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 Senior Girls and Boys Choir sang ‘I am Australian’ as they’d done the week before at the Showstopper concert. They’d been rehearsing it for seven months without a single excuse to sing it and now they’d performed it twice in eight days. When they stood up to sing it, Mrs Walliams, the choir teacher, assured us they chose it especially for the vigil. But that was a lie because everyone knew the only other song the choir knew was ‘Bound for Botany Bay’. And ‘Bound for Botany Bay’ was not right for the night. Not with everyone so dreadfully distraught. Not with all those toorali-oorali-additys in the chorus.
But in the end it didn’t matter what song the choir sang because the search helicopter had returned by that stage due to the fading light. It chkkt-chkkted overhead the whole time they sang and the clipped rhythm of its rotors showed up the choir as being out of time. They finished the last verse half a beat too soon.
Mr Davidson from the Rotary Club spoke, and when he was finished we raised our candles in the air and chanted: ‘Bring our girls home.’ We were strong during a crisis, that’s what Mr Davidson said. Strong when it counted the most.
‘How are you holding up, Tikka?’ Mum asked when Mr Davidson had finished speaking.
‘Strong,’ I replied, even though, honestly, my arm was getting tired from holding my candle all that time. Mr Davidson spoke for ages and my candle was drippy. It was hard not to spill wax on the picnic blanket.
Later, when my candle was just a stub and all that was left of the vigil was the scent of burned matches and singed hair, I asked Dad if the police had dusted for prints like I’d seen them do on TV.
‘What? Dust the whole valley? Every single tree?’ Laura said. And for the first time in more than a week my sister found a hole in her grief that was large enough for her to poke a snigger through.
Dad told her to bugger off.
‘They’re doing everything they can,’ he assured me. ‘The police, the searchers, they’re all doing their best.’
And I guessed they were, whatever that meant. But on the day they disappeared Hannah, Cordelia and Ruth had been wearing twenty-one items of clothing between them. Two pairs of Converse sneakers (with socks); one pair of pink jelly shoes; three pairs of knickers; two bralettes (Ruth didn’t wear one yet, though she probably needed to more than her sisters did); two T-shirts; one skirt (and belt); one dress; and one pair of Daisy Dukes (Cordie’s). They wore three signet rings; five bangles; one friendship band (Hannah’s, which she’d exchanged with my sister); two hair elastics; plus Cordelia was wearing an oval locket around her neck that Sara Addison swore contained a lock of Troy Murphy’s hair (though I think it was probably Madonna the cat’s). They had six femurs, ninety-nine vertebrae, three skulls and thirty fingernails. Six kneecaps, forty-eight carpal bones, and more than three million strands of blonde hair, all tinged alien-green by the chlorine in their pool, which, up until the day they went missing, we’d swum in almost every single day that summer.
And yet all these things vanished – just evaporated in the heat. Not a single sign was left for us.
No sign, that is, until the day one pair of pink jellies and one dress and one pair of knickers and one signet ring and one hair elastic and two curved cheeks (one dirt-smeared, one not) and two fat knees (one grazed and one not) and one harelip were spat back out of that stinking valley and into the burning air.
* * *
The Van Apfels had lived in our neighbourhood since a time when blocks of bushland could be bought for $13,000 and an hour spent in the company of a chain-smoking real estate agent. And starting with Mrs McCausley’s at number one, up there on the corner, our cul-de-sac sloped stubbornly downwards in the direction of the valley like a spoon tipping towards a gullet.
It was a ganglion, Macedon Close. A ganglion. (I got ‘ganglion’ from our extension spelling list in week five of term two, back when we did ‘The Human Body’.) That’s what our cul-de-sac was: a lump that grows in some place it shouldn’t and nobody’s really sure why.
Our lump was swollen with quarter-acre blocks and backyards and carports and decks and pergolas and fishponds. No fences, though. No one around here built fences. At least, not front ones, and not back ones either. Just the thin kind that ran down the sides of our houses, made from chicken wire or brushwood or timber with missing slats. Leaky dividers. So that everything flowed easily from one house to the next. So that nothing could ever be contained.
