The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  The Senior Girls and Boys Choir sang ‘I am Australian’ as they’d done the week before at the Showstopper concert. They’d been rehearsing it for seven months without a single excuse to sing it and now they’d performed it twice in eight days. When they stood up to sing it, Mrs Walliams, the choir teacher, assured us they chose it especially for the vigil. But that was a lie because everyone knew the only other song the choir knew was ‘Bound for Botany Bay’. And ‘Bound for Botany Bay’ was not right for the night. Not with everyone so dreadfully distraught. Not with all those toorali-oorali-additys in the chorus.

  But in the end it didn’t matter what song the choir sang because the search helicopter had returned by that stage due to the fading light. It chkkt-chkkted overhead the whole time they sang and the clipped rhythm of its rotors showed up the choir as being out of time. They finished the last verse half a beat too soon.

  Mr Davidson from the Rotary Club spoke, and when he was finished we raised our candles in the air and chanted: ‘Bring our girls home.’ We were strong during a crisis, that’s what Mr Davidson said. Strong when it counted the most.

  ‘How are you holding up, Tikka?’ Mum asked when Mr Davidson had finished speaking.

  ‘Strong,’ I replied, even though, honestly, my arm was getting tired from holding my candle all that time. Mr Davidson spoke for ages and my candle was drippy. It was hard not to spill wax on the picnic blanket.

  Later, when my candle was just a stub and all that was left of the vigil was the scent of burned matches and singed hair, I asked Dad if the police had dusted for prints like I’d seen them do on TV.

  ‘What? Dust the whole valley? Every single tree?’ Laura said. And for the first time in more than a week my sister found a hole in her grief that was large enough for her to poke a snigger through.

  Dad told her to bugger off.

  ‘They’re doing everything they can,’ he assured me. ‘The police, the searchers, they’re all doing their best.’

  And I guessed they were, whatever that meant. But on the day they disappeared Hannah, Cordelia and Ruth had been wearing twenty-one items of clothing between them. Two pairs of Converse sneakers (with socks); one pair of pink jelly shoes; three pairs of knickers; two bralettes (Ruth didn’t wear one yet, though she probably needed to more than her sisters did); two T-shirts; one skirt (and belt); one dress; and one pair of Daisy Dukes (Cordie’s). They wore three signet rings; five bangles; one friendship band (Hannah’s, which she’d exchanged with my sister); two hair elastics; plus Cordelia was wearing an oval locket around her neck that Sara Addison swore contained a lock of Troy Murphy’s hair (though I think it was probably Madonna the cat’s). They had six femurs, ninety-nine vertebrae, three skulls and thirty fingernails. Six kneecaps, forty-eight carpal bones, and more than three million strands of blonde hair, all tinged alien-green by the chlorine in their pool, which, up until the day they went missing, we’d swum in almost every single day that summer.

  And yet all these things vanished – just evaporated in the heat. Not a single sign was left for us.

  No sign, that is, until the day one pair of pink jellies and one dress and one pair of knickers and one signet ring and one hair elastic and two curved cheeks (one dirt-smeared, one not) and two fat knees (one grazed and one not) and one harelip were spat back out of that stinking valley and into the burning air.

  * * *

  The Van Apfels had lived in our neighbourhood since a time when blocks of bushland could be bought for $13,000 and an hour spent in the company of a chain-smoking real estate agent. And starting with Mrs McCausley’s at number one, up there on the corner, our cul-de-sac sloped stubbornly downwards in the direction of the valley like a spoon tipping towards a gullet.

  It was a ganglion, Macedon Close. A ganglion. (I got ‘ganglion’ from our extension spelling list in week five of term two, back when we did ‘The Human Body’.) That’s what our cul-de-sac was: a lump that grows in some place it shouldn’t and nobody’s really sure why.

  Our lump was swollen with quarter-acre blocks and backyards and carports and decks and pergolas and fishponds. No fences, though. No one around here built fences. At least, not front ones, and not back ones either. Just the thin kind that ran down the sides of our houses, made from chicken wire or brushwood or timber with missing slats. Leaky dividers. So that everything flowed easily from one house to the next. So that nothing could ever be contained.

