The Labyrinth Page 3
One of the warders looks across. He is alert, ready to move. I glance at him and shake my head. ‘It’s okay,’ I mouth.
‘Yes, it’s horrible,’ I say. ‘Who could paint anything so ugly?’
Daniel leans back in his steel chair and closes his eyes, as if the sight of it is too much of an affront to bear.
Here we are, then, framed by this ghastly mural with its thickly drawn lines, its muddy palette, its jagged rocks. I know better than to react, for I know what is happening here. My son is an artist; he has done nothing in his adult life but daub canvas, nothing, that is, until his crime. Like any fantasist he believed he could remake the world in his own image, and when that failed he had no alternative but to smash it up: the world, that is. His, and mine.
Back home, I drop my keys onto the kitchen table and collapse into a chair. The afternoon darkens. The sun sets over the hills. The moon comes out. But still my body won’t move. I must get up, I think, I must get out of this chair. My mouth is dry. I must drink something. I am cold. There is a rug on the couch opposite and I could reach out for it. I could reach out for the rug but my arms are lead. It’s as if my body has unlearned everything it knew.
°
The weather turns and is suddenly warm. At the weekend, families come and settle in at the beach with their children, their bright towels, their trail bikes, their lobster sunburn.
My nearest neighbours are Lynnie and Ray Gittus, a couple in late middle age who live in an old settler’s cottage set back from the road. With its rose bushes and neatly mowed lawn it looks suburban; there is a white picket fence, freshly painted, and on either side of its little gate stand two tin statues of pink flamingos, their feathers weathered into a greyish ochre.
On my walks I often pass by Lynnie, who looks after the grounds of several of the shack owners. Clad in a black leather bikie’s jacket with a skull and crossbones on the back, her head encased in goggles and industrial earmuffs, she looks formidable, manoeuvring her noisy ride-on mower like a veteran aviatrix, temporarily grounded. Whenever she sees me she is in the habit of giving a thumbs up, but one morning she had cut the engine, pulled off the goggles and beckoned me from across the road. ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ she said. ‘Come in for a coffee.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘Tomorrow morning suit you?’
Without her armour, Lynnie is a wiry woman with reddish curls and pale freckled skin. She wears no makeup other than to pencil her eyebrows into thin black arcs.
I walk up the steps of the veranda where Ray Gittus is slumped in a battered cane chair, propped up by pillows. He is a heavily built man run to seed, with shoulders of compacted muscle and wasted calves that seem to dangle from his khaki shorts so that his feet barely touch the ground. His thinning black hair is greying and his skin is sallow. Beside him on a small wicker table is an alarm clock of the old-fashioned kind, the size of a bread and butter plate, with two chrome bells on top and a small chrome hammer that activates the alarm. He sees me staring at it and I look away.
Lynnie beckons me into the kitchen where she is pouring water from the kettle into a large brown teapot. ‘Ray’s not himself,’ she says.
‘He’s unwell?’
‘Had to retire early. Worked for years as a roustabout for the Napiers.’
The Napiers are the local squatters, sheep graziers with a vast swathe of land in the valley that bears their name.
‘He must miss it.’
‘He doesn’t miss the turbines.’
‘The turbines?’
‘You know, the wind turbines. All along the old mining ridges there, dozens and dozens of ’em. They make that whup whup noise. They call it infrasound. Heard of that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank God we moved here. The turbines drove Ray mad. He was all right until they put those things in. Now he has his torments.’
‘Really? What are his…’ I hesitate. ‘What are his symptoms?’
‘It’s his legs. They ache. It’s painful for him to walk.’ She lowers her voice. ‘Something in his mind’s not right. He broods on things. Dinny, up the road,’ she nods in the direction of the turn-off, ‘said he could get him some marijuana for it but Ray won’t hear of it. He’s always been teetotal. Kind of Dinny to offer, though.’
‘Who’s Dinny?’
