The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods Read online

  She typed ‘Gmail’ into the bar at the top and filled in ‘artyvenus’ and ‘goddesses’, and then she was looking at her own email account.

  That was a brand-new thing. She wished Venus and Vishnu could see her now.

  There were four emails in it. Three were from Cherry and the fourth was from Gmail telling her that she was welcome to their service. Cherry’s first one was about the train, the second one was sending her lots of goddess things, and the third just said: ‘Oh my god Arty – email me!!!’ Before she could think about replying to that, she knew what she had to do.

  She typed in Florence’s email address and wrote:

  Dear Zeus, I miss you so much! I think about you all the time. I hope you’re all right in France. I will write more when I can use the computer better. I love you. We are all gods and goddesses. Your sister Arty xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  Then she typed in Joe’s and wrote:

  HELP. I NEED YOUR HELP. You told everyone about me. This is my email so tell me why you did that. Help me. Please Joe. I thought you were my friend. Arty

  She was reading Cherry’s first message properly when the boy who worked here put his hand on her shoulder. She turned round, wondering what else she didn’t know, and found that it wasn’t the boy.

  It was the police.

  They were a man and a woman wearing brown uniforms. Arty was so scared she almost wet herself. She had seen police in the distance, but she had kept as far away from them as she could. And now there was just her and them in this tiny room. Her, and them, and the boy.

  She looked over at him. He made a strange face.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I recognized you at once. That photograph, if I wasn’t already sure, I was then. I called them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For your safety. Everyone is worried about you. Also, AMK wants you found.’

  ‘But I’m fine.’

  The policeman looked cross.

  ‘You caused a lot of worry to a lot of people,’ he said. ‘You ran away from a safe home, and now you’re living under a stolen identity. This is a serious business.’

  ‘It’s not a stolen identity!’ Arty was furious. ‘I didn’t steal anything. Just one piece of paper, and that was from my friend. Two pieces of paper.’

  ‘You are not Margaret Armitage,’ said the woman. ‘She is sixty-four years old. You, on the other hand, are sixteen or so. Your name is Artemis. You were placed in an excellent foster home with people who took great care of you, and then ran away from those people who were looking after you in the dead of night. They were distraught.’

  Arty felt sorry for them. ‘They were really nice,’ she said. ‘It’s not their fault. I just needed to come to Mumbai once that woman took Zeus to France.’

  ‘You were not at liberty to do that.’

  They led her out towards a police car, which turned out to be a car with POLICE written on it, without a blue light or a siren or anything else that Arty thought a police car would have. There were people on the pavement holding up their phones again. She wanted to run past them, but then she had a better idea. If they were so interested in her she would use them to help her.

  ‘This is a message for Joe,’ she said loudly to them all. ‘He’s Nepalese and from Germany too. Joe, I know you put my photo everywhere. Come and talk to me unless you’re too scared. And, AMK, why do you want people to find me? That’s not fair.’

  ‘Come on!’ The policeman was cross, and the woman pulled Arty’s wrist so she had to go with her.

  She got in the car. ‘Am I under arrest?’ she said, knowing that she wasn’t because being under arrest was one of those things that only happened when you said the words to activate it, and no one had said them to her. She thanked Diana for that. Otherwise she would have been scared, but now she was only angry.

  ‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Of course not. We’re taking you back into care.’

  ‘I can care for myself.’

  The woman didn’t answer.

  The police station had a blue arch over its entrance and writing in yellow. Arty was ready for a fight. There was no way she was going ‘back into care’.

  She asked for the bathroom and locked the door and screamed and screamed and screamed. Then she took deep breaths of toilet smells until she was sick. After that she pulled every part of herself together and marched out there to find out what was going to happen next.

  It turned out that everyone had easily worked out that she was in Mumbai, as she had suspected they would, but that after that she had successfully vanished. No one knew what she had done from the station or beyond. When Joe had listened to her messages from Cherry’s phone he gave the police the number, and that was why Cherry had emailed Arty sounding panicked. It had taken him a while to listen to them because he had been on his meditation thing.

  When he heard her message saying she was outside AMK’s house he had put it on the internet. Which, Arty thought, had not been very meditative of him. Joe, she decided, was not her friend after all. He was not her friend at all. She put her hands in her hair and pulled. This was horrible. Joe was the first friend she had in the outside world, and he had done a horrible thing to her. He had done a thing that made her life much worse, and that was not what friends did. She drew in all her fury and focused it on him. At that moment she hated him. She had never hated anyone before, and now she did, and the feeling was shocking and almost thrilling.

  Then she realized that there was a mean thing she could do to him, in return. She remembered what he had said about the herbs, and went over to the policewoman, who was sitting at a desk writing with a pen.

  ‘I gave Joe a bag of herbs that we grew in the clearing,’ she said. ‘He sold them for me and gave me money. He said he could go to prison if anyone knew about it.’

  The woman wrote that down.

