Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  I’m the daughter of my mum, Eve, and my dad, Art, who lives with his girlfriend Marlene in Liverpool – where I was born – and we visit them in the summer or at Christmas. I’m Simone’s big sister and . . . okay, so, yeah, I don’t, like, know everything, but I know life is a mix of the good, the bad and the downright bogus but I get it; well, I think I get it. I, like, wanna figure it out and do my own thing, make my own way in the world.

  My mum says we left Liverpool when I was five because of the riots. I don’t remember them but I kind of remember my stepdad, Joseph, moving in with us when I was about seven or eight. He has a trailer load of kids who come and stay for weekends or holidays and sometimes I think it’s well cool having loads of stepbrothers and sisters, but other times it’s bogus ’cause our house is so small and there are seven of them. One time, when I was twelve, I was so totally pissed off that there was no room, I slept in a sleeping bag in the bath. Joseph is mega, though; he gives me pocket money and plays the drums and always tells us these hard riddles that we never know the answers to. Apart from when he gives us loooonnnng lectures about the meaning of life, I think he’s a safe stepdad.

  Our house is in Wolverhampton, small town, small-minded people that talk about you all the time, and if they ain’t got nothin’ to say, they’ll make it up. School’s okay; some of my teachers are, like, total smegheads, but my friends are cool – I’ve got nuff love for my friends, even though most of them come from completely different backgrounds to me. I play sports at school; favourites gotta be hockey of course . . . oh, and netball. I really like, no, luurve eating chocolate. Deep down I am kinda sensitive, and I do think a lot about stuff, but I can always make the best out of any situation, can’t I? Well, if you don’t like me, you can go and swing for all I care. Which I tell people to do on a regs,15 and the things I don’t wanna share with peeps I share with my diary.

  The diaries!

  I got off the bed and looked around the room. It didn’t take me long to find the diaries packed away in a cardboard box under the bed. I pulled it out. It was full of books of different sizes and colours. Some had patterns on the front; others were plain. Some were bound in leather; others hardback.

  My head started to pound again.

  No, not yet.

  I pushed the box back under the bed and carried on trying to remember what I knew about myself. This somehow stopped the thumping pain.

  From what Katie and Simone had told me the night before, I figured Adult Naomi’s life was the complete opposite of how I thought it should have turned out. It felt like I was watching her life standing on the other side of a window.

  In the future she was still the daughter of Eve and Art, but Art had had another child, a boy called JJ who was eighteen years younger than she was. Eve was miles away and I figured out Adult Naomi wasn’t speaking to her. I didn’t know why and I didn’t want to know. Besides, Simone and Katie seemed to go quiet or change the subject every time I said her name.

  I was still Simone’s big sister, but of course the biggest thing was Adult Naomi actually having a son, which I didn’t quite get. On the one hand, I didn’t understand her decision to have a child in the first place, and on the other, to do it and not marry the guy. Okay, Art and Eve never married, but surely Adult Naomi would if she wanted to settle down and have a kid. Didn’t she, like, want a husband?

  I kinda wanted to meet Leo’s father, but at the same time, didn’t want to know who Adult Naomi had chosen. There had to be a reason she wasn’t with him and I got the sense from Katie and Simone’s reactions that it wasn’t a good reason.

  What I totally didn’t get was that she was doing a degree in psychology of all things. I mean, come on, why would she want to sit and figure out people’s problems for a living? So she could graduate, she had to sit four final exams and was trying to revise before she disappeared. Is this why she disappeared? She didn’t want to take her smegging exams!

  I wanted to write. Or be a news journalist and see the world. Did the fact that she’d had a child change all of that? I didn’t really know about Adult Naomi’s behaviour, or the way she felt about stuff, but I figured her life couldn’t have been that great, considering she smoked cigarettes, drank way too much coffee, and hardly slept.

  What happened to you, Adult Naomi?

  No, I thought. What happens to me? Do I pass my exams? Does Robert Harris find out if I fancy him? Does Simone eventually stop using my hair gel? Do I have anything to do with the way the future has turned out?

