The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  Zeus sniffed. He put his head down. Tears fell on to his paneer.

  ‘France will be splendid,’ said Vikram, but he looked a bit concerned.

  ‘I have always longed to go to Paris,’ said Gita, almost crying herself.

  ‘You’ll have to use a fork in France, I think,’ Arty managed to say, as Zeus picked up a clump of rice with his fingers again.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Vikram. ‘Table manners will be paramount. The food will be very different. Also, I think the weather will be colder, perhaps even snowing at times.’

  They stared at him. Arty hadn’t thought about snow being a thing that was real in this world, and she wasn’t sure Zeus had any kind of concept of what the word meant, so she said, ‘Snow is white, cold stuff that falls from the sky instead of rain, Zeus,’ then looked to Vikram and Gita to check that was right.

  They both nodded. Zeus looked to the ceiling, as if expecting snow to fall at once.

  Gita and Vikram tried to be normal, but when Arty walked into the kitchen with the dirty plates afterwards she heard Gita saying, ‘To be honest I’d like to slap the woman. It’s cruelty, separating them,’ and Vikram agreeing. When Gita noticed her, she walked over and hugged her, and that was the closest Arty came to crying.

  ‘Stay here with us, dear girl,’ said Vikram, and everything about him was kind. ‘We will take care of you.’

  She tried to imagine herself living here and being their foster daughter, as there didn’t appear to be any Uncle Matthew turning up for her. She supposed Venus had never said he would come and collect her. She was meant to go and find him, but how could she? She would have to go to school now, and she knew Vikram and Gita would help her to work it all out. It might turn out all right.

  Then when she was eighteen, which seemed to be the age you needed to be to do things on your own, she would get herself to France and battle through the snow to find her little brother, and he could come and live with her forever. The two of them would go together to London and Matthew and Persephone. She considered it.

  As they lay in bed that night, cuddled up together, she put her face into his hair and tried to say the right things.

  ‘You might have to stay in France for a little bit,’ she whispered. ‘But then I’ll come and find you. I promise I will. I’ll go to Mumbai where it’s a huge city, and I’ll go to France and find you, and you and me will go to London to find Matthew and Persephone. And they will help us to know what to do.’

  ‘Persephone,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. She’s one of us. She’s from our home. Matthew’s my uncle so he might not understand, like your aunt, but Persephone will help us.’

  They talked late into the night. Arty whispered to him about the clearing, about their family. She told him they would always have each other. They talked about each of their family members in turn, because Arty knew that by the time they came to do it again Zeus might have forgotten. He was so small. They talked about Luna, their quiet sister. She was the baby born after Arty, and Arty told him how exciting it had been when Hella’s baby finally arrived. They talked about Hercules, who had been so close to Zeddy that they were practically twins. She told him about his own birth, how Kali had been in labour for three days, sometimes walking around the clearing yelling her power to the skies, and sometimes shut in the hut with Hella and Venus sitting with her, but that then finally a baby boy had cried and the clearing had a huge celebration.

  They went through their parents, and all the other grown-ups.

  Zeus said: ‘I want Kali.’

  It was the first time he had said that. Arty held him tight and they never wanted to let go of each other.

  He fell asleep. Arty didn’t. She lay awake all night and watched it getting light outside the window. She had said goodbye to everyone she had ever known, and now she was going to say goodbye to Zeus too.

  The next morning she helped Zeus into the car, knowing they had lost. She hated Florence for taking him away. Arty knew that she could have lived with a foster family in France, if Florence had helped to set that up.

  ‘Kali was my family too,’ she said in a quiet voice in French, as Florence stepped towards her with a fake smile on her face. ‘Zeus is all I have left.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Florence.

  Zeus and Arty were staring at each other. They had already hugged and said goodbye. She had promised to get in touch with FaceTime and the other things Florence had said. She had promised him the whole world.

  Florence got into the back seat, blocking Arty’s view of Zeus, and said thank you to Pia for helping them. The car started up and Arty watched Florence talking to Zeus, and Zeus leaning as far away from her as he could. As the car drove away she knew she had failed him. This was wrong.

  And now she had nobody.

  June

  I pulled the back off the remote control, and snapped it, and then I had a point that would hurt if it stuck into a soft part of your body. I sat and stared at the television, poking myself with the sharp bit and trying to work out how I could use it.

  Eyes were soft. I didn’t want to poke this into someone’s eye, and particularly not hers (we were related, after all). But if I was going to get out of here I had to do it, and I couldn’t think of anywhere where it would work, apart from her eye. This was my problem.

  It was small. I kept it up my sleeve. The toys all approved. They were changing again before my eyes. The bear, the rabbit and the monkey were becoming softer, like cartoon animals from the television. And there were other things. There were cartoon bluebirds singing in the corner of the room, and squirrels that climbed up the walls. I knew they were all trying to get me to be strong and brave, so that I could attack the woman and get out.

  The bear sidled up to me and spoke out of the corner of its mouth. ‘I love you loads,’ it said, ‘but you’re a bit smelly, you know?’

