The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  My mobile number is below. Call me on this, rather than at the office.

  I am laughing at your persistence (not as much as my colleagues are), but also very nervous. Please can you make him stop?!

  We are all gods and goddesses.

  Tania xxx

  Arty smiled, and then laughed. She laughed for a long time.

  Dear AMK,

  You are the best!! Thank you, thank you. Tania has messaged me at last. I’m going to call her now. So you can stop. Job done!

  Arty xxxxxx

  She called Tania’s mobile number and it went straight to voicemail, so she left a message. Then she called again, and when she had called eleven times she decided to go out for a walk.

  She stood up. It was important to her to get out before Grandma heard her because, in spite of everything she knew, she was a bit scared of Grandma now.

  There were footsteps on the stairs.

  Arty shivered.

  ‘There you are!’ said Grandma.

  Arty forced a smile. ‘Here I am.’

  ‘I never thought I’d come down here again.’ Grandma stood in the doorway, not quite coming into the room, and Arty thought she looked much older today. ‘Arty – could you pop upstairs if you’re not too busy with your studies? We need to talk about a couple of things.’

  Her manner was different. It was almost formal, and that meant she was nervous.

  ‘Of course,’ said Arty, and she had taken a couple of steps towards the door when Grandma said, ‘Could you bring that bear up with you?’

  In the kitchen Grandma opened a packet of biscuits, the sort that were two chocolate ones stuck together with a creamy layer. Arty loved those. She took one and ate it slowly, performing how lovely it was to make Grandma smile, which worked a little bit.

  ‘Two things,’ Grandma said, taking a biscuit herself, which she never did. ‘First of all – this isn’t easy – I’ve had a call from the authorities with news from your old home. Well, not so much your home, but, well, the illness that so affected everything, that – that killed Victoria. They’ve established where it came from. Little Zeus told his aunt.’

  ‘Zeus told his aunt what?’

  ‘What happened. The two little boys, as I understand it.’

  There was a long pause as Grandma tried to collect herself. Arty had no idea what was coming so she just waited.

  ‘The two little boys,’ Grandma said, ‘were dressed as monkeys? Went into the trees to chase the monkeys away from your party? Well, it seems they went too close, urging each other on. They knew they were being naughty. That’s why Zeus hasn’t said anything before. Apparently he felt …’ She stopped.

  ‘He felt it was their fault?’

  ‘His fault. He felt it was his fault. He said he and his brother were daring each other to go closer, to fight the monkeys. And one of them bit him.’

  ‘Bit Zeus?’

  ‘Bit Hercules. That was where it began. A monkey bite.’

  Arty was back in the clearing. It was Kotta day. They had spent the entire day singing and dancing and having the last real day of their lives. It had been happy.

  She remembered looking at Hercules and Zeus, little furry fake-monkeys in the moonlight. She had wanted to run over and give them both a hug. She had watched them going into the forest, daring each other to go further into the darkness, taunting the monkeys, laughing and laughing.

  ‘A monkey bit him.’ Arty said it slowly, picturing it in her head. It was probably Chandler. He was the one who went closest to the people. Hercules had taunted him, and he had attacked.

  That was the missing thing. The bridge between Kotta day and everything else. The boys had been in the forest. They were messing around too much, getting too close to the monkeys, taunting them, and one had bitten Hercules. And then he got ill.

  Her heart broke for Zeus all over again. All that time he had been by her side but he had never said it. He had retreated right inside himself. He had barely spoken. She revisited it all. Their walk out of the woods, and the time in hospital, and then Gita and Vikram’s house. Through all that he must have been feeling the burden of his secret. She wished he had told her.

  She was pleased he had told Florence. That was the surest sign she had had that he felt at home.

  ‘Goodness knows,’ said Grandma, ‘how it was missed. The other little boy, I mean. The bite. Must have been quite something.’

  ‘His dad buried him in the forest. No one saw his body. We didn’t know there was a bite. Anyone who did see it died soon afterwards.’

