The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods Read online

  Zeus was leaning on her, drowsy and silent, so as she felt his body breathing in and out she concentrated on the world around her. She tried to make it into a walking meditation. Twigs snapped under her feet. The bike made the plants rustle as it pushed past them. The birds screeched and sang. Arty lived from one second to the next. I am present, she said. I am.

  In the books she had read people were overwhelmed by grief when their families died. Yet Arty didn’t feel anything. When she tried to picture Hercules and Kali and Diana and Hella in her head, there was just mist. Her only focus was on the fact that she was putting one foot in front of the other and pushing a bicycle, and that she was in the first bit of the outside world she had ever seen and so far it was like the forest at home.

  After a while she propped the bike against a tree, got Zeus down and sat down to drink some water. She closed her eyes and thought that she could have gone to sleep, but she didn’t. The sun was beginning to set and they still hadn’t reached a building. Arty thought they might have gone the wrong way and wondered whether they could just stay in this forest forever, walking round and round its endless paths. She knew Hella probably used this bike and she must have known how to ride it, but it couldn’t have made it that much faster. Could it? Maybe. Arty didn’t know. She didn’t know anything.

  She thought that perhaps they had imagined the buildings, that maybe Hella had just got the things she brought back by magic, or from some kind of cave that Arty didn’t know about. She thought that perhaps, in fact, there was no outside world. Maybe there was no one in the world but herself and Zeus. Perhaps the rest of it had been a trick, invented by Venus to make them feel less alone.

  She persuaded Zeus to get back on the bike and carried on walking. But then she noticed, with a creeping dread, that the trees were further apart and the light ahead was different. The path was level now, and it was wider because there weren’t so many trees. The canopy was thinner. More light was coming in.

  She slowed down. Her knees were shaking, and her heart was pounding. She struggled to breathe. She put a hand on Zeus’s back to steady herself. He didn’t respond.

  The forest had been her home for all her life. She had never left it, and now she was walking towards its edge. The thread that bound her to everything she knew was pulled so tight that it was about to snap.

  I need a doctor, she whispered.

  We need a doctor.

  Hello. We need a doctor.

  Between the bike and the outside world there was a fence. It was like the one that separated the herbs from the rest of the plants, but much bigger. There was a gate in it, and a big chain that was keeping it closed.

  There was a lock on the chain. They were locked in.

  Arty had three keys round her neck.

  She took a deep breath. She was doing this for her family. She leaned the bike against a tree and swung Zeus down to stand beside her, and she unhooked the thin necklace.

  Two of the keys were much bigger than the space in the lock. The third was the right size. She put it in.

  It disappeared into the lock. Arty turned it and it pinged open. She fiddled around, her hands shaking so much that it was hard to do, and eventually she took the whole lock off the metal chain and unwound the chain and opened the gate.

  She had never seen a lock before, but now she had opened one. She had failed at riding a bike, but she had successfully opened a lock.

  She went back for the bike and pushed it with one hand while holding Zeus’s hand with the other, and they stepped together out of everything they had ever known, into everything they had never known.

  Arty took a step. It was the same so far. She closed the gate behind them and wound the chain back round it, but she didn’t close the lock. She needed to be able to go home again, whether or not she had the key. She put her necklace back on and checked it was done up.

  She took a deep breath. This was it.

  ‘Are you ready, Zeddy?’ she said.

  He shook his head. His black hair was full of leaves and twigs from where the branches had hit the top of his head as she pushed him along.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not ready.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Arty.

  May

  She came back and gave me some tablets, which I swallowed with difficulty. I lay back and pretended to sleep. She left a tray of food but I didn’t eat it, which was easy because it was horrible, like her food always was. It was some kind of slimy pasta in a plastic tray, and it had come out of the microwave. I stayed in bed and drifted off to sleep.

  When I woke up, it was dark outside. The door was locked. There was no doctor. I wasn’t at all sleepy. I just lay there for a long, long time. The toys came and stood round the bed. I thought they were on my side now, though I would never have trusted them. The bear and the rabbit climbed into bed with me and let me hug them for comfort, and that was a new thing.

  She came back and stuck something into my ear until it beeped. Then she looked at it, shook her head, and said, ‘Oh dear.’

  I was pleased about that. Oh dear was what I wanted her to think. I had been concentrating so hard on being ill that I almost believed I was now. I did feel terrible. She knew that. She had locked me down here to make me feel bad.

  She took my wrist in her hand. Her fingers were cold and poky. She looked at her watch while holding my wrist, and I knew she was taking my pulse. I did everything I could to make it speed up.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ she said, so I did, and she pushed my tongue down with a little wooden thing and shone a little torch into my throat. She felt my neck.

  Then she jabbed my stomach. She did it suddenly with her other hand and I wasn’t expecting it, so it took me a while to realize what she’d done and to react.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘You silly child. I love you, but you’re not leaving this place until I can trust you. And this shows that I can’t trust you at all.’