  I went to have a shower. The bear was right. If I was going to get out I needed to look presentable, and not to smell, because I would need to run away and blend in. It was scary, and I would only get one chance, and I had to do it right. It was for the greater good.

  The water in the shower wasn’t very warm, and it came out in a dribble, but I stood under it for ages. The water raining on top of me made me think about standing outside in the rain, and I closed my eyes and imagined myself out of here.

  I dried myself with the towel and got dressed quickly. My hair was wet and it made my shoulders wet too. I was a bit cold and the room had a nasty musty kind of smell.

  I was desperate to see the sun. I put on a long-sleeved top and pushed the weapon up my sleeve. I psyched myself up and up and up.

  ‘You can do it!’ said the animals, and the birds flew around the ceiling, and the edges of the room became grass. Flowers bloomed in the wallpaper, even though the walls had been painted white before. The whole room was coming together to help me.

  ‘I’m not going to kill her,’ I told the rabbit.

  It looked a bit disappointed. ‘You’re going to hurt her, though,’ it said, and I agreed that I was. I was going to get out, and that was fair and right. I was doing the right thing to free myself.

  By the time she came in I was ready to do it. All my friends were hiding behind the box, tense and excited, waiting.

  She was holding a tray. I watched as she went through her usual routine. She unlocked the door, turned round and picked up the tray she had left on the other side. When she was through the door she put the tray down again, and locked us in. She brought the tray over and put it down on the floor beside me. It had a sandwich and a bag of crisps and a banana on it. I liked bananas. I didn’t like crisps. They were too nothingy and they made me feel ill inside. I wasn’t planning to eat these ones anyway.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said.

  I looked at her and forced a smile. ‘Hello,’ I said as I stood up.

  I heard the animals gasping and chattering.

  ‘Someone smells better,’ she said, and I could see t
hat she was pleased. She thought she had tamed that part of me. ‘Your hair looks nice like that. Clean.’

  ‘I had a shower,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Clearly. Don’t think you’re getting a hairdryer.’

  ‘I don’t want a hairdryer.’

  I was breathing heavily, steeling myself. I waited. I let her tell me about things I didn’t care about, about what her friends were up to today. I let her talk. I didn’t really listen. I could hear the bear saying, ‘Do it! Do it now!’ and the rabbit saying, ‘Not yet. Wait a minute!’

  ‘It’s just you and me,’ she said suddenly. ‘Doing this. No one else is interested. One day you’ll realize this is all for your own good.’ Her eyes were glinting with madness.

  ‘I will not,’ I said. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

  When she turned to leave I got up too. I walked behind her to the door, knowing that the toys were following me. She stopped to get her keys off her belt and turned to look at me.

  ‘What are you doing there?’ she said. ‘Looming.’ She flinched away from me.

  I didn’t answer. This was the moment. I held the weapon in my hand, and I thought of everything in the world outside, and I thought about how she had no right at all to be keeping me prisoner, and I pushed it into her face.

  9

  Arty started running, desperate to follow the car. But it was faster than she was. Of course it was; that was how cars worked. When she stopped running, Pia was there behind her. She put both hands on Arty’s shoulders.

  ‘They will look after him,’ she said.

  Arty liked Pia’s smell because it was like flowers. She liked Pia, who was quite young and tall and wore nice clothes. But Arty knew that, right now, Pia was wrong. She knew that the only thing she could do was to get herself to France and to rescue her brother and look after him forever.

  Pia was kind but she couldn’t see that Arty was on fire. Florence had taken the last thing she cared about and now there was nothing left. This was not her world, because she had no world. She was a spirit here. Nothing bad could happen because the worst things had happened already, every single one of them. She felt a surge of power. She would keep it inside for now. But, when she needed to, she would let it out and she would power through the world like a hurricane, like the monsoon rain, like the ocean.

  ‘At least it’s done,’ Pia said. ‘He will be OK, you know. He will.’ She didn’t seem to see at all that Arty was different. She did not see that she was a girl who had come out of the woods to power through the world.

  ‘Can I go for a walk on my own?’ Arty said. ‘I’ll come back here later.’

  ‘No, Artemis. Sorry. Actually there’s someone who wants to see you, and I think it would do you good today. Distract you.’

  ‘Who wants to see me?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  They went back to the same cafe. Arty was hoping against hope that the friend who wanted to see her was, somehow, Zeus, or Venus miraculously saved from the plague, or perhaps her uncle Matthew. She thought it might even have been Persephone, but it wasn’t. She tried not to look disappointed as she walked through the smells of tea and coffee and food and sat down at a different table, where Joe was waiting. The boy from the taxi.

  He stood up and kissed her on the cheek. That was odd. She shrank away a bit. In fact, though, she was pleased to see him. He had been at her side through that time in hospital. No one else would ever know what that time had been like.

  ‘Artemis,’ he said. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and a pair of blue shorts and flip-flops. His hair was still really short. She thought he must cut it all the time to keep it like that. ‘How are you doing?’

  She sat at the table. Pia sat at the next one, close enough to keep a proper eye on them, but not part of their conversation.

