The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  ‘I could come up with an alibi or, better yet, a diversion! Buy them more time to run!’ I was thinking of the news reports Dad watched on TV with their ‘alibis’ and their ‘pending police investigations’. A diversion was what Hannah and Cordie would need. I would give them the cover to run.

  Already my mind was racing towards my Showstopper skit. My skit could be vital to Cordie’s getaway.

  ‘My skit!’ I said. ‘They could run . . . while I . . . distracted . . . my skit!’

  My brain was skipping ahead and my mouth couldn’t keep up. Ruth looked at me like I was possessed.

  ‘Cordie could be the star,’ I talked while I planned it, ‘and . . . and she could disappear straight from the side of the stage.’

  ‘What about Hannah?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘Hannah?’

  ‘Yeah, what about Hannah?’

  ‘Hannah could be waiting for Cordie backstage,’ I said. ‘As a stagehand! She could be dressed in black and holding props as part of her disguise.’

  ‘But Hannah doesn’t even go to our school any more.’ Ruth was suddenly indignant at the unfairness of it all.

  ‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe Hannah would wait in the audience and then she could sneak away and meet Cordie during the climax of my play?’

  ‘Or maybe they could sneak off just like they planned in the first place at any old point in the night,’ she said haughtily.

  ‘If they did it during my play it would be better,’ I explained. ‘More guarantee that people won’t notice.’

  But Ruth was unimpressed.

  ‘You shouldn’t help them,’ she warned. ‘You shouldn’t help and they shouldn’t go. It’s sinful. It’s sinning, you know.’

  But you could tell by the way she said it – by the way she dragged the back of her hand across her eyes, and by the way the trail it left was wet – that the real problem wasn’t that her big sisters were going.

  Only that they were leaving her behind.

  ‘Have they packed?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t hear that bit,’ Ruth conceded.

  ‘Have they even decided what they’re going to take?’

  Ruth hadn’t heard that either.

  I made a mental list of what I would choose. (A torch, a compass. My Britannica Junior Encyclopaedia, volume WXYZ Atlas because of the maps at the back.) But then I remembered: I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t invited. I hadn’t even been deemed special enough to know.

  Outside, the Year Six girls were doing handstands against the wall of the cleaner’s storeroom and their school shoes smack-whacked against the bricks. They scraped sideways down the wall when the momentum wore off, and I wondered if Cordie was out there with them, her shoes flinging upwards, her feet flying in the air like birds taking off. I wondered if she and Hannah were really going to go. If they would actually go through with it and run away from home, or if the momentum might wear off before then.

  And it wasn’t until years later that I realised the one thing I forgot to ask Ruth that day inside the cleaner’s store cupboard. I was so distracted thinking about my skit and the runaway plan that I never thought to ask Ruth: why?

  Why were Hannah and Cordie planning to run away from home? What had happened? What had made them go now? It seemed so obvious – preordained – that they would want to get away that I never thought to ask Ruth why.

  * * *

  On Saturday night Mum dropped the five of us off at Hayley Stinson’s sleepover. There was Lor in the front, with Hannah squashed in next to her. (They might have been fourteen but their bodies didn’t know it, four bum cheeks fitting easily in the front seat.) While Cordie, Ruth and I sat in the back with Cordie’s cool cast resting against my leg.

  ‘Dad’ll pick you up,’ Mum told us. ‘And you lot better be ready to go the minute he arrives because if you’re not home by ten, Mr and Mrs Van Apfel will have my guts for garters.’

  We scrambled out of the car and onto the footpath outside Hayley’s house, making promises to be ready when Dad arrived.

  We cared about Mum’s guts.

  Hayley’s party was in the backyard, where the Stinsons’ pool stretched down one whole length of the yard. At the bottom of the yard was a chicken-wire fence that faced out onto the next street. Then a long trestle table, weighed down with party food, ran the length of the other side of the yard. A hot wind was blowing, and from a hook on the verandah a homemade 15 spun jerkily on its noose.

