The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  And as we stood up and gathered our towels in our hands, as Cordie scooped her hands gently under the mouse that was still hammocked inside her cossie, the crows gave up too and they rose up in one single dark flurry and then they wheeled away on the wind.

  ‘And anyway,’ I said, trying to claw back the older girls’ respect and, at the same time, being too incensed to care. ‘It’s not called a group. When you see crows together like that, you’re supposed to call it a murder.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When I returned to the river all those years later, I arrived when the neap tide skinned the riverbanks, stripping back the shoreline and exposing the mangroves that clawed their way up through the silt.

  And still it didn’t stink.

  That valley hadn’t smelled bad for twenty years, as if it was appeased when we sacrificed those girls.

  Now when I came back from Baltimore I would pick up a different scent. Wattle blossoms laced with cold air off the mountains in August. Cut grass and scaling jasmine in spring. Then in March, when the clouds massed and the sky cracked and the rain hammered down, the dirt would give off its wild petrichor.

  Down at the river that day the sandflies rose up from the mudflats in near-invisible columns seeking out my exposed skin as I picked my way along the shore, slapping uselessly at my legs.

  No-see-ums they call them in some parts of the States. As if the problem was there in their windowpane wings. Not the fact they won’t leave me alone.

  I walked as far as the bend in the river, and from there a whole new stretch of river appeared around the corner. A miraculous blue berth. I took several steps backwards and the view disappeared. I stepped forward and summoned it again.

  At that bend I found a seat in the crooked vee of a mangrove tree where I could lean forward to make the view materialise whenever I wanted. But the tree was soft-skinned with rot and age – and I was heavier with both things too – and I snapped the branch clean off before I gave up and leaned against the trunk instead.

  The tide was on its way out, so I stood and watched the waves retreat down the slope and back into the briny water. Then I gave up on the tide too, and I went and found a stick and wrote my name in the hard sand. Tikka. Tik, Tik, Tik. I wrote it like a countdown. Then I moved further along, to a stretch of fresh sand, and I wrote Cordie, Cordie, Cordie, as well.

  Missing smell aside, that valley hadn’t changed. Not really. Not enough. It was still tied together with that same skinny two-lane road that wound down and around and across the river. Although the flyover bridge did streak across the sky now like a correction across a page.

  It took eighteen months to complete, that bridge. First they hacked back the trees along both sides of the ridge line to make way for the new expressway, and then they sent it out, slab by slab into the air so that now, instead of driving into the valley, you flew above it at eighty kilometres per hour.

  Other than the new bridge, the valley still spurted turpentines and tea-trees with their acrid lemon scent. Spindly she-oaks still smothered the tide with their spines. And if you stood at my parents’ place high on the western rim and gazed towards the east, then the heat haze in summer still made two horizons: the true one and its sister image.

  That day at the river I decided to look for the place we used to go to as kids. Our spot was further up the river, to the south of the amphitheatre. It was a slash of cleared scrub – just a slit really. Where she-oaks stood rooted in soil and not sand, but where spangled dead fish sometimes washed up on the tide, their glassy eyes wide in surprise. Not mangrove, but not strictly bushland either. A trickier animal. A more in-between thing. And from every point in that clearing you could see the red roofs of the picnic sheds burning amber in the sunshine.

  We used to go to the clearing to dig for artefacts. Crunching among the grit and the dirt we’d pick out mussel shells and whelks. Fish bones. Purple pipi shells. The thing was that all of them were missing some essential part. The pipis and mussels with their meaty middles gone. Fish bones missing their flesh. There must have been an Aboriginal midden somewhere nearby because, no matter how many times we dug up the dirt, there was always one more shell to find. One more bird bone buried just below the surface. It was our very own valley of dry bones.

  It was in this clearing that Ruth hurt her hand once. She’d been trying to prise open a black mussel shell and somehow she pinched the soft webbing between her thumb and index finger and then howled as though she’d chopped them both off.

  ‘Blood blister,’ Hannah diagnosed dismissively.

  ‘Blood blister?’ Ruth perked right up once her injury had a name.

  ‘Hey, Tikka, did you hear that? I’ve got a blood blister. Right here, a blood blister. Wanna see?’

