The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  We drifted inside after that. Up the steps and onto the verandah and then into the entrance hall with its brown and yellow tiles. Its doormat warning Love Lies Here. The smell of cut grass followed us in. It seeped through closed windows and past the heavy front door. Snaked round the downstairs lounge room.

  Upstairs the house smelled of mildew and also of bleach and you could just see Mrs Van Apfel on her knees on Saturday afternoon, scouring cupboards where enemy spores had sprung up during the week. Casting out mould-ridden sins.

  We circled the kitchen then settled at the table. On top of the table, ready for Mrs Van Apfel to arrive home and start serving up tea, were five lots of cutlery, five amber glass tumblers, and a squeezy bottle of tomato sauce that had stood all day in the sun. There were five plastic placemats too, each one revealing pictures of foods still too exotic to be seen in Macedon Close. Eggplants, artichokes, ruby pomegranates. Every item had its name spelled out for us by a foreign cursive hand.

  ‘What are the mice doing up here?’ I said, noticing the tank sitting on the breakfast bar.

  Normally the mice lived in the laundry downstairs and not on the kitchen bench. The cast-off aquarium had four squirmy white bodies inside. Pink tails, red eyes. A mouse for each girl plus a spare. (Cordie said Mrs Van Apfel did that in case one of them died. The mice that is, not the girls.)

  ‘I’m teaching them to count,’ Cordie said but then she didn’t bother to explain what that meant. Didn’t say how she was doing that, or why.

  Outside the lawnmower gave one last whine and then stopped, and in that moment the world was quiet until there came the unearthly shriek of a lyrebird that must have been digging up Mrs Tierney’s runner beans again, two doors up from us.

  ‘Sounds like a human baby,’ Hannah said.

  Next to her at the table my sister checked the tip of her ponytail for signs her hair had grown overnight. Ruth rested her cheek against the tabletop.

  We were still sitting there moments later when Mr Van Apfel pulled into the drive in his faded blue station wagon the colour of the rainless sky. We heard one car door slam, then another as he lifted his briefcase off the passenger seat. He took the steps of the verandah two at a time, as if to waste a moment on the odd ones would be an insult to the Lord, then he barged inside, conquered the spiral staircase and emerged in the kitchen doorway like a black blotch on your retina after looking at the sun too long.

  Despite his bulk and his shock of blond hair, you got the feeling Mr Van Apfel was struggling to be seen.

  ‘Ladies! This is the day that the Lord has made! Why are you sitting around doing nothing?’

  But it hadn’t occurred to us that we were.

  ‘Is your mother home?’

  Ruth shook her head without bothering to lift it off the table and the movement first squashed her cheek and then stretched her mouth into a forced kind of smile.

  ‘Enough time then,’ Mr Van Apfel reasoned as he moved around the kitchen, bumping a vase of plastic pansies, yanking the fridge door open to stare hopefully inside, ‘for a family Bible study before dinner.’

  My sister gave me the stink eye.

  ‘Actually, we’d better get going or Mum’ll be mad.’

  As Laura spoke she flipped her index finger back and forth between the two of us as if to indicate exactly which of the bare-armed bodies draped around his kitchen table Mr Van Apfel should excuse.

  ‘I just came over to help Hannah watch the others while you and Mrs Van Apfel were out,’ Laura said. ‘And so, you know, if there’s an adult at home now . . .’ She trailed off.

  I couldn’t believe she was sticking to her story about her and Hannah being babysitters, but Mr Van Apfel seemed to swallow the whole thing.

  ‘I see,’ he said sagely.

  He walked over to a small table near the doorway and picked up a Bible from where it sat next to the telephone like a second line to God, and then he came back and thudded it down on the kitchen table.

  ‘But even babysitters need God’s word, surely?’ he said. ‘All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.’

  I thought Hannah and Laura didn’t need any more training in righteousness just then – not from the Lord, not from anybody – but Mr Van Apfel seemed to think otherwise and he patted the air in front of him with flat palms, pressing us into our seats.

