Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  As we walked through the automatic doors, I noticed a large sign at the entrance that told the shopper that it was an ‘eco-friendly’ store.

  Simone continued to explain to me that Wal-Mart had taken over Asda Dales and dropped the Dales, Tesco now offered everything from petrol to credit cards, and Netto, Lidl and Aldi were new and popular cheaper supermarkets from Europe.

  As we walked through the aisles of this gigantic place, my senses were slapped silly by the smell of freshly brewed coffee, baked bread and roasting chickens. My stomach rumbled loudly and I felt the sudden need to buy as much food as I possibly could. I followed my sister around and couldn’t believe the variety of foods on offer – Kosher food for the Jews, Halal meat for the Muslims, Caribbean spices for the Caribbeans, Polish food for the Poles, and even tacos for those with a desire for Mexican food. There was gluten free, sugar free, wheat free, dairy free. The choice was endless. They didn’t have the familiar orange and white labels of Happy Shopper, which was the cheapest brand on the corner shop shelves when I was a kid.

  And what was this ‘organic’ food everywhere? Simone explained what it meant and I was baffled why people would choose to buy food full of chemicals anyway. She said that some people didn’t have a choice, that there was now something called ‘genetically modified’ to deal with the growing demand for food and the increasing world population. My brain so couldn’t deal. I felt like a small child wandering up and down the aisles of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory staring in awe and wonder at the limitless stuff available. How did you make a choice?

  ‘Is there anything you want, sis?’ Simone stopped, pivoted, and headed back up the dairy aisle. I was staring at rice milk, trying to figure out how you got milk from rice.

  ‘Erm, cottage cheese.’ I put the rice carton back on the shelf. ‘Oh, and pickled onions.’

  Simone stopped and turned to me.

  ‘You don’t eat dairy, especially not cottage cheese.’ She pushed the trolley on.

  ‘I don’t eat dairy? What? Like, I don’t drink milk?’

  ‘Nope, nor cheese or ice cream. Well, sometimes you allow yourself ice cream, but not much because it runs your stomach.’

  I burst out laughing. ‘Runs it where?’ I watched as she put the ‘dairy-free’ butter into the trolley. ‘Are you squerious?17’

  ‘Yep, you don’t eat dairy or pickled onions. I haven’t seen you eat those since . . .’

  She paused and looked at me intently.

  ‘What? Since when?’

  ‘Since you were fifteen.’

  I rolled my eyes at the yogurt pots and followed her as she set off again.

  ‘What? Why does it make me ill? What happened?’

  ‘You turned vegan.’ She manoeuvred the trolley round me. I was glued to the floor, staring into the frozen-food space, confused. A vegan? I don’t, like, eat anything except vegetables?

  The only vegans I had ever known were Pippa and Robin, a couple of long-haired hippies who used to live a few doors away from us. They and their four white-blond-haired rosy-cheeked kids were vegans and they were, like, always skinny and always happy. I was chubby and miserable, but thought they were weird and cool. I used to sit with Pippa outside their house on summer nights while the children played barefoot on the street and she sang to herself while making daisy chains and beaded necklaces.

  Robin loved music and taught me the first three chords of the James Bond 007 theme tune on his battered guitar. Before I had to go home, Robin would bring out his small metal pan pipe and Pippa would dance around in her long flowing skirts and tie-dyed tops, encouraging me to dance with her. I used to wish I were the fifth child in their little hippie, vegan, barefoot life. I was totally morosed out when they left for a five-bedroom house in the posh part of town, and confused at how two people who didn’t work, who sat on cushions instead of sofas, could afford such a big place. And then one day, a neighbour told me it wasn’t the meat-free, vegetable-only diet that made them so laid-back and happy; it was the amount of magic mushrooms they ate and the mounds of weed they smoked.

  Clearly, Adult Naomi was no hippie; she wore skinny Morrissey-type jeans, Ugly boots and loose-fitting jumpers, which were supposed to be dresses. I didn’t feel the need to play pan pipes or make daisy chains and yet here I was, standing in the middle of this ginormous food mecca, trying to get my head around the apparent crapation of my taste buds.

