The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  It took a while but eventually I got bored. And sweaty. And my legs started to ache.

  I stood and stretched, and when I did I found a large tub of raw pasta shells hidden behind the wastepaper bin. We’d used that pasta back in term one when we’d made designs that we glued onto paper. Now, though, I opened up the tub and discovered there were still hundreds of pieces of pasta in there. All sorts, not just macaroni but bows and shells and half-moons and spirals, all brittle and smelling like dust. Some pieces had been dyed with food colouring and they were deep blues and greens, lurid yellows and reds. I lay on my stomach and fished through the tub, letting the shapes slide through my fingers like Bakelite jewels. I began sorting through them, making piles on the carpet. Blue tubes, red spirals, green bows. I separated the shells into two different sizes. Laid spaghetti lines all in a row. At one point, without thinking, I popped a piece into my mouth and it tasted like nothing and broke easily between my molars. Then I heard Mrs Laguna tell the class that they had ten minutes left until they had to pack up their desks for the day. I needed to start tidying up.

  But instead of putting the pasta back in the tub I stayed where I was, flat on the floor, and began destroying the mounds of colours and shapes I had made. Next I smoothed the blue tubes into a line as flat as sky. I laid red spirals into a road – Blaxland Road – that long line that ran through our suburb, and I planted green bows on either side. The yellow bits could be houses and shops, I decided. I built the whole road and some of its offshoots before I started on Macedon Close. There was Mrs McCausley’s place and the Van Apfels’ house, standing sentry on either corner. Then lower down, our house backing onto the bush.

  I’d built most of our side of the ridge before I sat up and saw what I couldn’t see when I was lying on the ground. Inside the tub of pasta, a minuscule black leg. Or was it a snout? It was straight and stick-like, but flared at the end like some sort of sucker. Then I saw more and more suckers, more stick arms and stick legs. They were crawling, scrounging, slipping. It was swarming with weevils. They were down in the dregs, away from the light, where I hadn’t seen them when I first found the tub. I watched as they climbed across each other, not caring where they trod. I yanked my hand back in horror, trying to shake off the germs. I wiped my fingers frantically on my tunic and ran to tell Mrs Laguna. I had never seen anything so gross.

  Mrs Laguna was cranky when I told her what I’d found, but even more annoyed when she saw my suburb spread out across the carpet. ‘You were supposed to be tidying up, Tikka. Not making more mess!’ She swept away my suburb with the instep of her shoe, with all the force of a natural disaster. I helped Mrs Laguna scoop the pasta back into the tub and seal it up for the cleaners. But my skin crawled for the whole of my long walk home without Ruth.

  * * *

  The evening of the Showstopper was somehow hotter than ever. As if the dial had been turned up to ten. When we left the house and headed out to the car the sky burned with the kind of last-ditch heat that comes at sunset. My stomach churned in a way that it was impossible to tell if it was performance nerves or too much pineapple pizza. And when Dad backed up the drive, we seemed to be headed straight for the sun. Dry air blasted in my window and I sat back in disgust.

  We had just straightened up, engine in gear, nose aimed out of Macedon Close, when Cordie came running towards us. She appeared at my open window and I pulled back in surprise. Sunshine made the whites of her eyes dance.

  ‘Cordie!’

  That same instant Mum yelled: ‘Graham, stop!’ And Dad fell on the brakes and the car jerked to a stop.

  ‘Can I come in the car with youse?’ Cordie said and her cast clunked against my car door.

  ‘Christ, Cordelia! Where’d you spring from?’ Dad said.

  She thumbed towards her own car that was sitting in the Van Apfels’ drive at the top of the cul-de-sac. There were bodies piled in it, though no noise was coming out. You could just about make out three blonde heads inside. Meanwhile, Mr Van Apfel stood half in and half out, one leg on the drive, the other swallowed by the car. He was smiling but his mouth was pulled tight at the corners.

  ‘Please?’ Cordie begged.

  One word. But enough to answer our questions. One word to tell us the world. Things were not right in the Van Apfel household and Cordie was still doing all she could to get away.