‘Dinny works for the council in weed control.’ Lynnie grins, winking at me, then looks anxiously over her shoulder in the direction of the veranda. ‘The gorse is taking over,’ she says, in a loud voice. ‘That and the Spanish heath.’ She lowers her voice again. ‘Now that Ray can’t work anymore he won’t leave the house, except to see the doc. Just sits on the veranda and stares into space, poor old bugger. You wouldn’t think it but he was an active man once, captain of the volunteer fire service in these parts.’
‘There was a big fire here, wasn’t there?’
‘Oh, yes, big all right.’ She starts, and looks out to the veranda. The alarm on the clock beside Ray is emitting a shrill tinny alert. ‘He’s done it again,’ she mutters and heads for the door.
I drain my mug, certain that I should leave Lynnie to deal with the alarm. I pause on the threshold of the veranda, where Ray glowers at me like a sullen child.
Lynnie follows me out and down the path to stand at the gate, flanked by the tin flamingos and with her arms folded across her apron. ‘Well, thanks for coming.’
I nod in the direction of the veranda. ‘What’s with the alarm clock?’
Lynnie sighs and shakes her head. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
Late afternoon, I step out into the garden to water a row of river wattles I have planted along the fence line. I am dribbling water from the hose onto the delicate fronds of their lacy foliage when I see a small snake lying half under the wire fence, a young copperhead less than a metre long. The hose jerks in my hand so that water sprays onto my feet but I recover, for I see that the snake is distressed and appears to be caught in the fence. I walk toward it until I am close enough to see that it’s limp, half-dead. I drop the hose and pick up a rake that sits against the fence, and poke at the snake with the end of the long handle to see if I can release it, but the snake twitches and goes limp again. I walk across to the shack where a spade is propped beside the back door and hope that by the time I return the snake will have freed itself and slithered under the fence to the vacant block of ferns between me and the Gittuses. But when I return it’s still there, twitching beneath the wire. Holding my breath I drive the spade into its spine.
The phone is ringing from inside and I leave the hose to dribble in the sand. The tin roof has turned dark against a fiery evening sky. Smoke from a forestry burn-off has created a lurid sunset; great nimbus clouds of burnt coral streak above the horizon and the sun flares low over the hills.
I open the phone and it’s my brother. He wants to know if he can come to visit. ‘Not yet, Axel,’ I say. ‘I’m not ready.’
He begins to remonstrate. ‘Erica—’
I hang up. But the timbre of his voice has penetrated my guard; he sounds so much like my father, the same deep, slightly hoarse tone. It’s as if a gong has been struck and the vibration continues to resonate in my body in waves, so that I must lie my head on the cool surface of the kitchen table until they have subsided.
°
Why am I here, here behind the dunes in this dusty old shack? To be close to the prison, yes, but there is another reason.
One night, in the city, some months after my son had been sentenced, suddenly I emerged from the limbo that had held me in its suffocating pall. As if waking from a coma into floodlit mania I stood up, rigid, and began to stalk each room of my apartment, looking for something I had mislaid. Something was missing. Where was it? At last, unable to find that thing, I returned to my bed and gulped down a sleeping pill.
When I woke it was from a dream of intense clarity. For a long time I lay on my bed, breathing deeply and bathed in the peculiar light that had irradiated the dream. I was living on a great desert plain, a place of immense horizons and dazzling light where there was no depth of field, no shadow, just a blessed sunlit transparency. In this desert was a city of white walls and low rooftops and at the centre of the city was a vast labyrinth. In an instant I was within the labyrinth but as I approached the centre I woke and sat up in bed with my hands over my eyes, as if to preserve the image of its form, the seductive curves of its sinuous path. But found that I could not recall the pattern, only the sensation of being within it, my myopic focus, and the sight of my feet moving along the sunlit meander, one bare foot after the other. I was too far in, too far in to see the whole of the thing. Too busy looking at my feet.
For days that sensation stayed with me: the immensity of the plain; the freedom from dread; the clarity of the light. The pain of the past months was a hollow sensation in my chest that never went away but in the dream the pain had assumed a shape, something half-apprehended that persisted now like a kernel buried in my brain, a hazy but luminous image projected against the screen of my mind’s eye.
