Really it began when Cordelia fell out of the tree. When she slipped out of its branches and fell back to earth, landing in the mess of roots and drupes underneath, breaking her arm in two places. That was when it really began. Long before those girls went missing.
We used to collect the peppercorns from that tree. We’d sweep them up and put them on the windowsills of our bedrooms and wait for them to turn from green to pink to purplish brown. Then when they were at their ripest – their darkest, toxic best – we would feed them to our hard-faced dolls until we spoiled their plastic pouts.
But Cordie wasn’t collecting peppercorns that day. She wasn’t doing anything much. Just sitting and watching while the witchy fingers of the tree sank into her skin until the instant they didn’t. Until it was her skin doing the sinking. Her skin and her bones and her hair and her teeth. Her bare toes released by the crone.
That’s when it started.
When Cordelia fell out of that tree.
* * *
Ruth said Dr Adiga did all the usual stuff at the hospital. Checked Cordie’s head, shone a light in her ears. Pressed his cold palm against her stomach. Ruth had to go to the hospital with Cordie and Mrs Van Apfel because you couldn’t exactly leave her at home on her own. Not if you wanted any food left in your fridge.
But it was handy having Ruth in the hospital contingent because it meant she could tell me what happened. (You’d never get that level of detail from Cordie.) Ruth could tell, for instance, how Dr Adiga had asked Cordie if she had any dizziness or a headache, or if her eyes felt blurry. She could remember how he asked Cordie if her stomach felt okay. And how Cordie said she didn’t eat any of the peppercorns.
‘Everyone knows they’re poison,’ she said. ‘I’m not stupid, you know.’
And Dr Adiga said that he never thought she was stupid, but that actually he was more interested in whether or not she had concussion. And I could see how that would be a useful thing for a treating doctor to know.
Mrs Van Apfel was there too of course – she wasn’t going to miss out on an emergency. And when Ruth said her mum said: ‘It was the peppercorn tree in our backyard. I’ve told my husband a hundred times to trim it,’ well then, you knew Ruth was telling the truth about things because that’s just what Mrs Van Apfel would say. Just like you could bet she’d have sat in that hospital waiting room reading back issues of Watchtower as if Moses himself carried them down from the Mount.
Dr Adiga was the only doctor who ever worked in the hospital back in those days, or so it seemed to us. He was my doctor when I had chickenpox and I got a fever in the middle of the night, when Dad took me to the hospital and wore his clothes over his pyjamas. Lor had Dr Adiga too. That time when she burned her hand on a bunger at cracker night after Carl Mannix double-dared her to touch it. (Lor was all right but Carl Mannix was not. He got grounded for a week for that.)
And even though Dr Adiga had to look after all of us kids, even though he had to fix up our fevers and our burned hands and a whole bunch of busted bones, he never acted like he minded. He was never in a hurry. (These days it’s different. They’ve moved the hospital to a new site across the ridge. There it’s bigger and whiter than ever before, and Dr Adiga has retired.)
But back when the hospital was on our side of the valley, back when it wasn’t much more than an emergency room with a few beds out the back and the floors were covered with lino that squealed when you walked on it, back then Dr Adiga seemed to be the only doctor around.
‘Dr Adiga said she broke her radius and ulna,’ Ruth reported as the two of us walked to school the day after the fall. Cordie was at home resting, and Laura and Hannah were long gone. They left early to catch the bus to high school.
‘He said she did a good job.’
‘You mean a bad job.’
‘He definitely said good.’
‘Yeah, but a good job of a bad thing,’ I said. ‘He was being sarcastic.’ She’d understand when she got to Year Five like me.
‘What about Cordie’s sleepwalking?’ I asked.
‘Still doing it, you mean?’
‘Well, yeah. But do you think the sleepwalking’s related? Did Dr Adiga ask her that?’
‘Related? To her busted arm?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How?’ Ruth was confused.
‘I don’t know. Just – did Dr Adiga mention it? Did he say the sleepwalking could be linked?’
‘She didn’t fall asleep in the tree, if that’s what you’re getting at,’ she said.
But I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting at, so I could hardly explain it to Ruth.
‘She is still doing it but,’ Ruth admitted. ‘She goes walking every few nights.’
‘Out of the house?’
‘Not usually. She only did that the morning everyone saw her in the street. Normally she gets about as far as the hallway. Once Mum found her in the bath. She was crouched inside, and when Mum woke her up, Cordie had no idea how she got there.’
It was hot as we walked and the sky seemed to sag. Everything looked ready to melt.
‘Dr Adiga did want to know how she got the other bruise,’ Ruth said.
‘What other bruise?’
‘The one around the top of her arm.’
‘The arm she busted?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Cordie had a bruise around the top of the arm that she broke?’ I repeated.
‘Yeah.’
‘Then she did it when she fell,’ I said. You didn’t need to be a doctor to work that one out. Dr Adiga must have been having an off day.
But Ruth was saying no, Dr Adiga didn’t agree. How he’d questioned Cordie when he saw the bruise there.
‘What did Cordie say?’