  We swam and ate that afternoon at Hayley’s party. Played Marco Polo in the pool. All except for Cordie, who sat on the edge, dangling her feet in the churning water but keeping her cast dry by wrapping it in a plastic shopping bag and laying it in her lap. We rolled our towels into crowns and we wore them with their terry-towelling tails hanging down our bare backs. Then we stood in a horseshoe to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ while Hayley’s mum tried to get a decent photo. We sucked Redskins and ate popcorn that was every colour of the rainbow. We wore Cheezel rings on our fingers. Then we sat on the pavers under the coral tree with our limbs in a line and compared leg hairs and tan marks and moles. We played at being posh ladies, flipping our wet hair back from our faces in one fat curl, wearing the coral tree flowers like lips.

  ‘Hello, I’m Pearl.’

  ‘Hi, Pearl, I’m Shirl,’ we said to one another.

  We spoke like ventriloquists, our scarlet smiles unmoving until the flowers fell, bruised, to the floor. Then we got bored of that too and we wandered inside, where the twilight followed us in.

  ‘Truth or Dare?’ someone said hopefully.

  We flopped onto couches, wearing our swimming costumes and turban towels. We were bare shoulders, soft midriffs. We slumped.

  I sat on the floor, running my palms over the cork tiles, while in the corner Hannah and Cordie shared an armchair. Cordie sat in the centre, taking up all the space, while Hannah perched on the armrest like a conscience perched at her shoulder. The chair was orange and ugly and covered with thick corduroy-like material. That thing made me hot just to look at it.

  ‘I’ve got one! I’ve got a Truth,’ said Jade Heddingly. Jade was at the party because she went to swimming club; there was no other reason you’d invite her.

  ‘Hey, Cordie,’ she said, drawing out the words in a singsong way, ‘is it true that you love Mr Avery?’

  Cordie smiled and, without meaning to, I dug my nails into the cork, where they left tiny moon-shaped indents.

  ‘Nah,’ Cordie said, ‘I don’t love Mr Avery.

  ‘But I’d still do him,’ she added. Then she folded her arms and tipped her chin up and dared us to say she wouldn’t.

  ‘Ew!’ squealed Jade, and the older girls shrieked with laughter. ‘She’d sleep with a teacher! Did you hear that? Cordie said she’d sleep with Mr Avery! That’s gross! He’s so hairy!’ As if Jade Heddingly had anything to compare sleeping with Mr Avery to. As if any of us did.

  ‘What?’ Cordie said. ‘Wouldn’t you? Hairy’s cute.’

  She rubbed her cast nonchalantly and nobody spoke for a stunned moment.

  ‘I heard he prefers boys,’ Jade said.

  ‘I heard he’s been in jail,’ Hayley said.

  But nobody had any advances on that so we sat for a moment while we pondered Mr Avery’s true identity and while we all watched Cordie, who was running her good hand up and down the surface of her cast. She paused and tickled the pads of her own fingertips as if the arm belonged to someone else.

  ‘Aching?’ Hannah asked her grudgingly. Hannah didn’t approve of sleeping with teachers; not even joking about it.

  ‘That means it’s going to rain,’ my sister said authoritatively. ‘Broken bones always ache before it rains.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Cordie. ‘I just banged it on the side of the pool.’

  * * *

  Somewhere between Marco Polo and Truth or Dare the wind had picked up. It had shifted south and down several degrees, and whenever gusts flung themselves through the open back door and circled the ro
om they ruffled hair and raised goosebumps. There was music coming from a CD player in the corner – had been playing all evening so far – but a song came on now that Cordie approved of so she arched herself over the sunrise of her armchair to turn up the volume.

  ‘You’ve gotta hear this,’ she commanded.

  Then she stood and let her towel fall away from where it had been wrapped around her head, and she sashayed across the room to switch off the lights. Her hip rolling was slight – just a suggestion – but coming from Cordie dressed only in a cossie the movement was almost obscene. The rest of us looked away.

  The verandah light burned where no one had switched it off. A halo, hung from corrugated tin. Cordie danced towards it in the dark and positioned herself under its spotlight. She began to dance with more purpose, more intensity than before.

  She moved slowly at first. She swayed and scuffed her feet. She gripped herself by the hips and then she slowly unfolded, stretching upwards, her good arm snaking around her cast shaft as she held her arms high above her head. She writhed and twirled, stomping her feet, reaching towards the dirty coin of light.