Some of the families in our street had been there for more than a generation, and the Van Apfel family was one of them. It was Mr Van Apfel’s father who had built the house on the corner opposite Mrs McCausley. Strictly speaking, the Van Apfel house was on the adjoining street, facing outwards to the rest of the suburb, giving Macedon Close the cold shoulder. But we didn’t mind; we still included the Van Apfels in everything we did. Still invited them to our street barbecue each Christmas.
‘A mole on the neighbourhood’s blonde-brick skin’ was what Mrs McCausley called the Van Apfel house, referring to its dark-coloured bricks and dark crosshatched windows. The pristine black tiles on its roof. That house was kept in immaculate condition but even that didn’t mollify Mrs McCausley. ‘Exhibitionist’ was the word she’d used.
Then inside, that gloomy spiral staircase winding all the way to the top. Its steel centre pole like a stake trying to pin the house to the earth. As if it might rise straight up to heaven if it wasn’t pegged to our cul-de-sac.
Mr Van Apfel Senior lived on his own in the house until, some time early in their marriage, Mr Van Apfel Senior’s son and his new wife arrived and began filling up the dark house with pink girls. First Hannah, then Cordelia and, just when it was starting to look like you couldn’t squeeze in any more cots or trikes or Cabbage Patch dolls or Space Hoppers, or hang any more nappies on the line like little white flags of surrender blowing in the breeze, Mr Van Apfel’s father curled up his toes and died, leaving room for one more: Ruth.
But before he could die, and before Ruth arrived, Mrs Van Apfel led her young family like shrieking, squabbling magpies to the Hope Revival Centre across the valley. With its cavernous hall and its immaculate paintwork, its glossy whitewash repelling the heat, the Hope Revival Centre was a shiny silo rising from the dust on the eastern ridge.
God had blessed the Revivalists with an 850 square metre block in the new estate across the valley. The church looked out over the valley, over swathes of bushland and over the river that ran through the gully. (Although the church building itself was surrounded by felled trees and blank lots marked out with fluorescent tape. By the stumps of barely built homes. The roads were unsurfaced in the new estate in those days and the loose gravel baked in the sun while it waited for someone to return with the kerbs and gutters and the white road markings that were needed to hold things in place.)
It was along these roads that Mr and Mrs Van Apfel carefully negotiated their blue station wagon each Sunday morning, with their two small daughters strapped into the back seat, headed for the Rise Up service at eight. And several months later they added a baby capsule to the back seat in preparation for Ruth’s arrival. Then, while Mr Van Apfel looked on, singing ‘Lord, Mould Me in Your Image’, complete with hand claps, Ruth was dragged, bloodied and ball-fisted, from Mrs Van Apfel’s tight womb, her tiny cleft lip glistening in the hospital’s bright glare.
That was seven years ago.
Seven days of creation, seven days Noah waited for the flood, seven solemn words Christ spoke from the cross. Seven hundred mentions of the number seven in the Bible (including fifty-four times in Revelations alone, which talks of seven churches, seven angels, seven trumpets and seven stars).
For seven years Mr Van Apfel had three daughters. Now, through some trick of mathematics, his three had become one and no number of prayers could solve that for him.
* * *
The final time we ever went inside the Van Apfel house was when we babysat the girls. (‘Hannah and I are the babysitters – you’re a babysittee,’ my sister corrected me when I tried out that line at the time.)
The two of us thwack-thwacked our way up to the dark house at the top of the cul-de-sac, the bitumen sticking to our thin thongs as we walked. Laura was fourteen years old and three grades ahead of me at school – the same as Hannah Van Apfel – but for the two of them to think that they were in charge was just the pair of them being stuck up. And anyway the whole world knew it was Cordie who ruled. Cordelia Van Apfel: the middle one. With her wide-set eyes and her violet lips. The air hummed when Cordie walked across the front lawn. As if you were letting out a breath you didn’t know you were holding: Cordeli. Aaah.
Everyone had something to say about Cordelia Van Apfel.
