Follow Me Down

by Tanya Byrne

  It wasn’t like the canal I’d walked along when I was in London last summer, the one in Camden with the brick bridges bruised with graffiti. Like the rest of Crofton, it was edged with green. The other side was as well, but it was more overgrown, and, as I listened to the whisper of the willow trees, their branches leaning over the edge as though they were trying to drink the water, I realised that it was the first moment of quiet I’d had since I’d left New York. Even the light was different here, green and white all at once, like a peeled pear.

  ‘It’s so pretty,’ I said, a little breathless.

  ‘It leads to my house.’ She nodded up the canal. ‘When my sisters and I were little, we’d joke about swimming to school.’

  ‘You don’t board?’

  She shook her head then shrugged off her blazer, laying it on the grass and sitting cross-legged on it. ‘We don’t have to; we only live a few minutes away, in the house on the hill.’ She said it like I should know which one. ‘Your first time?’

  ‘How did you guess?’ I said with a small sigh, copying her and taking off my blazer. I laid it on the grass in front of her. ‘I thought my last school was strict.’

  She watched me sit down, then smiled. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ I gave her a look that told her I didn’t believe her and she laughed. ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘Didn’t you just get told off for wearing lipstick?’

  ‘Red lipstick.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘I’m sure your school in New York was much cooler,’ she conceded with a shrug and I don’t know how she knew that I went to school in New York, but then how did Dominic know my name? So I let her go on. ‘But we know how to have fun.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Watch all the Harry Potter films at Saturday Film Club kind of fun?’

  ‘Hey.’ She pointed at me. ‘Don’t hate on Harry.’

  I held my hands up. ‘I would never.’

  ‘Yes. Well, as fun as that is,’ she went on with sly smile, ‘a school like Crofton is nothing without its rules, but rules are meant to be broken, right?’

  I perked up at that. ‘So they say.’

  She glanced over her shoulder, then leaned in. She was loving it, I could tell – the drama of it, teasing me a little – and her eyes were bright. ‘The first Alphabet Party is on Saturday.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a stupid name, but they’ve been having them here since the forties. Not everyone is invited,’ she told me, and I could tell she loved that, too, ‘but the first Saturday of the year, Abbott hosts a party in Savernake Forest, then the month after that Bedwyn does it, then Burnham and every house takes it in turns until the end of the year.’

  ‘Yeah, but next Saturday isn’t an exeat weekend.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yeah, because you don’t board. I’m not allowed out.’

  ‘What was it I said about rules?’ She heaved her bag into her lap with a smug smile. She rooted through it for a moment or two, then took out a key and held it out to me.

  I stared at it, my lips parted. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a master key. It will open pretty much any door in Crofton.’

  ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’ She rolled her eyes, then handed it to me. ‘There’s a window in the broom cupboard on the first floor of Burnham that opens on to a flat roof. If you walk across it then climb down the trellis, you can get out without anyone seeing you.’ I must have looked horrified, because she shrugged. ‘It sounds so Katniss Everdeen, I know, but if you don’t want to spend your Saturday nights watching Clueless and going to bed early, Adamma, you’d better learn to climb down trellis with your shoes in your hands.’

  I tried to picture it and couldn’t. Jumoke won’t even use the Subway because there are too many stairs. She’ll choke with laughter when I tell her.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I guess I didn’t look grateful enough, because she tilted her head and looked at me. ‘Do you know how much that key is worth, Adamma? Molly Avery could pay her fees with the amount she charges girls for master keys.’

  ‘Thank you, Scarlett,’ I breathed, closing my fist around it.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, taking off her jumper. I heard a crackle of static as she pulled it over her head, her dark hair rising then spilling over her shoulders and down her back. I could see her red bra beneath her cotton shirt and when I looked away, I wondered if that was something she did on purpose, if she always wore something red.

  ‘You don’t sound African,’ she said and I looked at her again.

  ‘What do Africans sound like?’

  ‘You sound American.’

  ‘Do I?’ I’d never thought about it.