  ‘You know,’ she said slowly as the thought occurred to her, ‘if you got one too, then we could rub them together like they do on TV and then we’d be blood brothers forever.’

  ‘Blood sisters,’ I corrected.

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘That’s only if you’re actually bleeding,’ I pointed out.

  But Ruth looked so disappointed that I pinched my skin too and I rubbed my hand against hers to make us blood sisters. Ruth and I: blood blisters for life.

  The other thing about this clearing was that it was where the Van Apfel girls were supposed to meet my sister on the night they ran away. Laura always maintains she must have missed them by minutes. She was insistent about that. It wasn’t her fault – she’d got to the spot at exactly the time they’d agreed. But somehow it was too late, and Hannah, Cordie and Ruth had already gone. Laura never saw them again.

  And the irony wasn’t that they disappeared from the very place they were supposed to appear. Or that the clearing was littered with empty shells and lonely bones – it was our clearing where things were supposed to go missing. No, the irony was that they vanished in full view of the picnic sheds where the police search centre would soon be set up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The weatherman on the news said high-pressure systems in the Tasman were causing heatwaves all along the southeast of the state. He pointed to a chart, to a long mass in the shape of a gun with its magazine tracing the stretch of the coast, its muzzle pointing out to sea. The heat, he explained, was trapped close to the surface, where it was acting like kind of a lid. But even that didn’t explain the claustrophobia that had settled over Macedon Close. (‘Claustrophobia’: extension spelling list, week nine. Also: ‘foreboding’, ‘phantasmal’ and ‘pagan’. The Halloween-themed lists had dragged on long into November – the Van Apfels would not have approved.)

  I walked to school with Ruth like always that day, though not with Cordie, because she stayed at home.

  ‘Sick?’ I asked.

  ‘Pig’s bum,’ Ruth admonished. ‘She doesn’t look sick to me. Her arm’s not hurting any more, so I don’t know what excuse she’s used.’

  Ruth had lumbered out of the house alone, her legionnaire hat pulled down low. The sun was scorching, even at that time of morning, and the stink off the river was bad.

  ‘Wish I had a peg for my nose,’ I said.

  ‘Wish I was allowed to stay at home like Cordie,’ Ruth said bitterly.

  She didn’t seem to notice the smell.

  ‘Carn, let’s go,’ I said, pushing off the signpost to our street. I’d been leaning against it while I waited for Ruth. But the signpost was old and the paintwork was faded and most of the letters to ‘Macedon Close’ had disappeared.

  We started up the street in the direction of school. Ruth panted softly as we walked.

  ‘What’ve you got to eat for recess?’ she asked when we reached the first cross-street. As she said it she was already unwrapping something folded carefully in wax paper, which she’d pulled from that enormous backpack of hers. She examined it critically and then crammed it in her mouth, chewing mournfully, shedding crumbs as she walked.

  ‘Nothing. Mum gave me money for the canteen,’ I lied. Mum never gave me money to
spend at the canteen. But I wasn’t about to hand my morning tea over to Ruth. You wouldn’t get change back from that.

  We walked and Ruth concentrated on staving off hunger. That, and not overbalancing with her bag.

  Then she had a thought that cheered her right up: ‘Dad and Cordie had a massive fight last night.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What about?’

  ‘Because he won’t let us go to Hayley’s sleepover.’

  ‘You’re not going?’ I was surprised.

  Ruth shook her head. ‘None of us are allowed.’

  Hayley Stinson was in the same swimming club as me and Laura and the Van Apfel girls. We went every Saturday afternoon. And even though Hayley was turning fifteen (older, even, than Hannah and Laura), all the girls at swimming were invited to Hayley’s sleepover.

  ‘Not even Hannah’s going?’ I asked.

  ‘Not even Hannah,’ Ruth confirmed. ‘Cordie says Dad’s being mean.’

  Actually, Laura and I were only going to Hayley Stinson’s sleepover party for the evening part. We weren’t staying the night because we had to go up the coast early the next morning for my nan’s birthday. But I didn’t know the Van Apfel girls couldn’t go at all. I felt even worse for them than I did for Laura and me.

