The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods Read online

  Emily Barr

  * * *

  THE GIRL WHO CAME OUT OF THE WOODS

  Contents

  PART ONE May

  Chapter 1

  May

  Chapter 2

  May

  Chapter 3

  May

  Chapter 4

  May

  Chapter 5

  May

  Chapter 6

  June

  Chapter 7

  June

  Chapter 8

  June

  Chapter 9

  June

  Chapter 10

  June

  Chapter 11

  June

  Chapter 12

  June

  Chapter 13

  June

  Chapter 14

  June

  Chapter 15

  June

  Chapter 16

  June

  PART TWO Chapter 17

  June

  Chapter 18

  June

  Chapter 19

  June

  Chapter 20

  June

  Chapter 21

  June

  Chapter 22

  June

  Chapter 23

  August

  Chapter 24

  January

  Chapter 25

  Five Years Later

  Chapter 26

  January

  Chapter 27

  January

  Chapter 28

  Matthew

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE ONE MEMORY OF FLORA BANKS published in 2017 was Emily Barr’s first novel for young adults and was a global hit. Before that, she worked as a journalist in London but always hankered after a quiet room and a book to write. She went travelling for a year, which gave her an idea for a novel set in the world of backpackers in Asia. This became BACKPACK, an adult thriller which won the WH Smith New Talent Award, and she has since written eleven more adult novels published in the UK and around the world. She lives in Cornwall with her partner and their children.

  Books by Emily Barr

  THE ONE MEMORY OF FLORA BANKS

  THE TRUTH AND LIES OF ELLA BLACK

  THE GIRL WHO CAME OUT OF THE WOODS

  For Craig, Gabe, Seb, Charlie, Lottie and Alfie

  PART ONE

  * * *

  May

  I stood behind the door and rattled its handle, even though I knew you needed a key to get in or out and I didn’t have one. I had been here for days. The air around me was stale. My hair was tangled. I knew I looked wild. I felt wild. I felt I had lost my mind completely. I had lost all my sense of myself and I didn’t know who I was, who I used to be.

  The world was still out there. It felt impossible, but it was there. The window high up in the wall was pale with daylight, which meant there were people outside. There were millions of them and they were nearby. Those people might rescue me if they knew I was here, because surely no one was allowed to keep someone locked up like this. People would help me. I just couldn’t get to them.

  I lifted a fist and banged on the back of the door as hard as I could. It hurt my knuckles but I didn’t care. I thumped and kicked at the door, and shouted.

  ‘Let me out!’

  My head was aching. I was feeling terrible. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and tried to focus.

  I had paper in here. I had pens.

  I was starting to think that I was going to die here. It felt like a place where you could be left to die. Nobody knew I was here and no one out there would be missing me.

  I found a pen and decided to start to write down my story, so that one day, when I was discovered, they would know who I was and why I was here. I started to write.

  I never meant this to happen, I wrote. Any of it.

  I stared at the words. It was too difficult. I was not ready to say my truth. I didn’t even know what the truth was. I knew that I couldn’t try to find it without unravelling. I sucked the pen until ink flooded my mouth, threw it across the room, then found another pen and tried again.

  I don’t know what I’m doing here, I wrote. It was no use. I needed to write my story but I didn’t know where to begin.

  In the corner of the room there was a box filled with stuffed animals, and next to it was the white bear. That was my bear. Maybe I would be able to talk things through with the bear.

  I picked it up. It was a white teddy with a quizzical face, holding a heart that had the words ‘Love You Loads X’ embroidered on it. That bear had been with me through everything. I tried to smile at it.

  ‘What are you going to do now, you loser?’ said the bear, and it laughed in my face.

  1

  A baby was born in a forest in India, sixty miles and an entire universe from Mumbai. She was a lively baby who punched the air with her little fists and bellowed when she wanted attention. She roared her arrival to the trees, the birds, the sky. Everyone around her took care of her. They considered her to be a miracle; the moment she was born no one could imagine this place without a child in it.

  As she grew up, Artemis tried to understand everything at once. She tackled everything, from learning to walk and learning to read to – later – folding the laundry and collecting the mangoes with passion. She spoke three languages without knowing that was what she was doing. She saw the world in Technicolor and lived with all her senses, and for a long time she was very happy.

  Her world was small, though she didn’t realize it at first. It was bordered on all sides by thick forest, and, apart from one visitor when she was a baby, new people never arrived. Sometimes new people arrived in her dreams, but they were never there when she woke up.

  Artemis grew up with the knowledge that every single person in her world adored her, though there weren’t very many of them. Her arrival made her community nine-strong, but one person left to go back to what she called ‘the real world’, and another arrived and left again, and when those things had happened they were eight. Until she learned to read books Artemis had no idea that it was unusual for a person to have met just nine other people, and to know only seven. At first she felt sorry for the book people living in their chaotic worlds, and then, as she got older, she felt curious.

