Carousel (20 page)

Deep into the night I was curled on the couch, listening to Rocky's ragged breath, hoping not to hear it stop. Straining my ears, I heard another noise. A deep rumbling that rolled toward us from somewhere north, then faded with a long sigh. I listened closely as it came again. Still mysterious and undisclosed. I looked around at the dim outline of the room. The dull grey of televisions and laptops flickered with light. Moments later another rumble rolled through.

A thunderstorm was approaching.

Lizzy watched me as I quietly sat up. She was awake beside a sleeping Taylor. I glanced at Rocky on the
couch across from me. He was awake also. Once more distant lightning bounced around the walls. Rocky looked at me and I saw something in his gaze. He wanted to leave JB's. He wanted to see the storm.

I looked over at Lizzy. She hesitated, then gently nudged her sister awake.

We gave Rocky a couple of painkillers and carefully lifted him onto a mattress positioned on the manual forklift Taylor had pulled across from the dome. He winced, but made no complaint. Big grumbles of thunder reached us now. Every year Perth was battered by two, maybe three, epic summer storms. For Rocky, this one had come early.

We piled the mattress with blankets and cushions and set out toward the back entrance. I pulled it gently through the darkened corridors, its wheels and our shuffling feet echoing through the centre amid the deep, growling thunder from the north.

I checked on Rocky several times. He was pale and gaunt, but placid on the weird, hovering bed. Taylor and Lizzy Finn walked beside him like tiny elfin sentinels in some strange ceremony or vigil. Blue light bounced around us, reflecting off walls, floors and ceilings.

I rounded the corner and the large glass-paned eastern entrance came into view. It flickered wickedly
with light and energy as the storm rolled closer. I glanced back at Rocky. His eyes danced with something I hadn't seen in him for a long time. They shifted from the glass to mine, and stayed there.

I pulled the platform a fraction faster. Rocky gave a tiny nod.

I banked it left and brought it around in a one-eighty so that I was pushing it now with Rocky in the lead. Taylor and Lizzy watched me but didn't speak. Thunder cracked and boomed outside.

I placed the handle in forward lock and picked up speed. Pushing it out in front of me I began to run. Rocky's hood filled with wind as he coasted through the corridors once again. Ahead of us the glass towered over, pulsing neon like a portal. There was nothing but the rush of air and rolling thunder and for a moment I forgot about Carousel and the legionnaires and the whole crazy world that had become our own.

We closed in on our reflections and I slowed us to a gradual stop. Rocky was shadowy beneath his hood but I could still see his eyes. They rose to find mine in the glass ahead. Taylor and Lizzy caught up to us, smiling and puffing and as awesome as they had ever been. Together we pulled up to watch Rocky's final storm rip across the city.

It was early morning on a Wednesday, or a Thursday. The Finns and I tried to do something different on weekends so that we could keep a sense of the weeks passing. But weekdays in Carousel still tended to blur. I pulled on some Asics and a hoodie and slipped silently out of JB's into the sleeping centre.

I scanned the iPod for a playlist while my feet took me to Pure 'n' Natural on autopilot. The island was quiet and empty. I took an apple-berry juice box from a trolley outside and downed it while I stretched. The corridor to the east was dark and hidden. I checked the time and waited for a few seconds. There was a hum, then a flicker, and the lights timed on.

I set off eastward at a three-quarter run.

I stuck to the corridors that were lit, swinging a wide arch across the north-eastern edge of the centre, diverting under intersections where overhead vents offered fleeting wafts of cool, semi-fresh air. My legs
felt sore and tight, but strong beneath me. They could carry me from one end of the centre to the other in under twenty minutes now. Under five on a bike. Our diets had become increasingly rigid and rationed, but I felt healthier than ever before. My body stripped nutrients from my food like a machine, keeping every scrap that it needed and expelling the rest. A brutal, efficient survival machine. I gave it whatever I could and pushed it hard in return.

Together we prepared for a faceless, dateless moment.