  Some of the families in our street had been there for more than a generation, and the Van Apfel family was one of them. It was Mr Van Apfel’s father who had built the house on the corner opposite Mrs McCausley. Strictly speaking, the Van Apfel house was on the adjoining street, facing outwards to the rest of the suburb, giving Macedon Close the cold shoulder. But we didn’t mind; we still included the Van Apfels in everything we did. Still invited them to our street barbecue each Christmas.

  ‘A mole on the neighbourhood’s blonde-brick skin’ was what Mrs McCausley called the Van Apfel house, referring to its dark-coloured bricks and dark crosshatched windows. The pristine black tiles on its roof. That house was kept in immaculate condition but even that didn’t mollify Mrs McCausley. ‘Exhibitionist’ was the word she’d used.

  Then inside, that gloomy spiral staircase winding all the way to the top. Its steel centre pole like a stake trying to pin the house to the earth. As if it might rise straight up to heaven if it wasn’t pegged to our cul-de-sac.

  Mr Van Apfel Senior lived on his own in the house until, some time early in their marriage, Mr Van Apfel Senior’s son and his new wife arrived and began filling up the dark house with pink girls. First Hannah, then Cordelia and, just when it was starting to look like you couldn’t squeeze in any more cots or trikes or Cabbage Patch dolls or Space Hoppers, or hang any more nappies on the line like little white flags of surrender blowing in the breeze, Mr Van Apfel’s father curled up his toes and died, leaving room for one more: Ruth.

  But before he could die, and before Ruth arrived, Mrs Van Apfel led her young family like shrieking, squabbling magpies to the Hope Revival Centre across the valley. With its cavernous hall and its immaculate paintwork, its glossy whitewash repelling the heat, the Hope Revival Centre was a shiny silo rising from the dust on the eastern ridge.

  God had blessed the Revivalists with an 850 square metre block in the new estate across the valley. The church looked out over the valley, over swathes of bushland and over the river that ran through the gully. (Although the church building itself was surrounded by felled trees and blank lots marked out with fluorescent tape. By the stumps of barely built homes. The roads were unsurfaced in the new estate in those days and the loose gravel baked in the sun while it waited for someone to return with the kerbs and gutters and the white road markings that were needed to hold things in place.)

  It was along these roads that Mr and Mrs Van Apfel carefully negotiated their blue station wagon each Sunday morning, with their two small daughters strapped into the back seat, headed for the Rise Up service at eight. And several months later they added a baby capsule to the back seat in preparation for Ruth’s arrival. Then, while Mr Van Apfel looked on, singing ‘Lord, Mould Me in Your Image’, complete with hand claps, Ruth was dragged, bloodied and ball-fisted, from Mrs Van Apfel’s tight womb, her tiny cleft lip glistening in the hospital’s bright glare.

  That was seven years ago.

  Seven days of creation, seven days Noah waited for the flood, seven solemn words Christ spoke from the cross. Seven hundred mentions of the number seven in the Bible (including fifty-four times in Revelations alone, which talks of seven churches, seven angels, seven trumpets and seven stars).

  For seven years Mr Van Apfel had three daughters. Now, through some trick of mathematics, his three had become one and no number of prayers could solve that for him.

  * * *

  The final time we ever went inside the Van Apfel house was when we babysat the girls. (‘Hannah and I are the babysitters – you’re a babysittee,’ my sister corr
ected me when I tried out that line at the time.)

  The two of us thwack-thwacked our way up to the dark house at the top of the cul-de-sac, the bitumen sticking to our thin thongs as we walked. Laura was fourteen years old and three grades ahead of me at school – the same as Hannah Van Apfel – but for the two of them to think that they were in charge was just the pair of them being stuck up. And anyway the whole world knew it was Cordie who ruled. Cordelia Van Apfel: the middle one. With her wide-set eyes and her violet lips. The air hummed when Cordie walked across the front lawn. As if you were letting out a breath you didn’t know you were holding: Cordeli. Aaah.

  Everyone had something to say about Cordelia Van Apfel.

  Like the time the Van Apfel girls were angels in Mrs Blunt’s nativity play and someone started the rumour that Cordie wasn’t wearing any knickers under her costume. I was the narrator of the nativity so I had to open and close the play by reciting a poem I’d written. (That was the reason I was included in the production back when I was only in Mr Simpson’s Year Three class at the time.) My poem was good – it got me into the play – but it wasn’t that good it earned me a costume. Instead the narrator had to wear their plain old school uniform and the label of mine read LauraCordeliaTikka and would probably soon include Ruth, as our clothes were passed back and forth between our two houses.