  ‘What did your dad say, for why he wouldn’t let you go?’

  ‘We’ve got church the next morning. But Cordie says that’s just an excuse. She said he and Mum could easily pick us up from Hayley’s place on the way to church. It’s not like it’s too far to drive.’

  That part was true. Nowhere was far to drive in our suburb.

  ‘Is that when they had their fight then? Your dad and Cordie?’ I asked. ‘Did Cordie say that was just an excuse and that’s when he got mad?’

  Ruth nodded, and then remembered: ‘Also, she said that Dad wasn’t the boss of her.’

  I whistled long and low.

  No wonder the fight had been a massive one. Mr Van Apfel wouldn’t have liked that.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ruth said, ‘Dad’s the one who’s always saying God’s the boss. He’s the boss of everyone. Even Dad.’

  To prove it to me she sang a few bars of a song I didn’t recognise.

  ‘But what happened to Cordie?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Dunno,’ Ruth said, chewing her cheek thoughtfully. ‘Mum had sent me and Hannah to bed by then.’

  ‘They’ve got a secret, you know,’ she added.

  ‘Who, your dad and Cordie?’ I asked, though I already knew the answer.

  ‘No, Hannah and Cordie. They’re up to something. Ask Laura – she knows too. It’s only you and me who are left out.’

  ‘They don’t have a secret,’ I scoffed. ‘You’ve got it wrong. They wouldn’t keep a secret from us.’

  When what I really meant to say was: How come they haven’t told me?

  * * *

  We were getting closer to school, where the houses were larger and set further back from the road. They had deeper front yards here. Shadier trees. (Though their neat lawns still wilted under the relentless sun the same as everyone else’s.) The trees along the nature strip were grander too, and we wove in and out of them as we walked. The heat was so thick that it made my skin crawl and I swatted at flies that weren’t there.

  Then suddenly something was there, something stung my bare skin. Something pinged past my ear, something else bit into my wrist.

  ‘We’re under attack!’ Ruth bellowed.

  She ducked her head low and started to run, her legs straining under the weight of her backpack, her arms pumping. She’d been several steps behind me when she’d picked up the pace and now, as she bumped past, she reached out and grabbed my hand and she dragged me along behind. Small, sharp pellets bounced off my body. They skimmed my arm, chipped my ankle. Hunted out soft parts of flesh.

  I glanced back but there was only shadow and speckled sunlight behind us. Nothing stirred in the car-less street. Whatever had attacked us had vanished again. Melted back into the broiling heat.

  And, oh boy, that heat. I still gripped Ruth’s hand but we ran slower now. Just jogged along side by side. I could hear her laboured breathing, her soft grunts of effort. Sweat bled through the fabric of her dress.

  Then, without warning, the pellets started firing again. Harder this time. Hard and fast. As though whatever great mouth they were being spat from was closing in on us. ‘Run!’ Ruth ordered, and I put my head down and ran, but as I did, something dark skidded past. It leapt and then landed in one liquid movement and Ruth and I both reared back like spooked horses.

  The creature gave a blood-chilling cry – a holler of war – before it pointed its stick gun at me.

  ‘Rack off, Jason Kenny!’ shrilled Ruth.

  He sneered. ‘Rack off, Jason Kenny,’ he mimicked and he flung a fistful of gumnut bullets at Ruth’s face. They glanced off her cheeks, off her carefully ironed collar, and then pattered harmlessly onto the footpath. Jason Kenny was in Ruth’s class at school and now she strode indignantly towards him. She opened her mouth, ready to shout out again, but Jason Kenny was too quick. He leaned forward casually and popped a gumnut in her open mouth. Ruth spluttered. Then spat it out onto the footpath.

  ‘Yuck!’ Ruth cried.

  The gumnut landed in a divot and stayed wedged where it fell. Bullseye. Like she’d meant to do it. Like we’d been spitting watermelon seeds and Ruth had hit the target. You couldn’t do it twice if you tried.

  ‘Shut yer face, Fish Lips!’ Jason Kenny said.

