The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  Inari strummed the songs on his guitar. Odin was singing ‘Creep’, along with Inari, which Arty liked because it made her shiver and also laugh. Odin really wasn’t a creep or a weirdo because the people like that were all on the outside, but the song said he was, and that gave her a strange feeling about things not always being what they seemed. The whole song pulsed in purple and blue in Arty’s head, like a bruise, like something that was trying to attract her attention. She wanted to learn that song next.

  Vishnu was bringing more rice over from the cooking fire, because even when it was Kotta they still needed sensible food. No one wanted only to have Dairy Milk. Vishnu saw Arty watching and raised a hand to wave to her. All the men here were Arty’s dad, but Vishnu actually properly was. He was the tallest and thinnest of everyone, and his beard and hair would grow and grow until he looked like a bush, and then he would cut it all off. Arty thought that if she’d been a boy she would have been just like him.

  The moon was bright in the sky, the last bits of dusk almost gone by the time the boys were ready. A few years ago Hella had found the monkey suits for sale out in the world beyond the clearing, and Venus had immediately said they would become part of the Kotta ceremony. The two boys had the job of wearing them these days; the monkeys freaked out completely when they saw human monkeys, and they kept away from everything.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Venus. ‘Adorable.’

  The boys danced around the edges of the clearing, making monkey sounds, giggling uncontrollably, periodically shouting, ‘Monkeys, monkeys, go away. Thank you for letting us live in your forest, but stay away.’

  When everyone was settled Venus stepped back into the middle of the pit.

  ‘Let’s eat!’ she said, and everybody shouted and clapped and stamped their feet. ‘We’re here to celebrate. Thank you, Hella, for your boundless skill in bringing us the things we need. Thank you, Vishnu, for cooking. Thank you, Kali, for healing. Thank you, Inari, Odin and Diana, for farming and teaching, and for looking after the home. Thank you, Arty, for looking after the books. Thank you, Luna, for helping Arty and Hella. Thank you, Zeus and Herc, for keeping Chandler and Monica and Phoebe and Joey away from our feast. Thank you, Lorax, for speaking for the trees.’ She paused for a second to smile at Arty. ‘Thank you, Persephone, for remembering us because I know that wherever you are you will be thinking of us today. Thank you, everyone, for making our world work in peace and harmony. Now dig in.’

  Inari started strumming ‘I’ll Be There for You’ and they all reached forward and took a bar of Dairy Milk each.

  Arty opened the wrapper slowly. She could feel that it was a bit soft, of course, because of the heat. That didn’t matter. She peeled back the purple and savoured every second of it. She touched the chocolate with her finger and licked it off. Her whole mouth came alive and sparkled with pure gold. This was the best thing ever. For the rest of the year mango was her favourite thing, but Dairy Milk was amazing.

  They always made a collage from the wrappers. They were purple jewels, not things that could be discarded.

  Everyone else was eating slowly too. They all made these last. The boys had to stay on monkey duty until the rest of them had finished, and they kept looking over, but they knew that their chocolate would be waiting when they stopped, and they knew they would get extra for waiting. Arty looked at them, little furry fake-monkeys in the moonlight, and she wanted to run over and give them both a hug. She watched them going into the forest, daring each other to go further into the darkness, taunting the monkeys, laughing and laughing.

  She wanted to go with them, to pull them back. But she didn’t.

  May

  There were no soft toys any more. There were demons, with wings, flying around the room, and they had the toys’ faces. They hated me. They hated me loads. Sometimes they flew at me in a cloud and I had to run away and hide in a corner. They hissed and spat and told me I was going to be one of them.

  Whenever she came in they all lay down and pretended to be normal. I tried to tell her a couple of times but she just took my hand and pressed it too hard with hers and said, ‘You’ll feel better soon.’

  I could not stay here. Getting out was more urgent than anything had ever been. I tried to find some energy but I seemed to have nothing left. I didn’t know how I was meant to do it when I felt like this. I clawed at myself. I tore at my skin and my hair. I kicked the walls. I ran towards the demons and they flew out of my way.

