Follow Me Down

by Tanya Byrne

  I must have gone quiet because he kissed me and said, ‘Hey. Even if they find out and kill me,’ he grinned, his lips a delicious shade of pink from my lip-gloss. ‘We’ll always have Paris, right?’

  Scarlett came to my party. I wasn’t even surprised when she swaggered in, blue eyes bright, but I refused to give her the reaction she was hoping for. I just smiled sweetly and gestured at the waiter with the tray of cocktails moving around the room, encouraging her to try one. ‘A Nigerian Sling. They’re delicious,’ I told her with another sweet smile, before I swept off to the bar. She seemed impressed and even raised a glass when she got one as if to say, touché.

  After that, the only thing I could do was try to pretend that she wasn’t there. It seemed to work. We moved seamlessly around each other; when she was on the dance floor, I went to the bar and when she went to the bar, I went back and danced between Orla and Jumoke. Even during the fireworks, when we all ran outside to gasp and cheer, I was aware of her behind me, but I just looked up at the sky, my eyes wide and my heart beating too hard as I pressed the silver medal he’d given me between my finger and thumb with a secret smile.

  In the end, she was forced to wait outside the ladies. When I came out, she draped an arm across my shoulders. ‘I like your dress,’ she said, swaying on her heels. Her mouth was so close to mine that I could smell the rum on her breath. And I don’t even know how she got so drunk – the club knew it was my seventeenth so the bar was dry – but then I’m sure she wasn’t the only one to sneak something in.

  ‘Thank you, Scarlett,’ I said with a tight smile. I would have shrugged her off, but she was all groggy and loose-limbed and would have fallen over if I had.

  ‘It’s so pretty,’ she said, taking a handful of the pale-green taffeta skirt and fluffing it up, her nose wrinkled, like a little girl playing with her First Holy Communion dress.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It reminds me of a bridesmaid’s dress I wore once.’

  I rolled my eyes, assuming that she was talking about Edith’s wedding and waited for another dig. But then she said, ‘I was six. I was a bridesmaid and Dominic was a pageboy. That’s how we met. Did I ever tell you that?’ She poked me in the shoulder with her finger. ‘That’s when we plotted to run away to Darkest Peru. I told you about that, didn’t I?’ She stopped to play with the skirt of my dress again. ‘About the first time I ran away. Dominic told me to do it, convinced me that Savernake Forest was Darkest Peru. I was meeting him on the other side of the bridge.’ She was obviously pleased at how stunned I looked, because she grinned. ‘From the moment I met that boy, he’s been leading me astray.’

  I didn’t doubt that.

  ‘Anyway,’ she waved her hand, ‘that’s how we met, at a wedding.’

  She leaned into me and if there wasn’t a wall behind us, I would have folded. The flocked wallpaper tickled my bare shoulders and it made me shiver. ‘I think you should sit down, Scarlett,’ I said, out of breath from the effort of trying to hold her up. I looked at the velvet booth nearest us, just past the bar, and contemplated how I was going to get her into it.

  ‘He pushed me into the pool.’ She put a hand on my shoulder, tipped her head back and laughed. ‘That’s the first thing he did after the wedding. He didn’t say hello, he didn’t tell me I looked pretty, he just pushed me into the pool. Can you believe it?’

  I did actually.

  ‘Daddy had to fish me out.’

  I slipped my arm around her waist and looked over at the booth. As I did, I saw Jumoke walking towards us and while I needed the help, I was sure she’d just peel Scarlett off me and leave her lying where she fell, so I shook my head and she turned back to the dance floor with a roll of her eyes.

  ‘There I was, Adamma,’ Scarlett went on, both arms around my neck, oblivious to the Herculean effort it was taking to keep her upright, ‘standing at the edge of the pool in my pretty green bridesmaid’s dress, dripping onto my pretty green shoes and Dominic just smiled and said, “You look like a mermaid.”’