  ‘Besides, it’s Ezekiel 36 today, ladies,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to miss this.’

  Cordie rocked back in her chair, hanging in space between the table and the wall behind her, daring the universe to let her fall.

  ‘You mean 37,’ Ruth said without lifting her head off the table. ‘We did 36 yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cordie sarcastically.

  She rocked forward and planted her chair on the floorboards with a crack, and then she laid her cheek down on the table like Ruth, as if this one short syllable had just about worn her out.

  ‘We did too!’ Mr Van Apfel said in wonderment. ‘My mistake, ladies. Ezekiel 37.’

  ‘Sure, Mr Van Apfel,’ I said, ‘we can stay for a bit.’

  ‘Suck-up,’ my sister hissed at me, but she said it so low only I could hear.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Mr Van Apfel said. He flipped open his Bible and began to read its strange and magical words.

  ‘The hand of the Lord was on me, Ezekiel, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.

  ‘Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life . . .’”’

  I shivered as I thought of all those bones. But Mr Van Apfel had more.

  ‘So I prophesied as I was commanded. And . . . there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them . . .

  ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves.”’

  When Mr Van Apfel got to a point he seemed satisfied with he paused and looked at us expectantly, but the five of us sat and stared at the grain of the table. At our bare knees tucked underneath. We stared lower down, at our calves; we studied the skin on the backs of our heels and the way it was segmented like worms.

  In the end it was Cordie who took pity on him. Inscrutable Cordie. With those alien eyes set so wide in her face, those lips that were verging on purple. The confusing one, who didn’t look much like her mum, and not at all like her dad, and therefore must have been a true child of God. Gifted to Mr Van Apfel, for him to favour all he liked.

  ‘Ezekiel brought the bones back to life,’ Cordie said dully.

  She crossed her arms and looked unimpressed about Ezekiel and his old bones – or possibly her father, it was difficult to say.

  Jeez, wasn’t Mr Van Apfel excited but.

  ‘Ezekiel did bring the bones back to life, Cordelia! That’s right! Ezekiel was to tell the bones that they would be brought back to life. That’s correct,’ he said.

  ‘But if we listen carefully to the end of that verse – who was listening? Anyone? Laura, can you tell me? No? Well, Ezekiel didn’t put breath into the bones himself. Oh no – and this is important – Ezekiel got his power from the Lord! From Jehovah! The Almighty One!

  ‘It was only through the grace of God that those bones were brought back to life.’

  Mr Van Apfel was getting wound up now. He was really getting going.

  ‘Ezekiel was carrying out the Lord’
s work when he talked about putting tendons and flesh on those bones, and about covering them with skin. They were the bones of the Lord’s people but those people had been corrupt and idolatrous. They had gone astray. They had ignored the prophets that God had sent to warn them and they had refused to repent, and so it was God, through Nebuchadnezzar, who had destroyed them all, and now he was telling Ezekiel to bring them back to life in his name!

  ‘What do you say to that?’ he said.

  But none of us knew what we should say to that, especially not Laura and me.

  Mr Van Apfel went back to his Bible then, flipping the cigarette-paper pages, thrusting whole sections into tall peaks until they collapsed into plains.

  ‘Ezekiel prophesised that God would make breath enter the bones in the same way he first breathed life into Adam,’ Mr Van Apfel told us.

  ‘In Genesis,’ he clarified for Laura and me, the heathens from down the street.

  He stopped thumbing through pages and he looked up at the two of us.

  ‘Did you know the “Apfel” in Van Apfel means “apple”?’ he said solemnly. ‘From the Garden of Eden. From the Tree of Knowledge.’

  ‘By eating the malus, Eve contracted malum,’ he told us. ‘That means: by eating the apple, Eve contracted evil.’

  And I had a feeling we were getting to the part when it would all be Eve’s fault.

