Carousel

by Brendan Ritchie

  ‘Was she there with him?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘She didn’t show,’ I replied.

  Taylor’s brain was running in overdrive while she stared hard at the floor.

  ‘Did he see anything out there?’ she asked.

  ‘He just said it was really windy for a moment,’ I replied.

  ‘I don’t understand how he survived,’ she said.

  ‘It was Carousel,’ whispered Lizzy.

  The three of us were silent for a moment.

  ‘You didn’t find him entering?’ I asked Taylor.

  She shook her head. ‘Just inside Target. A little later.’

  Taylor took us through a series of files. I was pretty impressed at how quickly she’d been able to locate the footage. Taylor would often do things like that and shrug as if you were the weird one when you complimented her efficiency. On a file taken not long after the door shudder we watched Rocky emerge from somewhere within Target. He was wearing his uniform and looked generally normal. He paced the store for signs of anyone else, then stood at the entrance for a moment looking out on the empty corridors. After this he simply walked over to the camping section, took a mat from the shelves and set up a bed within the PJ aisle nearby.

  Nothing about any of this seemed too unusual for Rocky. If he had been hysterical or energetic that might have been alarming. But he seemed, at least from the distant, elevated camera, to be his normal self.

  He did lie still for quite a long time. Taylor skipped through a lot of footage and Rocky remained pretty much motionless on the mattress throughout. He wasn’t asleep. His eyes remained open. The camera was too far away to assess his expression, even in a close-up this was difficult with Rocky. But I couldn’t help but think he was processing whatever had just happened outside. We’d seen a second of it on a computer screen and had been rocked backward. Rocky had been out there and somehow survived. I started to think that his week-long hibernation in Target was pretty understandable.

  ‘I looked through a lot of files and can’t find anybody else show up,’ said Taylor. ‘Until Rachel arrives for her shift about a week later.’

  ‘Did you see Peter anywhere?’ I asked.

  Taylor shook her head.

  ‘There’s so much of this stuff,’ she said, scrolling through file after file in just one of countless folders.

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ said Lizzy.

  Taylor and I looked at her. She was probably right. Whatever had happened, happened. The fact that we entered through the same door was the most interesting discovery. We had always suspected this; it was the first place Taylor really started checking doors. But there were a lot of doors down there and, as with the taxi driver, our recollections were cloudy.

  Now we had proof. This footage confirmed that this was where the taxis, or taxi, as Lizzy would have it, had dropped us both. Not at the front or the back, or even one of the minor entrances running to car parks. Places that would no doubt have been locked.

  Lizzy was right, it didn’t seem arbitrary.

  ‘So we got here just before the shudder, and Rocky pretty much just after, and then nobody shows for a week or so,’ I said.

  Taylor watched me and ran it over in her head.

  ‘I didn’t go back any further,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Before we got here,’ she said.

  Lizzy and I watched as she leant across and scrolled through to find a random file well above S032011. She opened it and the three of us watched. It showed a corridor full of shoppers.

  ‘Oh god,’ said Lizzy and turned away from the screen.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Taylor.

  She quickly closed down the window. It was way too weird to see all of those people in Carousel, knowing what we knew.

  Lizzy paced the room in anxious circles. Taylor looked at me as if to ask if she should continue. I shrugged, then had a thought.

  ‘Maybe just look a week back from when you first saw Rachel arrive,’ I suggested.

  Taylor nodded and scanned through the files in a folder named Centre East Corridor. She found what she was after and before long we saw Rachel emerge from her cleaning door with a Redbull and what looked like a nasty hangover.

  ‘Chipper as always,’ said Lizzy, watching from over my shoulder.

  ‘This is not long before the door shudder, right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep,’ replied Taylor.

  We watched as Rachel cleaned the gnome-free bathrooms and completely missed the flash of dark outside. She left through the door in the east end an hour or so later, hesitating only briefly after stepping back outside.

