by Emily Barr
‘OK,’ said Lucy. ‘Let’s email. We’ll find her email address. Where does she work?’
They had just found it when Grandma came back into the room. She didn’t notice that they suddenly went quiet.
‘And how have you two got on?’ she asked in a breezy voice, but with the air around her crackling with worry.
She really, really wanted Arty to be capable of being normal, Arty realized. Of course she did.
‘We’ve got on great actually, Mrs Jones,’ said Lucy. Her voice had gone super polite. Arty wasn’t sure whether she changed her own voice when she was talking to different people. ‘Arty wrote me an essay about Macbeth and it was brilliant. She’ll have no trouble starting an English course. Next time we’ll look at history, and we’ve agreed to work on the economics together, but really it’s study skills that are the thing, and I think she’ll be fine with those. She’s an extremely bright, well-educated girl.’
‘Well done, Artemis. I’m glad to hear that. Clever girl! So, you’ll continue to come over, Lucy, as we agreed?’
‘I’d love to.’
As Lucy and Grandma talked about details, Arty tuned out. She tried to imagine herself at school. In the book Grandma had shown her they weren’t wearing uniform, but she still wondered if they might. She had seen children dressed in school uniforms in Mumbai. It was an exotic thing.
‘Why don’t you see Lucy out?’ Grandma said.
Arty worked out that this meant walking to the door with her, but when she got there she decided she wanted to go out too.
‘Can I walk with you a bit?’ she said. ‘I don’t like being inside for too long.’
‘Oh,’ said Lucy. ‘Yes. Sure. I was going to the shops actually. Do you want to walk to Hill Road with me? Maybe check with your grandmother first.’
Grandma said, ‘Oh, go on then, but don’t be long,’ and Arty pulled on her new shoes, lacing them up carefully (it was still a strange new thing to be doing), and set off down the road with Lucy. The sun was shining in a very pale and weak way, and she longed for proper burning heat, for dust, to feel it on her skin. She loved being out of doors, but she longed for India with all her being.
‘I’ve got that email address,’ Lucy said as soon as the door had closed behind them. ‘Why don’t you dictate what you’d like to say into my phone, and I’ll type it up and send it for you with an explanation?’
‘Thank you! Thank you, thank you, Lucy.’
They sat on a wall and did it. Lucy promised she would send it right away, and Arty believed her.
June
I was out. They made me lie on a bed in hospital and breathe lots of oxygen. They bandaged a couple of burns, but mainly they said I was very lucky.
The bear was next to me. The nurses sometimes smiled at it and asked who had given it to me.
‘My mum,’ I told them, and they said it was lovely.
The bear and I only spoke in the night, but during the day it stood there like a sentry and a protector. It felt like my only friend in all the world.
20
Dear Zeus,
I can’t wait to talk to you this week. Here are some photos of where I live now. These people are my grandparents, Venus’s mum and dad.
Florence, est-ce que tu peux m’envoyer des photos de chez vous, s’il te plaît?
Arty xxxxxxxxxx
________
Dear AMK,
Thank you for your messages. Thank you EVEN MORE for the flowers that arrived the other day!!!! Even my grandparents now think you are the greatest movie star who ever lived, and they’d hardly even heard of Bollywood. The house smells beautiful and the flowers are so bright and perfect. They made me very happy. Thank you, thank you.
I’m glad you went out and said hello to the people outside your house!!!! I can only imagine how brilliant that was for them. I wish you’d done that when I was there. I gave all your photos to people I met on the way here, apart from one that I have kept for myself. I have it on my bedroom wall here now. Everyone was super excited to get them.
You asked about life here in Britain. Well, first of all it is COLD. It’s cold and it’s strange. I sleep in my mother’s old bedroom, which makes me sad. I miss her every day, and it’s like I’m living her life twenty years after she left.
I’m having lessons with my friend Lucy, who is a tutor, so I can go to school in September. Grandma wants me to stay here forever, I think, but I can’t. I just can’t.
Remember I told you that I needed to find my uncle Matthew and my parents’ friend Persephone? Well, Matthew is in Uganda, but he might come back in a few weeks so I just have to wait for him. I’ve called Tania/Persephone lots of times but she never calls back. We’ve emailed her but she doesn’t answer. I don’t know what to do. She’s called Tania Roswell and she works at a law company called Prince’s. Maybe your people in London know her? Please help me work out what to do.
Love from your friend,
Arty xxxx
________
Dear Cherry,
I’m a bit better at typing now but it still takes me ages. I’m in Clevedon, which is a place by the sea, and you can see Wales from the end of the road. I’m still getting used to it.
I’m sorry that I pretended to be you to stay in the hotel. I know they found you to tell you that. I loved your messages from the train and I’d like to know what happened next.
So you said you’ve got lots to say to me. Go on then.
Love from your friend,
Arty xxxxx
________
Dear Vikram and Gita,
I’m so sorry I ran away from your house. I really liked it there and you were so nice to me. I should have talked to you about it, but I knew no one would let me go and I just couldn’t bear it when they took Zeus away.
