The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods Read online

  The door swung open and there were hands on me. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I could breathe the air out here. I wasn’t on fire. I gulped down the air as if it were a glass of water.

  Someone picked me up and carried me right out of there.

  And I was free.

  18

  ‘We need to have a funeral,’ Arty said, fiddling with her cup of tea. She hated saying the words but they were necessary. ‘I don’t even know what happened to. To. To her body. And the others’ bodies too. No one said.’ She remembered how confused she had been during that time, how absent she was from her self. ‘Or maybe they did but I didn’t hear properly.’

  The fog was clearing now that she had been here for a few days. She didn’t have to worry about money, or about where she was going to sleep or whether she was going to eat. A stressed social worker had come over to check that she was all right, and was satisfied that she was. Arty was officially living here. With survival taken care of, everything else was flooding back.

  She was sitting in the kitchen with both grandparents, drinking tea. There was a plate of biscuits on the table. Arty wanted to eat them all at once, but she knew it would be rude. She had already eaten three in quick succession.

  ‘Can you help me find out?’ she said when they didn’t reply.

  ‘Well,’ said Grandma, ‘from what we understand, everyone involved was … cremated. Because of the infection. I know you don’t know much about everything that happened on that front, and I’m glad you don’t, but I know it was taken very seriously.’

  ‘We expect to have the ashes delivered to us at some point,’ said Grandad, looking into the corner of the room. He picked up a pink wafer, looked at it and put it back.

  ‘When Matthew’s here,’ said Arty, ‘can we have a funeral? A blessing? Otherwise nothing is quite finished. Venus – Victoria – deserves a ceremony.’

  Neither grandparent said anything for a while. Arty sipped her tea. Now that Grandma was letting her drink it black, with one sugar, she liked it.

  ‘Of course she does,’ said Grandma. ‘Yes, Artemis. We’ll have a nice ceremony. And of course Matthew will come.’

  ‘It feels a bit odd to us,’ said Grandad. ‘We hadn’t heard from her for so long …’ He looked as if he wanted to explain more, but he stopped speaking.

  Arty nodded. Grandma stood up and Arty took a pink wafer in case she was about to take the plate away.

  ‘Yes,’ said Grandma. ‘We’ll do something nice for Victoria. And we can do it your way, even if your grandad and I might find it odd. Now, the laptop should be charged up, so do you want to get ready for your Skypie thing?’

  Arty smiled. ‘Yes please! I’d love to.’

  Her grandparents had produced a computer after she’d begged them for it. They had plugged it into the wall a while ago, and had promised that she could use it to call Zeus. She had emailed Florence to ask if she could call, and Florence had actually replied, and so they were speaking at half past eleven, which was very nearly now.

  Grandma cleared the table, and Grandad helped Arty set the laptop computer up so that the camera was on. She hated it when her face appeared on the screen, but then she got used to it when she realized this image of her would be on Florence’s screen for Zeus to see.

  At twenty-eight minutes past eleven she ran upstairs to fetch her bear. She wanted to show it to Zeus. She sat at the table with the bear on her lap, and stared at the screen, and waited.

  At exactly eleven thirty the computer made an electronic sound again and again, and she clicked the green thing to answer it. A few seconds after that a picture appeared on her screen, and it was a picture of Zeus.

  It was actual Zeus. His hair was much shorter, and his teeth were white, and he looked different in lots of tiny ways, but it was him. Her little brother. Her other self.

  ‘ARTY!’ he yelled, and she saw his face get suddenly bigger as he tried to climb through the two screens on to her lap.

  ‘Zeddy!’ She knew she couldn’t climb through, but she stroked the place where his face was on the screen. ‘Oh, Zeddy, darling. How are you?’

  ‘Arty, I can see you!’ he said. He was bouncing up and down.

  ‘I know, darling,’ she said. ‘And I can see you too.’ She stuck her tongue out at him, and he did the same back to her. ‘How is it in France?’ She saw him look round and knew that Florence must be out of shot. ‘If we talk in Hindi,’ she said in Hindi, ‘then no one will understand.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, switching languages. ‘I don’t want to be in France. I want to be at home.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Oh gosh, I miss you so much, darling.’