  We ran through a lot of footage that night, carefully examining the days right after our arrival, in case there were others. We watched as an Indian man surfaced a few days after us and decided it must be Peter. We couldn’t find footage of his entrance but it was in the vicinity of the staff car park. He shuffled about anxiously for the best part of a day, narrowly missing Taylor at the dome before eventually making his way to the food court. It was pretty harrowing to watch. The guy seemed erratic, and was clearly distressed by whatever he had witnessed outside. He huddled in the corner of the Travelex for long stints in between gorging on random foods and gathering together top-line electrical items. It seemed like he knew the Travelex store and Taylor suggested that maybe he had a job there. Late in the day he spent several long and ominous minutes with a bottle of water in Friendlies Chemist before slipping into the food court toilets, where he remained indefinitely. We stopped the video and decided we had uncovered enough of Peter’s mystery. None of us needed to see Rachel make the discovery. Or shift him to the storeroom.

  Lizzy left us in thick, heavy silence. It was a lot to take in about a world we had wiped from our minds. I stared hard at the desktop and tried to find a word for how I felt.

  ‘Did you find Stocktake Sale Lady?’ I asked, to break the silence.

  Taylor looked at me and nodded.

  ‘Seriously?’

  She nodded again. There was a tiny flicker of something in her gaze.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  Taylor opened another folder and located the file. She skipped through a half-hour of empty footage on the front entrance. Until a figure came into view.

  She was in her twenties and pretty, from what the grainy footage suggested. She was wearing jeans and a black top and carrying a kind of chunky retro handbag. There was something odd about her clothing. Taylor noticed me straining to see and paused the clip. I looked closer.

  ‘Is that paint?’ I asked.

  Taylor nodded.

  The mystery shopper had paint all over her clothing. Not the heavy white splatter of a tradesman, but the random palate of a painter.

  She lingered at the door for a few moments, knocked gently, then waited a few moments longer. Another couple of seconds passed before she turned and left the frame, her shoulders dropping a little with disappointment. She looked a touch edgy maybe, but hardly like someone fearful of zombies or nuclear fallout.

  ‘Artists,’ said Taylor, and closed the video.

  I looked at her and suddenly remembered something. I shook my head and almost laughed.

  ‘What?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘Rachel said something to me that night we were drinking,’ I replied.

  Taylor looked at me curiously.

  ‘She asked me if we were artists,’ I said. ‘But it was kind of like she already knew that we were.’

  ‘Because we were alive,’ said Taylor. ‘Protected.’

  I looked at her and tried to process everything that had happened to us.

  ‘Who would do that?’ I asked.

  Taylor stared at the static screen. She didn’t have an answer.

  ‘Come on. We better go find Lizzy,’ she said.

  30

  Following Taylor’s discovery I set some goals for my writing and was pretty keen to at least get through January before letting them slide. We had delved too deeply
into the murky and sombre Carousel past. Digging it up had left us fragile and revealed little that was of use. Somehow the centre had protected us from a kind of apocalyptic vacuum. This protection had been enough for Rocky as he waited outside Target, while Rachel had been fatefully inside already. How Peter arrived was still a mystery, but seemed innately connected to the drawings in his Fiesta.

  From there the six of us adapted to our new environment in the best ways we could. None of us wanted to judge Peter’s decision. Or Rachel’s upon finding his body. The security footage held its own silent judgement on each of us, and that was enough.

  The only thing I chose to hang onto was the idea that my arrival here wasn’t arbitrary. That there was a reason I was alive and in Carousel. I let this drive my writing goals.

  The first one was just to finish the book of short stories and move on to something new. It had been all but done for months now but I had to decide on whether I wanted to include the ‘Boy on the Bus’ story or leave it alone and forgotten.

  If I was straight with myself I knew the story had to be included; in a way, it was the one from which all of the others had stemmed. It was more a matter of whether I knew what the hell it was about. And if I didn’t know, and couldn’t figure it out, deciding whether this actually mattered.