  ‘Okay, let’s recap, ladies,’ Mr Van Apfel said. ‘What have we learned so far from Ezekiel 37?’

  He spoke slowly and he smiled widely as he talked.

  ‘That the bones would come back to life?’ I volunteered.

  ‘That the bones would come back to life,’ Mr Van Apfel confirmed, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Good, good.’

  ‘And who would bring those bones back to life?’ he asked. ‘Who would put tendons and flesh and skin on the bones? Who would raise them from the dead?’

  ‘Come on, ladies,’ he said. ‘You can do this.’

  But his voice suggested he thought otherwise. Like maybe he’d have more luck getting the mice to count than getting girls to do anything as important as receiving God’s word.

  Finally Ruth spoke.

  ‘Ezekiel.’

  She spoke without lifting her head from the table, and then she changed her mind and raised her head regally and held it there, stiff-necked and awkward, while she waited for her praise. She knew she was right – she’d heard Cordie give that exact answer only moments ago. But Ruth should have known better than to try to compete with Cordie. Not when it came to Mr Van Apfel. Not before the Lord.

  ‘What did you say?’ Mr Van Apfel asked Ruth.

  ‘Ezekiel?’ Ruth repeated, but she sounded less certain this time. She was watching something that hovered in the air above the table. Something invisible to me.

  ‘After everything we’ve discussed here today, after everything I’ve told you about Ezekiel getting his power from the Lord, about the Almighty One, about the grace of God, after all of this you still think it was Ezekiel who resurrected those bones?’

  ‘Yes?’ Ruth said cautiously.

  Then she changed her mind. ‘I mean, no,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Ezekiel.’ Mr Van Apfel said it again, only this time it came out in a slow and terrible whisper.

  He lowered his chin and squinted his eyes and you could practically hear the scrunch of his skin as it puckered at his eye sockets. He stood and leaned forward, cementing his shirtsleeves to the table on two balled fists. The fridge hummed, then lost its nerve and shifted down a note.

  ‘Ezekiel? Our Lord and Saviour, Our Redeemer is Ezekiel?’ Mr Van Apfel said slowly. ‘Is that what you said? Is that what you mean? Ezekiel will bring the dead back to life?’

  Ruth froze.

  ‘The Almighty One: Ezekiel?’

  Ruth said nothing.

  ‘Lord Ezekiel, was he? Is that what you’re telling me? Ezekiel? Ezekiel?’

  He kept repeating that name until I wanted to shout: ‘That’s not it! That’s not what she means! She’s just confused, that’s all.’

  Mr Van Apfel was still standing, still leaning forward over the table. He was still whispering in that horrible voice when suddenly he stopped.

  We waited.

  ‘Blasphemy!’ Mr Van Apfel shouted. He thumped the table. ‘That’s blasphemy. And it’s a sin. And I will not have you sinning in my house.’

  Ruth looked stunned, and no wonder. She’d thought she got the answer right, but what was right moments ago was now blasphemy and a sin and Ruth was going to pay.

  ‘Do not use thy name in vain,’ Mr Van Apfel muttered darkly. ‘Do not use thy name in vain. Do not use thy name in vain.’

  He said it over and over again and I wanted to lean across and ask Laura if by ‘thy’ he meant God or if he was referring to himself because I was starting to get confused and I was nervous that, if pushed to say what I thought, I might give a wrong answer like Ruth. But the look on Laura’s face told me it could wait, that I should ask her later at home.

  I was ready, I realised. I was ready to go. I’d had enough Bible study for today.

  The muttering stopped after that and Mr Van Apfel sat down, scraping his chair across the floorboards and making them cry out. Ruth chewed on her lip in that way she had, and even now I don’t know if it was the lip or the chewing that set Mr Van Apfel off again. Or if Ruth had had it coming all along.