  ‘I miss you so much too.’ They were both crying. That was no good. Arty picked the bear up off her lap and held it up so he could see it. ‘Hello, Zeus,’ she said in the bear’s voice in English, making it move around. ‘It’s very nice to see you again. Have you been reading some books?’

  ‘Hello, library bear!’ said Zeus, cheering up at once. ‘Yes, I have, because Arty did teach me reading in English and now I go to la grande section and I do some reading in French too.’

  ‘Well,’ said the bear, ‘that is quite something. You are a very clever young man.’

  Out of the corner of her eye Arty caught sight of her grandmother leaving the room quickly. That was good. She turned her attention back to Zeus. They talked about books, about his nursery school, about his sisters. They switched between languages often, and she noticed how much better his French was than hers now. In the end Florence appeared behind him.

  ‘Salut, Arty!’ she said. She looked much better than she had in India. Much happier and more relaxed. Nicer.

  ‘Salut, Florence,’ said Arty, and she told her that, yes, she was in England now, living with her grandparents, and, yes, she was fine. They talked in the friendliest way they ever had, and then she said goodbye to Zeus and they agreed that they could speak once a week.

  When she hung up Grandma wasn’t around, so Arty went into the garden. She walked across the grass to the tree, and stood in front of it and looked up.

  It was a different tree from the ones in the forest, but it was the same too. It was the origin of the clearing. This felt like a spiritual place to Arty, and she sat down on the grass, ignoring her wet bottom, and closed her eyes.

  I can see my mother.

  I can hear my mother’s voice.

  I can smell my mother’s smell.

  I can feel my mother’s touch.

  I can taste Dairy Milk.

  She sat there for a long time. She tried to let it go, to let Venus go, but in a way that didn’t involve Arty falling apart. She thought about Victoria and Matthew up this tree as children, pretending a world that was later going to be real. She pictured them, a little boy and a little girl, twins, pretending to be in the forest and her heart broke into pieces for the things that had happened to them. She tried not to be sad for her mother, because she had actually done it, and she had been strong and wonderful and happy, but now she was dead.

  Though because Arty hadn’t seen her mother’s body, she was starting to think that she might not be dead. She could have got better before the medical people reached the clearing. She might have crept away and be living deep in the forest now, waiting.

  It was no use. If Venus was alive, she would have found Arty. She would be here in Clevedon right now. She would not have abandoned her child in the outside world. Arty told herself that again and again. Venus was dead. She needed to accept that. That was why she needed to have a funeral.

  ‘When you were on the computer-call thing before,’ Grandma said. Her voice was very even. ‘You had a bear you were showing to the little boy. Where did that come from?’

  ‘It’s the library bear,’ Arty said. ‘It’s mine. I had it from when I was really small. I think Venus gave it to me. Vicky. I brought it with me because it’s my special thing. It’s been with me all my life.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said
Grandma. ‘Right. Well.’

  Arty was back at the laptop, trying to sign into her email account again. ‘Grandma,’ she said, ‘why don’t they put the alphabet in the right order on computers?’

  ‘Now I do know this,’ said Grandma. Arty noticed that she was wearing a necklace that said MUM on it in curly writing, and she wondered whether Venus or Matthew had given it to her, or maybe both of them. ‘It’s to get the letters you use most in the places where they’re easier to reach. See? You hardly ever use a “q”, and there it is right in the corner.’

  ‘Oh.’ Arty looked at it. ‘Yes, there’s the “z” in the other corner.’

  ‘You can learn touch typing. It’s a way of training yourself to type without even looking at the keys. In my day girls were supposed to learn secretarial skills so they could find work typing up letters for bosses and so on, but these days I daresay everyone does their own. You girls want to be your own bosses, don’t you? Not take dictation for some man.’

