Lizzy pulled up and looked at me. I shrugged, not knowing much about the place. We cycled over cautiously and snooped around. A Donut King had been smashed into at the front, but otherwise the complex looked relatively untouched. It was no Carousel, but the place still gave me the shivers.
With the last of our strength we levered the unlocked doors of a 7-Eleven and spent the next hour in a sugar coma on the floor inside.
Eventually Lizzy sat up and tried to shake off her stupor.
‘That was intense,’ she said. ‘The riding, that is. Although I don’t think I’ve eaten that many Skittles before either.’
I stretched out my arm.
‘How is your shoulder?’ she asked.
‘Fine. Just bruised I think.’
‘And your knees?’ she asked.
I shrugged like they were no big deal.
‘Keep an eye on them, Nox. If they get infected we’re screwed,’ said Lizzy.
I nodded. Lizzy looked at me carefully.
‘I’m sorry about your bag,’ she said.
‘It’s cool. You got that Bull pretty good,’ I replied.
‘You still have your short stories, yeah?’ she said, momentarily alarmed.
I nodded but couldn’t get rid of her gaze.
‘But you lost some other stuff?’ she asked.
‘A novel,’ I replied.
‘Oh shit. Wow. I’m so sorry, Nox. That sucks big-time,’ said Lizzy. ‘Was it finished? I mean, could you start over?’
‘I don’t know. There probably isn’t time now anyway,’ I replied.
I stood up and tried to forget about what this meant and focus on what was in front of us.
‘We should try to find some actual food. And some dry clothes,’ I said.
Lizzy stayed seated while I searched the shelves.
‘So I lied about having our album,’ she said.
I stopped and stared at her.
‘It’s back there in my bag,’ said Lizzy.
I sighed and shook my head. We were both screwed.
‘Sorry. But you would have wanted to go back for it,’ she said. ‘It was too risky with the jet gone.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Taylor has a copy anyhow,’ said Lizzy.
‘What if we can’t find her?’ I asked.
‘Then I guess I’m not going home,’ said Lizzy.
I looked down and shifted some dust about with my dirty All Stars. My plans were unravelling one by one.
Lizzy pulled herself up so that I would look at her.
‘It’s all of us or nothing, Nox. That’s how I roll on all of this,’ she said.
I took a breath.
‘Then I need to tell you about Georgia,’ I said.
‘Yeah, you do,’ said Lizzy.
She smiled and shoved me as if we were standing by her high school locker. I held back a smile myself.
‘She’s an actress from Ohio. We met at the casino and hung out for a week or so before she left for Fremantle,’ I said.
‘Was this before you met the Curator or after?’ asked Lizzy.
‘Before. She doesn’t know about the Prix de Rome,’ I replied.
‘So we need to find her and tell her?’ said Lizzy.
‘If we have time,’ I replied.
‘Where is Fremantle again?’ she asked.
‘It’s the major port. A fair way south of here,’ I replied.
‘So we find Taylor and Sophie, head to Fremantle for Georgia, get her and Sophie back to their Residencies, then race the hell back to Carousel,’ said Lizzy.
I nodded. It was a simple plan but still chocked full of secrets and holes.
‘Great. And while we ride you can tell me all about your new girlfriend,’ said Lizzy.
She turned and left the shop in a way that suggested there would be no arguments.
We searched the exterior stores for clothing and eventually found a Kathmandu.
‘I never thought I would be so pumped to find a trekking store,’ said Lizzy.
We kicked in the door and spent a while gearing up for the journey ahead. It was kind of fun and took my mind off our situation. We left our old clothes in a dirty pile and lined ourselves in the best thermals and windbreakers on offer. Then we found amazing, bouncy socks and actual trekking boots. Lizzy chose her stuff carefully and actually surfaced from the change rooms looking pretty cool. She wore a thigh-length olive windbreaker over some fitted hiking pants and an awesome pair of purple trekking boots. My outfit was less put together but I did find a beanie to hide my greasy matted hair.
