Moth Girls Read online

  She looked hopelessly around. The garden fences were solid. The houses on each side were in complete darkness. She couldn’t slip away into some alley that ran along the back because there wasn’t one.

  The car sat there silent. Then the passenger’s door opened. No one got out. It hung there for a few moments and then a pair of legs came into view.

  Mandy moved further behind the tree, feeling the rough bark on the side of her face. She peeked round. A young woman emerged. She stood up and closed the door of the car quietly, the click barely sounding. She walked towards the fence carrying a torch. Mandy could see the beam pointing out in a straight line. She came up to the edge of the property. Mandy felt her shoulders knotting. It was something to do with this house and Mandy was stuck where she couldn’t get out. Maybe the woman was from a security company, called out by some electronic alarm that Mandy had stumbled over. That was why she was wearing normal clothes: she wasn’t in uniform, she was on call.

  The torch sent a finger of light onto the site. The mist swirled through it. The beam was strong where the woman was but then fanned out and faded as it swept the back of the garden. The woman swung the torch from one side to the other, slowly as if she was looking for something. Was she searching for an intruder?

  She turned it off and the place seemed darker than it had been before.

  The woman stood looking at the site. Then she fiddled with the torch so that it lit up for a split second and illuminated her face.

  Mandy stared. The light went off but she’d already seen the girl’s face, bright white, in the light from the torch. She came out from behind the tree. She walked a few paces. The girl was still there and she’d turned the torch on again. It pointed into the centre of the garden, the place where the house would have been. The girl hadn’t noticed her because she was outside the light, but Mandy found herself drawn by the brightness, moving closer to the beam that cut through the old property. When she was a few metres away, the girl saw her and jumped. She snapped the torch off.

  ‘Petra,’ Mandy said, her voice hoarse, stuck down her throat. ‘Petra, it’s me, Mandy.

  The girl looked stunned, horrified. Behind her the car started up. The noise made Mandy start. The girl turned and headed back to the car.

  ‘Petra,’ Mandy called out. ‘Wait!’

  But the car was moving off at speed. In seconds it was gone. Mandy got down on her knees and scrambled under the wire. When she stood up in the street she saw the taillights of the car turning the corner.

  It was gone.

  Ten

  Miss Pearce and Tommy seemed busy preparing for the memorial most of the afternoon. The sixth-form common room was closed off and the only place to sit in-between lessons was the lunch area, which was still grubby from lunchtime and smelt of chips. Mandy had a free period after English so she sat at a table as far away from the serving area as she could. Some other sixth formers were there as well. They were still talking about Zoe’s party. The ripple of conversation had been there all day. Zoe’s older brothers had kept things under control so, although there had been alcohol and dope and loud music, it’d never got out of hand. There had been no fights and no gatecrashers but there had been plenty of drunkenness and lots of people getting together. No one said anything about Tommy and Leanne. Maybe no one wanted to say anything within Mandy’s earshot. Maybe they all knew that she had feelings for Tommy. How could they not? She’d been following him round for weeks.

  Not that any of it really mattered. Not with what she’d had in her head since early yesterday morning. She was still in a state of shock. That was the only way she could explain the numbness inside her. She had seen Petra Armstrong. Hadn’t she? She had stood on that demolition site and watched seventeen-year-old Petra get out of a car, walk up to the fence and use a torch to look around the remnants of the old house that she’d once been fixated on.

  Or had Mandy been mistaken? She’d spent the week thinking about that time five years ago, and then she’d looked at Alison Pointer’s website and the computer-generated image of what Petra looked like now. She’d had Petra on her mind ever since the house had been demolished. Maybe she’d wanted to see Petra there and had conjured her up, superimposed her face onto that of the security woman who’d been on call and was checking the site for vandalism.

  So why, when Mandy called out to her, had she not stood her ground, ordered Mandy out of the site, taken her name and address or called the police and had her charged with trespassing? Why had she turned tail, scuttled off into the car and driven away at speed?

  She remembered the moment that she’d seen Petra’s face. The torch had lit it up for a second and the skin had been ghostly white. But she’d had a moment’s recognition. In that expression she’d seen the twelve-year-old Petra. The blank stare and the lips puckered suspiciously to one side. It had been her, she was sure. But was it just like the bus sightings? She’d been sure each of those times as well.

