The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods Page 14

  ‘Oh, darling.’ Cherry put an arm round Arty’s shoulders. ‘And that is why I’m taking you to get official help. You absolutely cannot start growing weed. Did your friend Joe explain why it had to be secret? Because it’s highly illegal, here in particular. That is the worst idea I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard some bad ideas in my time. Also, I think you’d have to wash a hell of a lot of sheets to buy a plane ticket to London.’

  Arty could see there were stairs going down into the Dhobi Ghat and she set off carefully, holding the wall beside her with both hands.

  ‘Arty!’ said Cherry, but she followed. Arty had known she would. Down at street level there was a row of shops, and they walked along past them all without looking. At the end people started saying, ‘Tour of the Dhobi Ghat?’ but more to Cherry than to Arty, and she said no to all of them.

  At the end of the path there were stalls selling food. A very small breeze blew a stench into Arty’s face and her stomach turned over. She had to sit down, and then to put her head in her hands and try to breathe. She could feel pakora in her stomach churning around. She was going to be sick. That was not the smell of food.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Cherry, and she sat down next to her.

  Arty couldn’t turn her head. Every part of her was writhing. She thought she had the plague. This was how Venus had felt, and Hercules and Hella and Luna and the others. She turned her head aside. It was too much. The world went sick round the edges, and Arty was back in the clearing. She could see dried sick, blood, bodies in her home. Most of all it was bodies. Now it had finally got her too.

  This was the smell of rotting flesh.

  She could see the bodies of all her family. They were right there. In her head she saw her parents’ bodies, even though she had never seen them in reality. She saw her mother’s dead eyes. She saw her father lying like Hercules had, a shell with none of his essence there. She remembered Hercules, Diana, Hella, Luna. She could not bear it.

  ‘I am present,’ she muttered. ‘I am here in Mumbai. I’m in the Wasteland. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I feel nothing. I smell death. I am with Cherry.’

  I am with Cherry. That was the part that pulled her back. She opened her eyes and saw a table with severed animals’ heads on it (sheep or goats – something like that) and there were cats underneath licking up the dripping blood. That was the thing that smelled.

  She was sick, noisily sick, on the dusty road. A dog ran over and started eating it up.

  ‘Oh, darling.’ Cherry was cradling her in her arms and Arty succumbed, leaning into her, feeling her heartbeat. ‘Oh, sweetie. Come on. Let’s get you out of here. Sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. I only wanted to show you the laundry because I thought you’d like it. I had no idea …’

  A few people were nearby, and Arty thought from the tones of their voices that they were being kind. She couldn’t do any more breathing or meditation because everything smelled of death, so she took shallow breaths instead and forced her legs to stand up so she could get away.

  ‘That went well,’ said Cherry later. They were in a rickshaw, with Cherry’s backpack on the floor, on their way to take Arty to the police station before Cherry’s train. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I had no idea there would be a table of goats’ heads. I just thought you’d like the laundry city.’

  ‘I did like it.’ Arty was largely recovered now. ‘It was amazing. It’s like a whole city all about washing. It was so interesting. I really loved it a lot. Thank you. I suppose I should stay away from dead things.’

  She stopped. She hadn’t meant to say it quite like that.

  ‘You should really. Those goats’ heads were … intense.’ Cherry smiled. ‘I know. I stopped eating meat about twenty years ago. I was vegan for a long time too, but that paneer kind of tempted me out of it since I’ve been here. People still see animals as being there for humans to do what they like with. It’s not fair.’

  ‘It’s really not.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Stop saying sorry! I’m sorry. I was sick on the road. That was pretty horrible.’

  Cherry grinned. ‘You gave a stray dog a meal. You know what, Arty? I’m going to miss you very much. I know we only met yesterday, but it’s one of the most fortuitous encounters I’ve ever had. You must solemnly swear to keep in touch with me, one goddess to another?’

