Moth Girls (15 page)

They got to the gate.

‘I really don’t fancy going in there!’ Tina hissed.

‘Come on. It’ll be an adventure. We can make up stories about ghosts for Mandy.’

Petra was nervous. Now that she was at the gate, the enormity of what she was about to do hit her. She was going to burst in on an old sick man and tell him that he was in danger. She fiddled with the handle of the gate. It was tight, almost sticky. She wrestled with it, thinking that maybe she
should
turn back. She could make an anonymous phone call to the police. Use one of the payphones in the shopping centre. She almost turned to go when she felt Tina’s hands push hers away as she grasped the handle and wrenched it open.

Tina said, ‘Ta dah!’

Petra pushed the gate open and they both went through.

Mandy was waiting for the counsellor, Debbie Howard. She was in a coffee bar on Holloway Road. She had a drink in front of her which she hadn’t touched. While she was waiting she looked, for the hundredth time, at the postcard that had been sent to her almost two weeks before. Her eyes travelled across it. The picture was the kind you might see on a calendar or a greetings card: just a vase of red roses. Mandy’s finger had traced a path across the vase and touched each of the flowers, trying to find some meaning in them. Then there were the words on the other side: ‘Please don’t tell anyone that you saw me. I will contact you.’ No signature, no other sign of the sender, and yet Mandy knew exactly who had written it.

She looked up and saw Debbie coming into the coffee shop. She was closing an umbrella up and shaking droplets of water around. She came straight across, leaving her wet umbrella by the chair.

‘I’ll get a drink and join you,’ she said. ‘Won’t be a minute.’

Debbie was wearing black clothes again: black jeans and a leather jacket. This was their fourth meeting in two weeks and each time she had worn black. Mandy wondered, for a second, if Debbie could be in mourning for something or perhaps it was just a look she had. Mandy watched as Debbie talked to the woman serving her coffee. Debbie was easy to talk to but this would be their fourth time together and Mandy didn’t really know what to make of her. Mandy pictured Tommy sitting here at the table, chatting amiably to Debbie, his rock-hard briefcase on the floor next to Debbie’s collapsing umbrella. They would get on, Mandy knew; they would have tons of stuff to talk about. It made her feel momentarily weak with jealousy and she pulled herself up straight, took a drink from her cup and tried to fix a smile back on her face.

‘How are you?’ Debbie said breathlessly, placing a tall cup on the table and a single sachet of sugar next to it.

‘I’m good.’

Mandy watched as Debbie shook the sachet rigorously then tore one corner before pouring it into the drink (black coffee as well as black clothes). Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a notepad and pen.

‘What have you been up to?’ she said while flicking through the pages.

‘This and that. Usual things. School, home, school.’

‘Mm …’

Debbie had found the right page and was sitting looking at Mandy. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders and, as if suddenly aware of this, she used her hands to pull it rigorously back behind her ears. Then she let it go and it fell forward again.

‘So, last time we talked a bit about the weeks that led up to your friends’ disappearance and I made some notes. I also spoke to my supervisor and she’s pointed me in the direction of some recent literature on guilt …’

Debbie continued talking about guilt. She kept flicking through her notebook. Mandy thought of Dr Shukla and the notes she had. She remembered the picture on the wall in Dr Shukla’s surgery, the one called
Automat
which showed a young woman sitting in a café in the dead of night drinking from a cup. Mandy glanced around at the tables and booths and wondered what it would be like to sit in this café in the early hours of the morning, to look out on the dark street and see the city at night. Then, thinking of the street at night, she pictured Petra emerging from a car in the early hours of the morning, visiting the house that she’d once disappeared from. She’d stood by the wire and gazed at the remains of the property like a ghost. As soon as Petra heard her name being called she faded back into the car in which she had come.

‘You look as though you’re miles away!’

Debbie was staring at her. She was right. Mandy’s thoughts had travelled a long way. That was how it was lately: she found it hard to concentrate on one thing for very long.

‘Sorry, I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

‘Yes. That’s why we’re here. OK, so where were we? Maybe you could go through those early weeks of the school term again, focusing on your friendship with the two girls.’

Mandy talked again about the events of the first seven weeks at secondary school when she got together with Petra and Tina. Debbie made notes in the pad. Every now and then she asked her something but then went back to writing. When Mandy had said all she could think of, Debbie closed the pad with a flourish. The man behind the counter was gazing over at them. Mandy wondered if he was put out by two people clearly using his café as a meeting room, but Debbie had said she’d done it with other patients. ‘It’s important to get out of a clinical setting and just talk,’ she’d said.

‘I’ve had some thoughts, Mandy, which I’ve shared with my supervisor …’

The word ‘supervisor’ made Mandy think of a boss, but the supervisor in this case was the professor who was overseeing Debbie’s PhD thesis.

