Carousel

by Brendan Ritchie

  ‘You should do it, by the way,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Broadcast it. Lizzy will totally lose her shit,’ she said.

  ‘Seriously?’ I asked.

  Taylor nodded, and smiled magnanimously.

  27

  Christmas morning was awkward. We’d put up a plastic tree in our lounge area and covered it with some lights and a scattering of decorations from a discount stand in David Jones. In the days prior, a few presents appeared underneath as one of us made a wordless decision to gift something and the other two followed. We wandered over after breakfast and unwrapped them to flickers of surprise and guesses over which shop each item was from.

  Taylor gave me a pretty awesome writing pad she’d found down the back of a newsagent. Lizzy gave me a t-shirt from Myer that I somehow hadn’t seen despite walking past for over a year. It was navy and had a small pocket stitched into the front. I liked it straight away. I gave Taylor a book on hydroponic gardening I found when I was looking for radio information. I don’t think she’d considered this before and she seemed at least a little excited by the idea. To Lizzy I gave a small radio from Dick Smith. She was confused but I told her I would explain later. Taylor and Lizzy gave each other a trolley full of carefully selected clothes for a special Christmas edition of trolley shopping.

  The whole thing was fine but over in a matter of minutes, leaving a giant Christmas vacuum to fill for the remainder of the day. We strolled east to see Rocky’s garden and ended up sitting down there for a while talking about all the foods we missed.

  On the way back I sat through a few hours of trolley shopping in the corridor next to David Jones. It actually wasn’t so bad. Lizzy had baked some muffins and made a playlist of some great artists like Elvis and Bright Eyes doing Christmas songs. I flicked through some magazines and watched the Finns circle from trolley to change room in a kind of Zen state that seemed pretty comforting.

  Eventually we returned to JB’s and watched the Home Alone box set up until halfway through the third one where I conveniently suggested that we head up onto the roof with a few drinks and catch some afternoon sun. I told Lizzy to bring the radio. She gave Taylor a glance but to her credit she didn’t give anything back. My surprise remained intact.

  I had draped a sheet over my broadcast setup and Lizzy didn’t seem to notice it as we edged outside into what was a stunning Perth day. The sea breeze had probably rippled across Fremantle an hour or so ago and it reached us in cooling wafts of freshness as our skin sucked in the sunshine and thawed out what was beneath. The sky in Perth could be crazy blue. At the start of summer, before the first bushfire of the season, it regularly looked liked somebody had photoshopped the hell out of it. Even for me, it was hard not to stare at it when I ventured outside. Taylor and Lizzy dipped their eyes behind another pair of Wayfarers and gazed up with wonder as we made our way to the edge of the roof.

  We spread out a blanket and some cushions and cracked open some Beck’s from the rapidly diminishing shelves of Liquor Central. Soon we would be onto liqueurs and fortified wines. Facing a long, hot summer with just Tawny Port or Tia Maria for refreshment was a pretty depressing thought.

  ‘So?’ asked Lizzy and looked at me.

  ‘Yeah. Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m a little terrified about this so try not to lose your shit too much.’

  Lizzy looked at Taylor. She shrugged. I stood up.

  ‘You’ll need to turn that radio on and tune to 87.2 AM,’ I said.

  Lizzy looked at me pensively and nodded. I headed back to the projection booth.

  I pulled off the sheet and turned on my equipment in what now felt like a fairly routine procedure. I loaded up the new Taylor & Lizzy album and hesitated for a second. I think if Taylor hadn’t already have caught me out and told me it was a good idea I might have gone back out and checked with Lizzy first. But she had, and they were out there waiting now. So I hit Play and listened.

  From a distance I heard the first few chords of track one on Lizzy’s new radio. I grabbed my beer and headed sheepishly back outside to catch her reaction. She and Taylor were talking as I approached. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but at one point Lizzy flashed a smile and looked out over the horizon. It was a good sign.

  I reached them and sat down and the three of us listened until the first song faded.

  Lizzy looked over at me.

  ‘Thanks, Nox. This is pretty awesome,’ she said.

  I went to tell her she was welcome. And that the album was awesome. And it would be a fucking beacon of hope for anyone listening. And that if anything about Carousel was worthwhile it was this album. And that when we got out, she and Taylor could go back to their lives in Canada and forget me and I would be okay, or better even.

  But the second song started and Lizzy turned back to face her horizon of hidden listeners. Instead, Taylor gave me a little smile that reminded me that she knew pretty much everything I didn’t say, and if she knew, Lizzy probably did also.

  So I sat back and enjoyed the music and the beer like I don’t remember ever enjoying them. I thought of that great scene from The Shawshank Redemption where Red and co get an hour or so to drink some beers on the roof of the prison and bask in the momentary freedom. Maybe our circumstances weren’t quite as poetic, but in another way, maybe they were.

  28

  On Boxing Day, Taylor was gardening in the dome when she heard someone knock on the front entrance. She told us how she was wrist-deep, turning a stack of compost and humming the tune of Wilco’s ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ when she heard three distinctive bangs.

  ‘I stopped and looked straight at the front doors. You know when your eyes automatically go to where your ears have heard something. Like there’s no doubt in between your senses,’ she told us.

