Moth Girls (12 page)

Petra turned to look at the back of the house. The upstairs windows had curtains drawn across them but the downstairs ones did not. They were thick with grime but she still looked at them cautiously, half expecting to see the old man’s face again, his hand up waving at her. She could hear Tina talking loudly from behind her and wanted to shush her but her eye was drawn to the door through which her dad went in and out of Mr Merchant’s home. It was surrounded with close-knit ivy which had come from a trellis further along. It had travelled across the brickwork as if it were intent on gaining entry to the house. Her eye searched through the thick strands until she saw the glint of a key hanging from a hook. She picked it off. It was a Chubb-type key and attached to it was a leather key ring. It had some initials on it: ‘
GM’
in italics. Were they Mr Merchant’s initials?

A voice sounded. It made her jump.

She spun round to loud shouts. Tina and Mandy were running back down the garden, heading for the side passageway. She looked towards the house next door and saw a man standing by a broken fence. He was wearing black glasses and his face was red, his words booming angrily across the bushes and overgrown grass. ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ He was big, his belly hanging over his trousers, a split at the bottom of his shirt where the buttons wouldn’t fasten. She turned, lowered her head and walked swiftly to the corner and then ran out of the garden hurriedly, closing the gate behind her. The others had gone and as she stepped onto the pavement she saw their backs disappearing round the corner.

She followed them, running as fast as she could. When she turned out of Princess Street she saw they had stopped about twenty metres on. Tina was standing puffing, one hand on a wall. Mandy was beside her with a frightened look on her face. She walked up to them.

They all stared at each other.

They’d been chased out of the garden by the next-door neighbour.

‘Do you think he’ll tell my mum?’ Mandy said.

Moments before she’d been the intrepid explorer and now she was falling apart. Petra shook her head. Tina started to laugh and it made Petra smile.

‘Did you see his face? Like a strawberry!’

‘And his belly,’ Petra said, sticking her stomach out as if she were pregnant. She put on a deep voice. ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’

‘Don’t worry, Mandy. He doesn’t know who we are,’ Tina said.

Mandy seemed to relax. She dropped her hands and her mouth loosened, and she gave a weak smile. Moments later they walked back towards Tina’s. They took a long circuitous route so that they didn’t have to go along Princess Street again.

Petra thought about the garden though, and the Chubb key, and she wondered why her dad had bought shopping for Mr Merchant when he had carers to do that sort of thing for him.

Zofia was wearing a red dress. On top of that was a floral apron. There was no bruise around her eye and she had mascara on again. She looked like the old Zofia.

‘Come in! Lunch almost ready.’

The house was warm and there was a strong smell of cooking. Petra slipped her coat off immediately and hung it on the hall stand. In the hallway were two suitcases. Maybe there were some new people in the house. She went into the kitchen. Zofia was on her own. There was steam, rising from a pot on the stove. Zofia’s back was to her and she was humming. Petra went to say something but didn’t. The kitchen table was set with two places. At each place was a stemmed glass. Zofia collected them in charity shops. She liked the ones with floral patterns best. She had a shelf full of them. The room looked welcoming but there was something not quite right – Petra could feel it, like a vague smell that she couldn’t identify. There was the sound of footsteps from above. Somebody was in; Petra didn’t know who it was because the people staying in the house were always changing.

Zofia turned to her. She beamed a smile.

‘Sunday roast. Chicken and Yorkshire puddings and gravy. Is good,’ she said, ‘but not ready for half hour. You go and watch television in my room –
Friends
DVD there. I will come up in a minute.’

‘OK.’

Petra headed upstairs for Zofia’s bedroom. When she got there she saw that things had been moved round. There were some clothes folded in a pile and the ironing board was leaning against the wall. There was a clothes horse by the radiator where Zofia had hung some of her blouses to dry and she could see the legs of tights hanging down. The
Friends
DVD was placed on the bed.