  Coffee? No milk? Ugh! The thought made want to blow many serious chunks all over the Formica-tiled floor. No, I wanted cottage cheese and pickled onions and no one was gonna get in my way. Eventually we found the largest tub of cottage cheese and an even larger jar of pickled onions. I wondered why everything had grown to, like, three times its size.

  Cottage cheese and pickled onions were all I ever ate. Well, that and jacket potatoes and salad, low-fat crisps and bananas. By thirteen, I was fat and though people said I ‘carried it well’ and that I didn’t look ‘that heavy’, compared to all of my many skinny friends I felt big and clumsy. And then Sister Sugar Puff Teeth (the school nurse; she had bad teeth) told me that I had to lose weight. I cried to my dad on the phone and he put me on a thousand-calorie-a-day diet. Then I got, like, totally obsessed with calories and realized that cottage cheese and pickled onions – the strongest tasting vegetable that could prop up the tasteless cheese – were my best friends. But my stomach couldn’t handle it so I became kinda part-time bulimic, binging on a regs, and then throwing it all up. It’s just tooooo hard to function on celery and crackers.

  According to Simone this lasted on and off – mostly on – until I turned eighteen and discovered something called amphetamines. I decided I didn’t want to know what the Gaddafi they were so asked her more about being vegan.

  She explained to me how, when Adult Naomi was twenty-four and she was studying Chinese Medicine at university, she decided to change her diet to vegan and did a lot of yoga. Apparently, her chickpea burgers were to die for and she was quite happy living the kelp and brown rice lifestyle.

  ‘Well . . . what happened then?’ I was fascinated and repulsed all at the same time.

  ‘You quit uni, started smoking weed again, ate red meat, and decided to be a psychologist.’ Simone picked up some bin bags and threw them in the trolley.

  The Linda McCartney (not just Paul’s wife but creator of meat-free food) soya sausages (sausages from a bean?) and rice milk lifestyle sounded well better than a steak-eating, stoned psychologist.

  Simone did her best to buy as many things as she thought Leo and I would eat while I followed her, cast under the supermarket spell. It went something like this: ‘Buy one, get one free, no, two for the price of one; better still, three for the price of two, or how about save £s and double up your points.’ Points? You were rewarded for shopping?

  I lost count of the amount of cameras watching us. What were they watching anyway? Surely people would be too afraid to rob anything; you’d have to run a marathon to get to the door with your stuff. Wasn’t it only a matter of time before some government-approved robot would jump out of the eco-friendly fridge and rugby tackle you to the ground?

  My senses seriously smegged into a shopping stupor. I stood in a daze, watching my sister interact with a different kind of computer, which told her to place her items in the bagging area, and asked which method of payment she was using. No shopkeeper, no sales assistant, except for a woman who stood at the head of the machines and ran to the rescue if your items wouldn’t scan.

  Scan?

  Simone told me that the barcode had taken over the shopping experience and was supposed to make everything much more ‘convenient’.

  Disturbed beyond reality, by the time we’d reached the car, I realized there was something missing. It was the familiarity of the local shops, the friendliness of the staff that you got to know during your weekly shop. The megastore was cold and clinical, with way too much choice. And yet there was something inside me that made me feel that if I kept going back, I would one
day have the friendly experience I had just now left without. Was this how everyone who had swapped the local shop for the supermarket felt? Were they waiting to visit enough times so that eventually someone would recognize them, stop, and chat with them? Like a Cheers for lonely customers.

  Where everybody knows your name.

  I was missing home – the local village where everyone knew my name, or rather my mum’s, and the smaller shops you left with a smile or a clip round the ear if you tried to nick something. My head was starting to hurt. I needed another painkiller as my shopping expedition had only left me with more questions. I also had a sudden urge to eat a Marathon and read a newspaper.

  ‘Oh, why didn’t you say? We could have got you one from Tesco’s.’ Simone slowed the car down. ‘Shall we go back?’

  ‘No, I don’t want one from there. I want one from a newspaper shop.’