  I took my energy and tried to use it properly. Once, long before all of this, I had been sensible. As a young child I had been happy, living in my perfect world in the treetops. That had all gone now, viciously, but I tried to harness that world, to do the right thing.

  We are all gods and goddesses.

  I felt myself fill with strength, even though I knew I shouldn’t be strong because I hadn’t eaten for ages. (I wasn’t going to eat her food because I didn’t trust her.)

  When I felt strong the demons went to the corners of the room and watched me. That was easier.

  The door was locked and bolted from the outside. There was a little bathroom with no window, with a loo, a basin and a shower. The loo was smelly, the basin was tiny, and the shower was dribbly. There were books that I didn’t want to read, there was the bucket, and there was the television.

  It had got dark and then light again six times since I had been here. Possibly more or fewer, but I thought it was six. I had scratched a line on the wall every time I saw the light fading, like a real prisoner, because since I had lost all control over space I knew I had to keep a grip on time. I watched the colour outside the tiny window changing and pictured the world going into darkness, the lights coming on everywhere, and I held on to that. I would see it again. I would.

  I had thought they were just leaving me here for a little bit to teach me a lesson. Now, after a week with these demons, I knew what they were doing. They were doing it for their own reasons and they didn’t care about me at all.

  I started to cry, softly this time. These were tears of sadness, of the loss of my old life. They were tears for an unknown future.

  3

  Hercules went to bed early but Arty didn’t really notice. She saw that Zeus was playing on his own in the late part of the evening, but didn’t think anything of it until morning when Hercules was the only one who didn’t get up.

  ‘He’s ill,’ said Venus when Arty asked her. ‘He’s got a fever. He’ll be OK. Can you look after Zeus?’

  Arty thought he had been too excited on Kotta night. She imagined that he had made himself ill with dancing and joy and chocolate. However, as the morning turned to afternoon, she began to realize that it was worse than that.

  By the end of the day everyone knew that he had a fever and all kinds of pain. Kali was the doctor (she had trained as a doctor in France, which was a place in the outside world), and she looked after him. She didn’t let anyone see Hercules apart from Diana, because Diana was his mother.

  He was in the sick room. Kali had hung cloths over the window so no one could see in, and she would only let Diana go in to visit him. Venus talked to Kali outside the hut from time to time. Arty heard the tone of their voices (quiet, serious) but Venus wouldn’t say anything.

  ‘Kali’s looking after him,’ she said. ‘He should start feeling better soon. Just get on with things and I’ll tell you if anything changes. It’s just a virus or something. It’ll go.’

  Arty was doing washing and cleaning that week, so at lunchtime she swept the clearing then piled the clothes together, wrapped them in a sheet and carried them on her head down to the stream. She spent a long time scrubbing them on the flat rock until they were cleaner than they needed to be. Then she went back for the sheets and did them all, even though she had been planning to leave most of them for tomorrow. She thought if she did all the washing, and did it perfectly, she might cause a ripple of goodness in the clearing that could make Hercules get better. The longer she stayed away, the more likely she wa
s, she thought, to come back to happy news.

  She sat on the stones by the stream with the afternoon sun on her head. Everything she had washed was lying flat in the sun, weighted down with stones.

  She watched a snake whipping past, disappearing between the rocks.

  The sun was edging towards the hilltops when she walked back, willing everything to be all right. She walked as slowly as she could, straining her ears for the sounds of normality. She wanted to step into a world in which everything was spangled again, to see Hercules walking around on shaky legs and everyone smiling and making a fuss of him.

  Instead she saw Inari crouched down peeling onions. He looked up at her approach and it was clear from his face that there was nothing good.

  ‘Hey, Inari.’

  He avoided her eyes.

  ‘Hey, Arty,’ he said. Inari was from a village near Tokyo, he said, but had lived in India longer than he had lived in Japan and liked speaking Hindi.

  Arty supposed she was from India. She was from the clearing, which was in India, and so she was Indian. She, Inari, Diana and Vishnu often spoke Hindi, but the clearing as a whole did most things in English because it was the language that most people spoke the best.

