The Labyrinth Read online

  In Brockwood I spend my first night in a cheap motel room under thin blankets of faded cream wool, their satin trim fraying at the edges. In the morning, at a café on the esplanade I eat breakfast, seated behind a row of life-size fibreglass dolphins frozen in mid-frolic. There is a pale wintry sun. The esplanade is crowded with visitors and has the smell of seaside towns everywhere: salt, fish-and-chip fat, burnt coffee and oily sunscreen. Seagulls perch on the bollards of the marina, alert and quarrelsome. Outside the Thai restaurant a young man in shorts and thongs is leaning against the wall, hungover, or perhaps stoned. The hair on his bare legs has a golden sheen and his ragged blond hair, stiff with salt, frames his slack features. In one hand he clutches an oily white paper bag of hot food while with the other he attempts clumsily to manipulate his phone, managing twice to drop it with a snapping sound onto the bitumen. Large fat chips spill from the bag across the pavement as he bends unsteadily to retrieve the phone. Mission accomplished he leans back against the wall, eyes glazed and unfocussed, body splayed as if the effort of it has unhinged all his joints. From across the road a Pacific gull has been watching him. It begins to wend its way through the double lane of cruising traffic, hopping in the narrow spaces between the cars, its timing uncanny, its beak pointed with loaded intent, and I cannot take my eyes off it, for it has all the clarity of will and focus that the young man lacks. With one final hop it pounces on the scattered chips at his feet, just as he extends a grubby-thonged foot to kick in its direction, feebly, and again almost falls headlong into the gutter. ‘Fuck off!’ he hisses, righting himself against the wall with one arm. The phone now safely in his pocket, he buries his face in the greasy paper bag to bite into whatever is left. The seagull meanwhile has scavenged the last chip on the pavement and is hopping insouciantly back across the road towards the safety of the sea wall.

  No. Not Brockwood. This is not the place.

  I return to my car and head north. Here the freeway runs close beside the coast, so close that at high tide the foamy wash of the surf is only metres from the edge of the bitumen. Forty minutes beyond Brockwood I reach a turn-off and the sign Garra Nalla 5 km. I look across the dry sheep paddocks between the freeway and the ocean and can see a small settlement set on a grassy headland some thirty metres or so above sea level.

  The road in runs alongside reedy marshland, a breeding ground for black swans that congregate on the brackish water. It terminates beside a deep lagoon where the outgoing tide is flowing into the ocean and a row of pied cormorants are standing to attention on an exposed sandbank like a line of sentries. I turn away from the water and drive up a steep hill towards a cluster of houses that sit atop the spectacular headland, and from there I cruise slowly along the network of narrow unsealed roads that crisscross the settlement. There must be a hundred or so dwellings here, some with lush gardens, others bare and with the aura of rarely visited shacks. There is no shop, no pub, no petrol bowser. Nothing.

  I glance at my watch: almost noon. Down the hill then to the terminus of the main road, and the turning circle beside the lagoon where I park next to the picnic table and take out my laptop to look at rentals. There is one, a fibro shack on a flat area behind the sand dunes. Rough and bare, it is likely to be within my means. I ring the agent.

  A young man arrives in a white ute with a surfboard strapped to the roof of the cabin. He introduces himself as Job and when he hands me his card I see that he spells it Jobe, as if adding an ‘e’ will protect him from the unhappy fate of the original. He is eager to tell me that as a matter of fact he lives in Garra Nalla himself and it’s a great place, very private, if that’s what I am looking for and I say, yes, that is exactly what I am looking for. Jobe is just a kid, no more than twenty-five with bleached hair and a thin tie, the knot of which sits halfway down his shirt in a larrikin noose so that I wonder why he bothers. I follow him along a flat sandy drive behind the dunes until we come to the single-storey shack, grey, weathered and unkempt. Jobe pauses on the threshold, a concrete terrace, derelict and with tufts of grass sprouting through the cracks. ‘A bit of Roundup’ll fix that,’ he says. ‘Have to be honest with you. The owner has neglected the place.’ He wrenches the key in the lock, which sticks. ‘That’s why it’s cheap.’

