‘So try a monologue.’
‘A mono-what?’
‘A monologue. It’s where you get to speak all of the lines yourself. Tell the story from your point of view.’
And I had to admit the idea was tempting. There’d be fewer arguments that way.
‘No, you should do it in a group,’ my sister decreed, and she turned back to her algebra.
Living with Laura was a monologue, all right. There was no room for anyone else’s point of view.
Mum came bustling into the kitchen after that, in a cloud of white plastic shopping bags.
‘Give us a hand, Tik?’ she said as she dumped the bags on the bench. She went back to the car to unload more and for a moment I sat and looked longingly at my lovely workbook. Then I got up and went over to the bench and began to unpack grocery bags, heaving out sugar and instant coffee and tins of Golden Circle canned pineapple chunks. Lining them up in order.
‘Give us a hand, Lor,’ I said, mimicking Mum, but Laura shook her head and stared down at her doodles.
‘Can’t,’ she said, ‘this is really hard, Tik.’
I wished I was fourteen like her.
When Mum came back in ferrying more bags, the strap of her singlet had slipped off one shoulder.
‘Ugh, this heat,’ she said. ‘Makes you crazy, waiting for the rain.’
She kicked off her shoes and left them lying on the tiles, then moved around the kitchen quickly and easily, and it felt good to watch her there. I leaned against the bench and began working on opening a packet of biscuits where they lay, hidden inside a shopping bag, so that Mum couldn’t see what I was doing. Mum pulled out a packet of Weet-Bix and held it up.
‘Remember what you used to call this when you were little, Tik?’
I’d heard this a hundred times but I played along anyway.
‘Eat-Bricks.’
Mum smiled.
‘Better name for it anyway,’ I said. ‘Tastes like eating bricks.’
She slid the box into the cupboard and carried on unpacking the rest of the shopping.
‘I’ve been working on my skit for the Showstopper,’ I told her.
‘I can’t wait to see it,’ she said, opening cupboards and sliding things in. Rattling Tupperware like empty shells. ‘What’s it about again?’
‘It’s a mystery,’ I said. Because right then it was. A mystery how I would finish it. ‘A mysterious tragedy.’
‘Righto,’ Mum said as if that settled it. ‘Well, your dad and I will be there.’
She pulled out a chopping board and began slicing up pumpkin with a knife that had a blade wider than my wrist.
‘I saw Carol Van Apfel and Cordie at the shops,’ Mum said. ‘Cordie wasn’t at school today.’
‘Nup.’ The biscuit wrapper crinkled suspiciously.
‘Carol said she was sick, but Cordie looked okay when I saw her. I suppose it was her arm that was bothering her.’ Mum would send Lor and me to school if we were missing a limb. No wonder she was puzzled.
‘That’s what Ruth reckoned too,’ I reported to Mum. ‘She said “pig’s bum” when I asked her if Cordie was sick.’
‘Anyway,’ Mum said, as she flung open the fridge and began rummaging around the crisper drawer, ‘I said we’d pick the girls up from Hayley’s sleepover this weekend at the same time we pick up you and Lor. You know, in the evening before the sleepover part.’
‘What? The Van Apfel girls?’ I stopped what I was doing with the biscuits. ‘But they’re not going to Hayley’s.’
‘Mmm, that’s what Carol told me. She said they had church the next morning but I told her we could pick the girls up when we go and get you and Laura. It’s no trouble. It’s not like we’d have to drive out of our way.
‘So that’s what we’re going to do. Pick you all up together. I told Carol we’d have the girls home by ten o’clock, so you and Laura had better be ready to go at that time.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed. But how had Mum talked Mrs Van Apfel around? What about church? What about Mr Van Apfel? I wished I’d been there to see Cordie’s face.
‘Laura? Did you hear what I said?’ Mum said. ‘Ready to go by ten on the dot.’
Laura nodded without looking up from her doodles. ‘Yeah.’
‘And Tikka,’ Mum said, nudging me with her bum to shoo me out of her way, ‘stop ferreting around in those biscuits, I can see what you’re doing. Leave them alone or you won’t eat your tea.’
