The Labyrinth Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence.

  There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it—to find a way out of her quandary—Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past.

  The Labyrinth is a hypnotic story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children, that is also a meditation on how art can both be ruthlessly destructive and restore sanity. It shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something.

  Let me begin in my father’s house.

  I grew up in an asylum, a manicured madhouse. The lawns were kept trim and the flowerbeds in bloom all year round. My father Kenneth Marsden was the chief medical officer, meaning he was a psychiatrist, and unlike his colleagues who were happy to escape the institution as soon as their roster hours had expired, Ken chose to live within the compound. I say compound but in fact Melton Park was more like a country estate, with grand Victorian edifices, barrack-like courtyards, a tall clock tower and banks of exotic flowers. And bulbs in spring that bloomed beneath massive oak and sycamore trees that offered shade from the punishing sun, not for the inmates but for the nurses who sat under them on short breaks, smoking and gossiping. There was of course a security system but it was concealed to the outside observer. There were no bars on windows, though a dry moat ran around a certain high-walled enclosure.

  Today I am returning for the first time. The sky is a washed-out blue and the narrow road in is flanked on either side by bleached pastureland, the grass faded to straw, the sheep clustering under a Lebanese cedar. The great iron gates of the asylum stand permanently open, for the asylum is decommissioned and popular with visitors in search of antique horror. A minibus loaded with Chinese tourists cruises past and I follow it down the long avenue of silky oaks towards the grand clock tower. How abject it looks now, its sandstone face crumbling at the edges, the big round face with the hands stopped at a quarter to nine.

  I park beside an abandoned building, its windows broken, its tin guttering left to sag and flap in the breeze. After a long drive I am hungry, and I look for the asylum church that has been converted into a café. Its rustic timber cladding is weathered but the roof looks new, its eaves and finials freshly painted white.

  This is the place where I knew my mother, knew her for the first and last time.

  Behind the church, next to a pair of dilapidated tennis courts is a sandstone cottage, its windows boarded up with rough wooden planks. Here I lived with my father and my younger brother, Axel, until I was nineteen. My mother, Irene, ran away the week before my tenth birthday. When I found the courage to ask my father why she hadn’t taken me with her, Ken seemed unperturbed. ‘She was in a hurry,’ he said. ‘She will be back.’

  He was wrong. Not long before Irene disappeared I had overheard a heated exchange between my parents in which my mother expressed her unease at the recent admission of a man who had murdered his wife and chopped her up in a blender. He was a botanist (said to be a genius) and had asked for a small plot of land in the security zone where he could grow flowers. Ken had authorised the purchase of seeds.

  In that first year of my mother’s absence there were many nights when I could hear Axel sobbing, hear him through the attic bedroom wall that separated us. If the crying persisted I would climb into his bed, and he would turn his back to me and we would nestle together like spoons, and I would smell his boy smell and lie with him until we both fell asleep.

  The inside of the church is humid. Flies buzz around the door and are shooed away by a young waitress in a black singlet, tight black shorts and red Doc Martens. I order from the blackboard and carry my plastic number-on-a-stick to the outdoor tables, where a band of ageing musicians is setting up under a canvas awning. It’s all so familiar. The small meeting room at the back of the church, now the café kitchen, is where my brother and I had attended Sunday school with the Reverend James Harwood, a lumbering giant of a man in whose meaty fingers the Bible looked like a fragile thing. The Reverend was near-sighted to the point of blindness, and the lenses of his spectacles so thick that they magnified the pupils of his eyes into two milky orbs, like marbles. All through the Bible lesson he would squint over our heads at the light coming in through the small Gothic window above the door. Jesus is hungry but the fig tree has leaves and no fruit. The Messiah is enraged and curses the tree so that it withers. ‘This is the one time that Jesus performs a miracle devoid of mercy, and he did this my dear ones to confound our expectations, to show us that He knows more than we do. Remember that, children, when you are tempted by Satan into doubt. It’s a mistake ever to try to second-guess the Lord.’

  I remember this because I had never heard the term ‘second-guess’ and had to ask my father what it meant. But Ken had laughed, and said: ‘I wouldn’t worry about that.’ I asked him once about God the Father and why we had to have two fathers, one invisible. Again he laughed, and said he would explain when I was older.

  The four musos are warming up. They are lean and worn-looking, as if somewhere in the past they have been used and discarded. The singer, a woman in her fifties, is haggard, her lank greying hair tied back in a spiky knot. The guitar player strums a rhythmic intro; she taps her right foot three times and opens her mouth. And oh, that voice: that voice is a revelation. It’s as if she is channelling Billie Holiday, so smooth, so assured is her soft crooning.

  In my childhood there had been music here. On Friday afternoons there would be a tea dance in the church hall. A jazz band made up of staff and inmates would play, and staff and inmates would dance together. Every Friday of the year without fail, except Good Friday, and once when there was an outbreak of dysentery. My father played the clarinet in the asylum jazz combo, and after school Axel and I would stand behind a white-clothed trellis table and snigger at the monotonous foxtrot shuffle of the dancers, their jolting jitterbug, their hectic arm-pumping swirls in the final waltz that would signal it was time to lay out the sandwiches and scones.

