Beyond Carousel (6 page)

If there were other Artists up there, we didn't see them. Maybe it would be easier at night when a light might give them away. Or maybe they would try to stay dark and quiet like we had. By venturing into the city we were assuming that people there would be out in the open rather than hidden away. Tommy had made it sound like this. For the most part I hoped he was right.

By lunchtime our legs were already starting to tire. Taylor was the only one of us in any shape, and even she seemed to be flagging without the help of the slopes. We ambled along at pedestrian pace as the road started to radiate heat like some giant, never-ending pizza stone. Shade became sparse and I noticed Chess seemed reluctant to remain stationary on the bitumen for more than a moment.

We had all but left the hills and reached what looked like a series of market gardens when Lizzy slowed on
the road ahead of us. Chess peered up and circled her curiously. My hand dropped down to my golf club. Taylor stopped and glanced sideways at her sister.

‘Do you think there's any food here?' asked Lizzy.

Taylor had become a bit of a plant expert during our last year in Carousel, growing all kinds of things under the dome without much to work with. She looked around at the messy, browning pockets of land.

‘Could be some tomatoes. Maybe citrus. If the birds haven't got to it all,' said Taylor.

‘God, that would be awesome. I have hella scurvy right now,' said Lizzy.

‘We can't really carry anything else on these bikes,' I said.

‘But we could have a fresh lunch for once,' said Lizzy.

Taylor looked around and thought it over.

‘Okay. We gotta head this way anyhow. Let's check it out,' said Taylor.

She turned us down the remnants of a dirt road, eyes scanning the passing foliage as she went. One in four of the large, rectangular planting areas had some hint of life. Here Taylor found several patches of tomatoes and capsicum. They were clustered from self-seeding and stunted badly from the lack of water. But even so there were countless pockets of fruit and vegetables tucked under leaves and spread out across the cooler dirt. We put the bikes aside and trudged our way through, eating as we went. At first we took anything that was half ripe
and bug free. But as we realised how much was on offer we quickly became fussy, taking only premium produce to eat or stash for later.

Lizzy was excited and hopped about at each new discovery. She jammed tomato after tomato into her mouth, before holding her stomach and forcing down some more. Taylor blissed-out in the peaceful, sprawling gardens. This was probably what she had dreamed about for all those days stuck in Carousel. I could see her here, making a life for herself. Bringing the gardens back to life. Collecting water and cooking by the fire in winter. Harvesting and preserving in the baking-hot summers. It seemed as good an existence as any these days. If it wasn't for her painter I wondered if she would have stopped dead ahead of me and announced that she was staying.

The gardens gave me another flicker of home. I thought of messing about in Dad's veggie garden with Danni after school. Sprinklers tossing fat droplets of water in circles across the rows of green. Dad with his pants rolled up to the top of his calves. The three of us thumbing seeds into soft warm soil while Mum looked down on us with a white wine in one hand and the phone in the other. I meandered in the warmth of this for a while, getting a small pang of sadness on the way back out.

All of the fresh fruit and vegetables rocketed through our unsuspecting stomachs and left us bailed up in a
rusty outdoor toilet for the rest of the day. The toilet was beside a machinery shed on the border of a few acres of soil and wilting citrus. We felt stupid and hoped that the vitamin hit would be worth it. Night seemed to close in much quicker now that we were off the hills. Tired and edgy, we took our final visits to the toilet, then locked ourselves in a four-wheel drive parked in the shed. It was musty and cramped and smelt like canine. The sprawling king beds and fresh linen of our previous home were a million miles away now.

At first light we staggered from the car and set off again. We weaved our way along the grid of roads servicing the market gardens until a sweep of tiled roofs appeared and we surfaced into a subdivision. The drone of insects disappeared and an unnerving silence took its place. Lizzy hummed and chatted away to a skittish Chessboard. The more blasé she acted, the more I knew she was worried sick about him. We rolled quietly past the dormant houses. Some of them had paved frontages instead of gardens and looked no different to how they might if inhabited. I cooked up ridiculous fantasies of the cute uni students that could be inside. Killing time on Facebook and sunbaking in the backyard. Home alone until their mum brought their brothers and sisters back from school. Flirting with me on text about how they were bored out of their mind.