‘And she suggested that I read up some studies, in particular American cases …’

‘You mean like the Cleveland girls? The three who were kidnapped and held for ten years …’

‘No, not that. No …’ Debbie looked a touch flustered. ‘No, she suggested I look at some studies of teenage girls who were suffering from depression because of feelings of exclusion. I think some of these may have some relevance to your case.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Debbie flicked through her notebook and stopped at a page crammed with writing. She read for a moment and Mandy felt frustration building. She’d agreed to these meetings because the counsellor was from outside, not someone she’d seen before. But the sessions hadn’t produced anything new. It had been Debbie asking the same old questions and her telling the same old story. Now she was going to tell her she was depressed? She knew that!

‘If we divide up the events of five years ago there are three strands. Firstly, your friendship with the two girls, secondly, you refused to go into the house with the two girls and thirdly, you told no one where they went for five hours.’

Mandy was interested now. It had never been put to her like this before.

‘Let’s start with the third one: you told no one about the girls going into the house. This is clearly an action you took that had grave consequences. You were twelve years old and your reasons were clear. You didn’t want to get into trouble. It was not the case that you thought,
I know Petra and Tina are in that house and I know that something terrible is happening to them but I’m not going to tell anyone.
No, you simply did what most people do and looked out for yourself.’

It sounded bald, hard, selfish. Mandy glanced round, afraid that someone might hear Debbie, but no one was nearby. Behind the counter the man was intent on polishing the veneer of the coffee machine, making small circles with a cloth.

‘Let’s look at the second point,’ Debbie said. ‘You refused to go into the house with the two girls. I want you to consider this. Are you feeling bad about this because you let them down in some way? Perhaps you feel that you should have gone with them, as part of the group. Or maybe you feel that you should have persuaded them not to go and that gives you pain.’

Mandy thought about this. Had she felt anything specific about them going into the house without her? Normally her feelings seemed like one tight ball but now she was being asked to pull them apart, like peeling petals from a closed flower.

‘Lastly, let’s look the first point: your friendship with the two girls. You spent the time leading up to the tragedy trying to be part of this friendship group, and there are things that you’ve said, certainly to Dr Shukla in the past, that indicate that you were aggrieved that they did not accept you with open arms. I want to suggest that a big part of the pain – the depression – you are feeling may be to do with this unresolved feeling of rejection from these two girls. Or at least from one of these girls –
Petra
. This is why, I believe, it was
Petra
you thought you saw on the bus those times. Tina, who did accept your friendship and was warm towards you, does not haunt you in the way Petra does. When I say “haunt”, I’m speaking metaphorically.’

Mandy sat back in her chair and folded her arms. She didn’t answer. Her sense of frustration had gone and she was thinking about what Debbie had said. She’d always wondered why it was Petra she saw those times and not Tina. Could it be that she was unhappy because of Petra’s rejection of her? What sort of person did that make her though? That she was more upset about her own hurt feelings than the fact that two girls had disappeared?

‘I just want you to think about these things for me. You have a lot of hurt inside you. What we have to do is isolate the things that we can mend.’

‘What about the things we can’t mend?’

‘You have to find a way to live with those. You were twelve years old. If those girls are indeed dead, as everyone thinks they are, then you have to understand that it was not
you
who killed them.’

Debbie closed her book and slid it into a pocket in her bag. She stirred the rest of her coffee before drinking it down in one go.

‘I have to make a move,’ she said, picking up her umbrella and fussing with the flaps. ‘I have a lecture to go to. But I’ll see you after school on Thursday? Same time, same place?’

Mandy watched her leave the café. She thought, for a moment, how detached Debbie seemed, as if none of the emotions ever affected her. Maybe this was the reason Mandy felt comfortable with her. She was tired of wallowing in feelings; she wanted answers and Debbie seemed able to give them to her. Through the window she saw her put up the umbrella and walk off. Then she sat for a while with her hands around the cup even though her drink was finished.

If those two girls are dead as everyone thinks they are …

Now there was another problem. One she couldn’t tell Debbie about. One of the two girls was not dead, Mandy knew. She had seen her with her own eyes. It was no manifestation of her own guilt, it was the real-life person of Petra. And she had received a postcard from her. ‘I will contact you,’ it said. That had been two weeks ago.

Mandy was waiting for that contact: a call, a letter, another glimpse of Petra.

She was still waiting.

Mandy had a text from Jon Wallis.

Got something re that girl you asked about.

All day Mandy looked for him. He wasn’t in the sixth-form common room and a couple of the boys she spoke to said he was coming in late. They also gave her a suggestive look when she asked them what time he was due in. She ignored it, pretending she didn’t understand what it was they were implying. At lunchtime she went to the dining hall and scanned the room to see if he was at one of the tables. Then she left the school site and walked to the local shops and café that a lot of the kids used. He was nowhere to be seen.