  I leave the café garden and walk towards the Italianate portal of what was once the nurses’ quarters, now a collection of vintage shops. On either side of a long central hallway there are small rooms like monks’ cells, bedrooms for the nurses with high ceilings that were cool in the hot summers: intimate spaces, each with its narrow iron-frame bed, its modest wooden chest of drawers, its small swivel mirror. Now they are crammed with dusty books and furniture, dun-coloured stoneware jars, Victorian ruby glassware, vintage leather coats, and antique dolls with rouged ceramic cheeks and glass eyes that stare out into space with a petrified gaze.

  One of my father’s reforms had been to set up a workshop, along with a craft studio. This was a source of pride to him, for he believed in the mind as a divine engineering project designed for the invention and use of tools. Homo faber: man the maker. The use of the hands is a powerful medicine, he would say. We can succumb to the temptation to overthink a problem when the cure for many ills is to make something. This was one of his favourite maxims and he repeated it often, and on one occasion cited Jung (though he otherwise thought him a charlatan). It was Ken’s own experience that counted, for growing up on a small dairy farm had instilled in him a certain practicality, a childhood of rising in the dark to milk cows and school holidays spent mending fences. A man who does not use his hands is a mind untethered, he would say: when you make something you become a rivet in the fabric of the real. On his way home from the wards he would drop by the asylum workshop to inspect the pottery, the water-colours, the basketwork and rug-making. Nothing gave him greater pleasure, but in this as in other matters he did not regard himself as progressive—did not object, for example, to the term lunatic. We are all affected by the moon, he would say, just some of us more than others.

  At the rear of the family cottage he had built his own workshop where, after Irene disappeared, he made me a doll’s house with a circular staircase that I could never gaze on without a sense of the mystery of my own being. I would imagine that somewhere in the attic of the doll’s house, my mother had left behind a part of herself and that one day she would return for it.

  The only other woman in the family was Ken’s sister, Ruth. Ruth had trained as a nurse in a bush hospital and shipped to London in her twenties. For many years all we knew of her was that she lived somewhere in a place called Essex with a much older husband and no children. On birthdays and at Christmas she sent us presents—a book on the Tower of London, a jigsaw of the British Isles—never anything that interested us. But one day there arrived a foldout set of postcards of Ely Cathedral, and it was one of these that struck me with an uncanny familiarity verging on awe. It was an image of the cathedral’s Lady Chapel, its walls lined with rows of statues. But the startling thing was this: the larger statues had been hacked from their niches and the faces of the smaller figures mutilated with hammers, their eyes gouged out, their features obliterated. ‘Over one hundred and forty of them,’ Ruth had written, ‘most, it is thought, of the Virgin Mother.’
r />   ‘Fanatics,’ Ken had pronounced over supper, and he explained to me and to Axel the Protestant hatred of images. After supper he had put the postcards in the cupboard of the sideboard and when he had gone to bed I opened the cupboard, tore out the image of the Lady Chapel and took it up to my room, where I hid it in a drawer beneath my underwear. From time to time I would take it out and gaze at it with furtive fascination. It was as if I had dreamed it: the smashed faces of the saints. Like my mother: there and not there.

  Axel and I were allowed to roam the asylum freely and often I sought out the company of the young nurses, who gave me sweets and felt sorry for me because my mother had bolted. Later, in the long summer before university I worked in the big kitchen, averting my eyes from the slimy porridge, the fat pink saveloys, the grey mincemeat in watery gravy. Ken decided then that I should assist at some sessions of shock treatment. ‘People will tell you harsh things about this, Erica, because they haven’t seen it work.’ But on the two occasions that I attended as an observer I threw up, after which he excused me from any further involvement. I did not, he said, have the stomach for medicine.

  In the end it was Axel who was press-ganged into a medical degree while I spent two years studying Latin and Greek. My schoolgirl Latin, coached by my father, had been good, and the university had offered Greek for beginners. Soon it became clear that I had an aptitude, a gift for entering wholly into another world, whether Melton Park or the gods on Olympus it made no difference. And Ken had encouraged me. For as long as I could remember he had exhibited a wry fondness for Latin mottoes, and one in particular. When a diagnosis had been proved wrong, a prescribed treatment had failed, or some other unforeseen event had transpired, occasionally he would discuss it with Axel and me over dinner, and would pronounce: Dis aliter visum. Which we soon came to know meant: The gods thought otherwise. So it was that as a student I lost myself in the most arcane and useless study I could find, until the gods thought otherwise and I abandoned my studies to run off with the artist Gabriel Priest. But by then my father was dead.