I swung right and the eastern entrance loomed brightly at the end of the corridor. The sun hadn't risen but the clouds were rimmed with pink. I slowed to a half pace and took in the view. It was still our best window to the outside world. Mostly concrete, but also sky and a small patch of the hills. These days its sameness offered neither reassurance nor disillusionment. It was just the view from our back window.

My heart thumped a little as I walked over to the garden bed running along the base of the window. I scanned the fake wooden walls for breaches of liquid or soil. It was clean and secure. I looked cautiously over the soil inside. It was damp and fertile looking, but nothing grew in the long, rectangular expanse. I took
a watering can and showered it sparingly with water from one end to the other. Last summer, we had just about drowned the plants under the dome with constant, anxious watering. Here at the back entrance it was warmer, but I still had to be careful. We couldn't afford to fail this time. We needed something to germinate.

I sat back from the garden and rolled out a yoga mat. Outside, the colours had changed, but the sun remained hidden. I ran through a simple routine I'd learnt from a DVD and let the breathing wake me properly. When the sun spilled onto my forehead I rose and jogged to Myer to start writing.

Despite now living in JB's with the Finns, I chose the third level of Myer to do my writing. For a long time I didn't venture up to the level above my previous bedroom. It was predominantly furniture and kids' toys. Taylor and I had a brief obsession with remote-controlled stuff that had us clambering breathlessly up both escalators to search the shelves for cars and trucks, but otherwise it was left alone with the other seventy percent of Carousel that we didn't enter.

Most of the desks were made of thick and heavy timber and I probably could have got the Finns to help me lug one downstairs if I wanted. But one day I sat at one with my laptop and it felt like a good place to write.
Distraction was everywhere in an abandoned shopping complex. But, with its pastel lounges and dusty rows of kids' toys, Myer's upper level was mundane enough for my attention to be elsewhere.

And I was actually making some progress.

After a bunch of abandoned novellas and screenplays, I had turned my attention to shorter work. My only satisfaction, or maybe confidence, from writing so far had come from working on short stories. The stakes seemed lower and by the time a story rose up to intimidate me, it was often almost finished and I could battle through the final pages. The only thing that concerned me was that, on their own, they still felt insignificant and somehow amateur, no matter how much Lizzy would rate them. I was writing in Carousel for a lot of reasons. To fill the days, to have a focus. But also to be a writer. And a bunch of disjointed, random short stories didn't seem to offer me that. So I decided to group them together under a loose theme and produce a book. It had meant culling a few stories, and working on some new stuff, but overall I felt a lot more comfortable. The fact that any publication was entirely hypothetical didn't feel like an issue.

I chewed down an energy bar and wrote for two hours before Taylor and Lizzy fired up their amps. The final
story I was working on had spilled out rapidly last week and I was currently redrafting and trying to work out if it was awesome or shit. The line seemed ridiculously fine and I was regularly unsure of its position. I reworked some sections and it felt like it might even be finished. Either way I shut down the laptop and wandered downstairs toward the fractured, alluring music.

Taylor had joined Lizzy in the Rugs a Million studio two days after Rocky died. Their musical animosity was forgotten and they began slowly, gradually putting together songs for an album. Death had a way of returning people to their most simple form of existence. I had seen it as a teenager when my nanna died. The family worked, ate and slept with a diligence that made each process significant and strangely vivid. Everything else, that which filled a life, was suspended and momentarily superfluous.

For Taylor and Lizzy Finn, existence meant music.

Initially I had left them alone in this process. What they were doing seemed precious and delicate. There was no talk of what was happening, or any tangible shift in their behaviour. They just drifted over to the studio after long, lazy breakfasts and emerged hours later; sometimes looking wired, sometimes placid and relaxed. After endless months of musical hibernation,
Taylor and Lizzy were gradually waking each other and I was anxious not to get in the way.

During the first few weeks their music crept out into the centre in fleeting and broken snatches. I imagined them catching each other up on the hundreds of riffs and progressions that had been swirling through their heads since our arrival. Lizzy listening to Taylor with a weird sisterly awe as she moved from one riff to another, then another again, as if she had been preparing them in secret for months. Each one raw and fractured, but full of angst as she seemed to single out an emotion and find its truth and irony at the same time. Then Taylor, pacing about the room in a half smile as Lizzy infused it with shifting, magnetic pop from a bank of sounds she'd held secure for months, but had been strangely unable to release.