  ‘Erm, right, okay.’ She pulled out of the large car park. ‘I think there is one in the village.’

  I craved some small-town reality. If I could get just a small dose, maybe it would make the thumping pain go away.

  Minutes later, Simone pulled into a much smaller car park behind a bank. On the opposite side was a row of shops including a newsagent’s. I smiled triumphantly and jumped out of the car, passing a library and a chemist on my way. I could understand why Adult Naomi had chosen to live here. It reminded me of home and instantly, as if by some memory magic, the pain tearing through my skull subsided. I walked into the shop, a psychedelic purple and silver note in my hand, and bought a few newspapers and as many magazines as it could afford, which was, like, four.

  I also asked the guy for a Marathon. He looked confused, then laughed and pointed at a Snickers. As I left the shop, I couldn’t help it any longer. I had to get to know about the world I found myself in, here and now. In the supermarket, Simone had started to tell me about people’s attempts to live life in an eco-friendly way, that because they were wearing out the planet, everyone was now recycling, reusing, genetically modifying and saving energy. But what the smeg was a carbon footprint or global warming? Was that the same as the greenhouse effect we were told about at school? And what was this thing called the Internet?

  I had woken up in the future and as I walked back to the car, I figured I should fill my mind with as much information about the world as possible before I left. It was a better option to filling it with Adult Naomi’s memories and maybe it could help in understanding why she had left.

  I was on a mish. I was going to go global.

  By the time we had finished shopping, Simone needed to collect Leo from school; we ate at Katie’s, and went back home early.

  They let me pick the film, so we sat down to watch Back to the Future on UKTV Gold. I felt like I was Marty himself, except there was no Doc, and no help to guide me through the maze of a confusing future or a mysterious past.

  After another night filled with tossing and turning and strange dreams, I woke up to Simone snoring next to me and Leo standing by my bed, asking if he could have a sausage sandwich. His wide, dimple-cheeked smile quickly washed away any terror that had piggybacked itself from my sleep and I figured I could work the grill out to make him breakfast.

  It wasn’t long before we were sitting on the sofa together, eating tomato-ketchup-laden ‘chicken sausage’ (?) sandwiches while we watched Saturday-morning programmes on the Disney Channel. Even though I couldn’t remember anything about him, I liked being around and spending time with Leo. Every fear I had about myself, the world or this strange life seemed to disappear the moment he looked at me with his gorgeous brown eyes. On hearing his cute laugh, my confused existence became as clear as it could be. It made me feel real. Like I belonged. It was kinda strange, but as I watched him giggle at the slapstick programme about twin boys living in a hotel with a single mother, I wondered whether this was what Adult Naomi felt like around him. Protective and proud. Kinda like a big sister. And hey, it seemed like single motherhood wasn’t as bad as I’d first thought. Well, Disney didn’t think so.

  The smell of cooked sausages woke Simone up. Once we finished our breakfast, she suggested we go out for the day, maybe to her house, and then for a walk. Leo was happy – apparently he had friends in the gated community where she lived – but I sooooo did not want to leave the house. I was still digesting everything that I had experienced in the futuristic supermarket and needed time to chill, absorb it all.

  My ignorance was making me feel exposed, vulnerable, as if I should know everything about the world, but didn’t, so was, like, really stupid. I wondered if Adult Naomi felt like that or if it was just me. So I faked extreme head sensitivity and told Simone I wanted to rest for the day. Besides, I still had all of the newspapers and magazines to get through and needed to know more about the world before I ventured back into it. Simone and Leo left. I went back to bed and curled up under the duvet to indulge in my papered realm.

  The magazines fascinated and horrified me. I was used to Just Seventeen and Smash Hits, looking at pictures of Take That and NKOTB, doing the girly quizzes about boys – what they think, how to get one, and how to keep one once you have one – getting tips from supermodels Naomi Campbell or Linda Evangelista on how to get fuller lips. If my friends and I wanted a gossipy glossy, we’d buy More and sit in the back of French class curling each other’s eyelashes and taking the piss out of the ‘Position of the Week’ section. Fast forward seventeen years and More just seemed to have . . . more. More men, more make-up, more fashion, more sex, more, more, more.