  What would it be like, she wondered, out there? She knew it would be bad and corrupt, and she knew that she loved everyone here, so she was happy. Her curiosity was just theoretical.

  She loved her mother and father best of all. Arty’s mother was the goddess of the clearing – the matriarch – and was now known to everyone as Venus, though once she had been Victoria Jones from a town near Bristol in England, a child from a ruthlessly suburban home. Arty’s father, Vishnu, had grown up in Delhi, though he used to say he was ‘a citizen of everywhere’, with family in India, Afghanistan and Australia, and some other places too, though Arty couldn’t always remember what they were called. He was from everywhere, but there was nowhere he wanted to be but here in this clearing with Venus, the love of his life, and Artemis, his daughter, and their friends. Vishnu was a cook. His job was to feed everyone.

  She became Arty when she was very small. You can’t keep calling a baby Artemis when you could call her Arty instead. Venus called her sweetiepie and darlingheart and babykins and all kinds of other names too, and Vishnu always called her his chikoo. Everyone else called her Arty.

  As she grew up, some more babies arrived. Her sister, Luna, was born when Arty was about five, though in the clearing they chose not to count the years in the way the people on the outside did. The adults worried that Arty would be jealous of the new baby, but, in fa
ct, she adored her. Arty and Luna had different parents but they were still sisters.

  Luna was a very different child from Arty. She didn’t learn to read; she didn’t really even learn to talk. She hardly spoke to anyone, and lived behind her eyes in an internal world. But she loved Arty, and the two of them understood each other without words. They shared a treehouse, sleeping on the platform together, and Luna liked to follow Arty wherever she went, and listen silently to every word she said.

  The boys came later, in quick succession. First there was Hercules, and then there was Zeus. They had different mothers too, but they were almost twins. They learned to walk, to jump, to shout, to sing (badly). The clearing became much louder once they were there.

  The clearing was a happy place, even though no one believed Arty later when she said it had worked, because people always wanted to think that it was impossible for humans to live together in peace and harmony. But it did. It worked because there were rules. It worked because everyone wanted to be there, and it worked because there was no money.

  She was largely healthy. When she was about three she fell down from a tree and scraped her arm as she fell, and that scar would be with her forever, but that was the worst thing that happened to her for many years.

  The clearing had hills on all sides: the horizons of Arty’s world were the tops of the hills, and she never saw what was beyond them. Within her world they grew crops. They kept chickens. They cooked and read and meditated and lived from day to day. Hella, Luna’s mother, was the shaman, which meant that she was the only one to cross the hills and go out into the world. She took the herbs they grew and sold them in the outside world, and she brought back anything they needed that they couldn’t make for themselves. Although Arty knew it had taken a while to get things working smoothly, she didn’t really believe it; as far as she was concerned it had always been like that. That was just how life was.

  Life was peaceful and happy, right up until the moment when it went catastrophically wrong.

  May

  The room had turned into hell. I took deep breaths, feeling myself starting to panic again. I was constantly panicking and calming myself, and panicking and calming myself. There were demon bats in the corners of the ceiling, and prowling wolves around the edges. The bear sat on my pillow, and the words on the heart it was holding said ‘Hate You Loads’.

  I felt sick. I kept being sick into a bucket, however little I ate, and the bucket was about a quarter full of thin acid, disgusting in every way. Sometimes I stared at it and wondered how this could be the stuff that lived inside me, doing the job of normal human digestion.

  ‘Help me,’ I said to the bear. ‘You’re my friend. Please help.’

  The bear growled and lunged. Its teeth were sharp and its face had twisted into horror and hate.

  ‘I will not,’ it said. ‘Because you are evil and you are going to die here.’

  I shrank away from it and it ran towards me on its fat little legs. I closed my eyes and screamed, holding my arms up to keep it away, and when I opened them again it was back on the pillow, lying still, pretending.

  The bear was right. I had nothing to live for. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t change everything about myself just because they wanted me to be a different kind of person. I didn’t know who I was allowed to be now.

  I rubbed my scarred arm. I pulled my long fingernails along the scar, trying to make myself feel real pain, but it didn’t work. My stomach cramped.

  I stood up and felt the ground through my feet. I took some breaths. I breathed in, counting to five, held it for a count of five, and let it out.

  That didn’t work. It made it worse. I gasped for breath. I kicked the wall. That was better. I kicked it some more. I punched it and yelled for a long time, until I had no voice at all.

  Then I curled up on the floor. All the stuffed animals came and stood around me, pointing and laughing. I reached past them and managed to put the television on. It was a tiny little television set but it got a few channels, and I flicked around until I found a children’s programme. Then I shifted my position until I was staring at it. I let the pixels calm my brain. The animals sat down to watch it too.

