Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  He gave a sleepy smile and lay down in the back seat of the car. I remembered all of the times I had been left alone to look after the neighbours’ kids and babies when my mum and her mates wanted to go to the pub. I deffo could look after him for just one night. He was a cool kid. He would be all right with me.

  Ten minutes later, we pulled up outside the house. It was getting dark but I could see that it sat at the end of a narrow tree-lined lane with a large park nearby and a primary school down the road which wasn’t Leo’s school. Simone had told me rather matter-of-factly that the very bricks and mortar I had woken up in had provided Adult Naomi with a sanctuary at a time of her life when she had needed it the most.

  And . . . ? I was so not impressed.

  It had as much appeal as living in a caravan stuck at the edge of a cliff at the back end of nowhere during a wet and cold winter. I was embarrassed that she called it home. The broken gate, the unkempt gardens, the small windows and the old wooden door stared back at me mockingly. Yes, it said. This is her house and she doesn’t even own it and it’s a big fat symbol of her complete failure at life. I hung my head in shame, as my dreams of becoming very successful and living in a big house with at least six bedrooms, a pool and horses faded away. To see that seventeen years later I had not achieved what I was so convinced would rightfully be mine was rank bogusness. I was disappointed in Adult Naomi but I managed to push the ill-disguised disgust to the back of my mind. I was too young to entertain failure, and besides, this was not my life. I wasn’t responsible.

  We climbed out of the weird-shaped car and a cat came from behind the bushes and sat at the gate, licking her black paws.

  ‘Hey, Sophia.’ Leo bent down to stroke her; she purred furiously and rubbed her head against his hand.

  ‘Is that ours?’ I whispered to my sister so that Leo couldn’t hear me. She nodded.

  Leo walked through the gate and the cat followed him.

  ‘I’ve got a cat?’ I was mortified.

  ‘Told you you’d end up an old lady with cats.’ Simone laughed.

  So not funny.

  ‘I’m only joking, sis.’ She slapped me on the back. ‘Come on.’

  Stepping around the yellow-eyed, meowing ball of black fur, I followed my sister and Leo into the house. This I couldn’t deal with. Why the hell did she feel the need for a cat? I was so allergic to them and the only pets we had been allowed were two goldfish called Albie and Arthur that died after, like, a month ’cause we overfed them. I decided that somebody must have kidnapped the real her and replaced her with some Michaela Strachan clone from The Really Wild Show, all in love with animals and stuff.

  Jeez.

  Holding the door, I turned and looked at the cat. It meowed at me. I gave it the finger and slammed the door in its face, hoping it would disappear.

  I was happy for Simone to put Leo to bed for the night. When he finished in his bath he came to the top of the stairs and shouted, ‘Night, Mum.’

  I went to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, ‘Goodnight,’ back to him.

  He looked so cute with his shiny face and boy’s blue pyjamas that I went all slush puppies again. The whole thing was getting a bit confusing for me but I said, ‘See you in the morning, mate,’ to him, hoping to sound a bit like Simone and a bit more like a mum. He smiled and went to his bedroom. I was curious to see the inside of the room I had stayed away from when I first woke up in the future, but I was afraid that if I liked it, I would like him even more and want to stay in the future. I couldn’t; I had to leave. Adult Naomi had to come back.

  I went into the kitchen instead. The kettle and toaster were a chrome silver that reminded me of something from Blossom. I looked again at the postcards and photographs lining the walls. Leo had been such a cute chubby baby. He and I seemed happy in them all, with big smiles, a radiance in our faces. It almost looked as if, at times, life was good. But I couldn’t believe it. How dare Adult Naomi smile so happily given the way her life had turned out? And if she was so happy, why had she left?

  It made no sense.

  I pulled a postcard off the wall. It had the words ‘Greetings from Rhodes’ on the front and a picture of blue waves kissing a white beach. I turned the card over; it was blank on the other side. I stuck it back on the wall and tore down another.

  Atlanta! Wicked! I had made it.

