It was almost dark by then and the lights at the oval had been switched on. They sent down eerie green beams. The amphitheatre stage was lit too. Only, from underneath. Like a torch underneath the performers’ chins. The wind had picked up and it rippled across the river and the mudflats, carried mangrove stink across the oval. The smell settled in the dell of the concrete amphitheatre. It hung heavy over the stage.
‘We thought you weren’t coming,’ accused Melanie Firth when I took my seat in the queue with my cast.
‘Director’s stuff,’ I lied. As if Melanie would care.
Next to Melanie, Carly Sawtell was doing her best to look like a dingo in yellow flannelette pyjamas and yellow gardening gloves and a cut-up egg-carton nose. But the PJs were baggy in the seat and they’d started to pill, and the egg-carton pulp was going soft from over-handling. So mostly Carly looked like fuzzy custard instead of a wild dog.
Next to her, Sharrin Helpman and Jodi McNally were interchangeable in their matching blue school-sport tracksuits. Their toy handcuffs were the only sign to the audience that they should be seen as the police. In fact, the only believable part of our play was Melanie Firth as my daughter (she had enough contempt for me in real life that she could carry it off on stage). But for now the four of us sat silently next to the choir and watched the show from behind, through Mrs Van Apfel’s thin blackout curtain.
‘What are you singing?’ I asked a girl from the choir.
‘“I am Australian”,’ she said self-importantly.
They were hardly going to sing anything else.
Then Caitlin Willesee finished her ribbon dance and arrived backstage out of breath, her ribbon wound in a loose turquoise loop running from her thumb up to her elbow. Jacob Hunter and his trombone were up next. Sharp, raspy blasts all the way to Tipperary. But when he got to the end he started back at the beginning and I began to wonder whether the Van Apfel girls would even need my skit. They’d probably made it interstate on Jacob Hunter’s trombone alone (could probably hear it over the border as well).
Then all too fast it was time to line up, side of stage. I felt sick but I couldn’t say with what. Fear? Nerves? With anticipation? (With the knowledge that we’d never had a single successful run-through of my play and that no one, bar me, knew their lines?) Or just plain dread that Hannah and Cordie were going and that they were leaving the rest of us behind?
I shivered and Carly Sawtell saw me do it. ‘Someone’s walking over your grave,’ she informed me.
Mr Avery emerged then, from the dark, from the wings. Waiting to shepherd us onto the stage. It was his job to usher everyone up the concrete steps and make sure that nobody tripped. And when he saw me reach for my prop – my cardboard tree, cut out of Tupperware shipping boxes – he smiled and pointed at its crepe-paper leaves.
‘Ah, Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane,’ he said.
I nodded, even though I had no idea where Duns was or why you would go there again. And behind me Carly whispered: ‘Weirdo. He must have learned that in jail.’
Then somebody started shoving and the line of performers lurched forward. It steadied itself, but only in the instant before we fell. In the audience a dog barked and someone called out: ‘C’mere.’ Then Mr Avery said: ‘Right, Tikka, you’re on.’ The lights dimmed and I stepped onto the stage and took a deep breath.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On stage I swam through the darkness with one hand outstretched until I brushed against the black backdrop sheet. I plonked my prop by its folds in the centre of the stage, but a southerly wind swirled and threatened to fell my tree. I could hear Melanie Firth whispering to Carly Sawtell. Then a new voice snaked under the veil of black cotton that hung at the rear of the stage.
The voice said the Showstopper concert had run over time so we’d have to cut our skit in half.
‘In half?’ I said incredulously. The whole idea was to provide a distraction, not to hurry the show to an end. ‘Anyway, which half am I supposed to choose, Miss Elith? You can’t have the ending without a beginning, and the audience needs an ending, you know.’
But Miss Elith didn’t care. She had chairs to stack and lights to pack away for the hire company to collect. After 10 pm, you paid time and a half.
‘Choose the beginning or the ending and stick to it,’ Miss Elith said. Her voice was steely through the thin sheet. ‘But we’ve only got time for one half, Tikka. I’m timing.’ She disappeared again.
I hurried over to the wings of the stage to ask Mr Avery to turn on the lights. But side-of-stage was empty and Mr Avery was gone and the stage lights sprung on seemingly by themselves.