  But on stage stood those Van Apfel girls. (Steps on a ladder. Ducks in a row.) They were wearing white bedsheet shrouds and Cordie had tried to hem hers so that it was shorter than her sisters’ – a crazy staple smile looping along the fold. She was part Wood’s American Gothic, part Kylie Minogue. (But no Botticelli angel, that’s for sure.)

  And from where I stood on the side of the stage, you couldn’t say for certain if she had her knickers on.

  Then there was the time we saw Cordie coming out of the school office on the first day of the school year. She was holding her mum’s hand. (Though even from this distance you could see that it was Mrs Van Apfel who was doing all the holding. Cordie was so singular, so completely Cordie, that she didn’t seem to need to touch anyone else.)

  We’d been playing Chinese Whispers in the playground but when Cordie appeared hands dropped from mouths, and mouths fell to silence as if to continue with passing it on might shatter the sight. It wasn’t just the hand-holding that had everyone stumped. No, the thing was that Cordie was supposed to start high school. She’d finished primary school at the end of last year and yet here she was, in the same uniform as us, even though she had turned thirteen.

  Across the playground, skipping ropes were reverentially released, balls bounced out of bounds and nobody bothered to chase them. We watched while the two of them walked across the playground towards the Year Six classroom, connected only by their hands.

  ‘Is Cordie repeating Year Six?’

  ‘Why would they make her do that?’

  There was no reason we knew of for the Van Apfels to hold Cordie back from high school (though you wouldn’t put it past them), yet the idea she might repeat seemed familiar to us the instant it crossed our minds. She knew more, she sensed more. Cordie kept strange, private things curled up in her carelessness that were too tight for the rest of us to unravel. Of course she’d come back to flaunt that in our faces. It seemed so obvious afterwards.

  On that first day back at school, though, as Mrs Van Apfel walked her daughter towards the Year Six classroom in the corner of the playground, Cordie gave no sign she’d noticed us staring. Gave no sign she’d noticed us at all. She held her head up seeking some unseeable spot on the horizon. We returned to Chinese whispers.

  ‘Let’s start the game again,’ Melanie Firth commanded. ‘I’ll go first.’ She flicked her eyes meaningfully at me. She was determined to wrest back control of things and so she made a big show of pouring her message into the next ear in line and then she smiled sweetly at me. Whatever was coming around the circle was coming for my benefit. But by the time Melanie’s message had got two-thirds of the way around, it seemed to have almost dissolved. Next to me, Jodi McNally was having trouble deciphering what it meant.

  ‘Say it again?’ she asked but the girl on her left shook her head.

  ‘Can’t say it twice. That’s the rules.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jodi. She leaned in and whispered, her breath hot and thick. It prickled the inside of my ear.

  ‘Isla gaudy do-si-do,’ she slurred. I looked at her desperately for a clue.

  Melanie shrieked. ‘Say it out loud! You say it out loud.’

  ‘But it hasn’t been all the way around the circle,’ I protested.

  ‘Who cares? Just say it out loud. What’s the message? Say it now!’

  ‘Fine. I love gaudy do-si-do,’ I muttered.

  ‘Say it again!’

  ‘I love gaudy do-si-do.’ I raised my chin and said it louder this time.

  ‘You love Cordie!’ said Melanie. ‘You admitted it! That was the message and you said it out loud: I love Cordie, don’t you know.’

  I folded my arms. ‘Cordie’s a girl. Your message doesn’t make sense.’

  And Melanie shrugged. ‘It’s just a game,’ she said defensively, though we both knew she didn’t mean that.

  By now Cordie and Mrs Van Apfel had reached the Year Six classroom on the far side of the playground. Cordie never turned her head to acknowledge us. But as they rounded the corner to the entrance of the room, she raised her free hand and held it high behind her back. Then she flicked her middle finger at us.

  * * *

  We swam in the pool that day we babysat. The Van Apfels’ pool was an in-ground one that swallowed half their backyard. It was all pebblecrete and landscaped bushes. A violent blue vinyl lining to give it that ‘tropical feel’. That’s what Mr Van Apfel told us when he first laid the pool brochure on the kitchen table in a way that reminded me of the Van Apfels’ cat when she arranged possum carcasses on the doormat and then sat back and waited for praise.

