Beyond Carousel (2 page)

‘I wouldn't be hitting up any of the cheese that I've seen lately,' I replied.

‘Do you think we could poison the Bulls with bad food?' asked Taylor.

‘Holy shit, Taylor,' said Lizzy.

‘We can't hide away from them forever,' she replied.

She and Lizzy shared a glance. I looked northward to the airport. The land was dim and blurry in the fading light, but I could still make out a flat stretch of grey signalling the runways.

‘We could stick to the hills, go around and enter from the other side,' I suggested.

‘Where there are no Bulls?' said Lizzy.

I shrugged. We still didn't totally get the animal thing. They were out there, but seemingly just in random clusters. A scattering of dogs. The odd house cat. A flock of shrieking waterbirds. We could only assume that the animals of Perth hadn't disappeared alongside the humans. What we were seeing now, almost two years on, wasn't a pet store madhouse but a thinning array of
struggling urban survivors. Unsurprisingly, there were far more pit bulls than pomeranians.

‘Maybe there aren't. It looks less suburban out there,' said Taylor.

Lizzy was silent. I wondered how much Chess factored into these type of discussions now. Taylor looked at me for an answer.

‘It might be. Sorry, I haven't really been out that way much,' I said.

Taylor nodded and turned back to the horizon. This was how most of our serious discussions had gone lately. Never really getting off the ground. Everyone seemingly happy to let the conversation slide toward something less pressing.

The sun dropped into the ocean and a thin spike of red shot up abruptly out of the city. It swept dramatically north–south, then east–west.

We watched as the colour changed to blue and pulsed in a slow, rhythmic pattern. I traced the beams back to the ground and tried to work out where in the city they might be coming from. My memory of the city grid was vague, but the source was in there somewhere.

‘Wow,' said Taylor, drifting out to the railing.

I still wasn't sure if I understood this kind of industrial art like Taylor and Lizzy and others seemed to. The way it took forever to orchestrate, then sometimes only existed for a moment. The way you couldn't compare it to another book or film or painting. How it
didn't help you escape the world, but thrust you into it.

But since we had been up in the hills I had started to crave the lightshows. Nights without them felt shallow and insignificant. Like nobody had spoken to us. Or
for
us.

There was a final strobe of green before it stopped and the city returned to grey. We hesitated for a moment, then shuffled back inside. Closing the door on a bush that buzzed and ticked with life all around us.

The following morning Taylor and I ran an inventory of our supplies. We had left Carousel with nothing but a demo album, a couple of walkie-talkies and my mishmash book of short stories, and had been getting by on whatever we could find since then. Because the population had disappeared with their pantries full and houses intact we had survived okay. But we weren't living in a shopping centre anymore. We had to plan ahead.

We were low on food and also needed things like clothes, batteries and sunscreen. Although large, the house didn't have a lot to offer. No camping gear or outdoors stuff. No backpacks, torches or batteries. Just a giant wine cellar and stacks of beautifully folded linen.

‘I'm trying not to think of your stash in Army Depot,' said Taylor.

She sighed and closed another cupboard. I shook off a rush of guilt.

‘We'll have to check out the neighbours. This place is like some minimalist nineties shrine,' she said.

‘Through the trees or back out to the highway?' I asked.

‘I don't know. What do you think?' said Taylor.

‘I prefer the trees,' I replied.

Taylor looked at me and nodded.

‘Let's take a couple of these,' said Taylor.

She slid two expensive looking golf clubs out of a kit by the door.

‘For the Bulls,' she added.

I took one, switched on my radio and we headed off into the trees.

The house was perched on the lower half of the scarp with hundreds of other mansions pocketed across the hills above. We trudged upward through the thin, leafy forest, checking them off as we went. From a distance the Perth hills could look dense and green, even alpine. But within them the towering eucalypts held just a spindly canopy above a floor of grass trees, banksias and ancient rock.