‘We’re starting in the middle,’ I hissed to my cast as I jogged across the stage and positioned myself at the centre. ‘Act two, page three. I’ve got the first line.’ They’d have to take their cues from me.
I ran a critical eye over them. There was Melanie Firth, hand on hip, mouth in a pout. She was standing by a schoolbag, which was meant to represent a camping backpack but really she looked like she was waiting for the bus.
There were Sharrin Helpman and Jodi McNally, clutching the cuffs proudly between them like they were gripping the arms of a trophy.
Then there was Carly dressed as a dingo, not that anyone could tell. Her yellow flannelette pyjamas sagged gently at the knees. Her gardening gloves must have belonged to her mum because each digit ended long after Carly’s fingers finished, and when she stopped moving the gloves beckoned bashfully.
I was still standing there surveying my cast, when the wind rushed in and shook the blackout curtain by its shoulders. It gusted across the stage and knocked my cardboard tree flat, its crepe-paper leaves lifeless, its Tupperware backside blazing at the night sky.
‘Timber!’ someone in the audience called out, and all around them people began to laugh. I dragged the tree upright. This was hardly the tone I was after. But as soon as I had the tree standing, it blew down again and the audience cheered like it was part of the show. ‘Encore! Encore!’ someone called from the darkness. ‘Give her a go,’ someone else said.
The laughing died down after that, but when it did I missed it. I felt horribly exposed in the silence and the glare. Worse though: Melanie Firth was still standing beside me on stage. To my left, where the light was most flattering.
She was supposed to leave the stage if we were starting halfway through. She shouldn’t be here in this part of the play. ‘Geddoff,’ I urged her. My hand hung grimly by my side and I paddled it, waving her towards the wings.
But Melanie hadn’t done a term of drama class for nothing. ‘You go if there’s not enough time for everyone’s lines,’ she replied. ‘My mum made this costume especially.’
‘I can’t,’ I hissed, ‘that doesn’t make any sense. You’re the one who disappears.’
‘Gonna make me?’ Melanie said softly. ‘Huh? Are you, Tikka? Gunna sic your dog on me?’
Behind us, Carly Sawtell growled and that set off the dog in the audience. It barked excitedly, ready to defend its territory.
‘Fine,’ I muttered. If Melanie Firth wouldn’t leave the stage, we’d just have to do our play around her. The audience was getting restless. I could hear them talking, and was that someone leaving the amphitheatre?
I stepped forward towards the edge of the stage and opened my mouth wide to the night. Elocution is everything, Miss Elith always said. But when my words came out that night they were louder and fiercer than I expected. As if I’d called something up. My own inkan-nation.
‘A dingo’s got my baby!’ I cried dramatically.
The audience gasped. C’mere barked warningly. Then someone who sounded suspiciously like Mrs McCausley complained: ‘Is this what they teach them in schools these days?’
‘My baby!’ I said it again for effect. ‘A dingo’s stolen my baby!’
And even though what I was saying was blatantly untrue – for a start, Melanie was still standing there on stage. Also, she wasn’t a baby – not even faintly my daughter �
� and our dingo looked more like a Muppet. And still it was enough. Just to invoke those five words was enough. The crowd sat in scandalised silence. No one moved until Carly Sawtell stepped forward in her yellow pyjamas and her egg-carton nose and raised her gardening-gloved hands indignantly to the crowd.
‘No, I didn’t! I didn’t steal your baby. I never touched her!’ she protested hotly. ‘You never even gave me the chance!’
* * *
I was standing backstage several minutes later when Mr Avery showed up and began stacking chairs. He wasn’t wearing a Showstopper T-shirt like all the other teachers. Just his normal short-sleeved shirt and his normal brown trousers, which he hitched up at the knees so he could perch awkwardly on a stack of chairs piled beside me.
‘You okay, Tikka?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What was it you were trying to do up there?’ he asked, but he didn’t say it unkindly. Miss Elith had swooped on stage as soon as I had spoken. She’d flown fast and flown low, in her bat-winged Showstopper T-shirt. She was panting, even though the flight of stairs she’d scaled was hardly Kosciusko. Then she’d turned to the audience and she’d cancelled my skit. (‘I’m sorry,’ she explained, ‘but I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. If you’d like to join me in welcoming the Senior Girls and Boys Choir back onto the stage . . .’)