  ‘Everyone knows that c-a-t is cat,’ I said. I said it out loud, pretending the TV and I were conversing. It replied in its oblique way.

  ‘Cat, cat, cat,’ chanted the stuffed animals. One of them was a cat, a black-and-white kitten, and it strutted up and down, enjoying the attention. I watched it and smiled a bit, but I didn’t trust these things. They made me smile and then they went for my throat.

  2

  The day it happened started like any other day, except that at first it was better.

  Arty woke early with the sun at the window, and looked up at the wooden ceiling. There was a beetle walking across it upside down. She stretched and remembered that it was Kotta day.

  This was the best day of the clearing’s year and, even though she was so old now, she still loved it. She looked over at Luna, wondering whether she would be awake too, and excited, but she was fast asleep, her hair all over the pillow. Arty loved to look at Luna while she was asleep. Her face was relaxed and happy in a way it never was when she was awake. As Arty watched, Luna huffed in her sleep and rolled over, wrapping herself tightly in her sheet.

  Arty got up from her own mattress and walked quietly to the window. She took the mosquito net off and leaned out, breathing in the forest air. Kotta day was the highlight of Arty’s year. Today they would eat lovely food, and no one would do any chores.

  The forest was alight with its slanted morning glow, and the birds and insects were yelling about it at the tops of their voices. She stood at the window and drew in a deep breath and hung on to that moment.

  Arty stepped back as Chandler appeared right outside the window, baring his teeth at her.

  ‘You’re a stupid idiot,’ she said quietly, and glanced round at Luna, who hadn’t stirred. She picked up the broomstick from beside the window and threatened Chandler with it, but he bared his teeth and didn’t leave until she jabbed him in the chest. Then he snarled and jumped away, swinging through the treetops.

  There had been no monkeys here when she was small. Four of them moved into the area a few years ago, and the humans shared this part of the forest with them because they had to. They were part of nature, and the monkeys were part of nature too. Arty knew she was meant to thank them, so she gritted her teeth and muttered, ‘Thank you for sharing our forest, Chandler Bing,’ only actually saying it because he had gone away. In fact, the monkeys hung around because they loved to try to steal food, clothes, anything they could manage. Arty hated them, but that wasn’t in the spirit of the clearing so she rarely said it out loud.

  The people in her books weren’t plagued by monkeys. They lived in cities, or in other countries. She had read a lot of books (Hella brought them back whenever there was spare money from the herbs) but she had never read a book about anyone being plagued by monkeys.

  She pulled on a T-shirt and baggy trousers and went down their ladder to the bottom of the tree. Only Arty and Luna lived up this tree: their names were carved into its trunk.

  ARTEMIS & LUNA

  At the bottom of the ladder she stepped into the green flip-flops she’d left there last night, and walked out between the trees, following the path to the centre of the clearing.

  No one else was here.

  Arty walked round the edge of the clearing and focused on her breathing. The smell of early-morning greenery filled her lungs. She sat on the edge of the pit and closed her eyes.

  The pit was in the middle of everything, and all the houses were just into the forest, encircling it, built up in the branches wherever there had been a suitable tree. Venus and Vishnu shared a house, and Hella and Diana shared one, and the rest of the adults had one each. The boys shared the lowest of the houses, and they liked to jump down from it, laughing, occasionally hurting themselves but not seriously.

  The adults had dug the
pit as a celebration when Arty was born, and so she secretly felt it belonged to her. It had two steps down into it, each of which you could sit on, and in the middle was space for a big fire, or a dancing display, or a play, or a demonstration of anything anyone wanted to show you. The pit was where they sat and read and talked and sang. It was packed earth, and Arty took up the brush that someone had left in it yesterday and swept the old ashes into a corner, where they joined a pile of leaves that was ready to be added to the compost.

  Tonight was going to be fun. It was going to be (she tried out, in her head, a word from stories) a party. No one here called it that; it was always called a feast day or a celebration, but Arty was pretty sure this was what a party was. She sat on the second step, leaning back on the solid earth behind her, and closed her eyes and took a deep breath in. She held it as long as she could, feeling the buzz of the world around her, listening to the sounds of the insects in the forest, the birds singing so loudly that she couldn’t believe everyone else was still asleep, a tiny bit of distant monkey chatter. When she couldn’t hold it any longer she let it slowly out, feeling the vibrations of the planet as it went. She held on as long as she could before breathing in again.

  She did that five times. It made her feel like a part of the forest. She pulled her hair back from her face and tied it round itself and held her face up to the sun. She stood up and did some stretches in the middle of the pit, and then did the I-am-present meditation that Diana always made them do before lessons. She stood in the middle of the pit and said: ‘I see the trees. I hear the birds. I smell the early flowers. I touch the earth through my feet. I taste the morning air. I am present in the world. Thank you, universe.’