Like the time the Van Apfel girls were angels in Mrs Blunt’s nativity play and someone started the rumour that Cordie wasn’t wearing any knickers under her costume. I was the narrator of the nativity so I had to open and close the play by reciting a poem I’d written. (That was the reason I was included in the production back when I was only in Mr Simpson’s Year Three class at the time.) My poem was good – it got me into the play – but it wasn’t that good it earned me a costume. Instead the narrator had to wear their plain old school uniform and the label of mine read LauraCordeliaTikka and would probably soon include Ruth, as our clothes were passed back and forth between our two houses.
But on stage stood those Van Apfel girls. (Steps on a ladder. Ducks in a row.) They were wearing white bedsheet shrouds and Cordie had tried to hem hers so that it was shorter than her sisters’ – a crazy staple smile looping along the fold. She was part Wood’s American Gothic, part Kylie Minogue. (But no Botticelli angel, that’s for sure.)
And from where I stood on the side of the stage, you couldn’t say for certain if she had her knickers on.
Then there was the time we saw Cordie coming out of the school office on the first day of the school year. She was holding her mum’s hand. (Though even from this distance you could see that it was Mrs Van Apfel who was doing all the holding. Cordie was so singular, so completely Cordie, that she didn’t seem to need to touch anyone else.)
We’d been playing Chinese Whispers in the playground but when Cordie appeared hands dropped from mouths, and mouths fell to silence as if to continue with passing it on might shatter the sight. It wasn’t just the hand-holding that had everyone stumped. No, the thing was that Cordie was supposed to start high school. She’d finished primary school at the end of last year and yet here she was, in the same uniform as us, even though she had turned thirteen.
Across the playground, skipping ropes were reverentially released, balls bounced out of bounds and nobody bothered to chase them. We watched while the two of them walked across the playground towards the Year Six classroom, connected only by their hands.
‘Is Cordie repeating Year Six?’
‘Why would they make her do that?’
There was no reason we knew of for the Van Apfels to hold Cordie back from high school (though you wouldn’t put it past them), yet the idea she might repeat seemed familiar to us the instant it crossed our minds. She knew more, she sensed more. Cordie kept strange, private things curled up in her carelessness that were too tight for the rest of us to unravel. Of course she’d come back to flaunt that in our faces. It seemed so obvious afterwards.
On that first day back at school, though, as Mrs Van Apfel walked her daughter towards the Year Six classroom in the corner of the playground, Cordie gave no sign she’d noticed us staring. Gave no sign she’d noticed us at all. She held her head up seeking some unseeable spot on the horizon. We returned to Chinese whispers.
‘Let’s start the game again,’ Melanie Firth commanded. ‘I’ll go first.’ She flicked her eyes meaningfully at me. She was determined to wrest back control of things and so she made a big show of pouring her message into the next ear in line and then she smiled sweetly at me. Whatever was coming around the circle was coming for my benefit. But by the time Melanie’s message had got two-thirds of the way around, it seemed to have almost dissolved. Next to me, Jodi McNally was having trouble deciphering what it meant.
‘Say it again?’ she asked but the girl on her left shook her head.
‘Can’t say it twice. That’s the rules.’
‘Fine,’ said Jodi. She leaned in and whispered, her breath hot and thick. It prickled the inside of my ear.
‘Isla gaudy do-si-do,’ she slurred. I looked at her desperately for a clue.
Melanie shrieked. ‘Say it out loud! You say it out loud.’
‘But it hasn’t been all the way around the circle,’ I protested.
‘Who cares? Just say it out loud. What’s the message? Say it now!’
‘Fine. I love gaudy do-si-do,’ I muttered.
‘Say it again!’
‘I love gaudy do-si-do.’ I raised my chin and said it louder this time.
‘You love Cordie!’ said Melanie. ‘You admitted it! That was the message and you said it out loud: I love Cordie, don’t you know.’
I folded my arms. ‘Cordie’s a girl. Your message doesn’t make sense.’
And Melanie shrugged. ‘It’s just a game,’ she said defensively, though we both knew she didn’t mean that.
