The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  ‘Got it.’

  Laura pushed the trolley along the shopping strip, being careful not to lean forward and rest on the handle. (‘No one will assume you’re an invalid if you do that,’ I wanted to reassure her.)

  ‘Mrs McCausley!’ I called when we got close enough. ‘It’s me, Tikka! Tikka from down the road.’

  I indicated to Laura who was hanging back, standing a safe distance away, behind our trolley. ‘And you know Laura,’ I said.

  Mrs McCausley raised her grey head and looked at me shrewdly.

  ‘I know who you are, Tikka Malloy,’ she said sharply.

  I laughed.

  ‘Mrs McCausley,’ I said, ‘you haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ she said to me, looking pointedly at my messy ponytail, my shapeless T-shirt. The Swatch Watch I got for my ninth birthday was still strapped to the wrong wrist – the way I wore it when I first received it all those birthdays ago.

  ‘Touché,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Laura,’ she said, acknowledging my sister.

  ‘Hi, Mrs McCausley, nice to see you.’ Laura smiled but stayed where she was. Behind her, through the window of the newsagency, a queue was forming at the Powerball counter.

  ‘Well, Tikka, what are you doing here?’ Mrs McCausley said to me, cutting straight to the chase in her inimitable way. Honestly, it was like winding the clock back twenty years. Only, as she spoke, Mrs McCausley put her arm out and for one confused moment I thought she was offering me a hug. Instead she gripped my left arm while she steadied herself and I realised she was using me for balance.

  ‘Family,’ I said. ‘I came back to see the family.’

  ‘Long way to come for a visit,’ she observed and she released my arm.

  I shifted on the spot and looked sideways at Laura but her face was impassive. She wasn’t going to help me out.

  ‘It is a long way,’ I conceded. ‘But I don’t mind the flight.’

  ‘Travelling alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still living in America?’

  ‘Yes, Baltimore these days.’

  ‘Still working in science? What was it? Germs or something?’ She laughed at herself.

  ‘Basically,’ I said, not bothering to elaborate. Assistant lab technician wasn’t worth going into detail over.

  ‘I bet your parents are pleased to see you back.’

  I told her they were, and that Laura was too, and that I was pleased to see all of them.

  ‘They’d be more pleased if you were staying for good,’ she said slyly. No one left for very long around here, and if they did then they had a good reason.

  ‘And how are you, Mrs McCausley?’ I asked.

  ‘My hip, you mean?’

  I hadn’t meant her hip, but her hip would do. Laura sighed audibly from behind the trolley.

  ‘It’s been such a palaver, Tikka,’ Mrs McCausley said. She sat down on the bus-stop bench as if to settle in for the story, and I was left towering high above her.

  ‘I’ve had the most dreadful time with it,’ she said, and she proceeded to tell me and Laura about how she had waited thirteen months for surgery and then how, when she’d finally had her hip replaced, she dislocated it again only three weeks later (‘Just popped right out of its socket’), and she had to go back into hospital all over again.

  While she was speaking a bus blundered past, coming so close I could have touched it. I bumped down onto the bench next to Mrs McCausley just to feel like I was out of the bus’s path.

  ‘It’s very rare that happens, you know,’ she confided, and for a moment I thought she was talking about the bus. Then I realised she meant her hip palaver. Her rare Hippalaver. (It sounded like something that might bite.)

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about your hip, Mrs McCausley,’ I said. ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘It has been awful,’ she confirmed. ‘Just awful.’

  Not as awful as Hodgkin lymphoma, though I didn’t say that to Mrs McCausley. Instead we sat in silence outside the SupaCentre for a moment while she contemplated her awful hip and I fought off the urge to bend down and pull up her sunken stocking sock. On the far side of our shopping trolley Laura was now leaning heavily on the handle. I caught her eye and nodded. I understood: she was ready to leave.

  ‘We should probably get going, Mrs McCausley,’ I said after what I hoped was appropriate reverence for her hip. ‘It was good to see you.’

  ‘You’ll come and see me before you fly out, won’t you?’ she said to me. ‘Come for afternoon tea.’

