Dad wandered in then and wrapped me up in a hug.
‘Good to see you, Tik.’ He ruffled my hair.
The kettle complained on the bench.
‘Flight okay?’ Dad settled himself at the kitchen table, arms crossed, glasses gently cockeyed. ‘I was following it using Flight Tracker.’
Flight Tracker was Dad’s favourite app these days.
‘You took off a bit late,’ he told me, as if I hadn’t been on board, ‘but you made up the time over the Pacific.’
‘That’s when they asked us to lean on the seat in front. To go faster,’ I explained.
‘Cheeky bugger.’
‘It’s a fuel-economy policy.’
‘That why your flight was so cheap?’ he said drolly.
Because it might have been my idea to come home to see Laura, but Mum and Dad had to subsidise my flight.
‘Something like that,’ I said sheepishly.
Mum carried three mugs of tea over to the table and placed them on cork coasters. After they’d retired, Mum and Dad had bought a lightweight caravan, and each coaster on the table had been collected from a different tourist attraction around the state. The Big Banana! The Big Bull! The Big Merino! those coasters shouted.
‘Big tour for a little caravan,’ I noted.
‘Drink that.’ Mum ignored me and nodded towards the hot tea she’d placed in front of me. The mug was heavy and unfashionable. The tea was just how I like it.
‘I’ll make you some toast, Tik,’ she said. ‘You look like you haven’t eaten in months.’
We all stared at my baggy hoodie, my faded black tights, at my feet in mismatched flight socks. I blew steam off the surface of my tea.
‘Where’s Laura?’
‘Asleep,’ Mum said.
‘She gets tired,’ Dad explained.
‘How is she?’ I asked tentatively.
Mum sat down opposite me and drew in a long breath. Dad placed his hand on her knee and then he surprised me by starting to cry.
‘What? Is it worse? It’s worse, isn’t it? Dad? What haven’t you told me?’
‘We’ve told you everything, Tik,’ Mum said. ‘Chemo starts soon and the prognosis is good. Thank God the thing hasn’t spread.’
Dad wiped his eyes with the edge of his hand. Replaced his glasses, lifted his chin from his chest. ‘You expect it at our age,’ he said. ‘You expect your friends to get sick, maybe get crook yourself. But it shouldn’t ever happen to your child —’ He stopped as his voice cracked again.
And Mum swept one arm across the tablecloth, smoothing invisible creases. The back of her hand was marked with age spots.
‘Lovely Laura,’ she sighed.
* * *
Laura had phoned, just over a week ago, to tell me that it was cancer. Nodular sclerosis Hodgkin lymphoma. She’d been clinical, somehow, even when talking about herself, and I’d pictured her wearing her nurse’s scrubs while she spoke to me on the phone.
‘I’m coming home,’ I told her. ‘I’ll book a flight today.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’
‘I’m coming anyway. I want to see you.’
‘I might not look too great,’ she warned.
I was on the train when she phoned. On my way to the lab. Outside the carriage window: red brick buildings as relentless as the rain on the glass. My sister never me phoned at that time of the morning – just past midnight at home – so I knew, even before she spoke, that something was very wrong.
‘My reception might drop out. I’m on the train,’ I explained.
‘My life just dropped out,’ she replied.
* * *
When I saw her for the first time, that night I arrived from the airport, she wandered into the kitchen wearing a tired blue bathrobe and an expression to match. She poked through my bag I’d left lying on the table. ‘Ooh, duty free,’ she said.
I abandoned my tea on the table and threw my arms around her, burying my face in her neck, breathing her in.
‘Oh Lor.’
‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ she said gruffly. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘Yes I did,’ I said, and I smoothed down the part in her hair where it was mussed up from her sleep. In response, she leaned over and tucked in the tag that was poking out from the back of my hoodie.
‘We’re like chimpanzees,’ I said, ‘grooming one another.’
‘You might be,’ she said archly. ‘You’ve got the face for it.’
‘Ape-breath.’
‘Face-ache.’
I grinned and pressed my cheek against hers.
