The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  She looked up to the top of it and read:

  ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE THE LANDING

  IN INDIA OF THEIR IMPERIAL MAJESTIES

  KING GEORGE V AND QUEEN MARY

  ON THE SECOND OF DECEMBER MCMXI.

  She had once known Roman numerals. As far as she could remember, M was a thousand, C was a hundred, so a C before an M would be nine hundred. And of course X was ten so XI would be one more than that. That should mean 1911. That was even before Cherry was born. Arty knew that for sure.

  The arch was to celebrate a British king and queen arriving in 1911. An invasion. Arty was vaguely aware of the fact that the British had liked to invade places some time ago, and that India had been one of their conquests. She pictured a boat pulling up, and a man and woman in what she imagined historical royals might have worn stepping grandly on to the land and walking under this arch and into India. It was a weird thought. She wanted to walk under it herself, but she couldn’t because it was blocked off with metal fences.

  She smiled as she realized that she already knew about this place. She remembered Gita telling her about it. ‘The Gateway of India is there, on the coast where the British monarchy first landed.’ That was what she had said. Arty had not pictured this at all: she had imagined a real gate in a huge fence, like the one to the forest with the padlock round it, with kings and queens in gowns and crowns unlocking it and walking through to India as if it were theirs to take.

  She walked around. It was busy here. A man tried to sell her a metal stick, and she wanted to stop and ask him what it was for, but she remembered just in time something that Cherry had said: ‘Darling, if you start up conversations with people selling things, then they’ll think you want to buy them and you’ll leave them more disappointed.’

  So she just said, ‘No thank you,’ and carried on walking, and sure enough the man just went to try to sell it to someone else. He didn’t look disappointed at all.

  She watched some people taking photos together, holding their phones out in front of them so they were all in the picture. That was a selfie. She knew that because she had taken selfies with Joe, and with Cherry, and everyone at AMK’s house had taken selfies all the time. She was in some of them. She watched two women asking some foreign tourists for a selfie, and having a photo taken with them. She saw a family using one of those metal sticks to get their phone further away, and understood why the man was selling them. She walked and looked and breathed the sea air. She calmed the voice inside her that said, I don’t know what to do.

  I can see the people and the sea and the Gateway of India.

  I can hear the waves and the traffic and the voices.

  I can smell the cars and the sea.

  I can feel the soles of my flip-flops and the ground beneath them and the core of the Earth beneath that.

  I can taste fear, because I can see a group of young men coming towards me and I don’t like the looks in their eyes.

  She turned to walk away but they came after her. She walked faster and they did too.

  ‘Hello, miss,’ shouted one.

  The others giggled.

  She walked so fast that it turned into a run. They ran after her.

  One of them sprinted round to look her in the face. ‘It is!’ he said. ‘Ninety-nine per cent sure!’

  He was wearing jeans. So many of the men in the outside world seemed to wear jeans. They must have been hot. He put his phone up to her face, so she supposed he took a picture.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she called to the nearest people, who were a man and a woman walking hand in hand. ‘Can you help me?’

  They looked over and started walking towards her. ‘Is there a problem?’ said the man.

  ‘Yes,’ said Arty, but at the same time one of her pursuers said: ‘Look! It’s the girl who came out of the woods!’

  She stared wildly around. Every cell in her body yelled ‘RUN AWAY!’ She looked for a place to go, but more people were around them now and there was no path. She was surrounded.

  ‘I am not.’ She spoke very quickly. ‘Please leave me alone!’

  ‘You vanished into thin air! The police are trying to find you!’

  ‘No.’ She spotted a space between two people and set off fast, running away from all of it. She thought of the man who had recognized her on the train from whatever Joe had put on his phone. These men had seen her on their phones too, but Cherry hadn’t. She didn’t understand any of it, but she knew she had to get away. She ran as fast as she could, pushing between people when she had to and yelling ‘Sorry!’ over her shoulder.

  She looked back and saw phones held up everywhere, and then other people were coming closer just because there was a commotion. People in front of her had their phones out too and Arty wondered if this was a nightmare because everything had changed so fast.

  She was not going to be taken away by the police.

  She was not going to be treated as a child by people who didn’t understand.

  ‘The girl who came out of the woods!’ someone shouted behind her.

  ‘Hey, do you like the twenty-first century, Artemis?’

  She ran to the security place. She was hot and her T-shirt was sticking to her armpits, and the only place she wanted to be was in her room in the hotel with the door locked behind her.

  The woman security guard was watching people step through the magic beeping doorways. Arty tugged on the sleeve of her pale brown suit. The woman was annoyed, because she was trying to do her job.

  ‘Please!’ said Arty. ‘Please can you make the men stop chasing me?’ The woman looked round and her face changed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I can certainly do that.’ She motioned Arty away with her hands and turned to shout at the crowd.

  Arty went back through a rectangle and ran as fast as she could, as hot and dirty and smelly as could be, to where she thought the hotel might be.