‘It was just a skit,’ I said feebly to Mr Avery.
Because how could I tell him I was only trying to help Hannah and Cordie?
‘Did your parents know what it was about?’
They do now, I thought gravely. I hadn’t seen my parents – they were still in the audience somewhere. And I wasn’t in a hurry to find them.
‘What did Miss Elith say?’ Mr Avery asked.
‘Miss Elith said I let myself down. And my cast. And also the school.’
Near the river a night-bird cried out sharply.
‘And plus, it’s not right to make art out of other people’s tragedy.’
‘It’s not?’
‘Just ask Miss Elith,’ I said soberly.
Mr Avery was being so nice about the whole thing, I almost felt like telling him the truth. About how I knew the Chamberlain case was the wrong thing to choose, but I’d picked it deliberately as a diversion.
Then Jade Heddingly turned up and interrupted. She wanted to know why I hadn’t told her about my skit. And I told Jade that I didn’t really feel like talking about that right now and that I needed to go and find my sister.
But Jade was saying, no. Nobody was going anywhere.
No one was allowed to leave.
Then she said the words I’d been waiting to hear: ‘Don’t you know? The Van Apfel girls are gone.’
* * *
It took seventeen minutes for the first cop car to arrive after Mr and Mrs Van Apfel called the police. We know because Wade Nevrakis timed it on his watch. (Wade’s watch had a sports-grade timer that was backlit pale green and could go underwater to thirty-five metres.) Seventeen minutes, plus almost an hour of deliberation first. Do we call now? How do we know they’re really missing? Add to that the time it took for Mr Van Apfel to drive to Macedon Close and back just to check the girls hadn’t walked home. All in all, it was an hour twenty-seven while we searched and we waited. Shone emergency torches scrounged from people’s car boots along the black river.
An hour twenty-seven to work out what my sister understood in an instant: that something had gone very wrong.
‘You should say,’ I told Lor when the cop car arrived. (One flash of blue lights and I lost my nerve.) ‘Tell them now. Say Hannah and Cordie aren’t missing at all. Tell them they’ve just run away.’
Dad and I had been searching with one group to the east of the oval the whole time, while Mum and Laura’s group scoured the west. Laura and I hadn’t spoken – hadn’t seen each other since I’d come off the stage – and it was suddenly important that my sister knew I’d held out.
‘I haven’t blown their cover,’ I assured her. I could keep a secret as well as she could. I hadn’t breathed a word to anyone the whole time we searched – not to the teachers, not to the parents. Not even to the choir fanning out among the mangroves, blossoming like a rash. They called the girls’ names in two-part harmony: ‘Hannah! Cordelia! Ruth!’
Because that was the other thing: Ruth was gone too. She had disappeared along with her sisters. ‘Did you know about that?’ I asked Laura when I saw her now. ‘Did they say why they also took Ruth?’
But Laura looked stricken.
‘I don’t know where they are,’ she said in a terrible whisper. ‘Any of them. They never showed up at the meeting spot like we’d planned, so I don’t know where they are, or why they took Ruth.’
‘It was because of my skit, wasn’t it? Because it was cut short —’ I started saying.
‘What?’ Laura snapped. ‘They’ve gone, Tikka. They’ve really gone. I don’t understand it.’
‘So they went without you,’ I said simply.
I wanted to point out that it wasn’t nice, was it? When you were the one who was left out? And that maybe she’d think about that in the future, when she and Hannah and Cordie tried to exclude me from things.
‘But they can’t have. Can they?’ Laura said desperately. ‘They can’t have gone without meeting me because they didn’t have any money. Without that they can’t get anywhere. They don’t have anything with them – no food, no money, no nothing.’
‘Maybe they snuck some supplies with them from home?’
‘Did you see them carrying anything like that, when you saw them in the car park earlier?’
And I had to admit that I hadn’t. Just that one bag of popcorn.
Behind us the amphitheatre was roped off with blue and white striped plastic tape. The police had wrapped it around tight, as though those slick stripes might keep anybody out. But Mrs Van Apfel’s cotton curtain still flapped in the breeze, flaunting that police line.