  Grandma put her hand on Arty’s. ‘You’ll never know exactly what happened now,’ she said, and Arty knew that that was true.

  ‘What was the other thing?’ she said a bit later.

  ‘Oh,’ said Grandma. ‘Well. Shall we go for another walk?’

  January

  I sat at the counter of the shop and arranged the key rings that were in a basket, trying to tempt impulse buyers. They didn’t need rearranging but it gave me something to do.

  My name was Matthew Jones, the most unremarkable of names, and I had been clean for eight months and seventeen days. Today was my twentieth birthday and it was the first birthday I had ever spent without my twin sister. Vicky and I had done everything together. We had always had two cakes side by side, and blown the candles out for the camera.

  I sabotaged it. I had driven her away.

  Some student-type people were rifling through the clothes. I half watched them until Rhoda came and put a cup of tea in front of me.

  ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘A nice cuppa.’

  ‘Thanks, Rhoda,’ I said. I hadn’t told her it was my birthday because she would have done something kind and I didn’t want it. I just knew she would have baked me a cake, and they would have lit candles and sung to me. The ladies here were so nice. They knew I had been ‘troubled’, and they were giving me a chance because they were good people. They never left me alone with the till for any amount of time at all, and I knew they were right not to. I knew I wouldn’t steal from the charity shop, but they didn’t.

  I sipped the tea. I was a twin but the other half of me had gone.

  I was in the process of learning to live without heroin, but it also meant living without my heroine (I almost smiled at the terrible pun). I took my pleasures carefully in safe places. I went to church sometimes, without believing in God but relieved to surrender myself to something bigger. Rituals, I found, were helpful. I went to meetings twice a day. They kept me sane.

  I kept away from Clevedon. I couldn’t go near my parents because the tide of remorse would have swept me away. I wasn’t strong enough for it. I wrote them letters and sometimes I posted them but I couldn’t bear to open their replies.

  But my sister. My sister, the better half of me, had gone. She had always been the funny one, the clever one, the one who looked after me. She had always come first: we were always Victoria and Matthew. Vicky and Matt. No one ever said Matthew and Victoria. Vicky was better than me. She was a better person, frustrated with the world, always wanting to change it, make it better, do it differently.

  And she was uncompromising. I had wronged her, and she had left. I wished her a happy birthday in my head, and hoped that she was happy wherever she was now.

  Rhoda was talking to Sharon about Tony Blair. ‘I like him, I must say,’ she was saying. ‘He seems like a nice boy.’

  I tuned out. I didn’t care about Tony Blair.

  I forced myself to admit a few things.

  I stole from Vicky over and over again.

  I lied to her all the time.

  I took her stuff when her back was turned and swore I hadn’t. I pretended I was going to rehab so I could disappear for a while without her worrying about me. I lied about anything and everything.

  But the big thing. The thing she would never forgive me for. I had actually done that to my beloved sister.

  I couldn’t face it.

  ‘I think Tony Blair’s good too,’
I said, though I was only vaguely aware of who he was. The women turned and smiled, welcoming me to the conversation.

  25

  They walked down to the seafront again. Arty looked at the people they passed, knowing that she looked like everyone else except that she was half Indian. Most people were white, but not all of them, and she didn’t feel she stood out particularly. She was wearing her jeans and jumper, like a normal Clevedon girl. The social media thing had stopped as far as she could see. She was unremarkable.

  They passed a girl a bit younger than Arty, a tall girl with red hair. Arty glanced at her in passing and then looked again. She thought she must be imagining it. She stopped, and Grandma stopped next to her.

  ‘What is it?’ Grandma said.

  ‘Did you see that girl’s T-shirt?’ said Arty. ‘I might have to run after her and check.’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘It said …’ Arty could hardly believe it. She must have imagined it, because of Hercules. The words had hit her right in the stomach. ‘I thought it said Chandler and Phoebe and Monica and Rachel and Joey and Ross. It can’t have done. It can’t.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Grandma smiled. ‘Lots of people like Friends.’