  ‘Are you still – Do we —’ Laura didn’t know how to pose the question in front of Mum and Dad. Instead she held up her purse to show she had her money with her as planned. She was all set to meet Hannah and Cordie in the clearing if they wanted. All the muscles were tensed in the side of her neck.

  Dad said, ‘Let me check with your parents, Cordie,’ and he leaned on his windowsill to call out across the road. But Mr Van Apfel yanked his head towards the back seat of his own car – Get in – before Dad got the chance to speak.

  Cordie’s face collapsed.

  ‘It’s okay, sweetheart,’ Mum said, turning to face us in the back. ‘We’re all going to the same place. We’ll see you again in five minutes at the show.’

  Cordie nodded and waited until Mum turned around, and then she dropped a scrap of paper in my lap. It fluttered as it fell and landed right side up: Go.

  Laura’s head snapped to attention. ‘So you’re still going —’ she started saying.

  But Cordie was already gone. She turned and ran back up to the top of the street. At the car she hesitated as if daring her dad to say something.

  Then she slipped inside with her sisters and they rearranged themselves on the back seat. As we drove away I stuck my head out the window in case any of the Van Apfel girls waved. But despite the heat, despite the fact that they had no airconditioning in their car, the windows were wound right to the top and there were no fingers waggling goodbye.

  * * *

  The car park was nearly full when we arrived in the valley. It would be showtime in a little less than an hour. Right when the dusk turned into the dark. The older girls had planned it well. Dad swung the car into one of the last empty spaces and I craned my neck to watch the Van Apfels arrive.

  Their car stopped a few spaces up from ours. Laura and I got out and waited for the girls.

  ‘We’re going to go and get our seats in the amphitheatre while there’s still some left,’ Mum said to me. ‘Big crowd tonight, Tik. You going to be okay?’

  I nodded grimly.

  ‘Break a leg,’ Dad said. And I knew it was just theatre talk, but the last thing we needed was more broken bones.

  My sister stood beside me, by the archway to the amphitheatre, while we watched the Van Apfels’ sky-blue station wagon for a sign that the girls might emerge. Mrs Van Apfel got out first. Then Mr Van Apfel, then Hannah and Ruth. Hannah carried something under one arm, but from this distance it was impossible to say what. Cordie had been last in so she’d got the short straw: she’d been made to clamber over Ruth and forced to sit in the middle seat. Now she was the last one out. And when she appeared she looked too pale and too old, as if she’d travelled much further than just down the bends to the valley. She stood and moved over towards her sisters, and then the three of them shuffled across the car park, kicking up gravel and dust. Grey puffs of it hid their feet and half of their shins like they were already being erased. Their eyes were downcast as if searching for their feet. They trailed behind their parents.

  When Mr and Mrs Van Apfel walked past Laura and me, Mrs Van Apfel nodded hello. Mr Van Apfel smiled broadly and passed me a pamphlet. Salvation! it guaranteed brightly.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied and I slipped the flyer into my back pocket until I could work out what I was supposed to do with it.

  ‘You could put some flyers on Mrs McCausley’s table,’ I said helpfully. ‘Because she’s setting up over there.’

  I pointed to where Mrs McCausley had erected a fold-out table on the grass that stretched between the car park and the amphitheatre and where she was now handing out Tupperware brochures.

  ‘Hers is f
or the new Airtight Alright range,’ I explained because Mrs McCausley had told me earlier that week how the Showstopper was a sales opportunity. Just like she’d described how the new range came in four dishwasher-safe pastel colours.

  ‘She’d let you share her table,’ I assured Mr Van Apfel, ignoring the fact it was covered with candy-coloured plastic samples.

  But Mr Van Apfel told me that what God promised didn’t require a fold-out table on the grass, and to prove it he handed a flyer to Mr Gonski as he walked past.

  ‘Like bloody election day,’ Mr Gonski complained. ‘At least when you vote they give you a sausage.’