  She leaned closer and I had to put my hand on her stomach to stop her from tipping forward. When I looked at her again, she was staring at me, her forehead creased. ‘That’s why I’m scared of water, because of Dominic.’ She laughed, but not like before. She didn’t put a hand on my shoulder, didn’t tip her head back. I couldn’t look at her and looked at my hand on her stomach instead. ‘That’s why I’m scared of everything, because of Dominic.’

  She looked down at my hand on her stomach and I probably should have moved it, but I left it there. She pressed one of her hands to it – just for a second, her palm clammy against my knuckles – then she moved it away again.

  ‘I don’t even know why I’m talking about him,’ she said with a regal shrug. ‘This is nothing to do with Dominic, is it?’

  Before I could respond, she moved on. ‘Do you remember this dress?’ She lifted the skirt, then let it drop. ‘Do you remember what you said about it?’

  I remembered. It was my first exeat weekend at Crofton, the one I couldn’t persuade Jumoke to come to London for. She bought it in a tiny shop in Chelsea. Everything in the shop was white – the floors, the walls, the couches – and there was Scarlett, dark hair down, twirling around in that green silk dress. Then I realised why she was talking about Dominic: I’d said that she looked like a mermaid.

  ‘You’re the only person who will ever know me like Dominic does,’ she said, lifting her arm so that both of them were around my neck again. ‘I wish I was like you. I wish there was a door in my heart that I could just shut.’

  It would have hurt less if she’d punched me. I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘I wish I could forget like you, Adamma. Why can’t I forget?’

  Her forehead fell against my temple and I didn’t know what to do. So I just stood there, letting her almost hug me. She smelt of bruised rose petals and I suddenly felt very sad, because I didn’t know what perfume it was. It was something new, something I didn’t know about her, and it brought tears to my eyes.

  12 DAYS AFTER

  MAY

  I wouldn’t tell Bones a thing until he drove me to her house, which he did under duress, scowling and threatening to arrest me all the way.

  ‘They’re not here, you know?’ he muttered as he pulled into her long driveway. ‘They’ve gone to stay at their house in France.’

  ‘I know,’ I muttered back, undoing my seat belt as soon as he pulled up outside her front door, but when I opened the car door, he reached over and closed it.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘I need to check something in her room.’

  ‘Like fuck,’ he huffed, reaching over and grabbing the handle of the door as I tried to open it again. ‘I’m not letting you traipse through her house.’

  ‘If you want to know what happened to her then you have to let me in.’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything.’ He stared at me and I stared back until he sat back in his seat and sighed. ‘Look, Adamma. I know that you’ve just lost your friend in the most horrific, most public way possible and that you want to help. So I’m trying to be patient and you know how much I hate that,’ his gaze narrowed, ‘but I’m investigating a murder here. If you know something then you have to tell me.’

  My shoulders fell. ‘I will, Bones. I swear. When I’m sure.’

  He stared at me again, but I didn’t flinch. I don’t know why. I should have told him – I should have told him everything – but some part of me still couldn’t believe it. Still held on with both hands. I had to be sure.

  ‘I get that you’re trying to be a good friend, Adamma—’

  ‘A good friend?’ I interrupted with a bitter laugh, then turned my face away and looked out the window at her front door that opens with a long creak, like something from a horror movie. I brought my hand to m
y mouth and bit my knuckle to stop the tears I could feel pooling in my eyes. ‘It’s too late for that.’

  I don’t know how it came to this, when being friends became so hard. When I was a kid, making friends was easy. On my first day of school, I shared my crayons with Mbeke and that was it, we were best friends. Now it’s so complicated. We say things we don’t mean, don’t say things we do. The words hurt, draw blood.

