Moth Girls

by Anne Cassidy

  ‘How do I look?’ he said.

  ‘Good. Who are you picking up?’

  ‘New client, Mr Constantine. Off the books so no tax. A mate gave him my name. I’m meeting him at Heathrow then he wants me to drive him round a number of places in the West End.’

  ‘Like a chauffeur?’

  ‘Kind of. It might become a regular thing. Give me a bit of cash in the bank. It’s better than just taking people to hospital and back day after day! You’ll be OK? Round your friend’s? I won’t be back till morning.’

  ‘Course.’

  He picked up his phone from the table.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said and held it out in the air.

  A ringtone sounded. It was the theme tune of a television programme. Petra smiled. Her dad was always getting new ringtones and playing them to her.

  ‘Cool, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, rolling her eyes. No one said ‘cool’ any more.

  He put his phone in his jacket pocket and looked as if he was about to go. He hesitated though and turned back to Petra.

  ‘We’re all right, aren’t we? You and me? After the other night. No hard feelings?’

  Petra frowned. She looked down at the ironing board. The cover was stretched and the thin foam backing was showing through in places. They really needed a new one but they never seemed to get round to buying it.

  ‘I had a few too many; you know that, don’t you? I wasn’t myself.’

  Petra glanced at her forearm. The sleeve of her blouse covered her skin. When she looked up her dad caught her eye. He looked expectant, as though there was some particular thing he was waiting for her to say.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I understand.’

  He stepped across to her, put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a kiss on the head. She could smell his aftershave and feel the heat of his body.

  ‘You get me, Petra, don’t you? You know I don’t mean any harm,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re my best girl.’

  A music track sounded from the radio in his bedroom and he let go of her. He began to dance backwards, his eyes closed, his fists keeping the beat.

  ‘You should go,’ she said. ‘You might be late.’

  ‘Chop! Chop! You’re right. See you, love!’

  When the front door shut, she found herself relaxing. The music was still playing from her dad’s bedroom so she walked in and turned the radio off. His room was in disarray, his discarded clothes lying across the bed, his shoes at angles on the floor beside a pair of trainers. She made a tsking sound. He liked his things kept in order. She picked up the clothes and put them in the washing basket. Then she tidied the shoes, lining them up along the edge of his wardrobe. She smoothed the duvet and walked across to his window. She put her arm up to draw the curtain. The cuff on her blouse fell back and she saw the bruise then, a splash of navy that would slowly turn yellow and brown. At least her wrist wasn’t painful any more.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He’d just lost his temper.

  She closed his bedroom door and felt her spirits rise. There was the sleepover to look forward to.

  On the way to Tina’s house she thought about The Red Roses. Their performance wasn’t as polished as she wanted it to be. And the new girl in school, Mandy, was getting on her nerves, always mooning around. She’d told her, nicely, that she couldn’t be in the group and she’d said that was fine, but Petra had seen how enviously she looked at them when they were rehearsing.

  The Red Roses had been Petra’s idea. She’d decided that she and Tina would form a group. They sang songs at Tina’s mum’s birthday party. They wore black leggings and red T-shirts and had silk roses in their hair that were fastened onto headbands. They wore deep red lipstick and sang hits from the charts using a karaoke machine.

  One day they might go on one of the talent shows on television.

  In school they didn’t use the machine, just practised their singing and their dance moves and designed costumes for their performances. They intended to ask Miss Pearce if they could perform at a year assembly but not until they were word-perfect and their dances were choreographed. When Mandy started at the school and hung round with them she acted as a kind of audience. They were definitely going to make a short film for YouTube.

  Petra turned the corner onto Princess Street. It was still light and there were kids in school uniform hanging around the newsagent’s. She looked away as she passed them and crossed the road towards the turning for Tina’s street. She sighed as she thought back to Mandy. She didn’t dislike her, but it was odd having someone new around. Mandy’s mother was friendly with Tina’s so they couldn’t ignore her. But Petra and Tina had been best friends for as long as she could remember. It had always just been the two of them. Now Mandy was always there and it made Petra a little insecure.

  Tonight though it was just her and Tina.

  She was approaching number fifty-three Princess Street. When Petra was on her own she often slowed down at this garden wall and stared at the house. The place had fascinated her for the last few months, ever since the day her dad had pulled up at it to deliver a package. She’d waited in his cab while he’d gone in the side gate and then come out moments later. Now she came to a complete stop and scrutinised it. The house was bigger and older than all the others in the street and it was crumbling. The brickwork was chipped and battered, and the wood around the windows was fraying, the paintwork peeling off like skin. The solid wood front door had had its corner eaten away by something. The guttering was hanging down and when it was raining a stream of water poured from it.