After just two houses we already had more food than we could carry. The hills weren't exactly rural, but the locals seemed to stock their pantries pretty liberally. Each place had the token rotted-out fridge and freezer. Generally the top shelves of the pantries were useless also. But on the lower levels, or at the back, we found cans, nuts and dried food. Never exciting, but edible and reassuring none the less.

I hated snooping through people's kitchens. They were always so full of past life and emotion. Photos and
kids' drawings on the fridges. Lunchboxes half packed on the benches. Notes about dentist appointments and holiday accommodation scrawled down beside phones. I was training myself to look past this stuff. To stay objective and focused. Or numb, as Lizzy would say. But it was never easy. People's homes were nothing like the soulless shops to which we had become accustomed.

We left small stockpiles of supplies on driveways to collect on our way back and kept moving upward. Taylor chirped away to Lizzy on the radio, making sure we stayed in range. We had planned for all of us to go, but Lizzy was worried about how Chess might react to being out in the open like this. He didn't spook too easily, but we had no idea where he had come from or what he had been through. There was no evidence that the mansion was his home previously, so we assumed Chess had travelled from somewhere else before finding us. I think Lizzy was worried he might decide to take off back there.

By midmorning the heat had risen up out of the suburbs where it would cloak the bush until dusk. We would welcome this by the poolside, but not out here. The forest floor seemed to stay cool by bouncing the sunlight back upwards. Taylor and I had the uncomfortable sensation of being shaded from the sky, but slowly burned from the floor. Thankfully most of the properties stored water in huge tanks beside the houses in case of bushfires. We unclipped hoses and pumps to take cool blasts of rainwater in the face and neck.
Hydrated and more than halfway up the ridge, we kept moving, still taking the odd food item, but quietly more interested in seeing what lay east of the hills.

The final house on the ridge was a modest brick and tile place that looked older than the others. We stopped in the driveway and looked down at the bush speckled with roofs below. In another section of the hills one of them could easily be my parents' place. I felt a rumble of emotion and set off again, ignoring the final house and leaving Taylor to follow for once.

The ground rose sharply for fifty metres before levelling off. I moved out into full sunlight, the bush thinning in anticipation of the scrubland and desert to the east. Like explorers arriving a hundred years too late we took our final steps to the edge of the ridge and gazed out eastward.

‘Wow,' whispered Taylor.

For a moment I thought she was being sarcastic. Then I realised she and Lizzy probably hadn't seen farmland like this before. A barren patchwork of paddocks broken only by the snake of bitumen or branches of a eucalypt. The farmland was serviced by a highway sweeping down from somewhere to the right of us. There was a petrol station and a cluster of stores a few kilometres along this road, and at least one homestead that we could make out. Otherwise it was the lifeless summer palette of rural Australia.

‘That's it then,' said Taylor.

I looked at her. ‘What do you mean?'

‘It happened everywhere,' she replied.

‘I'm pretty sure that the view from here would look like this a lot of the time. Irrespective of any global catastrophe,' I said.

Taylor wasn't convinced.

‘See that truck down there?' she asked.

I turned back and traced the highway as it headed east into the distance. At the point where my eyes started to struggle, I saw something. A roadtrain. It was strewn about the road. The back half lying sideways. The front half off to the left. Shrubs had begun to grow up around the cab. The driver had disappeared with the rest of them.

Taylor turned and headed back to the house, writing off the rest of the country with a shrug, like only she could. I lingered for a while, trying to figure out how I felt about the world now that I could finally look at it. It seemed weird that our only view from Carousel for all of those months was of the hills. And now we were out of there, this is where we found ourselves.

When I arrived back down at the last house, Taylor was in the driveway, empty-handed.

‘Should we check inside?' I asked.

‘I did. It's empty,' she replied.

Her brain was ticking over.

‘What, totally?' I asked.

‘Yep. All the cans, packets, batteries. As if we had
already been there,' she replied.

I looked at the house with new caution.

‘That's weird, right?' said Taylor.

‘Yeah,' I replied. ‘The final house.'

‘Do you think somebody stopped here to load up before heading east?' asked Taylor.

‘Maybe. Probably,' I replied.