  Arty said it again later, by which time they were in a little room. Arty was sitting on an uncomfortable chair and looking at the walls. They were too close. The police man and woman talked but Arty didn’t say anything about anything except the herbs. She didn’t care. She only half listened to what they said to her. They were concerned for her safety. She was a minor, too young to be out like this on her own. She had been through a terrible time. She needed an official identity, a surname, guidance, looking after. She needed documents. Cherry had said that too. Did she want to apply for Indian nationality or British or both?

  ‘Both,’ she said, because she wanted to keep both her mother and her father alive.

  Then she stopped speaking. She pretended she was her sister, Luna. She said nothing, and wondered whether the cream walls really were coming closer, and looked at the floor, which was tiled with black. If she screwed her eyes up a bit, she could imagine it was a deep pool, and that if she got up from her chair she could fall into it. There was a fan on a table that blew into her face every time it swept round to point at her.

  She thought about ways to escape, but she knew she couldn’t. People in books escaped from prisons by tunnelling out through floors or behind posters, or by crawling through sewers, but she didn’t have any idea how to do any of those things.

  ‘Can I go now?’ she said after a while.

  ‘No. You can’t leave until we’re satisfied you have somewhere to go.’

  ‘I’ve already paid for tonight at the hotel.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where shall I sleep then?’

  The woman sighed. ‘We’re looking for an emergency foster home. Just wait here for now.’

  ‘Have you got a book I can read?’

  ‘There might be one somewhere.’

  She came back a bit later and handed Arty a copy of Great Expectations. She started reading it and immediately relaxed. That, it turned out, was exactly what she needed. She loved every word of it. The shell of her stayed in the police station in Mumbai, while the little Arty inside went off to the freezing marshes. She read and read and read. She ate the lunch they gave her. She carried on reading.
/>   ‘Someone is here to see you,’ the woman said, at some point in the afternoon.

  Arty followed her, hoping against hope that it would, somehow, be someone from the clearing, even though she knew that there was no chance whatsoever of that being the case. It was hardly going to be Zeus, and it was even less likely to be anyone else.

  She just really wanted her mum. Maybe, she thought, it might be Cherry.

  ‘Joe!’ she shouted, and she ran right into him, the joy of a familiar face overpowering the fact that she hated him. She wasn’t sure what to do with her energy; in spite of everything she was happy to see him because she had known him longer than anyone else out here. He was still wearing his orange T-shirt, and his hair was a bit longer than it had been before.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. Arty could see that he didn’t want to be here at all. ‘So they found you. I have to say this first: I’m sorry for putting your picture on Instagram. I’m sorry for telling everyone you were at AMK’s house. Sorry, Arty. I didn’t expect you to be pleased to see me.’

  ‘Why did you?’

  He looked at the policewoman. They were in a big room with people answering phones and tapping at keyboards, but Arty was pretty sure that everyone who was close enough was listening to them.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d see you again. I thought your story was interesting. I was cooped up in hospital for ten days and I thought you and Zeus were amazing. To be completely honest, I thought you’d get me lots of likes on Instagram and that’s my weakness. I had a story to tell, and that was exciting. I’m really, really sorry.’

  Arty looked away from him. ‘You should be sorry because I was doing well. I thought you were my friend. You’ve spoiled everything.’

  ‘You know, when I got your messages I called the number back but I couldn’t get through. So I put it out there that you were in Bandra at AMK’s house because I wanted you to be safe. Everyone was looking for you.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Now they’ve found me.’

  June

  It turned out that it was difficult to set a house on fire. In films it was easy. You dropped a match and everything went up in flames. Now, though, the basement filled with smoke, but the flames didn’t catch on anything. That man Jeremy Clarkson’s face turned to ash, but he wasn’t flammable enough. I couldn’t make the room catch fire.

  My friends were no use to me at all. They were just waiting by the door.

  I coughed. The smoke was horrible but there weren’t enough flames to do what I needed it to do. There were no curtains. I walked over to the pathetic little fire and offered it the edge of my sleeping bag, but that just smouldered and made the smell worse. I had wanted to start the fire when she was here, but now I knew how impossible that would be. She would have put it out easily, over and over again.

  I stood and watched.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to it. ‘Come on! We need some petrol or something. You have to do it fast.’

  I looked round at the bear and the rabbit for backup, but they were just standing there, looking like toys. The other creatures had already left.

  I spread all my clothes, all my bedding, everything I could around the fire, and offered it the edges of everything. I couldn’t put the whole lot on there because it would have put the fire out straight away. I vaguely remembered learning that flour was flammable because of its surface area. Obviously I had no flour.

  I gave the fire every page of every book I had, and I added all the wood I could find. It didn’t burn.

  It didn’t burn. It didn’t burn. And then it did.

  I believed in fire gods because one moment I had lots of things mildly melting, and then I had a fire. The fire god pointed at my basement, and fire leaped up into the air. It was up the wall. It was licking everything, coming after every single thing in the room. The smoke was intense, and I dropped to the floor. I hammered on the wall. I watched the window crack, which I hadn’t expected to happen at all, and I begged the people outside to notice.

  I had done it. Whatever happened now, this part of my life was over.

  15

  ‘I’m just so sorry, Arty,’ Joe said.