  Inside, the air smells of dust. Jobe sneezes. ‘Built in the nineteen-twenties,’ he sniffs. ‘Bigger than it looks.’ Which it is, a jumble of rooms that appear to have been added in different eras and connected by short passageways as if the house is an organic puzzle that has evolved without planning. Unlike most fibro shacks it has a pitched roof and wide overhanging eaves that will keep it cool in summer. The living room is lined with dark-stained dado board and there is a red-brick fireplace and an old-fashioned picture rail around the walls. The kitchen is surprisingly large, with an old wood stove in cast iron and a tin flue reaching up through the plasterboard ceiling. The casement windows are cedar and the floor is pitted cork, bleached by the sun. When I stand in the middle of the room I see that it is exactly square and perfectly proportioned; all the fittings are in the right place and sit well together, so that it feels like a room with a living centre.

  ‘Who owns this place?’ I ask.

  ‘Some cranky old coot. Never met him.’

  I observe how the hallway is lined with handsome doors rescued from at least one older building and there is not a single cheap plywood door of the kind that has a hollow core. Instead the doors are pine and oak, no doubt salvaged from demolition sites, and while each has its own character this lack of uniformity is not chaotic but creates an effect of liveliness. The house breathes.

  The main bedroom is spacious, with a scuffed oak floor and another bay window that looks out to the hills. But the two small bedrooms are pokey and lined with brown unpainted Masonite, and one of them has been covered in pages from old colour magazines in an effect of faded decoupage. In all the rooms the venetian blinds are dusty and flyblown, but intact.

  We return to the kitchen, where Jobe unlocks the back door and we step outside. Above the window of the north-facing bedroom a cone-shaped nest of compacted mud is tucked in under the eaves. Small grey feathers snag in the flyscreen and grey-white bird shit is splattered on the narrow concrete path that winds around the house.

  ‘Swallows,’ says Jobe. ‘Supposed to be lucky.’ His eagerness to please is touching. I remark on how the rear of the house is almost against its western fence, a ragged line of wooden posts and sagging barbed wire, leaving a wide bare space on the eastern side between the house and the dunes.

  ‘Yeah, funny the way they’ve built it, all over on the one side.’ He stares at the dry sandy flat, a stretch of stunted grass and the sickly yellow of flowering capeweed. ‘You could put a cricket pitch in there.’

  ‘Indeed, you could,’ I say, though a cricket pitch is not what I have in mind. We agree that I will follow Jobe back to Brockwood and sign a lease, but already I have decided I will buy this house. Later, I persuade Jobe to give me the owner’s number—‘probably shouldn’t do this’—and that night I ring him.

  He is an old man with an old man’s voice, high and dry and whiny. He complains about the upkeep of the place and the rates, and that no one in the family ever wants to go there.

  ‘Well, sell it to me.’

  There is a long pause. ‘I’ll think about it.’ And then: ‘What did you say your name was, missus?’

  ‘Marsden. Erica Marsden.’

  ‘Haven’t I heard that name somewhere before?

  ‘I don’t know. Have you?’

  Someone is going to recognise me, even here.

  °

  It’s just after three in the afternoon and the removalists stomp about the shack in their boots, two brawny young men in a sweat. In the living room a blue-tongue lizard waddles onto the warm stone hearth and one of them pulls up short, backing his mate into a wall.

  ‘Fuck, a snake!’

  ‘Geez, you’re an idiot. It’s a goanna.’

  ‘An easy mistake to make,’ I say, glad they have been the first to see its vestigial legs, so comically out of proportion to the thickness of its body. The two men stare for a moment as the blue-tongue scampers across the hearth and into a low hole in the fibro wall beside the fireplace. The older of the two nods at the hole in the wall. ‘Needs some spackle there,’ he says. ‘You’ll be doing some repairs to this place, I reckon.’

  By four in the afternoon they are gone. Packing boxes are stacked against the walls along with furniture covered in grey serge blankets. The house was sold to me as empty but in the largest of the bedrooms a big old-fashioned wardrobe has been left behind, a three-door unit in shiny dark walnut with a curved door at the centre that opens onto a column of cedar drawers. In the coming days I will arrange for it to be removed. Although handsome, it reeks of a stale intimacy.

