Moth Girls

by Anne Cassidy

  She looked around to see who’d just come in. Her eye scanned the room, looking for Tommy. But it wasn’t him; just some kids she didn’t know.

  ‘Are you not staying?’ a voice said.

  It was a Lucy, a girl from her history group. Mandy hardly knew her. She was pointing at her coat.

  ‘I’m feeling a bit cold,’ she said, not wanting to take it off yet.

  ‘How are you finding history? I wish the teacher would stop lecturing. I get so bored.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Actually Mandy didn’t get bored in history but that was because she was sitting beside Tommy. He kept her entertained. She thought it might be dreary otherwise.

  ‘What are you doing in English? I’m in the parallel group.’

  Mandy screwed her face up, trying to think. She’d never spoken to Lucy before. She wondered why the girl had struck up this conversation.

  ‘I think we’re doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’

  ‘I wish we were! We’re starting Antony and Cleopatra after half-term!’

  People were trying to get past them to get to the drinks. Mandy was moving here and there and couldn’t quite hear Lucy.

  ‘Do you want to come into the other room? There’s more space,’ Lucy said, in a louder voice.

  ‘Sure.’

  She followed her out, looking around all the time in case Tommy had come and she had missed him. The living room was bigger and some people were sitting down on the sofa. The music was loud but no one was dancing. Lucy headed over to the window. Mandy noticed that she had really long hair. It had wispy ends like baby hair and Mandy wondered if she was one of those girls who’d never had a haircut.

  She was feeling very hot in her coat. She shrugged her shoulders at Lucy and took it off.

  ‘Warm in here …’ she said.

  ‘Put it over there,’ Lucy said, pointing to a chair in the corner that had coats draped over it.

  After she left her coat she stood by Lucy and kept her eye on the window where she could see the front garden and the path. When Tommy came she would see him.

  ‘I love your beads and bangles. You make them, don’t you? I heard you saying one day. I always wondered why you didn’t do matching earrings.’

  ‘That’s a bit too technical for me. I collect nice and unusual beads. I can string them but I haven’t mastered anything as clever as earrings.’

  ‘My mum could show you. She makes earrings and sells them on a market stall. My mum made these!’

  Lucy pulled her hair back and showed off a beaded earring. It was striking: long and colourful. A little wasted hidden behind Lucy’s heavy hair.

  ‘They’re really pretty.’

  ‘My mum’s really artistic. I’m the opposite. All I seem to do is study. I want to go to Oxford. So I have to get high grades. Are you planning to go to uni?’

  ‘I might. I haven’t thought that far ahead.’

  ‘Oh you need to. Do some research on universities. There are some good ones and some terrible ones. You don’t want to waste your student loan.’

  The music had stopped and there were a few moments of silence. Mandy gazed out of the window. She saw Tommy come up the front path of the house. She stood up straight. He was here. She felt herself smiling. Lucy must have noticed the difference in Mandy because she looked out of the window as well.

  ‘I really like Tommy,’ Lucy said, ‘don’t you? He’s so different from the other guys, so easy to talk to.’

  Mandy nodded, looking down at the red shoes, wondering whether she should have worn them or not.

  ‘I was surprised about him and Leanne getting together!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tommy and Leanne. They’ve been seeing each other. I saw them after school yesterday afternoon. I had a tutorial with my English teacher and I was leaving late and I saw them holding hands.’

  ‘Leanne?’

  Mandy was touching the beads on her necklace, spinning them.

  ‘I was amazed. I knew he was always hanging out with Toni and Leanne but I guess I thought it was Toni he liked. She seems much more like him. You know, a bit zany in the way she dresses. But Leanne?’

  Mandy felt herself weaken. Her shoes seemed higher all of a sudden and she felt she might topple off them. She looked for somewhere to put her beer can.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Lucy said.

  The front door bell rang. Tommy was coming in and Mandy couldn’t face him. Leanne? He was with Leanne?

  ‘I just …’

  Lucy’s face changed. She frowned and seemed to squeeze her lips together.

  ‘You didn’t know.’

  Mandy stood back, behind the living room door, and Lucy moved to stay with her. The music was louder and a couple of girls were dancing, which made the living room look crowded. From behind the door Mandy could hear the sound of Tommy’s voice. Was Leanne with him? That was something she couldn’t face. Lucy was staring at her with concern.

  ‘You like him, don’t you? I didn’t realise. I just thought you were mates. I’m really sorry I said anything.’

  Tommy didn’t come into the living room and Mandy knew he must have gone straight towards the kitchen like most of the partygoers, heading for the table with the drinks.

  ‘Can you get my coat for me?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, don’t go. There are lots of guys here …’

  ‘Please.’

  Lucy seemed to think for a moment, then she strode across the room, and sorted out Mandy’s coat.

  ‘Thanks,’ Mandy said, putting it on. ‘If anyone asks, just say I didn’t feel very well.’

  ‘Sure. Will you be all right?’

  Mandy walked out of the living room, leaving the music behind, and went through the front door as a group of kids came in. No one noticed her; no one said anything. It was like she was invisible. As if she’d never gone to the party at all.

  Nine

  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 s
traight 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 t
urned 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?