  The card read, ‘Everything’s peachy in Atlanta’ on the front, and the words were framed with pictures of peaches. Again this card was blank on the other side. Disappointed, I placed it back on the wall; I didn’t bother to look at the ones from Portugal or New York. Had she actually visited these countries?

  I walked back into the small wooden-floored living room, looked at the dark pink walls, and shuddered. What had possessed her to paint them that rank colour? There was a humongous TV in the corner and I marvelled at its massive rectangular-shaped shiny flat screenage. It looked like that huge TV on Back to the Future II. It was worlds away from the small cube-shaped television that I was used to. But how the smeg did you switch it on? There were no buttons. Had buttons been banned?

  Simone found me staring at a tall wooden bookcase containing stuff that looked nothing like books.

  ‘Leo okay?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes, he’s fine. He was tired,’ she told me. ‘It’s been a long day. I told him you weren’t feeling very well and that I was going to be around for a few days to take care of you both.’

  ‘Cool.’ I turned back to the bookcase. ‘Err, what are these? There are loads of them.’ I pulled a slim plastic case from the shelf. It had a picture of a red high-heeled shoe on the front.

  ‘It’s a DVD.’ My sister joined me by the unit.

  ‘What the frignacious is a DVD?’ I flipped it over and saw film images on the back.

  ‘It’s a film on disc. Look.’ She grabbed hold of a case from a shelf and opened it to reveal a round, thin, shiny silver object. I took it out of her hands and looked at my reflection in it.

  ‘Is it a mirror as well?’

  She burst out laughing and took another off the shelf. ‘No, look, you play it on a DVD player.’ She pointed to a slim silver machine underneath the television stand.

  ‘Shut the front door! What happened to video?’

  ‘Videos went out with Record Breakers, Nay.’

  ‘There’s no more Record Breakers? But Roy’s still alive, right?’

  Simone shook her head.

  I couldn’t believe that Roy was gone. I thought he would last forever. I asked her about TV. Apparently Simon and Trevor didn’t swing their pants anymore, Phillip Schofield’s hair had gone silver and he had swapped Gordon the Gopher for grown-up telly, and Andi Peters had retired Edd the Duck, and, well . . . was still Andi Peters. And Ant and Dec had left Byker Grove and were searching for Britain’s most talented celebrities in a jungle or sumthin’.

  Like a magpie watching over its horde, I continued to marvel at the shiny silver object in my hand. There were numerous DVDs on the shelves. I looked through them, recognizing some of the titles like Pretty in Pink and The Goonies.

  ‘But there are so many. Don’t I do anything apart from watch these things? I mean, we watched films and stuff, but it looks as if I’ve turned into some kind of div film nerd.’

  ‘No, Nay, this is cool. You’ve always loved films and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you think about it, you’ve had to stay at home most of the time to take care of a child, so what better thing to do than watch movies?’

  So far, sooooo offended, but instead I nodded, even though it seemed like such a waste of life. I thought of more interesting things I could do with my time than sit in front of a television all night, like, say, I don’t know, build a multi-million-dollar empire à la J. R. Ewing.

  I asked Simone why I had painted the living-room walls a spew-inducing salmon pink.

  ‘You said you were going for a Tuscany vibe,’ she answered.

  I shuddered. I didn’t get Adult Naomi’s taste in dec
or, but the kitchen with its bright orange and yellow wasn’t so bad.

  ‘You were going for a Mexican feel,’ she explained.

  I followed her up to the bathroom and looked at the cream and beige walls, and the small shells and pictures of beaches lining the walls and shelves. ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘I was going for the Blackpool feel.’

  My sister laughed and then we walked into the bedroom where this had all started, where I had woken up a few hours earlier, my life turned upside down. I looked at Simone for some futuristic-themed decorating explanation for the bare floorboards and grey plaster walls but she shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Don’t know what happened here, babe. You started stripping, and well . . .’

  She never finished, I thought. I looked around at the lovely bedroom furniture and wondered why Adult Naomi had not continued to make the place where she slept beautiful.