Together they would sift through these sounds with a kind of floating diligence. Always exploring, but never without direction. Finding the core of the other's work without fuss, then building, unwrapping, layering texture until it took on a new but somehow inevitable sound.

The mysteries of Taylor and Lizzy's music had become a little clearer when they asked me to come and help record some stuff on Lizzy's MacBook. I had arrived early and stood rigid at the laptop with my finger
hovering nervously above record. Taylor and Lizzy glanced at one another and laughed. I felt a huge gulf of coolness open between us, the Finns on one side, me on the other.

‘Nox. Relax a little, yeah. This stuff takes a while,' said Taylor.

Since then I had managed to loosen up and we developed a routine where I would turn up in the studio an hour or so after them and man the Pro Tools recording window until one of them nodded for me to hit
Record
. I'd watch as the guitar or keyboard snaked along the timeline and onto the hard drive where I labelled it and backed it up before they went again. There was some structure in the process and I focused on this and tried hard to keep the gulf narrow.

Lizzy was sipping on a juice box and watching Taylor run over some chords on her guitar when I arrived. I smiled hello and edged past Taylor to take up my position at the laptop. It was a casual looking workspace now. When I began to understand the pace of the recording process, with its experimentation, multiple takes and long creative discussions, I brought in a bunch of magazines. I would flick through these, semi-interested, but never consumed, trying to give the Finns space for their work without seeming outright
bored or uninterested. A book would be too much. As was just sitting at the screen and waiting. Recording an album seemed to require a shifting mix of focus and downtime. Taylor and Lizzy morphed into this seamlessly. For me it took some practice.

I was starting to see how a song would start out with a riff or some keys and unpack to become a skeleton for something full and complicated. Taylor and Lizzy would have me record this trigger, then play it back as they experimented with other sounds to fill it out. Once they were happy I would record the keyboard and guitar as separate tracks. At some point they would switch to vocals and play all the tracks in a rough mix through headphones whilst I recorded their voices in solitude. This gave Taylor and Lizzy a demo of the song, which they would critique and we would begin rerecording tracks until there were files and files and the Finns made a wordless decision to move on. Everything about their workflow made sense but at the same time it was like nothing I expected.

Taylor came over to sit beside me. I shifted across and she adjusted some settings on the laptop.

‘How far did you run this morning?' she asked.

‘Twelve k,' I replied.

‘You're a machine, Nox,' she said.

I nodded and watched the screen. The program was still a bit of a mystery to me.

‘You go past the back entrance?' she asked after a moment.

‘Yeah,' I replied, feeling oddly guilty. ‘Nothing is growing yet.'

Taylor glanced at me and nodded. Lizzy watched us from behind a keyboard across the room.

‘Want to do a Coles run with me later?' she asked.

‘Sure,' I replied.

She finished with the laptop and joined Lizzy at the keyboard.

We spent the afternoon recording Lizzy playing keys for a song that Taylor was calling ‘Little Low'. She had written the lyrics and guitar and needed Lizzy to fill out the opening and add to the chorus. After this, the two of them had to work out what they were going to do with the drums and bass.

Even though I'd been to a bunch of Taylor & Lizzy shows and seen the rest of the band, it didn't click that recording an album without these additional musicians might be problematic. I listened through lengthy discussions over the arrangement of songs as the Finns weighed up leaving out the drums or bass, or playing something simple themselves. They tried the latter on
several occasions, and I thought it sounded fine. But it was clear that Taylor and Lizzy knew otherwise. I could see their frustration as they struggled to pull sounds from instruments they didn't usually play. In these moments I wondered if this was another thing that defined them as real artists. The admission that their skills in one area, despite seeming fine to the rest of the world, were insufficient and couldn't offer the song what they knew it required. They wouldn't settle, but it was more than that. They knew.