The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  I had wanted to punch her but I knew it wouldn’t be enough. A punch wasn’t going to do it. I needed a weapon. Something sharp. Something that could be serious.

  She had, of course, been careful about preparing this place. There was nothing useful in here at all. I could not find a single thing that might help me escape.

  ‘Come on, gang,’ I said, and I arranged the toys in a circle. ‘I need some help. How can I overpower her so we can get out? Because my bare hands aren’t going to cut it, are they?’

  The rabbit put its hand up. ‘Hit her on the head with one of those books?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the bear. ‘Then get her keys while she’s on the ground.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I looked at the books. Some of them were big enough to do something with, but I didn’t think it would be possible for me to actually put her out of action with a book. They were stupid books that I hated, so I refused to read them. All of them were by old men talking about their lives and saying what they thought about the world, and I didn’t want to read that.

  The monkey passed me one of them and I held it in my hands. It was called Clarkson on Cars and it was by one of those men. I tried hitting myself on the head with it: the best I could do was to make myself a bit dizzy. The animals giggled.

  ‘I don’t think that’ll work,’ I said. ‘Good idea, though. We need something sharp, I think.’

  The bear handed me the remote control and I put the television on, hoping it might inspire me. And it did.

  8

  ‘You’re coming too,’ Zeus said. He said it over and over again, and she held tightly to his hand.

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘No one’s taking you away from me, my darling.’

  Zeus looked up at her and smiled. She forced a smile back.

  They were walking down a street in the town that had the hospital in it. Walking down a street was a new thing. Arty felt as if she were living inside a book, doing the things book people did. She was wearing a pair of loose black trousers that had appeared from somewhere, and a T-shirt that was the same pink as a flower in the clearing. Zeus was in shorts and a white vest. He was adorable. Arty’s heart was full of love for him.

  Neither of them could imagine the journey that they had ahead of them. How did you get to France? Arty knew there would be an aeroplane but she couldn’t imagine such a thing. They could not picture what might be round the corner when they were walking, let alone what it might be like to travel to a different country, and then to live in France.

  Their legs shook and their hearts pounded at each new thing, and that was everything. They clung to each other all the time. The world was scary. In her head Arty wanted to be brave, but it turned out that in reality she wasn’t. She was terrified, and sad, and she had no compass. All her certainty had died. She was not the person she used to be, because she had lost her universe. She felt she was walking through the world like a ghost.

  The woman ahead of them turned round. ‘Nearly there!’ she said. Arty walked a little bit slower, but Zeus slowed down even more than that, so that even though she was dawdling she had to pull him along.

  The outside smelled of traffic, but when they were indoors it was worse. The hospital had been stifling. The house they were staying in right now belonged to Gita and Vikram, who were nice enough, Arty supposed, and she was working hard on not hating them because none of this was their fault. They were foster carers: their job was to look after children who needed to be looked after. Their house smelled of chemical cleaning stuff and it burned her nose and her throat and she was on the verge of cracking every moment she was there, because she was meant to call it ‘home’ but it wasn’t home.

  They had told her to have a shower every day in hospital. Now she knew she needed to have showers using soap, and to wash her hair with both shampoo and conditioner so it would be ‘nice and shiny’, as Gita had said, fingering a strand of it. ‘You’re lucky with your hair, Artemis,’ she had added.

  Arty had looked away. She didn’t know why she was meant to want hair that was nice and shiny. She didn’t know what was lucky about that. It was just hair. Equally she had no idea why she was meant to care what she looked like, or what other people thought of her.

  She and Zeus had to talk separately to some kind of brain doctor every day, but Arty said nothing and she thought Zeus did the same. She knew that the man, who had wiry glasses and a kind face, was trying to make her talk about her feelings, but she didn’t have feelings. She knew that seed was putting down roots inside her, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want the man to force her to think about things, and there was no way she was going to tell him about the things she had lost. The idea almost made her laugh. Of course that wasn’t going to happen.