  ‘What, at your house?’ I tried to think of the last time I had been at Mrs McCausley’s house up there on the corner. I would have been in high school.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs McCausley,’ I said, ‘but you don’t have to do that.’

  ‘I know I don’t have to,’ she bristled. ‘Come and see me Thursday afternoon, Tikka. But come before four. I give the kookaburras their dinner on the back deck at that time and they don’t like it when I’m late.’

  And I could imagine Mrs McCausley out there on her deck, handfeeding bits of sausage to the birds. Taking beef strips out of Tupperware tubs and laying them out on the railing. Say what you will about Mrs McCausley, her heart was in the right place.

  ‘Okay, Mrs McCausley, I’ll come up and see you on Thursday.’

  ‘Before four.’

  ‘Before four.’

  ‘And Tikka —’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said, and she looked meaningfully at me.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I waited for her to say whatever it was, but she stared at me in silence.

  ‘Oh, you mean on Thursday,’ I realised. ‘You’ve got something to tell me on Thursday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  By the trolley Laura was shifting from one foot to the other just in case I was in any doubt.

  ‘Then I’m looking forward to hearing it on Thursday, Mrs McCausley,’ I said. I stood up from the bus-stop bench and dusted down the back of my jeans.

  ‘I know why you’re back, Tikka,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  She leaned in, and when she started to speak her mouth was at the same height as my knees.

  ‘It’s all right, I know about Jade Heddingly’s wedding,’ she said. She glanced sideways to check who else might be listening and, satisfied that it was safe to speak, she leaned closer and carried on.

  ‘The Heddinglys have asked me to do the catering,’ she revealed.

  ‘They have?’

  I looked to Laura for guidance. Was Mrs McCausley cracking up? She’d seemed so lucid till this point.

  ‘Yes. And Mrs Lantana’s doing the flowers, did you hear?’

  No, I hadn’t heard that. But then I hadn’t really paid attention whenever the wedding had been discussed at home.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come back for Jade’s wedding,’ she went on, ‘the Heddinglys are really touched, you know.’

  And I wanted to say to her then that Jade Heddingly’s wedding was hardly a reason for a person to fly sixteen thousand kilometres across the globe, but then I didn’t like to delude Mrs McCausley. No more than she already was.

  I looked at her there with her tartan shopping trolley, her grey hair set and combed. Those slippery stocking socks that wouldn’t stay where they should. She looked so ancient it was hard to believe that I’d thought she was old back when I was eleven.

  I realised Mrs McCausley was looking at me, waiting for me to comment on Jade Heddingly’s wedding. And in that second all I could think to say to her was: ‘How did he propose again?’

  ‘What? Her fiancé?’ Mrs McCausley said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I suppose he got down on one knee,’ she said. ‘You’d have to ask Jade.’

  ‘Sure,’ I mumbled. I’d arks Jade sometime. I’d arks her how he arksed.

  ‘Bye, Mrs McCausley,’ Laura said, finally asserting her ri
ght as the eldest sister to cut off the conversation.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ I added. And Mrs McCausley nodded, yes, it had been nice for me to see her, and then she got back to the business of stacking and restacking the contents of her shopping cart.

  Laura pushed the trolley and led me expertly past the deluxe car wash and the Handsfree Shopping Experience and straight to where she had parked our car an hour earlier, despite there being more than two dozen or so identical parking rows we could have mistaken for ours.

  ‘I can never find my car in one of these places.’

  ‘It’s alphabetised,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘There’s a system to it.’

  At the car I tried to get Laura to sit in the passenger seat and rest while I packed the groceries into the boot. But she took this as a slight on her strength. Or a sign I was taking over, or I don’t know what, but she didn’t trust me to put the stuff in the boot without her supervision.

  ‘Just let me look after you,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t need looking after,’ she replied flatly.

  So we both stacked the groceries into the car and then she returned the trolley to its bay.

  Driving home, Laura flicked impatiently through radio stations and eventually settled on silence.

  ‘Mrs McCausley isn’t really doing the catering for Jade Heddingly’s wedding, is she?’ I said after a while.

