by Tanya Byrne
I turned back to Dominic with another sigh. ‘Fine. What’ve you got?’
He licked his lips, then grinned. ‘Fuck this shitty hockey game. I have a story.’
It had stopped raining, but I still wanted to cry. I wanted to be in Lagos. I find myself missing home at the strangest times – not just when I’m frowning at a plate of shepherd’s pie in the dining hall or laughing at my grandmother on Skype because she won’t talk to me until she’s changed out of her old boubou – but on days like today, after the rain, when my limbs suddenly felt heavier as I followed Dominic away from the hockey pitch. It was probably because my hair was wet and I could smell my mango shampoo and it made me think of Comfort’s mango cake, of sneaking slices of it with my father when she’d gone to bed. I even began to miss New York. At least there autumn is lazy and golden. As my shoes squelched in the muddy grass, I thought of the colours changing in Central Park – green to red to gold – and wondered if Ostley would be as beautiful, if the leaves would fall from the trees like brown paper butterflies.
‘I love this weather,’ Dominic told me as we took the short cut to the car park.
When we approached the top of the hill, he held out his hand and I refused, until the sole of my shoe skidded in the mud, and I took it. At least he wasn’t offering to carry me.
‘You love rain?’ I muttered, horrified.
‘When it’s fierce like that.’ When we got to the bottom of the hill, he started unbuttoning his coat, then he shrugged it off. ‘It feels like the world is about to end.’
I looked up at the grey sky as we walked through the car park. ‘I think it might be.’
His eyes lit up. ‘We should probably do it in case it is.’ I sighed wearily, but when he tugged off his sweatshirt, the black T-shirt underneath riding up to expose a strip of skin and the waistband of his underwear, I tensed, sure that he meant it. But then he handed me the sweatshirt. ‘Put this on, Miss Okomma. Your magical waterproof trench coat has failed you and I don’t want you to catch pneumonia.’
I stuck my nose up at it. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Stop being a princess.’
‘I’m not. I just don’t get why I can’t go back to Burnham and change.’
‘Because it might be raining again in ten minutes. We won’t be able to see anything if it’s raining.’
‘See what?’
‘Patience, little one. Now take it. Quick, before the heavens open again.’
I glanced at the grey sweatshirt. It looked so tempting – all soft and warm and fluffy – that my disdain dissolved. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, peeling off my trench coat.
‘You should probably take that off too.’ He nodded at my sweater. ‘It looks soaked.’ It was, but I had no intention of removing any more clothing in front of him. ‘Fine. I won’t look,’ he said, turning his back and putting his coat over his head. I considered leaving him like that, but instead ducked behind the Range Rover we were standing beside and tore off my sweater, then tugged on his sweatshirt so quickly that I banged my elbow against the window.
‘That sounded like it hurt,’ he said from under his coat.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ I said, emerging from behind the Range Rover.
He pulled his coat away and grinned. ‘That’s the spirit!’
‘This had better be worth it.’
He put his coat back on with a laugh and I thought it was at me, until he told me that he’d never seen me like that before.
‘Like what?’
‘I dunno. Like you, I suppose. You’re so quiet when you’re with Scarlett.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yeah. You never say anything. This,’ he pointed at me, ‘is the Adamma I met outside English lit last month. I’ve missed her.’ He turned to me with a loose smile. ‘I know Scarlett’s a human tornado, but you shouldn’t let her overpower you.’
I didn’t realise I did.
‘I’m about to say a whole lot more if you don’t tell me where we’re going,’ I warned, as I stopped to check my make-up in the wing mirror of a car, licking my thumb and wiping away the black smudges of mascara from under my eyes before we carried on.
‘You’ll see.’
When we passed his car, I frowned. ‘Aren’t we driving?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s only a few minutes’ walk.’
I knew where we were going then. ‘So what’s in Savernake Forest?’
He shot me a look, gaze narrowing as I smiled smugly. ‘How did you know?’
‘You don’t walk anywhere, Dominic, so we have to be going to Savernake Forest because you don’t want to damage your precious car.’
‘That,’ he thumbed over his shoulder, ‘is a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 and the road through Savernake Forest is barely a road. It’s some gravel held together with tree sap and the tears of drunk Crofton girls.’
I knew what he meant, it was fine to run on, but if I had a car, I’d think twice about driving on it, too. That didn’t mean I couldn’t tease him about it, though.
‘It’s just a car.’
‘Sssh!’ he said theatrically, waving his hands about. ‘She’ll hear you.’
‘How come you even have a car? Don’t you have to be seventeen to drive here?’
‘I’m driving it illegally.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘Scarlett drives The Old Dear all the time.’
‘Not all the time and definitely not to school. You love that car, if you were driving it illegally, you wouldn’t risk parking it at Crofton. Security would notice.’
‘OK, Nancy Drew.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m a bit older than you think I am.’
‘How much older?’
‘Forty-two. That’s my car. My wife drives the Volvo.’ I raised an eyebrow at him and he sighed dramatically. ‘Fine. I’m already seventeen.’
‘How come?’
‘I lost a year.’
‘How do you lose a year, Dominic?’
