The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  She felt her heart pounding. Arty gasped for breath, forcing it into her lungs, forcing it out again. No breath was quite enough.

  ‘I need to do something,’ she said quietly, then gasped for air.

  ‘Sure.’

  Arty stood in the middle of the room and managed to say: ‘I see the white wall with a picture of an elephant.’ Her voice was a hoarse whisper. She breathed in and out. ‘I hear the traffic outside.’ In, and out. ‘I smell the chemicals from the house, I think. I touch my shoes with the soles of my feet, and the soles of my shoes touch the floor of this room and the floor touches the earth. I taste the traffic and the chemicals. I am present in the universe. I am here, in Cherry’s room. I’m Artemis and I am here in the outside world, with Cherry. Cherry is my friend. I am present.’

  She breathed slowly in, held her breath, and breathed out again.

  After a while she felt a touch on her shoulder.

  ‘You OK?’ said Cherry, and Arty took Cherry’s hand and held it very tightly. The meditation had worked, just about. It had calmed her enough. She nodded.

  ‘I’ll show you what I do,’ said Cherry.

  She took two pillows from the bed and put them on the ground, then took a candle from a shelf and put it between them and lit it. Arty looked at the box of matches she used, the way she swooshed a match across the side of the box and made a flame appear. She watched her light the candle and breathed in the smell of jasmine that filled the room. Cherry took a little bell and rang it. It made a tinkly jingly noise.

  Cherry took Arty’s hand and started chanting. ‘Om,’ she said, and she kept it going until the vibration of the word went right through Arty, through the middle of her. She joined in. Then Cherry changed it to ‘Om mani padme hum’ and Arty joined that too.

  She closed her eyes, but the candle still flickered. She sank into the moment, losing herself, finding herself, letting go. I see the flame through my eyelids. I smell the candle. I hear our chanting. I feel the pillow and Cherry’s hand.

  After a while she felt all right, so she stopped chanting and opened her eyes.

  Cherry carried on for a bit then stopped and laughed. ‘How was that?’ she said.

  ‘So much better!’ said Arty. ‘Thank you. Thank you for letting me come to your home. Thank you. Can I just do one more thing?’

  ‘Sure you can, darling.’

  ‘Right.’ Arty kept hold of Cherry’s hand and put her other hand on the top of Cherry’s head. She had no idea what to say so she made up the words, trying to make them sound right. ‘As a goddess of the clearing I use my power and the strength of the universe to pass it on to you. You, Cherry, are now an honorary goddess because you have shown kindness and love to me. We welcome you.’

  She couldn’t think what else to say, so she sang a little bit of ‘Respect’, and to Arty’s amazement Cherry actually joined in. Her voice was lovely.

  ‘You know the words!’ Arty was astonished.

  ‘It’s a famous song. A wonderful one.’

  ‘Oh. I thought it was just ours.’

  ‘It’s everyone’s. It’s amazing. Here – do you want to hear it?’

  Cherry went and fetched her phone and fiddled with it for a moment. Then she put it down and smiled at Arty.

  The song started to play. It was huge. There were sounds in it that Arty had never heard before. It made her skin shiver. It made her heart beat faster. She couldn’t breathe. She had never heard anything like it. It was the song and the words she knew, but bigger, bolder, wildly exciting.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I had no idea. I could never have imagined.’

  ‘And thank you so much, my dear. That means more than you can possibly know. I am honoured to be a goddess. Tell me – just how remote is your clearing? It seems like it’s a million miles away from this late capitalist world, but it’s clearly not. Not in miles at least.’

  ‘It is remote,’ said Arty. ‘It’s a place you can live in for sixteen or seventeen years and only sometimes see an aeroplane and nothing else. It’s behind a fence with a sign that says “Danger Radiation”, but I think we must have put that there to stop people going in. It took me all day to walk from the clearing to the fence. Then we went in a car to Lonavala. It was horrible.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Cherry, and there was something in her eyes that she didn’t say.

  Arty looked at the photographs beside her bed. ‘Who are they?’ she said.

  Cherry glanced over at the photograph, then away. ‘That man is my stepson, Barney. The woman is Alisha. We were together for twenty years, and she left me.’ They were still sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  ‘Did she die?’

  ‘No. She really did just leave. She had enough of me.’

  ‘Oh. That’s mean.’

  ‘It wasn’t really. It was just time to go separate ways. We’d been clashing for years. But Barney’s my son in all but biology and I miss him more than Alisha. So my path brought me to Mumbai. Which I’m OK with. Well, this is my home for today, and it’s your home too now that you’ve chanted in it and made me a goddess. We’ll make you a bed on the floor with these pillows. I think you’ll be comfortable.’

  Late in the afternoon they went to stand outside AMK’s house. It was easy to find. Cherry just typed into her phone to ask where it was, and the phone directed them there. It was a six-minute walk from Cherry’s room.

  Arty loved it: it turned out that the other people outside his house were friendly to her, and they all agreed with her that AMK was the greatest movie star of all time. His house was huge, though it was hard to see it because there was a high wall and there were tall trees with lots of flowers on them. Still, she could count six floors, and the idea of all those stairs made her dizzy.

