The White Garden (28 page)

The Hotel of the Stars

191

pink dress, and the pieces of bright red and yellow flesh were piled up in her lap. For a long, long time we said nothing, and then I said in a sort of whisper — Those things are poisonous.

Just then my father, I mean Felix, came through the trees with the little pine tree over his shoulder and the axe dragging along the ground. He said — There you are. What d’you think of this then? — and he stood the tree up in front of us. Then he saw the bits of toadstool and he just exploded. He shouted at Jennifer

— You should never touch those things! You’ll die! Don’t you know they’re poisonous. Jennifer jumped up and the toadstools fell out of her dress and seemed to float to the ground in slow motion. She ran off through the bush back towards the house.

Me and Felix stood in the clearing staring after her, then he hoisted the tree onto his shoulder again. — You carry the axe, he said. And we walked home across the fields in silence.

‘We decorated the Christmas tree, but Jennifer was quiet and awkward. She stayed right next to my mother. My father just went on as if nothing had happened, and when all the tinsel was on the tree Jennifer said she was sick and her mother came to get her. I wished I could go with them. Then, that night — it was a few days before Christmas — I tried to run away. I got into a mad, blind panic, imagining I could walk to Jennifer’s — it was probably five miles. I put on a jacket and packed some things in my school bag — fruit cake and my gold locket. I crept along the veranda at about nine o’clock. I was halfway up our drive when the front door flew open and my father was there, framed in the lighted doorway. He was huge like a giant, his horrible face in shadow. He yelled — Get back inside before I thrash the living daylights out of you. I started to run but I tripped just before the gate and he caught up with me, picked me up like a rabbit and took me inside. Like he said, he thrashed the living daylights out of me. This man who would fondle me and undress me and make me suck his cock — that night he took off his belt and thrashed me with it until I couldn’t stand up.

‘I think I first gave up on life that night. Something inside me died.

‘It was just after that my mother went to work for Doctor Goddard, and later on we moved into a cottage in the grounds
192

The White Garden

of Mandala. To begin with I felt safe there. The doctor and the nurses were nice to me, and I could ride my bike all over the grounds. Sometimes Sophie and Sebastian Goddard came over and I would play with them. We’d play on the swings and the monkey bars that belonged to the school that used to be there.

It was funny, really, Sophie and Sebastian being so nice. With a father like that — and a mother. She was pretty terrible. But they really were nice. For me their lives were like a fairy tale.

They had so many toys and Sophie had such beautiful dresses.

And shoes. You wouldn’t believe the shoes she had. But there was a lot of work to be done — for me I mean — and I didn’t get to play very often — what with the alterations and the cleaning and renovating. Once Sophie gave me a bracelet with a silver ballet dancer on it. I’ve still got it.

‘Part of the old convent hadn’t been used for years and every day after school I was sent up there to clean up. It was like Sleeping Beauty’s Palace — well that’s a laugh — Ambrose Goddard had his own version of Sleeping Beauty’s Palace

— hemmed in with blackberry bushes. Men came and cut the bushes back, then it was my turn to do most of the work.

‘I’ve always been frightened of spiders. That place was full of them. Webs everywhere like a house in a horror movie, webs and great big fat scuttling black spiders with bright and evil eyes. But there was no question of not doing what I was told.

Think of it — a nine- or ten-year-old girl alone in the dark and empty cells with a tin bucket of soapy water and a basket of cloths and brushes. Plus what seemed like my worst nightmares come true — all the spiders, all the hairy-legged spiders. Once I was bitten on the hand and it swelled up and I thought I was going to die from the sheer pain.

‘Doctor Goddard said it was nothing to worry about.

‘The paving stones of the veranda were arranged like honeycomb. Because nobody had walked there for a long time, weeds had sprung up in the cracks between the stones. I had to get down on my hands and knees and dig them out with a knife.

I ended up being obsessed with the honeycomb pavement. I suppose being out on the veranda was better than facing the hairy monsters in the cells. Anyhow I got that pavement perfect.

