Carousel (2 page)

Taylor looked at me. ‘How long have you been here for?' she asked.

‘Not long. I stopped at Dymocks to look at some books, then came down the corridor and saw you guys,' I trailed off.

‘Right,' said Taylor and sipped on her coffee.

‘What about you?' I asked.

Taylor and Lizzy shared another look.

‘Maybe twenty minutes before you. We were in the chocolate store looking at gift baskets. Picked one out but there was nobody at the counter. So we sat out on the couch and waited for them to come back,' said Taylor.

‘Then we saw you looking for luggage,' said Lizzy.

I smiled a little and so did Lizzy. Taylor shook her head and looked around.

Something was bothering me.

‘Why Carousel?' I asked.

‘What do you mean?' asked Taylor.

‘For the chocolates? Why did you come here?' I asked.

‘We're still jetlagged. Woke up early looking for something to do. This weird cab driver dropped us here and said there would be good shopping,' answered Lizzy.

‘You believed him?' I asked.

‘He was oddly convincing,' said Lizzy.

She and Taylor glanced at each other as if to confirm this.

‘Weird,' I said, to myself.

‘What?' asked Taylor.

‘I came by taxi too,' I said.

They kind of shrugged as if that were no big deal.

‘I was heading into the city for the early shift at work but my car wouldn't start so I walked to the bus stop. While I was waiting this taxi pulled up and beeped at me. I figured
what the hell
and got in,' I said. ‘The driver seemed kind of stressed. He was driving fast, taking a bunch of back streets. Next thing I know he
pulls up at this big building that turns out to be the back of Carousel.'

The Finns sipped on their coffees and listened.

‘Anyway, he didn't charge me anything. Just said he couldn't take me any further. Told me to go inside,' I added.

Lizzy nodded and thought this over.

‘Surely some security guy must have seen us screwing around by now,' said Taylor.

‘Do you want to check out the other exits?' I asked.

‘Yeah,' said Taylor, and hopped down from her stool.

I led them through the complex, trying to remember how it was laid out. I'm not really good with shopping centres and at least twice I led us back through the same corridor. It's hard to tell if Taylor and Lizzy noticed. They seemed pretty curious about the shops we were passing. I heard them laughing a few times and turned back to smile like I was in on the joke. Or like I knew how hilarious this whole scenario was. Really, I just felt normal. Like this was something that was always going to happen. I've always felt underwhelmed in dramatic scenarios. People say I'm calm in a crisis, or hard to faze. Truth is I just go numb as hell.

Carousel had exits all over the place. Aside from the
front, we found a series of side exits, and a large glass exit to a car park at the back. All of these were locked. The back entrance offered a pretty big view but mostly just of the car park, and a small patch of hills east of the city. Taylor and Lizzy stayed there for a little while, looking out at the view as you do in a new place, even when it's like stuff you've seen before.

The strangest thing we found was that all of the emergency fire doors were locked as well. Those doors with a small lever on the face that you just push to open. I didn't think they were ever locked from the inside. The significance of this didn't really dawn on Taylor and Lizzy. Actually, they both seemed a little tired.

I pushed on another fire door, without success, and turned to find them sitting on a corridor lounge, back on their phones. I went over there and took a seat. I looked at my own phone for a while, then just sat there looking at the light reflecting off the floor. Taylor was lying back with her knees drawn up. Lizzy was cross-legged, still glancing through her static Twitter feed as if her flight was delayed, or her doctor was running late.

It felt comfortable. The three of us just sitting there, waiting for the inevitable opening. The snap of a door somewhere as a cleaner or security guard came on shift. Our voices echoing through the corridors to help them
find us. Some paperwork to fill out. A few questions. Then the swish of a door as the morning breeze hit our faces. Taylor and Lizzy would want to go back to their hotel and get ready for their flight. Maybe we could share a taxi. I turned to ask them about this but Taylor's eyes were closed, and Lizzy's leg had fallen to rest, just slightly, against my own.

Instead I kept quiet and silently wished that the security guards wouldn't come. And that the cleaners didn't have to start a shift. That we wouldn't hear the snap of a door or feel the breeze on our faces.

