The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  She remembered sitting in the clearing and looking up at the lights that passed overhead. They were aeroplanes, Vishnu had said, and she had gazed at them with a vague interest, not really caring. Aeroplanes were the same as shooting stars in her world. Arty had seen pictures of planes in books, but she had never really thought about the fact that those lights in the sky had represented people inside metal boxes flying through the air.

  She had never, ever thought she might be in one. Even when she had run away to follow Zeus, she had never properly imagined the aeroplane. It had been an abstract thing, and now it was real. As the plane bumped along the runway, she hung on to the armrest next to her and held her breath. No one else was screaming. Even Arty wasn’t actually screaming. If she was screaming, it was on the inside. She checked; her mouth was closed.

  No one else seemed to feel that flying was an impossible thing. It was just Arty. Even Zeus had been on a plane by now, and he must have been through all this. She knew that he would have tried to hide how scared he was, would have reached out for her and found she wasn’t there, and that broke her heart.

  All she could see through the window across the aisle was a patch of grey sky. They really should have bigger windows on planes.

  This was England. She was pleased that she was here to follow her mother’s quest, but what she didn’t want was to have to stay with the grandparents who had come forward to claim her. Venus had hated them. Arty remembered her saying, Be careful of the rest of my family. Don’t go into the basement. She didn’t know what Venus had meant by that, but she was keeping that advice in her head at all times. It was precious; one of the last things her mother had said to her.

  No one had given her a choice. Her mother’s family had seen her on the news and come forward to claim her, and now she was going to live with them. So here she was with an emergency passport and a piece of paper with ‘Matthew Jones & Tania Roswell’ written on it in her bag, and two unknown keys round her neck. The only thing she could do was to get on with it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the man next to her, just as he clicked his seatbelt open. He took it off even though the sign was still lit up.

  He looked round. ‘Mm?’

  Arty had ignored him for the flight because that was what everyone was doing. Now she needed information.

  ‘What’s London like?’ she asked. ‘Are there eighteen million people?’

  ‘Not eighteen million,’ he said. He had grey hair and he had spent the whole journey watching episodes of a programme called Veep. He smelled like old wine. ‘More like eight?’

  ‘Smaller than Mumbai.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘But still a bit big to walk around and hope you find the right person.’

  He laughed. ‘Yep. You’ll need a more focused strategy than that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Arty turned her face away so he knew not to talk to her any more, and closed her eyes so she could pretend to be somewhere else. She didn’t want to go to wherever it was that her grandparents lived. Clevedon. She wanted to go to Persephone’s house. She wanted to find Matthew. She was very much hoping that he would be at the grandparents’ house.

  She knew that her grandparents were going to be there to meet her, and she knew they had paid for her to go on the plane. Perhaps she would get used to England at their house and as soon as she could she would go to London. She had been trying to prepare herself to meet them, but it was difficult because all she had in her head were monsters. Her mother hadn’t been happy at home. She had been so unhappy that she had run away to India and never spoken to them again. She had never said anything good about them. ‘It wasn’t a happy place.’ Arty could hear her saying that now. It wasn’t a happy place. Arty was arriving at an unhappy place.

  She could see that there was grass here. The sky was still grey. It didn’t look very different from Mumbai even after all that flying. The aeroplane stopped moving, and then people were queuing so they could be the first to get off. Arty waited for every one of them to go because she found that she didn’t want to get off the plane. Then she stood up, took her bag from beside her feet and put Woman on the Edge of Time into it. She touched the keys round her neck for luck. She was the last off the plane because she had to do some meditation and breathing before she could make her legs stand her up and walk her towards the door.

  The nice plane people were standing there saying goodbye to everyone. When Arty went past, the very last of all, a woman with pink-painted lips said, ‘Good luck, Arty. I hope it works out for you here, darling.’

  Arty turned and looked at her face. She was kind. She knew Arty’s name. She felt her eyes fill with tears.

  The woman rubbed her arm and then, as Arty started properly crying, she hugged her.

  ‘Do you live in England?’ Arty said.

  ‘No, no. I’m Delhi based. Working this route today.’

  ‘My dad comes from Delhi! Can I come and stay with you there?’

  The woman laughed. ‘Oh, sweetie. It doesn’t really work like that, I’m afraid. I wish it did.’

  ‘Well,’ said Arty, ‘thank you for being kind. You’re really lovely. I wish it did work like that too.’

  ‘Oh, darling.’ The woman wiped under her eye with a finger, and the lady next to her was sniffing too. ‘You take care of yourself, all right? Tell me – what was AMK like?’

  Arty stopped and felt her face smiling through her tears. ‘He was wonderful,’ she said. ‘So kind and funny. He’s going to help me.’

  ‘You lucky thing. I’d give anything to have dinner with him.’

  ‘Oh! I’ve got something you can have.’ Arty felt inside her bag. She had his envelope of pictures in there, so she gave one to the woman. ‘There you go. He said I could give these to people if I wanted to. That’s for you, from him.’ She handed them to the others too.