The room felt different. She looked around. There was something missing or it just seemed bigger today, even though it was full of drying laundry. She sat on the bed and picked up the DVD. She lay back. She didn’t feel like watching it. She was tired. She’d hardly slept the previous night. It shouldn’t be called a
sleepover
at all, she thought. She, Tina and Mandy had been in Mandy’s living room. They’d had sleeping bags laid on top of old duvets. They’d made posters, watched films and talked and made plans for The Red Roses. Mandy’s mum had allowed them in the kitchen to make snacks and take drinks whenever they wanted. Actually, the whole night hadn’t been bad. They’d laughed a lot and taken hours to get to sleep. Petra smiled when she thought of it. At just gone two Mandy’s mother had come down the stairs and opened the door a few centimetres. ‘Lights off; time to go to sleep,’ she’d whispered. They’d turned the light off and lay in the dark with only a strip of light showing below the curtains from out in the street. There had been silence for a long time and then Mandy whispered, ‘Lights off; time to go to sleep,’ and that set them off giggling. Then every time they were silent one of them would spurt out, ‘Lights off,’ until the three of them were ragged with laughter and fatigue. Somehow they had each drifted into some sort of sleep. When Petra woke up it was almost eleven. The room was grey and the others were still burrowed into the sleeping bags.

Petra sat up. There
was
something different about Zofia’s room. The pictures were gone. She looked to the side of the bed and saw that most of the photographs of Klara were missing. There were just two small ones left.

The door opened and Zofia came in. She’d taken her apron off and was smiling.

‘Lunch in ten minutes,’ she said.

She sat on the bed beside Petra. She picked up the DVD and held it in her hand. Petra wondered whether they were just going to watch ten minutes’ worth of an episode and then eat. Zofia was just fiddling with the box though, turning it right way up then sideways then flipping it over as if she were reading the information on the other side. Then she spoke.

‘You know that me and your dad have broke up?’

Petra didn’t answer. She didn’t want to say anything. She’d been persuading herself otherwise, ever since she’d seen the black eye. She’d known it really though, in her heart, but not admitted it to herself.

‘This happens,’ Zofia said. ‘People get along very good for a while and then they don’t. Is just life.’

Petra sat very still, her elbows pushing against her ribs. She pictured Zofia’s eye, the bruise dark as though it had been drawn on with charcoal.

‘Did my dad hit you?’ she said, her voice tiny.

‘No, no. No, he didn’t. The bruise you saw on this eye? No, no, I knocked into the door. I was a bit drunk. That’s the truth.’

But Zofia was turning the DVD case in her fingers, quickly and deftly. Petra
felt
that she was lying. She wondered if there had been other times when he’d hit out at her. They’d been together for many months. Had there been bruises that Petra hadn’t noticed, like the ones
she
tried to hide from Tina?

‘So, we have lunch? And you and me are still friends. You can come and see me and we can go to Angel.’

Petra stood up.

‘For a while,’ Zofia said.

Zofia didn’t move. There was more to come in this conversation. Petra lowered herself down onto the bed again. She took the DVD from Zofia’s hands. It was series three. The one where Ross and Rachel break up. He slept with someone else because he was ‘on a break’, but Rachel didn’t agree. It was one of Zofia’s favourite episodes.

‘Why
for a while
?’

‘Marya is going to Poland? I told you this?’

Petra nodded.

‘She has friend who is opening a hair and nail shop in Lodz. This friend has inherited money from her father and she is selling her home and …’

Zofia seemed to dry up and looked as though she was thinking hard.

‘And to tell the story more quickly, this friend has asked Marya to work with her and build up business?’

Petra was listening hard, trying to work out where the story was going, and then she remembered the pictures that were missing from Zofia’s wall.

‘So, Marya said to me …’

‘You’re going back to Poland with Marya.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is my home. I thought here, you know, with your father …’

‘But it might be all right. You might get back together.’

Zofia shook her head. She did it with such firmness that her ponytail moved dramatically. Her eyelids were lowered and her jaw sharp.

‘No. Finished.’

‘But you can’t go back. You live here.’

‘You can send me email. I can phone you and when I come to London again, maybe in a couple of years, we can meet up and have Pizza Express.’