By now Cordie and Mrs Van Apfel had reached the Year Six classroom on the far side of the playground. Cordie never turned her head to acknowledge us. But as they rounded the corner to the entrance of the room, she raised her free hand and held it high behind her back. Then she flicked her middle finger at us.
* * *
We swam in the pool that day we babysat. The Van Apfels’ pool was an in-ground one that swallowed half their backyard. It was all pebblecrete and landscaped bushes. A violent blue vinyl lining to give it that ‘tropical feel’. That’s what Mr Van Apfel told us when he first laid the pool brochure on the kitchen table in a way that reminded me of the Van Apfels’ cat when she arranged possum carcasses on the doormat and then sat back and waited for praise.
We ran elaborate underwater handstand competitions in the Van Apfel pool that day. First round, second round, best of the best. Our skinny legs stabbing at the sky like the bows of some demented orchestra.
‘Tikka cheated,’ Ruth complained.
She appealed to Cordie, the judge on the side of the pool.
‘How?’ I asked. ‘How do you even cheat at underwater handstands?’
But Hannah and Cordie were too busy talking about getting their ears pierced to care what Ruth had to say.
Later we lay on the grass under the peppercorn tree, our faces split into jigsaws by its shade. Madonna wandered over and sniffed us half-heartedly, and Cordelia put out a lazy forearm – her good arm – and let the cat rub her fur against Cordie’s own peach fuzz. The girls had named the ginger after their idol (and let their parents think they meant Jesus’s mum). Laura and Hannah lay on their backs, each with one hand resting across their stomachs and the other arm stretched out so that they were linked, pinkie finger to pinkie finger, while Cordelia was propped up on her side so that one round hip held up the sky.
Ruth had arranged her towel closest to mine and then sat cross-legged on it, hunched over, stabbing at ants with a stick.
‘Whaddayawanna do?’ Laura said.
‘I dunno. Whadda you wanna do?’ I said.
‘I asked first,’ my sister said flatly.
‘Get a canoe?’ Hannah suggested.
From the boatshed, she meant, down by the river. It was two dollars to hire one but we never had two dollars. Or it was too hot. Or Laura didn’t feel like it.
‘Yeah! Canoes!’ I said.
Ruth shook her head.
‘“Two in a canoe,”’ she reminded us about the hand-painted sign that had hung by the boatshed for as long as I could remember.
Ruth counted us out: Laura–Hannah; Tikka–Cordie.
She thumbed her own pink chest. ‘Two in a canoe but what about me?’
We never got canoes anyway.
Ruth hunched over again and went back to stabbing her ants.
‘If you were a Buddhist you could come back as an ant,’ my sister said.
‘If I was a Buddhist I would burn in hell,’ Ruth replied automatically.
Somewhere in a neighbouring yard a lawnmower started to moan and Madonna looked disdainfully towards the noise.
‘Mr Avery said there is no hell,’ said Cordie.
‘When did he say that?’ Hannah wanted to know.
‘I’ve never heard him say that,’ I said helpfully, and Cordie clucked her tongue sympathetically at me as if to say that was my dead loss, not hers.
‘Is that where you go when you’re sleepwalking?’ Laura teased Cordie. ‘To see Mr Avery, to talk to him about hell?’
But Hannah didn’t like that. She didn’t like it one bit.
‘You’re a moll, Cordie,’ she said. She raised her head as far off the ground as she could without expending any actual effort and she looked disapprovingly at her sister.
‘That’s what Jade said too,’ I confirmed.
Because Jade had said that. She called Cordie a moll at swimming club one day when Cordie hadn’t bothered to go into the changing rooms to get into her cossie. Instead she got changed on the pool deck in front of the boys.
‘What did the boys do?’ my sister wanted to know.
So I told her how they waited poolside the whole afternoon in case she got changed in full view after her swim.
‘And did you?’ Laura asked Cordie.
‘Nah, I went home in my cossie.’ Cordie smirked.
But Hannah was more interested in what Jade Heddingly had to say.
‘I’m the only one who can call my sister a moll. You tell Jade Heddingly that from me,’ Hannah said warningly.