She sent him three texts all asking him to find her asap.

She had history in the afternoon and she deliberately got there late so that she could sit in the seat nearest the door and not have the choice to sit by Tommy. He waved across at her and she smiled at him and got on with taking notes. He must have known that she was avoiding spending time with him. Returning to school after the half-term she’d said, ‘I’m so behind on assignments, I’m going to be stuck in the library for most of this week!’ He’d given her a sympathetic expression but she’d caught his eye as he did it and in that moment she knew that he understood. She’d felt her face warm up and flustered through a list of things she had to complete but his look had told her everything. He’d
known
how she felt about him. He knew why she was shying away from him.

She’d seen him and Leanne in the common room on the first morning back. They sat together and Leanne whispered things in his ear, her mouth almost touching his skin. Leanne looked her usual doll-like self, her hair hanging down over one shoulder. Even though the weather had turned cold she was still wearing short sleeves and a light jacket, which meant she did a lot of shivering. Later that day Mandy had seen her walking around with one of Tommy’s jumpers draped over her shoulders, the arms tied together, the cuffs hanging over her breasts.

She didn’t hate Leanne. She was just angry with herself for not realising the kind of girl that Tommy wanted. Not someone like Mandy. When she bumped into Tommy alone in the corridor or outside a classroom they fell into their old chatter, talking about films and books, but later when she saw him with his arm around Leanne it gave her a gnawing pain.

After history Mandy had a free period and went to the library. She found a carrel and placed her books open in front of her so that it looked as though she were hard at work. It wasn’t long before her mind went back to Petra and the fact that it was two weeks and one day since she’d been contacted. Every day she’d woken up and wondered if this was to be the day when she got a phone call or a message of some sort from her. She felt it keenly when she was out somewhere, sure that Petra would approach her then. She pictured herself walking along Holloway Road and being called at by someone across the way, or perhaps if she was in a sandwich shop choosing something for lunch there would be a tap on her shoulder and Petra would be there standing behind her and Mandy would say, ‘My God, Petra, I thought you were dead.’ But fifteen days had gone by without a word and now Mandy began to think that she wouldn’t hear anything from her at all. Her appearance at the house over two weeks ago would be as much a mystery as her disappearance at that very same house five years before.

Was there anything Mandy could do? She knew what she had seen. She had the postcard. Should she go to the police? Find Officer Farraday and talk to him? He would think she was mad though, especially when she described going to the demolition site early in the morning. And Dr Shukla, if asked, would tell them that she had imagined Petra years before and that now she was seeing a counsellor for depression. No one would believe Mandy. Five years ago they wished she’d spoken up, told them where the girls had gone. Now they would wish her to shut up, to keep her imaginings to herself.

She did some work, taking notes on the first scene of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. She read the dialogue and noted down character points. Then she sat with her chin on her hand and gazed round the library. There were some boys from the upper sixth on the computers. The boy she’d asked about Jon Wallis was there and he gave her a knowing look. She turned away, cross. She thought of Jon’s text and pulled her phone out to check that he hadn’t tried to contact her again. There was no answer to her text. What
was
it that he wanted to tell her? On the day when he’d given her the envelope from Petra she’d quizzed him over and over. ‘What did the girl say? Exactly? Word for word? What did she look like? What was she wearing? What about the car she was in?’ He’d not really taken any notice, he’d said. She’d walked up and asked him to give the envelope to Mandy Crystal. Then she’d gone back towards a car, a white car, he thought. She was young with shoulder-length reddish hair and was wearing dark trousers and a top that was like a uniform of some sort. That was all he could remember.

‘Hi, Mandy,’ a voice said.

She turned and saw Lucy standing by the carrel – the girl she’d talked to at Zoe’s party. She’d seen her at lunch a couple of days before and they’d chatted for a while, mostly about the poor food. Lucy hadn’t alluded to the party or the fact that she knew how upset Mandy had been. Mandy was grateful for that but felt awkward with her. She didn’t even know her second name.

‘What are you up to?’ Lucy said.

‘Just taking some notes. Catching up on work.’

‘I’m behind too. There’s so much reading to do …’

‘I know.’

Lucy looked around the library, her mouth open as though she was about to talk. Mandy waited, glancing back at her notes, not sure what to say.

‘I wondered,’ Lucy said, tentatively, ‘if you’d like to come over to my house at the weekend? My mum will be there and she said she’d love to show you how to make some earrings.’

‘Oh.’

Mandy looked away, at her book, at her notes, embarrassed. Lucy was making an attempt at
friendship
. She had no room in life for a new friend.