  ‘I’m so jealous that you got to live in New York!’ She swooned. ‘I love New York. I go there all the time. I always stay at the Bowery Hotel,’ she said, hands everywhere. ‘I’m obsessed with the theatre. I was there last month; I went to see John Malkovich in Waiting for Godot. Were you born there?’ she asked before I had a chance to tell her that I’d seen it as well.

  I shook my head. ‘No, Nigeria. My father’s a diplomat. We lived in Lagos until I was five, then he was posted to Madrid, then to New York when I was seven.’

  ‘You speak Spanish?’ She didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘I love Barcelona.’

  ‘Me too. I much prefer it to Paris.’

  ‘I know, but I have such a soft spot for Paris. That’s where my parents met. My older sister Edith was born there. I’m thinking of going to uni there.’

  ‘Is that why you’re doing the Baccalaureate not A-levels?’

  ‘That and I’m applying to a few American universities. It makes life easier.’

  She opened her bag and took out a series of Tupperware tubs, piling them on to the grass between us. She peeled off each lid, revealing bright green salads and shiny cherry tomatoes. When she pulled out a roll and split it in half with her fingers, I watched the flour puff up in the air like dust and thought of the girls at my school in New York who were absurdly proud of the fact that they hadn’t eaten bread since they were twelve.

  ‘So which American colleges are you applying to?’

  ‘Juilliard, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, DePaul and Yale.’

  ‘Ah. An actor.’

  Her eyes lit up. ‘Wannabe Judi Dench.’

  I didn’t expect that. Most girls our age would have said Angelina Jolie.

  ‘The funny thing is,’ she said, unwrapping a slab of cheese, ‘my parents aren’t like the other parents here. They’re total hippies so they just want me to be happy. They aren’t putting pressure on me to even go to university if I don’t want to. I’m too scared to tell them that I want to go to Yale. They’ll be so disappointed.’

  I giggled, then pretended to nod solemnly. ‘My father just wants me to be happy, too. Happy at Cambridge.’

  ‘Is that where he went?’

  I nodded.

  She rolled her eyes and handed me a piece of cheese, then opened a jar. ‘Butternut squash chutney.’ She dipped her cheese into it and held the jar out to me. When I copied her, she asked what I thought. ‘Dad’s trying a new recipe,’ she explained and I finally made the connection: Scarlett Chiltern of Chiltern Organics.

  ‘So good,’ I told her, holding up the piece of cheese. ‘My mother would love it. She’s obsessed with your Scarlett Tomato Chutney. She has a nervous breakdown if she goes to the Fairway Market and they don’t have it.’

  ‘Scarlett Tomato!’ She pointed at herself. ‘That’s my recipe! I invented that. I say invented, I accidentally put apple in the wrong saucepan, but still. It would never have happened if it wasn’t for me.’ She giggled and handed me a celery stick. ‘It’s so funny that you can buy it in New York.
I remember the first batch Dad made. He did it in this massive saucepan. I was so little I had to stand on a chair to stir it.’

  I smiled. My father can’t even make coffee. Neither can my mother; she writes the most beautiful poetry which makes you feel like you can touch the sky, but is confounded by the microwave. But imagining Scarlett on that chair, adding chopped apples to the wrong pan, made me think of our house in Lagos and our cook, Comfort. When I was little, I loved watching her in the kitchen as she hummed to herself while she plucked the bones from stockfish or pounded cocoyams in the mortar. It was so hot in there, though – there was always a huddle of pots boiling gleefully on the stove, steam puffing out of them like smoke – that I couldn’t stand to be in there for more than a few minutes.

  ‘Now I’m jealous,’ I admitted, biting into the celery and thinking about the dining hall. I was yet to eat there, but didn’t have high expectations. I doubt I’d be having moi moi any time soon. ‘Do you just get to eat delicious things all day?’

  ‘Pretty much. Dad’s trying potato and rosemary bread today. I’ll tell him to make extra so we can have it for lunch tomorrow.’

  I smiled. ‘The French make the best bread.’

  She frowned. ‘The French?’