But then Ruth began complaining that she wanted an iceblock and so she was dispatched – as the youngest and therefore our slave, and as the one whose idea it was anyway – to go to the garage to get five Sunnyboys. She would have to dig them out of the chest freezer where Mrs Van Apfel kept great slabs of cut-price meat. The Sunnyboys and the slabs of meat were buried in the freezer together. So we waited for Ruth to separate the iceblocks out, and after that we sat and listened to the lawnmower whine while we ate our Sunnyboys, and Mr Avery and his hell-free existence were forgotten.
We drifted inside after that. Up the steps and onto the verandah and then into the entrance hall with its brown and yellow tiles. Its doormat warning Love Lies Here. The smell of cut grass followed us in. It seeped through closed windows and past the heavy front door. Snaked round the downstairs lounge room.
Upstairs the house smelled of mildew and also of bleach and you could just see Mrs Van Apfel on her knees on Saturday afternoon, scouring cupboards where enemy spores had sprung up during the week. Casting out mould-ridden sins.
We circled the kitchen then settled at the table. On top of the table, ready for Mrs Van Apfel to arrive home and start serving up tea, were five lots of cutlery, five amber glass tumblers, and a squeezy bottle of tomato sauce that had stood all day in the sun. There were five plastic placemats too, each one revealing pictures of foods still too exotic to be seen in Macedon Close. Eggplants, artichokes, ruby pomegranates. Every item had its name spelled out for us by a foreign cursive hand.
‘What are the mice doing up here?’ I said, noticing the tank sitting on the breakfast bar.
Normally the mice lived in the laundry downstairs and not on the kitchen bench. The cast-off aquarium had four squirmy white bodies inside. Pink tails, red eyes. A mouse for each girl plus a spare. (Cordie said Mrs Van Apfel did that in case one of them died. The mice that is, not the girls.)
‘I’m teaching them to count,’ Cordie said but then she didn’t bother to explain what that meant. Didn’t say how she was doing that, or why.
Outside the lawnmower gave one last whine and then stopped, and in that moment the world was quiet until there came the unearthly shriek of a lyrebird that must have been digging up Mrs Tierney’s runner beans again, two doors up from us.
‘Sounds like a human baby,’ Hannah said.
Next to her at the table my sister checked the tip of her ponytail for signs her hair had grown overnight. Ruth rested her cheek against the tabletop.
We were still sitting there moments later when Mr Van Apfel pulled into the drive in his faded blue station wagon the colour of the rainless sky. We heard one car door slam, then another as he lifted his briefcase off the passenger seat. He took the steps of the verandah two at a time, as if to waste a moment on the odd ones would be an insult to the Lord, then he barged inside, conquered the spiral staircase and emerged in the kitchen doorway like a black blotch on your retina after looking at the sun too long.
Despite his bulk and his shock of blond hair, you got the feeling Mr Van Apfel was struggling to be seen.
‘Ladies! This is the day that the Lord has made! Why are you sitting around doing nothing?’
But it hadn’t occurred to us that we were.
‘Is your mother home?’
Ruth shook her head without bothering to lift it off the table and the movement first squashed her cheek and then stretched her mouth into a forced kind of smile.
‘Enough time then,’ Mr Van Apfel reasoned as he moved around the kitchen, bumping a vase of plastic pansies, yanking the fridge door open to stare hopefully inside, ‘for a family Bible study before dinner.’
My sister gave me the stink eye.
‘Actually, we’d better get going or Mum’ll be mad.’
As Laura spoke she flipped her index finger back and forth between the two of us as if to indicate exactly which of the bare-armed bodies draped around his kitchen table Mr Van Apfel should excuse.
‘I just came over to help Hannah watch the others while you and Mrs Van Apfel were out,’ Laura said. ‘And so, you know, if there’s an adult at home now . . .’ She trailed off.
I couldn’t believe she was sticking to her story about her and Hannah being babysitters, but Mr Van Apfel seemed to swallow the whole thing.
‘I see,’ he said sagely.
He walked over to a small table near the doorway and picked up a Bible from where it sat next to the telephone like a second line to God, and then he came back and thudded it down on the kitchen table.