* * *
It would be another week before either of us mentioned the disappearance of the Van Apfel girls, and even then we’d both be cagey.
‘Have you told anyone?’ My sister would say it casually, like she didn’t care about my answer. Like I couldn’t see her holding her breath.
‘Have you?’
‘I asked first,’ she’d insist, becoming fourteen years old again.
Making me forever eleven.
CHAPTER THREE
We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song, and when one came back, she wasn’t the one we were trying to recall to begin with.
Spring slunk off too. Skulked away into the scrub and there, standing in its place, was a summer that scorched the air and burned our nostrils and sealed in the stink. Like the lids on our Tupperware lunchboxes.
‘Jade Heddingly says if it gets hot enough your shadow will spontaneously rust,’ I reported.
‘It’s spontaneously combust!’ my sister crowed. ‘Jade Heddingly is an idiot and so are you, and anyway your shadow can’t combust or rust or nothing. Your shadow is always there, dummy.’
‘Not in the dark.’
Mum was right: you can’t see your shadow in the dark. She stood at the kitchen sink ripping the heads off bottlebrush stems. Flitch, flitch, flitch. She snapped the dead blooms off at the neck and dropped them into the sink, where their fine spiky hairs were the same ferrous red as the scabs we picked off our knees. It was the year the Cold War ended. The year they stopped making Atari 2600s forever. I was eleven and one-sixth, but it wasn’t enough. By then we’d learned shadows vanished in the dark.
‘What else did Jade tell you?’ Laura said.
She waited until Mum went into the laundry before she asked the question, so that the two of us were left alone at the kitchen table where we were pretending to do our homework.
‘About shadows?’
‘About anything. Go on, what else did Jade say?’
Jade Heddingly was fourteen, which meant she was old enough to wear braces on her teeth but not so old that she used those teeth and her tongue and the rest of her mean mouth to stop saying ‘arks’ instead of ‘ask’. Jade kept saying it wrong long after the rest of us had left behind ‘hostibul’ and ‘lellow’ and all those other word jumbles we said when we were little kids. ‘Why didn’t you arks my opinion?’ she would whine. As if that would ever make you change your mind.
‘What else did Jade say?’ I echoed.
‘Yeah.’
I leaned in before answering: ‘She told me that to hide a dead body you bury it six feet underground and then bury a dog three feet above that.’
‘Why?’
‘So that the police sniffer dogs will only dig as far as the dead dog, and they won’t find the body below.’
‘That’s gross!’ my sister squealed.
‘Well, you arksed.’
‘Is it true?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.
‘Did she say anything else? You know, anything about – you know.’
‘Nothing.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ I said defensively.
‘Jade doesn’t know anything about it,’ I added.
She didn’t know nothing about nothing.
What we all knew – even as fa
r back as that – was that the valley stank. Jeez, it reeked. It smelled like a sore. Like something bad had been dug out before the sky was stitched back over, low-slung and bruised and suffocating.
They never did work out why.
It wasn’t Ruth’s fault, but. That valley had smelled bad long before any of the Van Apfel girls ever went missing there. Even from our house high on the western rim, the stench would waft up the gully and smack us in the face on a hot dry day, and they were all hot dry days once the Cold War had ended.
That summer was the hottest on record.
Back in those days the valley had only been developed in pockets. It was dissected by a cutting where a skinny, two-lane road wound down and around and across the river and then slithered up and out again, but the real excavation work had been done long ago by something much more primitive than us. The valley was deep and wide. Trees covered both walls. Spindly, stunted she-oaks spewed from the basin, swallowing the sunlight and smothering the tide with their needles. Higher up there were paperbarks, and tea-trees with their camphorous lemon smell. Then hairpin banksias, river dogroses and gums of every kind – woollybutts, blackbutts, bloodwoods and Craven grey boxes, right up to the anaemic angophoras that stood twisted and mangled all along the ridge line.
At school we called the valley the ‘bum crack’.