  ‘No, Tikka.’

  ‘Is she, you know —’

  ‘Is she senile?’ Laura supplied the question for me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Looks that way. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken with her long enough to tell. Mum goes up there sometimes and has a chat. Checks she’s okay. I guess she must be well into her eighties by now.’

  That was good, I thought. Someone should go and check on Mrs McCausley.

  Laura didn’t say anything after that, just concentrated on the road. I wondered if she was thinking about Mrs McCausley getting old. And about whether she’d get to see her eighties herself. Getting doddery wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Not when compared to getting cancer at thirty-four.

  But then Laura spoke and broke my train of thought.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Mr Avery couldn’t have arrived at school in the November when Cordie broke her arm.’

  Was she serious? Our argument about Mr Avery and Cordie’s broken arm from earlier wasn’t finished?

  ‘You should have been a lawyer.’

  My sister ignored me.

  ‘Okay, why couldn’t he have arrived at school in November?’ I asked.

  ‘What teacher would start a new school in the middle of a term?’ she replied.

  She had a point. But what about the map and Mrs Harrow’s Reading Corner beanbag? I could have sworn they vanished over a single weekend. I don’t know, maybe she was right. Maybe Mr Avery arrived before Cordie fell out of the peppercorn tree. It hardly mattered now.

  ‘And also,’ Laura said as she negotiated the turn into the drive, ‘another thing —’

  She said it as if she was remembering something we forgot to pick up while we were at the SupaCentre. Soy milk, avocados, oh and this.

  ‘Cordie didn’t fall. She jumped.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  During that heatwave summer of 1992, every TV news bulletin reported the government was doing deals with the devil. Night after night the thing simmered. I watched, fascinated, as the Northern Territory Government paid compensation worth more than a million dollars, plus almost half a million in legal costs and $19,000 for a car that was dismantled for evidence and, along with the lives of all the people in that family, was never put back together.

  The devil, I noted, was a woman with a bob and, more often than not, a strappy sundress.

  ‘What’s she getting money for if she’s guilty, Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s not guilty, Tik. That’s the point,’ he said without turning his face from the screen. ‘Lindy Chamberlain’s not guilty, even though they locked her up. That’s why she’s being compensated now. Not that these grubs want us to think she’s innocent. Disgusting the way they’re carrying on.’

  He sat watching the screen, one ankle resting on the opposing knee, making a triangle where he rested his newspaper. He liked to have the broadsheet open in front of him while he watched the headlines, as if he was playing along at home. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and long-legged shorts. He hadn’t loosened his tie since he’d finished teaching and walked out of his classroom earlier that afternoon. He had taken his shoes and socks off, though, and his legs were white where his long socks had stretched to his knees. He was tanned in a band round the top.

  Mum came in then, carrying two glasses of something with ice that clinked as she walked. She crossed the lounge room, handed one to Dad and held the other against her cheek while she stood, hand on hip, and watched the screen.

  ‘She’s too attractive for them,’ she observed to no one in particular. ‘Too sultry-looking. They can’t handle it.’

  ‘Who, Mum? Lindy Chamberlain?’ I asked. ‘Is that who you mean, Mum?’

  ‘It’s hardly a crime,’ Dad said. ‘Not a hanging offence.’

  ‘Do you mean Lindy Chamberlain, Mum? Her, Mum? Is she the one that’s too attractive?’

  ‘Not a crime,’ Dad repeated.

  ‘Yeah? Well, you tell those blokes,’ Mum said. She gestured towards the TV with her glass and, on the screen, a group of men in brown ties were standing outside a courthouse. ‘They’d still have her locked up if it was their decision.’

  ‘She walks like Cordie,’ Laura commented. My sister lay on the couch in the corner with her legs dangling over the armrest.

  ‘Take your feet off there,’ Mum replied automatically, and I waited for Laura to say that it was her legs, not her feet, and why couldn’t it be a leg rest? If it was good enough for arms, why wasn’t it okay for other limbs?

  But Laura was too busy watching TV. She slid her legs off the couch without shifting her eyes from the screen.