I'd never heard the rain on the roof of a shopping complex. It had always been drowned out by people and music and a thousand other noises. But now, after seven months of emptiness, Carousel sounded cavernous. I could hear sheets of rain hammering against the long cinema roof upstairs. The lighter drumming and trickle of water against the glass of the back entrance. An occasional spatter of droplets on tiles as they reached down through the uncovered hole in the dome to the slippery floor below. The small rivers of water traversing the centre's complicated gutter system. And the dull hum on the roof above the homeware section of Myer where I slept.

I had chosen a single bed. Sometimes Lizzy would rib me about this, given there was a whole bunch of kings and queens in the centre. But I needed some
sense of confinement. Sleeping in an empty shopping complex, with a whole level of Myer to myself, was room enough. I didn't need to roll over three times on a giant bed before I reached the edge.

It was actually a kids' bunk setup. One of those with a standard top bunk and a slightly larger bottom bed running at right angles beneath. I slept okay under there with my head up against the back of a display chest, and an assortment of colourful lamps running along a shelf down the side.

Taylor and Lizzy had tried a bunch of beds since the first night. Like they were still on the road, moving from hotel to hotel to play shows in different cities. I mentioned this once but it made them upset and a while ago the four of us had agreed not to do that. At the moment Taylor was back in Bed Bath and Home on a four-poster queen, and Lizzy had moved her favourite ensemble into a corner of Dymocks Books where the lighting was perfect for reading, but not too bright to keep her awake.

Lighting was a major drag for us. Most shops in the centre kept some lights on twenty-four-seven. Sometimes you could find the switches and screw around until you found which ones to turn off, but in the bigger stores they were often locked in electrical closets
or offices. In Myer they were set to a timer that sent the upper levels into a three-quarter-dim at eight o'clock each night. This was still too bright for sleep.

A few nights in I tripped a fuse and cut out the whole kids section. But the place was too creepy in the dark and I quickly switched them back on. I think we all secretly felt this way. Behind our complaints on the first night there was unspoken relief that the lights hadn't shut down and left us alone and in darkness until morning.

This particular morning I had woken early with the rain. I lay there listening and looking around the level. The kitchen section was the closest to my bed. A constant shimmer of wine glasses and cutlery in selective downward lighting. I sometimes thought of taking a photo each week to see how long it would take for enough dust to collect to dim the reflections. One of the best carafes stood stained at a nearby table from earlier in the week. Taylor and I had taken our weekly pilgrimage down the east end of the centre to Liquor Central for a shiraz she had read about in a travel magazine.

Past kitchenware was the pastel warmth of the linen section. I had started to make a decent-size pile of dirty linen in a corner over there since Lizzy had introduced me to the novelty of fresh sheets.

‘Come on. You can even have Spider-Man if you want,' she had said.

Before long I had a pile of vacuum-packed square sheet sets ready beside the bunks.

She was right about the sheets though. I didn't know what she and Taylor were on about when they ranted over thread counts or the cotton in Myer compared to Bed Bath and Home, but the crispy feel of sheets straight out of the packet, with their sweet, plasticy smell, was pretty addictive.

Linen eventually gave way to electrical and the walls of HD televisions that I had turned off long ago. Initially I was pretty excited about the electrical section. Watching DVDs and Blu-rays from JB Hi-Fi on huge 3D LCD LED ADD TVs. Gaming on the demo consoles chained to the cabinets beneath. But there was something kind of sullen about a TV with no reception. While Carousel had plenty of power, it was a total black spot for any kind of communication. No TV. No internet. Not even radio. Sure we could watch stuff on disc, and we did a lot of this, but every time I walked by the TVs I couldn't help but wish they were screening the latest
Modern Family
or
X Factor
. Shit, I'd even settle for
MasterChef
. Instead they sat dormant and lifeless. As disconnected from the world as we were.

Then there were the escalators. Static and exhausting. If there was a switch for these we hadn't found it. The increased fall of the stationary stairs meant that traversing was unusually difficult and made Taylor feel like she was ‘going to die in this creepy mall'. I used a collection of long cardboard sheets to slide down to ground floor. After a few days practice it was relatively easy. The only downside was lugging all the sheets back up every so often.