  Katie phoned me when she got back from taking her kids to school to see if I was okay. I told her I was and that Leo was cool. She reminded me that if I needed her I only had to call her and she would come around straight away. She seemed to be a good friend to Adult Naomi and I was glad she was in her life.

  Simone got the afternoon off work and came home to find me curled up on the sofa staring at the flat screenage, disturbed on some other totally mental level. What the hell had happened to TV?

  ‘Sim, they all look like cartoons.’ I was hypnotized. Technicoloured faces stared back at me, features animated to within an inch of their life, with these sharp, intense rainbow colours that somehow highlighted each pore, each line, each wrinkle, each crease of their skin. I could see every tiny movement, every step, every wave of an arm or expression on a face. It was like that moment when Dorothy opens the door of her sepia-toned fallen house and reveals an intensely hued kaleidoscopic Oz on the other side.

  Simone sat next to me. I stared at her clothes: washed-out denim jeans and a thick blue hoodie with the words ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ on it. Wasn’t Abercrombie a street name in Liverpool? And who was Fitch? I shrugged it off; maybe it was the new fashion, to wear expensive-looking jumpers named after random streets. What had happened to Fruit of the Loom? Was there still Benetton? What about LA Gear?

  ‘It’s digital TV, babe.’ She took the remote from my hand.

  I flicked over to a channel actually called ‘Reality TV’ and watched as it advertised reruns of a show called I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here!

  ‘Please tell me, what the Gaddafi is this all about?’ I said.

  ‘No memories yet?’ asked Simone.

  I shook my head, mesmerized by the scenes playing out in front of me of unknown adults in goggles eating insects and trying not to throw up.

  ‘Why are they doing this?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because they’re sad, and they used to be famous and now they’re not,’ Simone replied.

  ‘This makes them famous again?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, only the winner. The rest just leave with a fat cheque in their pockets. They say it’s for charity, though,’ she finished.

  I looked back at the TV. ‘Duh, so run a marathon then! What has happened to TV, man? Where are, like, all the real programmes? Is there still Channel 4?’

  ‘Yeah, but they have Big Brother,’ she replied.

  My only reference to the term ‘Big Brother’ was from an Orwell book called 1984 that I’d read when I was thirteen. My dad had let me watch the John Hurt film, which had led to me reading the book. It was unsettling on many levels. Did I even want to know what the future version entailed?

  As I sat and listened to her, my mind became totally disturbed. I was shocked to hear how people with no talent became rich and famous overnight by actually doing nothing other than allowing millions of people to watch them. My fear of this unknown phenomenon translated into hostility and I deemed it sick, bordering on the weird. I couldn’t believe it when she told me Adult Naomi had actually enjoyed watching Big Brother and had invested time and energy into following it. No wonder she hadn’t built her empire! She was watching this pants.

  I couldn’t handle any more information. I jumped up from the sofa and pressed the off button, my hands trembling. ‘This is madness, total mental madness,’ I said. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Concerned at my indignation, Simone suggested I get dressed and she take me food shopping.

&nb
sp; ‘Your cupboards are bare,’ she said, grabbing a black handbag from the side of the sofa. ‘You’re going to need some money from the cashpoint.’

  ‘Money?’ I was mystified. ‘I have money? Where from? I don’t bloody work.’

  ‘Now, Nay, don’t freak out, okay . . .’ She held up her hands.

  ‘What?’ I said slowly, unsure if I wanted to hear what she was about to tell me. Although I knew it couldn’t top the ‘Adult Naomi didn’t even own the crappy house she lived in’ fact.

  ‘Well, you have basically been living off a student loan for the past few years. You have some savings, but your weekly costs are covered by income support,’ Simone stated.

  ‘Income what?’

  ‘It’s a weekly payment you get from the government to help with the cost of living—’

  ‘From the government?’ I jumped up, interrupting her explanation. ‘I’m a single mother on the sosh?16’

  ‘Nay, calm down.’ She lowered her hands.