  Arty didn’t know what that meant, but she got the gist of it.

  ‘That’s quite right, Grandma,’ she said. ‘Let the man take his own dictation and I’ll take mine. What you said sounds like a thing from the patriarchy and I don’t like the patriarchy.’

  ‘Oh my dear. You’re your mother’s daughter all right,’ said Grandma.

  They smiled at each other.

  ‘Venus was a wonderful matriarch,’ Arty said, and Grandma gave a little nod and looked away.

  Arty typed ‘Tania Roswell’ into the Google screen. The only person it came up with who could possibly have been Persephone was a person who worked at a law firm in London. She wrote down the phone number for the company and went back to her emails.

  She sent a quick apology email to Cherry and a chatty one to AMK, saying that she was here and that she was all right. She begged them to keep in touch with her, then shut the computer down because she could tell that Grandma wanted her to.

  Grandma nodded. ‘Come out for a walk,’ she said.

  They walked along by the sea, which was brown and rocky with a few people swimming in it. Arty could not even imagine how freezing those people must have been. She was huddled in an old coat of her mother’s, shivering, but she liked the air in her face. It had the same smell of the sea that the air in Bandra and Colaba had.

  She spoke to Grandma about Zeus. Talking to him had made her feel different. She loved it that they could still see each other on the screen. She loved it that they could chat and tell each other what they were doing. This showed her that Joe had been right when he said that not all internet things were horrible.

  ‘Zeus is so adorable,’ she said. ‘I have to go to France and see him one day.’

  ‘One day no doubt you will. You need to get settled here first before you go gallivanting away anywhere.’

  ‘Just to see his little face,’ said Arty.

  She could tell that Grandma was preoccupied, and she thought perhaps she didn’t like her talking about Zeus because he was from her old life.

  ‘How about an ice cream?’ Grandma said.

  ‘Ice cream!’ Arty was immediately on board. ‘Really? I can have ice cream?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I had lentil ice cream with AMK,’ she said, and Grandma smiled a little smile.

  ‘Only you, my dear,’ she said. ‘I must say, I’m intrigued by this AMK of yours. I’m going to look him up.’

  ‘You should.’

  When they got home Arty went to watch television because Grandma told her to. Grandma went upstairs on her own. As Arty put the TV on, she saw a man hiking through a forest, talking about how you could find water. It was interesting, but not as interesting as Tania Roswell, so she tiptoed across the hallway and into the kitchen to find the phone.

  It was easy to call Tania Roswell’s office. She just pressed the numbers in the right order and put the phone to her ear and there it was, making a ringing sound. Someone answered and said the name of the company.

  ‘Can I speak to Tania Roswell, please?’ said Arty.

  ‘I’ll put you through to her office,’ said the person inside the phone, who might have been a deep-voiced woman or a high-voiced man. Arty couldn’t tell. She waited and the phone rang again and someone else answered. Someone who was definitely a woman.

  ‘Tania Roswell’s office?’ she said, and Arty took a deep breath and tried to make sense.

  ‘Hello, Tania,’ she said. ‘My name’s Arty. I come from India, from the clearing, and I need to meet you because my mum, Venus –’

  She stopped when the voice interrupted her. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not Tania. I’m her secretary. Can I pass on a message?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Arty. ‘Yes. Sorry. OK. Can you ask her to call me? If you tell her I’m Venus’s daughter from the clearing, she’ll know.’ She left the number that was written on a white label attached to the phone, and then put it next to her and stared at it, waiting for it to ring.

  It didn’t.

  After a while Arty went back to watching the television, while keeping the phone next to her all the time, staring at it often. She couldn’t sit on the sofa without moving, so while the TV was playing she did stretches. She leaned over backwards and lowered her hands to the floor. It was weird doing this on carpet – it hurt her hands a bit – but it made her muscles feel good. She held the pose and counted to fifty in her head. Then she stood up, pulling herself upright with her stomach muscles, which made her realize that she hadn’t done anything much with those muscles apart from eating for a long time. She sat on the floor and stretched her legs out, then put her head down on her knees. She held that, listening to the man on the television saying, ‘But of course before we can do that we’ll need to make fire.’