‘We should tell,’ I said to Laura. ‘We should tell the police. Or we should tell Mum and Dad and they can tell the police —’
‘No!’
As Laura spoke a helicopter appeared like an insect on the horizon. It rose above the ridge line and lowered itself gingerly into the gully, the gusts from its rotors forming frothy peaks on the river.
‘We won’t tell,’ she instructed. ‘We can’t.’
‘Why can’t we?’ I asked fearfully.
‘Because,’ my sister snapped, as if she was irritated that it was left to her to tell me, ‘Cordie’s pregnant. That’s why they’re running away.’
‘Pregnant?’
The ground seemed to tilt like a table being upended. I felt dizzy and reached for Laura’s sleeve. Ahead of us, the search helicopter hung motionless in midair while the walls of the valley dipped and shifted all around it.
Cordie couldn’t be pregnant.
‘Who told you?’ I demanded.
‘Hannah said.’
‘How does she know?’
‘Cordie told her.’
‘Is it true, but?’
‘How should I know? I’m not a doctor.’
‘Pregnant.’ It felt weird just to make the word with my mouth. Cordie was pregnant? Was that even possible? She was just a kid. But even in my bewilderment, you had to admit there was a chance. With Cordie, anything was believable.
‘So how will they —’
But Laura didn’t know any of the details. All she knew was that Hannah was terrified their parents would discover. Who knew what they’d do then? And Cordie sure as hell wasn’t hanging around to find out.
‘But if Cordie – but if she really is —’ I couldn’t get the words out. ‘She needs looking after. It’s even more reason to tell!’ I blurted.
‘We can’t,’ Laura said. ‘Imagine bringing her back to Mr and Mrs Van Apfel if she’s pregnant. We can’t tell anyone, Tik. You have to promise. No one, and especially not the police.’
‘Why not the police?’
Laura looked
at me like it was obvious. ‘Cordie’s a minor.’
‘A what?’
‘A minor,’ Laura said sombrely. ‘She’s only thirteen, and if they find out she’s pregnant, she could get arrested.’
So that’s why we kept our friends’ terrible secret. Because my sister said so. Because we didn’t know any better.
And the whole time Laura spoke she clutched her purse under one arm, still full of cash for the girls. We were already implicated, that purse seemed to say, its sequins glinting in the searchlights.
‘Besides,’ Laura said, ‘I reckon you’ve said enough for one night, don’t you, Tik?’
She hitched her purse higher and nodded towards the stage, which was wrapped in plastic police tape.
* * *
It had been during the second half of the show, people said later. On the eastern side of the amphitheatre witnesses saw a large figure in the audience stand and move awkwardly along the row. Past the Gonskis, past the Tooleys, past the Townsends from number nine. Shuffling, smiling. Treading on toes. At the end of the row he stepped heavily off the concrete step, losing his balance momentarily. Then he righted himself and strode out across the grass in the direction of the gravel car park. The figure was tall and bulky. Big hands and wide shoulders. Had the goggle-eyed stare of a child. He paused behind a parked car, and then he opened the boot. Fossicked around, did a stocktake back there. And in the low glow of the interior car light, a person could just about say for certain that the large figure was Mr Van Apfel.
Several moments later a second figure emerged from the gloom at the side of the stage. This figure was almost as tall as the previous one but leaner, slighter in build. No Showstopper T-shirt. Instead he wore a short-sleeved collared shirt that mopped up sweat as it formed at the back of his neck.
Leaving his post at the side of stage, the figure walked in the opposite direction to the car park. He was headed towards the river. He walked slowly, inconspicuously. But as he passed the toilet block to the west of the stage, he stepped inside at the last instant. The toilets were badly lit (though the council was going to fix them just as soon as the funding came through). But in the moonlight and the glare coming off the Showstopper stage that figure looked a lot like Mr Avery. And as the Senior Girls and Boys Choir began to sing their encore (‘I am Australian’), a dog barked abruptly in the amphitheatre and its owner called it: ‘C’mere.’ Then the barking got fainter, and the dog got smaller as he bounded off into the night.
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone Page 18