Moth Girls (6 page)

She walked home. She didn’t call her dad but made her own way back. She trudged through the streets by herself for almost an hour. She thought about the party and felt wave after wave of embarrassment. She’d not been there for longer than thirty minutes. Maybe she should have stayed, seen Tommy, made a show of pretending that everything was normal. And if Leanne had been there she could have chatted and said, ‘How did you and Tommy get together?’ As if it were no big deal. As if it were something she might have expected.

During the walk she felt a choking hurt that clenched her chest. Getting further away from the party it seemed to loosen just a little and she just experienced a kind of disbelief that she’d ever thought that there might be something between her and Tommy. He’d been sweet and attentive and always keen to spend time with her but it’d never been anything to do with
attraction
. She was his mate. That was all. No one else thought they might be paired off because Lucy had told her about Leanne without flinching, with no sense that it might offend or upset Mandy. She had never considered Mandy as girlfriend material for Tommy and hadn’t thought, for a second, that Mandy had that idea either.

It was probably the same for everyone else in the sixth form.

She
was the only person who hadn’t known. She felt tears in her eyes at this thought. It was
shameful
that she hadn’t realised. Was she some kind of idiot? Maybe if she hadn’t been so wound up with all this other stuff about Petra and Tina. If she’d not had that on her mind she might have looked calmly round the common room and seen the signs that Tommy was attracted to Leanne and then realised in time, before she made an emotional show of herself in front of Lucy.

Her head was filled up with what happened years before. She was so preoccupied she couldn’t see what was going on under her own nose, she couldn’t think straight, otherwise she would have realised that Tommy wasn’t for her. He was interesting, full of ideas, funny, good company. Why would he want her?

She got home and avoided questions about the party and why she hadn’t called for a lift. Her dad was tired and yawned his way up the stairs to his room. She went straight to bed and seemed to fall asleep quickly.

She woke up just after three. She tried to go back to sleep but was still tossing and turning an hour later. Eventually she sat up. Her room felt cold. She put her bedside light on and took a drink from the glass of water beside her. She looked over at her wardrobe. Her red top was still hanging on the outside of the door. She hadn’t even worn it. It hung there like a flag that had been lowered.

She shouldn’t have gone to the party at all. She should have stayed at home and wallowed in the thoughts that had been weighing her head down this week. She got up. She walked to the window and pulled the curtain back a few centimetres and looked out. It was black and there was mist or possibly fog. She could see it making the street light hazy.

She wondered about the house on Princess Street. She hadn’t passed by it since Tuesday morning when the bulldozers were starting up. Alison Pointer said that it’d been almost flattened. Mandy tried to picture what it looked like. There would be a big gap and the walls of the adjacent houses would look odd and exposed. You would be able to look straight through to what had been the back garden. She wondered if the demolishers had taken the trees and bushes as well. There’d been a lot of them she remembered from years before but they may have been cleared by the people who lived in the flats. There’d been brick sheds at the bottom of the garden too. Had they been flattened?

It was twenty past four and she was wide awake. Her mum and dad wouldn’t get up for hours. It felt freezing, and the heating wasn’t due to come on until seven. The silence of the house seemed to stifle her. She felt restless and wanted to go out,
do something
. Later, maybe after lunch, she could go on Facebook and congratulate Tommy on getting together with Leanne. That would be an easy way of getting over the awkward embarrassment of being told about it. She could ask Tommy what had gone on at the party, who was wearing what, who got drunk, and so on. It would be just as if nothing unusual had happened.

There was a tightness in her throat at the thought of Tommy and Leanne being together. Leanne wasn’t his kind of girl at all. Leanne was an identikit teenage girl, one of the many in school who looked similar, talked about the same things, wore the same clothes. Mandy couldn’t think of a single time that she’d said something interesting in class or socially. Leanne was pretty, and wore lots of make-up. Her clothes were tight and always showed the outline of her breasts and her slim hips. Leanne didn’t wear charity shop clothes and didn’t care about things like recycling. Whenever Mandy saw her in the toilets she was layering lipstick on her mouth and smacking her lips together, eyeing herself in the mirror to make sure she looked good.

Leanne was
not
the girl for Tommy, she thought miserably.

The whole of Sunday stretched ahead of her. How would she get through it?