  Cosmo followed, as did Vogue and Marie Claire. I flipped from page to page, reading shocking true stories of women from around the world who were suffering from unimaginable oppression and poverty, only to flip over the page and see a model draped all over a Gucci bag. Adverts for petrol-guzzling cars sat next to articles about ice caps melting and severe weather disasters and saving the polar bears. I was freaking out. These magazines were contradictory, schizophrenic, masochistic publications that flaunted extreme wealth on the one hand, yet exploited poverty on the other.

  The fashion was as strange as the Ugly boots. Embellishment! Everything was ‘embellished’: bags, shoes, jackets, all studded with metallic gold and silver studs. The dress of the season was ‘bandage’. Exsqueese me? Didn’t that usually happen if you’d hurt yourself?

  But the thing that freaked me out the most was page after page of perfect-looking people. I mean, come on, where were the freckles, spots, blemishes? And what had happened to real bodies? What was with the size zero?

  Was this for real? Did people, like, really wanna be, like, NO SIZE? I mean, AT ALL? As if! ‘Nobody looks like this in real life,’ I said out loud. This is impossible! WHAT THE SMEG HAS HAPPENED?

  This was beyond absurd. My brain was having a total spaz attack! I threw down the magazines in disgust. I felt patronized and suddenly very inadequate, like when Mr Benson, headmaster of my school, had told me off for telling my typing teacher to go and throw her knickers in the air and see how time flies while I was walking out of my exam. This feeling was supposed to end with school, but something told me Adult Naomi and half the female population on the planet had become accustomed to it. It was inevitable if they read these types of magazines. How could anyone live up to what they saw in those pages? The flawless skin, the skinny bodies, the exclusive get-yourself-into-debt-for-fashion store card, the celebrity diet, and then the fatty recipes on the next page. The whole thing about how wine is bad for you, chocolate is good, no, wine is full of antioxidants (huh?) and chocolate is bad; exercise should be done two times, no, three times, no, four times a week, for ten minutes, no twenty, no, no less than thirty; eat berries and lose weight (duh), no, eat burgers and lose weight (duh).

  Relationships – what he’s thinking; who cares what he’s thinking? But you’re an independent woman and you don’t need a man; still, you can find The One before you’re thirty. Sex is good, but it can kill you (?). Sex is bad and you’ll go to hell or join a cult
and give up your life to the Prophet.

  The whole lifestyle dumping truck of ‘you’re not good enough no matter what you do’ shebang!

  I mean, my fifteen-year-old mind knew it was pointless chasing after something that was never going to happen, hence walking out of the exam (who wants to type for a career anyway? It wasn’t 1950). And yet I had an eerie sensation that I wasn’t alone in the weird sense of lack I felt after reading those magazines, the same way I had felt after our supermarket sweep.

  Something was missing.

  Kinda like that feeling when someone tells you a joke, but you’re stuck in a five-second delay before you get the punchline? Kinda like that.

  I turned to the newspapers, starting with the red tops. The April weather was going to be full of cloud and rain. There was still a Page Three girl proudly showing off her boobs, no sign of a pencil case. People were still dying in the most heinous ways and a young African-American senator was running to be president of America and was ahead in the polls.

  Hold up, wait a minute! Did I read right? I flipped over the page to see if the next page contained some crap journalist’s idea of Joke of the Month, but found no such thing. For real, a black man was hoping to take up residence in the White House. People were actually positive he had a chance of winning.

  I picked up the mobile phone and, concentrating hard, remembered Simone’s demonstration of how to call her.

  ‘Hiya, babe,’ she answered, sounding upbeat. ‘You okay?’

  ‘What? Oh yes, totally, yeah, I’m fine. But sis, is it real, that, like, is there, like, gonna be a black president of America?’

  ‘What? Erm, yeah, well, that’s what they reckon if Obama wins.’

  ‘Shut the front door! No. Way. Jose!’ I was stunned.

  ‘Serious, this is big stuff, and after the last president, America needs hope; the whole bloody planet does.’