  It was broken down. If it’d been a car it would’ve been taken to the scrapyard.

  No one ever saw the owner. Her dad had told her about him though. His name was Mr Merchant. He knew because he sometimes did errands for him. Mr Merchant was a recluse, which meant he never went out. He was thin, his legs like sticks. He could hardly get off his chair to answer the door. He lived in a room at the front of the house, her dad said. The rest of the place was unused. Every single room had been taken over by cobwebs and if you looked hard enough you could see mice darting in-between the skirting boards.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing, he said. At times there were mysterious knocking sounds that came from upstairs, even though Mr Merchant clearly lived alone. Once or twice, her dad said, he had glimpsed some shadowy movements in the hallway. One night, after bringing Mr Merchant some shopping, he’d gone up the stairs to check that no one had broken in and had felt something brushing at the back of his neck. He said it’d made his skin crawl.

  Petra had shivered at this thought.

  She’d pointed it out to Mandy a couple of days ago when they were walking home from school. Mandy had said, ‘What a dump!’ Petra had been put out by this. That was the trouble with new friends. Their thinking wasn’t always the same as yours. Tina knew that Petra was interested in this house so she chatted to her about it. Tina understood Petra. One day Petra had told her that the two of them (without Mandy) would creep into the house to have a look around. Tina had made a face at this but Petra wasn’t worried. She could always persuade Tina to do the things she wanted her to do.

  Later that night, after they’d watched recordings of some X Factor and eaten pizza, crisps and ice cream, she suggested to Tina that they should become blood sisters. Tina agreed instantly. Petra explained, solemnly, that Mandy was not to know about it. Tina promised and crossed the fingers on both hands. When it was time for them to go to bed Petra smuggled a knife from Tina’s mum’s kitchen up to the bedroom. When the house had gone quiet and she was sure Tina’s mum was asleep she pulled it out from under her pillow and sliced the top of her thumb with it.

  ‘Oh!’ Tina whispered loudly, her face shocked.

  Petra moaned quietly as blood oozed from the cut. She held her thumb in the air and ignored the sharp stinging pain that came from it.

  ‘Your turn,’ she whispered to Ti
na, holding the knife out.

  Tina looked a bit sick and shook her head rapidly.

  ‘Just a tiny prick.’

  ‘I don’t … My mum will …’

  Petra grabbed Tina’s thumb and held the point of the knife to her skin. Tina’s eyes were tightly closed and she was baring her teeth. Petra felt a moment’s hesitation. She’d done it to herself but it was harder to do it to someone else. Especially as she felt Tina pulling her arm back. She glanced at her own thumb now, dripping blood onto her T-shirt. She quickly pushed the point of the blade onto the soft pad of Tina’s thumb.

  ‘Ow!’

  Tina opened her eyes and saw her blood.

  ‘Quick!’

  Petra placed her thumb on top of Tina’s. Using her other hand she put pressure on each thumb, pushing them tightly together.

  ‘So that our blood can mingle,’ she explained to Tina who was looking queasy.

  ‘Are we blood sisters now?’ Tina said.

  ‘For ever,’ Petra said.

  Tina glanced down at Petra’s forearm. The bruise was there: a dark cloud on her skin.

  ‘I knocked into something,’ she said, still holding the thumbs together.

  Tina averted her eyes. She had seen Petra’s bruises before.

  The next day, Petra got back to the flat just after two. As soon as she opened the door she saw her dad’s keys on the hall table. The place was silent though: no radio, no television. He had gone to bed. In the living room his jacket was draped across the back of the sofa and there was a cup and plate on the coffee table. His bedroom door was shut and from inside she could hear the low sound of snoring.

  She dropped her bag and went towards the kitchen. On top of the workshop was a sheet of paper. Her dad’s handwriting was scrawled across it.

  Don’t cook anything. Sophie is bringing a takeaway. Dad.

  Her dad insisted on calling his girlfriend ‘Sophie’. Zofia was amused by it. ‘It’s easier for English people to say Sophie.’ But Petra liked the polish name: Zofia Banach from Warsaw. Her phone vibrated and she pulled it out of her pocket. It was another text. Perhaps Zofia sensed in some way that Petra was thinking of her. She opened it up.

  I buy Chinese, moja mała róża, OK?

  Moja mała róża was Polish for ‘my little rose’. Zofia had started to use it after she’d explained about her and Tina’s duo, The Red Roses.