  ‘I solemnly swear. Goddesses.’

  ‘Tell me what happens next. What the police do. When you get to London. We will meet again. I know it.’

  ‘I know it too.’

  ‘As soon as you’re in a place with technology, what will you do?’

  ‘I’ll log into my email: artyvenus@gmail.com. Password: goddesses.’

  ‘Good. There will be plenty of messages from me waiting for you when you do. I promise you that.’

  They had set up the email on Cherry’s phone, trying different combinations of important words until they found one that hadn’t already been taken by someone else. Arty hadn’t got her head around how it worked, but Cherry said all she needed was her email address and password, which she shouldn’t tell to anyone else, and she would be ready to go.

  The rickshaw stopped. ‘Police, madam,’ said the driver.

  ‘It’s just me getting out here,’ Arty told him in Hindi, knowing that Cherry wouldn’t understand. ‘So drive her to the station as soon as I’m out. Whatever she says, she has to get to the station quickly. Thanks!’

  ‘Of course.’

  She and Cherry hugged. Arty said, ‘I’m fine. I promise. Go and get your train and have a lovely time in the north.’

  ‘You promise?’

  Cherry did not want to leave her. Arty could see that. But Arty had made sure they left late, so there wouldn’t be time for Cherry to come with her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If this doesn’t work, you can go back home.’

  ‘I will.’

  She walked into the police station until she heard the buzzing of the rickshaw’s engine and knew that they were driving away.

  A promise wasn’t one of those things that became true just by being spoken. It was just a word. There was, Arty thought, nothing binding about it. Nobody’s world had changed when she said ‘Yes’.

  ‘Can I help you, miss?’ said a young man behind a counter.

  Arty’s heart started pounding again. She did not like being so close to the police.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I was just feeling a bit ill and I came in because I thought you might have air conditioning.’ She had no idea where that came from, but it seemed to work.

  He smiled. ‘Sorry. No air con here! Maybe one day!’

  Arty smiled back and left.

  Cherry’s rickshaw had gone.

  She was alone.

  June

  I only had to wait a couple of days, and then the moment arrived. By this point I had an excellent collection of flammable things in the corner, and she hadn’t realized that was what I was doing. She thought I was pulling the silly books apart and piling the pages up because her stupid prison had driven me mad, and I could see that she liked that. She liked breaking my mind.

  My friends had started to talk to her, and she always thought it was me. We enjoyed that, me and the teddy and the rabbit and the kitten and all the mice and the birds and the monkey and the pigs.

  ‘She doesn’t love you,’ the bear had said one time, and it turned its heart towards me, the embroidery saying ‘She Hates You Loads X’.

  ‘I do love you,’ she’d said with a sigh. ‘And please stop talking like that.’

  I had moved the box that the toys had been in over to the door, and they were going to jump into it when the fire started so I could rescue them. The others, the cartoon ones, would just vanish and meet us on the outside. The box was up against the wall, covered in a T-shirt, looking like a bit of mess but not one that you would particularly notice. There was nothing else in here I cared about. In fact, I couldn’t wait to burn every single bit of the prison to ash.<
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  She came in huffing away, and she sat down next to me on the mattress. She looked at me with her one watery eye and touched her hair, which was looking thin. She touched the piratey patch over her other eye. She hadn’t lost her eye or anything. She’d just hurt it a bit. She was wearing a necklace that said MUM on it.

  All the animals had put patches over their eyes too. They stood behind her copying everything she did.

  ‘You do know that this is because I love you,’ she said.

  ‘You do know that this is because I love you,’ mimicked the animals.

  ‘Oh, stop that,’ she said, and she started to cry, then made herself stop. I pulled my hair across my face. I was going to cut my hair as soon as I had scissors.

  ‘Can I cut my hair?’ I said. ‘Look at it!’

  She made a tutting sound. ‘Of course not. You think I’m going to give you a pair of scissors after this?’ She touched her eyepatch.