I left the biscuits and returned to the table. Got back to the business of my skit. I was still sitting there, moments later, when the Van Apfel girls appeared at the kitchen window. They were red-faced and out of breath.
‘We’ve run —’
‘All the way over —’
‘There’s a man —’
‘A man!’ Ruth confirmed hysterically.
Mum froze where she stood shaping rissoles at the kitchen bench, little worms of minced meat leaking through her fingers.
‘What? What man?’ she said urgently. ‘You’d better come inside, girls.’
The three of them ran down the side of the house and then reappeared at the flyscreen door.
‘Inside!’ Mum said, and she threw the back door open, holding it ajar with her hip while she stood wiping minced meat from her fingers. She twisted the tea towel dexterously around each knuckle.
‘Thanks-Mrs-Malloy-Thanks-Mrs-Malloy-Thanks-Mrs-Malloy.’
The door complained three times before Mum let it go. It creaked and banged to a stop.
‘Here, sit down.’ Mum motioned to the table where Laura and I were working. ‘What’s happened? Are you girls all right?’
‘Yes.’ Hannah spoke for all of them without checking.
Mum raised an eyebrow at Cordie and Ruth and they nodded. Yes, they were all right too. Hannah laid a hand protectively on Cordie’s arm. Ruth sucked the tips of her hair.
‘Where are your parents? Are they at home?’
‘Mrs and Mrs Van Apfel aren’t there on a Wednesday afternoo—’ I started to say, but Mum held up her hand to silence me. She kept her eyes fixed on Hannah.
‘They’re not home,’ Hannah said. ‘Dad’s at work and Mum’s at Praise and Worship, so I’m in charge of the others.’ She inclined her head towards Ruth and Cordie, who were now settled next to her at the table.
Ruth look stricken, her face was mottled with the effort of trying to run as fast as her older sisters. Cordie, on the other hand, looked faintly amused. As if she knew the end of the joke.
‘All right,’ Mum said. ‘Now tell me what’s happened? Who was this man?’
‘We don’t know —’ Hannah began.
‘Yes we do! He was coming to kill us!’ Ruth interrupted.
‘Actually, we don’t know that for sure —’
Hannah looked slightly sheepish now she was in the safety of our kitchen. Outside the window a butcherbird perched lightly on a branch, its head cocked to one side as if it was sizing us up.
‘We just thought, you know . . .’ Hannah let her voice trail off.
‘We do know,’ Ruth corrected and then she started to recite. ‘1 John 5:19: For we know that we are children of God, and the world is under the control of the evil one —’
‘I never said that!’ Hannah snapped.
‘Yes, you did!’
‘Well, you weren’t the one who answered the phone.’
Hannah was embarrassed and she studied the tablecloth now. Picked at embroidered yellow daisies with her finger. Then Cordie reached out and stopped Hannah’s fidgeting.
‘He could’ve been a murderer,’ Cordie conceded.
‘A murderer!’ I shivered. Maybe I’d need Jai Fordham after all. This could be good for my skit.
On the stovetop something plopped in its pot and Mum glanced over at it. Then she turned back to Hannah and frowned.
‘On the phone, you say?’
Hannah nodded. ‘He rang us just then. When we were home on our own. I didn’t recognise the voice when I picke
d up the phone. He sounded kinda weird. And he didn’t tell me who he was.’
‘What did he say?’ Mum asked.
‘Uh,’ Hannah hesitated. ‘He wanted to know what radio station we listen to.’
‘Creepy,’ Laura confirmed.
‘2GB,’ Mum replied. She said it without hesitation.
The thing on the stovetop plopped again impatiently.
‘What?’ Hannah was confused.
‘The answer’s 2GB,’ Mum explained. ‘It’s a competition. Oh, girls,’ she groaned. ‘Nobody was coming to get you – the man on the phone was trying to give you a prize! You say that you listen to their radio station and then they send you a prize. What made you think it was a murderer?’
Outside, the butcherbird was still on its branch. It opened and closed its hooked beak rhythmically, moving it in time with the beat of the sun.
‘We just thought, because you know —’ Hannah petered out.
‘We’d been watching scary movies,’ she confessed.