  She looked at me. Her face was disappointed. I felt my heart speeding up. If she came back with a doctor, I was ready. I would tell them everything quickly. I would get out of here. No doctor would let her keep me prisoner. That was why she wasn’t going to get one.

  ‘If you’re actually ill,’ she said, and I got excited again for a moment, ‘I’m afraid it would only be with a terrible case of malingering and trickery.’

  And she got up and walked out, locking the door and bolting it from the outside.

  I cried for ages. The toys stood in a circle round me, looking at each other awkwardly, none of them quite knowing what to say. Then I ate the cold pasta, because I knew I was going to need some energy and even though that food was barely edible it was more edible than anything else in the room.

  6

  She screamed and screamed and screamed, and Zeus did too. There were lights coming towards them. Arty had never seen anything that bright. It was as if two suns were crashing at them, as if they had taken the path that led into outer space. She clung to Zeus and closed her eyes.

  She didn’t mean to shout but once she’d started she couldn’t stop. It didn’t matter, because the noises of the lights were so loud that any sound the humans made was lost.

  She took a step back. She dropped the bike and snatched Zeus up into her arms before the thing could take him away. She pressed his body close to hers, feeling his life force and clinging to it as the only certainty she had. They didn’t run back into the forest because the gate was closed, but they stood flat against the fence, trying to make themselves so small that they might squeeze through the squares and then reassemble on the other side, in the world they knew.

  The fence was the dividing line between worlds. Arty stood pressed to it for a long time.

  The lights and the noise passed. It was quiet again, but she could hear sounds far away.

  When she spoke her voice hardly came out at all.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, forcing the words out. ‘I don’t want to and I wish you didn’t have to do it with me, but
the thing is we have to. We have to get help.’

  His hands were over his ears. She held on to him tightly and left the bike where it was. ‘Sorry,’ she said again, and she squeezed him because although he couldn’t hear her words he would know her touch. Then she stepped out on to the road, and took one hand away from Zeus to wave at the next thing that came past.

  It sped by so fast that they both fell over. Arty sat down heavily and Zeus clung on so that his fingers dug into her. The thing made a long noise again, all one note, and didn’t slow down at all.

  She had never imagined anything going that fast. It burst the boundaries of her mind. It was as if there were a new colour, a new universe, a gateway opening up into a cosmos that had different physics.

  They both coughed at the smoke.

  Arty took Zeus’s face in her hands and made him look at her. She remembered looking down on all this from the top of the hill.

  ‘I think that was a car,’ she said. ‘And that means cars are not what we thought.’

  Cars were brightly coloured. In her head they had chugged along a bit faster than people walked. She had never seen speed before, had never had any concept of it. Arty knew real cars existed and that they weren’t like storybook cars; she had a pretty good idea of how their engines worked. She had read an engineering book in lessons with Diana and, although she couldn’t really remember the exact details, she was well aware of the fact that they burned fuel and used that to power themselves along. She knew they made pollution and that even when people knew how bad pollution was they just carried on making more and more of it because they couldn’t stop themselves once they had started, and because the people who made the petrol wanted to keep getting all the money.

  But she had still not expected a car to be like this. These were dragons, breathing out smoke that was making Zeus choke.

  ‘Right, Zed,’ she said, taking his hand. She went back for the bike, sat him on it again and started pushing it along the very edge of what she supposed must be the road, with Arty on the road part, and Zeus and the bike on the earth. Her legs trembled as she walked. Everything was strange. It was dangerous.

  The road went steeply downhill, and she followed it down because that was where the cars had gone.

  Venus had said they needed a shop with a green cross on it, and that when they got there they needed to ask for an emergency doctor. She had said that the people working there would help. She needed to look for the man with the turban and tell him Hella, who had come to see him two days earlier, was dead. Arty needed to do that, and then she and Zeus would go home. And home would be different, and the community would be small and sad, but it would still be home and they would rebuild their world as best they could.

  Arty thought about people. She tried to imagine new people.

  It was nearly dark. She wanted to go home so much that she knew that, even after everything that had happened, she could never live anywhere but the forest. She did not belong in this world.

  Cars drove round them, when they came, and they made the same horrible sounds and belched out the same smoke. Zeus cried every time it happened. Arty just kept walking. She made her legs keep going. She thought that she would still be able to walk while she slept and she wondered whether perhaps that was what she was doing, whether this was all a dream. She willed herself to wake up back in her life, in her clearing, with everyone well. She wanted to go back to Kotta morning and do it differently. In some way there would be something she could have done differently that would have stopped Hercules getting ill.

  There were no trees on the other side of the road, but lots on the forest side. Arty stayed on this side because she wanted to be as close as she could be to home. There was a sign on the fence a little way along that said DANGER RADIATION, with some symbols underneath it.

  After a while someone came past riding a bike, a woman. She was riding it like the rabbit did in the book, the way Arty couldn’t, and she was going slowly enough to talk to.