  ‘Did you go over there straight away?’ asked Lizzy.

  Taylor shook her head ruefully.

  ‘I just knelt there like an idiot, waiting to hear it again,’ she replied.

  ‘But you didn’t?’ I asked.

  Taylor shook her head.

  ‘So eventually I stood up and walked over. I was right over the other side at the lettuces so it took me maybe twenty or thirty seconds to get there,’ she said.

  Lizzy and I nodded.

  The main entrance of the dome had a frosted glass partition running in an arch just inside the door. When Carousel was open for regular business you came in through the outside doors and then swung either left or right to get into the actual entrance, and the dome. Whether it was filtering pedestrian traffic or sheltering the quasi-tranquillity of the dome from the car park outside, it made exiting the centre a clumsy process.

  ‘When I got to the doors there was nobody there. I mean, you can only see out to that little wall at the edge of the car park so they could have been just around the corner. But they didn’t come back,’ said Taylor.

  ‘Did you try the door?’ I asked.

  Taylor looked at me a little strangely and shook her head.

  Lizzy and I were pensive.

  ‘God, I don’t know. Maybe it was just a bird flying into the glass or the wind or something,’ said Taylor.

  Lizzy looked at her carefully.

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ she said.

  Taylor met her gaze. I watched the two of them as information and emotion flew across the private Finn highway.

  Taylor shook her head.

  ‘When I got to the door I felt them,’ she said. ‘Like when you go into a room somebody has just left. I used to be pretty crap at that but this place sharpens you up. You’re alone so fucking much you really feel when somebody else is around.’

  Lizzy gave Taylor a tiny, reassuring smile and started thinking it over.

  I had a stupid thought that I didn’t want to share, but felt like I should.

  ‘Do you guys have big post-Christmas department store sales in Canada?’ I asked.

  Taylor and Lizzy shared a strange expression.

  ‘Yeah
. I guess so,’ said Taylor.

  ‘They’re a pretty big deal over here. Some people totally lose their shit. Lining up at the doors for hours until they open. Trampling over each other to get to the sale racks,’ I said.

  The Finns were quickly impatient.

  ‘It starts on Boxing Day,’ I said.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Lizzy.

  ‘Really?’ asked Taylor.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Why not?’ said Lizzy.

  ‘Someone out there still thinks there’s a stocktake sale even though the world is crumbling down?’ said Taylor.

  ‘It’s about as nuts as a cleaner coming in to do the unused toilets every week,’ said Lizzy.

  Taylor sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Fuck. This place,’ she said tiredly.

  We were silent for a moment or two.

  ‘It’s like some people just didn’t get the memo,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lizzy, nodding seriously.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘This massive thing went down in the world, and some people: us, Rocky, Rachel, Peter, Stocktake Sale Lady, just didn’t get the memo,’ I said.

  ‘And now we’re just wandering around, trying to find hobbies while we figure out if we were lucky or unlucky,’ said Lizzy.

  Taylor looked at her, and then back out at the entrance. Her brain was ticking over.

  ‘Nox, you know how you said Peter had those drawings in the back of his car,’ she said.

  Lizzy and I didn’t follow.

  ‘He must have been some kind of illustrator,’ said Taylor. ‘Nox is a writer. We’re musicians,’ said Taylor.

  Lizzy looked at her sister carefully.

  ‘It’s like, the people that didn’t get the memo are all artists,’ said Taylor.

  ‘Rachel? Rocky?’ I asked.

  Lizzy shrugged as if to say, they could be. Taylor didn’t have an answer. She looked at Lizzy and the two of them tried to work out whether it could be true. That instead of politicians, scientists or doctors, it was artists that had been saved from the apocalypse.

  I joined them in pensive silence. Quietly wondering about my place within this exclusive, fantasy demographic.

  29

  It was a week or so into the new year when we started hearing other noises outside. For a while I racked my brain to remember whether there were normally fireworks or celebrations at the start of January that might have offered an explanation. But I couldn’t think of anything. Plus these didn’t really sound like fireworks. They were lower. Maybe not underground, like I imagined an earthquake would sound, but definitely somewhere around street level. They were bassy and without a real echo.

  The Finns and I ran through the lists of things we thought we had heard outside Carousel since our arrival. There were trucks or large car sounds that would drift in from somewhere distant, maybe the hills, maybe the city, before quickly fading away again into silence. Sometimes we thought we heard a dog barking somewhere deep in suburbia where his owners would presumably silence him for fear of discovery. Then there were random things like church bells, a football siren, a Mr Whippy van, guitars tuning, a ship leaving the port. One morning Lizzy swore she could hear a Britney Spears album playing somewhere to the west of us.

  Nothing could be confirmed or denied. Every sound was fleeting and uncertain. Maybe Perth was still alive, but she was keeping things close to her chest.

  Until the noises started.

  The Finns and I listened carefully from various vantage points around the centre. We tried to place them geographically but the source was shifting. We watched the sky for the yellow tinge of smoke, but it remained brilliant and blue.

  Eventually we grew used to them.