  Lizzy had asked me something important about the story that I felt I needed to get straight. It was important for the writing, but also for me personally. Rocky’s death was a weight on my shoulders that I don’t think he would have wanted. Taylor had tried to lift this, telling me it was Carousel that decided if and when we could leave, and whether we lived or died, not a remote control in a dead man’s Fiesta. But the weight had remained.

  Somehow I knew that the boy on the bus was Rocky. But I didn’t know what he decided by staying aboard the wrong bus. If I could work this out and finish the story, maybe things would become clear and the weight would lift.

  I danced around the story for weeks, sometimes sitting down and reading it carefully, line by line, as if the answer was available to the focused eye. I tried typing it out on my laptop and shuffling things around. Digging like a child in a sandpit, manically shifting the surface, but never going deep. And I would walk the corridors with the writing pad in my pocket. The story bobbing in my head as I kept myself moving and willed it to surface.

  On a Thursday I set out southward where the corridors were long and wide and I could wander for hours before passing the same stores. I skirted east around the dome and left Taylor to herself with the gardening. I would see her and Lizzy at dinner and my best chance of an answer seemed to be in solitude. I passed Woolworths, the music shop and the bubble tea outlets and continued onward. This was the edge of my neighbourhood and I gazed around as my memory ebbed and flowed ahead of my vision. I was moving faster than I normally did. For once not so aimless.

  Before long I found myself standing in front of Target.

  I stared up at the huge red logo. The checkouts stood below like lonely, silent pillars.

  I hadn’t been to Target since Lizzy started building her studio. Since I went in to get us a Vitamin Water and ended up staring at the place where we found Rocky. The realisation ripped across my skin like an icy southern wind.

  I got the dizzy feeling on auto dial. The loss of my feet. My head towering above my body. The spread of the centre like a complex, 3D map. My eyes searching through a mass of doors, narrowing and narrowing, before I was tilted too far over to know the ceiling from the floor and I jolted back awake.

  I caught myself on a checkout and sucked in some air. It felt like hours had passed but I knew this wasn’t the case. This dizzy sensation had plagued me ever since my last visit to Target. Suddenly being back at the store didn’t feel so accidental.

  My feet returned and I stood upright and tested myself against gravity. I steadied, then pushed through the checkout and into the store. Rocky’s first bed was tucked away at the back and I weaved toward it without hesitation.

  Within moments, his tiny dwelling was before me. A thin rubber mat rolled out to sleep on. A small, batterypowered lamp. Empty bottles of Sprite and Pepsi. Chocolate wrappers. A pile of clothes for a pillow. I knelt and looked over the sombre arrangement and wondered if I was going to break down. For a moment I wavered, before I noticed a glint of silver within the clothes.

  Rocky had pulled down a bunch of shirts from a nearby rack to form his pillow. They had remained there, dusty and unmoved since we found him all those days ago. But within this mass was something else. I shifted the shirts away. A set of keys lay beneath.

  Nothing for a car or bike. Just a couple of regular keys with a cord to a security card.

  They were Rocky’s.

  With a horrible, unexpected jolt I knew what happened at the bus stop. What the boy really decided. What Rocky had decided.

  I grabbed the keys and radioed Taylor and Lizzy.

  ‘Should we bring anything?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘Just your album,’ I replied.

  ‘And meet you at Target?’ asked Lizzy.

  ‘Yeah. Please,’ I said. ‘Just leave everything but the album and come straight over.’

  ‘Alright. We’ll be there soon,’ said Taylor.

  It was hard to gauge their voices over the radio. But they were coming, that was what mattered.

  I left the bed and skirted the long left side of Target. I reached the end, then turned along the back wall, but still didn’t find what I was after. I moved past manchester, into electronics and eventually toward camping supplies. Then, in the back right corner, beside the fishing rods and eskies, I found the door.

  Just a regular grey door with a small sign saying Staff Only.

  Beside it was a tagging mechanism like the one we had seen Rachel use. A steady red light emanated from the front. I lifted Rocky’s card to the sensor.

  The light turned green.

  I stood there for a moment and took a breath. I didn’t push the door open. Instead I sat down and took out the small writing pad Taylor had given me at Christmas. My original ‘Boy on the Bus’ story was folded and worn inside. I lifted it out and read it again.