It had clouded over during the night but the heat had remained. Now the air felt sticky and we heard the
distant echo of thunder somewhere to the north. At the outer edge of the houses was a long, high wall blocking them in from whatever lay to the west. We traced along this wall for a while without any luck. Eventually Lizzy stopped and looked back behind us.

‘Does this thing ever end?' said Lizzy.

‘What is it even for?' said Taylor.

‘I think it's like a sound barrier to the highway on the other side,' I replied.

‘There's a highway over there?' asked Lizzy, looking up at the wall.

‘Does it go to the city?' asked Taylor.

I shrugged. ‘Sorry,' I said.

‘You're the worst, Nox,' said Taylor, deadpan.

‘Let's just keep heading north. Otherwise we have to backtrack and who knows how long it goes southwards,' I said.

I pedalled off without waiting for a reply.

Following the wall was slow going. There wasn't always a street that ran parallel, so we had to work in semicircles, keeping it on our left shoulder until finally it was gone.

I was right about the highway. It sat on top of the subdivision, stretching away to the north and south like a runway. Six lanes of vastness broken only by the occasional overpass and hulk of an abandoned car. We climbed down a steep, sandy slope onto the nearest lanes. These were separated from the other side by a
tubular concrete island. The section we were in felt low and enclosed. It would be almost impossible to get back up the slope with our bikes and supplies.

Taylor and Lizzy looked at me for an opinion on which direction we should take. The highway wasn't familiar, but I knew that the city was still closer to our north than it was to the south. So we pedalled northward with hopes that it might magically deliver us to the city.

The riding was good on the highway, but none of us felt at ease. There were long stretches without an exit where the road seemed to close in around us like a concrete riverbed. It amplified the noises we made. Our voices, the squeak of our wheels, the rattle of tins in our baskets. At one point Chess let out a solitary bark that was shrill and piercing and sent a chill rippling across my arms. There were also more abandoned cars out here than we had seen anywhere else. We weaved around their creepy, silent frames and tried not to think of
The Walking Dead
. I tried to work out why this highway had more early risers than anywhere else we had seen. The only explanation I could think of was that it was heading towards the airport.

Ironically it was Lizzy who wanted out of there first. The thunder we had heard in the morning sounded closer now and the sky took on a slightly purple tinge. The highway had maintained its trajectory with no indication of swinging westward. There was a good chance the city would be south of us now.
Subconsciously our pace had quickened and more than once Chess stopped and rubbernecked to look back at the empty road behind us. It was seriously creepy.

‘Okay, we're getting off at the next exit,' said Lizzy in the wake of more muffled thunder.

There was no argument from the rest of us.

Twenty minutes later we spotted an overpass. We cycled up the entrance ramp, then swung west and crossed the bridge down into the welcome mess of houses.

The suburbs that used to mark the fringes of Perth were old and tired. Bricks changed to dark browns or morphed into weatherboard. Yards were large and rambling, filled with rusted-out cars and spindly shrubs. The silence of the highway and newer subdivisions was broken here by creaking shed doors and jittery wooden windows. Chess's ears were rigid with these noises and others. He knew, as did we, that these were prime suburbs for the Bulls.

We picked out one of the nicer houses and sheltered for the evening as the thunderstorms drifted closer. It was a loud and unsettling night. Storms seemed to shift all around us, filling the house with pops and rumbles and flickers of light that outlined the lumps of our bodies huddled together on the living room floor. And there were other noises. Doors banging shut. The rev of an engine or generator. Music, murmured and vague, as if on the edge of a dream, but never quite within it.
Suddenly we were in the same world as these sounds. Not listening from the safety of a shopping centre or mansion.

None of us mentioned these things in the morning. But they were written on each of our faces. These suburbs were alive. With what, we would find out soon.