  She used the time instead to ask him questions about where they were. She was starting to search for a sense of herself now as a single human among billions, rather than one of eleven.

  She knew that the nearest city to Lonavala, where she was currently staying, was Mumbai. The doctor had told her not to go there. ‘You’ll be ready for Mumbai one day,’ he said. ‘But not yet.’ She had that filed away. Mumbai. She imagined a shiny city of skyscrapers and department stores and people moving money around in cars.

  Though now, it seemed, they were going to France, and that was thousands of miles away and mainly reached by aeroplane. The good news was that France was near London, and London was where Matthew and Persephone might be, and – very, very slowly, as her brain began to come into focus – Arty was remembering that the last thing her mother had said was that she must find her uncle Matthew and Venus’s friend Persephone. Persephone was also called Tania, and she had lived in the clearing until she had argued with Venus and gone away long ago.

  Arty wished she knew what had happened. The story she had pieced together was that someone from the outside world had found them in the clearing and had wanted to stay, but that this person hadn’t been allowed. And Persephone had thought that wasn’t fair, and had left with him or her. And that this might have happened before Arty was born, or else when she was very small. She knew she had it muddled up, though, because no one wanted to explain it properly.

  Persephone was a part of her old life. Matthew was her actual uncle. That meant that they were the closest Arty would ever get now to finding her mother. She wondered why Zeus’s aunt had come to get them, rather than Arty’s uncle.

  ‘We’re here!’ called the woman, whose name, Arty actually knew, was Pia.

  Arty squeezed Zeus’s hand and they walked the last few steps to the cafe.

  It was strange to walk into a cafe in real life. There were tiles on the floor, and the door and windows were all open, and there was a smell of new food and old food and coffee and tea, and although that smell was strong it was not as horrible as most things. There were eight tables in there, and a white woman was sitting at one of them, looking hot and worried. She stood up and stared and then remembered to smile, and held up a hand and then wiped under her eye with a finger.

  Arty and Zeus and Pia walked over to her and, as they walked, Arty saw that Kali’s sister, Florence, didn’t want Arty. Energy filled every atom of her body. It was like walking through the thick air before a summer storm. Electricity crackled. Arty thought that she must be trailing thunder and lightning behind her. She felt like a warrior.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, because the woman hadn’t said anything. Arty squeezed Zeus’s hand and looked at him.

  ‘Hello,’ he whispered to the floor.

  Florence looked a bit like Kali. She looked enough like her to be her sister.

  Arty had only recently discovered that brothers and sisters, out here, had exactly the same parents. In the clearing all the children had been called brothers and sisters no matter who their parents were, but she could see that that wouldn’t work when you had billions of people to sort out.

  Florence’s light hair was sticking to her forehead, and the air around her was heavy with the drea
d that was seeping out of her skin.

  ‘Zeus?’ she said, and she leaned down and hugged him, then jumped quickly away.

  Arty waited for her to look at her, but she didn’t. She was only interested in Zeus. He didn’t say anything or look at her, so Arty spoke instead.

  ‘He’s finding this difficult.’ Her own voice trembled even though she was on fire inside.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ said Florence, and Arty knew that she was speaking French and was pleased that she understood it. Life in the clearing had at least prepared them to speak to people from different countries in different languages. She found she could speak French just by imagining she was speaking to Kali.

  ‘He’s OK when he’s with me,’ she said in French, and Florence shot her a look.

  ‘He will be OK with me too,’ she said, ‘because I am his blood family.’

  Arty tried to let go of Zeus’s hand but he wouldn’t let her. He was trembling all over.

  ‘Arty must come too,’ he said in English, his voice clear. Then he said it in French, and then in Hindi.

  ‘You are clever,’ said Florence. ‘Speaking these different languages.’ She stared into his face. ‘You have her eyes,’ she said, and she pulled him close to her again and picked him up. He tried to wriggle away, and he wouldn’t let go of Arty’s hand so she had to twist her arm round to avoid hurting herself.

