podcasts were the popular choice for small-time broadcasters. But without the internet this wasn’t an option. I had to go old-school and the best reference I could find was Future Scientist Magazine.

  It was a pretty cheesy mag aimed at geeky teenage science nuts. A lot of the content was internet based but I lucked out and stumbled across an edition with a feature on a bunch of kids who built a radio transmitter out of an old motorbike as part of a grade six science experiment. I didn’t have a motorbike, but I had all kinds of other stuff, and without too much trouble I’d gathered all the required elements in Projection Five.

  The hole in the cinema roof offered a perfect spot for a broadcast antenna. From what I’d learnt from the grade sixers, the surrounding buildings shouldn’t affect the broadcast, but large land masses might. Carousel was the tallest building in a big, sprawling swampland on the eastern edge of the city. If I could work out how to get a signal out it should be receivable all the way to the hills in the east, and to the Indian Ocean and beyond in the west.

  Taylor and Lizzy took my sudden and secretive venture with a deal of caution. And rightly so. I felt like I’d been messing around behind somebody’s back ever since I arrived in Carousel and I hated the idea that they thought I was doing it again. But this could be a great surprise and Christmas was only a week or so away. Our last Christmas sucked and we sheltered away from it with movie marathons and junk food. But if I could get my shit together and resemble the awesomeness of the sixth graders in just a small way, maybe I could give Taylor and Lizzy something decent for a present and give this long, chaotic year some sense of closure. But I resigned myself to not lying. If they asked me what I was doing I would tell them up-front. The surprise was a luxury.

  But they didn’t.

  They just seemed to watch me silently, probably crossing their fingers that their last remaining housemate wasn’t losing his shit as surely one day we all would.

  Late into a warm December afternoon I was ready for a test. I had taped an antenna to the top of one of the old air conditioning units on the roof. From here I ran a wire back down into Projection Four, and across to Five where I had set up a small desk with a transformer, oscillator, computer and microphone. The mic was an afterthought and I didn’t really plan on starting some crappy breakfast program, but the setup didn’t seem complete without it. I ran some power to a separate radio and set the dial to the 87.2 where I was about to broadcast. I put on a song by Radiohead, turned the computer volume to zero and ran the transmission.

  The static on the radio drew a tiny breath, then morphed into beautiful nineties alt-rock. I smiled properly for the first time in ages.

  ‘You’re not going to tell the zombies where we’re hiding, are you?’ said Taylor.

  I jumped up and spun around. Taylor was standing in the doorway with an expression I couldn’t place.

  ‘Hadn’t planned on it,’ I said, after a moment.

  Taylor nodded.

  ‘Radiohead,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. It’s kind of obvious. But still classic,’ I said.

  She looked around at my setup.

  ‘Sorry to ruin your secret,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, well, there goes Christmas,’ I replied.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I was going to broadcast your album. If you wanted me to,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘To who?’

  I shrugged honestly.

  ‘Sorry. Tough question,’ she said.

  We stood there and listened to the song for a bit.

  ‘So is it working?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘Yeah. I guess so,’ I answered. ‘This radio picks it up so there’s no reason others couldn’t.’

  ‘How far away?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘I don’t know really. Most of the city,’ I replied.

  Taylor nodded. The song finished. I switched off the equipment. Taylor wandered around the space.

  ‘Christmas,’ said Taylor, and shook her head.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I replied.

  ‘I hate New Year’s here the most,’ said Taylor.

  I nodded, understanding why.

  ‘Easter is pretty shit,’ I said.

  Taylor laughed.

  ‘What’s wrong with Easter?’ she asked. ‘Aside from having no eggs.’

  ‘I don’t know. Perth is like a ghost town at Easter,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Taylor, sarcastically.

  ‘No, I mean, like a different ghost town. Everyone in Perth goes away for Easter. The city is deserted. So I drive up to the hills and hang around at Mum and Dad’s for the weekend,’ I said. ‘It’s so boring. Me and Danni drive each other crazy.’

  I was going to keep going and try to explain why I missed that, but Taylor was already nodding.

  ‘I miss fighting with people too,’ she said. ‘Not really fighting, just arguing about something. Having it out. Even with Lizzy.’

  ‘You guys fight a little,’ I said.

  ‘Not properly. You can’t in this place, right? It’s too hard already,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s like you swallow it down a little bit each day. Then eventually you stop needing to. Because in here nothing really matters,’ she said.

  ‘You should have torn shreds off me for the roller door,’ I said. ‘I mean, I expected you to.’

  Tayl
or didn’t look at me.

  ‘All I could think of was Rocky,’ she said.

  I sucked in a shallow breath.

  ‘But you didn’t have the key in time for him. Right?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. Taylor exhaled a little.

  ‘Plus this stupid mall probably wouldn’t have let him out. Like it didn’t with us,’ she said. ‘Lizzy has been right all along.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The door opened for you. But you didn’t leave. You came back for us,’ she said, dead serious.

  ‘I think I just freaked out,’ I said.

  Taylor ignored me. ‘I watched you packing in Army Depot for weeks. All that stuff. Tiny bottles of my shampoo. Those crappy socks Lizzy likes. Rocky’s hacky sack,’ said Taylor.

  ‘You didn’t say anything,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t think you had a fucking key,’ she said and we both smiled. ‘I just figured it was something you needed to do.’

  I felt beat up inside and stared hard at the dirty red carpet.

  ‘You drive me crazy, Nox. But it doesn’t bother me,’ she said.

  I smiled and we both focused on the carpet for a while.

  ‘Maybe we’ll never get out of this place,’ said Taylor. ‘And maybe we’re lucky because there’s a life in here for us. A pretty weird one, but it’s still a life, and none of us knows whether anything better exists somewhere else.’

  I looked up at her. She seemed relaxed but her gaze held an intensity, as always.

  ‘But if we do get out, the Nox you are in here, with the writing and the haircuts and the leather jackets, that Nox doesn’t need to stay here. It’s not determined by this place, or by me or Lizzy, or anything else. If that’s you, then that’s you, Nox. The apocalypse is irrelevant,’ she said.

  I nodded and took a breath. Taylor smiled at me and looked up at the small window of sky above us.

  ‘Carousel does a decent summer. All things considered,’ she said.

  She stepped across to ruffle my hair and wandered back toward the stairs. I watched her go. With the album done and the doors left alone, the tension had finally left her shoulders. Taylor Finn was calm and stable, and for better or worse had found a place in Carousel. She stopped and turned around.