by Emily Barr
Eventually there were no more tears, and Arty hiccupped and then yawned. Her face was red and swollen, and her throat hurt, but she felt, in some way, that she was healing. For the first time she believed that her mother was dead.
‘Better?’ said Grandma, who was blowing her own nose. Arty nodded.
She slept for longer than she had for a very long time, and when she woke up she was certain she had dreamed Vishnu’s return. When she remembered it was real she tore down the stairs.
He was there. Her dad was there, in this house. He was holding a cup of coffee and talking to Grandad about cricket.
‘Of course,’ he was saying. ‘I grew up in India! We had cricket on every street corner.’
‘Are you …’ Grandad started to say.
Arty thought Grandad wasn’t quite sure how to say it and she smiled as he tried to get it right.
‘Are you one hundred per cent Indian?’
‘I am not,’ Vishnu said. ‘Indian father, international mother. I have, of course, reintroduced myself to my father’s family rather dramatically, so next up is a visit to my mother’s side of things. How about it, Arty? Shall we go and seek out the rest of the family?’
‘Yes,’ said Arty. ‘I want to do everything.’
It was raining outside, but she still took Vishnu into the back garden to show him the tree.
‘It’s not even the right tree,’ she said, pulling herself up into it, knowing that he would follow. ‘The real one died. That’s its stump over there. But this one has the same spirit. It’s the clearing tree in its second incarnation.’
He sat there with her and they looked at each other.
‘Just look at you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to look at you forever.’
‘Good,’ she said. The rain was plastering her hair to her face.
‘When we feel a bit more settled we need to make a plan. Your grandparents are trying not to say it at the moment, but they’re terrified that I’m going to whisk you away. I can see it. They just got you, and they’ve spent hours telling me how you’ve transformed their lives, and now they think I’m going to take you back to India. What would you like to do, Arty?’
She sighed. ‘Being here made me feel so bad. Like I couldn’t breathe. Like I had to be everything to them all the time. And then I felt a bit better. But I do love them. I don’t want to leave them because they’ve lost everyone.’
He squeezed her hand.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could go to the college thing here? Your grandmother could not be more proud of your studying, and Lucy thinks you’re amazing. Get two years of education. If you want? I’ll live wherever you live. They’ve said that I can stay here in the house too. And after that we’ll go wherever you want. And you can do whatever you want. We can travel the world. We’ll find Matthew, and my family in Australia, and anyone else you fancy.’
‘Zeus, Cherry and AMK,’ Arty said at once.
‘Cherry and AMK,’ he agreed. ‘Zeus – well, we need to go and see him right away. Get the three survivors together. Tell him that the monkey bite wasn’t his fault. You must tell me all about Mr Bollywood. We can check in with Persephone. We can do all that, and then you should go to university wherever you like. London? Mumbai? Anything you want.’
‘I’d love to see snow,’ she said.
‘Then we’ll find you some snow.’
Matthew
I was twenty-four, and it was the beginning of the rest of my life. I wobbled when I got back to Mumbai. I knew it would be easy to find any drug I wanted here, because I knew how to do it. That was the way in any big city. I pictured myself living on the streets, hollow and desperate, until I died. For a few days it felt like the most appealing option I had.
Then I remembered what Vicky had said: ‘We might come out one day.’ The baby might come out into this world one day. Of course she would. It’s one thing looking after a tiny baby away from the rest of the big bad world, but no one could grow up there. Vicky and Vishnu and Arty would appear in my life at some point, and I needed to be ready for them.
I decided to do all the good that I could. I started working with homeless people in Bristol and, sixteen years later, I was living in Uganda working with refugees from Sudan. This was my life now. I never had time or inclination to think of anything else. I worked hard, drank soft drinks when my colleagues went for a beer, and slept well because I was exhausted. The people I saw every day had lost everything, and my shame spread to cover the fact that I had had a comfortable home, a family who loved me, and I had never been hungry, yet I had still messed it up irredeemably.
I moved from place to place. Charities make you take time out in between placements to avoid burnout, and I would go back to Europe when I had to, but I rarely went back home.
Whenever I had the chance I spent my free time in India. I flew to Mumbai and took the train to Lonavala. I walked to the radiation sign and into the forest and I walked up to the clearing.
The first time I did it, I thought I would somehow lurk in the trees and secretly glimpse my sister and my niece. Of course it didn’t work like that, but, luckily for me, the person who spotted me was Vishnu. He signalled to me to wait further away, back in the forest, and twenty minutes later he and Artemis appeared.
I went back three more times, and each time I spent time with her. We talked to each other and she treated me, unquestioningly, as her friend who was only occasionally there.
As soon as I knew she was old enough to tell other people about me, Vishnu and I agreed that I should stop going. After that I would just watch from far away, on the hillside, just to check there was movement and the community was still going. It broke my heart to know that she had no memories of me at all, that we had no relationship, but I knew it was payback for what I’d done to Vicky, and I had to live with it.
Our last conversation was when she was about three. She toddled into the woods with Vishnu at a distance behind her. I jumped down from a tree and said, ‘Hello!’