‘I’m quite the scatterbrain, Miss Okomma.’ He smiled, but when I didn’t smile back, he turned away and shook his head. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘Give me the CliffsNotes, then.’
‘Harrow. The Headmaster’s daughter.’
I sighed and shook my head. ‘Jesus, Dominic.’
‘What?’ He feigned innocence. ‘I loved her.’
‘Of course you did.’
‘I love them all,’ he said with an unrepentant smile, then kicked at a particularly large piece of gravel. ‘I was blacklisted after that. If Scarlett and her parents hadn’t sweet-talked Mr Lucas into giving me a reference to Eton I would have ended up at school in Alaska. They still made me retake the year, though.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘There are lots of things you don’t know about me, Miss Okomma,’ he said with a lascivious wink and I realised that he still hadn’t answered my question.
‘So what’s in Savernake Forest?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘I’m guessing a hot shower is out of the question?’ I asked with a shiver.
‘It can be arranged.’ He waggled his eyebrows.
‘Hands up who’s not going to get punched in the face in a minute.’ I put my hand up and looked around at the neat rows of cars still dripping with rain.
He laughed, nudging me with his hip.
‘Face. Punched,’ I reminded him with a scowl.
He went quiet and I wondered if he thought I was being serious. But then he said, ‘You’ve seen the photo, then.’
‘Which photo?’
‘You know which photo.’
I feigned nonchalance, waving a hand at him. ‘I don’t care.’
‘Clearly. You’ve only threatened to punch me twice in the last five minutes.’
‘Like I’m the first person to do that.’
‘OK, Miss Okomma,’ he said with a slow smile.
We walked the rest of the way in silence and when we turned left out of Crofton towards the forest I relaxed. I’m very fond of Savernake Forest; I go running in it every morning. It’s been a relief to have somewhere to run where I know I’m not being watched, where I can just run and run without worrying about the sweat patches on my T-shirt and my messy hair; where I don’t have to think about Crofton’s sharp spires and green, green lawns and homework and what universities I’m applying to next year and why Jumoke hasn’t replied to my last two emails. I guess it’s kind of funny, how it takes running until my lungs feel like they’re going to burst until I can take a breath.
As we approached the stone pillars that mark the entrance, the light began to change. It went from grey to gold as we passed under the canopy of trees towards the road that runs through the middle of the forest, cutting through the beech trees, neat as the parting my mother used to comb into my hair when I was a kid. The four-mile-long road leads from the entrance to a pair of iron gates that are just known at Crofton as ‘the gates’, which is as far as Mrs Delaney permits me to run. I don’t know what’s behind them, they probably belong to one of the private houses, but there are several stories at Crofton: an old insane asylum, a mansion where the lady of the house was murdered and now haunts the forest in a white dress, and my personal favourite, an abandoned coaching house where the girls from Crofton used to go with bottles of gin and knitting needles if they found themselves ‘in trouble’.
The gates are usually locked, but someone at Crofton has a key, so that’s where the parties are usually held. Every Halloween, Scarlett says, the Upper Sixth host one there that’s invitation only. It’s a huge deal, apparently, especially as you only know if you’re invited on Halloween morning, when the chosen ones wake up to a white postcard with a black cat on it. Scarlett already knows what she’s going to wear. She showed me the dress with great glee the last time I was at her house and when she did, I thought of the one I’d bought in London our first exeat weekend, the black one with the lace that kind of looks like cobwebs. It wasn’t an accident that I’d picked it out, not after she’d said, ‘You’re new, so you shouldn’t be invited, but I go every year, so you’ll probably get a postcard.’ I was too distracted by the thought, so didn’t notice when Dominic started to veer off the road towards the trees.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked when I caught up.
‘It isn’t far.’ He looked down at my muddied ballet pumps. ‘Are you gonna be OK?’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘If you say so, Miss Okomma,’ he said with a shrug, taking my trench coat and sweater from me and throwing them over his shoulder. ‘This way.’
He began walking through a break in the trees, towards a path. It wasn’t a proper path, it had just been worn into the ground by years of people walking over it, so it was narrow and uneven, and my shoes slipped on the wet leaves as I followed him. The trees were still heavy with water and dripped on us as we passed under them. The smell made me think of something I read in an article once about the smell of rain. Apparently, rain doesn’t smell of anything, it’s the moisture in the air that heightens the smell of everything around you so you smell what you couldn’t before. This afternoon, the forest smelt earthy, of wet soil and mushrooms and piles of raked-up leaves and it was a smell I knew, that I found comforting, even though I usually only smell it in those scented candles you buy in gift shops.
After a few minutes, the sunlight began to push through the trees, sieving through the browning leaves into white threads that illuminated the forest floor and the spider webs shivering in the breeze. He kept turning back to check I was OK as we stepped over the stray tree roots, twigs snapping, loud and sharp as bones beneath our feet. I could hear the birds too, chattering in the trees above us and making the leaves rustle as they darted from branch to branch. As we passed under one tree, we startled them because they flew away in such a rush that it showered us with leaves that fell around us like brown confetti.