  ‘Is anything …?’

  He shrugged and stared at the onion in his hand, turning it over as if it were an alien thing. ‘No change. It seems that it’s actually pretty serious. I’m sorry. I’ve heard Herc sounding bad.’ He threw the onion down on to the earth, his face contorted. ‘I don’t understand. You get a fever from something. Hercules was well, and then he was ill. Nothing happened. Nobody else is sick. Fever doesn’t arrive from nowhere. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s an autoimmune thing …’ His voice trailed off.

  She crouched beside him and took a knife and an onion. Inari was the most grumpy of the adults. He would just say it straight out when he had a problem, and then you knew what you were dealing with.

  ‘There’s loads of food left over from last night,’ he said, nodding at the pots. ‘Have some. You missed lunch.’

  She wasn’t hungry but she took some anyway.

  Everyone pretended to be busy, but they were all thinking about Hercules. Arty wondered about the unfamiliar word that Inari had spoken. Autoimmune. She didn’t know it, but when she found a medical dictionary and looked it up she found it gave her lots more questions. An autoimmune disease seemed to be something that happened when your body attacked itself. Inari was saying that Hercules might be making himself ill. She wanted to ask Kali about it, but she also knew this wasn’t the time.

  She went to find Venus. ‘Has he got an autoimmune disease?’ she said. ‘Has he?’

  Venus looked at her for a long time. She reached out and tucked a strand of Arty’s hair behind her ear.

  ‘We have no idea,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. Possibly. Who said that?’

  ‘Inari.’

  ‘Herc’s picked up an infection from somewhere. Or reacted to something. We don’t know, but we’ll get on top of it. I promise.’

  Diana was with Hercules all the time, because she was his mother. That meant there was no teacher, which left Zeus with nothing to do. Late in the afternoon, Arty found him sitting outside the sick room, gazing at nothing.

  The boys had always been together. She could remember them a few years earlier, Zeus sitting on the ground in the middle of the pit, clapping his hands and laughing, and Hercules crouched beside him, laughing too. As soon as Zeus was mobile they were running around together, climbing the trees, shouting and chasing and getting in everyone’s way.

  Now Zeus was squatting on his heels, tearing a leaf into pieces. Arty looked at him, then walked over to the sick hut and listened to Hercules weeping. She went back to Zeus.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and she offered him her hand. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  He looked at her, and his eyes were filled with all the sadness she had ever seen. She hugged him, and he was stiff in her arms for a long time before he relaxed and moulded his body to the shape of hers.

  ‘Come on, Zeddy,’ she said again. He shook his head. ‘Come on. Come with me, darling. Let’s go and see if we can find a mango. For when he’s better. Herc loves mangoes.’

  Kali rushed past but barely looked at Arty and Zeus. Arty knew she would work out how to make Hercules better. She absolutely knew it. Because that was what Kali did. They watched Kali pull Hella to one side, heard the low murmur of their voices.

  Arty thought of everything she knew about hospitals. Everything she knew told her that a hospital was where Hercules needed to be.

  She walked over to them, dragging Zeus behind her.

  ‘Are you going to take him to a hospital?’ she said.

  Neither of the women answered. They just looked at each other. Kali made a face that Arty thought meant she agreed.

  Zeus tugged at her hand. ‘Mango,’ he said.

  They headed off in the direction of the shack. The shack was wooden, varnished and it only had one wall. The rest of it was poles holding up the roof. The library was in there, and the tool collection, and things that were on their way somewhere else, and anything someone couldn’t quite be bothered to put away. There were lots of cushions on the floor. In the rainy season they spent a lot of time in there.

  Behind it was the farmland, where they grew all the crops, with the stream running through the middle of it and forest all around.