  There was a sudden commotion.

  ‘Look!’ shouted a man, and everyone was pointing and getting their phones out.

  ‘What?’ said Arty to a woman with lovely food. They were all excited by something in the house but Arty didn’t know what.

  ‘Someone at the window!’ the woman said, gazing intently.

  Arty could see it if she looked very hard. The outline of a person standing at a window on the nearly top floor.

  ‘Is it AMK?’

  ‘Maybe one of the family. Or staff.’

  Arty was excited as any of them by that. She could see that Cherry was enjoying herself too. She asked Cherry if she could leave another message for Joe; when he didn’t answer again she said: ‘Hello, Joe – it’s Arty again. Please come and find me in Mumbai. I’m outside AMK’s house. You can easily find that. Love from Arty.’

  She ended the call carefully by pressing the red circle and handed it back.

  When Cherry said it was time to leave they walked down to the sea. Although she had glimpsed it in the distance when they arrived in Bandra, this was the first time she had been able to concentrate on it.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Arty said, staring at the waves, just as Cherry’s phone rang.

  She looked at the screen and said, ‘Sorry, darling. It’s not Joe, but I do have to answer. Hey – Barney!’ She made some kind of gesture with her hand that Arty thought meant she wouldn’t be long.

  Arty nodded. She didn’t mind how long Cherry was on the phone. She just wanted to be near her, and she would stare at the water for any amount of time.

  So much water in one place moving around. If she stood in this spot staring forever, she still wouldn’t understand it. Sometimes she tried to turn away and pretend it was normal, like everyone else did, but she couldn’t help spinning back and looking again. It was as big as land, but it was made of water. If you stood on it, you would fall through and get wet. It made the air smell different. It was a place where they couldn’t make buildings or shops. She pictured the wind blowing across the ocean, picking up bits of water and salt as it went, blowing them into her face.

  A bird landed on the water and sat there, bobbing around.

  There were stones and rocks leading down t
o it, and then there was sand.

  Cherry punched the air with her right arm, even though the person on the other end, Barney, wouldn’t be able to see that. Arty only heard a few words, when she almost shouted, ‘Well, maybe your biological mother?’ And another time: ‘Actually I’m with a friend. No, not like that at all.’

  Even though the bottom of AMK’s house wasn’t beside the sea, Arty could see his top windows. She waved just in case he was watching and wondered whether AMK could control the ocean like gods could in stories. She knew he was a human, but she still wondered.

  Cherry stopped her phone call and started another. Arty looked at her in her red trousers and her black T-shirt. Cherry was much older than Venus. Maybe she was what a grandmother would be like. She thought that one day she should get her own hair cut short like Cherry’s. She liked it that, out here, you could make your hair be however you wanted it to be, that there were people whose job was changing other people’s hair. She had found that fascinating, walking with Cherry earlier, and had made her stop so she could stare at people casually snipping other people’s hair with scissors, letting clumps of it fall to the floor.

  She walked along the path that went beside the sea, away from Cherry and away from AMK’s house. She sat on a rock on the beach, her bag beside her, and looked out at the water. After a while she stood up, her lungs full of the salty air, and picked her way back up the beach to the path. She turned and set off back towards Cherry.

  A few seconds later she heard someone shout, ‘Excuse me! Stop please!’ and when she looked over her shoulder there was a man who she thought was a policeman running after her.

  She could not let this happen.

  They were not going to take her now.

  She took a deep breath of fresh air and ran as fast as she could. She ran and ran, and she could hear that the policeman was running after her. She ran towards Cherry, who was still on the phone, and past her. Lots of people were in her way and she ran past them too, but she could hear the footsteps getting closer and then there was a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back, and she had to stop.

  It was a man in uniform, so he had to be a policeman, she thought. He pulled her round so she was facing him. He was tall and skinny, and for some reason he was laughing a bit.

  It flashed through her brain the way things might go from here. She would be in trouble for running away. She would be taken to a new foster home and they would watch her all the time, and lock her in at night so she couldn’t run away, and the people wouldn’t be as nice as Gita and Vikram. She took great gulps of air and tried to shout to Cherry to come and rescue her.

  ‘Sorry to scare you,’ the policeman said in Hindi. ‘You dropped this.’ And that was when she saw that he was holding her bear.

  Her precious bear from the clearing, with ‘Love You Loads X’ written on the heart it was holding, was squashed in his hand.

  She grabbed it and looked at him. ‘Are you a policeman?’ she said, because she was too scared to say thank you.

  ‘Me? No, not a cop,’ he said. ‘Just on my way to work. I’m a security guard. Why? Why were you running so hard from someone you thought was the police?’

  Arty forced her mouth to smile at him.

  ‘No reason,’ she said, and then she saw that Cherry was there and she let all her breath out at once and clutched the bear and leaned on Cherry and pretended to think it was all funny.

  June

  Once there had been camping stoves here, but now there weren’t. There was nothing to use for fire. I was going to need to find a way to make it, or else I was going to have to steal something from her, some matches or something, and start it with that.