‘Just for a couple of hours. I live quite near you.’

‘That sounds good,’ Mandy said, pulling herself together. ‘I’ll just check with my mum? I’m not sure if she’s got plans for the weekend. Can I text you?’

‘Sure,’ Lucy said.

‘Here, write your number down for me.’

Mandy pushed the corner of her notepad over to the edge of the carrel and held out her pen for Lucy. Lucy took it and scribbled her mobile number down.

‘See you later,’ Lucy said and walked off.

When the library door closed Mandy felt bad. Lucy was being kind, she knew. She probably thought that now Mandy had lost Tommy she had a vacancy for a friend. That was the last thing Mandy wanted. She saw the screen of her phone light up. There was a message from Jon.

I’m in the common room now.

She replied:

Be there soon.

Mandy packed her stuff away and headed off.

Jon Wallis was sitting by the window, looking at his phone. There were other kids around but no one was nearby. When she walked in he looked up and smiled, leaning forward in his chair and placing his phone on the low table in front. His hair looked long, shaggy almost. She was sure he used to keep it short. When had it grown? She hadn’t noticed.

‘Hi,’ she said, putting her bag on the seat beside him and sitting on the next one along.

‘How are you?’ Jon said.

‘OK.’

‘I see your best mate has got himself a girlfriend.’

‘Yeah …’ Mandy looked down at her bag; there was dust all over the bottom of it. She brushed it away.

‘I thought you and him …’

‘No, no. Not at all. We’re just mates.’

‘I thought he was gay, anyway.’

‘Why? Because of the way he dresses?’

‘No. Well, that too. No, there’s something about him.’

‘He’s not.’

‘Don’t matter to me whether he is or not. I was just saying.’

‘So,’ Mandy said, trying to pull the conversation back on track, ‘you said you had something to tell me about the girl who gave you the letter for me.’

Jon nodded. Mandy waited.

‘There’s something I don’t get, though,’ he said. ‘How come you don’t know this person? Why would someone you don’t know send you a letter via your school?’

Mandy frowned. She could feel her face was screwed up because she genuinely didn’t know how to answer him. Why hadn’t she considered this? That he would be puzzled, intrigued even. She couldn’t tell him the truth though. She sighed.

‘If I tell you, you have to promise not to say a word to anyone.’

Jon leant forward, his face rapt with curiosity. She lowered her voice, even though there was no one nearby to hear them.

‘That letter? It was an anonymous note about the missing girls. I don’t know if it’s a fake or a joke or what. I don’t want to take it to the police in case it means nothing and gets everyone’s hopes up. I’ve had them before, over the years: letters, phone calls about the girls.’

The lies came easily. Jon sat up and assumed a serious expression. This was what happened to most kids she knew whenever she mentioned ‘the girls’. It was shorthand for years of sadness and loss. Kids always seemed to stiffen up, look at her in a kindly but distant way. It was why she’d clicked with Tommy so quickly. He’d reacted differently.

‘So if I could find out who this person was who gave the envelope to you then I could work out how genuine it was …’

‘Right. Well, I won’t say a word to anyone,’ he said. ‘So, yesterday, we went on a trip to the British Museum. We were doing some primary research, looking at old manuscripts. It was pretty good as it goes …’

‘Yes?’ Mandy said.

‘Anyway, a few of us went out for a walk around at lunchtime and I saw this car parked on a double yellow line and half up on the pavement. It was a car – not a van – and on the back, on the hatch window, it had some italic writing. It was for cakes. I wrote it down here.’

Jon pulled something out of his trouser pocket. It was a scrap of newspaper, the corner of a page that had been torn off. On the margin was some handwriting. He read it out.

‘“Paris Patisserie. We deliver to your door.” There’s a phone number as well.’

She didn’t say anything, unsure as to what he was offering her.

‘As soon as I saw the car and the writing on the back I felt as if I’d seen it somewhere before. Then I remembered. It was on the back of the car that the girl got into. The one who gave me the letter for you. It was the word “Patisserie” that I noticed because it’s unusual.’

‘Did you see the girl again?’

‘No, the car was empty. Maybe they were delivering stuff. I don’t know. But I thought I’d tell you. It would be easy to look on the web and find out where the shop is.’

‘Yes,’ Mandy said.

‘Then you could go and ask around. See who worked there. Unless it’s a huge place you should be able to spot her. Do you want me to come with you? I could come along, if you felt nervous about going on your own.’

Mandy was surprised. It was the second time that day she’d been offered some sort of friendship. The last one she’d all but turned down. She had no intention of taking anyone with her to find Petra but she didn’t want to sound ungrateful.

‘Maybe. Or maybe, after I’ve been to check it out, we could have a coffee. A way of me saying thank you.’

Jon nodded. ‘Send me a text.’