  ‘But those aren’t friends. They’re enemies. How do people know about them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  That was how she discovered that the monkeys had been named after characters from a television programme called Friends. ‘Your mother loved it, just before she went away,’ Grandma said. Arty decided she must never watch it.

  They walked on, but seeing those names, particularly Chandler’s and Monica’s, had made her jittery. She didn’t feel quite safe. Hercules had been bitten by a monkey and that changed everything. She didn’t know quite why, but it did. People had that monkey’s name on T-shirts.

  ‘Let’s get an ice cream,’ said Grandma, because she knew Arty would love that. There was a queue at the ice-cream shop, and Arty could see how wobbly Grandma was.

  ‘You sit down out here,’ Arty said, ‘and I’ll go and get them.’ Grandma gave her the money and sat down in the pale sunshine at a plastic table.

  Arty queued up behind a woman with three small children who Arty thought must have been her grandchildren. One of them held the woman’s hand. Another jumped up and down trying to look at the ice cream in its freezer, and the third, who was very small indeed but extremely fast, kept running away. It was a child who might have been a boy or might have been a girl, and every time the grandmother turned her attention away it ran for the door. Arty noticed how difficult this was for the grown-up, and the next time the child ran, Arty went after it.

  She caught up with the child on the pavement and scooped it up from behind. The child laughed, and when she (Arty thought) turned round and saw that Arty was a stranger, she laughed even more. She had straggly brown hair and a face that was full of laughter and joy.

  ‘You are such a cheeky monster,’ Arty said, and she giggled too.

  She pulled the child on to her hip and took her back into the shop, passing Grandma who gave her a sad smile and said, ‘Oh, Artemis.’

  The other grandma put a hand to her chest and mimed being relieved. She had short grey hair, like real Grandma, and bright pink lips.

  ‘Thank you so much, my love!’ she said. ‘Oh, you are a minx, Lily. Come back to Nana. What am I meant to do!’ She looked at Arty. ‘This little lady is more trouble than her brother and sister put together. All she wants is to run away. She doesn’t know where she’s going! She just wants to go, don’t you, darling?’

  ‘I know how she feels,’ said Arty. ‘We’re two of a kind. Why don’t I look after her while you buy their ice creams? I’ll take her outside to wait. My grandma is out there. Then I’ll get the ice creams for me and Grandma afterwards.’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ said Nana. ‘What would you like, dear? Both of you. I’ll gladly buy you a hundred ice creams if you’ll keep this one out of mischief.’ She looked at the two other children. ‘Poor Nana can’t keep up with Lily, can she?’

  ‘No,’ said the one who was trying to see the ice cream. ‘Mummy can’t either. Daddy says Lily is a little bugger.’

  ‘Well,’ said Nana, ‘far be it from me to endorse that, but I see where he’s coming from.’ She looked at Arty. ‘So, what’s it to be?’

  ‘Please could I have a strawberry ice cream?’ Arty said. ‘And my grandma too. Thank you very much.’

  ‘See how polite the lady is?’ she said to all the children. ‘Of course you can.’

  Arty went outside and sat down with Grandma, the wayward child on her lap.

  ‘This is Lily,’ she said to Grandma. ‘Lily, this is my grandma.’

  ‘Hello, Lily.’ Grandma sounded sad, even though Arty knew she liked little children normally.

  Lily seemed quite happy to stay still now she was with Arty. She twisted round and patted Arty on the face. Arty could smell her sweet breath, see the pen marks on her squishy hands.

  ‘Nose,’ said Lily, and she touched her own nose.

  ‘That is your nose,’ Arty said. ‘And this is mine.’

  ‘Mowf,’ said Lily. She touched her own mouth, and then Arty’s.

  ‘Yes,’ said Arty. ‘Mouth.’

  She sat outside, talking about ears and hands and teef, and looked across the road to the sea. The sun was shining and everyone but her was clearly finding it extremely warm. People looked happy. Everyone but Grandma looked happy at least.

  She looked back to Lily.

  ‘Do you like this bear?’ she said, and she took the library bear out of her bag and held it out. ‘Hello, Lily,’ she made it say. ‘I’m the library bear. I like books.’