‘Not me!’ Ruth protested.
‘No, just Cordie and me,’ Hannah said. ‘We were watching M-rated stuff when we’re not supposed to.’
‘Even so —’ Mum started saying, then she thought better of it.
‘Scary movies can be quite convincing,’ she agreed. She walked over to the stovetop and turned down the dial, then went back to her minced meat on the bench.
‘They give you money, or sometimes a holiday or a car,’ she explained. ‘Did you tell him that your mum was busy? Did you ask him to ring back at another time?’
Hannah shook her head apologetically.
‘I’ve been waiting years for them to call me!’ Mum joked to Hannah, but Hannah didn’t seem to find it funny. A prize? From a prank phone call? How was she supposed to know that? Hannah didn’t know such things even existed. She thought she’d done the right thing bringing her sisters safely here. (She’d thought they were going to die.) No one told her that they could win a prize. Her parents didn’t listen to commercial radio at home.
‘You know, I thought it was probably something like that,’ Cordie said lightly.
‘No, you didn’t!’ Hannah said indignantly. Her face was flushed and she kicked at Cordie under the table. ‘You thought it was a murderer too.’
‘At least you’re safe,’ Mum said soothingly. ‘Now, do you girls want to stay for dinner? There are plenty of rissoles. Why don’t you wait here until your parents get home?’
‘Yuck, rissoles,’ Laura muttered. ‘Stay and then you can eat mine.’
But Hannah said that they’d better go, that they had to be home by the time both their parents got back.
That night I crept out of bed and went to the kitchen for some water. While I was there I figured I might as well stay and listen to Mum and Dad for a bit. I liked hearing their voices drift up the stairwell, shot through with the sound of the TV. Liked hearing what they said when they thought we were in bed.
‘Those girls were so upset today, Graham,’ Mum was saying. ‘You should have seen them. God knows what they’re filling their heads with.’
‘God,’ Dad replied. ‘That’s what they’re filling their heads with.’
‘The court warns it’s a dangerous mix . . .’ agreed the voiceover on TV.
‘I don’t know what the parents are telling them but those girls shouldn’t be afraid like that,’ Mum said. ‘They’re kids, for heaven’s sake. What have they got to be fearful of? Movies wouldn’t scare them that much.
‘And Cordie didn’t look very sick to me,’ Mum said, remembering.
‘Should she?’
‘She wasn’t at school today. Carol told me she was sick.’
‘Maybe that arm of hers was giving her grief.’
‘Maybe,’ Mum said thoughtfully.
‘Been sleepwalking again, you reckon?’ Dad suggested.
‘Who knows?’ Mum said. ‘In that house, who could say?’
CHAPTER TEN
Once the search was called off, my fire dreams began. Gusting through the flyscreen on the gritty wind. They tangled my shortie pyjamas and knotted the vines of my hair. Danced flame-licking into my sleep.
Fire dreams.
As if we might smoke those girls out.
When I had the dream as a kid I’d wake – mid-blaze – to find Mum or Dad, or sometimes Lor squatting there next to my bed. They’d be gripping my arm, saying my name. Pushing my hair off my face. ‘Just a dream,’ they’d murmur. ‘Go back to sleep, Tik. Just a dream. It can’t hurt you now.’ Then they’d unclench the fingers on my right hand – my thumb, my pointer, my middle finger, all pinched together – gripping some invisible pen. And if it was Mum or Dad who’d come into my room to see me, they’d smooth the damp sheets and sit with me and stroke my hair. Talk me back off to thick sleep. (If it was Laura, she’d wait long enough to check I’d woken right up, but not so long I went back to sleep.)
For twenty years I’d been having that same dream. I saw eyeholes and claw marks. I walked across scorched earth that was raw as a skinned animal, and the world would smell of burning. Sometimes the river flowed through my dream, its spume pink and frothy like creaming soda, the water a dark cherry red. But it wasn’t until I lived alone – not until Baltimore where there was no Mum or Dad or Laura or anyone else to wake me up when I thrashed in my sheets – it wasn’t until then that I saw the dream end. Then I found I was holding the match.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Ruth first tried to tell me about her sisters’ plan, I didn’t want to hear about it. Neither did the bird-of-paradise flowers in the garden bed behind us. They stood in a row, their bright heads turned to look the other way. A disapproving corps de ballet.