  She knew it wasn’t his fault but she glared at him anyway. ‘Bad,’ she said. ‘They took Zeus. They took him away.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you’ve been separated. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’m going to get him back.’

  ‘Good. You do that.’

  ‘I don’t know how to get to France. Or anything. But I’ll find him. I shouldn’t have let them go. I saw him, Joe. As they drove off she talked to him and he did this.’ She leaned to the side as far as she could without falling off her chair. ‘He needs me. I hate her.’

  Joe sighed. ‘Yes. I know. For what it’s worth I hate her too.’

  They talked for a bit, and it was good to get it all out. Arty asked Joe about himself because that was better than talking about the fact that Zeus had gone, and she discovered that Joe, like herself, was from lots of places. He was Nepalese but had grown up in Germany and spoke Nepali, German and English fluently. That made her ask lots more questions, and he answered them all patiently.

  Pia was nice but she was always trying to contain Arty. With Joe it was different. He felt like a … She tried the word out in her head. He felt like a friend. Not family, but friend. That was a new thing. He drank a Kingfisher, and she had a Coke, which she loved very much. She forgot that Pia was there, forgot for a moment that Zeus had gone.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked, after a while, staring at the Kingfisher.

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘And you like Kingfisher?’ She was struggling with that, blocking out the memories.

  ‘I do. It’s nice when it’s cold. Refreshing.’

  ‘I hate it.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  She stared at its label and didn’t hear lots of the things he said to her. Kingfisher meant Kotta. Kingfisher was the last thing that had happened in the clearing. Kingfisher sent her head into a whirlwind and she had to work hard to keep herself from spinning out of control. And here Joe was, drinking it as if it were a normal thing.

  After a while Pia’s phone played a tune and she looked at it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I have to go to take this. I won’t be long.’

  They both watched her walking out of the cafe. As soon as she was through the door, Joe changed. His dark eyes glinted and he leaned forward. Joe’s smell was more like clearing people than outside people.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Thank God she’s gone. I was going to ask her to give us a minute but I thought she probably wouldn’t have dared to leave you unchaperoned. Arty, I have to give you something. You remember the grass you had, when we first met? You were going to try to use it to pay for medicines.’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s not grass. It’s herbs.’

  ‘Mmm. Well, I took it away from you and hid it. You won’t remember because you were too shell-shocked, but when I realized we were being taken to hospital, and that they would definitely take control of all our stuff, I hid it in the bushes behind the pharmacy. When I went back for it, it was still there. So I’ve managed to sell it for you. It’s quality stuff. Look, take this envelope. It’s money. Hide it from everyone, for God’s sake. Whatever happens, you can’t tell them where you got it.’

  She took the envelope, dazed.

  ‘Money,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘Lots of it. It won’t get you to France, but it’ll help you along the way. You haven’t got a bag, have you? Really, don’t let Pia see it.’

  Arty tucked the envelope into the waistband of her trousers and pulled her T-shirt down over it. It was perfectly hidden.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  It felt odd having money. Actual dirty money that had travelled around the world without ever being cleaned. She could feel the envelope against her skin, could feel the money inside it. She wasn’t going to let it make her evil.

  She had never had an envelope before either, but that seemed less momentous.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Joe said. ‘I hope you manage to get to Zeus. Look, why don’t we take another selfie? I’ll send it to you when you get an email address.’

  He had to stop and explain what a selfie was, and he told her that they’d taken so
me while they were in hospital. She vaguely remembered. She remembered discovering that a phone in the outside world was not at all the thing she’d thought it was. It was a camera and all kinds of other things, and not a thing that you used to ring people with unless you absolutely had to.

  He did things with his phone and then he showed it to her. There was a photograph of Arty and Zeus smiling out of the phone. She moved, but the Arty on the screen didn’t move, and anyway she knew that Zeus wasn’t next to her now. This was them in the hospital.

  She stared at the photos of herself and Zeus for ages.

  ‘Can I have these pictures?’ she said. ‘Can I have all the pictures of Zeddy?’

  ‘Of course. When you’ve got an email address, then message me and I’ll send them right over.’

  Then she and Joe leaned their heads together, and he held the phone out with his arm straight, and took pictures of them. Pia came back at that point and smiled at them.

  ‘Let me get one of you two together,’ she said, and she stood a little way back from the table, and got them to pick up their drinks and clink the bottles together, and she took pictures of them in the cafe.

  ‘Can we meet again?’ Arty asked Joe when Pia said they had to leave. She liked being with Joe. He was the only person who treated her as just another person. She really wanted to see him again.

  He did a kind of smile that didn’t look happy. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘that I’m off to Mumbai tomorrow. I’m going to a retreat. It’s a Buddhist thing, a silent meditation. Just outside Mumbai. So I’ll be out of action for ten days or so. You can email, but I won’t get it for a while. I’ll reply as soon as I’m done.’

  ‘You’re a Buddhist?’

  ‘We talked about this in the hospital. Yes, I am.’

  ‘Buddhism isn’t a religion in the same way that the others are.’ She remembered that Diana used to talk about this. ‘It’s a philosophy. A way of life. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that sort of thing. It clears the mind. Keeps you grounded.’