Follow Me Down

Copyright © Tanya Byrne 2013

The right of Tanya Byrne to be identified as the Author ofthe Work has been asserted by her in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group 2013

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblanceto real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

E-pub conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

eISBN: 978 0 7553 9310 7

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About the Book

First love. Last lie.

When Adamma Okomma has to leave her glossy high school in New York for a dusty English boarding school, she thinks it’s the end of the world – or the end of her social life, at least.

Then she meets the wicked-witted Scarlett Chiltern, who shows her all of Crofton College’s darkest corners and Adamma realises that there’s much more to her new school than tartan skirts and hockey sticks.

She and Scarlett become inseparable, but when they fall for the same guy, the battle lines are firmly drawn.

Adamma gets the guy but loses her best friend. Then, when Scarlett runs away, Adamma finds herself caught up in something far more sinister than a messy love triangle. Adamma always knew that Scarlett had her secrets, but some secrets are too big to keep and this one will change all of their lives forever.

About the Author

Tanya Byrne was born in London and studied in Surrey, where she still lives with her cat who goes by several names, none of which he actually answers to. After eight years working for BBC Radio, she left to write her debut novel,
Heart-Shaped Bruise
, which was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger, and longlisted for the Branford Boase Award. Tanya was also shortlisted for New Writer of the Year at the National Book Awards. She has travelled all round the country; to speak to crowds at the Edinburgh festival and to classrooms of young people.

Twitter:
@tanyabyrne

Also by Tanya Byrne:

HEART-SHAPED BRUISE

FOLLOW ME DOWN

Praise for
Heart-Shaped Bruise

‘Promises to be disturbing, powerful and moving’ Adele Parks

‘Gritty, unpredictable and very well written, this is fiction for kids at its very best. Absolutely loved it’
Sun

‘Byrne’s superb debut novel is the story of how gangster’s daughter Emily Koll ends up in a young offender’s institute. Parents may have to steel themselves to receive the raw emotional shocks that their teenage childrne will take in their stride’
Sunday

‘A jigsaw of a novel in which we piece together events and are driven on to the final twist, it is a tense, emotionally complex study of love and hate’
The Sunday Times

‘It’s compelling and clever. We loved’
Company

‘Reminiscent of
The Catcher in the Rye
, this psychological jigsaw of a novel will appeal to your dark side. A troubling, demanding but addictive sotry’
Glamour

‘Raw and gripping, with a wholly unexpected final twist’
Guardian

To Claire Wilson, without whom this would still be in my head

‘A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.’

Attributed to William G. T. Shedd

THE DAY AFTER

MAY

When I was a kid and I couldn’t sleep, my father would tell me it was because someone was dreaming about me. I know now that this isn’t true – it’s just one of those things he used to tell me to make me feel better – but for a long time, I believed him.

I’m sure she doesn’t want me dreaming about her, either, but I do – a lot – which is kind of cruel because I spend most of the day trying to avoid her, yet as soon as I close my eyes, there she is, as though my brain won’t forget. I hate that, how it holds on to things and won’t let go. I can’t remember a thing about my fifth birthday party. I’ve seen photographs of it – me in that frothy pink dress, my aunts and uncles laughing so much you can see their teeth – but all I remember about that day is how my father ran over a dog that ran out in front of our car when we went to pick up the cake. Who does that? I don’t know. So when I say that I dream about her, they’re not always good dreams – and even the not-so-bad dreams still make me wake up gasping her name like someone running down the street shouting, ‘Fire!’

I was dreaming about him last night, the two of us lying on our backs on his scratchy tartan blanket in Savernake Forest, the sun weighing over us, all fat and yellow and ready to burst. We were watching the clouds bob past, pretending each one was a country – ‘India! Let’s go there . . . Australia! Let’s go there’ – like we did yesterday afternoon. I saw a cloud that looked like Africa, but when I turned to tell him, it was her next to me. She was grinning and wearing those heart-shaped sunglasses – the cheap red ones that she loves so much – and for a few moments it was like it used to be, the two of us giggling and comparing nail polish, until she asked me if I thought death was going to be beautiful. Only she could ask a question like that, and I told her not to be so morbid. She just laughed and blamed Oscar Wilde, then told me to imagine it, lying in the earth with flowers growing from my fingernails and grass from my eyelashes. It does sound kind of beautiful, doesn’t it?

I woke up with a gasp and for a moment I wasn’t sure where I was. It wasn’t until the shadows began to take shape – my closet, my desk, my noticeboard with its patchwork of photographs, the gaps where the ones of her used to be now covered with other ones – that I remembered I was at school and my nerves lurched back into place.