  I take some linen from the car, make up a bed and unpack a small suitcase of clothes. In the chaos of the living room a mellow light is slanting through the half-drawn blinds and pooling on the bare floorboards. The sun is low over the distant hills and I can hear the rustle of swallows under the eaves. I climb onto a chair to hang one of my son’s paintings from the dark-stained picture rail; it’s the only one of his works left since he burned his canvases: a self-portrait in charcoal with a vivid red slash of paint across the forehead. For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to hang it, but now in the artless jumble of this shack it looks as if it belongs.

  Weary, I make myself a sandwich and some tea. In an hour I will go to bed early and lie propped up on two pillows so that I can see the moon through the window.

  I have arrived. I have found the place.

  °

  Two weeks on, and I stand at the open door and listen to the roar of the sea coming from beyond the dunes. Am I at home in this place? Not yet, but I had better get used to it. The house is gritty with sand that blows in through the wire screens, dead flies appear where I have swept just the day before and I need to install an iron lid for the chimney. The sunroom and two of the bedrooms are crammed with boxes still unpacked.

  At eight in the morning I light the cast-iron stove which I have learned to operate from a faded sheet of instructions that a former tenant has left Blu-Tacked to the wall, the same tenant who presumably left the wood and the number of Joe the wood carter, whom I am about to ring. I walk to the sink and half-fill a glass with lukewarm water from the tap. The corrugated-iron tank is old and rusted, and I have ordered two new tanks in dark green plastic, one for me and one for the fire service since this is an area prone to bushfire. Just four years ago a fire swept through the settlement with little warning and the residents had to stand chest-deep in the lagoon until rescued by boats. And soon I must attend to the roof and the guttering. The birds and the possums shit on the roof and I am probably drinking E. coli.

  My days have no routine. I do things impulsively, waiting for the day when I can visit Daniel in the new prison. This morning when I got out of bed I began to unpack one of the boxes labelled BOOKS that are stacked in the sunroom. So many books, some in cartons secured with masking tape, some in plastic storage boxes with fitted lids, others in wooden crates. My son was not merely a reader but a collector and now the two smaller bedrooms and the sunroom, an enclosed veranda, are stacked to the ceiling with hundreds of volumes of bound paper destined for incineration (and there are dozens of other cartons that for the moment I have had to put into storage). I can burn only one a day, for I have learned that paper is bad for the wood stove and ash from a paper burn clogs the flue, and even at this rate it will take me years. When Ken died his books were locked away in storage by my brother, who didn’t want them but, still in awe of his father, couldn’t bring himself to dispose of them. Later he had offered them to Daniel, who had rifled through the boxes with the unselfconscious delight of Aladdin looting a cave. ‘Some crazy shit here,’ he’d said, while Axel looked on with an expression of disapproval as if to say: He’s just like you, reckless and impatient.

  I take one of these books to the table now to read while I drink my coffee. When I open it at random my eye goes immediately to the sentence There is absolutely no problem. Methodically I tear the pages from the spine and begin to feed them into the stove. One book a day until I have burned the lot. These are my son’s instructions: Burn my books. Why, Daniel? They have deceived me. This was the last coherent thing he said to me before they led him away.

  °

  Thursday morning. Early. I climb out of bed and shiver in the still-dark house. There is no question of breakfast, for I am too agitated to eat. Instead I linger for a long time in the shower, a narrow enclosure built of prefab fibreglass. Then I stand at the open cupboard where I hang my clothes, unable to decide what to wear. And silently berate myself: This is absurd, I say out loud. I am not a young woman on a date. But I do not want to provoke or upset him.

  It’s just after eight when I set out and turn off onto the road that runs through the grazing lands that surround Garra Nalla. To my right are sheep paddocks that slope down towards the marshlands, to my left the bare chocolate soil where a young man on a tractor is ploughing furrows for what I guess is a potato crop. Jobe had described the surrounding farmland as ‘spud country’. Sheep and spuds, he had said, ‘that’s what they do here.’

