The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  The hospital hadn’t made Katy better, but she had been all right, even though her legs didn’t work. She had stayed alive.

  ‘Go and see if Vishnu needs a hand,’ Venus said, clearly trying to make Arty go and talk to her father instead. Arty considered grabbing Hercules and carrying him out of the forest, but she had no idea how long it would take, or where to go, or what to say, and while she was trying to work it out he might die.

  The air was static. Vishnu was stoking the fire ready to boil more water, with Zeus sitting right up against him.

  ‘Hey there,’ he said as she approached. Vishnu had the most lovely smile. Arty hoped she had one like it. The tiniest mirror hung on the wall of the latrines, and it was hard to tell what she actually looked like. ‘How you doin’?’

  Arty sat down. ‘Will Hella be back tonight?’ she said. ‘Why did she go so late? Why didn’t she take Herc with her to hospital?’

  Vishnu sighed. ‘It’s a long way, Arts. He’s too sick to be carried that far. She left late because it took them that long to agree to getting help. She’ll sleep somewhere on the way to make an early start tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, why don’t we get an ambulance?’

  He shrugged. ‘We don’t have a phone? We get an ambulance by sending someone to the nearest village so they can call one. You may have noticed that we’ve sent someone to the nearest village. Arty, I can see you think we’re sitting back and doing nothing, but I promise you that we’re really not. I heard you talking to Venus, and for what it’s worth I agree. We should take him to hospital. I hope that Hella will bring help when she comes back because this is too much for us.’

  Zeus climbed on to Arty’s lap and she held him tight. No one said anything for a while, and then Vishnu spoke again.

  ‘And,’ he said, glancing at Zeus and then back to Arty, ‘look, I’m afraid that Diana’s not feeling well either. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m just the cook right now.’ He slapped a mosquito on his arm. ‘But we need to keep out of the way of the sick people, because there is something very weird here. Right out of their way.’

  Arty looked at Zeus. He had closed his eyes.

  ‘Can I have another mango?’ he said from inside his eye-cage.

  ‘Course,’ said Vishnu. ‘Help yourself, mate. Have all the mangoes you want.’

  ‘Is there anything we can do right now?’

  ‘You can pass me that pot.’ Vishnu nodded at a big metal cooking pot that was stacked in the shed behind him. Arty fetched it; it was heavy and she had to use both hands to carry it.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. The air was thick with humidity. It was the worst when it was like that. Vishnu ladled food into the pot and set it on the fire.

  They sat and stared at it. Nothing happened. They just had to wait. Hercules’s cries slid through the forest, touching everything.

  May

  ‘If you’re going to get out,’ said the rabbit, ‘then you need to make a plan.’

  I picked it up and looked into its face. It snarled, but it was the friendliest of all the creatures.

  ‘What can I do, though?’ I said, and that brought the others over. The teddy, with its ‘Love You Loads X’ heart, was the leader. I had loved that bear and now I was terrified of it. Sometimes its heart said ‘love’ and sometimes it said ‘hate’. Today, though, it said ‘love’. That spurred me on to start planning.

  I started to think of ideas, and went to fetch a pen and a new piece of paper. With the help of the creatures, I started to write.

  Pretend to be ill so I can be taken to a doctor.

  Overpower her when she comes in and just leave through the door and deal with whatever else is out there when I find it.

  Get a message to the outside world by sticking a sign up in the window, or smashing the window, or somehow making the people out there notice me.

  Convince her I’m sorry and I won’t do anything to upset her again.

  Start a fire.

  The ceiling was low. It was low enough for me to hit it with something if I wanted to, but I was pretty sure I had tried that for hours (probably days) and nothing had happened. Everything I did in here, every noise I made, was contained. It was muffled instantly, and bounced back at me in a dull way.

  I fiddled around with the television controller and ended up on a channel that seemed to be about nothing but shopping. I stared at it right up until I felt everything I thought I knew about humanity and capitalism flying apart in all directions until there was nothing left. I found myself at the centre of an apocalyptic wasteland watching a man and a woman I didn’t know trying to convince me to phone them to buy a necklace I didn’t want, and they were so convincing that if I’d had a phone and a bank account I would have ordered one just to make it stop.

  Help me, I said to them. Please help me get out of here!

  I stared at them, and I was sure their faces changed when they understood me. It felt like this was about more than a necklace; I was sure there was something else going on but I didn’t know how to decode it. Maybe they were trying to tell me what to do. Perhaps if I wrote down the words they spoke, the initial letters would give me a message. I had no idea. I even tried it, but it spelled ‘guarawwgioiwty’ (give us a ring and we will get it on its way to you), which didn’t help.

  In a small chink of sanity I saw that my mind had gone.

  I couldn’t let that happen. I was young. There might be a life ahead of me.

  I looked at my list, and decided that I would start at the top and pretend to be ill. As soon as I was in the hands of the NHS I would be out of her control. I knew that I looked terrible, but I was also pretty certain that she didn’t care. I would have to find a new kind of ill, a dangerous one that would make her bring in a doctor. It was worth a try.

