by Emily Barr
On the way she passed a door that was locked. She didn’t know what made her stop and stare at it, but Jones looked back at her and said, ‘Not in there. That’s not a place for you to go.’
Arty said, ‘Is it the basement?’
Her grandmother didn’t answer.
‘This is the kitchen,’ she said.
Arty’s eyes darted around. She felt like a small animal that had come to the wrong place and needed a way out. This was not a kitchen. Everything in it was bright white. Every surface was shiny. The smell was not a food smell. It was a chemical smell: in fact, this room was the way she expected a science laboratory would be, rather than a place in which you made food.
There were cupboard doors, all closed, and a few machines were tucked away on shelves. There was one book, called Delia’s Complete How to Cook. Two little bowls and two spoons were drying on a rack by the sink, and that was the only sign of anything to do with eating. There was a white table with three chairs at it, and Arty wondered whether they had got another chair out for her.
‘Is this where you … cook?’ she said, and for a few seconds she was back in the clearing, sitting in the cooking area with Vishnu. He was boiling up the vegetable peelings to make stock. There were bags of rice and lentils next to him, and a pot over the fire. That had been real cooking. Here she felt it was more likely that her grandmother would hand her a pill and that she would get everything she needed from that, like in space stories.
The clearing kitchen could never have gleamed like this, because it had been packed-down earth. It had shone for Arty, though, because it was the place where things from the ground were transformed to nutrition that gave them all the energy they needed. She had sat with Vishnu for hours at a time, while he told her about protein and carbs and vitamins. He explained what they got from which food. He kept them all as healthy as he could, by growing and feeding them the right things.
He would have been horrified to see this, and at first Arty was glad he hadn’t had to. Then she remembered that he was from the outside world too (not England, but still) and that he had known this stuff well enough to decide to leave it all behind. Her heart overflowed again. Her family had seen this, rejected it, and made something different instead. She appreciated it all now like she had never done before. She didn’t say any of this aloud.
Her grandfather shouted, ‘Back in a bit,’ and the door slammed.
Jones rolled her eyes a bit at the place where his voice hung in the air, put her bag on the back of the door and sighed.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is where I cook.’ She clicked the button on one of her machines and it started to make a noise. ‘Welcome to your new home, Artemis.’
Arty picked up a thing from beside the cooker. It was white plastic and had a button on it.
‘You can call me Arty, Jones,’ she said. ‘Everyone else does.’ She hadn’t meant to call her Jones, but her grandmother didn’t understand what she meant anyway.
‘Arty Jones,’ she said. ‘Yes. All right. Put that down.’
Arty pressed the button. The thing made a clicking sound and inside it, at the tip, there was a tiny spark.
‘What should I call you?’
‘Oh, call me Grandma. I always thought if we’d had grandchildren I’d be Grandma. And now here you are.’
‘What’s this for?’
Her grandmother took it out of her hand and put it back in its place. ‘It’s for lighting the hobs. Don’t fiddle with it. Sit down.’
Arty picked up one of the spoons and looked at her face in it. It was upside down. That was right. She was upside down. She sat down, the spoon still in her hand. ‘There are no other grandchildren?’ she asked. ‘Matthew doesn’t have any children?’
‘Of course not. He’s never in one place long enough. He’s not a family man, your uncle.’
‘When’s he back?’
‘A couple of months, perhaps? Artemis – Arty – I can see you’re excited about your uncle Matthew. I suppose your mother talked about him.’
Arty could hardly say the words. ‘She spoke about him all the time. She … she didn’t know if he was still alive.’
‘Yes. Well. I’m surprised she spoke of him fondly, given the way things were when she left. She hadn’t seen him since he was in a terrible state. She told you about the drugs, I suppose?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s long past all of that now. We’re proud of him. It hasn’t been easy for him. So she spoke about him – I daresay she spoke about us too?’
‘She did,’ Arty said. The words she told me to stay away from your basement were jumping around, wanting to come out, but she decided she had better not say them. ‘She missed him,’ she said instead. ‘And you,’ she added, even though that was a lie. She could see that Grandma needed to hear it.
‘Well,’ said Grandma. ‘If she’d got in touch, we would have welcomed her with open arms. And you too.’
‘So, Grandma?’ The word felt strange to say. It was a storybook word. ‘What should I call …?’ She didn’t even know his name, so she couldn’t ask. She pointed at the place where his Back in a bit was still hanging in the air.
‘Oh, Grandad, dear.’
‘OK. And will he call me Arty?’
‘Yes. Arty Jones. Would you like a cup of tea, Arty Jones?’ She smiled as if she were being a bit mischievous. ‘And then I’m sure you’d like to freshen up after your journey.’
‘Yes please.’ She saw that the noisy machine had boiled some water very quickly. She liked that, and she watched her grandmother putting a little square that Arty thought had tea in it into a cup that she took from the cupboard, and pouring the water over it. She wanted to tell her how they had made tea in the clearing, filling the urn with mint and whatever else had grown that was edible, and topping it up with water throughout the day. She had a feeling, though, that her grandmother wouldn’t have liked that.
