Free Beyond Carousel by Brendan Ritchie

still hadn’t risen by midmorning, the Finns and I gathered out the front to debrief.
    â€˜There’s no point in waiting around,’ said Taylor.
    Lizzy and I looked at her.
    â€˜You think they will be okay?’ asked Lizzy.
    â€˜They have up until now,’ replied Taylor.
    We stood in some weighty silence. None of us felt great about the situation.
    â€˜Look, they need to get their shit together, but I don’t see how we can really help with that,’ said Taylor.
    â€˜We could clean the place up. Try to fix the plumbing. Put in a garden or something,’ said Lizzy.
    She didn’t sound overly keen.
    â€˜It would be back looking like this in a week,’ said Taylor.
    â€˜Did they mention the Curator?’ I asked. ‘Maybe he checks in on them.’
    Taylor shook her head.
    Lizzy sighed. ‘So what do we do?’
    â€˜We can’t take them with us. They wouldn’t last a day in this weather,’ said Taylor. ‘Plus we don’t even really know if where we’re going will be any better.’
    â€˜It couldn’t be much worse, could it?’ said Lizzy in a mini stand-off.
    I looked out at the dusty, barren street.
    â€˜I don’t think they want to come with us anyway,’ I said.
    The Finns looked at me.
    â€˜What did she say to you?’ asked Taylor.
    â€˜Nothing really,’ I replied. ‘I just don’t think they care about growing a garden or living somewhere better. They want other things. Cred or status or something.’
    â€˜To be famous, but still stay unknown,’ said Lizzy.
    Taylor and I nodded. It was true. They were hipster kids trapped in a bizarre ideology where success held a delicate line on the scale of popularity. You had to creep up on it, but never tip over into the mainstream. To be known was to be labelled, and to them to be labelled was to die.
    Taylor and Lizzy hovered in silence and waited, Chess restless by Lizzy’s side. It seemed to be up to me to make the decision.
    â€˜Let’s get out of here,’ I said.
    The Finns nodded and Lizzy put a hand on my shoulder.
    â€˜We’ll leave our food for them,’ said Taylor. ‘It will keep them off the streets for a while.’
    Lizzy and I agreed and the three of us emptied our bags and left a pile of supplies inside the door for them. Before we left I tore out the pages I had written about the band – actually more so about Molly – the night before, and left them with the food. They read like a review of her and her music and I thought there was at least a chance that it would offer the kind of validation she could stomach. At the top I wrote,
On Molly – of Kink & Kink
.
    The suburbs changed not long after we left. As if the Kink & Kink warehouse was the final marker on Perth’s outer suburbs. Cautiously we shifted ahead into new ground. There was a swampy nature reserve to the north of us. The bush looked thick and uninhabited. Probably full of Bulls. We skirted around it and got a glimpse of some towers that looked like they might have been part of the airport. Lizzy ignored them and kept on without a fuss. It was hard to tell how much she was putting her sister first in this venture to the city. For Lizzy the airport, operational or not, had always held the strongest link to home. Now we were bypassing it for the second time with no real plan to return.
    By lunchtime we hit another highway, this one bordered by airport hotels and rental car outlets. It was ghostly and exposed. Rather than walk along it we crossed over to some small streets that ran parallel and followed the dirty green signs that now pointed us back southward to the city.
    â€˜Is that like the main river?’ asked Taylor.
    â€˜Yeah,’ I replied, and followed her gaze toward the Swan.
    Pockets of shimmering water broke through the trees and houses to the west of us.
    â€˜Are there many bridges?’ asked Taylor.
    I hadn’t really