  I knew that there was sometimes a children’s programme about doctors and ill people, and so I tore myself away from the necklace and switched to the children’s channel so that I could wait for it to come on. I picked up the bear and cuddled it, and it bit my finger.

  4

  Arty couldn’t sleep. She watched Luna, checking she was breathing, touching her forehead occasionally to see whether she had a fever. She did the same to Zeus, who was sleeping in Arty’s bed tonight. Both of them seemed healthy.

  She stood at the window of the treehouse, leaning out. The moon was lopsided, a few days on from the round moon of Kotta. Everything looked the way it always did. The sounds of the night-time world were the same as they had been all her life. It was very loud when you weren’t doing anything else. It had always soothed her. The insects were riotous. Every now and then there was another noise, a human one, and she tried not to think about what that meant.

  Arty knew that Luna didn’t understand. Zeus did, though. She looked round. He was staring at her with huge dark eyes. She tried to smile, pulling up the corners of her mouth, but it didn’t feel like a smile at all, and his face didn’t move.

  Nothing had happened for hours.

  Hella had stayed away all night, like Vishnu had said, but when she came back halfway through the next day she didn’t have an ambulance, or a doctor, or anything that could help apart from a bag of tablets.

  Everyone ran to meet her. She held up the bag.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘This will sort it out.’ Her eyes darted around, checking everyone’s reactions, but her mouth was set in a straight line. The sky was heavy with clouds. Arty wanted to cry. Hercules needed a proper doctor from the outside world; she could see that and she knew that her parents could as well. Diana would want that. Only Hella and Inari were against it.

  ‘Did you speak to a doctor?’ Venus asked.

  ‘I talked to the pharmacist,’ she said. ‘Nice man. He was wearing a turban. I’ve never spoken to him before. He said this would clear it all up. He wasn’t worried.’

  ‘Easy for him not to be worried,’ said Vishnu.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Hella glared at him. ‘You weren’t there. I told him how Hercules is feel
ing and he sold me these. They weren’t cheap either.’

  Venus actually grabbed her arm. ‘What did you tell him? Did you say how sick he is? Did you ask him to fetch a doctor?’

  Hella looked her in the eye. ‘Of course I didn’t ask for a doctor. He took it seriously, and he said to try these. He said he would come back with me himself, but I wasn’t having that.’

  ‘He needs proper help. Diana’s ill too. We need to bring in the modern world here, Hella. I can’t believe he said he would come and you turned him down.’

  They stared at each other for a long time. Arty could see the anger passing between them. She went and stood next to Venus and glared at Hella too. Inari went and stood with Hella.

  They were split. That had never happened as far as Arty knew. They stood there and argued and argued, but there was nothing they could do except take the pills Hella had bought.

  Odin was Herc’s dad. He was usually a quiet and kind man, but when he heard that Hella had turned down help he grabbed her by the shoulders and said he was going to kill her. Everyone pulled him off.

  Hella said some bad words to all of them.

  ‘Only Inari gets it,’ she said. ‘Fuck you, all the rest of you.’

  She stormed off into the forest and didn’t come back. By the end of the day Hercules had died.

  Everything had shattered. The world was over.

  They all took the pills, but they didn’t work. Diana was ill too, and then so was Kali, even though she was the doctor. Diana died. Other people got ill. It happened with a momentum that was terrifying to Arty. Hella came back because she was ill too and she needed to lie down. No one could be bothered to be angry any more because everything was different.

  Arty walked over, holding Venus’s hand, to look at Hercules and Diana, his mother, lying side by side in the sick room. It was the first time Arty had seen him since Kotta night.

  He was so tiny. Arty looked into his little face. He was the second youngest out of all of them, the first boy born in the new world, and he was dead. He had a body, but it would never be any bigger than it was now, and it would never climb trees or jump up and down or chase Zeus through the woods ever again.

  He had a body but he didn’t have a spirit. Arty looked at his little fingers, and his nose, and all the hairs on his head, and she longed to pull him back from wherever he had gone. It was everything that had once been him, but not him any more. It was impossible to find words for it. When she looked at him everything stopped. The whole world shifted. It would never go back.

  Diana had taught Arty everything. She had been a brilliant teacher. It was thanks to Diana that Arty could read and do maths and understand about the water cycle and how engines worked and what had brought the world to its current disastrous state. Arty looked at her still face for a few seconds and then ran out of the hut. A few days ago, Diana and Arty had been reading Hamlet. Now Diana had watched her only child die, before dying herself.

  Everyone was taking tablets. No one was doing anything. It was hot, and there was a cloud of sickness lying on top of everything.

  We might all die. Once Arty had had that thought she couldn’t think of anything else. The words were in her head, written everywhere she looked. We might all die, it said in the middle of the pit. It was carved into the trees. It was written in tiny letters on every leaf. It was in the birdsong, the splash of the stream, the crackling of the fire.

  Kali had gone up to her treehouse to lie in bed. That meant there was no doctor. Hella was trying to pretend she wasn’t sick but she was lying in the shack with burning skin and sweaty hair. Luna had shuffled over to her, and was sitting with her, holding her hand, and no one stopped her.

  All these things were real. Arty wanted them not to be, but they were real and actually happening. She knew that Kali was going to die. She knew that Hella was going to die. She knew that she might be next.

