The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  Arty hoped she and Zeus would be able to tell Luna about this. Luna wouldn’t say anything, but she would listen. She would be interested.

  She took a half step towards the car.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said the one called Joe. ‘I promise we’re just taking you for help. Honestly.’

  Arty had no idea whether she could trust him. He was smiling, but that didn’t mean he was nice. She had no other options so she took a deep breath.

  ‘OK,’ she said, and quickly, before she could change her mind, she pushed Zeus into the back of the car and sat down next to him. The seat felt sticky where she touched it. The smell hurt her nose and she coughed and choked and wondered whether she was going to die now anyway. When Joe closed the door with a huge bang she could hardly breathe because she was stuck in a little place without any air. Zeus was barely behind his eyes at all; he clung to Arty’s hand but the rest of him had shut down and gone home. He rocked a little back and forth.

  Ganesh had a wheel in front of him and other things to do with his hands and Arty realized that, although she knew about engines a bit, she had no idea how anyone made them go. She watched what he did. A key made the engine start. She fingered the keys round her neck. One had opened the chain. The other two could be anything.

  Although she was ready for it to go fast because she had been watching them zooming past, Arty could never have been ready for what it felt like. She closed her eyes and hung on to Zeus with both hands and she was screaming in her head and probably with her mouth too. It went on and on and it was making her sick and she didn’t know what to do.

  I am a goddess. I am a goddess. I am a goddess.

  Arty knew the boy in the front was talking to her, and she couldn’t listen because everything was crowding in and there was too much. It was in all her senses. She couldn’t open her eyes. She wished she could close her ears too because the noise was impossible. The smell was going to kill her and Zeus. She could taste it all and she had no words for what it was like. She knew the tastes of her home, and she knew what they were. Mango and rice and water and forest air. Not long ago she had tasted beer and thought it was the worst thing in the world. Now she knew that the poison the inside of a car put into your mouth was the worst thing in the world. Cars made people die, and she was in a car. She tried to focus. What was the other sense? Sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. It was touch.

  She didn’t want to touch anything, but she was still clinging to Zeus, and she could feel his warmth. He was part of her.

  She had met three new people.

  Everything about this was horrific, but a part of her (it was a small part, but it was there, even at that point) was so proud of what she had done that she thought that when she got back home she would want to talk about this adventure for the rest of her life.

  There was a world beyond the clearing, and it was real.

  People lived in it. And now she was sitting in it.

  It had been a grey haze to her before, a scary place of destruction and poison and horror, and she had spent her life hiding from it, sometimes calling it the Wasteland like Hella did. Now things came out of the mist, defined.

  She was not the only teenager in the world.

  She moved her hand a little and touched Joe’s shoulder, in front of her. He reached round and put his hand on top of hers. Arty could feel his pulse. She felt their skin touching. She felt the warmth of the blood in his veins.

  When the car stopped and Joe opened the door, she took a deep breath of foulness. She didn’t want him to take his hand off hers. Joe helped Arty and Zeus out of the back of the car. She wanted to stay with him, to have him helping her forever.

  He looked different from the men in the clearing. He had a different smell, and she could see that he cut his hair much more often and he didn’t have a beard. She liked his face.

  Arty stared around. This was a road. Those were shops. There were cars that were still, parked beside the road. There were people. Some of them were staring at her and Zeus, but probably not as much as she was staring at them. Everything swirled. She gasped for breath. She touched the car to steady herself. It was smooth and warm beneath her fingers.

  Pharmacy, doctor, medicine, help.

  The pharmacy had a counter, open to the street, with little cardboard boxes and bottles on it, and Arty realized this was what shops were like. It was on the side of the road and cars were still going past. She tried to shut out everything else behind a curtain of black, and focused only on the shop with the green cross.

  ‘Will we need to pay?’ she asked Joe. ‘I don’t have … money.’ She looked at him to make sure she’d said it right. When she had met that word in books she had read it as ‘moany’, and Venus had corrected her, but she still didn’t believe it was ‘munny’.

  Venus hated money. She said it had started out as a convenient way to get things without having to have something to barter directly, but that now it had corrupted everything. She said the love of money was the root of all evil.

  ‘Don’t worry about the cash for now,’ he said.

  ‘I have these herbs.’ Arty passed him Hella’s bag. ‘I think we use them to pay for things because money is the root of all evil. We barter our herbs. Can I do that? At the pharmacy? Is that … right?’

  She watched him open the bag.

  ‘Oh shit!’ he said. He looked around and closed it again quickly. ‘No. Don’t worry about the money. I’ll take this and I’ll pay for your medicine. Don’t worry, OK? We’ll work it out later. Don’t let anyone else see this. Where the hell do you come from?’

  He held the bag where the shop man wouldn’t see it.

  The pharmacist spoke a little bit of English and a lot of Hindi. He had a round face and a turban on his head, just like Hella had said. He smiled a friendly smile at Arty and Zeus.