‘But even babysitters need God’s word, surely?’ he said. ‘All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.’
I thought Hannah and Laura didn’t need any more training in righteousness just then – not from the Lord, not from anybody – but Mr Van Apfel seemed to think otherwise and he patted the air in front of him with flat palms, pressing us into our seats.
‘Besides, it’s Ezekiel 36 today, ladies,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to miss this.’
Cordie rocked back in her chair, hanging in space between the table and the wall behind her, daring the universe to let her fall.
‘You mean 37,’ Ruth said without lifting her head off the table. ‘We did 36 yesterday.’
‘Yeah,’ said Cordie sarcastically.
She rocked forward and planted her chair on the floorboards with a crack, and then she laid her cheek down on the table like Ruth, as if this one short syllable had just about worn her out.
‘We did too!’ Mr Van Apfel said in wonderment. ‘My mistake, ladies. Ezekiel 37.’
‘Sure, Mr Van Apfel,’ I said, ‘we can stay for a bit.’
‘Suck-up,’ my sister hissed at me, but she said it so low only I could hear.
‘Wonderful,’ Mr Van Apfel said. He flipped open his Bible and began to read its strange and magical words.
‘The hand of the Lord was on me, Ezekiel, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.
‘Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life . . .’”’
I shivered as I thought of all those bones. But Mr Van Apfel had more.
‘So I prophesied as I was commanded. And . . . there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them . . .
‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves.”’
When Mr Van Apfel got to a point he seemed satisfied with he paused and looked at us expectantly, but the five of us sat and stared at the grain of the table. At our bare knees tucked underneath. We stared lower down, at our calves; we studied the skin on the backs of our heels and the way it was segmented like worms.
In the end it was Cordie who took pity on him. Inscrutable Cordie. With those alien eyes set so wide in her face, those lips that were verging on purple. The confusing one, who didn’t look much like her mum, and not at all like her dad, and therefore must have been a true child of God. Gifted to Mr Van Apfel, for him to favour all he liked.
‘Ezekiel brought the bones back to life,’ Cordie said dully.
She crossed her arms and looked unimpressed about Ezekiel and his old bones – or possibly her father, it was difficult to say.
Jeez, wasn’t Mr Van Apfel excited but.
‘Ezekiel did bring the bones back to life, Cordelia! That’s right! Ezekiel was to tell the bones that they would be brought back to life. That’s correct,’ he said.
‘But if we listen carefully to the end of that verse – who was listening? Anyone? Laura, can you tell me? No? Well, Ezekiel didn’t put breath into the bones himself. Oh no – and this is important – Ezekiel got his power from the Lord! From Jehovah! The Almighty One!
‘It was only through the grace of God that those bones were brought back to life.’
Mr Van Apfel was getting wound up now. He was really getting going.
‘Ezekiel was carrying out the Lord’s work when he talked about putting tendons and flesh on those bones, and about covering them with skin. They were the bones of the Lord’s people but those people had been corrupt and idolatrous. They had gone astray. They had ignored the prophets that God had sent to warn them and they had refused to repent, and so it was God, through Nebuchadnezzar, who had destroyed them all, and now he was telling Ezekiel to bring them back to life in his name!
‘What do you say to that?’ he said.
But none of us knew what we should say to that, especially not Laura and me.
Mr Van Apfel went back to his Bible then, flipping the cigarette-paper pages, thrusting whole sections into tall peaks until they collapsed into plains.
‘Ezekiel prophesised that God would make breath enter the bones in the same way he first breathed life into Adam,’ Mr Van Apfel told us.
‘In Genesis,’ he clarified for Laura and me, the heathens from down the street.
He stopped thumbing through pages and he looked up at the two of us.
‘Did you know the “Apfel” in Van Apfel means “apple”?’ he said solemnly. ‘From the Garden of Eden. From the Tree of Knowledge.’
‘By eating the malus, Eve contracted malum,’ he told us. ‘That means: by eating the apple, Eve contracted evil.’
And I had a feeling we were getting to the part when it would all be Eve’s fault.
‘Okay, let’s recap, ladies,’ Mr Van Apfel said. ‘What have we learned so far from Ezekiel 37?’