  It’s almost four in the afternoon and I have walked over most of the estate but still I haven’t found it: the labyrinth. How could I have forgotten its location? I was sure that it sat in the courtyard behind the clock tower, a pattern of red-brick and terracotta paving. But when I look there is only a patchy lawn of dry, uneven grass. Here in the evenings Axel and I had played by our own rules, each rule designed to hinder the other from reaching the centre; variations on hopscotch to begin with that became more and more arbitrary, wilful and competitive: no crossing the lines, and remembering passwords conjured at short notice that had to be shouted whenever we passed one another on the path. The pattern of the labyrinth was meaningless but it fascinated us both, for it seemed to suggest the possibility of another reality, a mystical geometry of secret formulae and magic spells, of alchemy in brick and a mathematical wizardry that Axel explored more conscientiously than I. He was a shy boy, anxious to please, and I would sometimes catch my father watching him: perplexed and wary, he would encourage Axel with a tender concern that could make me jealous. Some summer evenings after work, Ken would walk the labyrinth with us, would produce a tape measure from his pocket and demand that we estimate the co-ordinates of a section, nominated by him, which would then be measured out by Axel while I made little attempt to hide my boredom. I was not compliant; I withdrew into the gap where my mother had been. It was typical of Ken that he never told us the story of the Minotaur. For Ken it was all about the co-ordinates. Evil was a chemical malfunction in the brain.

  By late afternoon there is only one place left to look, and I walk up the hill to a squat building in the style of Victorian gothic that had once been the women’s ward and is now another antique shop of musty alcoves crammed with old books and furniture. It’s an octagonal building in which the beds, separated by partitions, faced a central station where the nurses had desks and the inmates’ cubicles radiated out like canisters on a flywheel. As a child I would hover around the nurses’ station, fascinated by the high shelves of medication, brown glass bottles of pills locked behind the doors of a cedar cupboard. A tall, sombre woman named Grace, a mute, had taken a shine to me; whenever I entered the ward she would appear and follow close behind, solemn and intent. ‘Don’t worry about Grace,’ one of the jolly young nurses had said, ‘she’s decided it’s her job to protect you from the others.’ Soon I got used to this phantom guardian and would sometimes try to bamboozle her by darting behind doors or crouching under beds while Grace stood bewildered in the aisle, rigid as a statue.

  Behind a large circular desk a woman is sitting beside an old-fashioned cash register and playing Solitaire on her iPad. She looks up grudgingly when interrupted. Does she by any chance know what happened to the labyrinth? The woman shrugs. ‘Neil who runs the café grew up around here,’ she says. ‘Ask him.’

  In the café, Neil is packing up for the day. He is a heavy-set man in his forties who does not look me in the eye. ‘The labyrinth? They dug it out. It was all overgrown and good for nothing.’

  ‘I used to play on it as a child.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, it had some lovely colonial bricks, the orange ones, handmade by convicts. They’ve stacked them up in the old bakery.’ He moves across to the entrance, where he lowers the blind on the door with a sudden snap.

  ‘Do you know if they’re for sale?’

  ‘They were, but they’re not now. I put in a bid for ’em. Got ’em cheap.’

  ‘I suppose you could use them for paving.’

  ‘Don’t need any paving.’ The dishcloth hangs limply in his hand. ‘They’ll make a nice pizza oven.’

  That night, at my roadside motel, I sleep soundly, drifting off with the image of the clock tower in my mind’s eye. This was my unlikely beginning: in the midst of madness I had been happy. It was a place of great suffering, people said, and former inmates come forward on television, still, after all these years, to weep over their incarceration in Melton Park. But Axel and I had roamed the place with perfect freedom. Our father indulged us, and our mother’s absence gave me licence to do as I pleased. Ken had one day confessed that in giving his children this freedom he had perhaps overcompensated for Irene’s flight, though he had watched us closely for signs of mourning. Some weeks after Irene disappeared he gave me a set of small stuffed animals and instructed me to play with them on the floor of his office for an hour, once a week, while he sat and observed me.

  When I was old enough to be curious I asked him about these sessions and he said he would show me his notes from that time, when I turned twenty-one. But he died a week before my twentieth birthday. A patient attacked him with a scythe that had been left lying in the garden and severed his carotid artery. Before he could be found he had bled to death on a bank of pink azaleas.

  Since then I have had a recurring dream. My father is sitting under one of the sycamore trees near the entrance to the asylum church. He is wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, such as he never owned, and he is playing his clarinet. I am loitering behind a tree and straining to hear the music. Is it Mozart? Or some jazz improvisation in the Benny Goodman style that he loved? The notes glide on the air, pure and true, but there is interference coming from the clock tower that strikes the hour; again the notes swoop and dive, then fade, then build once more, at first warm and mellow, then bright and clear. But the clock tower goes on striking the hour, though the hour has not yet arrived: striking over and over, so that I am unable to make out the melody.

  °

  My son’s first trial lasted for twenty-eight days. The jury could not agree on a verdict and was dismissed, the agony prolonged. The second jury was conclusive.

  A week after Daniel was sentenced I studied a map of the Napier Valley, where the new private prison sits in the heart of sheep-grazing country: metal and concrete and barbed wire on a pasture of shrivelled grass.

  The town nearest to the prison is Brockwood, which lies not in the valley but on the coast. Behind Brockwood is a low mountain range and on the inland side of the mountains is the Napier Valley, an old coal-mining precinct. From here the coast can only be accessed by a narrow pass of thirty-six hairpin bends: built by convicts in the 1840s and densely forested on either side it winds in a meandering descent to the coast, so that at each bend there is a glimpse of the ocean that extends like a mirage to the horizon.