  ‘Are you a foreigner?’ he asked in Hindi.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I’m from here. From the forest. My mother is from England. My father is from India and Afghanistan and Australia and Morocco.’ She said those words carefully in English because she didn’t know the Hindi words.

  He laughed. ‘You speak Hinglish! You speak it very well.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And you are from many places.’

  ‘I’m just from here. Just one place. One. I don’t know any other places.’

  ‘And what,’ he said in Hindi, ‘is the problem?’

  Arty took a deep breath. ‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘a woman who came here with long grey hair? A white woman?’

  ‘White woman?’ he said. ‘Speaking English? Yes, I remember. She had a little boy who was ill, at her home.’

  ‘Well, the boy died,’ said Arty. ‘And then so did she. And other people too.’

  She said the words and she made them real in the outside world as well as in the clearing. She concentrated hard, and explained, saying what she could in Hindi and the rest in English. She told him all of it. She was aware of Joe next to her not really understanding the Hindi, and Ganesh beside him following all of it.

  ‘Four people are still there,’ she said to finish. ‘Or five. Sick. Very sick. Please send help. Please send a doctor and an ambulance. Please.’

  She said it without melting away or flying into little pieces. She said it while holding tightly to Zeus. It took every bit of all the strength she had taken from her family, and she thanked them in her head.

  The man spoke, and Arty saw that his smile had gone.

  ‘This is … this is very bad. I think this is very bad indeed. We will send help. I offered help last time but the lady just wanted medications. Please tell us how we reach this place. Now, you sit back in the taxi, please. We’ll find a doctor for you too.’

  June

  I kept pretending to be ill, just in case. Considering that she was keeping me as a secret prisoner away from fresh air and the sun, I thought she really did need to be worried
about my health, and I kept coughing and looking pained whenever she came in. At the very least I could see it made her feel bad, and I wanted to work on that, to open the wound, to keep her feeling bad until she remembered that people didn’t keep other people imprisoned in basements. Then she could let me go.

  ‘Take us with you when you go,’ the toys used to say, and I would promise them one by one that I would.

  I would too. They didn’t belong down here. I would take them all to a charity shop or something so they could go to smaller children. All but the bear. I was going to keep that bear, because it was important.

  I moved on to the next idea, which was to overpower her. On the face of it that should have been easy. She was much older than I was, and I was in my teens and I ought to have been much stronger than her. However, she was turning out to be the strongest person in the world and I knew I couldn’t underestimate her.

  I should be able to push her over, if I caught her by surprise. Then I would need to get her keys.

  The door to this place was actually two doors, one at the top of the stairs and the other at the bottom, so I knew I was going to need both keys. There was no point getting out of the basement if I ended up stuck at the top of the stairs, still locked in.

  I could punch her in the face.

  That was unthinkable. She was family.

  I sat and thought about it. I could punch her in the face. I was going to have to hurt her because she wouldn’t give me the keys if I didn’t.

  I thought of the world out there. I thought of my future.

  I had to hurt her.

  I had to hurt her so that I could get out of here. I wouldn’t kill her. I would just hurt her enough to get the keys. That was all.

  7

  They were taken in an ambulance to a hospital that was far away. Everyone who came near them wore astronaut suits. They were put in a room together and left alone. Their bodies were side by side in their hospital room while their minds were all over the place.

  She knew in a pale second-hand way that there were a lot of things happening. Doctors and other people were panicking about the fever, calling it a plague, asking if they ever ate monkey meat, or got bitten by bats, and things like that. There had been another illness, far away, that came from a bat, and they thought this might be the same thing. Everyone was very worried about it. She told them they never ate any meat, and no one had been bitten by anything, but they kept asking again and again.

  Even through her fog of shock and horror Arty could understand that everyone was scared that she and Zeus were going to make more people ill. They flustered around, doing things she couldn’t see, but all the time they kept the two of them, and anyone they’d spoken to, away from everyone else in the whole of the world.

  All she saw were four white walls and a closed window that was dusty on the outside. There was a fan, which plugged into the wall and worked using the electricity that lived there. When she looked out of the window she saw streets with people walking on them, down below, and she knew that she was higher up than the top of a tree, even though she couldn’t remember how she had got here.

  She watched cars. She could see that people carried bags with things in them that they had bought from shops. The strangeness of it all melted away quickly, and it became ordinary and horrible.

  Arty had still not seen money. She knew about it. It was made from pieces of paper and metal, which went from hand to hand, from person to shop, for years and years and years. It was dirty – it travelled around and around and never got cleaned. It was the most horrible thought to look after a piece of paper that could have been anywhere in this filthy massive world, and to give it to someone else when they had a thing you wanted. Arty could not imagine being happy to swap a bag of mangoes, for example, for a dirty piece of paper.