  ‘Just ignore her,’ Hannah instructed and she moved into the space Cordie had vacated on the armchair. ‘She’ll come back inside.’

  And Cordie laughed at that, throwing her head back and opening her mouth wide to drink in the night, until she was filled to overflowing with dusk and cicada hiss and the scent of jasmine slowly strangling the fence. And in that instant a beam of light appeared among the murk and the chicken wire at the bottom of the backyard. It lighthoused across the rear of the house, illuminating Cordie for a split second – barely a heartbeat – before swinging off into the night.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘There’s someone out there,’ said Hayley, sounding panicky. ‘Someone’s in the street out the back, they had their high beams pointed at us.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘What? A car?’

  ‘Close the door, Cordie!’

  ‘Cordie! Come back inside!’

  Cordie laughed again. ‘Who cares? Let them watch if they want.’ She spun and stomped her feet.

  ‘Come inside, Cordie!’ Hannah urged. ‘You have to come inside now!’

  ‘Someone! Turn the lights on!’

  You could feel the room getting frantic, feel the frenzy rising. Everyone was shouting now, but no one made any move to switch off the music or to turn on the lights. Everybody was transfixed.

  ‘Cordie! Sit down!’ Hannah yelled at her. ‘Stop dancing! Now!’

  But Cordie didn’t stop. She was getting faster and faster, leaving the music behind. Spinning. Swirling. Spiralling. Stomping. Bare feet making the timber boards bounce. The chorus came on and Cordie mouthed the words to herself, her hands clamped to the sides of her head.

  ‘Cordie! Stop it!’

  It was Ruth shouting now, and something about her sister’s voice made Hannah snap into action. She stood and ran out onto the verandah and lunged at Cordie, catching her by her good arm and pulling her towards the house, while someone else turned the music off and the whole night suddenly stopped.

  The inside lights flicked on, flooding the weak verandah light in a sea of yellow.

  ‘You’re dead meat, Cordie, when Dad finds out about this,’ Ruth said.

  Mrs Stinson came in then carrying a bowl of popcorn. ‘Do you girls want Mr Stinson to put the movie on yet or . . .’ she started saying, but she stopped when she saw Cordie standing there with Hannah still hanging off her arm.

  ‘Everything okay, girls?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re not ready for the movie yet,’ Hayley said plaintively.

  ‘Well, just let me know when you are,’ Mrs Stinson said. ‘I’ll leave this here.’ She put the bowl down on a table by the door, and backed out of the room.

  Hayley turned to us after her mum had left. ‘What do we do now?’

  She could feel her party slipping away from her, and Cordie was to blame.

  ‘What about the light?’ someone asked. ‘What if there’s someone still out there?’

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ my sister said. ‘Just someone doing a U-turn in the street. Anyway, we’re safe inside.’

  ‘Wanna go back in the pool?’ someone suggested. ‘Marco Polo?’

  ‘Not again.’

  ‘Not out there!’

  ‘We could make prank calls?’

  But Hayley shook her head anxiously at that idea.

  ‘Dad’ll be here soon anyway to come and pick us up,’ Laura said. But that only made Hayley more upset. She wasn’t ready for her birthday to be over.

  Outside the wind flung bits of leaves and sticks and gumnuts onto the roof in place of rain. They pinged off the corrugated roof of the verandah without rhythm, silent one moment and then clattering fistfuls the next.

  ‘Hey, let’s do a séance!’ someone said. It was one of the older girls – a friend of Hayley’s who didn’t go to swimming club with us, and so I didn’t know her name. She was much bigger than the rest of us, with real bumps and curves in her swimming costume, but in exchange her eyelashes and eyebrows were so incredibly pale that they looked like they weren’t there at all.

  ‘It’s easy. My cousin told me. All we need is a ouija board and an empty glass and we need to turn the lights off again.’

  ‘No more lights off,’ Hannah said.

  The birthday girl narrowed her eyes suspiciously at her lashless friend. ‘What is it called again, Nicole?’ she asked.

  ‘A séance! It’s where you talk to dead people by asking them questions and things. And then they reply by moving a glass around the board to spell out the letters of their answer. You can ask them anything. Like what they’re doing, or how they died . . . It’ll be really fun!’

  ‘You can talk to actual dead people?’ I said incredulously. How had I not heard of this before?