  Soon I am at the foot of the narrow mountain pass with its thirty-six hairpin bends that will take me up and into the Napier Valley. The pass is surrounded on all sides by dry sclerophyll forest scarred by a recent bushfire, so that pale feathery shoots of epicormic growth sprout from blackened trunks. At the top is the little town of Mt Godwin, a row of weathered veranda shopfronts miraculously spared by the flames.

  It’s a bright morning, crisp and dry, and the paddocks and hedges of the valley are covered in an unseasonal white frost. This valley is a cold place, a string of towns that were supposed to grow and prosper, but in the 1970s a deep seam of coal caught alight and the main mine had to be abandoned (if I turn my head and look to the hills I can see a thin waft of smoke rising through the trees). Now the valley is sparsely populated, except for the new prison that sits among the paddocks, hard-edged and shiny, a complex of massive silver boxes deposited by aliens.

  The gaol is said to be a model of its kind but my son is in maximum security and has no privileges. As I drive along the final straight beside frostbitten fields I begin to see flashes of his face in the windscreen and I am unnerved; my gut spasms and I pull over to the side of the road, fling open the car door and scramble down a steep bank to vomit into a hawthorn bush.

  A car slows behind me and a young man in a high-vis vest sticks his head out the driver’s window. ‘You okay, lady?’

  I raise my head to him, dizzy and unseeing, beyond shame. My hair snags on a low-lying branch laden with the last of its red winter berries and my fingers prick on the sharp thorns. ‘Fine. Thanks.’ I can barely speak for heaving. I stagger up the bank, picking at sticky strands of hair that cling to my mouth, and give a weak nod in the direction of the stranger. Back in my car I sit in a cold sweat and stare ahead, waiting for my good Samaritan to cruise on out of sight.

  The metallic walls of the prison glint above the frost-covered fields. Along the denuded mining ridge of the hills the wind turbines stand like elegant guards, their blades becalmed in the harsh light. In the parking lot I follow the instructions from Jodie, my contact from the prisoners’ support group. Jodie’s husband, a drug dealer, is in for manslaughter and seems to be some kind of prison warlord, privy to the goings-on in the gaol and prepared to give out information if Jodie approves of the enquirer. I have met Jodie only once, in a coffee shop in the city, and she must have decided I could be trusted because she has been forthcoming ever since.

  I leave my phone and handbag in the car, walk to the gates and press the button. ‘They’ll leave you hanging,’ Jodie had said. ‘They look at you from inside on a camera, so pretend you’re not bothered.’ I try to appear casual, and gaze around me as if admiring the scenery: the dome-shaped hill to the south, the tangle of willow trees along the narrow riverbed, the white cockatoos foraging by the road.

  The electronic gate slides open.

  Inside, I am directed across a yard to a checkpoint. A short middle-aged woman with a baby face and a peroxided ponytail asks to see my driver’s licence.

  ‘You’re here for the prisoner Daniel Priest. That correct?’

  I nod. The warder pats me down and points to the guillotine frame of a metal detector. From there I am ushered to an X-ray machine where my guts are illuminated and I feel for an instant as if my bones might melt into a viscous glue.

  The walls of the visitors’ room are a violent mustard yellow. On one wall there is a huge mural of crudely drawn trees and boulders in shades of muddy orange and greenish brown. It has the quality of sludge. Two warders escort me to a steel table, bolted to the floor, and I sit on a steel chair, also bolted to the floor. Everything here is steel and concrete; even the air has a metallic taste. And the room is so very empty, for I am visiting by special arrangement; there will be no other prisoners and no other visitors.

  The door clangs open and my son, in an orange boilersuit, is shuffling towards me in shackles. He is so volatile, his rages so great that he must be visited alone as his ranting disturbs other families. I have been warned: if the rages persist, all visitation rights will be cancelled.

  Daniel slumps into the chair opposite me and I see that he is weeping. The shock of this almost undoes me. I feared that I might be the one to cry. He has a large bruise on his left cheek and his fine-boned hands are red raw. He wipes his eyes with chafed fingers and stares ahead at the mural on the wall. ‘Rubbish,’ he mumbles, shaking his head. Then he looks up to the ceiling and roars: ‘Rubbish!’