‘Same as you. That she must have bumped the top part of her arm when she fell out of the tree, and Dr Adiga said, “Are you sure about that?” and “That bruise looks like it’s been there a while.”’
‘Had it?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Well, did Cordie say where she got it?’
‘I don’t think she knew where she got it,’ Ruth said. ‘I don’t know where she got it.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not your arm,’ I pointed out. ‘If it was, you’d know.’
‘Kids get bruises all the time,’ she said with authority. ‘Doesn’t mean they have to know where they came from.’
‘If I had a bruise,’ I said, ‘then I would definitely know where it came from. Don’t you think it’s weird Cordie didn’t know where she got her own bruise?’
But if she thought it was weird, Ruth didn’t say. We walked in silence while she concentrated on the path. There was no breeze along the street that day.
‘The bruise was very yellow,’ Ruth said eventually. ‘So it’s not surprising Cordie couldn’t remember where she got it from.’
I nodded.
‘It’s probably disappeared by now,’ she added.
And the one person who was there couldn’t tell us anything because he didn’t see it happen, so he said. Trent Rainer was doing the edges of his yard next door the day Cordie fell from the tree. He was using his new four-stroke line trimmer which cut grass in half the time of his old star-tooth edger, but which made more than ten times the noise. That line trimmer meant Trent Rainer didn’t hear the whump when Cordie landed on the lawn. A whump like a basketball filled with rainwater.
* * *
Cordelia was back at school on Monday, and when we saw her cast we just about died with jealousy.
‘Can I touch it?’
‘Can I sign it?’
‘Does it hurt when I do this?’
We’d abandoned our game of Poison Letter and stood pressed around Cordie, jostling for position, hoping to soak up some of her suffering. We asked how many bandages Dr Adiga had used and whether it itched underneath her cast, and she handed out answers like she was sharing her lunch.
One or two kids still stuck with the game and they stood frozen, legs bent, fists balled, while they waited for us to come back and join in. But to be honest, we’d been growing bored with Poison Letter long before Cordie got her arm in a cast. It wasn’t the same, standing around on the asphalt, waiting for someone to call out the letters of your name. Lots of our games and our playground rituals were beginning to feel alien to us by then. The teachers called it ‘being too big for our boots’ and told us that high school would sort us out – by ‘high school’ they meant the Year Eights – but even that didn’t really explain it. Not fully. Not the sort of restlessness we felt. As if our boredom was a symptom of some bigger change, a dangerous shift in the earth’s axis. Something bigger than our school shoes getting too tight.
And so each day that we walked across the playground in the same two straight lines, under the same sun, under the same paint-chipped pergola slowly being strangled by wisteria, you could practically smell the change that was coming our way as sure as that stink off the mangroves.
The day Cordie came back in a cast was no exception. We stayed huddled around her, admiring her arm, until the bell went and we moved off to our classrooms, and the playground was left empty except for a lone legionnaire hat left skewered on a garden stake like some kind of ancient warning.
* * *
Around this time two things happened, and even now I find it hard to separate them in my mind. The first thing was Cordie falling out of that tree. And the second? Thing number two was when Mr Avery turned up at school for the very first time.
He arrived on the same day Cordie came back with her arm in a plaster cast. When 6H walked into their classroom that morning, ready to get out their Maths books, ready for another week of being baffled by compound fractions, they instead learned that Mrs Harrow had left after sport on Friday, taking with her the Reading Corner beanbag and the butcher’s paper mural of the First Fleet, and that there, in her place, was an enigma more mysterious, more complex than any mixed numbers. There in her place was Mr Avery.
He stood in the space where the missing mural had hung. Great continents of bare wall floated behind him. The maintenance men had been in since Friday afternoon and had painted the blackboard a sickly sea green – a perfect clean slate – and the effect of seeing him there, marooned between the blank wall and the repainted blackboard, was one of only hollowness.
He wore a short-sleeved shirt and tie, and his shoes were foreign-looking. Leather but without any laces. His beard was thick and dark, though very neatly trimmed. Its colour matched exactly the fur on his arms. Mr Avery was the only man our school had ever seen who wasn’t the maintenance man or the principal. And when he arrived Cordie and the rest of Mrs Harrow’s 6H class were instantly promoted to ‘6A’.
Mr Avery arrived the same day as Cordie’s cast did, and so the two things are stuck together in my mind. So stuck that, even now, it’s impossible to say for sure that Mr Avery wasn’t the cause of Cordie’s problems.
Or maybe he came as the cure.
Still, that’s when it began. Late in November, when the sky burned and the jacarandas started rotting just as soon as they blossomed, and soldier beetles flung themselves against our classroom windows, preferring the blunt smash to the roasting heat.
That’s when it started. As far back as that. When the summer had barely got going. Back in the days before Cordelia Van Apfel disappeared, when she was still real and soft and falling from trees.
* * *
‘No, it didn’t,’ my sister said when I suggested this version to her twenty years later. We were shopping together at the new SupaCentre – the one that used to be the milk bar when we were kids. Now it had a deluxe car wash and a ‘Handsfree Shopping Experience’ and car park that stretched for miles.