  ‘Calm down! Calm frickin’ down! Are you smegging serious, Simone? I’m on social security? Oh God, this is worse than I imagined.’ I burst into tears and, swinging my arms around, I flung myself down onto the sofa.

  Living in Manchester, I could just about deal with. Having a son, I was managing to get my head around. Being single wasn’t a total surprise. But living a life in which I was doing a degree I would never use and taking weekly government handouts to survive brought on a whole other level of shame and anger at Adult Naomi.

  I was cracking. The hot tears felt acidic as they stung my face. Simone put her arm around my shoulder.

  ‘Nay, listen to me, you’ve got to stop reacting like this. You’re going to make yourself ill. You’ve only been on this money since you lived in this house. You have worked every single day of your life since you were sixteen.’

  I gulped back the taste of bile in my throat. ‘I have?’

  ‘Yes. You have even run three businesses successfully; two of them were your own.’

  ‘Have I?’

  She nodded. ‘One was a friend’s haulage company you helped run when you were twenty-one, when Leo was first born, and the other two, you were a teacher and therapist.’

  ‘So what happened, Sim?’

  Being told Adult Naomi had run three businesses seemed to spark something inside me. I felt like an artist restoring the colours on a faded canvas and in those last few moments I had somehow become sensitive to the details of her life. For the first time since I had woken up in the future, I really wanted to know what had happened. Even as a little kid I had possessed an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. My mum reckoned it was because when I was a baby, I always seemed to attract money, no matter where I went or who I met. I was like a pudgy pirate in Pampers – someone always crossed my palm with silver. Seeing quite a lucrative opportunity here, when Eve and Art had no money for bread and cigs, they would dress me in my finest and take me down the pub. People would coo over how gorgeous a baby I was and dip in their pockets. The drunker they were, the more they gave. And as I grew older, I got a feel for money. I liked getting it and having it and spending it. So I developed a talent for selling. My wares were anything from shrunken crisp-packet badges to sweets from my own tuck shop. If I could sell it, I would. School was my market and I was The Fresh Princess of Belle Queenswood Comprehensive ready to make my fortune.

  Had Adult Naomi lost that entrepreneurial spirit?

  Simone tried to explain. ‘Nay, it’s a long and complicated story, and if I tell you, you will try and remember and your head might start hurting again.’

  As if on cue, a sharp pain stabbed at the back of my skull. I held on to my head and winced.

  ‘Do you want a painkiller?’ She stood up. ‘Or a drink?’

  I thought about what my sister had just said. I couldn’t deny any longer the need to know who Adult Naomi was and the life she had created for herself. I made a solemn promise to myself that if by Monday I was still stuck in the future, then I was going to find out just exactly what had happened to her.

  Simone returned from the kitchen with a glass of water and a small white pill.

  ‘Listen, at least you haven’t given Jeremy Kyle a call yet, so all hope is not lost, okay?’ She smiled reassuringly at me.

  ‘Who the frick is Jeremy Kyle?’

  ‘He’s like Jerry Springer, but British and angry, and a bit of a dick really.’

  ‘Oh God. My life is over.’ I placed the painkiller on my tongue, drank the water in one big gulp and slammed the glass down on the bookshelf next to the sofa several times. It sounded like a judge slamming a gavel, calling order to a chaotic court.

  ‘This cannot be real, this cannot be my life,’ I said.

  I thought of Katie and her suggestion I should go to hospital. I felt like I should go, but there was something stopping me.

  I needed to change the subject. ‘Did you say there isn’t any food?’ I asked Simone.

  ‘Well, there is, but you need bits – milk and stuff.’

  ‘Let’s go shopping then.’ I stood up and straightened my crumpled pyjamas as if this act would somehow smooth out my thoughts. ‘I’ll have a quick bath and get dressed.’

  ‘Okay.’ My sister picked up the remote. ‘I’ll just watch a bit of MTV while you do.’

