by Emily Barr
Venus went into the shack and sat with Hella, then came out with a list of instructions of places to go in the outside world. She brought Luna out with her, holding her hand.
‘We’ll go and get help,’ she told Luna. ‘You come with us. And Zeus and Arty. You can walk with Arty. And we’ll send a doctor to your mum, OK?’
Luna didn’t respond. She came and lay down with Arty under her blanket, and Arty hugged her as tightly as she could.
In the middle of the night Odin carried Hercules’s body into the forest. They heard him yelling at the monkeys, at the snakes and the insects and the whole world, for still existing when his son did not.
He came back and took Diana’s body too, dragging her awkwardly between the trees but refusing help. At some point the clouds moved and the moon lit the clearing. Arty could see Zeus lying on his blanket near her, breathing deeply, and asleep at last. She studied the other three. Inari was sitting by himself with an expression that meant no one could approach. Venus and Vishnu were talking quietly, and both of them kept looking round at Arty, and then to the shack, and then back to each other. Luna had gone into the hut, back to her mother.
In Arty’s head the outside world was a wild place, a fuzzy one, with bad things happening. It was scary. It was purple and black and dark blue, and it fizzed and crackled. Maybe that was because it had electricity in it and Arty had never seen electricity except in storms, when lightning split the sky. In the clearing they had things with batteries, but Arty knew that real electricity lived in walls, that you plugged things into it, like hairdryers. She couldn’t really picture a hairdryer; she had no idea why people used electricity to dry their hair when the sun could do it.
‘It’s going to be a shock,’ Venus said softly to Vishnu. ‘For them, and for us. I mean, it’s brutal. But we have to. We always knew we would. We’ve had infinity longer than we ever thought we might. Honestly. Remember at the start? We were aiming to keep our heads down for a year.’
Arty stayed very still. She hadn’t known that. They had come for a year, but stayed for twenty.
‘You can find Matthew,’ Vishnu said.
‘If he’s still alive.’
Arty lay still, her eyes closed, feeling the hard ground under her and pulling the blanket round her body even though it was too warm. She felt … well. She tried to imagine herself ill, with a fever, but she was just not. She didn’t feel sick. She was full with the food Vishnu had made her eat even though she hadn’t been hungry.
The noises that came from the shack and the sick room were terrible. They were red and orange and harsh. She drifted into a semi-sleep, hearing them in reality and seeing them abstract in her dreams.
When she woke early in the morning she knew someone else was dead. The sun was rising and she got up as quietly as she could. She stood outside the pit and looked down at them.
They were all breathing. Zeus, Venus and Vishnu were alive. Inari had gone, but she walked around and found him asleep behind the shack. Zeus was peaceful, his thumb in his mouth. He had barely spoken since Herc had died.
Arty soon discovered that Hella was dead. She climbed Kali’s tree and found that she was too. She also saw that Luna, Venus, Inari and Vishnu were all sick. Odin had stayed in the forest. She looked for him and called for him but he had gone.
Only Arty and Zeus were in the clearing, and well.
Before anyone woke up, she went to the herb field. Hella always took herbs with her when she left. Arty wished she had asked her why, and who she gave them to, and what protection they offered, but now she couldn’t. She would never ask Hella anything ever again.
There was a layer of dew on everything. She pushed open the gate and went into the field. All the children were banned from this place because those herbs were what Hella called ‘Wasteland things’, but there was nobody to stop her now. She started picking them. She liked their leaves. They were pretty, with pointed ends and a dreamy pale green smell. She picked a huge amount of them, and crept back into the house to find Hella’s bag. She pushed them in there, and added more and more and more until it was completely full.
Then she walked to the spring and washed her hands and face and wondered why she was still well.
‘I’m going,’ Arty said to her mother, who was struggling to breathe and dripping with sweat.
