by Emily Barr
‘No. You heard them. You’re not allowed to disappear again. I’ve had to leave my passport with them as security.’
That was why they were here, at the Oval Maidan, a big field not far from the police station.
‘They’re going to make me go to another foster home after that,’ Arty said. ‘Aren’t they? I’m allowed one night in the smart hotel and then I’m going to have to go and pretend to be someone’s daughter. Someone I’ve never met before.’ The idea of foster parents made her feel weird in lots of ways. It was the way the word ‘parents’ was used so casually. The adjective ‘foster’ didn’t distance it enough from the idea of her real parents.
‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘You’re at a terrible age for the system. There are girls who are married at your age, so in lots of ways it’s ridiculous to keep you under lock and key. That’s why I’m allowed to take you out. And it’s why you’re allowed to stay at the hotel, thanks to Mr AMK.’
Someone from a different game hit the ball hard, and it came towards them. Joe pushed Arty down, but she shoved his arm away and leaned over, caught it with one hand and then threw it back.
He was surprised. ‘Where did you learn that?’
‘At home. We played a lot of ball games. You have to keep fit.’
‘You do. Yes.’
‘Joe?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I see the things on your phone? The pictures of me and everything? I know you said before that I shouldn’t. But I saw things on the train, on that man’s phone when he knew who I was. I want to look properly. I want to understand what it is that people know about me. I … well, I asked those people outside the internet place to tell you to come, and then you were there. I need to see how that happened.’
She watched Joe thinking. She reached out her hand to touch his head. It was fuzzy. Strange sensations went through her.
Joe was nineteen. She was sixteen. That wasn’t very different.
He took her hand in his and looked at her. ‘Are you sure?’
And suddenly she didn’t care about the phone. She felt his hand on hers, and she didn’t feel alone any more. She had the strangest feeling that she wanted to kiss him. It was in every cell in her body all at once.
She looked at him.
He was looking at her too. They looked into each other’s eyes, and then he turned his head away and tapped at his phone screen with his thumbs in the way that people did.
‘Are you sure?’ he said, as if that moment had never happened, and she longed for him to look at her again. ‘OK. Don’t freak out. You’ve got your own hashtag. It’s hashtag girloutofthewoods.’
Arty sighed. ‘I saw that,’ she said. ‘Hashtag girloutofthewoods. I saw it but I didn’t understand it.’
He talked, explaining it all to her. All she could think of was the feel of his hand on hers, the feeling that had gone through her when he looked at her that way. Was that love? Did she love Joe? She was pretty sure she didn’t even like him very much, except that he was her only friend. So why had he made her feel like that? She looked at his fingers as he showed her things on his phone. She liked his fingers. She liked his arm. She liked the way he smelled of himself rather than of chemicals.
He told her about phones and she ignored him until she got interested. When she started to understand she found it interesting, then horrible, then fascinating, and then so awful that she wanted to throw all the phones in the world into the sea. The way social media worked was something that her recent self would have thought of as magic. She found it hard to understand that all the people who stood around tapping at their phones were secretly doing this. They were looking at photos of Arty and clicking on her hashtag. Girloutofthewoods. They were writing about her, laughing about her. They were making things up about her. Someone was pretending to be her, and someone else was pretending to be her red trousers, writing things on the internet to pretend they were baffled by everything in the world.
Someone else wrote, ‘Me, when I wake up and can’t remember what day it is,’ and put a photo of her looking confused at the Gateway of India and the hashtag girloutofthewoods. There were lots like that.
It was really, really stupid.
‘OK,’ she said. She regulated her breathing. She stared at the people playing cricket. She watched a boy wearing blue waiting for the ball, then stepping forward and holding his bat out at just the right angle to hit it. It made a pleasing noise. He started running. Arty stared at it and breathed deeply. ‘OK,’ she said again. ‘And people think I’m the strange one. Does everyone do this?’
‘No. But lots of people. Most people your age. Most people my age.’
‘People who are clever still think this is funny?’
He looked embarrassed. ‘It has different uses. Some people watch videos of kittens. Some people organize politically. Some people listen to stories to fall asleep at night. But, yes, lots of clever people still think it’s funny. Plenty of people live through their phones. Including me. I have to admit that. I do. But, Arty – look. I didn’t write about the plague really, but people have put it together. They’re trying to get to your clearing. Don’t worry – anyone who gets close is being stopped. The fence is locked and there are guards. I think there was a woman who got through but that was dealt with.’
Arty closed her eyes and fought it all down inside herself. She had put the clearing out of her head, and now it was coming back. People were actually trying to go there. It was all wrong. Everything about it was horrific.
‘I hate them all,’ she said. ‘I hate those people.’ Joe didn’t reply. ‘I don’t want a phone,’ she said after more time had passed. ‘I’d like to talk to Cherry and Zeus, but I could use the normal kind of phone for that. I hate all the rest of it. I will never, ever, ever be part of it.’
‘I know. It sucks. Again, sorry. I uploaded the first picture of you and Zeus on our first day in hospital because your story was so incredible. And I did want the attention. I couldn’t help myself. It’s the opposite of being a good Buddhist.’