  I turned to see an image of half-naked girls simulating sex moves, rubbing their bodies against each other and gyrating suggestively over a rapper reclining in a chair. I shuddered. Oh, it was all so wrong, so, so wrong. What else was I going to discover about the planet? About this life? And more importantly, how was my fifteen-year-old mind going to cope?

  Fighting my curiosity was exhausting me. On the one hand, I wanted an explanation before I left, but on the other, I was afraid to know too much in case it meant that I would remain in the future. It worried me that I might find out too much about Adult Naomi, like her, get attached and not be able to leave her world behind.

  As I ran the bath I thought that maybe Adult Naomi was in that house, the one I had seen in my mind before I’d fallen asleep. Maybe I could somehow get in through a window and look for her. Maybe I could find her, make her return and I could get out of the future.

  In the meantime, the easiest choice was to blank everything as much as I could. Whatever hurt the least. I climbed into the bath and agreed with myself that, yes, maybe it was better to ignore that house and look to others to take over. The problem was that the only three people who could do this for me were my sister, Katie – a woman who had known Adult Naomi for five years – and a ten-year-old boy. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel that if I wanted to get out of the future, the house was the only way. And if I wanted to know more, I would have to venture further out into Adult Naomi’s world.

  As I got dressed, I suddenly thought, What if I can’t ever leave the future? What if I’m stuck here and I’ve got no way of getting home? What if Adult Naomi doesn’t come back?

  In the wardrobe mirror I caught sight of my aged face. In spite of the dark circles around my eyes, the spots and the boobs that no longer defied gravity, I still cared about the body in which I had awoken. The thought of possibly having a brain tumour was the stuff of nightmares, and I didn’t want to put this body at risk or through any unnecessary harm. I wondered what could be hiding inside of me so terrible that could cause brain damage. What was so bad that Adult Naomi had had to leave and take seventeen years with her?

  If I was still here the next day and the day after that, I would have no choice. I would have to get to know the parts of Adult Naomi’s life I had been ignoring.

  But first it was time for me to venture out into this strange and unfamiliar world with my sister.

  Out into the future.

  5

  Global Warning

  An eye for an eye

  will make the whole world

  blind.

  MAHATMA GANDHI

  The future is now called the twenty-first century and it’s kinda, like, a bit fre
aky, like Freaky Friday – freaky in the way that you know it belongs but it doesn’t quite fit.

  The future has:

  laptops

  and MacBooks

  and PCs

  and desktops

  and USB sticks

  and touch-screen phones

  and iPods

  and the Internet

  and Google

  and Facebook

  and YouTube

  and reams and reams and reams of information.

  Simone explained all this to me on the way to the shops. My brain was smacked speechless.

  I mean, we had computers at school, with massive keyboards and small black-screened monitors, and when you typed the letters were orange. If you were Mulder and Scully, you had one of those newfangled computers with a bright blue screen and white letters that you could type your X-files into. The computer Art bought us a couple of Christmases ago was a Commodore 64 and the program played on a tape machine. And Joseph got us one of those new front-loader video players when Mum threw out the top-loader Betamax. But TV kinda takes the piss out of the new car phone/mobile phone idea. They’re for those suited, ‘Loadsa Money’-type banker gits who drive red sports cars and carry Filofaxes.

  The future also has:

  chip

  and pin.

  It totally blew my brain when my sister and I stood in front of the cashpoint machine while she showed me how to use my ‘debit’ card. I remembered cashpoint machines but these were, like, sooooo different. I stood there, smegged to silence by the colour screen and mini camera watching me like a suspicious eye.

  Like Katie’s telephone number, Simone and I guessed the four-digit number going around in my head was in fact attached to the card. I was confused. Why could I remember numbers?

  Simone parked outside a humongous Tesco.

  ‘Whoa!’ I stopped and stared at it. ‘I thought we were only popping out for bread and milk?’

  She turned the engine off and climbed out.

  ‘Where are the shops?’ I asked her, following.

  ‘There aren’t that many local shops anymore; the big supermarket chains have forced most of them out of business and pretty much taken over everything.’