  ‘You said your parents met in Paris.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. No. They met in Paris, but they’re both English. My mother’s a Lister.’

  As with her house, she assumed that I knew that too, but I had no idea who the Listers were. Very important, I guessed, so I just smiled sweetly as she told me about her mother who was an only child and, like most of the girls at Crofton, was raised by a nanny. I had a similar upbringing. That surprises some people, they seem to think all Africans are desperately poor. Someone at my last school once asked me if I lived in a house in Nigeria. I guess she thought I lived in a mud hut. I don’t. I live in a house. A very nice house, in fact.

  I felt a sudden ache as I thought about home, about my big white house and the garden, with its hot, bright flowers and the curved palm leaves that cast shadows on the lawn like black eyelashes in the afternoon sun. I could never run away like Scarlett’s mother did; I’d miss my parents too much. Miss how my mother still likes to plait my hair before I go to bed and how my father eats breakfast in a suit while frowning at his copy of The Vanguard. But I suppose I can understand why her mother did it, why she felt like she had to run away. I’m an only child, too. I understand the burden of knowing that my family’s name ends with me. But that’s a good thing, too, I think. When I marry, I can shuffle it off. Make a new name for myself. I guess that’s what her mother was trying to do.

  The story is hopelessly romantic, and, to be frank, a little cliché, but it is what it is: her mother packed a bag, left a note for her parents, and fled in the middle of the night to Paris. Scarlett spoke of it with such joy: of how her parents met in a café and fell in love; of the top-floor apartment they shared in the twentieth arrondissement and their second-hand brass bed that they dragged into the living room so that they could wake to a view of the rooftops and the Eiffel Tower in the distance. And it was a charming story, one Scarlett was clearly proud of, even though I’m not sure that what her mother did was remarkable enough to warrant being spoken of with such reverence. When I thought about it, it was actually pretty selfish; she was in Paris for a year before she told her family where she was. But I couldn’t say that, could I? So I nodded and smiled in all the right places and waited for her to finish.

  ‘So what are your co-curriculars?’ she asked without stopping for breath.

  ‘Running, tennis and lacrosse. And I’m thinking, maybe, swimming as well.’

  ‘Oh God, I couldn’t.’ Her eyes widened as she reached for a grape. ‘I hate swimming pools. I can’t go near them. My sister, Olivia, swims, though.’

  ‘Does she go to Crofton?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What year is she in?’

  ‘Ours,’ she said with a shrug, offering me the last cherry tomato, then putting the lid back on the Tupperware tub. ‘We’re twins. She’s doing A-levels, though.’

  I grinned. ‘You’re a twin? I’ve never met a twin before.’

  ‘I was born first,’ she said with a grand wave of her hand that told me she was done talking about it, then pulled a magazine out of her bag and started flicking through it. ‘So what other co-curriculars are you interested in?’

  ‘I want to go for the Disraeli. I used to write for my school newspaper in New York, but I hear it’s super hard to get on to.’

  ‘I know the editor, Hannah. I’ll introduce you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ripping a page out of the magazine, then pulling a pen out of her bag and scribbling something on it.

  I didn’t know what to say so I just smiled clumsily and said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Plus Mr Lucas is going to be overseeing it this year and he’s a family friend.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. My parents rent out rooms in our house to artists, and—’ She stopped folding the page and looked up. ‘I almost told you his name then!’ she said with a smile, savouring the secret as though it was a truffle. ‘Mr Lucas is a poet. He stayed with us a couple of years ago, after he graduated from Oxford and again when he got the job at Crofton, while his cottage was being decorated. I’ve never had so many girls drop by unannounced to see how I was.’

  She winked then held up her hand, a folded paper boat cupped in her palm.

  ‘That’s so cute!’

  ‘It’s a ship. I used to make them with my dad when I was little. His were much better, though. He’d find a toothpick and stick a sail on it with my name on. The HMS Scarlett.’ She smiled to herself and touched the top of it with her finger.

  ‘Why ships?’

