by Naomi Jacobs
‘Why, what happened?’ I so wanted to know.
‘Why don’t you Google it?’
She reminded me that Leo had shown me how to use the computer the night before. Apart from the odd strange look and question of ‘Don’t you remember this?’ he had seemed to accept the excuse that I was helping him practise for senior school. To this, he replied that it was now called ‘high school’ and rolled his eyes. I stuck my tongue out at him and then remembered I was supposed to be a mum and straightened my face.
Why was the UK Americanizing everything? First high fives, then everyone started using the word ‘lame’, then supersized food, and now schools have grades not years. Is this what happens when you go global? I wondered.
I hung up the mobile on my sister and followed the steps to access Google. Fascinated by its ability to produce endless information at the touch of a button, I decided whoever invented the Internet was top frickin’ bananas. I wanted to venture into the unknown terrain of cyberspace.
As far as my world went, the closest I got to politics was Spitting Image, those large rubber puppets of MPs or pop and film stars. Most of the political jokes were beyond me, but I just loved it when they did Michael Jackson’s heliumed voice, and I always creased up laughing at the size of Mick Jagger’s exaggerated lips. In 1992, Bill Clinton was running for the American presidency; John Major had been elected Prime Minister here and was penned the dullest politician to ever walk the planet until he started attacking single mums, saying they were raising a generation of sociopaths and criminals. George Bush Sr and his band of ‘Coalition Forces’ had not long kicked Saddam’s arse out of Kuwait and back to Iraq. None of this really affected me; if I ever caught Spitting Image, the rebel leader they took the piss out of was Colonel Gaddafi who was reportedly behind the murder of a British police officer outside of the Libyan Embassy and the Lockerbie bombing. In the future, I suddenly wanted to know exactly what had happened since.
My sister had told me to Google three words: George Bush Jr. I did just that and was absolutely and utterly horrified as I read about the horrors of 9/11 and 7/7. It took me most of the day and I needed to take a few breaks in between but I spent hours reading article after article about the War on Terror.
Tears flowed heavily down my face as I read of the lives lost and the families devastated by the attacks. This search for ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had led to a war that was still raging, and to websites of endless conspiracy theories about the whole administration. They were after oil, and the Twin Towers was a set-up by the American government themselves; George Jr was just going after Saddam for revenge (or to impress his dad). Many protested about the war all over the world, from the Oscar-winning movie star to the average Joe on the street, and were silenced or ostracized.
The sites led me to more sites where I read about the genocide in Darfur, the lawlessness and civil war in Somalia, the AIDS epidemic wiping out a whole generation of Africans. Hurricane Katrina, Britain flooding, extreme weather conditions affecting extreme poverty in the Third World, and the famine in Ethiopia, which had worsened since the first Live Aid in 1988.
I slammed the laptop lid down; I couldn’t take anymore. Was this for real? The planet’s situation had got so much worse, not better as I had imagined it would, and I felt so helpless. One positive thing was that there hadn’t been a nuclear war but from what I had read, it seemed like the world was only moments away from it happening. Those CND marches didn’t work then, I thought.
I wiped my tears, and picked up a broadsheet paper, the front of which spoke about new regulations on cloning human DNA. I took a deep breath and opened it up to the middle section. It read ‘HUNGER. STRIKES. RIOTS. THE FOOD CRISIS BITES’ in big black bold type surrounded by images of people from all over the world scrambling for handouts from aid aeroplanes and queuing up outside stores to buy their food in bulk, not knowing when the next delivery would be.
Photographs of long queues of cars waiting to fill their tanks at petrol stations sat next to pictures of empty supermarket shelves. I gulped down the strong wave of fear that threatened to engulf me and fought back the tears. It was futile. I couldn’t take anymore. I threw down the paper, pulled the duvet cover over my head, and let out one long scream. I lay there for what felt like an eternity and screamed and screamed and screamed until my voice went hoarse.