She would never have chosen to do this, but everything had changed. Now Arty urgently needed to get out into the world because that was where the doctors were. She was going to do the thing no one else had done, to get real help for everyone who was ill. It was her chance to make this better. Not for Hercules or Diana or Hella or Kali, but for everyone else she knew.
‘I’m going to fetch an ambulance,’ she said, staring into her mother’s face.
‘Yes,’ Venus said. She could hardly move, though she was trying to be strong. Arty wanted to take her indoors but she couldn’t because the two buildings at ground level had bodies and death inside them. Instead she brought blankets out and did the best she could to make Venus, Vishnu, Luna and Inari comfortable, while Zeus shadowed every move she made. She took her ‘Love You Loads X’ bear and put it next to Venus, who didn’t notice.
‘Arty?’ said Venus.
‘Yes?’
‘Find a doctor. Tell them everything. All of it. Get them to check you out. Walk that way.’ She pointed. Arty knew that because she had watched Hella walk that way for as long as she could remember.
‘I’ll take Zeus.’
‘Yes, you have to. And look. Arty.’ She took her hand. Arty squeezed hers, feeling Venus’s heart still beating, wanting to hang on to that forever. ‘I’m so sorry. I knew you would go one day but I didn’t think … If … Look. If … if they can’t help, you must find Matthew. He’s your uncle. Look for him, or look for Tania. Find the keys and take them. Now. Before you go. Take my keys and find Matthew or Tania. They might be in London. I don’t know. I hope Matthew’s alive. Clean. Be careful of the rest of my family. Don’t go into the basement. They’ll think you’re weird and they don’t like weird. Can you bring me a pen and paper?’
Arty listened to the noises of the forest, the sounds that had been there for her whole life. She took all the strength from Venus that she could, and then she went up the ladder to the house her parents shared and looked everywhere for the keys that Venus wanted. Zeus followed her.
Venus and Vishnu’s house was the prettiest one on the inside. They were the only two people who had a kind of marriage, as far as Arty could tell. They adored each other. Odin and Diana had sort of been a couple, but they didn’t live in the same house, and then Hella and Diana had been in love. Venus and Vishnu were together all the time.
She picked up the book Venus always kept on the table. It was called Woman on the Edge of Time, and Arty had watched Venus read it again and again. That wasn’t what she was supposed to find, though she put it in her own bag anyway.
She looked everywhere. In the end they were in a box under the bed. The box was almost flat, wooden, with ornate carving on the lid, and inside it there was a notebook and a ring with three keys on it. The notebook was filled with handwriting and pictures, and Arty didn’t stop to read it. There were lots of blank pages towards the back, so she took the book and the pen and the keys, and ushered the silent Zeus to go back down the ladder before her.
Venus made the biggest effort, and sat up and took the pen and the notebook. She turned to the back page, tore it out and wrote ‘MATTHEW JONES & TANIA ROSWELL’. She drew a heart and a lot of kisses round the names, then wrote ‘please look after my Arty’ in small writing at the bottom of the page. Then she took off her own necklace and handed it to Arty.
‘Keys on there,’ she said. Arty threaded all three keys on to the chain and put it round her own neck. It felt like a charm. She put Venus’s note in her bag.
She couldn’t go to London. It was like saying she was going to visit the surface of the sun. She was going to the place at the end of the path to fetch a human doctor,
and the doctor would make the ill people better and then Venus would be in charge again. She had no idea what don’t go into the basement, and the other things, meant. She put them from her mind.
She hugged her mother for the longest time possible. She hugged Vishnu, who muttered lovely things into her hair. She hugged Luna and told her it would all be better soon. She hugged Inari, who was deeply asleep but clearly completely ill, and forgave him for being horrible. She went back to Venus and held her hand.
‘Good luck, Arty,’ she whispered. ‘I love you more than everything in the world, my darling. More than everything.’ She handed Arty the cuddly bear, and Arty put it into her bag.
They walked for a few moments, and then Arty turned back. She went to Venus again, and kissed her forehead. Zeus did the same, mimicking every move Arty made.
