Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus

Free extract

The sun beat down on the back of my neck. I was hot and queasy, probably from the remnants of jet lag and the tea I’d made in my hotel room with one of those little plastic mini-buckets of “milk”. When I’d gotten up that morning, the air was cool – I’d no idea of the temperature because I couldn’t be bothered to deal with Celsius-to-Fahrenheit math – so I’d put on my warmest clothes. But now it was a proper summer day. Forget looking like a responsible business owner, I wished for shorts and flip-flops.

I tried to make my way back to the house and Lauren, annoyed at Kevin, annoyed at the gallery, annoyed at the mess my life had become. I didn’t know where to start with taking care of things. Ponds had shrunk to puddles, clogged with decades’ worth of fallen leaves, their fish gone. Large bowl-shaped depressions promised to become mud pits after heavy rains, a haven for toads and insects. I spied a rusted greenhouse roof and headed toward it, finding shards of glass glittering like fallen stars in the dirt and weeds around it. Everywhere I looked was decay and rot, a perfect metaphor for my life. I clomped along what I thought was a path and ended up twisting my ankle on a piece of broken brick, going down into a dusty pile of leaves and scratchy plants. And then my phone rang.

“Shit!” I didn’t care whether Lauren could hear me. I scrambled around on all fours, trying to stand back up with a tiny shred of dignity. By then the phone had stopped ringing, and I was covered in burrs and seedpods and plant crumbs. My skirt was like Velcro: everything stuck to it. I started picking them off, one by one, while limping down the path, looking for something to sit on that wasn’t the ground. The Remains – for that’s what I’d taken to calling it in my head – loomed out of the jungle and I headed toward it. Then, in front of me, was a wooden garden gate with vines climbing up and over it.

The gate’s handle, a sinuous art nouveau curve, felt cool and smooth in my hand. I stroked it, my mood subsiding with the mindless but comforting action.

When I pushed the gate open, Kevin’s complaints, the mounting bills, my credit card balance, and even The Remains disappeared. I should have walked here at twilight  beneath lanterns the servants hung in the trees, their light soft under the blush-pink and soft lavender of the sunset. I should have sat here in the mornings to drink my coffee from dainty porcelain, the plan of my day dependent on how slowly the shadows slid across the stone path and up the trunks of the fruit trees splayed against the wall. I should have met a lover here, behind the closed door, where no one would see us as the blossoms brushed against our soft, naked skin. I should have slept here and dreamed about other places and times.

My footsteps were silent, lost in the soft, thick turf as I approached the bronze sundial in the shape of a horse atop a stone plinth. A careless gardener must have messed up because it read three p.m. Around the top edge of the column ran a motto: Ver non semper viret. I was relieved, if that’s the right word, to find a translation carved around the column’s base. Springtime does not last. No kidding, mister. Yet spring was at its fullest around me. I wasn’t sure when different flowers were supposed to bloom, but who knew when things happened in gardens in England?

The sundial’s base was a riot of pink roses, and the beds surrounding the sundial were in full bloom. Round flowers, spiky ones, little short ones, tall ones. Pink, blue, yellow, purple, red, all battled to be the brightest. And everywhere, green. The soft green of lavender, the bright green of box, the silvery green of lambs’ ears. And like that, the names slotted into space. Iris. Peony. Foxglove. Delphinium. Primrose. Lily. Violet. Aquilegia. Stock. Dianthus.

I knew these flowers.

Knew them as if I’d been the one to plant them. Knew them as if I’d never killed every houseplant I’d ever bought or hadn’t almost failed an art history exam when asked to describe and analyze the Dutch masters’ flower-rich still lifes.

How did I know these flowers?

The sound of trickling water drew me to a small halfcircle basin set into a niche in one wall. A stone mermaid, softened with green lichen, topped the wall fountain, and the water trickled down from where she wrung her hair. It made me thirsty to see that water, and I cupped my hands beneath the mermaid and tasted it. It was cool and dark, and I tasted the fountain it came from and the pipes that brought it to the fountain, deep underground where it flowed fast and dark. I tasted the years that the garden had been here. I tasted minerals and metals and stone and flesh and bone and hate and devastation and obsession and madness and love.

I slumped down onto the shaded bench hidden in the recess to the side of the fountain, slipped off my shoes, and rubbed my ankle. It smarted but nothing was broken. A few minutes’ rest and I’d go find Lauren and ask her about The Remains. The chimneys loomed over the top of the wall and looked down at me. I felt pinned down on the bench, caught like a bug specimen under glass. If I waited long enough, maybe she’d find me. To distract myself from thinking about being with her in this garden I checked my phone, but it didn’t show any calls or texts. Perhaps I’d heard Lauren’s phone out on the path. Perhaps it had been one of those green parakeets. Or maybe you’re losing it, I thought. Tasting the years, indeed.