  Not that I pretended to know any dead people. No one I knew had ever died, except for Mrs McCausley’s husband, Ralph. He’d ‘passed’, she always said, as if he’d passed an exam. As though Ralph really knew his stuff. But Ralph had gone and passed long before I was born, so I was guessing he didn’t really count.

  ‘Can you talk to any dead people?’ I asked. ‘Or just ones you know? Can you talk to famous ones? Like people from history? Or do they have to be related to you? And what about ones that don’t speak English? How do you talk to them?’

  I had so many questions, so it was lucky this older girl had plenty of answers as well.

  ‘You can only talk to people you know,’ she said firmly. ‘And they have to speak the same language too. Plus, you can only try the same person three times, that’s it. After three goes, you leave them alone.’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or else.’

  And Laura muttered to Hannah: ‘Wonder who died and made her boss.’

  Which was a bit rich coming from them.

  Nicole went on to explain the ins and outs of ouija board etiquette, which sounded suspiciously like our classroom rules (‘Raise your hand when it’s your turn to talk’), and also a bit like Knock and Run (‘Every man for himself once the door is opened’). But she knew so much about it, and I was entranced. This was definitely what I wanted to play.

  ‘So, have you got one?’ Nicole asked Hayley eventually.

  ‘One what?’ Hayley said.

  ‘A board.’ The older girl rolled her eyes. ‘We need something like Scrabble tiles to use as the ouija board. Something with lots of letters.’

  Hayley panicked. ‘We don’t have Scrabble. We used to, but Mum threw it out in the council clean-up. We’ve got Monopoly and Hungry, Hungry Hippos and that’s it. She kept Hungry, Hungry Hippos for my younger cousins.’

  My sister snorted. ‘Hungry, Hungry Hippos! Yeah, we’ll ask the dead people if they want to play Hungry, Hungry Hippos. Best of three.’

  She and Hannah were pretending they we
ren’t interested in the séance, even though the girl who suggested it was older than both of them.

  ‘We could use Monopoly,’ I suggested. ‘Make it so the first letter of every property was the letter being spelled out by the dead person. Like Park Lane means “P” and Mayfair means “M”.

  ‘There’s an “A” for “The Angel, Islington” and an “E” for “Euston Road”. “A” and “E” are the letters we’ll need the most,’ I said, thinking aloud.

  I really wanted this séance to work.

  The older girl nodded approvingly. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘That would work.’

  And to Hayley she said: ‘Go get Monopoly. We’ll use that.’

  Hayley went off, glancing over her shoulder at me, not knowing whether to be grateful or annoyed.

  Before we could get started though, the Van Apfel girls had to excuse themselves from the game. At the mention of the word ‘séance’ Ruth’s face had taken on a strained look and you got the feeling a séance was something they’d heard of before and, what’s more, it was the kind of something that was a sin.

  ‘We’re not allowed to talk to dead people,’ Hannah explained.

  She was perched back in the ugly orange armchair by the back door. Cordie was next to her, within easy reach. And when Hannah spoke, Cordie’s expression said it wasn’t a big deal. Like talking to dead people wasn’t the strangest thing to come up in conversation at the Van Apfel breakfast table.

  ‘She’s right,’ Ruth confirmed.

  Hayley returned with Monopoly then and we all sat in a circle around the board. Except for the Van Apfel girls, who were prohibited from bugging the dead. (The instant the board appeared, Ruth stood up and moved across the room to the safety of her sisters and she sat cross-legged beside Cordie’s bare feet, her back hunched against the armchair’s wooden leg.)

  ‘We need a cup,’ Nicole said.

  A plastic cup was produced and it was handed to Nicole, who placed it ceremoniously on the board.

  ‘Now what?’ my sister said.

  ‘Turn the lights off, stupid,’ Nicole instructed.

  And I was so shocked to hear someone giving orders to my sister (instead of the other way around) that it didn’t occur to me that I should defend her. Laura must have been shocked too. Because she did what she was told without arguing, although she did switch on the reading lamp by the couch as a small act of rebellion. Through the doorway I could see branches moving in the tree next to the verandah. A possum poked its head out, then pulled it back in and ran along the branch that overhung the roof.