‘I love you more than everything too,’ she whispered. ‘Hang on. Wait and I will be back. You must hang on. Wait for me.’
They set off again and this time Zeus spoke as they went.
‘We thought he’d get better, didn’t we, Arty?’ he said. ‘We thought Hercules would get better.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We did. But now we’re going to get help, Zeddy. We’re going to do everything we can to make the others get well. We’ll fetch a doctor. We’ll come back.’
May
I tried to sound as ill as I possibly could.
‘Argh,’ I moaned, clutching my stomach. ‘It hurts. It’s different from before. It really hurts.’
I was lying on my mattress, curled up, transferring everything I felt to an imaginary pain in my stomach. It was easy to do.
I heard her come in. I felt the blast of different air. I let the tears fall. My face screwed up. I cried and cried and cried. I cried for everything. That was easy to do.
‘It hurts.’ I said it louder this time. ‘It hurts it hurts it hurts and I don’t know what to do. It’s been hurting all night.’
‘Oh, has it indeed?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘How convenient.’
‘I’m really ill,’ I whimpered.
She paused.
‘How stupid do you think I am?’
‘Not stupid at all. I just feel really ill. It all really hurts.’
I kept my eyes closed as she put a hand on my forehead.
‘You’re not hot,’ she said, ‘but I’ll get you some paracetamol. Whereabouts in your stomach does it hurt?’
I knew what to say to that. ‘Here.’ I put my hand where I knew, thanks to Blue Peter, that my appendix lived. ‘It hurts here. Can’t I see a doctor?’
‘I don’t think that’s going to be necessary, do you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I really do.’
5
Arty hated walking away. She remembered Inari’s words and felt that she was betraying everything with each step she took. She stopped often, and decided to take the pure path, to go back to the clearing and wait there. She didn’t need to go to the Wasteland. She had been born to a different life.
But she did need to go to the Wasteland, the outside world. She had to go there for help for the people she loved the most. That was the thing that kept her going. She put one foot in front of the other and tried to think of nothing but the path ahead.
She was terrified. After a while she knew they were further from the clearing than either of them had ever been before, walking uphill into the unknown. Although they were hot and sweaty, she and Zeus never let go of one another’s hands, except when the narrow path meant they had to.
At one point Arty tried to sing ‘Respect’ to make him happy, but it sounded stupid. She tailed off quickly, her mouth dry, her body sweaty. ‘Everybody Hurts’ would have been better, but she didn’t think they needed reminding of that fact. The insects bit them because she had forgotten to rub the leaves on their skin. After a while she found the right plant and picked some leaves to rub on their bites.
The path went up and up. Arty knew that it had to cross the hills that were all around, though she had never thought before that the outside world must be uphill and then downhill. Sometimes she or Zeus would slip on the loose stones, but they held tightly to each other and neither of them ever quite fell over. The path twisted between trees, and the leaves unfurled around them, and they strayed into a different dimension altogether. They walked through a world in which time wasn’t a thing and death didn’t matter. Everyone was made from atoms, and atoms were all around, and as the dappled sun fell on her through the trees she thought that none of it mattered anyway. All the life on Earth would die.
She looked at the insects they passed. The insects didn’t care that Arty’s family were dead and dying, any more than she cared when she killed a mosquito. There were spiderwebs everywhere, shaped like tunnels that led back into the roots of the trees, and often a big spider sat guarding the entrance, waiting for food. Vishnu had told her that in Australia these spiders were deadly poisonous to people, but here they weren’t, so she focused all her energies on being pleased to be here where the spiders, at least, were harmless.
The forest sounds stayed the same as they walked, and that was comforting. They knew the birds, the insects, even the distant monkeys. They walked and walked and walked.