  Mr and Mrs Van Apfel continued walking towards the amphitheatre, a thick bundle of pamphlets tucked under Mr Van Apfel’s arm.

  The girls scuffed past in their parents’ wake. Cordie held loosely to the back of Hannah’s shirt with her cast arm, while her good arm dangled by her side. She wore her hair out and flipped over to one side in a style we hadn’t seen before, but that everyone would copy by Monday.

  ‘You busted?’ Laura spoke low to her friend.

  ‘Tell you later,’ Hannah said urgently. She had a giant bag of popcorn tucked under one arm. The bag was made of plastic and it was comically large, almost a sack, so that the back end of the bag wobbled from side to side as Hannah walked, like a happy dog wagging its tail.

  ‘What? It’s for watching the show,’ she said defensively when she saw me eyeing the bag. I noticed she spoke loudly enough so that her parents might hear.

  ‘What happened after we left?’ Laura said desperately.

  But Hannah looked nervously at the backs of her parents. They were maybe ten steps ahead on the path.

  ‘Where’s your stuff?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Going without it. Just got the popcorn.’

  ‘Still going?’ Laura was shocked. Like she didn’t have a scrap of paper in her pocket that instructed Go in Cordie’s scrawled handwriting. As though Laura hadn’t helped plan the whole thing, hadn’t brought her purse along. The reality of running away was hitting home.

  ‘We’re going all right,’ Cordie said fiercely.

  ‘And Ruth?’

  ‘All of us,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Not you,’ Hannah hissed. ‘It’s not safe for you.’ She said it too loudly then dropped her voice low. ‘Not you, Ruth. You’re not coming.’

  ‘So how —’ Laura started saying.

  But Hannah interrupted. ‘You gonna meet us or what?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Promise?’ Hannah said urgently.

  ‘Promise,’ Laura said but she sounded uncertain. She inclined her head towards Mr and Mrs Van Apfel, who were almost at the amphitheatre steps. ‘But they know you’re going to run . . .’

  ‘They don’t know when,’ Hannah said. She spat the word out. ‘They’ve got no idea it’s tonight. Got our money?’

  Laura patted her pocket to show that she did.

  ‘Give it to them now,’ I said to Laura.

  My sister shook her head pityingly at me. ‘Too risky,’ she whispered because it was clear I didn’t understand. But I wonder, looking back, if she wasn’t deliberately missing her chances. And that by holding on to the money she was trying to keep hold of the girls.

  ‘I’ll still meet you at the clearing during the —’

  Mr Van Apfel looked back at us sharply and Laura stopped mid-sentence. In her panic, she took a step back and Cordie’s note fell from her pocket. It pinwheeled to the ground and landed on the grass, and for one awful instant nobody moved.

  Then Mr Van Apfel motioned to the girls and they shuffled after him, and Laura bent down and cleaned up the note.

  * * *

  Backstage Miss Elith was in a tizz. But because it was an open-air amphitheatre, and because it was in the valley, ‘backstage’ was just the space behind the toilet block that stretched out and across the stumpy grass until it bumped up against the mangroves. Whump.

  Mrs Van Apfel’s curtains were used as blackout sheets that hung at the rear of the stage but they too looked hopelessly amateur. The curtains sagged in the top corner and they were too threadbare to hold back the sunset. You could see Miss Elith easily through the thin threads. Her jerky hands, her slumped shoulders. Her busy, big-curled head.

  I peered past the curtain and saw she was wearing black backstage trousers and a T-shirt to match. Showstopper the shirt was trying to say in flamboyant lettering. But most of the letters were lost down the sides of Miss Elith’s terrifying chest. Ho-top it said in her case.

  There was a handful of chairs backstage, and a table covered in costumes and sheet music. Plus a tape deck, its useless cord snaking through the grass. No power in the pit of the valley. The dancers could only dance for as long as the fat batteries in the back of the tape deck lasted. (Luckily, a generator powered all of the lights.)