He spoke slowly and he smiled widely as he talked.
‘That the bones would come back to life?’ I volunteered.
‘That the bones would come back to life,’ Mr Van Apfel confirmed, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Good, good.’
‘And who would bring those bones back to life?’ he asked. ‘Who would put tendons and flesh and skin on the bones? Who would raise them from the dead?’
‘Come on, ladies,’ he said. ‘You can do this.’
But his voice suggested he thought otherwise. Like maybe he’d have more luck getting the mice to count than getting girls to do anything as important as receiving God’s word.
Finally Ruth spoke.
‘Ezekiel.’
She spoke without lifting her head from the table, and then she changed her mind and raised her head regally and held it there, stiff-necked and awkward, while she waited for her praise. She knew she was right – she’d heard Cordie give that exact answer only moments ago. But Ruth should have known better than to try to compete with Cordie. Not when it came to Mr Van Apfel. Not before the Lord.
‘What did you say?’ Mr Van Apfel asked Ruth.
‘Ezekiel?’ Ruth repeated, but she sounded less certain this time. She was watching something that hovered in the air above the table. Something invisible to me.
‘After everything we’ve discussed here today, after everything I’ve told you about Ezekiel getting his power from the Lord, about the Almighty One, about the grace of God, after all of this you still think it was Ezekiel who resurrected those bones?’
‘Yes?’ Ruth said cautiously.
Then she changed her mind. ‘I mean, no,’ she said quickly.
‘Ezekiel.’ Mr Van Apfel said it again, only this time it came out in a slow and terrible whisper.
He lowered his chin and squinted his eyes and you could practically hear the scrunch of his skin as it puckered at his eye sockets. He stood and leaned forward, cementing his shirtsleeves to the table on two balled fists. The fridge hummed, then lost its nerve and shifted down a note.
‘Ezekiel? Our Lord and Saviour, Our Redeemer is Ezekiel?’ Mr Van Apfel said slowly. ‘Is that what you said? Is that what you mean? Ezekiel will bring the dead back to life?’
Ruth froze.
‘The Almighty One: Ezekiel?’
Ruth said nothing.
‘Lord Ezekiel, was he? Is that what you’re telling me? Ezekiel? Ezekiel?’
He kept repeating that name until I wanted to shout: ‘That’s not it! That’s not what she means! She’s just confused, that’s all.’
Mr Van Apfel was still standing, still leaning forward over the table. He was still whispering in that horrible voice when suddenly he stopped.
We waited.
‘Blasphemy!’ Mr Van Apfel shouted. He thumped the table. ‘That’s blasphemy. And it’s a sin. And I will not have you sinning in my house.’
Ruth looked stunned, and no wonder. She’d thought she got the answer right, but what was right moments ago was now blasphemy and a sin and Ruth was going to pay.
‘Do not use thy name in vain,’ Mr Van Apfel muttered darkly. ‘Do not use thy name in vain. Do not use thy name in vain.’
He said it over and over again and I wanted to lean across and ask Laura if by ‘thy’ he meant God or if he was referring to himself because I was starting to get confused and I was nervous that, if pushed to say what I thought, I might give a wrong answer like Ruth. But the look on Laura’s face told me it could wait, that I should ask her later at home.
I was ready, I realised. I was ready to go. I’d had enough Bible study for today.
The muttering stopped after that and Mr Van Apfel sat down, scraping his chair across the floorboards and making them cry out. Ruth chewed on her lip in that way she had, and even now I don’t know if it was the lip or the chewing that set Mr Van Apfel off again. Or if Ruth had had it coming all along.
Whatever it was, Mr Van Apfel stood and lurched towards Ruth’s end of the table, and I was shocked that someone so big could move so terribly fast. He raised his arm and brought it down with a dull, flat sound across Ruth’s cheek.
She bowed.
Then she fell, slumping sideways in her chair. Her body jolted as it banged against mine, then she righted herself, gripping the chair as if she’d turned a corner on the bus. And the force of her small, thick torso barging into my shoulder was the only way I could tell that any of it was real.