  Pia hesitated, then pulled out a chair at the table and sat down, and after a bit of shuffling they were all sitting round the table. Zeus and Arty still held hands. He looked at Arty, and Arty looked at Florence.

  A man put cups of sweet chai down in front of Zeus and Arty. They both loved that drink. Arty hadn’t noticed Pia ordering it.

  Florence took a deep breath, and started talking. ‘Zeus,’ she said, ‘I know that you are very attached to Arty because you two have been through a terrible, horrible thing. But I am your aunt, and we are your family. I can’t take a teenager home with me, but I promise the very best home to you, my nephew. We loved your mother and we missed her every day. We will take care of you so well because you are part of her coming back to us.’

  ‘Arty must come too,’ he said.

  Arty squeezed his hand. She was desolate inside because she knew that she wasn’t going to go to France at all.

  ‘I know it’s difficult for you to imagine leaving her behind. Yes, I can see that. But, hey, you’re young and you’re going to a happy life. Guess what – you’re going to love it in France. Because you have two cousins there, my girls, and you’ll be a brother to them. So you’ll have two new sisters! Coco is four too, about the same as you, and Camille is the baby. Lucky them, getting a new brother!’

  ‘Arty must come too.’ He was shaking his head and his eyes were swimming with tears.

  ‘We can phone Arty, and write to her. You can talk to each other on FaceTime. Do you know FaceTime? You’ll love that. You’ll still have Arty in your life.’

  He put his face down on to the wooden table and sobbed, because he could see as well as Arty could that nothing they could say was going to change her mind.

  Arty glared at Florence. She didn’t care about France or about those little girls. She just knew that anyone who cared about Zeus would be keeping the two of them together.

  She tried. She leaned forward and put her face where Florence had to look at her.

  ‘If I could come with you,’ she said, ‘then I would do everything I could to help. I’m good at doing laundry. I can help Zeus get used to his new life. I can help you with your little girls. I promise to be no trouble at all. I won’t be a difficult person. I’ll be a useful one. I’ve already taught Zeus to read since we’ve been here. You know he’s –’

  Florence cut her off. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But we can’t. We have a small house and now we will have three small children. Taking a teenager back from India too – it’s just not possible. But you can keep in touch, like I said.’ She looked at Zeus, who had climbed on to Arty’s lap and wrapped his arms round her. Her T-shirt was soaked with his tears. ‘And I don’t think this helps. I think he needs to start to be independent of you, Artemis. This isn’t healthy.’

  Arty stared at her. ‘It is healthy,’ she said. ‘It is healthy. That’s a horrible thing to say.’

  She wanted to stand up and throw all the cups in the cafe on to the floor. She wanted to break every window, to attack the woman in front of her. Pia put a hand on her arm, and she forced herself to give it one last try.

  ‘I could stay with a foster family nearby then,’ she said, staring at the table, clinging on to Zeus, fighting to control herself. He was juddering in her arms, holding her so tightly that it hurt. ‘Please?’ she said to the table. ‘Zed needs me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Florence.

  Pia stepped in and Arty zoned out of their conversation and muttered what assurances she could into Zeus’s hair. It was hard, though. There wasn’t much she could say.

  When she tuned back in they were talking in English because Pia didn’t speak French. Florence was saying, ‘My mother is so happy. Delphine went away long ago and we always hoped to see her one day but now we won’t. Yet here’s her son. Delphine was always so clever.’ Arty stroked Zeus’s hair and listened to this bit carefully. She wanted to know all about Kali, who, it seemed, had once been Delphine. ‘She went to medical school, you know, to become a doctor, and voilà. Clever Delphine. She was the clever one and she was more pretty – I mean, to a young sister that’s not fair, is it? Ce n’était pas juste. She was going to, you know, become a doctor, marry a doctor, have doctor babies. She became a doctor, all on track, and then she breaks up with her boyfriend, freaks out and – poof! – off to India. Everyone says, It’s OK, she’ll be back. Needs to get it out of her system. But then we … Well, we never heard from her again. We tried to find her but she had gone.’ She gazed at Zeus. ‘And now we have her baby.’