  Fish Lips. The boys always called Ruth that. They’d call out in the playground whenever she walked past: ‘Does a fish have lips? Does a fish have lips?’ Or else they called her ‘Roof’ because her lip made it hard for her to say the ‘th’ bit of her name. ‘Roof, Roof,’ they’d shout, trying to sound like barking dogs. ‘Roof, Roof’ every time they saw her.

  Ruth’s eyes filled up and threatened to spill. She wiped her nose on the short sleeve of her dress. ‘Leave her alone, Jason Kenny,’ I said, towering over the both of them. Even then I spoke without Ruth’s conviction.

  And Jason Kenny must have sensed my hesitation because he tucked his stick rifle under his arm. Then he marched back and forth in front of the two of us, boldly blocking our path. As he marched he whistled the tune from the Cottee’s Cordial ad on TV. Everybody knew that ad. And at the end of the refrain he stopped and he stood at ease and he rapped his stick against his flattened palm. Whack-whack-whack.

  ‘Get lost, Jason Kenny!’

  I said it louder this time and he stopped his marching. He lined me up in the sight of his rifle.

  ‘You’re a goner,’ he told me.

  ‘Well, you’re going to hell because killing is a sin, don’t you know!’ Ruth huffed.

  She wiped her nose on her forearm, which was at least drier than her sleeve, and then she barged past Jason Kenny, swinging her bum wildly at the last second so her backpack slammed into him, knocking him sideways. He stumbled and dropped his gun.

  ‘Loser,’ he said angrily, and he kicked his foot out to try to trip her. But Ruth wasn’t about to fall down at that. She stepped over it grimly and then kept on walking.

  ‘You’re the loser,’ I said, and I skittered around his outstretched leg.

  I tugged my tunic lower as I hurried after Ruth and a spray of gumnuts thwacked against my backpack.

  ‘Knock it off!’ I shouted to the sky. Behind me I could hear him whacking his stick against a tree, assaulting invisible enemies while he sang to himself. He’d already lost interest in us.

  I hurried to catch up with Ruth who’d found her rhythm again and was walking doggedly towards school. I snuck an admiring glance in her direction, but she was back to concentrating on not toppling over.

  * * *

  That afternoon I sat at the kitchen table and worked on writing my skit. Laura sat opposite doing algebra, which from where I was sitting looked a lot like drawing love-heart doodles in the grid boxes of her Maths book. Outside, pale blossoms
reached towards the open window and their scent mingled with the stench from the river.

  ‘What’s that?’ Laura asked, eyeing my writing.

  ‘My skit for the Showstopper,’ I said and I flipped back to the beginning of my book. ‘Wanna hear it?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I could do it for you now.’

  ‘What, every person’s part?’ she said suspiciously.

  So far there were six roles in my play, but I’d only been able to convince four other people to be involved. And that was after I’d tried recruiting using the most sure-fire method known: passing notes in class. ‘Pass ’em on,’ I had instructed Jai Fordham, who sat next to me in Mrs Laguna’s 5L class. I gave him the handwritten duplicates, outlining my artistic vision. Jai read one and grunted in disgust. ‘Don’t worry, there’s no parts for boys,’ I said. ‘Unless it turns out I need a murderer.’ And at the word ‘murderer’ Jai sat higher in his seat. ‘If the part opens up, I’ll let you know,’ I promised him. Jai would make a great murderer some day.

  But I didn’t need a murderer or, at least I didn’t think so. I hadn’t worked out all of the script. I hadn’t worked out all the cast yet either, though Sharrin Helpman and Jodi McNally were in. Melanie Firth would be in it too, and her best friend Carly Sawtell, though the both of them hated my guts. But Melanie did drama lessons at a real studio after school and, in 5L you couldn’t buy that kind of experience. Of course there’d be Cordie – she’d play the lead part. Just as soon as I saw her to tell her. But she’d been away from school so many days lately that I hadn’t had the chance to say it.

  ‘Why don’t you do it as a monologue?’ Miss Elith had suggested when I’d told her my casting problems. ‘If Cordie’s not interested in being in it, and if you’re having trouble organising the other girls, then do it on your own.’

  It wasn’t, I explained, that Cordie wasn’t interested. She just hadn’t made a firm commitment yet.