She looked at him again. He looked into her eyes and then away. Then he looked back.
‘Arty,’ he said, and his voice was different. ‘You’re sixteen. I’m nineteen. Some things would be a terrible idea and can’t happen.’
She nodded. They would never speak about it again.
The boy in blue was running. It said BABU on his back, and Arty thought that was a nice word to say. Babu. She mouthed it. She wanted to think about anything other than Joe.
‘They’ll forget about you soon,’ Joe said after a while. ‘It’s a social media storm. They don’t last. The next thing will be along.’
Arty pushed the phone away. They stayed there not saying much, just watching. Someone caught the ball and Babu was out. The next person to come up to bat was called, according to his shirt, Ankit.
Arty didn’t want to watch the cricket any more.
‘I’ve never seen a movie, Joe,’ she said, shifting around. ‘Can we do that?’
He looked at his phone. ‘Maybe,’ he said while tapping. ‘Let me see.’
‘I’m scared about meeting AMK. I’ve never met anyone like him. I mean, I’ve never met anyone. But particularly not like him. He feels like a god to me. Does he look like a person?’
‘He does. He is a person, Arty. Just a person. He’s never met anyone like you either.’ He looked hard at his screen. ‘So, we can’t go and see one of his movies, but we can go and see a movie at the Regal Cinema, which is nearby, in an hour. How about that?’
‘I know where the Regal Cinema is!’
‘We leave here in maybe twenty minutes?’
‘Twenty minutes,’ Arty said. ‘One third of an hour. One seventy-twoth of a day. Seventy-second, I mean.’ She was getting to grips with the way the time worked out here.
‘Can we have a photo together?’ Joe said. ‘I’ll email it to you, and you can keep it to remind you of today. I’ll only send it to you. To prove myself as a friend.’
She didn’t answer. The photo he took showed Arty wincing and looking away. She felt awkward because of her strange feelings. She wanted to be close to Joe and far, far away from him at the same time. She did not want to be in any of his photographs because she knew what he would do with them but he had promised he would only show it to her and she wanted to believe him. She very much wanted him to prove himself.
June
It was a wall of flame and it went from the floor to the ceiling.
It was hell. It was like being in a painting of hell, but it was real.
It was hot. I was scared.
16
The seats were red and warm. Arty stared up at the screen. The cinema was different from the way she had expected it to be. First of all, it was an enormous amount bigger. Arty had expected a small room, and she thought they would be sitting on a row of chairs to watch the film, basing her ideas on the television at Gita’s house. In fact, this was a huge space with hundreds and hundreds of comfy chairs to sit on. The screen was gigantic. And the lights were off, so you had to look at the film because you couldn’t see anything else.
The movie was confusing at first. It was like watching a book, but seeing it in the moving pictures rather than in your head. Arty loved watching books play out in her own brain as she read them, and it was very strange seeing it done on the outside. The movie was called 1921 and it turned out to be incredibly scary. She grabbed Joe’s arm as they watched the story of a man in London cutting his wrists, and then saw him as a boy in Mumbai, and followed the story of how he came to do that.
She was transfixed and astonished by everything about it. She forgot all about everything else. She forgot about hashtags and selfies. She forgot about the fact that the greatest movie star of all time wanted her to have dinner with him that very day. She forgot all of it. She wanted to stay in this cinema and watch films forever and ever and ever.
She loved reading. She loved looking at the sea. She liked cricket, and now she loved movies. All of them could hide the bad things for a while. She wanted to gather her family around her and show them. Look! she told them in her head. Look at this! There’s a way of telling stories on a screen and it’s really, really amazing.
But of course the adults already knew that. They must have been to cinemas before they went to the clearing. She told the children instead. Hey, Luna, she said internally. Look at this! I know! It’s the most spectacular amazing thing. You could sit and look and no one would want you to talk to them. Hey, Herc. See? She pulled the two of them on to her lap and watched it with them, which was the best she could do. She imagined Zeus watching a film in France and hoped he would find it as wonderful as she did.
The story was full of ghosts, like Arty’s head. It made her feel scared in the same way that books could make her feel scared. She was sitting perfectly safely in a chair in a comfortable room next to Joe (not thinking about his arms, his hands, his kiss), but she was terrified of the ghosts terrorizing poor Ayush. It was a safe terror. She sank into it, and the real world stopped meaning anything at all.
The film ended and Arty sat there for a long time. She needed to pull herself out of it, back into the other world, but she had no idea, for quite a long time, which was real.
When they stepped out into the sunshine, Joe laughed. ‘That wasn’t the greatest movie to start your viewing career. Are you OK?’
‘Are you joking? It was amazing! It was the most incredible thing. I want to watch it again. Oh, the ghosts. The music. The … everything. I loved it so much!’
‘You did seem to be invested.’
‘Yes. It was brilliant and awesome.’
He looked as if he thought that was funny, and Arty was annoyed at him all over again. ‘Good. Glad you liked it. Movies come much better than that. So now you can ask the greatest movie star who ever lived all about cinema.’