  The woman gasped and clutched it to her chest.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said, and as Arty walked away she could hear them talking about him.

  She walked without knowing where she was supposed to be going, as the other passengers had vanished. Actually she managed not to get lost because she never had to pick a way to go. It was all right there for her, like a path through the forest. She just went the way the yellow signs showed her, in the same way that she had followed Hella’s path and come out of her whole world. This path took her to passport control, and she stood at the back of a queue that said REST OF THE WORLD because that had to include even her, and she liked it that it moved slowly because she was in no hurry to get out. She wouldn’t have minded staying in the airport for a long time, and never actually being anywhere.

  In the end a woman looked at her emergency passport and nodded and said ‘thank you’ and told her she hadn’t needed to queue because this still counted as a British passport but it was fine, and then she was there. The next stop was a place to collect bags but Arty didn’t have a bag to get, so she walked, very slowly, under a big green sign that said NOTHING TO DECLARE.

  She had quite a lot to declare actually. Mainly she wanted to declare that she absolutely did not want to meet these grandparents, who had driven her mother away and who had a basement she must avoid.

  Then she was in a wide open space with huge windows, and crowds and crowds of people. She wanted to run away, but she had nowhere to go.

  She saw them before they saw her. The woman was holding a sign that said ARTEMIS JONES on it, and she supposed that must be her own name. She had never known she was called Jones. It didn’t feel like a word that was hers.

  The woman was the palest person she had ever seen. ‘Jones’ was a word that suited her. She should have been called Jones Jones. Her skin was grey and her hair was grey and she was wearing a grey skirt and a greyish blueish jumper. The man had his arms folded and looked grumpy and purple. He looked like a Crosspatch Jones.

  Arty walked to them as slowly as she could. When they saw her, their faces changed in slow motion. The wom
an fixed on a smile, but her eyes were sad and she flinched a bit. The man just made his lips thin in something that wasn’t a smile at all, then looked away and kept his arms folded.

  Arty saw that they didn’t want her any more than she wanted them. She saw they wanted Venus, because she was their daughter. She thought they wished Venus had been the one to walk out of the clearing and come on an aeroplane to see them. They were waiting for Arty in case she had turned out to be an exact copy of her mother, but they could see at once that she wasn’t.

  Arty wanted Venus too. She missed her more than they did. She tried to imagine what a nice granddaughter would do now, and she smiled, even though she meant it just as much as they didn’t.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and she tried very hard to pretend to be nice. ‘I’m Arty.’

  ‘Artemis,’ said the woman. This was her grandmother. If she’d been eaten by a wolf, Arty wouldn’t have told it she had such big teeth. She would have gone back outside and eaten the cake on her own. ‘Well. Here you are. How was the flight?’

  ‘It was weird,’ Arty said. ‘It wasn’t like I thought.’

  ‘If we get back to the car now,’ said the man, ‘then we’ll come in under an hour in the car park. Lucky you landed on time or it would have cost us a bloody fortune, though you took your time getting out. We wondered about getting the bus here, or maybe just your grandma coming up to meet you, but we weren’t sure if you had bags. Often you see them with hundreds of bags, all taped up and what have you.’

  He looked quite cross about the fact that Arty didn’t have hundreds of bags all taped up. She had no idea what she was meant to say to him. He turned and hurried away and she followed.

  This did not seem to be the sort of grandfather who would be kind and come to rescue his grandchild from a predicament. He was the sort who would leave her in a forest alone because she was too expensive to feed.

  The grandmother (Jones) walked fast, and Arty ended up trailing. She lost sight of them altogether in the end, and then she didn’t know where to go, so she stood still and let the airport happen around her.

  It was not so different from the airport at Mumbai. Everything felt blue, but not soft or gentle or relaxing blue. The airport blue was harsh and cold, like metal. It was quite exciting, though. It was the way she thought a space station might be. A place to go to if you planned to be shot away into the sky.

  But all the people here were in their own worlds; they were on their own space stations. They walked round her looking at their phones and Arty quite liked that. She was almost pleased when she noticed a couple of people on the escalator pointing their phones towards her, because that let her be her Indian self.

  She smiled and waved. The people waved back. A woman in a sari came up to her and said, ‘You are friends with AMK – can it be true?’

  ‘Yes it can!’ Arty said, and she reached for a photo. This was the last one she was going to give out, because she was keeping the final picture of him for herself.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said. ‘It’s from him. For you. He said I should give them to friends and that you are his friend too.’ She embellished the last bit.

  ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ said the woman, and she took Arty’s hand and stared into her eyes.

  Arty’s grandmother turned up on her other side and tugged at her other arm.

  ‘Artemis,’ she said. ‘For goodness’ sake! Don’t talk to strangers! Keep up. The car park!’

  ‘You’re a stranger,’ Arty said, and her grandmother pretended she hadn’t heard.

  They went out of the door, and it hit her.

  The cold.

  The cold.

  The freezing cold. All the hairs on her arms stood up and she trembled all over. She had never known that it was possible to be so cold.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘Why’s it so cold? What happened?’