  We ran elaborate underwater handstand competitions in the Van Apfel pool that day. First round, second round, best of the best. Our skinny legs stabbing at the sky like the bows of some demented orchestra.

  ‘Tikka cheated,’ Ruth complained.

  She appealed to Cordie, the judge on the side of the pool.

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘How do you even cheat at underwater handstands?’

  But Hannah and Cordie were too busy talking about getting their ears pierced to care what Ruth had to say.

  Later we lay on the grass under the peppercorn tree, our faces split into jigsaws by its shade. Madonna wandered over and sniffed us half-heartedly, and Cordelia put out a lazy forearm – her good arm – and let the cat rub her fur against Cordie’s own peach fuzz. The girls had named the ginger after their idol (and let their parents think they meant Jesus’s mum). Laura and Hannah lay on their backs, each with one hand resting across their stomachs and the other arm stretched out so that they were linked, pinkie finger to pinkie finger, while Cordelia was propped up on her side so that one round hip held up the sky.

  Ruth had arranged her towel closest to mine and then sat cross-legged on it, hunched over, stabbing at ants with a stick.

  ‘Whaddayawanna do?’ Laura said.

  ‘I dunno. Whadda you wanna do?’ I said.

  ‘I asked first,’ my sister said flatly.

  ‘Get a canoe?’ Hannah suggested.

  From the boatshed, she meant, down by the river. It was two dollars to hire one but we never had two dollars. Or it was too hot. Or Laura didn’t feel like it.

  ‘Yeah! Canoes!’ I said.

  Ruth shook her head.

  ‘“Two in a canoe,”’ she reminded us about the hand-painted sign that had hung by the boatshed for as long as I could remember.

  Ruth counted us out: Laura–Hannah; Tikka–Cordie.

  She thumbed her own pink chest. ‘Two in a canoe but what about me?’

  We never got canoes anyway.

  Ruth hunched over again and went back to stabbing her ants.


  ‘If you were a Buddhist you could come back as an ant,’ my sister said.

  ‘If I was a Buddhist I would burn in hell,’ Ruth replied automatically.

  Somewhere in a neighbouring yard a lawnmower started to moan and Madonna looked disdainfully towards the noise.

  ‘Mr Avery said there is no hell,’ said Cordie.

  ‘When did he say that?’ Hannah wanted to know.

  ‘I’ve never heard him say that,’ I said helpfully, and Cordie clucked her tongue sympathetically at me as if to say that was my dead loss, not hers.

  ‘Is that where you go when you’re sleepwalking?’ Laura teased Cordie. ‘To see Mr Avery, to talk to him about hell?’

  But Hannah didn’t like that. She didn’t like it one bit.

  ‘You’re a moll, Cordie,’ she said. She raised her head as far off the ground as she could without expending any actual effort and she looked disapprovingly at her sister.

  ‘That’s what Jade said too,’ I confirmed.

  Because Jade had said that. She called Cordie a moll at swimming club one day when Cordie hadn’t bothered to go into the changing rooms to get into her cossie. Instead she got changed on the pool deck in front of the boys.

  ‘What did the boys do?’ my sister wanted to know.

  So I told her how they waited poolside the whole afternoon in case she got changed in full view after her swim.

  ‘And did you?’ Laura asked Cordie.

  ‘Nah, I went home in my cossie.’ Cordie smirked.

  But Hannah was more interested in what Jade Heddingly had to say.

  ‘I’m the only one who can call my sister a moll. You tell Jade Heddingly that from me,’ Hannah said warningly.

  But then Ruth began complaining that she wanted an iceblock and so she was dispatched – as the youngest and therefore our slave, and as the one whose idea it was anyway – to go to the garage to get five Sunnyboys. She would have to dig them out of the chest freezer where Mrs Van Apfel kept great slabs of cut-price meat. The Sunnyboys and the slabs of meat were buried in the freezer together. So we waited for Ruth to separate the iceblocks out, and after that we sat and listened to the lawnmower whine while we ate our Sunnyboys, and Mr Avery and his hell-free existence were forgotten.