We steered clear of the Pryders and the Callum boys and the rest of that handful of kids who lived in the shanty-style shacks in clumps along the valley. But the strangest thing about the place wasn’t the kids who lived there. It wasn’t the silence, or the way the sunlight sloped in late in the morning and slid out again as soon as it could in the afternoon. No, the awful part was the shape of the thing. Those terrible, fall-able cliffs. The valley wasn’t V-shaped like normal river valleys; instead the whole canyon was a hollowed-out ‘U’. It was almost as wide at the bottom as it was at the top, as if an enormous rock had been chiselled out but somehow we’d gone and lost that too. It was a fat gap. A void.
Even now its geography is only worth mentioning because of what’s not there.
I used to spend hours down there on my own. I’d go when I was bored – when my sister was at Hannah’s – and when the wind was blowing the right way for a change and the stink wasn’t so awful. I’d pick fuchsia heath flowers and suck the nectar out of their tiny pink throats and then I’d pretend they were poisonous and that I was going to die. Back then dying was nothing to be afraid of. At least, that’s what Hannah once said her dad said, and her dad was told it by God. But then Hannah’s dad had never actually died and so I said: ‘What would your dad know?’
What none of us knew – what we’ll never know – is what happened to Hannah and Cordie that December.
We knew about Ruth because she came back, her lip curled in a whine like she’d lost her lunch money, not got lost in the bush all alone. (Or worse: not alone. What if she wasn’t alone?)
When they found her she was poking out of a deep crack in one of the boulders by the river. She was stuffed right down, shoved into the fissure as if she’d been trying to jump in feet first but the gorge had choked on her at the last minute. Had tried to spit her back out.
Wade Nevrakis told us that when the police found her there were so many flies crawling over the surface of Ruth’s rock that it looked like it was spinning. But Wade Nevrakis’s parents ran the deli near our school so I don’t know why Wade thought we’d believe his parents were anywhere near it. (But when Kelly Ashwood spread it that Ruth was alive enough to say: ‘C’niva Rainbow Paddle Pop if I say my throat hurts?’ well then, you could almost believe it because everyone knew Kelly Ashwood was a dobber, and also that Ruth was a pig.)
It took thirteen detectives, two special analysts from the city, forensics, plus all the local area command and the SES – State Emergency Service – volunteers to find Ruth in the rock that day. Them and the black cockatoos that circled in the sky above. They shouldn’t have been there, those cockatoos. Not in numbers like that and not during breeding time, and yet there they were, going around and around, over and over, like a record getting stuck on a scratch.
When they discovered Ruth her eyes were squeezed shut as if she’d seen enough. Like she couldn’t bear to look. And except for a smear of dirt running the length of her left cheek and a few dead pine needles sticking out of her plait, she appeared untouched, and as though she was praying.
Her parents would’ve liked that.
We all heard the wail of the siren that day as it wound jerkily up the bends and out of the valley, which by that stage of the early afternoon was already creeping with shadows. The noise of the siren rose and fell with each turn. Louder then fainter as the drivers negotiated each bend. Mrs Van Apfel was at the police command post at the time, waiting for Detective Senior Constable Mundy, and they say she froze when she heard the siren because the news about Ruth hadn’t reached them yet. Mrs McCausley, who lived on the corner of our cul-de-sac, was at the command post making tea for the searchers. She said Mrs Van Apfel swung her head towards the sound, like a dog that heard its owner’s whistle.
Each rise and fall of that siren’s song, Mrs McCausley told us, ‘was as if God himself was opening and closing the door on that poor woman’s pain’.
Mrs McCausley had been ‘Tuppered’. Least, that’s what she told me.
‘She’s been what?’ Mum said when I reported it back to her. ‘There’s no such word.’ Mum was a librarian so she knew all about words. Words and overdue notices.
‘Is,’ I insisted. ‘Mrs McCausley told it to me.’
But it took several back-and-forths to work out what she’d meant, and it wasn’t until I explained how Mrs McCausley’s life had changed for the better when she’d learned Tupperware products were guaranteed against chipping, cracking, breaking or peeling for the whole lifetime of the product, that Mum really understood where she was coming from.