She pointed at me and said, ‘Lorax.’
I rarely looked at the news. My colleagues were online as often as they could be, but I wasn’t interested in anything beyond the world I could see around me every day.
I missed the flurry about the forest girl completely. No one mentioned her to me and, even if they had, I probably wouldn’t have made the connection. Not unless I’d heard the name Arty.
I had missed calls from my parents and I intended to call them back. I didn’t have voicemail because no one uses it, really.
I was busy, and talking to my parents always left me feeling bad, because I knew that to complete my atonement I needed to go back and spend some proper time with them. I had never felt quite ready for it.
Eventually, though, I did call them back. Then my world changed again.
29
Arty was sitting in the clearing. It was a different clearing, but there were trees round it, and insects shouting, and birds calling to each other and perhaps, far away, the distant sound of monkeys. The afternoon heat had faded and the shadows were long.
There was no pit here, not yet, but they were sitting on the ground cross-legged. She looked around. Everyone had come, except one, who she thought would never turn up anywhere.
She gazed at Zeus. She would never stop gazing at him. He was all right. He was with his family in France, and was settling into his new home, and he was going to be OK. He was bigger than he had been before, and he spoke French much better than any other language, but when he saw Arty he had run into her arms and for a few moments it was as if they had never been apart.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she had said to him again and again and again.
He knew that now. She could see it in his eyes. His real self was back again, and a lot of the time he was a normal five-year-old boy.
Florence was here with him, and she was much more friendly to Arty this time. Arty thought that perhaps that first time she had been more scared and sad than mean, thou
gh Arty hadn’t been able to see it.
Vishnu caught her eye across the circle and smiled. She grinned back at him. He was sitting with Persephone. She could see exactly why Persephone had been Venus’s friend.
Persephone had been so scared to talk to Arty, because she had never told anyone about her time in the clearing. It was because of the herbs, it turned out. She was a lawyer, and lawyers couldn’t have anything to do with drugs. She had pretended that she’d worked as a nanny for those years, and if anyone knew she had lied she thought she would lose her job.
Now, though, she was their best friend. Arty adored her, and she also loved Luke, who was sitting on Persephone’s other side.
Luke was also from the clearing in a way, because Persephone had found out after she left that she was pregnant. Luke’s father was Odin and that made him a clearing baby too. He was the lost clearing child.
Arty turned to the woman sitting next to her. ‘You’re really going to do this?’ she said.
‘Are you kidding me? Of course I am, sweetie. It’s my dream come true. You know that. From the moment you first told me about it I wanted this. I wish – of course I wish it could have been different.’
‘I know,’ said Arty. ‘Me too. But thank you. This is exactly what Venus would have wanted. Exactly. It’s what Vishnu wants, and Tania, and me and Zeus and Luke, and we are the clearing people.’
Cherry put an arm round her and hugged her. ‘It’s going to have to be a very different set-up. But we’ll stick to her principles, I promise.’
This new clearing was in the Maharashtra hills, but it was nowhere near Lonavala. AMK had bought this piece of land, saying it was so he could make his film in peace, and had given it to Arty as a present. She had refused it as a gift and eventually he accepted a thousand of her leftover rupees and put it in both their names. Now, except when the filming was happening, Cherry was going to run it as a retreat. Anyone who needed to shelter from the outside, for any reason, could apply to stay here, and people would spend months at a time living away from the modern world. There were no phones allowed, no screens, and Cherry was to be the matriarch, just as she had always wanted.
AMK was pacing around, but now he came over to join the circle. His people had melted away somewhere, even though Arty had invited them all to stay.
‘Goodness me,’ he said. ‘Why must we do this? Help me down, Artemis.’
She helped him to sit. He huffed and puffed and called himself too old, but when he was actually sitting cross-legged he looked considerably more comfortable than Arty had expected, and she wondered how much the huffing had been for show. AMK had presented her with a script a couple of days earlier. She hadn’t read it yet.
‘Tell me about it!’ said Grandad from across the circle. ‘Deckchairs for the old folks next time please, Artemis!’
Grandma had stayed at home. India, she said, was too much for her, and anyway she always wanted to be at home just in case Matthew came back. Arty had seen at once that no part of her was willing to be persuaded, so she had promised to look after Grandad, and set off with him and Vishnu with the primary aim of watching some cricket at the Oval Maidan before they did anything else.
Arty had watched her grandfather shedding his bluster. At first he had been shocked by Mumbai; as she watched him it seemed to Arty that the huge hot city with its car horns and extremes of everything was as far removed from his life experience as it had been from her own when she had first arrived there. As the days passed, though, he had started to acclimatize. They had sat in the shade at the Oval and watched people playing cricket. Arty had missed Joe just for a few minutes, but then she remembered all the people chasing her with their phones, and she had stopped missing him.
‘There’s no balance any more,’ said Grandad. ‘It’s all about the batsman. There’s no contest. Who’d be a bowler?’
‘Maybe the batsmen are just getting better,’ said Vishnu, who had adjusted quite a lot to the outside world now.