What could I possibly do, me, one of six and a half billion people? How was I going to save the world? I lay on the bed and sobbed, cried for the planet and all its apparently unsolvable problems. I had woken up in a Blade Runner, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, Orwellian nightmare and I was petrified. I wanted to go home.
If Adult Naomi knew this about the world, why did she selfishly bring a child into it? I felt resentment release into the bitter water that flowed from my eyes. I suddenly hated Adult Naomi for becoming a victim of greed, excess, and consumption. Was this what had caused her crap life and her reason for leaving the building, leaving me to pick up the pieces of this dismal smegging life she’d created? Well, I resolved then and there, I wasn’t going to end up like her; I was going to figure this stuff out and do everything in my power to make things better before I left.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to force my brain to forget, to forget everything it had read or seen. It didn’t happen; instead I saw a scene from Back to the Future where Doc Brown was telling Marty not to leave the house in 1959, as it could have serious consequences on the future. I opened my eyes. Had I done something wrong in 1992? Had I made a decision back then that had dire consequences for my future and now I was being made to live out the nightmare of an alien world filled with strange technology and smegged-up ideas?
I felt like one of those tattered notes in a bottle drifting on an endless wave, lost. Would I ever leave the year 2008, and what would happen to me if I couldn’t? The many questions swirling around my mind eventually collapsed into a faint din humming in the empty space that once housed Adult Naomi’s memories.
Exhausted, I lay back and closed my aching eyes.
I woke up hours later. Still in the future and still fifteen. I felt well sad. The room was dark. I lay in the large bed, staring at the grey walls. Images of the world played in reverse in my mind, from the last newspaper article to the two aeroplanes speeding into tall glass buildings. Fear began to stir in the pit of my belly, but the shrill tone of the mobile phone jump-started my heart into an adrenaline-fuelled alertness. The flashing screen told me it was Simone.
‘Hiya, babe. How you feeling? How’s your head?’ She sounded relaxed, calm. Her voice instantly soothed my panic.
‘I’m okay,’ I said, still a bit freaked out.
‘You don’t sound it, chica.’
‘Did you know the planet is running out of food?’ I started to cry again; where the tears were coming from, I had no frickin’ idea.
‘What?’
‘Yeah, I read it in the newspaper and all this other stuff, like Mum was right about Nostradamus. Sim, the world is ending,’ I sobbed.
‘What? Oh, Nay, seriously, don’t believe everything you read in the papers; you already know it’s just a lot of fear mongering.’
‘I do?’ I was confused.
‘Yeah, you are, like, one of those people who doesn’t read or watch the news. You say half of it is magnified half-truths and that no one ever reports the good things humans do, and you think there’s a bigger conspiracy going on to keep everyone scared and ignorant. You believe it’s all one big set-up.’
‘Are you squerious?’ I asked her. First the vegan stuff, now a conspiracy theorist. Adult Naomi was a hippie after all.
‘Yeah, babe. Nay, put down the papers and step away from the propaganda. Don’t believe the hype. Remember?’
Those four words, don’t believe the hype, reminded me of a Public Enemy rap song that condemned such sensationalism and fear mongering and told my generation to think for ourselves.
‘I need to smell me some teen spirit.’ I smiled and starte
d to laugh.
‘Exactly,’ Simone agreed.
‘Thanks, sis,’ I said, grateful she had called.
‘Listen, we’ve been out all day and are completely soaked. Leo wants to stay the night. Is that okay?’
It was a relief to hear. I didn’t want him to see me this way but guessed I wouldn’t be able to hide my real feelings from him. I wanted the space to clear my head and straighten my thoughts.
‘Oh, okay, sorted. Sim, you are totally safe.’
‘No problem, and I’ll cook tomorrow and bring your dinner up when I bring him home.’
‘Wicked.’
‘And Nay?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Chill the hell out and stop with the worrying. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems,’ she said.
‘Okay.’ I wanted to believe her, but my apocalyptic cynicism told me otherwise.