Eventually he reached an oak tree that must have fallen over in the last storm and lay on its side, its pale, torn belly exposed. He slapped it with his hand as he went past, turning left and heading into a thicker, darker part of the forest. He turned back to make sure that I was following him, his forehead creased and his arm outstretched as it got darker. I didn’t want to take his hand, but common sense prevailed and I reached for it; his palm warm against mine as he led me towards a clearing. When we got to it, he let go, as the trees parted to expose the open, blue-grey sky above our heads, flooding everything beneath them with light.
‘This is it,’ he said, out of breath.
‘What is?’
‘A couple of kids from Crofton were running through here last night.’
‘Running through here?’ I interrupted, looking back the way we came. ‘Why didn’t they stick to the road? You can’t run through here, it’s too uneven.’
‘OK, they were looking for somewhere to shag.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Stop being so judgmental, Adamma.’
‘I’m not being judgmental.’
‘Yes you are. You have Adamma face.’
He didn’t give me time to retaliate, he just ran ahead, and by the time I got to him, he was standing in the middle of the clearing, his lips parted.
‘Look, Adamma,’ he gasped, eyes big and black.
I looked around at the scene and it made my heart beat too fast. Stick figures hung from the trees, the twigs tied together with string so that they looked like people, and on the forest floor, there were piles of rocks. Each pile was spaced out across the clearing and as I watched him run between them, taking photos, I realised what was going on and let go of a breath.
‘Um, Dominic,’ I said, unsure whether to tell him, because he was so excited.
He wasn’t listening, he was taking photos of a pile of twigs that were tied together with a strip of plaid material. ‘Hannah will lose her shit when she sees this.’
‘Dominic,’ I said again, trying not to giggle. ‘I think you’ve been had.’
‘Had? What?’ he asked between snaps as I walked towards him.
‘I think this is a joke.’
He looked up at me, bewildered. ‘A joke?’
‘Yeah.’ I gestured at the pile of twigs at our feet. ‘The Blair Witch.’
‘What?’
‘The movie, The Blair Witch Project. Haven’t you seen it?’ He shook his head. ‘This is pretty much it. Someone’s obviously playing a prank. It’s Halloween this weekend, maybe they’re trying to scare some of the kids at Crofton.’
He looked around at the scene, eyes wide, then muttered, ‘Fucking Sam.’
‘This is actually pretty clever, for him,’ I conceded, but Dominic was livid and stomped around, kicking at the piles of rocks as I tried not to laugh. ‘What did you think this was? Some sort of pagan sacrifice?’
‘Fucking Sam,’ he hissed again, then marched back to where I was standing. As he did, my coat and sweater slipped off his shoulder and he tugged them back on with an angry huff. ‘I’m gonna kill him.’
‘OK.’ I crossed my arms. ‘But can we go now? I’m freezing.’
He looked a little despondent as we turned to walk back the way we had come, this time side by side. ‘Are you pissed that I made you come here for nothing?’
I wasn’t, actually. ‘You didn’t make me do anything. I was curious,’ I said as I watched him put the lens back on his camera. ‘Plus I got to see a different side of you.’
He looked up with a big smile. ‘A more doable side?’
‘A more annoying side.’ I retracted with a sneer.
‘Are you pissed about Scarlett?’
I stiffened. ‘I told you: I don’t care.’
‘I’d be pissed off if my best friend was keeping stuff from me, but you should get used to that.’
‘So it seems.’ I looked down at my shoes. They were ruined.
‘Welcome to Planet Scarlett. Population: everyone,’ he chuckled, then licked his lips. ‘She’s always been a brat, you know. When we were kids, we used to meet on the bridge over the canal between our houses, make paper ships and race them.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I always made mine out of newspaper because she cheated.’
I thought of her again, in the observatory, looking up at the domed ceiling – He was my first everything – and felt the itch of something.
‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ I asked.
‘Doing what?’
‘Flirting with me. To make her jealous?’
‘No.’ He looked horrified. ‘Of course not.’
‘So what’s going on here, then?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head and looked down at his camera again. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you two together?’
‘She doesn’t want to be in a relationship.’
It wasn’t a no.
‘But you do?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I want.’
‘Of course it does, Dominic.’
‘Not with Scarlett. You’ll see,’ he said with a bitter laugh, then thought better of it, his face softening. ‘But don’t be pissed at her, Adamma. It’s not her fault, it’s us.’ He sighed. ‘We’re a fucking train wreck. Don’t try and get in the middle of it.’
‘Why are you trying to put me in the middle of it, then?’
He oofed and missed a step as though I’d punched him in the chest. ‘You’re right. I am. Sorry.’ He shook his head then glanced sideways at me, his cheeks suddenly pink. ‘I used to think she was the one, you know?’
I nodded, but I didn’t. I thought of my ex-boyfriend Nathan with a sting of shame. As nice as he was – as perfect – he was hardly the love of my life, even if I had thought he was a month ago. I used to get so mad when my mother referred to it as ‘puppy love’, but she was right. I didn’t realise until then how little I’d thought about him since I had got to Crofton. I’d missed brunch at Sarabeth’s more than him.