  A cartoon firefly flew past me, humming a tune. I put out a hand to catch it. I had wanted to talk to this one for a long time. For the first time it flew straight into my hand. It stood on my arm, its feet tickling me. I wished I could use it to start my fire, but I knew it didn’t work like that.

  ‘How do I make a fire?’ I said.

  It smiled at me. It had a human face. It had my mother’s face, in fact. I looked away, then forced myself to look back at it.

  ‘Electrickery,’ it whispered.

  I nodded. It was right: the only thing that was fiery down here was electricity, but I didn’t know how electricity worked. I certainly didn’t know enough about it to pull it out of the wall and get a spark from it.

  Starting a fire was going to be the most dangerous thing of all. I needed to give myself the best chance possible of being rescued. I decided that, when I had a way of starting it (when I managed to steal something from her, somehow), I would try to do it when she was down here. Otherwise she was probably mad enough just to let me burn.

  I watched a television programme about electrical fires. I looked at pictures of people’s houses, all black and sooty after the fire had been put out, and I wished they would be more specific about how those fires had started in the first place.

  I started making a pile of stuff that would be good to burn. There were books, some shelves, some blankets that I didn’t need. I put them under the window so the people outside would notice the flames as soon as they began.

  I waited. Sooner or later she would bring something down here that would help me.

  12

  Arty had a nice evening with Cherry. Cherry took photos of the two of them together too, but she promised she wouldn’t show them to anyone, and Arty believed her. She slept better on Cherry’s floor than she had since Kotta day.

  Cherry only asked her once why she had run away from the security man, and Arty said, ‘Because I was scared,’ and Cherry didn’t ask any more. In the morning, though, Cherry said Arty had to go to the police station.

  They had an argument about it.

  ‘You have to, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I would never forgive myself if I left you fending for yourself in the city. You could come with me on the train to Dharamsala, but again that’s not straightforward without ID. The police will help you get documents and then everything will be open to you. I think they’ll be on your side, darling.’

  ‘I need to stay in Mumbai,’ Arty said. There was no way she was going to the police.

  ‘You need an ID card of some sort. You just do.’

  ‘Why does everyone have to have a piece of paper to say who you are? Why can’t we just exist?’

  ‘That’s a good abstract philosophical point, but we can’t change the way the world works today. You can’t have the law adjusted to suit you right now.’

  They were having breakfast, sitting on the wall looking out at the sea. Cherry had agreed that they could go to AMK’s house for a bit after this. Her train was at five past four in the afternoon. Arty had the basis of a plan: she was going to let Cherry think she was going to the police, and then run away.

  Arty put a piece of pakora into her mouth. That was the name of the food the woman had given her yesterday. She wanted to eat it every day. The sun was shining on her head. She was eating nice food. She had slept deeply and that made her mind feel sharper. She was considering jumping on the train with her friend and going to whatever Dharamsala meant. Cherry said she was going to be on lots of trains for a long time. Arty thought that sounded fine.

  ‘OK then,’ said Arty. ‘But how about if I come to the train station with you, and then go to the police? I can say goodbye to you properly. You’re a goddess. You should have another goddess waving to you.’

  Cherry grinned. Arty loved the way her face crinkled when she smiled.

  ‘Nice try, miss. I’m taking you through the door of the police station myself, and that’s final.’

  Arty shrugged and looked away.

  They watched the sea breathing in and out, the waves on the shore, the washing drying on the rocks. The wind was blowing salty water into her face. Arty wanted her old life back, but she also wished she had not been quite so isolated from all of this.

  After standing outside AMK’s for a while (a car went in! But its windows were
blacked out), Cherry said, ‘Right. We’ve still got a few hours. I want to show you one more place.’

  ‘Yes please!’ said Arty.

  They caught a rickshaw to Bandra station and Cherry bought them return tickets to a station whose name Arty didn’t catch.

  It was nice seeing things with Cherry. Arty knew she was safe.

  Arty loved it on the train. She loved being crammed in with the people, because she and Cherry were both goddesses.

  They got off at a station called Mahalakshmi.

  ‘Come on,’ said Cherry. ‘Just a quick look, and then we’ll head back. You said you liked doing laundry, right? It makes you feel like Rumpelstiltskin?’

  ‘I did.’ Arty remembered doing the laundry with Zeus, when Hercules was ill. She put it from her mind again, and calmed her breathing, and stayed in control of herself as she followed Cherry out of the station and round to stand on a bridge.

  Cherry pointed and Arty looked out and saw that there was a little city there, below where they were standing, and that it was filled with washing. ‘The Dhobi Ghat,’ said Cherry.

  Arty stared and stared. There was a rooftop full of white shirts hanging on lines. A lot of sheets, all pinned up in rows. She could see people doing the laundry, scrubbing at things in vats of water. Everywhere, washing was hung up to dry. It was on every rooftop, and there was a vat of washing water in every space. This was a whole town of laundry.

  Arty stared. ‘I could do that!’ she said. ‘I could get a job here, Cherry! I could work here, and then they’d pay me money and I could use that to buy my ticket to London. I wouldn’t have to try to grow herbs in secret!’