I’m living in Great Britain now with my grandparents. We’re in a town called Clevedon, which is beside the sea, and it’s really cold but not snowing. I miss India. I miss the sun. I’m going to be studying in September, and one of the subjects I’m doing is economics. Do you remember you explained to me about how money works? I found that so interesting that I want to know lots more about it.
Also, I saw the Gateway of India like you said.
Thank you again for looking after me, and sorry again.
Your friend,
Arty xxx
________
Dear Joe,
How are you?
I kind of miss you.
I don’t know.
I don’t know if you’re my friend. AMK says I shouldn’t trust you.
________
Dear Tania Roswell,
Please answer me.
Love from Arty xx
June
I was lucky because the fire had hardly touched me.
I was lucky because I was out.
I was lucky because I was alive.
I listened to the machine beeping and thought about how lucky I was.
‘You’re not that lucky,’ said the bear, ‘but you’re luckier than anyone else around you, aren’t you?’
Yes.
21
‘You are not going to London,’ said Grandma. ‘We’ve just got you here. I am not going to let you go.’
‘But I need to find Tania,’ said Arty. She wanted to say that she had a little note for her from Venus, but she stopped herself, as she always did, because she knew that Grandma would want to see it. She’d want to see something written by her dead daughter. Arty thought Grandma would be sad that Venus had written down Tania and Matthew’s names and not Grandma’s.
‘You don’t know who she is,’ said Grandma. ‘I mean, Tania Roswell? You have no idea if that’s even the person you want. It’s just someone you found on the blasted internet. If you find a friend of Victoria’s, then by all means invite her down to Clevedon.’
‘But I need to find her in real life,’ said Arty. ‘In London. I called and emailed her and she didn’t reply. So I need to go to find her.’
&n
bsp; ‘You do not,’ said Grandma.
Grandad put his hand on Arty’s shoulder. He was wearing a pale-green shirt with short sleeves and Arty thought he looked like pistachio ice cream.
‘One day you can go to London,’ he said. ‘Maybe when Matthew turns up, he’ll take you. We wouldn’t be able to go with you because we don’t do London, do we?’
‘Lucy doesn’t either,’ said Grandma. ‘She says she hates it.’
‘And you can’t go alone, Artemis,’ Grandad said. ‘You must see that.’
She did not see it. She had been alone in Mumbai and there were a lot more people there than there were in London. Still, she understood that there was no point having the argument. She thought that Grandma wanted to keep her here with them forever, whatever it would take.
She wouldn’t run away from them because it would be mean. And anyway she couldn’t flee in the night because she had no idea where she’d go. She couldn’t just buy a ticket and jump on a train because she didn’t have the right sort of money, though she still had a lot of rupees (the wrong kind of money): it turned out that you couldn’t change rupees into pounds anywhere in Clevedon as you weren’t meant to take them out of India. Also, there wasn’t a train station in Clevedon. She would need to get a bus somewhere to find a train.
So, for the moment, she stayed.
Every morning she had a shower and washed her hair. She studied. She practised typing. She sat in the tree, which she liked even though it was the wrong one, and stretched her legs out and did her best to vanish into a book if it wasn’t raining. If it was raining, she sat in the tree wearing Victoria’s old raincoat, and read her book under an umbrella that she propped up. She went out. She did all the things that she thought made her normal, and waited to feel all right.
At night, though, it exploded in her brain. She tried not to sleep because she knew that, when she did, her head would fill with those last few days in the clearing and she would wake up screaming. At night her whole being was ripped into pieces and she felt she had nothing, she was worthless, she had let everyone down, and she saw her mother, her sister, her friends, her family, and she watched them all die again and again and again.
She would grab her duvet and go out into the garden to feel the ground beneath her feet, the cold air on her skin. She would sit down on the earth wrapped in her duvet, and if it was clear she would stare up at the stars and remember and cry. She would often sit there until it started to get light, and then she found she could put it all away and get through the day.
When she did sleep she dreamed about the basement. Venus’s words – Don’t go into the basement – echoed through her sleeping mind, and dream-Arty opened that door to find unspeakable horror over and over and over again. Sometimes she would find it filled with writhing snakes, with mosquitoes, with Australian spiders that sank their venomous fangs into her skin. Other times her dream self would go through the door and find herself back in the middle of the worst of everything in the clearing. She found bodies down there. Men from Mumbai streets tried to grab her body. Tables were covered in goats’ heads with wild cats licking up the blood underneath. Everything bad that she could possibly imagine lurked in the basement. She wished again and again and again that she had asked Venus why she shouldn’t go there.
In the end she had to find out. She had asked to go down there a few times (Grandad went there often) but they always said no, so she had to take the opportunity when it arose. For a long time it didn’t, and then the day came when it did. It was a Tuesday morning: Grandad was at ‘the bowls’, and Grandma had popped out to Tesco.