‘Bloody Tuppered,’ I heard her say to Dad that night as I hung over the bannister eavesdropping on their conversation. ‘Selling Tupperware to our kids now.’
And she sounded cranky, and so did Dad, even though I hadn’t bought anything.
Mrs McCausley sold Tupperware, though it was more a hobby than a job.
‘Just enough to keep me out of trouble,’ she said.
Though anyone could see Mrs McCausley’s door-to-door Tupperware visits were more about unearthing strife than trying to stay out of its way.
* * *
The Van Apfels didn’t sell Tupperware – they didn’t sell anything as far as we could tell – but they bought right into Jesus Christ. Yeah, Jesus was their rock. (And round here, didn’t that make your family an island.)
Mr Van Apfel was a big man with big hands. Thick shoulders and neck. He had the goggle-eyed stare of a child. And when he painted the drainpipes or pressure-hosed the drive he wore thick plastic safety glasses, which made the whole effect worse.
Mr Van Apfel cared about that house with the same kind of devotion he showed his relationship with the Lord.
‘That right?’ I said when he told me that once. It was a Saturday morning and I sat melting over the handlebars of my bike, watching as Mr Van Apfel stooped down and shook pellets the size of rabbit poo in lines across the grass. Shoosh-shooosh-shoosh. They fell from the box in lovely neat rows.
‘Is that for the birds?’ I asked him.
There were kookaburras in the tree above and the three of us – the two kookas and I – watched him work.
‘Because the kookas eat meat,’ I added helpfully. Eat meat. Eeet meet. Shoosh-shooosh-shoosh. The sounds soft-shoe-shuffled in my head.
But Mr Van Apfel said, ‘No. It’s good for the grass.’
That’s when he told me the bit about God.
And I was impressed that he could grow grass at the same time he grew his relationship with the Lord. And that the rabbit poo worked for both.
‘Almost empty,’ he said, standing up straight so that his wide shoulders, his thick neck filled my
view. He shook the box for my benefit and a couple of loose pellets rattled around.
‘Mrs Van Apfel will have more,’ he assured me, even though I hadn’t been worried.
It was true Mrs Van Apfel was organised like that. I’d seen for myself her kitchen calendar full of violent warnings. Each item on the calendar was written in red capitals so it was clear what she should steel herself for next. That’s the sort of person Mrs Van Apfel was: she treated social engagements as emergencies. She read book dedications looking for evidence.
Most of all, though, Mrs Van Apfel was the sort of person who lived in dread of the dangers that surged through her daughters’ days just as sure as that stinking river surged below.
I guess now she could say: ‘I told you so.’ That must have brought her some solace.
CHAPTER FOUR
On the Saturday night after the Van Apfels vanished we held a vigil in Coronation Park. It had been eight days by then since they first disappeared (but still twenty-four hours before Ruth would come back).
‘Insanity,’ sniffed Mrs McCausley. ‘What would make anyone visit the scene of the crime while some maniac is still on the loose?’
But Mrs McCausley never missed a chance to stare down her nose at the rest of us, the way her house stared down from the rise of the nearest crossroad, and so she was there on Saturday night just like everyone else.
The whole suburb showed up in support. Just like they’d been showing up all week to volunteer in the search and had been cooking meals Mr and Mrs Van Apfel couldn’t stomach. For a whole week I’d watched our neighbours deliver casseroles and pasta bakes to the Van Apfel front doorstep, laying their colour-coordinated Tupperware on the doormat. Mrs McCausley would have approved of all that Tupperware – she’d sold almost all of it to us.
The vigil was run by Mrs Lantana, who was secretary of the school council. As well as the council, Mrs Lantana was in charge of the canteen roster and the annual spring fair and the uniform shop (open the third Friday of the month). Mrs Lantana liked attention to detail so the vigil was right up her street. And so, in those long, dreadful days while the rest of us were out searching for Hannah and Cordie and Ruth, or waiting for our parents who were out searching for Hannah and Cordie and Ruth, it was Mrs Lantana who stockpiled five thousand virgin white candles for us to cling to at the vigil.
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone Page 2