The Hotel of the Stars

193

But then what happened was the ants started excavating underneath, and all the lines, clean as a whistle, the lines between the stones — they filled up with mounds of sand left by the ants. I used to kick them over — I was so furious. Then I’d sweep the sand with the broom, whisk it off the edge of the veranda onto the gravel path. But before I kicked the sand away, I remember I used to squat down close to the pavement and stare at the sand and the patterns, and weep. Because of the shape of the stones, the mounds of sand took the form of little open mouths, gently smiling lips of sand. I would stare down at the lips of sand, run my fingers across them, careful not to disfigure them. Then I’d jump up and kick at them and grab the broom and sweep the sand away. I’d get a bucket of hot water and splash it across the pavement, hoping to drown the ants. But within days the piles of sand would be back, and I’d be kicking and weeping all over again.’

Because Jane told this strange and passionate anecdote in her soft singsong voice, it seemed to be a sinister story, the meaning of which remained just below the surface of my mind. I wanted to know more, to hear more. The stories she was telling of her life, far from being unrelated to my purpose, seemed in some dark unconscious way to be drawing me towards my destina-tion. In her voice, which began to sound unearthly and remote, she wove, spider-like, a web of lines, a net of threads invisible yet strong as steel and light. The patterns of the honeycomb pavement rose sharply before my eyes and I saw the lips of sand, the moving armies of the ants, the delicate and geometric purpose of the spiders; I heard the sound of bees among the blossoms, saw the lines, the bee-lines they etched into the air as they flew between the honey and the hive; I caught the echo of the sweet songs of companies of nuns at prayer in the cells, the rush of angels’ wings between the stars.

Jane stopped speaking as the door to Parker’s room was opened. He stood there with his dog. An unremarkable man in grey cords and a blue and green checked shirt with his dog, a pit-bull terrier, by his side.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Parker. You must be Laura. Welcome to
194

The White Garden

the Hotel of the Stars. This is Taurus.’ The dog wagged its tail and looked up at me. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Tea time.’

As if commanded, Jane rose from the sofa and went swiftly to the kitchen. Her voice was different now, almost business-like.

‘We haven’t even really started the interview yet, Parker,’ she said.

‘We’ll have a cuppa and then you can get on with it then.’

The man and Taurus stood oddly in the doorway of the Hotel of the Stars; I sat on the sofa, the tape still running, not quite knowing my place. Jane made the tea and brought it in with the open tin of cookies. It all seemed so normal. Afternoon tea in the suburbs with the astrologer, his wife, his dog, and a visitor looking for a clue to the possible murder of her sister long ago.

Parker, his mouth full of crumbs, said again, ‘Welcome to the Hotel of the Stars.’ And he gave me his business card. ‘I can’t tell you anything about old Doctor God and his Sleepytime, but if you want me to I can read your chart. When were you born?

No, don’t tell me. You’re a Virgo.’

I said yes I was, and Parker smiled with satisfaction. I said I needed to get on with the interview and leave them in peace, and before long Parker and Taurus went back into the Hotel of the Stars and shut the door.

The spell Jane had been weaving was broken, but as soon as she took up her story I felt myself being pulled back into the invisible web. I was being drawn, I knew not how, towards the day my sister died.

Jane’s voice dropped back into the singsong rhythm as she took up her story.

‘When the main hospital was all fixed up and the beds were ready they started moving patients in. Ambrose Goddard was beside himself with pride and excitement. He had the chapel turned into a glass meditation and meeting room with carpet like green moss. It was all written up in the paper at the time because it was so advanced, and he was such a godsend to his patients. Then he started on his experiments with LSD. People just had to say they were depressed about their job or their marriage and Ambrose would have them in the chapel high as

The Hotel of the Stars

195

kites at government expense. Then afterwards they told him all about it and he took notes to put in his so-called great book
Illumination
. Some book!