‘Go and eat some cottage cheese and watch a movie.’
What a good idea. I hadn’t eaten anything since that morning and needed some respite from the mental assault my brain had just experienced.
I hung the phone up and, still wrapped in my duvet, I went downstairs to the kitchen. There I buttered two slices of brown bread, heaped a large dollop of cottage cheese on one and poured myself a glass of orange juice. I sat down on the sofa, switched on the TV, avoiding the news and the weird reality shows until I found UKTV Gold. It was a marathon of old episodes of a comedy called Absolutely Fabulous. I had never seen it before but as a huge French and Saunders fan I was intrigued. And as I watched these two shallow, self-absorbed, fashion-obsessed women and their cigarette-smoking, drunken adventures in PR, trying to avoid an exasperated straight-laced daughter, I avoided Adult Naomi’s life in much the same way, dodging the questions I didn’t want the answers to. My dark mood lifted. I settled in for the night and as I watched and laughed at the funny one-liners, I began to chill and, for a short while, forgot what being global felt like.
6
The Secret Diary of Naomi Jacobs
The motion of the ocean
is just like emotion:
you’ve got to
let it flow,
and put that in your journal.
C. B.
I sat in the cold room and stared at the walls while the doctor tapped the keys of the computer. It felt well weird. In his dark blue suit and matching tie he reminded me of Mr Jervis, my maths teacher, a cross between Albert Einstein and Homer Simpson. I couldn’t stand Jumpin’ Jack Jervis and his dragon breath, his foul temper, his wild hair and his skin with this, like, strange yellow tint. And this doctor wasn’t much better.
‘And how long have you experienced this, er, “memory loss”?’ The doctor peered at me over his silver-rimmed glasses. I knew from the tone of his voice he hadn’t believed a word I’d said.
‘Since Thursday.’
‘And you don’t remember a thing?’
I shook my head, then nodded. ‘No . . . I mean, yes . . . I mean, no . . . I don’t remember some stuff and I do remember other stuff.’ I was beginning to wish I’d brought my sister in.
‘Well, what do you remember?’ he asked.
‘Erm, numbers, like phone numbers, and I know my bank number and I think I remember how to drive; I kind of remember my son. Well, I feel I do.’
‘You feel you do?’ He sighed heavily.
I nodded. The words coming out of my mouth sounded cracked so I pulled out the paper and read the words I had written the night before. ‘I think I’ve lost my episodic memory.’ I took a deep breath. ‘But my semantic memory is okay.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ It was as if I had just spoken in an obscure language from a remote village in the Himalayas. The language I was speaking was called ‘neurological psychology’ and I was a long way from home.
‘I think I might have something called transient global amnesia.’
He tried to disguise a laugh underneath a loud cough. ‘Transient global amnesia,’ he repeated. ‘And what makes you think that?’
I explained as best I could, starting with waking up in the future and ending with me furiously researching amnesia. Given the traumatic events, I hadn’t been able to wait any longer. I had woken yet again from more bad dreams, sweating in a pool of my own frickin’ despair. Frustrated by my fear of a world I didn’t understand and worried about brain damage, I’d decided to take things into my own hands and try and figure out myself what was wrong with me. Maybe deep down I had felt that I would be laughed out of the doctor’s surgery unless I could come up with an explanation as to why I was fifteen again.
At first my research on amnesia had ended in futility as most of the explanations for memory loss centred around car accidents and lobotomies, neither of which I’d had. The words ‘permanent brain damage’ had imprinted on my mind and then rung in my ears as I’d slammed the laptop lid down in frustration. But as I paced the house, racking my possibly damaged brain, it had come to me that if it wasn’t physical, then it could be mental or, more to the point, psychological.