  However, the noises had a kind of unspoken legacy. They reminded us that, despite our diminishing food stocks, the risks of illness and the constant battle to stay sane, being outside Carousel was not necessarily safer than being trapped inside. We understood the strange parameters of our centre, whereas outside remained a dark and sketchy mystery. We had never considered staying or going as a choice, and maybe we would never have to, but the noises seemed to raise the stakes either way. Late into a windy summer afternoon Lizzy and I were watching TV, waiting for Taylor to return from the dome with some vegetables for dinner. We reached the end of season four of Mad Men and got through two episodes of season five before Lizzy paused the disc and looked at me curiously. I gazed out the doorway.

  The daylight had left all but the highest sections of Carousel. The rest of the centre hung in dark limbo. Taylor should have been back a while ago. I lifted a radio to my lips when the echo of boots drifted into JB’s. Lizzy and I glanced at each other and listened as they grew louder. Taylor surfaced out of the shadows and joined us on the couch. Lizzy and I sat up and watched her carefully. Her head was full of something.

  ‘I found a video of when we arrived,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘The security cameras. They’re recording everything to hard drives.’

  Taylor had been unable to shake the Boxing Day experience from her mind. Something about the knock on the door had resonated with her and wouldn’t let go. That morning while gardening she had a brainwave that maybe she could somehow access archived security footage of the entrance and find out who the hell it was out there.

  As she led us back to the security office she told us how she had spent most of the afternoon screwing around with the computers up there trying to find footage of the entrance when she stumbled across a file that showed us dragging Lizzy’s bed into Dymocks a year and a half ago. When she realised how old the footage was she quickly skipped back further. Half an hour later she found a file named S032011 that revealed our entrance into Carousel.

  The three of us huddled around a computer as Taylor reopened the file, skipped past some footage and pressed pause. We looked at her. It was tense as all hell in there. She hit Play.

  It was an odd angle. A ceiling camera somewhere in the east end. Not focused on a major entrance, but a nondescript door beside some cleaning closets. It made no sense that anyone would arrive through it. We watched the static, empty space for a few moments, before the door shifted slightly, then opened inward and Taylor and Lizzy entered.

  ‘Holy shit,’ whispered Lizzy.

  The Finns stepped inside. They looked a little confused at where they had entered and Taylor turned to look back at the door. It had already closed behind them.

  They lingered for a second until Lizzy pointed out something down the hall. She took a step toward it but Taylor said something that stopped her. The two of them looked around at the dead-empty corridor. Eventually Lizzy shrugged and walked out of frame.

  Taylor paused the clip.

  ‘We go down the hall to the chocolate store,’ she said.

  Lizzy and I looked at her, still processing the vision.

  ‘What about Nox?’ asked Lizzy.

  Taylor reached across and scrolled forward around twenty minutes.

  ‘Keep watching,’ she said.

  We refocused on the door. A moment later it opened again and I stepped through into Carousel. The emptiness struck me quicker than it had the Finns. I looked confused and turned back to catch the door as it was closing. Taylor paused the clip with the door still a foot or so open.

  ‘There’s the cab,’ she said.

  Lizzy and I leant in close to the screen. It was true. Through the gap between door and doorway was the pearly white of a Perth taxi. Taylor resumed the video and the door closed before I could stop it. We watched as I tried to open it again, but found it locked. I paced around the corridor for a few moments, clearly confused by the emptiness and the door. Eventually I left in the same direction as Taylor and Lizzy, and most likely the bookstore.

  ‘It’s weird that you took a cab, yeah?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I mean, my car is shit, so it does break down a bit. But it was
weird that the driver stopped at the bus stop and picked me up like he did. And dropped me at Carousel.’

  ‘At that same door,’ said Taylor.

  ‘You don’t remember what he looked like?’ asked Lizzy.

  I shook my head. We’d spoken about this a bunch of times already.

  ‘Sorry. I was half asleep and screwing around on my phone. I just remember a normal looking dude,’ I said.

  Lizzy held in a sigh.

  ‘Ready for what’s next?’ asked Taylor.

  We nodded. She closed the file and opened another that offered a pretty wide angle on the dome and front entrance. Lizzy and I watched for several long minutes. Nothing appeared to happen.

  Taylor stopped the clip and looked at us. We shrugged. She flicked back and replayed from a point near the start.

  ‘Watch the doors,’ she said.

  Lizzy and I leant in close. A few seconds passed. Lizzy opened her mouth and was about to ask ‘what’ when both of us saw it.

  The doors shuddered and the light outside went black. As if somebody hit the switch on some giant vacuum. It was over in a second, but resonated right down to our bones. Even Taylor, who had seemingly watched this a few times over, seemed a little shaken.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘It’s the same right through the centre. Six fifty-two am,’ said Taylor.

  My legs were jittery. We had known something had happened in the world for a long time now. But this tiny flicker of footage had finally made it real.

  ‘God,’ said Lizzy, blinking through some tears.

  Taylor put a hand on her sister’s shoulder.

  ‘Where was Rocky when that happened?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘Outside,’ I replied.

  Taylor looked at me. ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Said he was waiting for Geri. There was a spot just outside Target where they would hang out before work sometimes,’ I replied.