I rang an agency and put my apartment on the market. I would go someplace and build this labyrinth: I would make the dream real. First the making—I recalled my father’s words: the cure for many ills is to build something—and then the repetition, the going over and over so that time would rupture and be stopped in its flow. And I could live in an infinitely expanding present in which there was no nostalgia, no consequence, no outcome or false promise. The future now meant nothing. Since my past and my future were hitched to my son’s life sentence, I felt that if I stepped outside the present I risked being turned to stone.
‘What will you do with your time there?’ Axel had asked when I told him I was moving to the coast. ‘If you give up work, you’ll just brood all day.’ To this there was no answer, or none that would satisfy him. For months I had lived in a fugue state, and knew there was no other cure. And besides, Daniel was soon to be moved to the new prison, a long way from the city. I would go to where this prison was and find the place I needed to be. But Axel was uneasy. You have always been impulsive, he said, chewing at his lip. Until our mother’s leaving Axel and I had competed fiercely, often with spite, but with Irene gone we had entered into a silent truce; thereafter the contest seemed pointless. Somewhere in late adolescence it dawned on us that we loved one another. But we had not been comfortable together since he married a woman who judged me, and my son. I could not accept that judgement.
°
It’s just after nine in the evening and I open a bottle of wine and carry it into the dusty sunroom, where I have set up a long trellis table and my laptop. The sunroom is a narrow skillion tacked onto the shack as an afterthought, so that its inner wall is the outer wall of the original dwelling and its tin roof is flat and draws the heat. Here I have laid out my papers, mostly designs for labyrinths taken from the internet or photocopied from books.
Now, at night, I pore over dozens of patterns, hundreds if you include the variation in materials. At first I went online to see what I could find but the net is a labyrinth of its own, a flashing series of messages, an echo chamber of disembodied voices that leaves me adrift and unsatisfied. These are the moments when my activity seems preposterous, a deluded attempt at distraction, nutty and futile. I want something to present itself, not as a choice but as a gift. But from where would such a gift come? I shudder now when I recall the first time I visited Daniel after his sentencing. It was in the old prison, now decommissioned, a modified panopticon, a labyrinth of a kind from which all the internal pathways had been removed and all the nodes had been sealed into fixed and frozen spaces.
Beside me is the thick yellow binder where I enter my notes. The word labyrinth comes from the Greek word labrys, a double-headed stone axe said to have been a weapon of the Amazons and to symbolise the early forms of matriarchal society. Said also to have been an early symbol of the act of creation, of techne, and making by hand.
I have learned that a simple labyrinth can be laid out by anyone, unlike a maze, which is a puzzle of mostly blind alleys designed for entrapment. The maze is a challenge to the brain (how smart are you), the labyrinth to the heart (will you surrender). In the maze you grapple with the challenge but in the labyrinth you let go. Effortlessly you come back to where you started, somehow changed by the act of surrender. In this way the labyrinth is said to be a model of reversible destiny.
In my notebook I have made a simple drawing of the oldest recorded labyrinth, the so-called seed pattern with its seven pathways, and in my idle moments I am given to doodling this shape, over and over. I like its rounded organic form, its soft asymmetry. There are no straight lines or precise angles: no brittle geometry.
I get up now, out of my chair to stretch, and walk to the kitchen to get some water. There are no lights on, and no moon; the shack is dark but by now it has become an extension of my body; I could find my way around it blindfolded. There are many nights when the glow of my laptop screen is the only light in the house.
Glass in hand I settle again to my notes: my conceptual wallpaper. The labyrinth is a single path that leads in a convoluted unravelling to its centre, and back out again. Each labyrinth pattern is made up of two essential elements, the meander and the spiral. The meander is the pathway, the groove of time which, while linear, must not be a simple path but intricately coiled so that it doubles back on itself in unexpected turns. As for the spiral, it is the primal image of creation and found just about everywhere, from the double helix of the DNA molecule to the unfolding frond of a fern, to the spinning galaxy itself. In the form of the classical labyrinth, or seed pattern, its opening is said by some to resemble a woman’s labia, its outer rim the cervix, its coils the inner walls of the womb.