‘Mr Avery arrived before Cordie broke her arm,’ Laura said. ‘You’re not remembering it right.’
As she spoke she steered a shopping trolley expertly down the pantry aisle using her left hand, and I considered how, if I tried the same thing, I would hit the simmer sauces for sure. But Laura could left-handedly steer while reading a shopping list while correcting my history at the same time.
‘It’s natural that I’d remember it better,’ she shrugged. ‘I am older after all.’
On the drive to the SupaCentre that morning the suburbs that rolled past my window had felt shrunken and strange. Roads that once stretched out in school-shoe-sized steps now skimmed past under the spin of Laura’s tyres. A doll’s house version of itself. Then walking across the car park I’d halfrecognised faces but they were older, or greyer, or strained.
‘How do you remember it then?’ I asked.
Laura stopped the trolley and turned to me.
‘He came first,’ she said. ‘Mr Avery was already here when Cordie fell out of the tree. He came at the start of term four, remember? And Cordie didn’t break her arm until nearly two months later, just before Hayley Stinson’s party in November.’
‘How do you remember when Hayley Stinson’s party was?’ I said. ‘That was twenty years ago.’
‘Because Hayley Stinson was exactly six months older than me. She still is. I see her here at the SupaCentre all the time. She lives in the white house two doors down from the school now. You know the one, with the ugly front bit and the palm trees. She’s just had twins.’
‘Hayley Stinson’s got twins?’
‘Yeah. Can you reach the olive oil? No, next to it. The green one. We don’t buy that brand,’ she directed.
I put the green one in the shopping trolley like I was told. I’d been back at Macedon Close for almost a week by this stage. Long enough to remember what it was like, and for Laura to always be right.
‘So Mr Avery came at the start of term four, and Cordie broke her arm near the end?’ I said.
‘Right.’
‘Around the time of Hayley Stinson’s sleepover?’
‘Right. Hayley turned fifteen in the November, and I didn’t turn fifteen until the following May. But we were still put in the same age division at swimming club and then everyone wondered why she always beat me.’
‘Good to see you’ve let that go,’ I said.
‘I was disadvantaged.’
‘You’re proving my point.’
My sister’s hair was almost impossibly blonde under the supermarket lights. It had always been lighter than mine but now, with that shade, she could have been a fourth Van Apfel sister.
‘You colour your hair,’ I said, thinking of my own mousy hair with some greys showing through.
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at me strangely. ‘Did you think it was natural?’
We made our way to the end of Laura’s list and then she steered the trolley to the front of the store. At the checkout I lifted the groceries out of the trolley while Laura arranged them on the conveyor belt in the order she wanted them packed.
‘Hey, do you remember we did a séance at that party? At Hayley’s sleepover,’ I said. ‘Remember that? And —’
‘The cup moved!’ we said in unison.
The girl at the checkout looked at us warily and then went back to scanning our groceries.
‘The cup moved onto Community Chest!’ I added, and then wished I hadn’t.
‘Geez, Tik, how do you remember that?’ Laura asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I lifted a bag of rice onto the counter, fiddled around with the packet. ‘I guess I think about it sometimes.’
‘You’ve got to find a way to live with it,’ Laura had told me once, using her best bedside voice. ‘I’m not saying forget. But you’ve got to find a way to get up in the morning and to go on. Work through it. Keep going.’
Get up and go on. Work through it. Keep going.
She made it sound like muscle exercises for her patients.
Now she looked at me with her face full of scepticism. You think about it sometimes? was what that look said.
We paid and pushed our trolley outside the SupaCentre, where the day was cloudless and hot. The strip that ran along the front of the centre was busy with shoppers, mostly pensioners and parents with prams, and at the bus stop an elderly woman was hunched over a tartan shopping cart, rearranging the contents. She wore a floral dress that was the same red as the tartan and ended just below her knees. One tan stocking sock had slipped down her leg and gathered like a holiday-coloured wrinkle around her calf.
‘Oh, it’s Mrs McCausley,’ Laura said. She let her shoulders slump as if just the sight was exhausting.
‘What? Where? I can’t see her.’
Laura pointed towards the bus stop.
‘That’s Mrs McCausley?’
I know I said it loudly but she was four shopfronts away, and the strip was noisy, and there were cars roaring past.
‘What?’ I said. ‘You don’t need to shush me. There’s no way Mrs McCausley could possibly have heard that.’
‘She hears everything,’ Laura admonished. She was annoyed I’d contradicted her.
‘We’re going to have to walk past her to get to the car,’ she said, grimacing.
‘That’s okay, I’ll do the talking,’ I said.
I was curious to see Mrs McCausley after all this time. It was years since I’d spoken to her.
‘Yeah, well just don’t say anything to her about me being sick,’ Laura instructed. ‘I don’t need her going around gossiping to everyone.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s not up to her,’ she added. ‘I’ll tell who I want, when I want, and only when I’m ready. Okay? You got it?’
‘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 right 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.’