‘How far is the nearest city?' she asked.

‘City? A long way,' I replied. ‘There are small towns though. Maybe every fifty kilometres or so. Until the desert.'

‘Do you think we should head that way, too?' she asked, carefully.

‘I don't know,' I replied. ‘It seems pretty definite.'

Taylor nodded, but was quiet.

‘Plus the airport is west,' I said.

Taylor looked at me and smiled. She dropped her head onto my shoulder and kept it there for a moment. Taylor had been carrying around a stack of disappointment at what we had found since leaving Carousel. It could be blurred by the mansion and the pool and the sunshine, but days like this brought it hurtling back, front and centre.

She straightened. ‘Let's get all this stuff back to the house before it gets any hotter. I need a swim and some breakfast.'

We set off back down to the house.

Days were long and dreamlike in the hills. We spoke of leaving in general terms, but without any real sense of urgency. In truth, the house had a rhythm that we slipped into and were reluctant to disturb. I think a lot of it had to do with sunlight. We were starved of this in Carousel and our bodies had a thirst for it that ran deep. But it wasn't only the sun. It was the pitch-dark of night, the haziness of dusk, the spiking clear of morning. The hills had a clock that told us what to do so that we didn't have to decide for ourselves. Wake up and eat something. Go outside and breathe the morning air. Cool off in the pool. Sleep in the shade. Warm up before dark. Eat, then sleep some more. Life felt simple and comforting, yet strangely full.

If Tommy hadn't arrived we might have stayed there forever.

We heard his footsteps on the driveway around lunchtime on a hot, blustery Saturday. The three of us had just been swimming and were drying off on the
pavers when Chess stood up and looked at the side gate. A few moments later we heard it too. We stared at each other in dopey holiday stupor, none of us with a suitable reaction.

‘Hello,' called Tommy.

It had the tone of somebody expecting an answer. Somebody that knew the house was inhabited.

‘Hello,' he said again.

He was at the gate now.

‘Yeah,' said Taylor.

She rose and Lizzy and I followed.

‘My name is Tommy. I'm not a Loot. I was just wondering if I could charge some batteries,' he said.

He had a slight accent. German, maybe. He waved both his hands above the tall side gate to show that they were empty. Taylor glanced at me. I kept silent.

‘Just a second, Tommy,' said Lizzy.

She walked over to the gate with Chess on her heels. Taylor and I followed.

‘This gate is tricky,' said Lizzy, fiddling with the latch.

After a moment it slipped and she stepped back to let it swing open.

Tommy was a young guy, maybe just in his twenties. Blond, skinny and sunburned. He was wearing a backpack and carrying a couple of camera bags and a small tripod.

‘Oh hi,' he said, with a big, earnest smile.

The three of us beamed back at him like idiots.

‘Come in, come in,' said Lizzy. ‘I'm Lizzy. This is Taylor and Nox. And Chess.'

Tommy shook our hands and gave Chess a long, friendly pat.

‘Taylor & Lizzy,' he said, knowingly.

‘Yep,' replied Lizzy, beaming.

‘Cool,' replied Tommy. ‘Thank you for letting me in. It's going to be a real hot one I think.'

‘No problem,' said Lizzy.

‘Where have you come from?' asked Taylor.

Tommy put down his cameras and stretched.

‘I've been tracking along the scarp for a few weeks now. I saw some lights over this way one night and really hoped I might find somebody,' he replied.

The three of us nodded, still dumbstruck by how relaxed he was.

‘Or did you mean before that?' he asked.

Taylor nodded, pensively.

‘Oh sure. I'm a film student from Denmark. I've been interviewing people since the Disappearance. For a documentary,' he added.

‘Wow,' said Lizzy.

‘What do you mean, Disappearance?' asked Taylor.

‘Nobody knows really. People have a lot of theories, but mostly I just ask them about their lives now. What they miss, how they spend their time. That sort of thing. Most people have been really cool. I've been getting some great footage,' he replied.

Lizzy laughed.

‘Sorry,' said Tommy with another big smile.