  It was easy to vanish into these streets. As soon as she was round a few corners she slowed down, because she thought a girl running was probably easier to remember than a girl walking. She walked in circles for a bit, but then the streets rearranged themselves around her and she was there, exactly where she wanted to be, on the corner of the right road.

  She walked slowly up to the Austen Hotel, hoping they hadn’t discovered that she wasn’t Margaret Cheryl Armitage, looked behind to check no one was following, and then took a deep breath, summoning the strength of Zeus in France, and Joe wherever he was, and Cherry on her train, and her family in the clearing, and walked through the door.

  She crossed the tiled floor and checked the face of the man behind the desk, hoping that he wouldn’t say, ‘You’re the girl from the woods and everyone is looking for you.’

  He didn’t. He looked up, smiled a little smile and carried on writing in his book. ‘One second,’ he said. His name was Amir. It said so on his name badge.

  ‘I like your pen,’ she said, and she did, because it was an old-style one that could have been a feather.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and he put it down and reached behind him, taking the key from the hook with the number six next to it. ‘Here’s your key, Miss Armitage.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and she smiled a very true and grateful smile; she’d forgotten she’d left her key at the desk when she’d gone out. Arty went upstairs to room six, where she closed the door and locked it with the key.

  She leaned on it and breathed. She was safe again. This was her room, her own place, her piece of the outside world.

  The shower was down the corridor, and she took the towel that had come with the room, and some of the little sachets of chemicals they’d left there, and spent ages getting clean. She knew that you had to smell of chemicals or people thought you were dirty, and so she made sure she did. She washed her hair twice, and washed all her body, particularly her armpits, which she had to admit were absolutely stinking.

  Then she sat on her bed with wet hair, her body wrapped in a towel, and tried to work it out.
This was definitely time for her to choose to be an adult. She tried to be Venus, to work out what her mother would have done.

  Get ahead of them, darling, Venus said in Arty’s head. Don’t let them catch you. You can do it.

  What about the social media? Arty asked her. The phones?

  Sorry, darling, said Venus. I don’t know anything about phones. Just get to London and find Matthew and Persephone. Rescue Zeus. Kali hated her sister, you know.

  It didn’t matter that the conversation was in her head; it gave her the support she needed to keep fighting.

  Joe had shown Arty and Zeus that phones were not the things she thought they were.

  He had taken a photo of her and done something with it, and the man from the train had shown it to her. This was where it went murky. She knew that a thing called a phone was really a camera and a map and a way of writing letters to people. However, Cherry had said, ‘I don’t do social media. Stopped a few years ago and, oh my God, do I feel better for it.’ Arty knew that social media was the key. If people on social media knew her, that would explain why Cherry hadn’t but everyone else had. Because Cherry wasn’t on social media and the rest of these people were.

  She wondered whether Joe had said on social media that Arty’s family were dead. She wished she had a phone herself, so she could find that out, and call Cherry, and try again to find Joe. But she couldn’t do any of those things.

  Maybe her money could buy her a phone. She felt that she probably needed one.

  She got dressed in her red trousers and T-shirt, even though they were dirty now, and washed her old clothes with soap as best she could and hung them out to dry on the rail in her bedroom. They dripped on to the floor but the floor was tiled and Arty didn’t think it mattered. She considered hanging them out of the window, but that felt like a flag and she didn’t want to make anyone look.

  Her stomach cramped and she sighed. Her period was the very last thing she needed. She checked the bottom of her bag and found that she was at least prepared. Somewhere in the hell of the plague sweeping the clearing, her mother had remembered to pack their moon cups.

  That took her almost to the edge. She screwed her eyes up. She thought of Venus packing everything she thought they might need. She realized that, in preparing for their periods, Venus had acknowledged that they were going to be away for a long time.

  She lay down on her bed and tried to cling on to her mother’s strength.

  There was a knock on the door and it took her a while to realize where she was. She was naked on her bed, tangled up in sheets and a towel.

  She put on her clothes as quickly as she could and opened the door.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Amir, and he handed her a tray that had tea and breakfast on it. She managed to thank him and take the tray, which rattled in her hands.

  It was morning. She must have been asleep for a very long time. She put the tray on the floor and sat and ate her breakfast with her fingers, wrapping vegetable curry in bread and eating it as if she were at home. She was starving and the food was perfect. There were boiled eggs, and that reminded her of home because although their poor chickens had been eccentric, when they were in the mood to lay there would be eggs all the time.

  She hadn’t thought about the chickens. They were probably still alive, scratching around for food, wondering why no one was collecting their eggs.

  She drank the tea and licked the plate. Her strength was back; now she was ready to set off to catch a train to Mahalakshmi to ask for a job in the Dhobi Ghat.

  ‘See you later, Miss Armitage,’ said Amir as she handed in her key.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

  She stepped out of the hotel and no one looked at her. She started to walk towards where she hoped the station might be. It was hot and she was soon sticky. She walked around the streets a bit, and then, when she passed a place that said COMPUTER, EMAIL, INTERNET, she decided on a whim to go inside.