She watched Grandma put milk into the tea (which Arty didn’t want), and take out the square things with a spoon and put them into a bin that she actually opened with her foot. Arty had no idea whether the ‘freshening up’ she was meant to do next involved washing her hands, or having a shower, or doing a wee, or something entirely different, a new English thing that she didn’t know about.
They sat at the table. The tea was horrible and Arty wanted to spit it out like she had the Kingfisher in the clearing but she felt she couldn’t do that here. She had to try to be the sort of granddaughter Grandma wanted.
‘This tea is so different,’ she managed to say, wanting to scrape the slime of the milk off her tongue. She knew the masala chai she had had in Mumbai had been milky, but it had also been filled with spice and flavour. This tasted of slimy milk and dust.
‘Oh,’ said Grandma. ‘Did you want some sugar?’
It turned out that sugar made it better.
‘Does Uncle Matthew know I’m here?’ she said.
‘We’ve tried to call him,’ said Grandma. ‘No luck so far. He’s like that. We’ll keep trying.’
‘I can’t wait to meet him.’
‘He struggled with his twin taking off like that all those years ago. He went out to India looking for her. He was a bit cagey about it, but he came back saying he thought she would be all right.’
‘Matthew and Venus were twins?’
‘Venus!’ Grandma stopped talking for a long time. When she did speak her voice was different, and she said, ‘Your mother’s name is Victoria, dear. And to us, whatever she went on to call herself, she will always be Victoria, or Vicky.’
‘Sorry.’ Arty had known that. She pictured her mother with her long straggly hair and flowing skirts and made herself apply the word Victoria to her image. It was just a word. It wasn’t the right word, though it had been once. It was a word that Venus had rejected for herself. But Arty could see that she would always be Victoria to her mother. It was what her parents had chosen for her.
Grandma spoke quickly. ‘You know, Matthew i
s Matthew Arthur, so I wonder whether you’re partly named for him.’
Arty didn’t know what to say. Arthur. Artemis. They were both Art. Maybe Grandma was right, but Arty would never know.
Grandma clearly wasn’t very good at silence and soon she started talking again.
‘Now, I’ve been looking into your options, Artem … Arty.’ Arty smiled her thanks, and Grandma did a tiny smile back, just with the very corners of her mouth. ‘You’re sixteen, aren’t you?’
‘I think so. Though we didn’t measure things like that very much.’
‘You’re sixteen. That’s what they said. Do you have a birthday?’
She remembered the date of birth on Cherry’s passport and said, ‘The twenty-first day of September.’
‘September the twenty-first? Goodness, you’ll just fit into that academic year then. Right. That’s good. I’m glad we have a birthday for you. Is it on your passport?’ Arty nodded. ‘That’s very good. We need to get your passport made official too, because that one they gave you was just an emergency travel thing.’
‘OK.’
‘There’s a social worker going to come to see you too, but don’t worry about that for now. So in September you can start at sixth-form college, just before your birthday. Now it’s May, so you’ve got a few months to get up to speed. I got you a prospectus for sixth form. Have a look. See what you think.’
She stood up and went to open a drawer. The prospectus was a glossy book with a picture of girls and boys smiling on the cover. Arty leafed through it, gradually working out that Grandma wanted to send her to a place where she would be able to study.
Arty knew all about school. She remembered their own lessons in the hut in the clearing, where Diana and everyone else (but it had mainly been Diana) taught the children to read and do sums, and all the other things they thought they would need to know. Arty had learned to read and write, to do things with numbers, to look at maps, sitting out in the fresh air during the winter, and undercover in the rainy season. She had loved learning.
‘Do I have to study everything?’
‘Of course you don’t! Oh – you do know how to read, don’t you? Yes, look at you reading that. You’ll be all right, I daresay. Three subjects would be the norm, if you want to go to university, which you should, though you’ll have to get a loan for your living costs. Or stay here with us and go to Bristol, I suppose. The bus would still cost, mind you. What are you interested in? Have you studied before? My friend Mrs Bourne from down the road recommended a tutor to get you up to speed between now and September. Normally there would be entry requirements for some GCSEs but under the circumstances …’
Arty stopped listening properly and leafed through the pages. Psychology. Maths and further maths. Chemistry. She didn’t know anything.
‘English literature!’ She said it triumphantly when she found it, stabbing the page with her finger. ‘That’s what I like. I like books.’
‘Good. What else?’
Arty didn’t know. ‘What did … What did my mother do?’
Grandma sighed.
‘Oh, she did English too, and history and economics. Two As and a B. Clever girl. She did much better than Matthew, of course. He was a lost cause at that point but he caught up later.’
‘Can I do the same as her? English, history and economics?’
Grandma paused.
‘Read up on them a bit. If those are what you really want to do, then I suppose you could. Economics is complicated, I think. I could never understand a word of what she was on about, and you – well, you’ve never even known shops really, have you?’
‘I know shops now. I’ve been to loads of them. I’ve been to Mumbai shops and cafes. I learned how to use money.’
Grandma smiled properly.