She made a decision. She pulled her nightclothes off and put on her jeans and jumper. She slipped into her boots and got a jacket out. She picked up her phone and then left her room, creeping along the landing and tiptoeing quietly downstairs. There was no sound at all from her parents’ room. They were fast asleep. She picked up her key from the hall table and then unhooked the chain on the front door and opened it, turning the lock slowly. She stepped out into the early morning. The mist seemed as though it were clinging to the street lights. She had the key in the lock so that she could turn it as the door closed to avoid any noise. Once it was shut she stood there for a few moments, tensing herself in case a light at the top of the stairs flickered on and her mother came running down. The house remained silent, so she walked on up the street. As she went her eyes grew accustomed to the dark.

It took less than five minutes to get to Princess Street. The roads were hushed, with just a single cyclist in a fluorescent jacket. The newsagent’s was shut. She crossed over to the other side and soon saw the place where the house had been.

A car passed slowly behind her and its headlights lit up the area for a few seconds. The space between the buildings was wide and long. She could see how the owners had got permission for a block of apartments. There was a wire fence across the front and she walked up to it. She frowned when she saw that it’d been pulled away at the side, vandalised already. She stood staring through it and her eyes began to pick out shapes. Two huge trees towering at the back. It looked as though most of the garden had been flattened. Maybe it would become a car park for the tenants.

She looked at the place where the wire had been pulled away from the post. The very bottom of it had curled back on itself. Then she glanced up and down the road. The street lamps were yellow, the mist eddying round the light. A car passed by, slowing down to go over a hump. She wondered who was up so early on a Sunday morning.

She pulled at the loose wire. It came away up to her waist. Then she crouched down on her knees, edged through the gap and stood up quickly on the other side, brushing the dirt from her jeans. She walked over to the wall of one of the adjacent houses and then stood against it so that she wasn’t visible to anyone passing by. From where she was standing she could see the ground that had been under the house. There was a faint outline of bricks, as if someone had drawn a line round the outside wall of what had been the house. Inside the line there was some concrete and earth in places and some slabs of stone sticking up. The area at the back, which had once been the garden, was mostly dug over and looked soft and mulchy. The brick sheds at the back were gone and just the two trees were left standing, looking lonely and out of place.

She edged along the wall until she came to the end of the neighbouring house. The garden fence was high and solid so she walked beside it until she came to the far corner of the garden. She stood in it and looked towards the road. She had seen the house from that position before. She remembered standing there and looking at it on the day that Petra had led them into the garden.

It was an inset training day and they’d been off school. It had been hot, an autumn day that still felt like summer. Petra had made a sudden decision that they should go in. Then she’d said, ‘I dare you!’ and made Tina say it back to her. Mandy had been baffled. What was the point? But Petra and Tina had marched off and she didn’t want to be left behind. She’d followed them into the front garden and then round the side through a gate. They’d emerged into a big overgrown garden. There was a narrow path round the side of the building that led to the back door. The rest of the garden was uncared for, the grass half a metre high, the bushes thick, their foliage reaching out and throwing everything into shade. Mandy could see a couple of white brick sheds. She’d headed towards it and was pleased when Tina followed her. They were only there for moments it seemed when the neighbour appeared. His face had loomed up from behind a bush in the next garden and had given Mandy a start. He wore heavy black glasses and he’d shouted loudly at them. She’d rushed back down the garden, flattening the grass as she went towards the side gate. Tina had followed. Once out, they’d run all the way along the street until they got to the next corner and then they’d stopped, out of breath, Mandy bending over, holding a stitch in her side, Tina looking startled. Then Petra came tearing round the corner and somehow the three of them had started laughing.

Mandy looked hard into the darkness of the garden. She could see the detritus left over by the demolishers. There was a wheelbarrow that had fallen to one side, looking as though it belonged to the old house rather than the workmen. Near where the sheds had been there was a jumble of terracotta pots. There were small piles of bricks scattered around, as if thrown carelessly about.

Just then a car pulled up, slowing right down on the street.

Mandy focused on it, tried to make out what colour it was and who was in it. It came to a stop and she felt immediately tense. She wasn’t supposed to be there. A dreadful thought occurred to her. What if it was someone from the party? She moved sideways until she was standing behind the trunk of one of the big trees. The car sat there for a few moments and Mandy could hear sounds coming from inside it: the heater, the radio, the engine running. Then the driver must have turned the key because it all stopped and the car was silent and still. There were people inside but Mandy couldn’t see them and she couldn’t tell what kind of car it was. Still no one moved. She felt a growing sense of panic. Could it be the people from the demolition company? Had someone come to fix the fence? But at five o’clock in the morning? Was it a security firm? Either way, she couldn’t be caught there. What kind of story would that be for people: after all this time and everything bad that had happened in this house Mandy Crystal
still
couldn’t stay away. What would people say? Her mother? Alison Pointer? Dr Shukla?

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.