I used to enjoy it, moving around. It didn’t bother me that I might be here in Wiltshire one day then back in Lagos the next, watching my grandmother in the kitchen in her faded boubou, singing to herself as she chopped bitterleaf. I used to be able to sleep anywhere, but I can’t sleep here. At first it was the strange bed, then it was the murmurs through the walls – the girls who have to sleep with the radio on, the ones who call their boyfriends at midnight, when they think everyone is asleep – and now it’s the dreams about her.

It’s got to the point where I dread going to bed. My stomach clenches like a fist just thinking about it because I know that I’m going to lie there – thinking about her, about him, about what we’ve done – until the muffled giggles stop and the DJs shut up and all I can hear is the heavy
tick
tick tick
of the grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs.

Then I wonder who else is awake, if there’s another girl in another bed in another room listening to the
tick tick tick
as well. If there’s a guy on the other side of the village, or a woman fussing over a loose thread on her duvet. It’s like I’m part of a club – the misfits, the liars, the lonely – who meet every night in the empty, black silence to wait for it to go grey with the promise of morning, with its cups of tea and conversations about the weather that fill the hours before we have to go to bed and do it again. And every night I tell myself the same thing, that tonight it will pass, that tonight I’ll sleep – and I never do.

But I guess that’s guilt, what it does to you.

245 DAYS BEFORE

SEPTEMBER

As first days of school go, today wasn’t so bad. No one flushed my head down the toilet or stole my lunch money, so I shouldn’t complain, but I still don’t want to be here. I’m trying to be mature about it, though; it’s hardly my father’s fault that the Nigerian High Commissioner in London died and he was posted here, plus my mother just found out that she’s going to be teaching a class at UCL, which she’s thrilled about. It doesn’t make being here any easier, though.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I could stay in London with them, but being shipped off to boarding school feels too much like I’ve done something wrong. I haven’t, I know. I know that they just want me to go to the best school in England – which is Crofton College – but if I had known that they were going to send me away, I would have asked to stay in New York where I had friends, a boyfriend, a favourite coffee shop, a favourite bench in Central Park. Secret places that I found, that were mine, but here I am at this dusty old school that’s about ten miles south of No One Gives a Damn, where no one can pronounce my surname.

I can’t tell my parents this, though, because they’d just tell me that it’s only been a day and I should give it a chance, and I should, but
my God
, if New York is the city that never sleeps, then Ostley is the village that’s about to nod off. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. It’s almost too much – too much green, too much space, too much sky. And it’s so quiet. There are no sirens, no buses panting in traffic, not the constant rumble of life you feel under your feet in New York. The rattle of the subway somewhere below the sidewalk or the far-off hum of a pneumatic drill splitting a road in two, as though the city is always shifting because there’s not enough room for everyone. But in Ostley, all there is is room. The fields go on until you get bored of looking at them and you can always hear stuff – birds chattering and brooks babbling – like a cartoon.

I’d refused to look at the Crofton brochure my father tried to show me before we left New York, but it didn’t matter because it’s just as I imagined. It’s the sort of school my father has always wanted to send me to, the sort of school he’d read about in books – that his friends from Cambridge had gone to – somewhere with hockey pitches and house badges and dining halls with long wooden tables. His eyes lit up when our car pulled onto the tree-lined drive and we got our first glimpse of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him like that – wide-eyed and blinking, like a little boy – which is why I’m giving it a chance.

Crofton is stunning, I’ll give it that – grand and gloriously Gothic, all spires and arches and leaded windows – but when the driver stopped to let a gaggle of girls cross the road, I realised that it has none of the glamour of my school in New York, none of the attitude. All the girls looked rather proper and seemed to be wearing their uniform with pride as though they’d chosen to wear it. No one tried to look different. There were no cute coats and matching headbands. No one had pinned a brooch to their blazer. They even seemed to be carrying the same folders. So when our car pulled up outside my boarding house and I was greeted by my housemistress, a middle-aged woman with a greying bob and sensible shoes called Mrs Delaney, I realised that I wouldn’t be wearing half the stuff I’d packed.

We’d got stuck in traffic leaving London so were half an hour late. In Nigerian time – where 7 a.m. means more like 11 a.m. – half an hour isn’t so bad, but in British time, it was a big deal, especially to Mrs Delaney, who made a point – three times – of telling us that she could only give us a fleeting tour before I had to get to Registration. So we left our housekeeper, Celina, in my room unpacking my luggage while Mrs Delaney showed us around.

‘Burnham houses all the girls in the Lower Six,’ she told us, marching back towards the stairs. ‘I’ve been the housemistress here for six years. Your house tutor is Madame Girard, whom you will see every morning for Registration, then for your one-on-one on a Monday.’

I nodded, wondering if I should be making a note of it, not that she slowed down for me to do so. She only stopped when we got to the end of the corridor. ‘I live in the cottage attached to the house and you can reach me out of hours by ringing this bell.’ She gestured at the door. ‘All the staff at Crofton live on campus, but we prefer if you call first, if you can.’