We loaded up a couple of new backpacks with spare clothes, torches and sleeping bags and left feeling a million times better about the journey ahead. There was a Coles on the corner of the building. Like most of the place, it hadn’t been touched since the Disappearance. We covered our noses against the smell and pushed our way inside. It was jet black and echoed with the skitter of rats. Chess looked like he was going to pop an excitement fuse, so we moved fast. Cans, water, batteries, dog biscuits, disinfectant, Lizzy’s favourite shampoo and conditioner. The backpacks were quickly full.
Back on the bikes we resumed our journey to the west. An hour into the ride Lizzy slowed and started sniffing at the air.
‘What is that?’ she asked.
A wash of cool, briny air had swamped over the suburb.
‘It’s the ocean. We must be close now,’ I replied.
Lizzy and Chess powered ahead of me. For a moment I lost them as the road turned and dipped away. As I followed, a dramatic sweep of Indian Ocean came into view. It spread left and right in a long line against the rigid coast. The water was deep navy in the onshore wind and slits of whitewater popped with luminescence. There was a harbour to our right. I couldn’t remember the name of it, but the boat owners wouldn’t be happy. A bunch of yachts had been blown into a corner of the marina by a winter storm. They clanked about in a tangled mess of old Perth money.
Lizzy had pulled up at a walkway overlooking a swimming beach. I joined her and we looked down at Chess carving mad loops across the sand.
‘This air is so fresh it’s kind of making me queasy,’ said Lizzy.
‘I guess we’ve been sucking in smoke and gas for so long now that our lungs aren’t used to it,’ I said.
I looked south and weighed up our next move. House upon house clung to the dunes overlooking every inch of the coastline. The medium distance was hazed over, but I knew that it would continue like this all the way to Fremantle and beyond. Lizzy and I hadn’t spoken about how we planned to find Taylor, mainly because there was nothing to say. She and Sophie could be anywhere. I was quietly hoping for some kind of Finn twin telepathy. Maybe Lizzy was, too.
31
It took us a while to discover that the nights held our best hope. During daylight we could call out, search houses, look for footsteps on beaches. But in darkness, if we were lucky, the Artists would reveal themselves.
Lizzy spotted the first lights as we trudged back up from another empty beach at dusk. It was different to the disco flicker of the city lightshow. These lights were warm and static. Lizzy stopped and pointed out a house set into the hill across from us. One of the windows stood out from the others. There were candles burning inside.
We bolted up there and banged on the door like a couple of manic trick-or-treaters. The door was opened by a middle-aged lady holding a can of pepper spray. Our conversation was awkward and underwhelming. She knew nothing of a musician and painter living nearby. Lizzy took the reins and told her about the Prix de Rome. The lady listened carefully and eventually she thanked us. But I worried whether we had lost too much credibility upon arrival for her to take our story seriously. We left disappointed, but with a new plan for finding Taylor and Sophie.
We sheltered away and slept through the mornings, and stayed up searching late into the nights. Before long we discovered that the coastline was scattered with Artists from all over the city. Most of them greeted us with surprise and
open arms, hustling our shivering bodies inside to warm beside fires and share in each other’s stories. Lizzy recognised some and was a stranger to others. We told them of the Curator and stressed the need to get moving back to their Residencies. Sometimes we stayed for a few hours to share a meal, but mostly we kept searching. There were just weeks to go now and so much still to do.
The atmosphere changed when we reached Scarborough. The place was decimated and teeming with Loots. The towering Rendezvous Hotel had been overrun. Now it pulsed with torchlight and garbled shouting. Shadows darted in and out of balconies, keeping watch on the pillaged streets below. Some of the Artists we met had warned us of a crystal meth epidemic in Scarborough and the signs were all over. Streets glinting with glass, trash and urine. Stores that were busted open and vandalised, but still had shelves full of food. Walls of harrowing artwork that had been redone, over and over, in manic attempts at perfection. Lizzy kicked away some rocks from under her boot, before cringing and realising that some of them were teeth.