‘I don’t know when he started having an affair with my mother, but by the time the LSD sessions started, the affair was going strong. My mother would do absolutely anything for him. People would, you see. He could get away with murder

— well he
did
. He literally got away with murder all the time, and people still treated him like some great good god. Actually my father had disappeared by this time, and me and my mother lived alone in the cottage in the grounds of Mandala. When I say she would do anything for him, I mean she thought nothing of handing me over to him for some so-called “treatments” of LSD, or psilocybin or whatever it was. I was one of the earliest, youngest “patients” to receive the benefit of those drugs in this country. It was the biggest nightmare for me. Believe me when I tell you that under LSD I became a rabbit, a white rabbit, running from a hunter. The whole world was pink, the most terrible pink, and I was the rabbit, running, running, running for my life. The hunter was always on the point of catching up with me to shoot me. I know I used to scream. I could hear my own screams, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was inside and outside my own skin. I tell you, I was a rabbit. I could feel myself going mad. I would have the thought: “I’m going mad,” and the words of the thought went spinning round and round in my head, round and round like the lines on a spinning top.

‘They could see I was going mad. I tell you, I was so wiped out I didn’t even
know
I was in for Deep Sleep. I didn’t know until recently, when the records came to light (and many, many records have mysteriously disappeared). When I saw my records I discovered I had been at one time in Mandala for over a month. I was given ECT and Deep Sleep for a month, and I didn’t even know. You can’t imagine what that’s like, to find out after twenty years that a month of your life was spent as a naked body in a room full of other naked bodies, men and women, constantly doped up with barbiturates, and zapped out with electric shocks. Remember I was a child. People around me would have died. The smell in that place was unbelievable
196

The White Garden

— all that piss and shit and blood and vomit — and the people groaning and screaming and writhing. We were strapped down.

You realise that when Ambrose Goddard gave or ordered shock treatment, this didn’t involve any anaesthetic. So you’d be conscious, and he or one of his offsiders would stick a rubber bite in your mouth and then apply the jelly and the pads to your head with a machine that had what he called “glissando”.

This sounds like a ballet step, doesn’t it? Well it meant that the current was given to the patient gradually — it was supposed to reduce the shock. The real effect was that with the glissando the patient saw terrible flashes of bright light before going into a convulsion. The glissando was one of the cruelest things you could do to people. And of course patients were always charged for the anaesthetic they didn’t get. And look at these papers.’

She handed me a pile of copies of medical records.

‘You can keep those. I’ve got the originals,’ she said.

There was a psychological appraisal that showed she had been given the following tests at the age of twelve: Wechsler Bellvue Intelligence

Penrose Pattern Perception

Goldstein Scheerer

Vigotsky

Schapiro Orientation

Psycho-Galvanic Response

Zulliger Perception

High School Personality Factor

Critical Flicker Frequency

The result of these tests was that Jane was described as having poor moral judgement, high anxiety, below average control of detail, poor general knowledge, slow thinking, below average capacity to grasp abstract concepts. She had an excessive degree of repression that was utilised as a mechanism of emotional defence. Her temperament was mildly cyclothymic and her self-confidence was below average. She showed some disturbances in perception, indicating schizoid mechanisms. She was depressed and acting in a psychopathic fashion, her behaviour being classically that of the immature, emotional psychopath.

She had strong disturbances in her emotional functioning,

The Hotel of the Stars

197

which could be Oedipal in nature. She was driven towards male figures, but any relationship with them ended in unhappiness and even death. There were marked themes of violence and death in her fantasies, and she seemed to be depressed and bereft of emotional support.

It was shocking and horrible to see these comments about a twelve-year-old girl. Even more grotesque to see the signature of Ambrose Goddard at the end of the document.

‘When I wasn’t being used as a guinea pig for LSD or Deep Sleep, I had to work in the wards after school. There was a patient called Shirley Temple who was very nice to me. Can you believe it, we used to have fun, me and Shirley. She taught me songs, and how to play the mouth organ. We’d be mopping out the rooms or changing the sheets and singing old songs like “Danny Boy” or something. I used to love it when Shirley brushed my hair and did it up in curls or braids.