Behind my bunk and out of view was a small giftware section. Several stands full of cards in sections like His Birthday, Her Birthday and Friendship. Every Sunday I would pick out the cheesiest card I could find from the With Regret section, sign my name, put it in an envelope and drop it off to Lizzy. She would respond the next day with the worst Happy Anniversary card she could find, trudging up my escalator while I was out microwaving soup or kicking around a soccer ball. One Sunday I started watching the
Lord of the Rings
box set and forgot to leave Lizzy her card. She brooded for two days. I realised then that the cards were important and I haven't missed one since.

It sounded like the rain had set in and I could come back and listen later if I wanted, so I got up and went to the bathroom. There were Mens, Ladies, Disabled and
Staff toilets on my level. Fortunately the staff toilets had a shower.

At first it had been pretty uninviting. Basically a cubicle without the toilet. But, thanks to an abundant supply of toiletry items, it wasn't so bad anymore.

I stood under water, under rain, for a good half hour. Thankfully wherever the hot water supply was coming from, like the power, it seemed inexhaustible.

I towelled off and walked around to the Mens where I kept a basin. The Ladies was closer, and I've never liked using a trough, but something still felt weird about going in there.

It had started getting cold in the mornings so I had laid out a series of bathmats in a collage surrounding the basin I used. Coupled with the piles of shave cream, toothbrushes and deodorants I had gathered, the room went from stark white to disco colour in a footstep. Being in there alone, with the long line of silent cubicles, could be pretty creepy. A while ago I decided to prop the doors open with garden gnomes from Backyard Bonanza. I figured as long as the doors were open there couldn't be anyone hiding behind them. The others felt the same so we spent a day gnoming the whole centre. Now whenever you went to the toilet a gnome was stationed outside.

My radio crackled. I stopped brushing my teeth and listened. It was Taylor.

‘We're moving to berry Pop-Tarts. Interested?' she asked.

‘Yeah. Be down in a sec,' I replied.

‘Awesome.'

We'd made a pact to keep the radios on after losing each other for a night during the first week. Taylor had stayed out late checking to see if any of the doors would open on the south side of the building. Lizzy was bunkered down in the alternative music section in JB's. I was supposed to stay by the dome to meet Taylor but got hungry and went to Coles. The corridor lights timed out and we chased each other's echoes around the place for hours before giving up and sleeping where we were. It felt like losing your mum when you were a kid. And the sounds had made it worse. Without people, parts of Carousel echoed like crazy. So when Lizzy started crying in Friendlies Chemist, Taylor and I could hear her. And when Taylor started too I couldn't really help it either. It was the first time any of us got upset. In the morning we found each other easily and all felt pretty stupid. So we charged some radios from Dick Smith and went shopping for belts to hook them on.

Now I didn't even notice it hanging by my side.
Right now breakfast was at the Pure 'n' Natural island. It had a microwave and toaster, but more importantly a freezer full of frozen fruit. Taylor and Lizzy were paranoid about getting scurvy after a former schoolmate of theirs contracted the ancient nautical condition. He was left to fend for himself while his parents were on holidays. They had a chest freezer full of frozen sausage rolls and party pies. So, thinking nothing of it, that's all he ate for a month. Until he collapsed at school with pasty white skin and sores all through his mouth.

Taylor and Lizzy Finn floated sleepily around the tropical-coloured island as I approached. Lizzy was putting together some weird fruit smoothie. She was slightly shorter than her twenty-six-year-old twin, but wispy in a way that made her seem taller than she actually was. She dressed herself in a lot of rock-star black but always with a flicker of feminine via a heart-shaped brooch or some smoky eye shadow.

Taylor was reading the box while she toasted some Pop-Tarts. She shared Lizzy's big, luminous eyes but hers had a kind of attitude that immediately distinguished her and somehow said both
What are you looking at
and
I'm really lost
at the same time. Taylor was all vintage denim jackets and high-cut boots. On
their album covers Lizzy was usually photographed at the front, but in an ironic kind of way.