I started to cool down, but I was sleepy, so I sat and watched the garden, listened to the birds, wondered how I’d ended up here, so far from home. This place wasn’t mine.

It belongs to you.

The voice sounded like my grandmother’s, and I jumped. I’d talked to her in my head for years since she died, but I never expected her to answer. Sometimes I liked to imagine showing her all the things in my life she never got to see, and I often talked to her as I went about my day to say, “Look, this is what I do.” The internet, my gallery, a TV show, silly things like a new pair of shoes. She’d have been tickled by all of it.

This isn’t something I ever admitted to anyone, not even the therapist I saw for a while several years ago. If little kids have imaginary friends, why can’t grown-ups talk to their dead relatives?

“What do you think of all of this?” I asked her, unafraid of being heard.

She didn’t answer, but the sun shone brighter as if it had come out from behind a cloud. I shaded my eyes and considered another taste of the water but didn’t want to move, afraid I’d miss something.

The edges of the flower petals sharpened, standing out against the leaves as if drawn rather than grown. Stamens and pistils, violently yellow with pollen, pulsed against the pinks, purples and blues. The sun glinted off the sundial so brightly I could barely see its shape, only a blazing disc, throwing its reflection into the air above. Bees droned among the roses, their buzzing taking on the grating edge of a lawnmower. I could feel the catch and hitch of the butterflies as they rubbed their legs along their antennae.

And the smell.

At first the scent of the roses on the sundial and the honeysuckle trained along the garden walls were a tease, reaching me with each small puff of breeze. It mixed with the soapiness of the lavender and the heady spice of peonies. As I sat, hypnotized by the garden, the scent became overwhelming, like being trapped in an elevator with a woman drenched in cheap perfume.

The garden’s walls closed in on me and my limbs weighed a ton, keeping me on the bench. I was panting, trying to catch my breath. The tinkling of the fountain caught my attention again, and I turned away from the colors and light of the garden to rest my eyes again in the cool shade. The mermaid’s smile was a growl, her sharp teeth biting into her bottom lip. Her hair, where she wrung it, was thick with sea creatures, scuttling crabs and writhing eels carved into the stone. The water in her bowl was full of dead leaves and insects and sludgy with moss. I peered closer and a bubble broke the surface as a fat sickly-white fish slid through the dark water.

I jumped up, grabbed my shoes, and hurried down the path. As I passed the sundial, its shadow elongated; the horse grew and stretched as if following me. I ran then, bad ankle or no, resisting the urge to look behind me.

That’s how the girls in movies always got caught: by looking to see how close the zombie or axe-wielding rapist was behind them, and then, boom, they were flat on their faces. It was only as I pushed open the gate that I saw a manshaped shadow, complete with old-fashioned hat and long coat, out of the corner of my eye. I looked back then – I couldn’t help myself – and saw something that my brain registered as a plane, its silver tail sticking up into the sky, but that had to be the glare of the sundial. Once I was beyond the wall, away from the colors and scents, I knew that it was my imagination getting the better of me.

The garden outside the wall was as I’d left it – was as everyone had left it for years: gray and brown and green, broken and messy. Nothing was recognizable. No flowers named themselves, and nothing mesmerized me.

This place wasn’t for me. It was too overgrown, too big, too beautiful, too scary. Too much.

On the walk back to the house, I wondered how it was still standing. The bomb damage was extensive: part of the house was missing, the wall caved in from ground to roof at the end of one side of its squared-off U-shape. A stained piece of ancient curtain, still attached to a window, shifted in the breeze. I imagined my great-grandmother or greataunt – whoever lived here then – had just closed the doors closest to this wing. The remaining parts looked big enough to house half a dozen families.

Hedges that had once lined this part of the garden were monstrous lumps. A tennis court was recognizable by the two poles meant to hold the net. The surface was a rectangular bed of weeds, golden in the sunlight. I cringed to imagine what the pool next to it looked like up close – probably like the mermaid fountain, only larger.

When I saw Lauren on the front drive, I hurried over, glad to see another human in the wasteland. Hiking in the desert or the mountains had always calmed me, but until now I hadn’t understood it was because even with the trees and plants it still felt empty – those plants grew there on their own. Being surrounded by vines and weeds and creepers, the descendants of the gardens that had been planted on purpose, left me feeling watched and suffocated.