No one moved. Across the table my sister had moulded herself into her seat.
Mr Van Apfel returned to his seat. ‘Where were we?’ he said. Then more brightly: ‘Let’s talk to God.’
Around the table four Van Apfel heads dropped as though pulled by one string and Laura and I followed fast. But the world Mr Van Apfel had been trying so hard to conjure up for us – a world of white bones and dancing skeletons, of miraculous resurrection – had slipped through his fingers and he couldn’t get it back.
‘Almighty Jesus, Lamb of God, forgiver of sins, cleanser of souls . . .’
He was still going minutes later when I heard Mum’s voice floating up the twisty stairs.
‘Yoo-hoo,’ she called. ‘Laura? Tikka? Are you girls all right?’
I glanced at Laura, who glanced at the doorway, but neither of us was game to move. I noticed that my hands were gripping the table and that the fingerprints I left were wet. Across from me Cordelia was drawing arcs on the floor with one bare toenail. Ruth cried softly and Hannah was deathly still.
Mr Van Apfel kept on praying.
Out in the stairwell Mum called up to us again and I felt relieved, and slightly squeamish too. Because you could hear her confusion, the creeping concern, but we were too scared to answer back.
‘Laura! Can you hear me? Are you there?’
She called out to us a third time and Mr Van Apfel must have noticed the alarm in her voice too because he opened one eye and fixed it directly on me and, without pausing the flood of words that were tumbling from his mouth, he nodded once.
Permission to go.
‘Tikka!’ Mum said when I appeared at the top of the stairwell. ‘Where have you been? I was calling you! Didn’t you hear me calling?’
She continued to walk up the stairs as I started down but I waved my arms to stop her. I pointed to the ceiling.
‘What? Where’s Laura? I thought you girls were never coming home. Didn’t you hear me —’
I kept moving as she talked and, when I reached her, I grabbed her elbow and rolled my eyes to the roof. Then I pressed my hands together and mimed along with Mr Van Apfel’s prayer.
‘What? Tikka, where have you been?’ she said irritably. ‘What are you doing with your mouth, you look like a fish.’
‘Shhh, they’re in the kitchen and the —’
‘Tikka Malloy, I don’t know what game you girls are —’
‘They’re praying,’ I hissed.
That stopped her dead.
‘Who are?’
‘The Van Apfels. They’re praying up there. They’re doing family Bible study and Mr Van Apfel is praying.’
Mum lifted her chin and her eyebrows as well and, sure enough, she could hear Mr Van Apfel now.
‘Oh. Right. Yes, so they are.’
She looked flummoxed.
‘Well, it’s time for you and Laura to come home.’
‘Okay.’
‘You’ve been over here for hours.’
I wanted to tell Mum, right then, that Ruth had got hit, but the words just dissolved in my mouth.
In the kitchen the praying petered out and for one awful moment I thought maybe Ruth was going to cop it again. Then Mr Van Apfel’s voice seemed to stand up on its own and saunter down the spiral staircase to where Mum and I were standing.
‘Mrs Malloy, we’re having a little family prayer time together,’ the voice said. ‘Why don’t you come up and join us?’
Mum didn’t miss a beat.
‘Thank you,’ she called up to heaven, ‘but I’ve got mince on the stove.’
‘Laura, I’ll wait outside,’ she added, and the two of us descended together.
* * *
Laura and I held hands that day as we walked home across the cul-de-sac with Mum. Paper dolls against the blazing sky.
Later, when we tried to remember exactly what had happened that day, I said I reckoned Mr Van Apfel’s hand had been flat when it smacked Ruth’s cheek, but my sister insisted: no. She said I was wrong and that I hadn’t seen properly, and that in the final airless instant before his hand came down, Mr Van Apfel had flexed his palm wide and then drawn it into a fist so that when he hit Ruth, it was a punch.
That’s what Laura said.
Either way we never told Mum about it. The three of us walked home together in silence so that the only noise came from the bottleneck to our street where Mrs McCausley’s sprinkler pftzz-pftzz-pftzzed away like the twisting cap on a fizzy drink in the instant before it bursts.