Arty had been to Tesco with her once, and it was not a thing she ever wanted to do again. It had freaked her out completely, and she understood now why everything was wrapped in plastic that had to go straight into the bin. It was because it had come from a place filled with stuff wrapped in plastic. It was so unlike real food, and there was so much of it that it scared her.
So she was there on her own, and as she walked past the locked door she thought it was time to find out what was down there, because whatever it was, it was going to be better than her dreams.
She was quite good at unlocking things now. From that starting point with the padlock at the edge of the forest, she had got used to putting keys into locks and turning them. She had opened hotel-room doors in India with a key at the Austen Hotel and with a card at the smart hotel, and now she had a set of keys to this very house, though she hardly ever used them because someone was always home.
This door, though, was a mystery. It was locked. It had a keyhole, but it didn’t have a key, and so she wasn’t sure what to do. She had seen Grandad going down there, but she had never seen what he did with his key afterwards. She tried all the keys that hung on the little hooks by the door, but none of them was even the right shape to go into the keyhole.
She looked in the drawers. All of them were so well organized that it made her head ache. Everything was in its own little section, and everything was labelled and sorted out. She looked through everything, and she looked further and further away from the kitchen, and then she decided to look in her grandparents’ bedroom.
She had never opened the door before, let alone stepped inside, but she really wanted the key, and so she told herself they’d never told her not to go in there. The room had a very thick carpet that felt lovely under her feet, and there was a table on each side of the bed. One had a pink lamp with tassels, a magazine called Good Housekeeping, and some plastic sheets of pills. Some were called fluoxetine. Some were called diazepam. Arty didn’t know what that meant, but she hoped it was all keeping Grandma well. The other side had a book called It Doesn’t Take a Hero and a clock. It was not hard to work out who slept on which side.
She opened the drawers and had to sit down heavily on the bed.
Grandad’s drawer of stuff was actually messy, and it was messy because it was filled with everything to do with Venus and Matthew. With Arty’s mother and uncle. Victoria and Matthew. The twins. There were photos, in books and loose, and there were school reports and newspaper cuttings and photographs of them in school uniform, and all kinds of things.
Arty stared at it. She couldn’t stop staring. She wanted to read every word of every bit of it, and she knew she would come back next time she was alone and do exactly that. For now, though, she just looked for the key.
She couldn’t find it.
She touched her own neck. She had almost forgotten about them, but there were keys here. It didn’t seem likely, but these were the only ones she hadn’t tried. She pushed the drawer closed and tiptoed out of the room, hoping that she hadn’t left footprints in the thick carpet.
One of her keys slotted straight in.
It went straight into the lock and turned easily. Inside the door there was a flight of stairs, and Arty went down feeling like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, not knowing what would be in here, but knowing that it would be something big. Whatever was down here, her mother had kept the key for twenty years, just in case.
At the bottom of the stairs there was another door. She knew her other key would work in that door, and it did.
It swung open.
Arty gasped and took a step forward.
And the door slammed shut behind her.
June
She was at my bedside. I didn’t want to look her in the face. I turned to the bear and picked it up instead.
‘You need to talk to her,’ it whispered to me. ‘It’s time. You need to say sorry.’
‘I know,’ I whispered.
She took my hand. I turned my head and looked at her eye, the one I had damaged. I hadn’t stopped crying for days, but now I knew I had to be brave. I had to look at the thing that I had done.
But I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough. I looked away.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You’re alive,’ she said. ‘You’re here.’
‘I’m alive,’ I managed to echo. ‘I’m
here.’
It was all crashing in on me. I knew the horror of it would stay with me forever.
‘It’s OK,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘It’s OK, darling. I’m always going to be here. I did it because we love you. I was all out of ideas.’
‘I want Vicky,’ I whispered.
She looked away. ‘I told you, Matthew,’ she said. ‘Vicky’s gone.’
22
There was nothing in the basement at all.
‘How the hell did you get in here?’ said Grandad, who must have followed her down here, as he was somehow standing behind Arty, between her and the stairs.
‘Venus told me not to come down here,’ she said. ‘When she was ill. It was one of the last things she said to me. Don’t go into the basement. I’ve been so scared of it. I have nightmares about it all the time. But there’s nothing.’
She looked again. The room was empty, except for a stepladder, a sheet on the floor, and a paintbrush and tray of paint. There was a radio plugged into the wall.
‘Yes, but how? There’s one key to each of those doors, and both of them are on my key ring at all times.’
She stepped back. This was not what she had expected, at all. It was a big room with a window high up in the wall. There was a light bulb hanging down from the ceiling, and a little room round the corner that had a shower and a loo in it.
Half the walls were black and dusty. The rest were bright white. The sheet on the floor was splattered with spots of white paint. Someone – Grandad – was painting the black away.
Arty held out her own keys, still on their chain. ‘Venus gave me these,’ she said. ‘When she was ill. When I went to get help. She didn’t say what they were for. The other one is for the gate out of the forest. I tried them, and they worked.’