And that’s how it went on, Mrs Delaney barking stuff – about when to get up and when to sign out and when to clear my room so that it could be cleaned – as she showed us around. My father seemed impressed, nodding at each room: the bedrooms, the Common Room, the Laundry Room, the Dining Hall with its long tables. He didn’t say a word, just followed her, hands behind his back, his long wool coat swinging as he swept in and out of each room. When we returned to my room, all he said was, ‘The lock on the Common Room window needs replacing,’ and it was Mrs Delaney’s turn to look bewildered.

He told us that he’d wait in my room while we looked at the bathroom. Not that I was in any hurry to see it; my mother had to take me by the elbow and lead me down the corridor. I could see it at the end, steam billowing out of the door as a girl ran in with a pink towel. ‘You have four minutes, Miss Avery,’ Mrs Delaney barked after her and I shot a look at my mother, who smiled tightly and patted my arm.

There are fifty girls in Burnham, apparently, most of them doing A-Levels, but some are doing the Baccalaureate, like me. It felt like much more, though, and I didn’t expect it to be so
chaotic
. It was the first day of term, so I don’t know why I was surprised, to be honest. I thought it would be quiet – solemn – like a convent, I guess. But there were girls everywhere, darting from room to room clutching washbags and hairbrushes. I’ve never had to share a bathroom before and the thought of it, of having to queue to use the shower and brushing my teeth a sink away from a stranger, made my stomach knot. Where would I put my make-up on? In all the upheaval, it was such a silly thing to worry about, but it was all I could think about.

My mother must have known because when we got back to my room, she went to the window. ‘What a nice view, Adamma.’ She gestured at the magnolia tree. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’

I didn’t respond, just fussed over my skirt and blazer. At least the uniform was black and white, which was more flattering than the bottle-green and tartan I had worn at my school in New York, but I still sneered at my reflection in the mirror as Mrs Delaney ushered a girl in. Even though she seemed sweet, her hair wet from the shower, I still glared at her like a cornered cat.

She was struggling under the weight of a hockey bag. I waited for Mrs Delaney to tell her to put it down, but she didn’t. ‘This is Orla Roberts. Orla’s doing A-levels – so you won’t have any classes together – but she’s a house monitor, so if you need anything, she’s just across the hall.’ She gestured at me. ‘Orla, this is Adamma Okomma and her parents. They’ve just moved here from New York. Mr Okomma is the new Nigerian High Commissioner in London.’ She turned to my parents with a smile. ‘Orla is a scholarship student.’

She said it as though she was describing her eye colour.
This is Orla Roberts. She has brown eyes and poor parents
. I guess my mother noticed it too because she smiled tightly, then, with a more genuine one, turned to Orla and extended her hand. My father did too, and when it was my turn I did the same – a little sullenly, I admit, but I was too distracted as I saw Celina trying to shoehorn my clothes into the tiny closet. Mrs Delaney turned to watch her too. ‘There was no need to bring everything, dear. You must learn to pack for the term.’ When she laughed, I wanted to tell her
that
was my Fall wardrobe, but my father gave me a look, so I crossed my arms instead.

I guess I’ve seen too many movies about English boarding schools because when my parents left, I expected Orla to roll up her skirt and put on some red lipstick. Instead she told me that she’d see me later and left. As I watched her go, still struggling with her hockey bag, I won’t lie, I was a little disappointed. She hadn’t given me a cigarette and tried to take me under her wing, warn me who I should and shouldn’t speak to, offer to show me Crofton’s secret places. I suppose it served me right for being surly.

Mercifully, I didn’t have to find my way to my first class because every new pupil is assigned a hen, an older girl who has to show her around and help her settle in. My hen was an Upper Sixth girl called Tara Salter. She was more what I had expected, bright eyed and shiny haired. She’d definitely drunk the Kool-Aid and she gushed and gushed about the school, introducing me to each building as if it was her friend. But, as eager as she was, she had the grace to let me go to the bathroom by myself – not before she made sure I knew where my English lit class was. I still got lost, though, and wandered up and down the long corridor several times before I had to admit defeat and get the map she had given me out of my bag.

‘Going my way?’ a guy asked, suddenly at my side.

He said it so smoothly – as though we were in an old black-and-white movie and he was offering me a cigarette – that I stared at him for a moment or two before I remembered that the sixth form was mixed.

Perhaps my father wasn’t trying to torture me after all.

‘I’m Dominic Sim.’ He held out his hand. I looked at it, but that just made his smile more wicked as his hand dropped back down to his side. ‘I can escort you.’

‘You can? How do you know where I’m going?’

‘Heaven, I assume?’