Petra’s mouth was dry. She didn’t know what to say. She felt a dragging sense of loss even though Zofia was sitting there beside her. In her head she saw her standing holding a suitcase and a holdall. She’d be wearing her old jeans to travel in and maybe not have her nails done. She’d get on a train or plane or maybe go through the Channel Tunnel and Petra would never see her again.

‘Are you going with Marya?’

‘Not so soon. Marya goes in four days. We have a friend with a van and he is going to drive her things there. No, I don’t go for two weeks. Our friend and the van come back for me. I go thirty-first of October. Halloween. So there is plenty of time. Oh, look. I got this for you.’

Zofia opened her bedside drawer and pulled out a cosmetics bag exactly like the one that she’d left round the flat the previous week, pink with black squiggles across it.

‘Now we have the same bag.’

Petra took it. Another day it would have given her a lot of pleasure; today it just seemed like a postcard from a far-off place. Zofia would be living a thousand kilometres away and Petra would only have the comfort of this gaudy little bag.

‘Let us have lunch. Then we can watch some
Friends
? Yes?’ Zofia said.

They sat at the kitchen table opposite each other. Petra had Coke in her stemmed glass and Zofia had some red wine. There was music coming from a radio, low and relaxing, and Zofia was talking about the Big Boss who came into the nail shop with four different girlfriends and how the staff had to pretend that each one was his
only
girlfriend. Petra wasn’t really listening. She moved her food around the plate and tried to convince herself that it might still be OK, her dad might change his mind. But then something occurred to her. What if it wasn’t her dad who was breaking up with Zofia? What if it was the other way round? Zofia had decided that her dad was not a good bet.

That phrase ‘a good bet’ came straight from her gran’s mouth. ‘The trouble with your dad is that he’s not a good bet.’ As if he were a horse in a race that he would never win. There were other things she used to say as well. ‘Your dad loves you but he has trouble controlling himself. There’s this line that he tries to stay above …’ Petra had pictured a line drawn with a ruler and a black felt-tip pen. ‘But sometimes he slips below it, then he becomes someone else.’ She’d had an image of her dad, a small figure below the line, one hand holding onto it, the rest of him dangling.

She felt herself trembling and thought that she might cry.

Zofia was still talking about the Big Boss who sent her out to buy a mobile phone for each girlfriend. ‘He wanted different covers for each one. He knew his girlfriends’ favourite colours!’ Then she stopped speaking and there was just the sound of the radio playing. Zofia looked up from her food and stared at Petra. Her face sagged. She put down her knife and fork.

‘Don’t cry,
moja mała ró
ż
a
…’

But Petra couldn’t help it. Her knife and fork lay half on, half off the plate as she covered up her eyes. Tears ran down her face. She couldn’t stop them. Soon Zofia would be gone and her life would seem bland, bleached of colour. She sobbed, using her fingers to flick the tears away. Zofia grabbed her hand. She held it tightly, her fingers locked around Petra’s as if Petra were on the edge of a building, about to fall off.

The sound of the front door bell ringing pierced the room.

They both looked round. Petra swallowed back her tears. Zofia got up.

‘Someone has forgot key. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Petra pushed her plate away, most of her food uneaten. She heard Zofia open the front door. There was a brief conversation then footsteps up the hall. Zofia called out. It sounded as though she was saying, ‘No, no.’ The kitchen door opened part way. She heard a male voice.

‘Soph, I told you. It was a one-off.’

‘You need to go.’

‘I never meant to lash out. How many times have I got to apologise?’

It was her dad. He came into the room and stopped speaking as soon as he saw Petra. He was astonished.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I …’

Zofia stood in the doorway, holding the door open.

‘I asked Petra for lunch. You did tell your dad?’

‘I …’

Her dad had been working all weekend. She’d told him she had a sleepover at Mandy’s house but hadn’t said she was going anywhere else. Petra often didn’t tell him exactly where she was going. Was she in trouble? Her dad was looking at her in a flustered way. His clothes were the same ones he’d put on the previous day. He had his car keys in his hand. His eyes looked a little puffy, as if he’d not been awake long. Had he slept in the back of his cab again?

‘You have to go, Jason. I told you not to come. I don’t want for Petra to see us arguing.’ Zofia’s voice was calm.