  Arty poured all her strength into trying to pretend to Zeus that it would be OK, but she couldn’t imagine how he was going to manage without her. Arty hadn’t thought that Florence wouldn’t want to take her too. She didn’t understand. It hurt. Florence didn’t realize that Arty was a part of Kali’s family too.

  Florence kept talking to fill the silence. ‘Really, you’ll have your cousins,’ she said in French. ‘They’re going to adore you. Their big cousin … I think that Zeus is not quite the right name for our town. Maybe Zachary? I think Zac for school. Then you can still be Zed if you like that.’

  Arty wished this woman would go back to France on her own. She even wanted to change his name. Again she wanted to run far away from here, back into the forest, and live with little Zeddy, just the two of them.

  She thought she understood why Kali, or Delphine, had run away from home and decided never to see her family again. Her sister was horrible, and the rest of them probably were too.

  ‘You need to be a big boy,’ Florence said to him. ‘You’re a big brother. You’ll be a lovely brother to Coco and Camille. We’ll get you settled in. Oh God, such a … I couldn’t believe it when I saw you on the … Oh my dear.’ She turned to Arty with a tight face. ‘Artemis. Thank you for everything you’ve done for him.’

  She looked away quickly. Pia asked Florence whether she’d been to India before (she had, to look for Kali when she vanished, and she clearly hadn’t enjoyed anything about it).

  Arty examined the fact that she might really have to live out here without Zeus. She would not sit tight any more when he was gone. She would not be pushed around and do as she was told then. She would have lost everything if he went.

  And if she lost everything, she would have nothing left to lose.

  And if she had nothing to lose, she would go wild.

  Neither of them talked about the fact that this was their last dinner together, because it was too big. Arty knew that Zeus was trying not to cry every single second. She was too. She didn’t want to tell the foster people how they were feeling, so she tried to pretend eve
rything was all right, while her insides were shrivelled up dead. She did her best to behave the way Gita and Vikram expected them to, and to mind her manners, but it was difficult because she didn’t care. She and Zeus wanted to sit on the floor and eat with their fingers, but instead they had to sit at the table and eat in a way that they didn’t know or understand at all.

  Zeus put down his fork and picked up a chickpea between his fingers. Arty saw Gita frowning and opening her mouth to say something.

  ‘Zeddy,’ Arty whispered, feeling as if she were going to die from the pointlessness of it all. She picked up the fork and held it up to him. He jutted out his lower lip and she saw his eyes fill with tears, but he picked his up and tried to balance the perfect little sphere on it. It fell off. He stabbed it, but it shot away off his plate and on to the floor. Arty picked it up and handed it back to him, but Gita intercepted her and put it into the bin.

  ‘Not after it’s been on the floor,’ she said.

  The door banged and Vikram came in from work. He was nice enough. Vikram didn’t stare at them as if they were strange animals, at least. He was interested in what they said.

  ‘Hello, children,’ he said with a little bow.

  ‘Hello, Vikram,’ Arty said, and Zeus gave him a little bow back, looking scared but trying to do the right thing. Gita stood up and fetched him a plate, and he sat down to join in.

  ‘Elbows off the table, Zeus,’ he said.

  Zeus moved, looking confused, and Arty wanted to tell them all that Zeus had never sat and eaten from a table until very recently indeed, so he was actually doing extremely well. And also that not having a table had not made them savages.

  ‘How has the day been?’ Vikram asked.

  Arty looked at Zeus. He had the real story, but he wasn’t going to say a word, so she took a deep breath and told it for him.

  ‘We met Florence,’ she said. ‘Kali’s sister. Zeddy’s aunt. She’s going to take him to Mumbai tomorrow and then to France. But she’s not taking me.’