  ‘Hello,’ Arty said, and when her voice came out small she said it again but louder. ‘Hello!’ She actually had to shout it to make her hear. ‘Hello!’

  She stared at her. This was a woman. A human she hadn’t met before.

  The woman put a foot down on the road and made it look like an easy thing to do. She turned.

  ‘Hello,’ she said back, looking surprised.

  Arty stared at her face. She looked at the woman’s eyes, at her nose, at her cheekbones. The woman was about the same age as Venus, Arty thought.

  I spoke to another person, she said to herself. I said hello. And she said the same word back. Everything rose up inside her. She took a deep breath and the words all came out at once. They came out in English, without Arty giving it any thought.

  ‘I need an ambulance please. There are people in the forest, very ill. My mother is very sick. And my father. And Inari and Luna. We need medicine. I need a place with a green cross. They get sick and then they die. We need help. Can you help?’

  That was not what she had practised in her head, but it was the way it came out.

  The woman’s eyes were big and dark brown, and Arty could see that she was a bit confused by what she’d said.

  ‘You need doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pointed, the way they were going. ‘You go here.’

  Arty’s stomach felt as if it were falling, swooping down. She had nothing to hold on to but Zeus and the bike.

  ‘We just keep walking?’

  The woman was talking fast, but now Arty didn’t understand her words. These words were not English or Hindi. She could see that the woman was asking questions and telling her things, and all she could think was that she had spoken to a new person, and that the pharmacy was that way. When the woman stopped she looked at Arty.

  ‘Not understand,’ the woman said in English after a while.

  Arty nodded.

  The woman smiled, got back on to her bike, nodded to them and rode away.

  Zeus was moaning, his voice quiet, but Arty knew he would stay on the seat because he was terrified and he had nowhere to go. She was pushing and walking, and it was nearly dark and she really hated it when cars came past.

  She hated it even more when a car came towards them, turned round in the road and stopped next to them. Two men got out. The car said TAXI on the roof. Taxis, then, were real.

  ‘Hey there,’ said one of the men. He was wearing a pair of baggy orange trousers and an orange T-shirt, and his hair was cut so short that he was almost bald.

  He was not much older than she was. Arty was looking at a man – a boy – who was about her own age. She had never met anyone like that before. She stared at him. He was as exotic to her as a Martian would have been. He made her feel strange. This was the worst of times, but she felt the horizons of the universe moving, further and further and further out, showing her things she would never have dared to seek. Her breath was coming in short bursts and her head was spinning.

  The other man had trousers and a T-shirt and his hair was longer, but still short.

  ‘Hey,’ said the first one, the young one, the one Arty couldn’t stop staring at. ‘Are you OK? You speak English, right?’

  He was looking back at her. The other man was the one who had been driving the car. The taxi driver, she thought, trying out the words. Taxi. Driver.

  ‘Yes,’ Arty tried to say, though the word didn’t quite work. She nodded her head to make it clear.

  ‘You need to find some medication, is that right? Sarita – she works at the monastery I’m staying at – she said she saw you here and you were agitated and you need a doctor, but that you didn’t understand Marathi, and that you spoke to her in English. Are you OK? She asked us to pick you up because she was worried that she couldn’t communicate with you well enough to help. We can give you a ride to a pharmacy or we can get you to a doctor. Where are you from?’

  Arty didn’t know what to say. There were too many questions. She absolute
ly did not want to get into a car, which she supposed was what give you a ride meant. No one had said that they would need to do that. She looked at Zeus, but he seemed to be in a trance. She saw the men looking at him too.

  She pointed to the forest to show where they were from.

  ‘We need help,’ she said carefully. I am saying words. A strange boy seems to be understanding them. ‘My mother is sick. And the others. They have a fever and they have pains and then they die. Some of them died.’

  Arty closed her eyes as tight as she could. We are all gods and goddesses. What happens to one happens to all. Zeus’s fingers were digging into her flesh. She tried to take all the strength of all her family. She named them in her head like a mantra. Hercules. Diana. Kali. Hella. She and Zeus had all their strength and Arty had to do this for them. She had to do it for Luna. Venus. Vishnu. Inari. Odin. She had to do it.

  She put the bike down by the side of the road and looked at the car door.

  ‘Shit,’ said the man. ‘Right. Um. I’m Joe. This is Ganesh. He’s a taxi driver and we’ll take you to the pharmacy gladly. The pharmacist will be able to help, I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes please,’ Arty said. She made herself speak as clearly as she could. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Please get in,’ said the other man. Ganesh.

  He held a door open and showed her the back seat of the car with his hand.

  Arty looked at Zeus. Zeus looked back. They clung to each other. She nodded. He shook his head.

  Arty took a deep breath of the choky Wasteland air and stared at the seat in the car. She just needed to put her bottom on it. She could slide in through the door and sit there and it would make her move faster than anything had ever gone before. She and Zeus would go to wherever the car took them. She didn’t have to worry about going the right way. It would take them to the right place.