  ‘Not the bear,’ said Grandma. Her voice was so firm that Arty handed it to her, and Lily didn’t complain. Grandma held it on her lap and twisted it round and round.

  Lily played with Arty’s hair, twiddling a strand of it, and she put the thumb of her other hand in her mouth and leaned her head on Arty’s chest. Arty held her tight, and longed for Zeus with every fibre of her being.

  ‘Well, look at you!’ Nana was there, her hands full of ice-cream cones. ‘The magic touch! Oh, Jane! Hello! This is your granddaughter – of course! It all falls into place. She’s a wonderful girl. Here, we got you both a strawberry ice cream. Now, the kids and I will be off. Thank you so much for running after Lily, my dear. If you ever want any babysitting work, I’m sure they’d love to have you.’

  When they had gone Grandma put the bear on the table.

  ‘Artemis,’ she said. ‘I need to know everything about how you came to have this bear. Did you really bring it from India with you?’

  ‘Yes. I had it all my life. Venus gave it to me. I told you.’

  ‘But that’s not possible,’ said Grandma. ‘Vicky went to India without the bear. This was Matthew’s bear. I got it for him when he was a baby. Just a silly thing, but he loved it. It was in the basement with him, Arty. It was the only thing he saved from the fire.’

  Five Years Later

  I was clean and sober when I arrived in Mumbai, and I knew exactly where I was going to go. I’d been trying to track Vicky down for years and years, and finally I had a clue.

  It was more than a clue, in fact. In no sense had I managed to find my sister. She had sent someone to find me. As ever, she was the capable one.

  It had started with a phone call. An unfamiliar number on my mobile-phone screen.

  ‘Is that … Matthew?’

  It was a woman, one I was sure I didn’t know.

  ‘Yes.’ Should I even have said that? Yes, it turned out. I should have.

  ‘Hi. Matthew. Found you at last. I got your number from your dad, but I had to pretend to be a friend from work, even though I didn’t know what work you do, because I was strictly not allowed to say who I really am.’

  I felt scared at that point. ‘Who are you really?’

  There was a pause. ‘My name’s Tania Roswell,�
� she said. ‘And I’m a friend of your sister’s. Until recently I was living in her community, in India.’

  It moved fast after that. I went to London to meet Tania Roswell, who was small and Irish. She had long curly hair and all the answers. For years I had agonized over what had become of Vicky every single day. And now I was with someone who had known all along.

  ‘I met her in a backpackers’ hostel,’ she said. ‘In Mumbai. Years ago. She took me to meet a friend of hers at a meditation retreat. They were planning to set up something new. He had the land – a huge section of forest he’d inherited. So they were going to build a new community there. It was very, very hardcore. It was going to be a matriarchy and contact with the outside world would be minimal. They’d advertised for people through the internet, which was a kind of new thing then. And they were pulling together a bunch of people.

  ‘I decided to join. It was exciting. I had a shit home life. I’d not long come out of an abusive relationship. I was ready to cut myself off from all that. Long story short, we did it. We planned and worked it out. Vicky came up with a list of rules. We were all going to be gods and goddesses. We all took new names, god and goddess names. I decided to be Persephone, because I’d always loved the sound of that word. It all sounds so simple to say it now, but it wasn’t. Still, we got there.’

  She told me everything. Where the community was, how they had tried to give it a name they’d carefully chosen by committee but ended up calling it ‘the clearing’ instead. The way they had started living in tents and gradually built treehouses.

  ‘So why,’ I asked, sipping my mineral water, ‘are you here? And why isn’t Vicky?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it any more,’ she said. ‘It was amazing for a while. Liberating. An experiment that worked. It genuinely worked. I’m sure it will carry on working. But it wasn’t for me. It was for a bit, but not for the rest of my life. And why am I here now, talking to you? Because your sister wanted me to give you this note. You are the only person I’m meant to talk to about it. They don’t want to become a tourist attraction. No one knows where they are and they’re very, very keen to keep it that way.’