  Twice she’d been in that garden. The first time she’d been chased out by the angry neighbour. A glimpse of his face flashed through her head and she remembered something that she hadn’t thought about for years. The week after the three of them had crept into the garden she’d seen the neighbour again. He’d been in front of Mandy and her mum in the supermarket. She’d been unloading the shopping onto the conveyor belt and he’d stared at her for a moment and then she’d realised who he was. She felt herself go red and could feel his eyes on her and she rearranged the tins and bottles so that they went through first. ‘Heaviest stuff at the bottom,’ she’d whispered to no one in particular and then told her mum she wanted to look at the magazines. She walked off, her face burning, and anxiously hung round the books and magazines, thinking that the man would tell her mum what she’d done. But moments later she saw her mum pushing the trolley towards her. She was smiling at something so Mandy knew he hadn’t said anything.

  She looked round and saw that Tommy had come into the hall. She shrunk a little in her seat because she sensed that he was looking for her. Something to do with the memorial service, no doubt. The very thought of it made her shoulders stiffen. He saw her then and waved, and came walking across, full of purpose, intent on speaking to her. A renewed sense of sadness hit her. A little bit of her had thought that his interest in the service had been because he was interested in her, but now she realised that wasn’t true. This was a project for him, like all the other things he did.

  ‘Hi!’ he said breathlessly. ‘I wondered if you’d come along to the common room so that I could just go through things with you. Just to check that you think it’s OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, getting up, pushing her empty paper cup away.

  She followed him along the corridor as he talked about the memorial. He was having music and poems and a couple of spots where teachers would say a few things about their memories of Petra and Tina and then he was going to say something about loss. He was ticking the sections off on his fingers in a businesslike way and she wondered if he would put this on his CV. But then she felt bad. He wasn’t someone who just did things for show; he did things because he liked them. She was allowing her disappointment to turn into something nasty and spiteful.

  She’d seen him with Leanne first thing that morning and it hadn’t been awkward. Mandy had simply said, ‘Hello! I heard about you two guys!’ with as much nonchalance as she could manage. The rest of the morning had been busy and the twisty feeling she had in her chest seemed to uncurl. After the memorial school would go back to normal and then it would be half-term. After the holidays she could disentangle herself from the group and put some space between herself and Tommy.

  The common room had been set out with chairs and a small platform. Behind it was a whiteboard with an open laptop on a small table beside it. Tommy ducked around the chairs and went up onto the platform. He leant over the laptop and pressed a couple of buttons and the white screen was filled with two photographs of Petra and Tina. They weren’t official school photo
s although Petra was wearing a school uniform in hers. She’d been in a group but the others had been cut out and Mandy wondered if it’d been taken on the day their class had gone on the museum trip. The photo of Tina was quite different. She was standing outside a front door, possibly her own, and she was wearing a dress and boots and a loose cardigan. Her hands were clasped as if she didn’t quite know what to do with them.

  ‘So, we’re starting with this music,’ Tommy said.

  A snatch of music came on. It was orchestral, sombre. Mandy recognised a cello playing. The tune was familiar, something she’d heard in the past, but she couldn’t have named it.

  ‘Then we are going to have the teachers’ memories and then this.’

  A song came on which Mandy recognised instantly. It was one of the songs that’d been very popular when they’d been friends. The girls had practised it over and over.

  ‘Tina Pointer’s mother gave me this. She said that Tina and Petra used to sing this as a girl band.’

  Mandy heard it play and immediately pictured Petra singing and Tina backing her up. Once, just once, Mandy had suggested that maybe two back-up singers would have been better than one. Petra told her, in a firm tone, that it was a duo, a two-girl group.

  ‘The Red Roses, they were called,’ he said.

  ‘I know what they were called, Tommy. I was friends with them.’

  ‘Course you were. Sorry, that must have sounded completely dumb!’

  ‘Did Miss Pearce say why we’re having this now? The anniversary is on the twenty-eighth and it’s only the nineteenth.’

  ‘Yeah, course. The twenty-eighth is in half-term and she wanted to get this done so that the rest of the week was clear.’

  ‘She wanted to get it out of the way?’

  ‘No! I didn’t mean that. It’s just that there are other more upbeat things that are planned and it seemed a good idea to …’

  ‘Get it done.’

  Tommy looked awkward. She tried to be positive.