The womb and the labrys axe. Female and male: mother and father. Except there is no reason why a woman should not wield an axe.
There is much that I have not bothered to enter in my yellow binder, some of it esoteric, residues of primitive superstition along with mediaeval theories of sacred geometry and the power of numbers. None of this speaks to me, and I am out of sympathy with the more speculative New Age websites with their reach for the sacred. Were it not for the spell cast by my dream, by the force and clarity of it, which remains with me still, I would not persevere. And then there is that flat, sandy expanse of ground between the shack and the dunes that I think of as the gap. Dead space, so abject, so derelict, it demands to be redeemed. I could plant a garden but the conditions are severe: salt, wind and sand. Nature alone is not enough. Some artefact, some human hand is demanded.
By now it is almost 2 a.m. and the pattern of my sleeplessness persists. Beside my bed is a small white plastic bottle of sleeping pills but since arriving at Garra Nalla I have yet to take one. Here in this little hamlet I have resolved to own the anguish of my nights, and if I am lethargic during the day then what does it matter? As long as I am not in a hot flush of panic it’s okay not to sleep, and when my labyrinth is constructed I think I might prefer to walk it in the dark.
Just yesterday evening when I was wheeling the garbage bin down my long sandy drive, a woman had emerged from the shadows, running towards me along the main road, a jogger dressed in a pink and yellow fluorescent singlet, white shorts and old running shoes. On her forehead was a headlight attached to a fluorescent band, the kind you buy in outdoor shops. With a glazed look of exertion she had pounded past on the gravel, staring ahead, then stopped, retraced her steps and stood on the verge, panting. ‘Hi, I’m Kelly.’ She gestured towards the headland. ‘From up the road.’
Kelly was small and thin and fine-boned. She would once have been pretty, though her face now was taut and dry.
‘Do you always run in the dark?’
‘Most nights.’
‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ I was squinting because the light on Kelly’s forehead was shining into my eyes.
‘Oh, there’s very little traffic around here. And I’ve got three kids under seven. It’s the only time I have for me.’ And she adjusted the headlight, which had slipped down over one eye so that she looked like a maimed pirate.
‘I’m Erica.’
‘Yeah, I know, Lynnie told me. Good to meet ya, Erica—good to see someone in the old shack.’ She tightened the strap on the headlight and shook her shoulders like an athlete ready to take up her position in the starting block. ‘Well, see ya round.’ And off she went, running in a steady stride towards the headland. And I lingered at the side of the road until she was out of sight. The vision of that slender maternal body receding into the dark was unsettling. Three children under seven and running, running. What if, like Irene, women kept on running and didn’t turn back?
The labyrinth is a model of reversible destiny…
°
My son’s father: Gabriel Priest. The son of a judge. The old man had tried to fondle me and if I couldn’t avoid his groping embraces I would fold my shoulders in towards him so that my body was concave and he couldn’t squeeze my breasts.
Gabe hated him.
When the money ran out from Ken’s estate, Gabe and I found a squat in Redfern. My inheritance had been meagre: Ken had not owned the asylum cottage we lived in and had paid for many of the materials in the craft workshop out of his own pocket. The squat was a dilapidated two-storey terrace and Gabe, who had dropped out of art school, spread a big tarp over the only room that got any sunlight and set up an easel. I knew that his paints were expensive but Gabe said he had a mate who worked in a shop that sold art materials and stole them for him.
The narrow terrace was full of mould and leaking gas. Strips of faded wallpaper hung from the walls and the house was built on clay which had shrunk in the long-running drought; a crack three centimetres wide opened up in the kitchen wall at the rear, and in winter it was draughty and cold. The cockroaches ran riot and every morning I wiped their black pinhead faeces from the chipped Formica benchtops. Upstairs we slept on a mattress on the floor with Daniel between us, his finelimbed body curled into my back. By then he was almost three, and I worked nights behind a bar in the city serving cocktails to jittery young executives and their glassy-eyed girlfriends.