They were high up when they found the thing leaning against a tree. The path was flatter and wider now, and Arty could see strange patterns in the dust, like snake tracks but much bigger. They were connected to the thing, which was made of metal. It had two wheels. In the clearing they had a cart with wheels that they would use to bring in the crops, but this was different.
This was a bicycle. There was a picture of one in Busy Town. People (and little animals) would ride them to get around. You had to balance. Once you’d learned how to do it you could do it forever. People used it as a simile. ‘It’s like learning to ride a bike,’ they said.
She stopped in front of it, and reached out a shaky hand to touch it. Zeus did the same, copying her movement exactly. The poles of it were smooth and black, and its seat was white, and there was a basket on the front. The two places where you put your feet were attached to a chain that looked dirty with oil.
Arty had never seen anything like this. It might have belonged to Hella. If it did, then why, Arty wondered, had she kept it secret? She could have kept it in the clearing and taught them all to ride it. She touched it and closed her eyes and did calm breathing because this was making her cry and she was absolutely not going to cry.
‘Bike?’ said Zeus, and Arty was so pleased that he’d spoken that she picked him up and cuddled him.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ she said into his hair. ‘I think so. It’s a bike. We’ve found a bike.’
Hella, she said in her head. Hella, tell me about the bike. Does it belong to us? Can we take it?
Of course. Hella didn’t answer, but Arty heard her voice say it anyway.
Arty thought about everything she knew about a bicycle. You sat on the seat, held on to the handles, and pushed the steps round with your feet. She could even see how that worked: when you pushed the steps you moved the chain, which was connected by some cogs to the wheels, and they moved round.
A bicycle would be useful. She told Zeus to stand to the side for a moment, put the bags into the basket, and got ready to give it a go. She pulled herself on to the seat and pushed the steps with her feet, and set off to see what it felt like.
The bike tipped up and she fell over and landed in a bush that scratched her arms and the side of her face but she didn’t care. She knew she must have done it wrong so she tried again, this time ready with her foot to steady herself when it didn’t work. She tried again and again but she couldn’t balance on it, and that made her take deep shuddering breaths and close her eyes to try to regain control.
After all this she could not allow herself to be destroyed by the fact that she couldn’t ride a bicycle. Zeus started to cry, though, and when he did Arty couldn’t help it. She let it happen, just for a bit. She had a book where a r
abbit rode a bike, but she couldn’t do it. She held on to him and they cried together, so much that it almost felt good.
Then they pushed the bike to the top of the hill and stood there and looked out.
Everything was new. This was the outside world.
Arty gripped Zeus’s hand and he squeezed hers back. When she looked at his face she saw the wonder and fear that she was feeling. The sun was shining, and the land stretched out before them. The slopes were covered in trees. There was more land out there than Arty had ever seen before, and in the distance, at the bottom of the hill and back a bit, there were buildings.
There were roads.
There was life.
There was medicine, and there were doctors.
She sat Zeus up on the bicycle’s seat and told him to hold on to the handles as tightly as he could. Arty held them too, and it was awkward with their four hands there, and it was very difficult to keep the bike upright, but eventually she worked out how to push it along the path, taking it very slowly when she had to bump it over roots, or push it round a rock. The sight of the buildings had changed her. She knew, now, where she was going. Arty felt Zeus’s forehead, and her own. They both felt normal.
Every step down the path was weird, because Hella had never spoken about what happened out here. They didn’t know she went on a bike. They didn’t know if they were meant to eat the herbs for protection or use them in some other way, so Arty just left them in the bag and hoped it would be obvious at some point.
The view of the rest of the world vanished as the path got narrow again, the trees closed in, and the branches scratched Arty’s legs. They were walking downhill, which was more difficult than you might have thought. Sometimes she had to make Zeus get down so she could pull the bike through undergrowth. There were birds overhead, and she could hear the chattering of monkeys, though they stayed out of sight, which was a shame as, even though the monkeys in the clearing had been so annoying, Arty would have welcomed the sight of them. Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and the others felt like her friends now.