  So not my problem. Knowing why meant going into her headspace, which I was still not willing to enter. But I reckoned the room would do, until I could leave the hamster cage of a house and go back to my lovely, warm, already decorated bedroom.

  We made our way back downstairs and I noticed the other wooden units in the far corner of the living room. The larger one contained books and the smaller one held objects I did not recognize.

  ‘I still read, then?’ I let my eyes wander over the titles, everything ranging from Stephen King, which I recognized, to Harry Potter, which I didn’t.

  ‘Yep, still a bookworm. In fact, this is only a fifth of your collection.’

  ‘What?’ I spun around. There were at least two to three hundred books packed tightly on the shelves.

  She nodded and pulled out a book called Twilight. I got a strange feeling when I looked at it.

  ‘But Dad has the books stored in boxes because this house was too small for them.’ Simone put the book back and noticed my stunned expression. ‘It’s okay. Your old house was much bigger than this, Nay.’

  I slumped on the sofa, stared up at the books, then at my sister. ‘And why am I not still living in this big house?’

  She sat down next to me and put her arm around me. ‘It’s a long story, babe. I know you don’t remember and I know it doesn’t make sense, but it will. You gave the house up.’

  ‘What? Why?’ I rubbed my temples, trying to remember. I was beginning to feel sick again. Simone went into the kitchen to fetch me a drink. I grabbed the glass from her and took a large sip. Even the water tasted strange.

  ‘Nay, listen, I promise you will remember everything and it will make sense to you. Just try not to force yourself to remember anything. We’ll see the doctor on Monday and then at least we’ll know what’s wrong and what we can do about it. I’m sure he’ll figure out how we can get your memory back.’

  I nodded, and fake smiled; I’m leaving tonight anyway, I thought. My head was beginning to thump painfully and I was tired, very tired. I shoved over to make room for her and held on to her.

  ‘Do you want me to stay? I can stay and leave for work in the morning,’ she said.

  ‘I know but, no, it’s okay. I’m just gonna go to bed when you leave anyway.’

  I didn’t want to disrupt anyone’s life any more than I already had and, seeing my sister’s tired eyes, I knew I had to let her get back to some normality. She and Katie had been so calm all day. I had a strange feeling this wasn’t the first time she had had to deal with something like this. Yeah, Simone might be an adult but she was still my little sister and I had to take care of her and make sure she was okay, and asking her to do any more than she had already done felt well selfish of me.

  So I convinced her I would be fine to be left alone with Leo and that I was sure everything would go back to normal. She didn’t want to go and I secretly didn’t want her to leave me in what had to be Nightmare on frickin’ Elm Street, but I told her to go home and come back the next day. Besides, Adult Naomi would wake up tomorrow, not me, and everything would go back to normal.

  ‘Well, Leo basically wakes himself up for school, gets a quick wash, brushes his teeth and dresses himself. All you need to do is help him with his breakfast and give him this,’ she said, handing me the Star Trek phone. ‘He walks to school on his own now most of the time, so he’ll call you when he gets to the school gates,’ she continued, before showing me how to work the device. I was astounded at the fact that a ten-year-old boy had a mobile phone and dumbfounded at the size and capability of the small contraption. It was the same size as the one Adult Naomi had but you had to flip it open to make a call or answer it.

  ‘Nay, can I ask you something?’ Simone said.

  I nodded, still trying to take everything in.

  ‘Why do you keep saying “smeg”?’

  I looked at her, puzzled. What a strange question. ‘Smeg, smegging, smeghead?’ I questioned her memory. ‘It’s cold outside. There’s no kind of atmosphere. I’m all alone, more or less.’ I began to sing and click my fingers.

  Perturbed, her eyes widened at my off-key attempts to sing the theme tune to my favourite programme.

  ‘Lister? Rimmer? Cat?’ Surely she hadn’t forgotten. ‘Oh my dayz, Red Dwarf!’

  ‘That was your thing, Nay, not mine.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Yeah, sadly, smeg is no more. Craig Charles moved to Coronation Street.’

  ‘What?’ I laughed and then realized by my sister’s expression that she was in fact telling the truth.