And here was where Adult Naomi came to the rescue. It was the first time I was actually grateful for the decision she had made to study psychology Looking at her university books, it seemed that she had every book available on the brain and how it affected behaviour. It was tough-going – there was all this stuff on neurological and psychological theory that I so didn’t get. Everything from how people choose their partners to why some people get addicted to drugs and others don’t. Still, as much as I didn’t get it, I needed to know. So I had taken all of Sunday while Leo was still with Simone and half the night when he was sleeping and Simone had gone to bed to go through the mountain of books Adult Naomi had left behind. I had almost given in until I came across a small textbook, which included a chapter called ‘Loss of episodic memory in retrograde amnesia’. It described something called ‘psychogenic amnesia’, where there was commonly a past history of ‘transient organic memory loss’. I’d had to look in a dictionary to understand the words, but when I did, it had made me wonder whether this had happened to Adult Naomi before. It also stated that this psychogenic amnesia could be situation-specific – brought on by a car accident or sexual abuse in childhood – and in those cases, there are brief gaps in memory for the episode. Alternatively, it said that psychogenic amnesia could be ‘global’, encompassing the whole of a person’s past, and could occur in so-called ‘fugue’ episodes.
The author outlined the three known case studies where transient global amnesia had lasted longer than twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I was fascinated. The story that stood out for me was that of a teenager, a nineteen-year-old male university student, who was found in a city park a few days before his exams were due to start. In addition to the stress of his exams, he had also lost his grandmother who he had been quite close to. Doctors took witness accounts from those who had been with him from the start. He had lost his autobiographical memory and his memory of public events. His recovery of memory function was monitored and it took four weeks for the retrograde amnesia to end.
The two other known cases both involved men; one had transient global amnesia for eight months, the other for a few days. What I noticed was that they had all suffered some form of heavy loss in their lives and were experiencing long and intense periods of something called ‘stress’ before they lost their memories.
The relief I experienced when I finished reading these stories was how I imagined it felt to be released by a large boa constrictor before it crushed the living daylights out of you – well grateful. I still didn’t understand how I could remember my bank card number or Katie’s phone number but further on in the chapter I came across something called ‘semantic memory’ – where all of a person’s automatic memories are stored, having been formed through repetitive use, such as memories of phone numbers, how to drive or of using the same bus route every morning – and ‘episodic memory’, which was connected to all the major experiences in your life such as births, deaths, marriages or signific
ant relationships, as well as the life-changing events that people have, which affect them on a more profound level.
It was difficult to take it all in but I eventually understood that these different types of memory were both hidden in the subconscious, and used if and when needed. Of course memories fade as we get older and details are lost, but we are reminded of the special events in our lives through sound (a wedding song), touch (a child’s hug), smell (Mum’s roast potatoes), sight (a faded Polaroid), or taste (Granddad’s eggnog). What we remember, what our brains choose to retain, is simply what makes each person unique. The author explained that we can all have different memories of the same events because our perspectives will always be different. Whether it’s through one of our five senses, our dreams, or even a deeper intuition, human beings remember what we need to survive and we discard what we don’t.
My brain had no emotional memories of the last seventeen years. By the time I had finished reading this book, I knew this as fact. Now, here in this surgery, all I needed to do was convince the doctor and get it checked out.
The doctor had been listening patiently. ‘So, let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You can’t remember anything from the last seventeen years, but you remembered how to get here and how to get money at the cashpoint?’
‘Well, my sister brought me,’ I replied.
‘I see.’ He turned back to his computer and continued to tap the keys.
I bit my lip. This appointment wasn’t going the way I had expected it to. ‘I . . . I know what it sounds like, but I really think I have amnesia,’ I stammered, tears starting to form.
‘Oh, you do, do you?’ His bearded face couldn’t hide his smirk.
‘Yes, I think I’ve been very stressed and then I woke up and I’m fifteen. I can’t remember how I got here.’
‘But you said your sister brought you.’
I looked at him, wondering why he was being such a total tosspot. I was about to start ramping18.
‘No, I mean here, Manchester, this life . . .’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have a brain tumour, or brain damage, because I haven’t, like, you know, had an accident or anything, but do you think I should maybe see a specialist? Like, in a hospital?’