  ‘Hey, Mum, it’s the school Showstopper concert soon,’ I said, remembering, ‘and Miss Elith said I can do a skit. Everyone else will be doing a dance or playing an instrument or stuff like that, but I’m allowed to put on a skit.’

  ‘Big deal.’ Laura said it low enough that only I could hear. ‘The Showstopper happens every year.’

  ‘Yeah, but no one’s ever done a skit before. Miss Elith said. Miss Elith said I was the first person ever to ask.’

  ‘Do you know how to write a skit?’ Laura said dubiously.

  ‘Yes!’ I said.

  Though in truth I had some doubts. (But they were the kind of doubts you kept to yourself, and not the sort you’d admit to your sister.) And anyway, I’d written a play before called ‘The Staff Meeting’, where I copied down everything I eavesdropped from the teachers’ staffroom. ‘The Staff Meeting’ was a comedy. And a good one, too, if it was even half as hilarious as the teachers seemed to find it.

  Plus, I’d written the poem that got me chosen for the nativity play. (Though I couldn’t take the credit for the plot.)

  All in all, I was pretty sure I could write a Showstopper skit. I just had to find something to write about.

  ‘Miss Elith thinks my skit will be very dramatic,’ I said. Actually, I was the one who had promised drama, but Miss Elith had said she didn’t doubt it.

  We did Music and Performing Arts with Miss Elith every Thursday when we had to share one instrument between two. That worked okay if you got the castanets, because castanets come in pre-prepared pairs. But the triangle was only fun if you were the partner who got to use the dinger. Miss Elith had a hard time keeping everyone under control during Music and Performing Arts on Thursdays. ‘Eyes to the left, eyes to the right, eyes to the front and eyes on me,’ she’d say desperately, though that never seemed to make much difference. Because everyone went ahead and put their eyes wherever they felt like, and that mostly didn’t include on Miss Elith.

  ‘I’m go
ing to have costumes for my skit too,’ I said, because the judge on TV had reminded me. The way he walked towards the courthouse with his black robe billowing, a white horsehair wig in his hand.

  ‘And I need two dollars for the bus, Mum. Mum, can I have two dollars? We’re doing a dress rehearsal in the amphitheatre on the morning of the concert.’

  ‘The amphitheatre?’ Mum said.

  ‘Yeah. At Coronation Park. You know, the amphitheatre in the valley?’

  ‘Why are they doing the Showstopper in the amphitheatre this year? It’s usually in the school hall.’

  ‘You can fit more parents in the amphitheatre,’ my sister said cynically. ‘More parents means more money for the school.’

  ‘Oh, is it a fundraiser?’

  ‘Can you lot keep it down?’ Dad said, which was funny, because the only time he ever raised his voice with us was to tell us to keep ours down during the news. He smoothed the pages of the paper in his lap.

  ‘Yeah, Mum, it’s a fundraiser,’ I said. ‘It’s on a Friday night, after work, so you and Dad can come and watch.’

  ‘At the amphitheatre?’

  ‘At the amphitheatre. In the valley.’

  The amphitheatre was the only place you could hold an outdoor concert around here, and even then we hardly ever used it. It had a mottled-concrete stage that stared out into a set of shallow mottled-concrete steps. On one side of the stage were the public toilets, and on the other a gravel car park.

  The real mystery about the amphitheatre was the Gothic archway that stretched over the footpath from the car park and served as a gateway to the stage. The arch was made of concrete and twisted metal that was rusty with age, and no one knew where the arch had come from or how long it had been there. We couldn’t remember a time without it. That arch wasn’t joined to anything, wasn’t part of any wall, it just stood among the grass and the gravel. As if it were a prop from an entirely different play.

  But we left the arch there because, aside from the stage itself, it was the only thing to signify you’d left the car park and were now standing in a place of culture.

  ‘At the Showstopper —’ I started saying.

  ‘Shhh,’ Dad said, and he pointed to the screen where the image of the judge had been replaced by a shot of a baby’s dress. The dress was black cotton, puff-sleeved, dark lace frothing at the neck. Red satin ribbon dribbled the length of the yoke.