  ‘It has been seventeen years, Nay.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, feeling dejected again. ‘It really has.’

  ‘But you can get it on DVD now, I think.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said. But it didn’t feel cool; it felt well sad that Red Dwarf was no more.

  My sister left for her own home, but not before she had been reassured countless times that I would be fine. She left me with all of her home and work numbers, and her mobile number. I took them, trying to figure out why people needed so many phone numbers. We agreed I would call her, no hesitation, if there was a problem.

  I listened by his door to see if Leo was asleep. His room was quiet.

  When I got into Adult Naomi’s bed I curled my body up really small and squeezed my eyes tight shut. I thought if I concentrated enough, I would be able to somehow find Adult Naomi and return her to her body so that when I woke up the next day, I would be back in my own home and back in 1992.

  My mind was a place of darkness; I couldn’t hear or see a thing. Nothing or no one existed, not even the pain I had been feeling all day. My body was too exhausted even to hurt anymore.

  Please, please, please, Adult Naomi, where the hell are you?

  I pleaded with the darkness to stop hiding her, to stop hiding her memories and release me from my futuristic prison.

  Then I saw it, a faint light in the distance. It felt like a dream; my eyes were closed, but I knew I wasn’t quite asleep because I could still hear my own breathing.

  I allowed myself to follow it and the more I focused on it, the bigger it got, until it got so close, it was undeniable. I was on a dark, deserted street, the only light provided by the orange glow of a street light. Behind me was a house. I called out and my voice echoed back to me, and then an eerie silence fell. Where am I? The sound of my breath faded and my body felt heavy; I drifted into a dream.

  I turned around and found myself staring at a house, and as I did, a strange feeling crept over me. It was quiet, it was empty and the windows were dark, but I knew something. Then it dawned on me, the way the house made me feel. I had been here before. I couldn’t remember, but it felt so familiar. I had that same feeling.

  I had seen this house before.

  It was déjà vu.

  4

  Window to the World

  Sometimes the windows steam up

  and you can’t see what’s outside

  but then you take your finger

  and make different shapes

  on the glass inside;

  that always ma
kes me smile

  N. S.

  I had to push down every feeling inside of me to stop myself from screaming when I woke up the next morning. I was still in the same bed, still in the same room and still in the same house. I was still in the future. I tried to calm myself by counting the little bumps on the woodchip ceiling.

  One, two, three, four, five . . . this isn’t really happening to me . . . six, seven, eight, nine, ten . . . this sooooo can’t be happening to me.

  But it was and I couldn’t stop it. I was majorly pissed off.

  And then I remembered Leo.

  He was already awake, sitting up in bed with a sleepy smile on his face.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said to him, sounding as happy as I could manage given how I felt.

  ‘Mornin’, Mum,’ he said, halfway through a yawn, and climbed out of his bed.

  I followed him around thinking he was cute bananas, watching him happily get himself ready for school, until he shoved me out of the bathroom for some privacy. He ate his cereal, packed his bag and put on his coat.

  ‘Is it okay for me to skate later on, when I finish my homework?’ he asked me as I opened the door for him.

  ‘Err, yeah, sure.’ I reckoned it would be okay.

  ‘Yes!’ He fist-pumped the air, kissed me goodbye, and was gone through the door quick time, leaving me standing there trying to style out13 the daft grin on my face.

  The sadness of still waking up in the future seemed to hide itself when Leo was around. He felt like my younger brother and I was kinda cool with playing the big sister while I was there. Adult Naomi’s life was bogus, but I had to make sure he was okay. A few moments after he left I called him on his mobile. Telling him to have a kriss14 day at school confused him, though. He called me lame and laughed at me.

  I went back to Adult Naomi’s bedroom, sat on her bed, and took a good look around, searching for any memories of her life or even the familiar house I had seen before I fell asleep. Nothing.

  I decided to start with what I knew.

  I know who I am, I told myself. I’m Naomi Jacobs and I’m fifteen. I’m supposed to be revising for my smegging French exam, ugh! But I’m stuck in this frickin’ place.