‘Tell me after,’ I hissed.
‘After first half?’ Our school split lunchtimes into first and second halves – one for eating, one not. Like separating the white from the yolk.
‘No, after school! Tell me on the way home.’
Ruth should have known better than to try to talk to me in the playground. She was only in Year Two, after all.
‘But it’s important,’ she whined.
‘So tell me after school.’
‘Hannah and Cordie are running away and Laura is helping them go.’ The words came out in a terrible rush like a spilt drink in the sun.
* * *
I have a photo of us that was taken around about that time. These days it’s got watery-brown splotches on parts of it, as if something’s seeped through from the other side. In the photo Hannah and Cordie are wearing matching dresses in different colours, which makes me think the dresses must have been on sale. Hannah’s in hot pink, Cordie in fluorescent orange. Laura is wedged in between them, one arm slung across each of their shoulders. (Though she’s lopsided where Cordie is shorter.)
Ruth is in the photo too, kneeling down, making her own front row. She has one hand resting on the grass for balance, while her other hand is raised, shielding her eyes from the sun, but whoever took the photo is casting a long shadow across her that wipes out most of her face.
Behind Ruth, to the left as you look at the picture, I’m standing and squinting into the sun. I look prettier (but sadder) than I am in my memory. When you look at the photo there’s a gap between the three older girls and me that’s big enough to fit another version of myself, and I’m leaning towards them, trying to be that person. But there’s a valley of blue sky in between.
* * *
In the playground that day when Ruth told me about the plan, I dragged her off to the cleaner’s store cupboard so she could tell me everything she knew. The store cupboard was barely a cubicle, full of Dettol and dustpans. No one ever went near the cleaner’s store cupboard.
I pulled Ruth inside and rested up against the door, and then I made her repeat everything she’d overheard her sisters saying. Whose idea was it? When were they planning to go? Where would they run to? How long would they stay away?
The ceiling inside the cleaner’s cubicle, like th
e rest of the toilet block, was spattered with welts of paper towel that had been wadded up, wetted and flung up there to stick. It had dried and turned to lumpy grey plaster. It must have been torture for the cleaner to have such a filthy store cupboard, or maybe the cleaner didn’t care.
I stared at those welts while I listened to Ruth, while I pumped her for the details of their plan. I listened carefully but couldn’t bring myself to ask the only thing I really wanted to know: why hadn’t they included me?
Ruth explained that the idea was to do it on the night of the Showstopper when everyone was watching the show. It would be easy to disappear from down in the valley. Especially in summer. Especially at dusk. And especially when everyone they knew, including Mrs McCausley, who could spot you and report you back to your parents before you’d even made it to the top of the street, would be sitting in the one spot, facing the one direction. Eyes fixed on the amphitheatre stage.
It wasn’t hard for a person to walk out of the valley. Not if they stuck to the road. There was plenty of scrub along both sides for cover. And once they were on the far side they could hitchhike easily. Or they could jump on a bus. Or it wasn’t far to the train station. From there they could go anywhere. They could disappear south. Head down the coast. Interstate. Or go north and get lost in the city.
It was a good plan, I had to admit it. I couldn’t have come up with better. And that stuck in my guts like wadded-up paper towel.
‘Laura’s giving them the cash.’
‘What cash?’
Ruth shrugged. ‘They’ll need cash to go.’
From her job on the supermarket checkout on Saturday afternoons, I thought bitterly. No wonder she had no money for ice creams.
‘You can’t say anything but,’ Ruth said, sounding panicky. She’d remembered she wasn’t supposed to know. ‘Don’t say that I told you. Promise? You promise? Hannah and Cordie don’t know I heard; they thought I was asleep.’
‘But how can I help with the plan if I’m not supposed to know?’
Ruth looked at me. She was baffled.
‘How could you help Hannah and Cordie? They’re older than us, remember?’
‘I could help,’ I said sniffily.
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone Page 11