  Zofia’s texts always made her smile.

  Her dad used to smile a lot when he first brought Zofia to the flat, when they started seeing each other. Nowadays, though, he mostly looked serious and sometimes a little irritated by her. Zofia didn’t seem to notice. Petra had watched Zofia humming while making her dad a cup of tea and then seen him roll his eyes at something she said. It made her feel sad to see it.

  She found herself frowning and used her hand to rub at her wrist, which had started to ache again. She tried to push gloomy thoughts out of her mind. It was her birthday. There was the Chinese to look forward to and Zofia would certainly have bought her a present.

  Twelve

  Zofia was washing the plates and Petra was drying up. Her dad was watching football on the television in the front room. There was a pile of silver cartons on the worktop that the food had come in. Over one of the chairs was a red nightie that Zofia had bought Petra for her birthday. It was exactly the same shade as the clothes she wore for The Red Roses. In the middle of the table was Zofia’s card to Petra. It was pink and had sparkles on it.

  From the living room the sound of cheering was loud. It felt like a normal family evening. Petra could imagine Tina standing in her kitchen, drying up the plates for her mum. Tina’s dad wouldn’t be there of course, he would be in South London with the beautician he’d moved in with some months before. Tina’s life would always seem more normal than Petra’s though. She wondered, for a second, about Mandy. She lived with her mum and dad, so she was the most normal of the three of them.

  Petra chewed at the side of her lip. She didn’t really like comparing her life to that of other people. She hadn’t, not until Mandy had started to hang round with them. Mandy was always so well turned out, her hair neatly brushed and held back with ties. Petra would bet that even her shoes were polished. She always did her homework, had packets of highlighters in her bag and all her books were covered with posh paper.

  ‘What happened, Anioł?’ Zofia said, touching the plaster on Petra’s thumb.

  Anioł was the Polish word for ‘angel’.

  ‘Cut it on a piece of paper.’

  Zofia frowned as if she didn’t believe her. They were looking directly at each other because Zofia was small, just a shade taller than Petra. She wore heels all the time and she was always squaring her shoulders and straightening her neck. Her red hair was often up in a ponytail or a bun because it gave her a few more centimetres of height. The nice thing about looking straight at Zofia was that it made it seem as though she was a friend and not a woman who happened to be her dad’s girlfriend.

  ‘How is school?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And Tina is good?’

  ‘OK. But we’ve got this other girl who hangs around with us now and she gets on my nerves a bit.’

  ‘Two is good. Three not so good? Too many arguments. My sister, Klara, she had one close friend. And many other not-so-close friends. But two close friends can be trouble.’

  Petra didn’t know how to answer this. She knew that Zofia’s sister had died of leukaemia when she was twelve years old. It’d happened a couple of years ago and Zofia often spoke about her. It was always awkward when she came up in conversation. Petra didn’t know whether to respond or to try to ignore it in case Zofia got upset. Today she almost asked a question. ‘What was Klara’s best friend like?’ she wanted to say and then maybe compare her in some way to her best friend, Tina. But before she spoke she thought of Tina living closer to Mandy than she did. She felt a twist of anxiety in her chest and momentarily forgot about Klara.

  Zofia dried her hands on the tea towel and Petra focused on her nails. Today they were yellow and had tiny pink stars stuck to them. Zofia worked in a nail shop with her friend Marya. They were always practising on each other’s nails. Zofia saw her looking.

  ‘Did I tell you Marya is going back to Poland? Her boyfriend has asked her to marry him.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He’s asked her three times before. I told her to dump him but she is in love! You can’t change the mind of someone in love.’

  ‘You’ll miss her.’

  ‘Lucky I have you. You’ll be my girlfriend. And I was thinking we should go shopping. I buy you some new jeans. These are tight. I think they are old.’

  Petra looked down at her jeans. They were old, the knees almost white and the zip fraying. She’d got taller since she’d bought them and she knew they were too short, but her trainers were bulky so it didn’t really show.

  ‘And maybe jumper?’

  ‘Great. When?’ Petra said.

  ‘I get paid Friday. Meet me at Angel tube at five thirty and we’ll go shopping.’

  Zofia folded the tea towel up into a neat oblong. Then she went into the living room and Petra heard her dad speak. They were talking quietly, her dad’s voice a little choppy, Zofia’s silky tones underneath. Petra couldn’t work out if they were getting on all right or not. They’d seemed quiet while eating and her dad had been looking at his phone a lot. It was hard to understand people’s relationships.