‘Yes. I’d better go to the hotel.’
Joe took her photo outside the cinema, which was annoying again because she didn’t trust him. He walked her to her hotel and into the part that was called the lobby. Her things had been taken to the hotel already, but she hadn’t been there yet.
It was the most astonishing place. There wasn’t a ceiling. It just went up and up. It made her head spin to look at it, even though she had looked up into outer space from the clearing, and that hadn’t made her dizzy. The rooms were all in corridors round the edges of the open space.
The lobby was completely shiny. The people who worked here were kind. They all stopped to say hello to her. It was different from her other hotel. This one was full of air and light and plants and space. It was like being on a spaceship, she thought. That was how other-worldly this felt.
‘Hello, Miss Artemis,’ said a nice man. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m very well, thank you,’ she said, and collected her key so she could go up to her room, with one of the hotel people accompanying her. Joe told her to have a nice time, and she wondered, as she said goodbye, whether she would ever see him again. She was sad and happy to see him leaving. Life as a girl in the outside world was so difficult.
‘No social media,’ she said, and he smiled and waved as he walked off. His phone was already in his hand before she stepped into the lift and she knew that he would post the photos anyway because he was addicted to the ‘likes’, as he had said. She hated that.
The hotel man pressed button eleven to get to her room. He opened the door for her with a white card, and then she was there, in a room with an enormous window and a view over Mumbai. The bed was huge. The bathroom had a bath and a shower in it, and there was water and chocolate for her.
When the man left she ran a bath and emptied so many chemicals into it that the bubbles made mountains and valleys of white (perhaps like snow), and then she lay in the perfect warm water and tried not to think about the fact that she was having dinner with AMK tonight at this hotel. The police had let her take Great Expectations with her, so she got out and went to fetch it from her bag, but it turned out that reading in the bath wasn’t a very good idea. First the pages went wavy and then she dropped it in.
She lay still instead and tried to calm herself. She didn’t like being alone with her thoughts. The way she had felt with Joe had been strange, and now she found she missed him and was angry with him, both at once, but she knew that if she couldn’t trust him then he couldn’t really be her friend.
But he had taken her to the cricket and the cinema. Without him she would have spent the afternoon at the police station. He had made her feel excited and happy, and then told her nothing could happen with those feelings. It was complicated.
All that, though, was a distraction. Her real thoughts were about her family, about Zeus. She had no idea where he was or how he was, but she was sure he was crying for her and for their family. She longed for the beat of his heart closer to hers, for the feeling of his little hand in hers. She was adrift without him. And behind that was the gaping jagged hole where the rest of her life had been ripped to pieces.
She lay in the bath for a while, thinking about her parents and her family and the clearing, letting the tears roll down her face into the water, and then she got out and had a shower too to wash her hair properly. She got dressed in the purple dress that a woman at the hotel had brought to her, saying it was a gift from AMK’s wife. It was soft and pretty and it fitted her well. It was a long dress with gold thread in it, and there was a pair of baggy trousers that went underneath.
While she waited for her hair to dry she sat on the bed. She turned on the television and flicked through the channels, but there was nothing she wanted to watch.
In the end someone knocked at the door. When she opened it, a hotel man was standing there.
‘Miss Artemis,’ he said. ‘I have the great pleasure of announcing that Mr AMK is waiting in the restaurant for you.’
He was sitting at the table, a big man with a white beard and black hair. She walked towards him, feeling self-conscious. She hoped she
was wearing the dress and trousers properly. She hoped she had washed enough. She had no idea how she was going to use the right table manners for this, because she had no idea what they were.
She wasn’t really scared of AMK, because she didn’t care about anything. This was her post-life, she thought; her real life had been at home, and everything that came after didn’t matter. She gave him a wary smile and he stood up to kiss her cheek.
‘You smell wonderful,’ she told him, and he laughed.
‘You’re very kind,’ he said. ‘So, Artemis, we meet at last. I hope you didn’t mind my getting involved in your life as I did. I was captivated by you. A girl alone in Mumbai, having walked out of the woods. I’m so sorry for your losses, my dear girl.’
His voice was deep and wonderful. Arty liked him at once. Joe was right: he was just a human being when you got up close. Their table was by the window, and she looked out at the blackness where she knew the sea was hidden by the night. There were lights of cars going along the road off to their right and left far below.
There were several knives and forks on the table next to each other.
AMK saw her looking at them. ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ he said, smiling and patting her hand. ‘No need for ceremony here. This is a welcoming and accommodating place, and anyway you are perfect. You are a shining example to all humankind.’
Arty smiled. ‘Well, you’re the greatest movie star of all time.’
He loved that. ‘How can a girl who came out of the woods be aware of the work of a humble Mumbai thespian, let alone speak of it in such glowing terms? Can my fame travel so far as that?’
AMK had ordered the vegetarian menu for them both. They stopped talking while a woman put a bowl in front of Arty. It was chaat with lentil ice cream, she said.
‘It sounds unusual,’ she added, ‘but you will find it delightful. I hope so. Let me know if there’s any problem.’