Carousel Read Free

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.

3
    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 somesense 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 closetsor 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.
    â€˜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