  I thought of him then and asked myself how I had got it so wrong. But I knew, I just didn’t want to admit it. She wasn’t the only one who wanted the big love, was she? Something to fight for. That’s why I was so drawn to her, to her stories about Paris and her parents’ second-hand brass bed. I used to think she was restless, but I am too. I’m always moving. ‘You make me want to jump,’ I told him once, my hands fisted in his shirt. ‘You make me want to stand still,’ he said, kissing me again. That’s why I did it, why I chose him. I shouldn’t have, I know that now, and that’s something I have to live with, but it was all I’d ever wanted, you know. I’ve read poems that are so beautiful it hurts, somewhere in my bones, and I wanted that, for someone to love me like that. I’m sorry if that doesn’t sound enough. Right now it doesn’t feel like enough, either. I can’t fix that, but I can fix this.

  I can pick her this time.

  ‘Why are you trying to protect him, Adamma?’ Bones asked with a softness I didn’t think him capable of. ‘He isn’t who you think he is.’

  I swept the tears from under my eyes with my fingers, then wiped them on my skirt. ‘Bones, don’t.’

  ‘You’ve worked it out, haven’t you – that’s why you were in the chemist – that she was pregnant, that she called him that afternoon, the afternoon she went missing, and asked him to meet her in Savernake Forest and when she told him, he strangled her.’

  I got a mental image: him with his hands around her neck and her eyes, wide and blue as she looked up at him, and the shock of it knocked something in me loose.

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘She told him she was pregnant and he strangled her and left her there.’

  ‘Stop it.’ I covered my face with my hands, but when I closed my eyes, all I could see was that photograph, the one in the police station, Scarlett with her red, red lips, lying pale but perfect on the forest floor, like Ophelia, a crown of green leaves in her hair.

  ‘And before you think that he just lost his mind, that they had an argument and he snapped, remember that he went back, Adamma. He went back and put lipstick on her.’

  I flew out of the car then, leaving the door open as I ran around the side of the house towards the back door. The doormat was already flipped over, the spare key in my hand by the time Bones got to me and he tried to grab my arm, but I pulled away. As soon as I got the door open, I was gone, through the mud room – with its lined-up wellies and wax jackets – into the kitchen, past the shopping list by the fridge and the bowl of browning bananas, into the hall. He called my name, but I was already running up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and he caught up with me as I was about to go into Scarlett’s room. He put his arm around my waist and pulled me back. I roared at him not to, but when I saw it, saw her unmade bed and her school skirt in a puddle on the floor, I was glad. I don’t think I could have gone in there.

  When he saw it, I watched his eyes go wide. ‘Did Forensics do this?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No wonder Hanlon couldn’t find anything in here.’

  I didn’t know how we were going to find anything, either. When I looked at all the drawers and dusty corners I realised how many places Scarlett had to hide stuff.

  It made me think of last October when she had been in New York, auditioning for that play, and Olivia and I had torn her room apart looking for some clue as to where she was. We’d found a bottle of vodka in one of her riding boots and a pack of cigarettes in her sock drawer, but other than that, there was nothing. Olivia had given up and gone downstairs to check her school bag – which Scarlett had dropped on the kitchen table when she came in from school – telling me to check the bookcase.

  I couldn’t find a thing and was about to admit defeat, but as I walked across her bedroom to check her hamper, hoping to find a receipt, a note, anything, in the pocket in a pair of jeans, I walked over her rug. The floorboard beneath it creaked, as it always did, but that day I stopped. I don’t know why, but I did and I tugged back the rug to find one floorboard slightly higher than the others.

  After failing to lift it with my fingers and breaking several nails, I had grabbed a pair of scissors from her desk and prised it open to find a red leather diary. The shock of it made me let go of the floorboard and it dropped back into place with a puff of dust. When I’d recovered, I lifted it again, reaching for the diary, my hands shaking. I didn’t know what to do with it for a moment, but then I thought of Olivia in the kitchen, tearing through Scarlett’s school bag, while her father checked his phone again, and I flicked to the last page and there it was, scribbled in her scruffy handwriting:

  Hamlet audition, Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd St

  I never told anyone I’d found the diary, not even Scarlett, as though I’d accidentally walked in on her while she was getting dressed and I didn’t want to embarrass her by letting her know I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. I just called the Bowrey Hotel and she answered on the second ring, laughing when she realised it was me.