  ‘I understand. It’s best this way,’ she said in a faux-cheerful voice. ‘Anyway, I should be off. What time does it start?’

  ‘Last period has been suspended for the lower sixth. So we’ll begin about three. In about twenty minutes?’

  ‘OK,’ Mandy said, her cheeks feeling tired from holding a smile.

  She left the common room and walked swiftly away, not quite knowing where she was headed. She knew for sure she didn’t want to go to the memorial. She had no wish to sit through another ceremony in memory of Tina and Petra, especially one organised by Tommy. The buzzer went for the end of lesson. The noise increased as students spilt out onto the corridors, calling to each other and letting doors bang behind them. Mandy kept walking towards the reception area where it was quieter and calmer. Being a sixth former meant she didn’t have to sign out so she went straight for the doors.

  Before she got there she heard someone call her name. She closed her eyes with annoyance. She didn’t want to go back and sit through Tommy’s ceremony. She stopped and turned round. It was Jon Wallis. He was walking towards her. He smiled and patted his pocket. He pulled something out of it.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.

  He held out an envelope to her.

  ‘At lunchtime a girl gave me this. She was outside school and she asked me if I knew you and told me to give this to you.’

  ‘At lunchtime?’ she said, puzzled.

  ‘I looked for you but the common room was being used and then I had a class.’

  She took the envelope. Her name was written on the front of it: ‘Mandy Crystal’.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not going to the memorial?’ Jon said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t blame you. Pointless exercise.’

  He walked away and she pulled the envelope open. Inside was a postcard with some handwriting on it.

  Please don’t tell anyone that you saw me. I will contact you.

  The handwriting was untidy as if it’d been done in a hurry. She read it again and then the meaning sunk in. There was no signature but she knew who it was from. She turned it over as if there might be more information on the other side, but it was a picture. A picture postcard, the kind you pin on a board. The image seemed to jump out at her then. It wasn’t just any floral design. It was a photograph of a bunch of red roses.

  The Red Roses. It was just a duo and Mandy had never been allowed to join.

  Petra had contacted her.

  PART TWO: The Past

  Petra

  Eleven

  It was Petra’s twelfth birthday. Three cards stood on the table: one from her dad, one from Zofia – his girlfriend – and one from Tina. In her bag there was a card from Mandy, the new girl at school, but she hadn’t taken it out of the envelope yet.

  It was gone five and she was ironing a shirt for her dad. She could hear him in his bedroom singing along with the radio. He was picking up an airport fare that evening and wanted to look smart. Petra took care that the iron was not too hot. Her dad was particular about his clothes. Hanging on the back of the door was his best jacket, still covered with the dry cleaner’s plastic bag. Petra had picked it up on her way home from school. She’d already removed the laundry tag from the inside pocket but she’d left it covered because her dad liked it like that.

  Her phone beeped. She took it out of her pocket. There was a message from Zofia:

  Happy Birthday Kochanie

  She grinned. Zofia was always using Polish words. Kochanie meant ‘honey’ or ‘baby’. Zofia was very affectionate.

  Petra turned the iron off. In her back pocket there were two twenty pound notes: her birthday present from her dad. She still had other gifts to look forward to: Tina’s and Zofia’s. Tina said that her mum, Mrs Pointer, had something small for her too. She was going there for her tea and a sleepover as soon as she’d got changed.

  Her dad came into the living room. He was wearing black trousers and a white short-sleeved vest. He was singing along to the music that was still playing from his bedroom. His hands were in tiny fists in front of his chest, moving like pistons in time with the beat. He closed his eyes and exaggerated the movements as if he were at a disco. She shook her head. He had good rhythm, she had to admit, but his way of dancing was embarrassingly old fashioned.

  The track ended and he opened his eyes. He was threading his new leather belt through the loops on his trousers. When he had done up the buckle she handed him the ironed shirt, which was still warm. He slipped his arms into it and began buttoning it up. He was humming something all the while. She scooped up a tie from the back of the settee and held it up.

  ‘Good girl, Petra,’ he said, taking it and draping it around his neck. ‘You want a lift to your friend’s house? I can go that way.’

  She shook her head as he concentrated on the tie, knotting it but leaving it loose at his neck, like lots of the boys in school did. He picked up his jacket and unpeeled the plastic wrapping. Then he put it on, brushing it down.