  ‘A pair of scissors after this?’ said the chorus, and they all touched their eyepatches.

  ‘It’ll be better soon,’ I said.

  ‘I know it will, but you’d do it again, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I wanted to get out.’

  ‘And you’ll be allowed out when you’re ready. You’re not ready. Not at all.’

  We sat there together for a while, and I zoned out while she told me about people I didn’t care about, and as she spoke I noticed that the rabbit was dancing round to the side of her, pointing at her apron pocket.

  There was a thing in there, and I recognized it as the thing she used to use to light the ring on her cooker. You clicked it and a little spark came.

  ‘Tell me about Mrs Bourne,’ I said. ‘When did you stop being friends?’

  She looked at me with her one eye and gave a wicked little smile. ‘That’s harsh. She’s a good neighbour! How can you accuse me of not liking her?’

  ‘You don’t, though, do you? Does she know I’m down here?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She told me all the things she’d disliked about Mrs Bourne for ages. ‘It was when she got the new washing line,’ she said. ‘You remember that.’

  As she spoke I moved my hand closer and closer. In the end she didn’t notice me pulling the thing out of her pocket. I moved my hand without looking at it, staring into her pale eye as she spoke, watching her face contort as she talked about her friend and neighbour. I moved the thing over to my sleeping bag and pushed it underneath.

  The animals cheered and danced.

  She didn’t notice.

  ‘You seem a little bit better,’ she said as she left. ‘A little more rational.’

  I took the cooker thing and practised clicking it. There was a spark inside it.

  13

  Arty had done something bad. She had stolen something from Cherry and she hoped that when Cherry noticed she wouldn’t mind too much. Arty had picked up Cherry’s passport when Cherry was in the shower. It was interesting. It was a little book filled with pages, which was not at all what Arty had expected.

  It was dark blue, and unsurprisingly it said ‘PASSPORT’ on it, and ‘United States of America’. Arty had flicked through the pages until she found a photograph of Cherry looking cross. Surname / Nom / Apellidos, it said. ARMITAGE. Given Names / Prénoms / Nombres: MARGARET CHERYL. Not Cherry. It said she was born in ‘Wisconsin, USA’. There were four pieces of paper folded and tucked into it. Two of them were copies of the page that had her photo on, and the other two were copies of the page with her visa on. Arty had stolen one of each copy and put the passport back.

  If she needed a document in order to be allowed to stay anywhere, then she would use this one. She would pretend to be Cherry. The only thing that worried her was the date of birth, because she knew she couldn’t pretend to be the same age as Cherry.

  Arty didn’t look like the photo, but neither did Cherry, and if Arty cut her hair she thought she might be all right. She didn’t know what year she was born, but she worked out what it might have been by asking a tea seller what year it was now and subtracting sixteen from that. She caught a train to Churchgate and went back to Leopold’s to work it out.

  Leopold’s cafe was the same as before except that it didn’t have Cherry in it this time. It still didn’t have Joe. Arty looked around, checking every person in case they were him. She did not understand why he had disappeared. She wanted to see him. She pictured his face, and she tried to imagine it into being. She needed him.

  Arty was better at ordering at least. She asked for a drink of Coca-Cola (it was the best drink in the world), and borrowed a pen from the waiter to change the year of birth. It took her a while to work it out, and she had to ask the people around her some questions, but she ended up sure that Cherry’s birthday was September the twenty-first, so now that was going to be Arty’s birthday too. She just changed the year as carefully as she could.

  When that was done she asked the man who was still trying to sell her a beautiful scarf from Kashmir where she could find somewhere cheap to stay, and he told her that she should go to the Austen Hotel just round the corner, as long as she would consider coming back to buy a scarf from him.

  The hotel was a white building with cracks in the front, but Arty felt it looked friendly. On the inside it had a strong smell, but not a nasty one. There was dust and food and cleaning stuff in the air. It smelled like a place that had given travellers shelter for many years.