For the best part of two days we worked our way westward. The older suburbs were sprawling and full of cul-de-sacs and dead-end streets that had us backtracking and winding north or south to creep our way forward. We stopped into a few houses for food and to use toilets that still had water in the cisterns. But generally we stayed away. They had a feel about them. As if they belonged to somebody. Not the vanished owners or renters. Somebody that was still around. Up until now nothing we had done in Carousel or elsewhere had felt like trespassing. But I couldn't shake the feeling that this was exactly what we were doing.

I was writing at every opportunity. On breaks in drought-stricken parks. On the dusty kitchen tables of strangers. At night beneath a harsh circle of torchlight. The work wasn't singular or focused. I was just filling pages. Writing to convince myself that I could. Racing towards some hidden moment when I might become the same as Taylor and Lizzy and the rest of the living world.
The distant city felt like a ticking clock running faster and faster as we closed in towards it.

The Finns watched me with a mixture of bemusement and encouragement. I hadn't told them what I had Tommy. But then, the two of them knew me better than anybody now. They knew that the writing wasn't just about what was on the page. Their silence and space was solidarity in its simplest form.

Lizzy seemed busy with her music anyway. She had brought a laptop along and would occasionally allow herself an hour to fiddle around with mixes before quickly shutting it back down and hoping the battery might last until we found more power. Meeting Tommy had made the album real again. It actually existed. And so did she. The poppy half of Canadian indie pillars Taylor & Lizzy. A fixture on any alternative radio station or hip summer festival. If what Tommy and Taylor said was true and we were now in a city, or a world, full of Artists, Lizzy wanted to be on her game.

Taylor seemed edgy for other reasons entirely. Things I knew about that maybe even Lizzy did not. I had underestimated the connection she had felt with the Boxing Day painter. Sold it off as loneliness. The thought of human contact after years without it. But Taylor felt a real connection to this mystery girl. Enough to convince Lizzy to forget the airport and its fractured link to Canada and their mother. Enough to have us leave the security of our cushy hillside life. To risk running
into Bulls and Loots and whatever the hell else lay in the abandoned sprawl of future Perth. Leaving the hills was about much more than Taylor finding her painter crush. Yet once again Taylor was leading, and Lizzy and I following. Like the doors in Carousel, it was Taylor's goal that defined us the most.

We started passing the occasional shop and warehouse. Really niche places like a repair centre for remote controllers or a ride-on lawnmower reseller. They filled the gaps between a depressing series of houses. Small box-like fibro places set back on quarter-acre blocks, sold off in the seventies in a city sprawling outward wherever it pleased. We were relieved to be emerging out of endless suburbia, but what lay ahead didn't feel overly welcoming.

We came across a couple of blackened buildings and street corners where it seemed like a gas pipe might have blown and burnt out the surrounding area. Chess sniffed cautiously and I thought again of Tommy's warning about the city.

‘I need a bathroom and some lunch,' said Lizzy.

She had stopped cycling and was assessing the options.

‘Which one of these palaces would you like to make a home?' asked Taylor.

The three of us looked around. One side of the street had a series of water-stained fibro houses. The other had a warehouse with an ambitiously large car park
neighbouring some kind of fenced-off power grid.

Lizzy rolled forward.

‘Number twelve has roses in the garden. Let's run with that,' she replied.

The laundry door was open at the back. Taylor let herself in and walked through to the front.

‘Soup anyone?' she asked as she let us in.

‘Wow,' I replied.

A wave of
old-lady-at-the-stove
smacked us in the face as Lizzy bombed through to find the toilet.

‘I swear that smell is immune to the apocalypse,' I said.

Taylor smirked and wandered through the neat shrine of a living room. It was dated and dusty, but neat as a pin. Patterned wallpaper. A cabinet housing glassware and football memorabilia. An orange couch with wooden veneer. I stayed away from people's photos, but Taylor drank them up like some wacky anthropologist. She nosed around while I distracted myself with an ancient TV guide.

‘This place is empty,' said Lizzy from the kitchen.