  Everything made sense. The boy’s reluctance to go home. The mystique of the wrong bus. Strange comings and goings of the passengers. Friendships built out of the darkness. The moment where he realises what’s happening, but does nothing. The inevitability of his destination.

  The story was finished. Had been for a long time now.

  In trying to make my own decision I had written about Rocky’s. I had only ever considered staying in Carousel as cowardice, but somehow Rocky had made it brave and defining, like so many things.

  I closed the pad and felt Rocky resonate somewhere deep, below the numbness. Tears streamed from my eyes but the air I breathed felt fresh and vital in my lungs.

  ‘Nox? Where are you?’ radioed Taylor.

  ‘At the back,’ I answered.

  Their footsteps echoed closer until they swung into view and found me.

  ‘Shit. Are you okay?’ asked Lizzy.

  I looked at them both as they knelt down beside me. Hair all choppy. Oversized black shirts rolled up at the sleaves. Big, luminous eyes staring right into me.

  About as Taylor & Lizzy as you get.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  Taylor looked around.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  I handed her Rocky’s keys. She and Lizzy looked at me carefully.

  ‘They’re Rocky’s,’ I said.

  Taylor glanced at the door, then stared at me hard. I nodded and climbed to my feet.

  Taylor and Lizzy looked at each other.

  ‘Did you bring your album?’ I asked.

  They nodded.

  I stood by the door and waited. Taylor edged forward and held out the card. She waited a moment, then lifted it to the sensor. The light turned green.

  She placed her hands on the door, looked at me, and pushed.

  31
/>   For a long time we just sat outside on the concrete, breathing in the air and trying to work out how we felt.

  We had exited Carousel onto a small concrete ramp that led away from Target toward some staff parking. At a turn in the ramp was a platform sheltered by the cornering walls and an overhang in the roof. Central in this platform was a dusty vending machine.

  It seemed like we were on the southwest corner of the centre as the sun was edging away from us toward the horizon.

  The horizon.

  It was messy, flat and suburban, like any other day I had seen in Perth.

  The three of us stared at it across the vacant car park. An empty highway divided the centre from the brick and tiles of the surrounding suburbs. Everything looked quiet and gentle.

  ‘You don’t think he forgot?’ asked Taylor, after a while.

  I looked at her and shook my head. She turned away and bit her lip as she cried.

  Lizzy held her sister’s head against her chest.

  ‘He wanted to stay,’ said Lizzy softly. ‘Didn’t he, Nox?’

  I looked at her and nodded. A familiar rumble reached us from somewhere in the suburbs. Suddenly it didn’t sound so distant.

  Taylor sniffed and we all looked out at the horizon once again.

  ‘All that stuff you packed,’ Taylor reminded me.

  I looked at her, then Lizzy.

  ‘We can’t go back,’ said Lizzy.

  Taylor and I nodded. The rumbling came again. We looked up at the sky. It was clear and cloudless.

  ‘I think I can get us to the airport,’ I said.

  The Finns glanced at each other. Lizzy nodded and Taylor pulled herself up off the concrete. Lizzy and I joined her and the three of us edged down to the base of the ramp. We shared a nervous smile and set off across the long, windswept car park.

  Acknowledgements

  Large and overdue thanks to Marcella Polain for her longstanding belief and support on so many writing journeys. I’m not sure that books can happen without people like you. Thanks to everyone at Fremantle Press. Particularly Cate, for a phone call that won’t be forgotten, and Naama, for getting Carousel and guiding me back through its web. Thanks to Edith Cowan University for opening its arms to creative research. Thanks always to Claire for her love, support and honesty, and for reading first while I hovered, feigning confidence. Thanks to Ange for reading second and inhaling where I’d hoped people one day might. Thanks to Mum and Dad for reading third, sharing the final pages by the fire in Karridale. I’ll remember that story. And thanks to my twin sisters. Maybe even to twin sisters everywhere.