  She hired a computer and sat down in front of it. It was surprisingly easy.

  June

  I gathered my friends around me and we all gazed at the clicky thing. They sat at my feet and we marvelled that we had done this. She had brought a thing with a tiny spark of a flame inside it into our room, and we had stolen it.

  I was feeling better. I would never admit it to her, but in myself I was beginning to feel more grounded. That was why those old demons had become my friends, I supposed.

  ‘We need to pick a time when we’ll get rescued,’ I said. I was including them even though all of them but the bear, the rabbit and the monkey could fly through walls.

  ‘We do,’ said the bear. ‘Daytime.’

  ‘Daytimes,’ said the rabbit, ‘and busytimes.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It needs to be busytime outside, doesn’t it? We need someone to call the police straight away.’

  We had to start this fire as far away from the door as possible, and I had to understand that I might not get out.

  I was very aware of the fact that I might actually be going to die and that the bear and the rabbit and the monkey might be going to go with me. That was a clear consequence of starting a fire when you are locked into the world’s most secure basement. I was ready for that to happen.

  ‘We don’t mind,’ the bear said, stroking my knee.

  We tried to work out when it was busiest outside. The trouble was it was almost never busy. Still, the morning, when people were going to work, or the afternoon, when they were coming home – those were the times to go for, I thought. I kept the television on because it would occasionally tell me the time, although only on a few of the channels.

  ‘We must do it,’ said the rabbit, ‘before she notices the fire thing has gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We must.’

  It was still light outside. There were people out there, however impossible that seemed, and I knew that some of them might have mobile phones in their pockets and would be able to call for help as soon as they saw the flames.

  If they saw the flames. This place was so secure, so fireproof and bombproof, that I knew the window wouldn’t smash. It had been built to keep the danger out, but instead it was going to keep the danger in.

  We had a bit of a plan. I filled every container I could find (and there weren’t many of them) with water, and stood them by the door. In reality this amounted to the plastic bucket she’d given me and a few plastic cups and bowls, but it was better than nothing. I would stand by the door, holding the toy box, and if no one came I would try to put the nearest flames out. I had considered standing in the shower and fending the flames off by running the water, but I didn’t think that would work. I had to be by the door. All the same, I left every tap in the little bathroom running just in case.

  14

  Arty was terrible at typing. She wished the alphabet was written in the right order on the little squares because she had no idea how to find the letter she wanted and it took her forever to work it out, every single time. The internet place was a tiny room in a basement with three chairs and three computers.

  This is a computer, she whispered. It was just a box but somehow it could link her to everything in the world.

  There was no one else in here so she couldn’t copy what they did. However, the screen said ‘Google’ on it, and when she pressed a letter a picture of it appeared on the screen, so after some time she managed to write ‘girlfromthewoods’. (Later she would discover how to put a gap between the words.) The computer said: ‘Did you mean girl out of the woods?’ So that was all right. She said that was what she meant.

  And then she was looking at herself. She was in the computer. There was her photograph. There were NEWS RESULTS. There were pictures of her at the Gateway of India. There was a lot of stuff about AMK’s house. People knew she had been there. They were sharing photos with her in them. A caption said that AMK had offered a reward for anyone who could find her and take her to safety, but that didn’t seem to make sense. One of the
results said that ‘#girloutofthewoods is trending’, whatever that meant.

  And then there was a photograph of her with Zeus at the hospital.

  She touched the screen, stroking Zeus’s face with her finger, and she held her breath and stared at him for a very long time. His huge dark eyes. The way he was pressed into her. She had hated the hospital and yet she missed everything about that time now with all her heart, because Zeus had been with her and now he was in France.

  Control it.

  She could not leave this picture here in the computer. She held on to that fact.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said to the boy who was in charge here. He was about her age.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is there … is there a way of getting this picture out of the computer so I can take it away with me?’

  ‘You want to print?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘It sounds like it. Can you pay extra?’ She nodded, and he came and stood behind her and pressed some buttons. ‘There you go,’ he said. He pointed to a plastic box in the corner and a piece of paper came out with herself and Zeus on it. He handed it to her.

  ‘Thank you.’ She stared at it, then folded it in half and put it into her book. The boy went back to his desk, back to his own computer.

  It was easy to work out how to move the little arrow around the screen and click on things, and she discovered that the police were looking for her since her escape from Gita and Vikram’s house. Even AMK wanted people to find her, and she was annoyed by that. She skimmed past the words because she didn’t want to read what people were saying, but she saw enough to understand that the whole world knew about the sickness, and that they knew it because Joe had told them about it when they were in hospital. Just like the man on the train had said.

  She had thought she was so clever constructing her alternative world, but actually everyone knew. Everyone knew what had happened. No wonder Joe hadn’t called her back.