I stared at him, horrified. I thought English boys were charming. I quietly cursed my father for making me watch
Downton Abbey
and raising my expectations.

I turned to walk away, but he changed tack. ‘OK. If the face isn’t working,’ he said, suddenly in front of me, ‘I’m a billionaire.’

That didn’t work, either. ‘Your father’s a billionaire,’ I replied, looking back down at my map. ‘The only thing you’ve earned is Air Miles.’

He laughed at that, loud and bright. ‘I like you already, Miss Okomma.’

I shot a look at him again. ‘How did you know my name?’

‘I know things.’ He gestured at the door of the classroom we were standing outside of. ‘Like you’re doing the Baccalaureate, right?’ I arched an eyebrow at him and his smile widened. ‘Me too. So this is where you want to be: English lit with Mr Lucas.’ He put a hand to his chest. ‘I promise never to lead you astray, Miss Okomma.’

He smiled and, as obnoxious as he was, I had to tell myself not to smile back. I kind of hate myself, but what can I say? What he lacked in humility he made up for in wit and if I have one weakness, it’s funny guys.

‘Come and sit next to me,’ he said, turning and walking into the classroom. ‘I’m new, too. We new kids need to stick together.’

‘I’m OK, thanks,’ I told him as I followed him in, sensing that I should probably keep as much distance between us as possible.

I headed for the empty desk in the middle of the classroom, but the girl sitting at the one behind it shook her head so emphatically that I stepped back. That left just one, in the front row, but before I could get to it, I heard Dominic say, ‘Get up, then, you unchivalrous bastard. Can’t you see the lady needs a desk?’

Realising what he was doing, I turned to tell him off, but was stunned to find the boy he’d barked at gathering up his books. By the time I’d recovered, he’d shuffled towards the desk in the front row, leaving just one free desk, the one next to Dominic’s.

‘Do people always do what you tell them?’ I asked, sighing as I realised that by sitting next to him, I was answering my own question.

At least he had the decency not to comment on it; he just smiled and gave me a
whatcha gonna do?
shrug as I took my notebook out of my bag. I put it down with a petulant huff, determined not to give him any further encouragement, but after I had opened it and written the date neatly in the top right-hand corner of the first page, my gaze strayed back towards him. He was still looking at me and I looked away, my toe tapping. I glanced at the doorway as a girl with dark hair walked in. She came in with a slight swagger and for a second, I thought she was walking towards me, but she stopped at his desk.

‘Dominic Sim,’ she said, and I could tell that she was fighting a smile.

He did smile. ‘Surprise!’

‘I thought you were on a slow boat to Korea after the Eton thing?’

The Eton thing
, I noted, pretending to write something in my notebook so that they wouldn’t think I was eavesdropping. I was the only one who took the trouble to be subtle, though; everyone else just turned to look at them as she stood in front of his desk, hands on her hips. Not that she seemed fazed that she had an audience, she had her chin up and her shoulders back. I got the feeling that she did this a lot.

‘You, more than anyone, should know not to listen to everything you hear, Scarlett,’ he said, his eyes suddenly black. ‘Good summer? How was rehab?’

‘I’m off the crack, at last. Three weeks clean.’ She crossed her fingers and held them up. ‘How was Eton? Do you still know what a vagina looks like?’

‘Feel free to remind me.’

‘Like you’d know what to do with it.’

He laughed and she claimed the victory with a curtsey, then went and sat at the desk in the middle. I guess that’s why that girl had shaken her head when I’d gone to sit there: it was her desk, the one in the middle where everyone could see her. Not that she needed to sit there; wherever she sat, you would see her; she seemed to reflect off the panelled walls like a new penny.

After her performance with Dominic, I wasn’t surprised that she was the first to raise her hand when class started. She didn’t do it with any eagerness, though – she looked rather bored, actually – but as soon as she did, four other hands shot up, and I watched Mr Lucas let go of a breath and smile, obviously grateful that his first lesson of the year wasn’t dying on its ass.

‘Yes, Miss Chiltern?’ He pointed the copy of
Anna Karenina
he was holding at her.

He’d been clutching it a little too tightly, I’d noticed, his knuckles white. And when he asked us what our favourite opening line of a book was, he sounded out of breath. I didn’t envy him. He was clearly flustered and
young
– in his early twenties, I guessed – much younger than the rest of the faculty, which must make some of the parents uncomfortable. I don’t think my father would be impressed; he seemed to think that every teacher at Crofton was the best in England. I think he’d struggle to believe that a twenty-something-year-old man, with what looked like MAX BIRTHDAY scribbled on the heel of his palm in biro, was the best English lit teacher they could find. His favourite line was from
Anna Karenina
. Somewhat predictable, or perhaps convenient, given that we were about to study it, so I expected her to say something similar. But she said, ‘All this happened, more or less.’