  She shrugged. ‘No idea, but it was our game. We have a globe in our nursery and he’d tell me to find a country. I’d look for somewhere really random like Kazakhstan and we’d go down to the library and find out as much as we could about it, then we’d make a paper ship, walk down the garden to the bridge over the canal and set sail to it.’

  ‘That’s lovely.’

  ‘Now I write secrets on them, send them off to Kazakhstan.’ She smiled at me, then handed me the paper ship. ‘So that’s your thing, huh?’ she asked when I took it, then started gathering the empty Tupperware tubs. ‘You want to be a journalist?’

  I nodded, putting the paper ship in the pocket of my blazer. ‘Wannabe Gwen Ifill.’

  ‘I have no idea who that is,’ she admitted with a chuckle. ‘But I can tell you who’ll also be going for the Disraeli –’ She paused for effect – ‘Dominic Sim.’

  ‘Let him.’

  ‘Oh really?’ she said, shoving the last Tupperware tub into her bag.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, watching as she stood up and shook the grass off her blazer. ‘He just helped me find Mr Lucas’s classroom this morning.’

  ‘Dominic Sim doesn’t just do anything.’

  ‘You think he likes me?’ I stood up and shook my blazer too.

  ‘Just hold on to your knickers around him, Adamma, that’s all I’m saying.’

  I laughed. ‘Thanks for the tip, but he isn’t my type.’

  ‘Dominic’s everyone’s type. Didn’t you hear why he got kicked out of Eton?’

  When I shook my head, she smirked. ‘He got a teacher pregnant.’

  THE DAY AFTER

  MAY

  The first time she ran away she was six. She announced it over breakfast, apparently, and I can just see her, a spoon in her hand, little chin raised, telling her parents that she was going to live in Darkest Peru. She even packed a suitcase, a tiny brown leather thing that belonged to the Paddington Bear that stood next to the bookcase in her nursery. She packed the essentials – her too
thbrush, her bridesmaid’s dress and her grandmother’s pearls – then added the round of marmalade sandwiches her father had made her and put on her coat.

  Her parents were amused by the whole thing, she says, and even took a photograph (I’ve seen it, Scarlett in her yellow wellington boots, pouting and clutching the tiny suitcase, the lace from her bridesmaid’s dress trapped in the clasp) as they stood by the back door waving her off. Edith and Olivia did too, but as she walked down the stone steps towards the lawn, Olivia began to cry. Her father told her that Scarlett would get scared and turn back, but she didn’t, she just stomped and stomped, and when she’d almost reached the end of the lawn (quite a feat for a six year old given it was almost half a mile long), her father ran after her. He grabbed her just as she reached the bridge that arced over the canal and she wriggled in his arms all the way back to the house.

  It’s in her DNA, apparently, that restlessness, that need to run. She inherited it from her mother, she says. That’s why no one was surprised when we found out that she’d run away this morning; she bounces off every wall she touches, like a butterfly trying to find an open window. She’s done it so many times – when she went to Glastonbury with Dominic the summer before we met, last October when she went to New York to audition for Hamlet and didn’t tell anyone because she didn’t want to jinx it – that it’s just become her ‘thing’. Some people play the ukulele, some collect stamps, Scarlett Chiltern runs away. So before Ballard had even finished telling us in assembly, Sam had started a book on when she’d be back. Most people went for twenty-four hours, Molly put £50 on thirty-six because she was sure she was in New York again. When Dominic found out, he told Sam to stop being a dick.

  It didn’t take long before the theories began to circulate. I was only in the dining hall a few minutes before I heard three: she was in Vegas with a guy she’d met on the Internet, she was doing a campaign with Stella McCartney and she’d got a part in a film with James McAvoy. It’s a shame she missed it, she would have loved it.

  When I spoke to him earlier, he told me to sign in for lunch then meet him in the prop room. We haven’t done that in months, not since we first got together and the thought of waiting until 3 o’clock was unbearable. It feels like it’s always me calling – breathless and a little desperate – asking to see him, so I was so excited that I didn’t even bother to pretend to queue in the dining hall. I just signed in, then slipped out again. But of all the people to catch me, of course it was Molly.