  And it was metaphorically dirty too, as Venus used to say. Money was a shortcut that meant you could get what you needed without having something to barter right then and there, but it had led to people trying to accumulate as much of it as they possibly could, in a way that they couldn’t have done if there was still bartering (because then they would just have ended up with a pile of rotting mangoes). She knew that money both did and didn’t exist: it existed as tokens people used to pay for things, but it wasn’t real. It was a promise. It could all collapse. Venus had talked about it a lot.

  Arty didn’t see it when a team of people in spacesuits went to the clearing – her clearing, her home, her universe – and discovered no human life. They found the bodies she had seen before she went, plus four more. They found everyone dead. She didn’t see any of that, and when they told her about it she shut the meanings out because she couldn’t deal with them.

  She sat on her bed, with Zeus always next to her, and they stared at the wall. Time passed. Arty felt feelings building and growing inside her, like a seed beneath the soil, getting ready to germinate. She kept them underground. She did not water that seed, didn’t put any compost on it, didn’t take any notice of it at all, but she knew it was there.

  Joe was being kept here too in case he already had the illness in his body, and so was Ganesh and the man from the pharmacy and the lady with the bike. Arty felt bad that Joe and the others had to stay here just because they’d spoken to her. Only Joe came to visit Arty and Zeus. He turned up in their room sometimes, and she spoke to him, but in an absent way. She answered his questions probably, but she didn’t really know what she was saying. He talked about the herbs, but she didn’t listen. He held her hand, but she didn’t care about that any more.

  He talked to Zeus too. He showed Zeus how to play games on his phone, and Zeus understood quickly and played them without a word, frowning at the screen. Zeus liked Joe’s company; Arty could tell that even though he never spoke. Arty recognized that Joe was being kind to them, that he was the closest thing she had to a friend out here, but she didn’t care. She did not want a friend out here and Joe was not her real friend. She wanted her world back. She could see that Joe was ready to answer her questions about the outside world, but she didn’t have anything she wanted to ask.

  She tried not to listen when they came in and spoke to her. She ate the food when it arrived, even though she didn’t want to, and she found a way to begin to tolerate the needle and the liquid that they put into her body, the medicine that was supposed to be taking away the sickness that she didn’t have.

  She sat back and let it all happen because she couldn’t do anything else. After a while she taught Zeus how to read, using the books the hospital people gave her when she begged them (books by Chetan Bhagat and Agatha Christie). She read those books without concentrating. In the clearing she used to get lost completely in her book world, and now she couldn’t, even though she knew the books were good. Reality, her nightmarish reality of horror, was always there and however hard she tried she couldn’t make it go away. She had her bag, with Venus’s note in it, but she couldn’t look at it. She knew her bear was in there, but she didn’t get it out as this didn’t feel like the place for a lovely friendly bear from the clearing.

  She thought about dying, because she knew that she couldn’t live here in the Wasteland. She knew, although she tried not to look at the fact head on, that both her parents must be dead. She knew that because people kept telling her over and over again and she hated them for that.

  She spent hours looking at ways she could die. The window didn’t open, but she would be able to get through it if she were able to throw something to smash the glass, and then she could just fling herself down to the dusty concrete in the car park below. She could probably poison herself if she drank all the medicine from their drips. She could stop eating. She could make a blade from something and cut herself with it. She could drown herself by blocking the drain in the shower and letting it fill with enough water. There were lots of things she could do if she tried hard enough.

  Zeus was the thing that stopped her. There was nothing to tether her to the world but him, and he was enough.
She knew that, although the thoughts comforted her, she would never do it because of him. He was material, real, breathing, and as confused and sad as she was, and she was all he had in the world. She knew that taking herself away from him would be the cruellest act she could ever commit, and she knew that she wouldn’t do it. Nor could she take him with her. However much she liked to spend hours imagining the two of them rushing towards their family in the perfect clearing of the afterlife, she knew it was not going happen yet. If she killed him, they would both be dead and that would be the end.

  She couldn’t do anything but stay in the hospital room, in body, while her mind did whatever it needed to do to survive. So that was what she did. She cuddled up to Zeus and she spoke to him. She got the bear out of her bag at some point, and spoke to it too. The bear seemed to talk back to her more than Zeus did.

  In the end it changed. One day the blood that they took out of her with their needle said something different. People started to come in without masks on. There was a flurry of talk about ‘arrangements’. About ‘successful containment’. A doctor said she must seek immediate medical help any time she had a fever, because this was still a new virus and it might come back.

  There were pieces of paper. Sometimes people tried to explain to Arty what had happened but she shut herself away and didn’t listen. She refused to hear any of it, until they told her they had found Kali’s sister in France, and that she was on her way over to meet them.

  June

  I went through everything in the room, looking for something to use to overpower her.

  ‘Sorry we’re so soft,’ said the rabbit, and the rest of them murmured agreement, wishing that they could have helped.

  ‘Can you do that thing where you become demons and fly around the room again?’ I asked, but they shook their heads and said they couldn’t, that that had just been for me. Lucky me.