  It started before then, but that day, when she laughed and said ‘Busted!’, was the first time I didn’t dismiss it, when I let myself question if we were really friends. I felt a sharp pain in my chest as I remembered it, but then I felt another deeper – louder – one when I looked across the room and saw the frame I’d given her for her birthday propped up on her desk. I guess Bones saw it too, because when he edged into the room, gingerly stepping over the piles of clothes cluttering the floor, he stopped and looked at the strip of passport photos she and I had taken our first exeat weekend in London that were stuck to the frame.

  I don’t know how she knew the frame was from me, but there we were, grinning and blowing kisses. I wonder if Bones read the print – A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for – because his cheeks were pink when he looked at me again.

  ‘Rug.’ I stopped to wipe away a tear with the cuff of my shirt, then pointed at the floor. He nodded and walked over to it, pulling it back. He knew immediately what I was trying to tell him and I held my breath as he struggled to ease the loose floorboard up, the skin between his blond eyebrows pinched. But then he did it and when he muttered ‘shit’ I knew he’d found it.

  He pulled the diary out first. Then, at last, a cellphone exactly like mine.

  I was right.

  Something in me unravelled then, tears spilling down my cheeks as I watched him switch it on. The screen lit up and he walked over to me, his head dipped as he waited for the menu to load. Once it had, he checked her text messages and stared at the screen.

  ‘What does it say?’ I breathed.

  He showed me the screen. It was a message from Scarlett to him.

  Meet me in Savernake Forest in ten minutes or I’m going to tell.

  2 DAYS BEFORE

  MAY

  Today was one of those perfect May days. The sun finally found the will to punch through the clouds and, as soon as it did, everything was brighter: the air warm with the promise of summer, of heat and watermelon and long, long nights.

  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to going to class on a Saturday, but today was especially excruciating. As soon as our last one ended, we all ran outside. Even Mr Crane had put his book into his bag before the bell rang, and he didn’t tell us not to run when it did. As we spilled out into the courtyard, I could hear the day kids tearing out of the car park, the tops of their cars down.

  The rest of us ran for the Green, squealing as we peeled of
f our cardigans. Even Orla took hers off – it’s such a little thing, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her bare arms. It made something in me settle because it’s something else she’s doing now that means she’s getting better. She still hasn’t cut her hair, but she does tuck it behind her ears sometimes. It’s not much, I suppose, but it’s something, because I look at her sometimes and I’m sure I can see the beginning of a spark in her eyes.

  We were only sitting on the grass for a few minutes when I got a text from him. He hadn’t sent me a message on my phone since he had given me the disposable one, so he must have been desperate to see me and it felt like it did when we first met; Orla rolling her eyes when I told her that I had to go. She’s so used to my emergency Disraeli meetings and forgotten swimming practices that she didn’t say anything. I never thought I was that girl – the girl who leaves her friend to be with a boy – but when I had to stop myself running to Savernake Forest, I realised that I was. As soon as I saw him waiting by our tree, a tartan blanket in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, the guilt was forgotten, and I ran at him and kissed him until he was breathless.

  Perhaps I’m being sentimental, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the forest look so pretty. Every day it changes; it gets a little brighter, a little fuller. I could feel something stirring around us as we walked under the trees. They felt closer, the gaps between their branches disappearing as clouds of yellow-green leaves filled them, blocking the sky. It made me think of my garden in Lagos, of how it’s almost obscenely green with neat, neat lawns and spiky palms. Savernake Forest is the opposite: its edges are softer, the grass patchy in places and the trees crooked, their cinnamon bark trunks splitting. This afternoon it looked like a watercolour, washed out and hazy, as the birds sung idly.

  ‘It won’t be long until all of this is covered in bluebells,’ he told me, waving his hand over the forest floor as we looked for a spot to sit down.