  Arty knew how to make fire. She sat up again to see how he was going to do it. The stupid phone still hadn’t rung.

  Her grandfather came in. Arty wasn’t sure what to say to him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Your grandmother says would you like a cup of tea?’ he said, making a funny face. ‘And have you seen the phone? Oh, yes. What’s it doing there?’

  He didn’t seem to want an answer, so Arty didn’t give him one. ‘No thanks. I don’t want a cup of tea, thank you.’

  ‘Fine. Look, if you don’t mind I’ll need the television at five for the cricket.’

  ‘Cricket?’

  ‘It’s a game. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I know it’s a game! I love cricket!’

  Arty sat up and edged on to the sofa. Grandad came and sat next to her.

  ‘Do you? Real cricket? Not just messing around with a ball?’

  ‘There’s a place in Mumbai. Called the Oval Maidan. I watched it there. With wickets and runs and a wicket keeper and a fast bowler and …’ Arty tried to remember all the words Joe had taught her. ‘There was a man trying to do a doosra. It means the other one in Hindi. It was real cricket. It was men playing, and they wore matching clothes.’

  ‘Ahh,’ he said, and there was a spark of interest. ‘The Oval? I suppose that would have been named for the London Oval. India is a good place for cricket, I’ll grant it that.’

  His pink shirt was bulging over his waistband.

  ‘Who are the teams?’ Arty said. ‘Playing at five, I mean.’

  ‘England and India, as it happens.’ He looked at her face. ‘And I for one shall be supporting England.’ His voice was firm but there was a tiny sparkle of enjoyment in his eyes.

  It wasn’t five for ages. Arty watched to the end of the forest programme, even though it made her homesick. Then it was the news, which was horrible, and then Grandad came back in, holding a bottle of beer.

  ‘Is that Kingfisher?’ Arty said.

  He barked a little laugh. ‘Not in this house. It’s Old Speckled Hen. Proper beer.’

  He sounded amused and annoyed and Arty didn’t know why. Still, he had happy eyes, probably because the cricket was about to start.

  ‘Would �
� would you like one?’ He changed his mind at once. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, of course you’re too young.’

  ‘I hate beer,’ Arty said. ‘So, no thank you.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘All the more for me.’

  ‘I like wine, though,’ she said, and he laughed again.

  ‘Don’t tell that to your grandmother.’

  Arty watched him changing slightly before her eyes. They watched the cricket, and Arty was grateful to Joe, for this if nothing else. She thought she would write him an email and say so, but then she thought she wouldn’t. She remembered him putting his hand on hers in that taxi. He was the first person she properly met, in the outside world.

  Now, thanks to his meticulous explanations, she won her grandfather’s approval. When she tentatively said, ‘Right in the corridor!’ he nodded and, although he didn’t really look at her, she could tell he was pleased.

  Mostly, though, she didn’t say anything. She just switched her brain off and enjoyed looking at people playing cricket, because it took her back to India, to her home. They watched it until Grandma came in and told them it was dinner time. Then they watched it some more until Grandma sent Arty to bed at half past ten.

  ‘You two,’ Grandma said, and she looked pleased.

  June

  I was lying on my back and there was a mask on my face. Whatever was coming through the mask was the thing I had to breathe, and I was trying to claw it off because I didn’t want to breathe what someone else put there for me.

  They held my arms down so I couldn’t get it off. I had no choice, and the air that was coming through the mask didn’t smell of smoke, and it did make me feel better, so I supposed that it was good. I didn’t like it, though. I didn’t like not being able to choose what I was breathing.

  Someone was stroking my hair. ‘It’s OK,’ she was saying. I tried to look at the person who was speaking. ‘Just breathe it. Breathe. It’s going to make you feel much better.’ This person sounded kind.

  ‘Can I go?’ I said, but the mask was over all my face so she couldn’t hear me.