  Her grandmother huffed a bit. ‘It’s actually quite mild,’ she said, and Arty could see that somehow by feeling cold she had offended her.

  She sat in the back of the car and didn’t say anything. Jones talked a little bit in a small voice, saying things like: ‘It was quite a shock when we discovered it was you, Artemis. The girl in India on the news. Our granddaughter.’

  ‘Did you know I existed?’

  ‘No. This is completely new to us. We never imagined we’d have grandchildren.’

  ‘So how did you find out?’

  ‘Oh, the Indian authorities found out the names of everyone who lived there, and we had a visit from the police telling us what had happened. We were astonished.’

  ‘What about my uncle Matthew?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Jones. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Can I see him?’ Now she felt wide awake.

  ‘Not for a long time, I’m afraid.’ Her voice was tight. Arty looked to her grandfather, but he was staring straight ahead, not saying anything either.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s in Africa. Doing his good works.’ She said ‘good works’ as if that were a bad thing.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Oh, he works in a refugee camp. We never see him.’

  ‘We do,’ said her grandad. ‘He comes back.’

  ‘Yes, but as little as he can. He’s living in Uganda. Once or twice a year we get a visit and he’s impossible to get hold of. You’ll meet him one day.’

  ‘Can I talk to him on the phone?’

  ‘Once in a blue moon.’

  Arty thought about this. Uncle Matthew was alive, and living in Africa doing ‘good works’. She might be able to speak to him on the phone and she would meet him one day. That was something. She knew that Uganda was a long, long way from here, but the fact that he was alive, and that she knew where he lived, was a huge thing.

  ‘We’ve missed Victoria terribly,’ Jones was saying. ‘Matthew has too, of course. And then this happens –’ She stopped talking very suddenly.

  ‘Don’t upset your grandmother,’ said Crosspatch as if Arty had done that.

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ she said.

  She wanted to ask her grandfather about patriarchy but she thought she’d probably better not because all the feelings she was getting from this man were that he hated her, and also that he probably loved patriarchy. After that she just stared out of the window while they talked to each other about people she didn’t know. At one point Jones offered Arty a sweet, and she kept it on her tongue for a long time, loving the sugar in spite of herself, letting it melt as slowly as it could.

  The roads were orderly and less bumpy, and no one seemed to use their car horns at all. Everything was straight and smooth. The houses were different, the road signs were different, the writing was different, and there were no people walking around. It was quite boring.

  The inside of the car smelled like nothing she had ever imagined. It was like chemicals, and it hurt her throat to breathe it. At one point she thought she was going to be sick, but it passed.

  Arty didn’t really care about this place. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be in Mumbai, and then back in the clearing. She was only here, she told herself, for Persephone and Zeus, and for Matthew when he came back.

  She was thousands of miles from everything and everyone she had ever known, apart from Zeus. She felt sick with longing for him. She leaned against the window and imagined herself going to France until she fell asleep.

  The house, when they got there, was not in a clearing in a forest as she had secretly hoped it might be; it was a square house in a street of other square houses that all looked the same. However, at the end of the street there was the sea, and that was something Arty had not expected at all. It was grey and soft on the horizon, close enough to the Mumbai water to be the same thing, and she loved that.

  ‘The ocean,’ she said, walking up the road towards it. The hairs on her arms were standing up again. She was trembling with the cold, but at least she was looking at the waves. There was land on the other side of it.

  �
�Ocean is a bit of a stretch,’ said Jones in a brisk voice, following her to bring her back. ‘It’s an estuary.’

  ‘Is that France?’ She pointed to the land, and waved, just in case Zeus was over there looking at her. She would build a boat and go and find him.

  ‘France!’ She laughed. ‘No, of course it’s not France. That’s Wales. This way, Artemis.’

  Arty didn’t know what an estuary was, though she knew that Wales existed, thanks to her lessons with Diana. The house had a garden path like a house in a book and a green front door. Clevedon was a place with houses in it, by the ocean, across from Wales.

  Jones stopped, looked Arty up and down, and smiled.

  ‘I’ve got you some suitable clothes,’ she said. ‘They’re in your room.’

  ‘I like my clothes. AMK’s wife got me this dress.’ She was not going to let Jones say anything against her purple dress. It was beautiful. ‘He’s the greatest actor in the world.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s just the thing for India,’ she said. ‘But be sensible. You need something warmer, don’t you?’

  The carpet was so thick that it tickled Arty’s feet when she stepped out of her green flip-flops. Her grandmother looked a bit surprised by her taking her shoes off.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘Your mother always did that too. She left them right there, the same as you.’

  That made the world stop.

  Venus had lived here. Arty had come through a portal and traversed a universe, and ended up in a place Venus had known too. That had not felt real until now.

  ‘Did she …’ Arty took a deep breath. She had to say it. ‘Did she live here? In this very house? With you? And … Matthew too?’

  Jones nodded without looking at Arty, and walked off. ‘She lived here until she stormed off to India and never came back,’ she said as she went. Arty wasn’t quite sure what to do, so she waited for a bit until Jones said, ‘Come on. Into the kitchen.’