  The mangoes grew far away from the house, and that made the orchard an important place for Arty. She loved to sit under those trees with a book when she needed peace. She would read about places and things and try to imagine them. She would close her eyes and fill her head with blue and try to see the sea. She pictured sand, which she imagined as a smooth yellow block like marble, that could be manipulated into castles. She imagined herself on a boat, bobbing up and down on the waves. She looked up to the night sky and pictured herself blasting through space. She travelled everywhere from that mango orchard, without ever having to leave the clearing.

  Zeus was so little. Arty knew he was about four, just as she was pretty sure she was sixteen. They lived by the moon, and the only two things that happened every year were Kotta and Diwali, which had got a bit mixed in with the kind of Christmas they understood from books, though they would never have snow like the book people did, and they didn’t have that sort of god either. However old he was, Zeus was the smallest person in the clearing. He was too little to understand very much, and yet she knew that both of them understood perfectly that what was happening to Hercules was very bad indeed.

  ‘He’ll be OK,’ she said, wondering why she was saying that, and she patted his hair.

  He gripped her hand tighter. ‘Really, really?’ he said.

  The silence went on too long before she said, ‘I hope so.’

  They picked a couple of mangoes. Zeus looked at her, assessing the likely response, and then bit into one, pulling its skin back, letting its juice go all over his face. The sun hit them as the clouds parted, and Arty looked at him and for a moment the world was pale and calm. She grabbed another mango and did the same as him. They laughed stupidly even though nothing was funny.

  The mangoes were riper than they usually were at Kotta, as if they were a gift from the forest just when Arty and Zeus needed something. They ate a whole one each (that never happened) and then they carried a few more down to the stream because they very much needed to wash faces and hands that were sticky with juice. Arty stood in the water and splashed her face and scrubbed her hands, and then she threw some water at Zeus and he threw some back at her and laughed.

  Right then, everything felt all right. Arty felt the water against her skin, the ground beneath her feet, the sun on her face, and she clung on to that.

  The laundry she had left out earlier was dry, and she let Zeus carry the mangoes while she packed as much of it as she could into a bundle and put it on her head, back to the shack in the clearing, where, still, nothing had changed except that the sun had g
one behind a mountain and it was about to get dark.

  ‘Zeus has mangoes,’ she said to Vishnu, who was sitting on the edge of the pit, whittling a twig without concentrating.

  ‘Brill,’ said Vishnu. ‘Let’s put them over here.’

  Zeus went with him. Arty found Luna standing on one leg in the shack (always a sign that she was troubled) and took her with her to fetch the rest of the laundry and feed the chickens. Luna said nothing, but she walked close to Arty and smiled a tiny smile when their eyes met. They sat together in the shack, at twilight, and folded the sheets.

  Hella had gone to get help in the outside world, and there was nothing to do but wait.

  ‘See,’ said Venus, who was standing there. ‘She’ll fetch what he needs. This needs heavy-duty medication to bring his temperature and pain down, and Hella has gone to get it. She’s going to find a doctor and ask for advice. We’ll follow that advice, I promise. Everything is under control, Arty.’

  ‘We need to take him to hospital.’

  Venus didn’t reply.

  Arty looked at her. She knew none of the adults wanted to take Hercules anywhere because it would change their way of life forever, and she felt outraged by that. Venus stared back. Sparks flew through the air between them. They argued without speaking a word.

  ‘It’s not like there’s a hospital nearby,’ Venus said after a long time. ‘We couldn’t just, like, drop into A and E.’

  Arty screwed her eyes shut as Hercules yelled, ‘But it hurts!’

  She wanted to ask where the hospital was in the outside world, and what drop into A and E meant, and why they couldn’t call an ambulance like people did in books.

  Then she realized that she was picturing an ambulance staffed by rabbits, as in Busy Town Busy People. A rabbit ambulance would be better than nothing. They also had a book called Katy and, while Arty’s imaginary ambulances were from Richard Scarry, the inside of a hospital had been created for her by Jacqueline Wilson. Hella had brought the book back a few years ago and Arty had read every word of it many times over. It was about a girl who fell down from a swing and stopped being able to walk. She spent a lot of time in the hospital. This was how they knew about hospitals. This was also how they knew that you had to be careful if you went up high.