  ‘You’ve said that too many times,’ she told him, and leaned back and kept her eyes on the cricket.

  ‘But it’s true. I don’t know what comes over me. I’m addicted to it, I think.’

  That was more interesting. ‘Addicted to what?’ she said. ‘Is it like drugs?’

  ‘I guess it’s a better addiction than drugs. But I feel it taking hold of me and it’s like I can’t do anything apart from upload the picture and count the likes.’

  ‘Count the likes?’

  ‘I know. It’s pathetic, isn’t it? I won’t do it again. I won’t do it today.’

  She looked at him. ‘I think you will. The man on the train said that the story was very popular. And now you know what I’m doing this evening. I think you will.’

  He screwed his eyes up and shook his head. ‘I won’t. I know I’m not allowed to tell anyone about this evening.’

  Joe and Arty were sitting in the shade at the edge of a field that was in the middle of the city but with all the roads hidden by trees and railings. Arty was lying back, propping herself up with her elbows on the ground to watch several games of cricket all at once.

  ‘Don’t talk about it any more,’ she said. ‘Tell me about the cricket instead.’

  The sun was hazy, as usual, and she liked the shade, but she was finding it difficult to concentrate on anything. Joe was sitting a little way away from her, uncomfortable even though they were kind-of friends again. Some part of her that she didn’t really understand wanted him to sit closer, in spite of what he’d done. She wanted to be near him. It came across her in waves, fury and then something different, something that was the opposite of fury.

  The police had let her go out with him as long as he promised to let them know where they were and not to leave the area. She shuffled a bit closer to him. They were filling in the time until her evening appointment, which was possibly the scariest thing that had happened since she arrived in the outside world.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Well, watch that little guy over there. Watch the way he’s holding the ball. I’ve been watching him. He thinks he’s Harbhajan Singh. He’s trying to bowl a doosra. I think he can do it, but he hasn’t done one yet.’

  ‘Doosra? That means “the other one” in Hindi.’

  ‘Does it? It’s a cricketing thing too. It’s where you bowl the ball and it spins the way you’re not expecting. See, he’s using these two fingers –’ he held up two of his fingers, the middle one and the ring one – ‘instead of these, which you usually use.’

  She watched. The man threw the ball – bowled it – and the batter hit it.

  ‘Not that ball then,’ said Joe.

  ‘That was the same one,’ said Arty. ‘Not the other one at all.’

  Cricket was new to Arty. She had seen a lot of games in the street but had thought it was people messing around with a ball and sticks of wood. Now, though, she had discovered that it was a real game. She was starting to understand the rules, and she was trying hard to concentrate on it to block out all the other things, because thinking about cricket stopped her thinking about everything else.

  Joe had explained batting and bowling, and then other things as she’d asked more and more questions. Arty liked the words: silly mid-on, corridor of uncertainty, googly, cherry. Particularly cherry. And now doosra.

  ‘Waiting for the doosra,’ she said, without knowing what she was looking for at all.

  ‘Always,’ said Joe. He turned to her. ‘Ready for tonight? Honestly I won’t tell anyone about it. You can depend on that. I’m not having AMK on my case.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘A scary man will stop you, but not a girl? Isn’t that a bit sexist?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He smiled, and it did something odd to her.

  ‘And I’m not ready at all. How could I be?’ She was feeling fluttery inside. She had done a g
ood thing for him today. She had stopped him going to prison.

  ‘These herbs,’ the policewoman had said. ‘You said you gave them to Joe and he gave you money. What exactly were they? What name did you know them by?’

  Arty knew some other names for the herbs now. They were called grass, and cannabis, and weed. The policewoman was looking at her very intently.

  Joe had told the whole world about her because he wanted the attention. He had told them about the plague and the clearing. He had pretended to be her friend, but he had not helped her at all. He had just used her and Zeus to get lots of attention on social media. It had messed up a lot of things for her.

  However, he had also given her money, and without that money she would still be in foster care. If she’d given the herbs to anyone else, she would have been in trouble. He had told her a lot of things about the outside world. He had been nice to Zeus. And she was pleased to see him.

  She had met the policewoman’s gaze.

  ‘Coriander,’ she had said. That had been the end of it.

  Everyone forgot about that quickly, because someone nearby answered the phone and called out, ‘AMK’s people are on the line!’ From there it turned out that AMK was very interested in Arty. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to meet her for dinner tonight. They were going to the restaurant of a smart hotel, and after that he was paying for her to stay there for the night in a luxury room.

  Even the police had been very excited by that. AMK had offered the reward that had made the computer boy call the police. He had offered it because he had been worried about her safety, and now he was so delighted that she had turned up safe that he wanted to meet her. Everyone established that he was going back to his house after dinner, and she was staying in the hotel alone, and then they all agreed that she could go.

  ‘Dinner with AMK,’ she said now, as someone hit the ball over their heads. ‘I won’t know what to say to him.’

  ‘You will,’ said Joe. ‘Look! There it was! The doosra.’

  Arty hadn’t seen it. ‘Can we go to Bandra? I want to tell the people at his house.’