  Mrs Walliams and the Senior Girls and Boys Choir were doing vocal warm-ups backstage, windmilling their arms as they sang. I watched as Mitchell Lorimer cracked Mitchell Ivamy across the back of the head with his windmill and then pretended to Mrs Walliams that it was an accident. Everywhere girls in leotards writhed, moving in synch with music that played only in their heads as they exorcised something trapped inside their Lycra. Instruments were tuned. They squeaked and honked. Someone practised the same four-note refrain over and over and still couldn’t get it right.

  But mostly kids played handball or Stuck in the Mud. Jacob Hunter had a Game Boy and there was a queue to watch him play. Jade Heddingly stood in line even though she had her own Game Boy at home.

  I went to look at the audience sitting in the amphitheatre. The mums and dads and nannas and grandpas and neighbours and brothers and sisters. They pooled on the steps like the rainwater used to do, back in the days when it still rained. Some people had brought picnic blankets and some had brought food. They looked like they were settling in for the night. One family had cold sausages wrapped in foil and a whole loaf of bread, and they were taking slices fresh from the bag and passing sausage sandwiches along the line.

  Mum, Dad and Laura were sitting near the back (an easy getaway for Laura later in the evening). The three of them were perched on our tartan picnic blanket, its pattern reassuringly familiar. The Rotary Club was here. So was Reverend Richmond, who insisted on being invited to everything but who always fell asleep long before it finished. I saw the Gonskis, in matching deckchairs strung with sunny yellow material. Pineapples doing the hula. Mrs McCausley sat off to one side, at a safe distance from the whole production, of which no doubt she didn’t approve. In front of her a large family had brought their dog along, a lovely rusty-red one that lay still and satisfied in the last of the sunshine, but which perked up when its owners called: ‘C’mere.’ There were pairs of Year Six girls weaving through the crowd, rattling tin fundraiser cups. Sticking their noses in the air in the way Year Six girls do. Like it was the audience, not the river, causing the stink.

  The fundraiser cups were red with handles and a slit in the top, and the girls stood, hand on hip, until people fed their spare change through the hole. Then they moved along to the next person in the row. I stood and watched the Year Sixes fleece the audience for a while. Until the sinking feeling in my stomach got too much for me and I took myself off to the river. By then the sunset was the same scarlet red as the fundraising cups. That horizon was an unholy red.

  * * *

  Down by the mangroves it was cool and still. I walked in as far as I could without getting my shoes wet, then I took them off and left them on a branch. I walked the rest of the way down to the water barefoot, and tiny bubbles foamed in the footprints I left.

  Back in the amphitheatre someone spoke excitedly into a microphone but reception was bad in the valley. The words came out staccato sharp – some syllables evaporated altogether – as the sound system dropped in and out. After a while applause dribbled in through the trees and I realised they must have been starting. And even though my skit wasn’t on until almost the end o
f the show my stomach started twisting itself into knots. I was on in the second half. After Caitlin Willesee with her ribbon and Jacob Hunter with his trombone. But before the Senior Girls and Boys Choir did their encore. That meant I could stay down in the mangroves a while longer and no one would notice. So I stayed and watched the tide arrive on tremulous waves. Then I went and collected my shoes off the branch where I’d left them and walked slowly back.

  Miss Elith was sitting backstage with her nose practically pressed against the black backdrop curtain. She was rooted to her chair, her feet flat on the ground. Whatever catastrophe Miss Elith was expecting on stage, she was determined that she’d see it first.

  ‘Tikka!’ she said when I got close enough. ‘Where have you been?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she directed me to sit and wait with the rest of the second-half acts. She waved an arm in the direction of the row of chairs behind her without shifting her eyes from the stage.

  ‘Actually, Miss Elith, I’ve got to go and get something for my skit. I left it with my sister in the audience . . .’

  It would be interval soon and I wanted to see Hannah and Cordie before they left. One last time. Just to say goodbye. And to check they had everything they’d need to run away and to ask when they thought they’d be back.

  But Miss Elith said no. And that I’d have to do without it. And that it couldn’t be that important if I forgot it in the first place. Then she watched me until I took my place in the queue, next to the members of the Senior Girls and Boys Choir.