We skirted around the hotel and stuck to the cover of a cycleway in the dunes. It was overgrown with saltbush and my skin prickled at the thought of a meth-head playwright hiding somewhere ahead.
Around midnight the wind picked up and it started to rain. It was light at first, then heavy and almost sideways with the westerly. Lizzy glanced at me but neither of us wanted to stop until we were clear of the suburb. So we rode on into the weather.
We probably could have moved faster on foot. On the bikes the wind pinned us down and swayed us sideways. Occasionally the path would rise or the bushes thin and I would catch a vista of wild ocean over our shoulder. Each time it looked the same. It was as if we were pedalling exercise bikes at a gym.
I looked back at the Rendezvous. It was fading, but still tall and ominous against the shifting sky. A pair of nautical searchlights cut frantic lines through the blackened suburb. They scanned the windblown beach behind us. Blocks of beachside apartments to our left. Then, alarmingly, swept across the cycleway ahead of us.
Lizzy and I braked in unison and looked back at the building.
‘Crystal Loots,’ whispered Lizzy.
The searchlights continued to jitter around us.
‘We have to keep moving. Get out of their range,’ I replied.
Lizzy was about to reply when one of the lights swept past her face and stuck. There was a muffled shriek of glee from somewhere in the tower. I watched from the front row as Lizzy’s eyes ran a gamut of emotion, then landed, grudgingly, on fear.
‘Come on!’ I yelled.
We took off along the path. The light clung to Lizzy’s back like a tracer. Before long the second light found my back.
‘We gotta get off this path!’ yelled Lizzy.
It was impossible to see more than a few metres in front of us. We turned off the cycleway regardless and splashed down onto a car park. It was big and wide and the lights kept on us. At the far side we pulled the bikes up onto the slushy lawn of a playground. Beyond this were some buildings. A school maybe. I steered us towards them and the lights followed frantically. We turned a corner and hid behind a building. The lights lost us, but hovered nearby, waiting for our next move.
We took a winding path through the school until we eventually found ourselves in a different car park. I looked back to see if the lights had managed to follow. They were still hunting through the school.
‘Should we keep going?’ I asked Lizzy.
She was drenched and slumped down over her handlebars.
‘I vote we hide out in that bus,’ she replied.
I followed her gaze to a regular looking school bus parked alongside the school’s gymnasium.
We hid our bikes under the bus, then struggled in through a window. Chess followed, clearing the jump easily after a dozen false starts. The bus was a bit musty, but otherwise not so bad. I turned around while Lizzy stripped off and pulled on some dry clothes. I was just finished doing the same when a distant beam of torchlight swept past the windows.
We hit the floor.
There were voices outside. Muffled and broken, but close by. In the school maybe.
My stomach tightened. The light flickered past again.
We lay wide-eyed and motionless as the voices moved closer. Chess’s ears traced them from the front of the bus to the side. I slowly reached for the bug spray in my bag.
Lizzy stopped me. She gestured to her ear.
I listened for the voices. They sounded strangely similar. I realised they were all coming from one person. It was the nonsensical babble of a solitary addict. Something about milkshake flavours and the Liberal party. Gradually they started to fade.
Lizzy and I stayed curled up on the floor long after they were gone. We were exhausted, but too wired with adrenaline for sleep.
‘Have you seen Crystal Loots before?’ I whispered, eventually.
‘Yeah. Sometimes they would sneak into the Collective to steal clothes or whatever. But there were a lot of us there to scare them off,’ said Lizzy. ‘Not like out here.’
‘One of them stole my golf buggy while I was shopping in Vic Park,’ I said.
Lizzy smirked in the darkness across from me.
‘He needed a car to take to the hills. To find the Curator,’ I said.
‘Didn’t you find Ed, like, right after that?’ asked Lizzy.
‘He was drinking a beer a few streets away,’ I replied.
Lizzy shook her head. ‘What hope do they have in this place? No family. No cops. No rehab programs.’