  When she got to the desk in the main entrance they just wanted her to sign in with her passport number and nationality, so she wrote down all of Cherry’s information, and pretended to be her. Margaret Cheryl Armitage. It was an odd spiky name. It didn’t suit either Cherry or Arty.

  ‘Your passport and visa,’ said a man. ‘I need a copy.’

  ‘I have a copy,’ she said, and she passed him the pages. She had scratched the photo with the pen lid a bit so it didn’t look like anyone in particular. The man looked at it for a moment, and her heart beat very fast so she worried he could hear it, but then he put it aside without really seeming to have looked at it at all.

  ‘Room six,’ he said, pushing a key across the counter. ‘Breakfast included. It will be brought to your room in the morning at eight. Veg or non-veg?’

  ‘Veg please,’ Arty said. ‘Definitely veg. Thank you very much.’

  A few hours later she was walking by the sea on her own, trying to keep herself whole. Maybe, she thought, she should have done what Cherry said and gone to the police. Joe had never called back, and now Cherry had gone, with her phone, which meant that Arty’s link to Joe had gone too. Florence had refused to take her. No one wanted her.

  I could go back to Gita and Vikram.

  It was true that Gita and Vikram had seemed to want her, though they might not any more. She examined that thought, as a small child waved to her from its father’s arms and she waved back.

  She could live with Gita and Vikram if they would have her back. She could go back to people looking after her. People who were being paid money to look after her. Back to a place in which she was confined, given a set of rules. Nice people, but she didn’t want that.

  She had to get to Zeus, and she had to get to Matthew and Persephone. That was her mission. Sometimes she felt like a child, and at other times she felt older than anyone else, because she was looking at their world through different eyes. She was about sixteen, which was not a child, and so she was going to be an adult. She could do it. She would do this her way.

  She was wearing a pair of red trousers that matched Cherry’s, because she had seen them for sale outside Leopold’s and had bought them with her money. The green flip-flops were still on her feet. She smiled down at them, a sad smile. A pair of shoes were the most constant thing in her life.

  All she really wanted to do was to stand exactly where she was now, here in the tourist part of Mumbai surrounded by other people who didn’t really know what they were doing, with the hot sun on her face, the people walking by as if Arty were one of them an
d not worthy of comment at all, the waves coming and going. The sea was a huge space in the city. It was the most calming thing to stand and stare at it, here even more than Bandra because the city was more intense.

  Across the road there was a big expensive hotel and Arty imagined being in a room up there with the waves outside her window. She pictured herself lying in bed, listening to the sound of the sea as she slept. It would be the sea and traffic. All the beeping didn’t scare her any more. In fact, the different tones the cars used made it sound as if they were talking to each other. You could never count to more than eight before you heard the beep of a car.

  Over to her left was a big stone archway that didn’t lead to anything. Arty didn’t know why it was more interesting than anything else, but lots of people were walking round it and taking photos, so she took a deep breath of car-and-sea-flavoured air, and felt the salt vapour of the sea going into her lungs, and she let that power her along as she went to investigate. Perhaps it was some kind of portal, like in a story.

  Arty was astonished by people. She was constantly surprised that there were so many of them and that, actually, they didn’t have fights and wars and point guns at each other and rampage around stealing and killing. They just milled around each other, talking.

  No one in the clearing had told her that most of the time people being together worked. She had imagined that she and her family were hiding from wars and bombs and danger, taking shelter like refugees in books.

  Why didn’t you tell me? she asked them. You never mentioned the good things.

  You couldn’t just walk over to the archway. You had to go through a little building first, and put your bag through a machine, and step through a rectangle that beeped or didn’t beep depending on whether you were good or bad (or something like that). It didn’t beep for Arty, but it did for the man next to her and she gave him a hard look. She picked her bag up again from the other side of the machine, and then she was able to go to the archway.