  Arty could make herself go into a kind of trance by telling herself over and over again, This is really, really, really, really real – until her head filled with infinite pale silver that blanketed everything in the way she imagined snow would do. The repeated words made reality warp and stretch until nothing in the world mattered. She didn’t feel that she was actually living. The cosmos was huge, and the world was small. She could see the edges of everything she had ever known and she could see outer space just by looking up.

  But the trance couldn’t last. She pulled herself back to reality and thought of Venus’s words at Kotta, just a few days earlier.

  We will never take our health for granted. We will all of us work for the greater good. We will move into the future with happiness and solidarity … What happens to one happens to all.

  What happens to one happens to all.

  She said that every year and Arty had always found it comforting. She had thought it meant that they all did their jobs for the good of everyone, that they helped each other out with anything that needed doing. It was not making her feel good any more, because it seemed to be literally true.

  What had happened to Hercules was happening to all. One by one they were getting ill. One by one they would die.

  At some point later in the day she found herself curled up on the step to the pit, which Venus was now calling the ‘quarantine area’, listening to Venus, Vishnu and Inari talking.

  ‘We have to.’ Venus hit the ground with her fists. Arty could see from her face that she was only just holding herself together. ‘Hella didn’t do it. She bottled it. We always said that if there was a medical emergency, we’d go. Hella tried not to, but that hasn’t worked. We don’t have a choice.’

  ‘So we’re going to give up?’ That was Inari. ‘Going back? Back into all that shit. Right where we left it. I’ll take my chances here.’

  ‘Don’t be a twat,’ she said. ‘This is life and death. Actual death of a child. Nothing carries on. It’s over.’

  ‘Yeah, come on, mate,’ said Vishnu. ‘Enough.’

  Before, there had been a protocol for arguments, which was that you talked it out calmly in front of a neutral person who helped you reach a conclusion, then each person involved made each other a drink or offered them something to eat. Arty wanted to step in and make all this happen but she knew they wouldn’t let her. Things were different now.

  Vishnu was trying to calm things, but neither Venus nor Inari was backing down. Their voices were getting louder and louder. Arty saw Vishnu look over at her and then he scooted over to sit beside her. She pulled herself up to a sitting position.

  ‘They’ll work it out,’ he said. ‘Venus is right. You and I know that. Inari’s wrong.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Arty and her dad listened as Venus shut Inari down.

  ‘You can do what you want,’ she said. ‘I’m taking the kids. By all means stay here and die.’

  ‘Oh, fuck you, Victoria,’ Inari said. Normally he was grumpy but quiet. Arty had never heard him like this before. His voice got louder and louder as he started to shout. ‘We’ve put everything into this. We renounced that. Gone! All of it. We were meant to live as if we were on a remote island, or a different planet. Are you really going to go crawling back? Oh sorry. We actually want some of your chemicals, in fact. We made our own society but as soon as things went wrong we gave up. Can you cure us please? Screw that.’

  ‘One of our children has died. Are you seriously fine with that?’

  ‘I’m not fine with it. No. But I’m not moving back there because of it either. Have some integrity.’

  ‘Then you might want to move on somewhere else.’

  ‘Don’t slam the door on your way out.’

  Venus stared at him. Then she looked away, and from that moment on she acted as if he didn’t exist.

  ‘You’re coming, aren’t you, Vish?’ she said. ‘And the kids.’ She looked around. ‘I don’t think Odin’s going anywhere.’

  Odin hadn’t moved from the hut. Arty supposed he was sitting with Diana and Hercules’s bodies. They should
have had a funeral ceremony, but no one could focus on that yet. Later, perhaps, they would do it, when they knew that the dying was over.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Arty’s dad, squeezing her hand. ‘Of course I’m coming. Arty and Zeus and Luna are getting to hospital. Absolutely no way are we losing another kid. That’s the thing that matters.’

  Losing another kid. The words felt unreal.

  Arty looked up at the sky, which was beginning to lose its light. She had read a book about physics, and she knew that space was a strange elastic thing, that it bent and stretched, that time was different up there. She liked that. Feeling insignificant felt like her best way of getting through each minute. She had no idea how the rest of them were able to hold rational conversations when Hercules had died. He had been born here and he had died here. He led an entire life in the clearing.

  That thought punctured her defences. Hercules’s life was over, and he had spent every moment of it here. She had seen him every day of his life and now she would never see him again.

  She struggled to breathe. The fact that Hercules and Diana didn’t exist any more blasted through every cell in her body. It was unimaginably huge, yet she felt numb. They just weren’t going to be there. If she called them for lunch, they wouldn’t come. If she went to wake them, they wouldn’t be in their beds. She wanted to bring them back but she couldn’t. Nothing she did would change any of it. For the rest of her life there would be no Hercules. It was too awful. She stared into space and wished for the whole world to end.

  Later she lay in the pit, covered with a blanket, and waited. She listened while Venus packed things up. They were going to leave as soon as it was light. They had to keep busy, to try to save the others. Arty focused on the plans, trying to keep her mind on practical things, doing her best to shut out the horror.