I sighed and nodded. She was right. It was a sad state of affairs.
We listened to the rain on the roof for a while. Being in the school bus felt safe and nostalgic. As if we’d handed the controls to somebody else for a while. I was drifting off to sleep when Lizzy turned and finally asked me about the aurora.
‘What did you see during that second aurora?’ she asked.
I sat up slightly. ‘Oh. It was my first time on a plane. We were on a family holiday to Adelaide. Ages ago when me and Danni were just kids,’ I said.
Lizzy nodded and waited for me to continue. I felt pretty awkward about the whole thing.
‘It didn’t last long. I just saw us on the plane. Then the view from our window,’ I said.
‘What was the view?’ asked Lizzy.
‘Just houses. We were coming in to land back in Perth. Dad said that if we looked hard enough we might be able to see our house,’ I replied.
‘Could you?’ asked Lizzy.
I shook my head and smiled.
‘There were thousands of them,’ I replied.
‘Did you remember how you felt?’ asked Lizzy.
I thought about it as Chess snored softly in the aisle between us.
‘I felt like everything was big and intimidating. Before that I think I felt like our house was the whole world. But looking out the window I realised that it was just one tiny dot amid a million other tiny dots. Like it was nothing at all, but also, kind of, everything we had.’
Thinking about it brought up a heavy dose of emotion. Lizzy seemed to notice this and stopped with the questions. She nestled down beneath the seat and we listened to the rain some more.
‘What was your mum doing during the Carousel aurora?’ I whispered.
Lizzy was silent and, for a moment, I thought she was asleep.
‘She was standing at an airport,’ said Lizzy.
‘Where abouts?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lizzy.
‘You don’t remember?’ I asked.
‘The vision was so short. It was impossible to tell,’ said Lizzy.
I remembered back to that day under the dome. How Lizzy was standing with a big smile and tears spilling from her eyes.
‘Do you think she was on her way somewhere?’ I asked.
‘I just saw her in a terminal. I couldn’t tell if she was going somewhere, or waiting for someone. But there was this expression on her face. It was as if something had shi
fted in her world. Something that wouldn’t be the same ever again,’ said Lizzy. ‘Then she heard something and turned away.’
‘What was it?’ I asked, sitting upright.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘The aurora stopped.’
Lizzy rolled over and used a jumper for a pillow. I lingered for a moment, trying to find something to say. But I couldn’t. There was every chance now that Lizzy would never see another.
After a long, fractured sleep through the day, I stirred just in time to catch the sun setting on a broken sky to the west. Lizzy was up, nervously humming some Feist and checking over our bikes.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Hey,’ I replied.
‘There aren’t any more houses over that hill,’ she said, nodding out the window.
‘What’s there instead?’ I asked.
‘I was going to ask you,’ she replied.
I couldn’t think of anything and shrugged apologetically. Lizzy was pensive and we packed up quickly.
After a short ride the land began to rise, before the houses and cycle paths ended abruptly with fenced-off bushland. I realised then that we had reached the army barracks. For the regular apocalyptic survivor this would be good news. Safety, weapons, maybe a fallout bunker or something. For us it just meant a big detour inland before we could resume our search of the coast.
Sometime around eight we bridged the hill and rolled down into the coastal havens of Swanbourne and Cottesloe. There was a heartening scatter of lights amid the Norfolk pines. Lizzy turned and smiled, then beelined for the closest one. It was a grand looking wood and stone place with an old boat named Doris out the front.
Lizzy knocked and before long a burnt-out old rocker came to the door.
‘Evening,’ he said.
‘Hey,’ replied Lizzy.
‘What are you trading?’ he asked.
Lizzy paused and we glanced at each other.
‘Oh, sorry. Nothing actually,’ said Lizzy. ‘We’re trying to find my sister. Taylor Finn.’
The guy looked at Lizzy strangely.
‘Musician from Canada. Hangs around with a painter. Looks a lot like you?’ he asked.
Beyond Carousel Page 17