  Whatever it was, Mr Van Apfel stood and lurched towards Ruth’s end of the table, and I was shocked that someone so big could move so terribly fast. He raised his arm and brought it down with a dull, flat sound across Ruth’s cheek.

  She bowed.

  Then she fell, slumping sideways in her chair. Her body jolted as it banged against mine, then she righted herself, gripping the chair as if she’d turned a corner on the bus. And the force of her small, thick torso barging into my shoulder was the only way I could tell that any of it was real.

  No one moved. Across the table my sister had moulded herself into her seat.

  Mr Van Apfel returned to his seat. ‘Where were we?’ he said. Then more brightly: ‘Let’s talk to God.’

  Around the table four Van Apfel heads dropped as though pulled by one string and Laura and I followed fast. But the world Mr Van Apfel had been trying so hard to conjure up for us – a world of white bones and dancing skeletons, of miraculous resurrection – had slipped through his fingers and he couldn’t get it back.

  ‘Almighty Jesus, Lamb of God, forgiver of sins, cleanser of souls . . .’

  He was still going minutes later when I heard Mum’s voice floating up the twisty stairs.

  ‘Yoo-hoo,’ she called. ‘Laura? Tikka? Are you girls all right?’

  I glanced at Laura, who glanced at the doorway, but neither of us was game to move. I noticed that my hands were gripping the table and that the fingerprints I left were wet. Across from me Cordelia was drawing arcs on the floor with one bare toenail. Ruth cried softly and Hannah was deathly still.

  Mr Van Apfel kept on praying.

  Out in the stairwell Mum called up to us again and I felt relieved, and slightly squeamish too. Because you could hear her confusion, the creeping concern, but we were too scared to answer back.

  ‘Laura! Can you hear me? Are you there?’

  She called out to us a third time and Mr Van Apfel must have noticed the alarm in her voice too because he opened one eye and fixed it directly on me and, without pausing the flood of words that were tumbling from his mouth, he nodded once.

  Permission to go.

  ‘Tikka!’ Mum said when I appeared at the top of the stairwell. ‘Where have you been? I was calling you! Didn’t you hear me calling?’

  She continued to walk up the stairs as I started down but I waved my arms to stop her. I pointed to the ceiling.

  ‘What? Where’s Laura? I thought you girls were never coming home. Didn’t you hear me —’

  I kept moving as she talked and, when I reached her, I grabbed her elbow and rolled my eyes to the
roof. Then I pressed my hands together and mimed along with Mr Van Apfel’s prayer.

  ‘What? Tikka, where have you been?’ she said irritably. ‘What are you doing with your mouth, you look like a fish.’

  ‘Shhh, they’re in the kitchen and the —’

  ‘Tikka Malloy, I don’t know what game you girls are —’

  ‘They’re praying,’ I hissed.

  That stopped her dead.

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘The Van Apfels. They’re praying up there. They’re doing family Bible study and Mr Van Apfel is praying.’

  Mum lifted her chin and her eyebrows as well and, sure enough, she could hear Mr Van Apfel now.

  ‘Oh. Right. Yes, so they are.’

  She looked flummoxed.

  ‘Well, it’s time for you and Laura to come home.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’ve been over here for hours.’

  I wanted to tell Mum, right then, that Ruth had got hit, but the words just dissolved in my mouth.

  In the kitchen the praying petered out and for one awful moment I thought maybe Ruth was going to cop it again. Then Mr Van Apfel’s voice seemed to stand up on its own and saunter down the spiral staircase to where Mum and I were standing.

  ‘Mrs Malloy, we’re having a little family prayer time together,’ the voice said. ‘Why don’t you come up and join us?’

  Mum didn’t miss a beat.

  ‘Thank you,’ she called up to heaven, ‘but I’ve got mince on the stove.’

  ‘Laura, I’ll wait outside,’ she added, and the two of us descended together.

  * * *

  Laura and I held hands that day as we walked home across the cul-de-sac with Mum. Paper dolls against the blazing sky.