‘I’m sure you have. Rather you than me with those Mumbai shops. Well, if that’s what you want, you should have a go. You’ve got time to find out.’
Arty flicked to the economics page and read the description. It made about as much sense as the rest of it, which was not very much at all, but she was interested in money, and she thought she could give it a try.
Her bedroom was her mother’s old room and that was just too much. Everything was new and different, and she was supposed to stay here now for years and years. She needed to work out how to fit into her mother’s old life, the one she had given up to become goddess of the clearing.
She didn’t know anyone. Matthew was in Uganda and she didn’t know him anyway. She had no idea how to find Persephone, and Florence and Zeus hadn’t replied to her emails. She didn’t want to cry in front of anyone, but she did actually need to cry.
There was a bed with a thick blanket kind of thing on it, which was pink. There was a pillow with a pink case. The walls were pale pink, and there were spots on them where, Arty thought, pictures had been taken down. She looked at the books on the shelf. They were definitely Venus’s books: there was Anna Karenina, there was Cat’s Eye and there was a book called The Second Sex, which she picked up and flicked through. She would read that.
She stood at the window and looked at the other houses that were out there with other people inside them living their strange English lives. She watched a cat walking along a wall. It was fatter than the cats she had seen in Mumbai. The garden here was a square of grass with some flowers round the edge and two trees by the back wall. One was small and the other one was big with thick branches.
She knew about this tree. That tree was the place where Venus and Matthew had sat and she had played at being goddess. That was where the clearing had begun.
She walked over to the bed and sat down because her legs could not hold her up for a second longer. She reached into her bag and took out her special bear from the bottom of it. It was holding out the heart that said ‘Love You Loads X’ on it, and Arty clutched it to herself. That bear had been with her for her whole life.
She buried her face in the pillow and thought about the fact that she had made her mother’s journey in reverse, from the clearing to Lonavala, to Mumbai and back to Clevedon and the tree. It had unravelled. She was in a weird dream, living Venus’s old life. She would be going to her mother’s old college, doing her old studying, sleeping in her old room, and all of it without being able to discuss it with her.
She missed her mother so much. The only person who would understand this was dead.
She buried her face in the pillow, even though it smelled weird, and cried and cried and cried. She kept it as quiet as she could so Grandma wouldn’t come in. Nothing happened. She heard cars going past sometimes. She cried until she couldn’t cry any more, and then she just lay there and stared into the bleakness.
This was her new life. And there was nothing she could do about it except wait for a long time and meet her uncle Matthew, if he ever answered his phone.
After a while she picked up the towel that was on the end of the bed and opened the door quietly to check that no one was out there. Then she ran into the bathroom and locked the door.
It was bigger and shinier than any bathroom she had used in India apart from the one at the AMK hotel (it was a lot smaller than that). She stared at her puffy face in the mirror for a while. She never knew she had a big brown spot on her cheek until she came out of the forest. She didn’t mind it. Her hair was knotted and she thought she looked messier than other people did.
She turned the shower on and let it run hot before she stepped under the water. She washed her body and hair for a long time, using the shampoo and conditioner and the shower gel, and rubbing her face to make it look normal again. She brushed her teeth, with the new toothbrush Jones had given her (it had a little button on it that made it vibrate! She loved it so much that she brushed them twice), put some cream on her face, and wrapped the towel round herself, ready to run back to the bedroom.
Her grandfather was standing on the stairs. Arty stopped, not sure whether she was meant to say something to him, but he just looked at her for a few seconds,
then turned away.
She dressed in the clothes Grandma had left her. They were black and blue like bruises. She put on a pair of the blue jeans that everyone else wore but they felt weird, so she tried a skirt instead and that was better. She put on a blue shirt that buttoned up the front, and because she was so extremely cold she added a jumper. Jumpers were also called sweaters and pullovers. Arty had read about them in books, but never worn one. It was scratchy.
She stared at the girl in the mirror. She looked like an English girl. It almost made her laugh. She hung her purple dress on a hanger and brushed her hair even though it was still wet. She put it into a plait so that it would dry wavy.
Her grandfather was back on the landing when she came out.
‘Must have been quite a thing,’ he said as if he had been waiting for her, planning what to say. ‘Finding that we were here. Flying over.’
‘Yes,’ Arty said. ‘Yes, it was. Quite a thing.’
He grunted.
‘Must be strange for you too,’ she said.
He actually smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Strange. Good that you’re here.’ And he went down the stairs.
June
I stepped back again and pressed myself against the door. No one was coming to rescue me. The fire was coming closer and closer and I knew that this was it. I pushed myself back as far as I could. The smoke was heavy in my throat.
I kept the bear behind me, squeezing it to reassure it. It said, ‘Thank you,’ in a tiny voice. We waited.
I thought of everything I’d done. I screamed for my mum.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ I shouted to the whole world. I really was sorry. I was sorry for everything. I was sorry for surviving when I shouldn’t have.
If they let me out, everything would be different. I could see a life in which I helped people. I would never do anything but good deeds. I promised it to the universe.