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.

May

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 loudly as I could. It hurt my knuckles but I didn’t care. I thumped and kicked at the door, and shouted. ‘Let me out!’ I said. ‘Please let me out! I promise it’ll be OK.’

I could not really promise that, and they knew it.

That was why they weren’t letting 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. She would be able to tell them that I’d gone away and no one would check. I wondered whether my jailer, the one I actually saw, had lost her mind, because sane people didn’t keep teenagers’ prisoner. Or perhaps it was me who was mad. Either way, this place was impossible to get to for anyone who didn’t have the key. I might stay here until I died.

If they died first, I would stay here forever because no one would know that they should come and get me. I found the pen and decided to start to write down my story, so that when, one day, 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.

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 every single thing, from learning to walk to learning to read to, later, folding the laundry and collecting the mangoes, with passion. She spoke three languages without realizing 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 she dreamed new people, 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 village 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 village and was now known to everyone as Venus, though once she had been Victoria Jones from a town near Bristol in England, the child of 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 didn’t count years in the way the people on the outside did. The adults worried that Arty would be jealous of the new baby, but in fact 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 village 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 that 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 all went horribly, catastrophically wrong.