Arty tuned out of that. She looked round this circle. Soon, she knew, she needed to get up and talk. She would wait just a few more minutes just in case. He still might make it.
No one came through the trees. That was all right. She looked at Cherry, at AMK and Grandad, at Zeus and Florence, Persephone and Luke, and at Vishnu, and she drew strength from all of them. She looked at the crate of beer and the box of chocolate bars that were waiting in the shade. In the end, the rest of her leftover rupees had gone on Dairy Milk.
She stood up. ‘Welcome to the twenty-first Kotta day,’ she said, and her voice broke with the emotion of it. ‘We are here to honour the memory of everyone who lived in the clearing from the moment it was set up until the moment it ended on the twentieth Kotta.’
There was a rustling in the trees. A cracking of twigs.
If it was a monkey, Arty thought, she would want to kill it herself. If it was a monkey, it might bite them. She saw Zeus thinking the same and leaning into his aunt.
Then she saw a figure emerging from between the trees. He was wearing cotton trousers and a T-shirt and he looked like her mother, his twin sister.
Everyone turned to stare.
‘Hello again, Arty,’ he said. ‘Sorry it’s taken so long. Mum said I’d find you somewhere round here. I seem to spend my life trekking through Indian forests trying to track you down in clearings.’
She stared at him. He was a man with the same face as her mother. But he was a man. He was not her mother.
It was Uncle Matthew. And she already knew him. He was the Lorax of her dreams.
‘Sorry I’m late, everyone,’ he said.
Epilogue
This was snow.
Arty was walking down a white street, looking at the white that covered the houses, the trees, the cars and everything else. It was falling from the sky. Snow – freezing, beautiful snow – was falling all around them like feathers.
‘This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,’ she said.
It was. Vishnu had asked them where in the world they would most like to go for a family holiday, and Arty had asked for snow and the Northern Lights.
‘It might be mine too, actually,’ said Luke.
Luke was her best friend. He was a bit more than that. He might be. They hadn’t talked about it. He was younger than she was, but taller, and he was the most astonishingly handsome boy she could imagine. His skin was dark like Odin’s, and he had freckles like Tania. He made her laugh. She loved to laugh with him.
They were walking behind the adults, slowing them down because they kept stopping to throw themselves into snowdrifts or to make snowballs and chuck them at each other. It was nearly dark, even though it was three in the afternoon, and there was a green tinge to the edges of the mountains on the horizon.
Tania and Vishnu were walking ahead, turning round every now and then to wait for them.
‘Come on, guys!’ called Tania now. ‘Some of us are freezing here. There’s a beer with my name on it just over there.’
Arty took a deep breath of frozen air. She was wearing the warmest clothes in the world, but she was still shivering a bit. That was all right. She quite liked it.
‘We could do it here maybe,’ said Luke, pointing to a pristine patch of snow under a lamp post. ‘Before it’s too dark.’
Arty agreed. She pulled the library bear out of her pocket. Luke pulled some snow around until he had made a throne for it to sit on, and they sat it down. Arty got out her new phone and took the bear’s photo with it. They took lots until they had one in which its quizzical face looked just right.
Her fingers were freezing, turning red and trying to stop working, but she managed to write the message.
Hello, Matthew. I am having a
lovely if cold time in Tromsø with
my family. We all wish you were
here. Love you loads x from Bear
She sent it and smiled. Uncle Matthew would love that.
‘Coming,’ she called, and they walked fast,
their arms touching through all their layers of clothing, to meet their parents in the pub. The sky above them started to dance with light.
Acknowledgements
From the moment my editor Ruth said, ‘Actually can you do the one about the girl coming out of the woods?’ this book has been a joy. Thank you to Ruth Knowles and Tig Wallace, whose editorial notes were incisive and inspiring at every stage; and to Wendy Shakespeare, Jennie Roman, Marcus Fletcher and Libby Volke for copy-editing, proofreading and generally picking up mistakes.
Thank you, Emily Smyth, for designing this beautiful cover.
Huge thanks to Stephanie Thwaites at Curtis Brown for everything she’s done on this book and so much more, with the help of Izzy Gahan. Thanks to Jasmine Joynson at Penguin Random House for all her help with absolutely everything.
To research the Indian section of the book, I went to Mumbai where an incredible taxi driver saved us from the fact that we went to the wrong station and got us to the right one incredibly fast, where we improbably caught the train that took us to the forest, telling us his life story all the way.
Thank you to all the staff at the Machan resort, outside Lonavala, including Deepak and David (who took us for a night-time walk through the forest where we met a very poisonous snake, to his delight). It’s far more luxurious than the clearing, but the descriptions of the clearing are very much grounded in that place. And thank you to the many people in Mumbai and its environs who helped me in all kinds of ways.
Finally, Craig Green has read this at every stage, and supported me in every way while I wrote it, so I owe him everything. Thank you to the gorgeous Gabe, Seb, Charlie, Lottie and Alfie for all kinds of distractions and worries and laughter.
Read more
Also by Emily Barr: