Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  I put the diary down. My mind was reeling and I felt sick – trying to digest the words was seriously making me want to hurl my breakfast. Something had to come out, but instead I choked down the sour taste in my mouth and said the words out loud. ‘She was homeless while she was at university and she did cocaine while she wrote her dissertation and she broke up with her boyfriend and was obsessed with her relationships with my dads and . . .’ I stopped. I felt really embarrassed. This wasn’t my life; this couldn’t be the woman I had turned into.

  I paced the floor, wracking my brain, searching for any memory. Something that could explain what I had just read. But all I could think was, Who the hell is Adult Naomi?

  Like partygoers being refused entry by a bouncer at a nightclub door, my questions were turned away answerless. My head started to hurt but I had to keep going. I decided to use the last diary entry as a starting point and work my way backwards.

  Iopened the diary randomly and read an entry.

  2 October 2007

  It is 3.20 a.m. and I’ve curled up with a spliff and my insomnia! My nose is blocked, presumably from the crap coke I had at the weekend. Bloody Ajax giving me the Columbian flu. Slightly bemused with myself for having taken it in the first place, and yet not at the same time, because you know what? I tried to write in here while under the influence and it all came out weird, my handwriting and everything! Seeing that made it clear what the cocaine is doing to my brain. Anyway, I am listening to the tunes that will hopefully transport my mind to another place and take me out of this life right now and drop me somewhere in the near future.

  I’m reading a book, a misery memoir, still figuring out why I even bought it in the first place as all it has achieved is making me more miserable. Why do they tell you everything that happened to them and tell you that they got over it but never tell you how exactly? Never really get to the inside of the person’s mind and how they dealt with all of the crap, how they healed it? You don’t just wake up one day and everything is okay – life doesn’t work like that. Still, maybe reading it has given me the push I needed to deal with the painful energy that has manifested as my inner child and help me try to heal everything into wholeness. Will I ever?

  It hangs around like a bad smell – the manipulation and intimidation that has played a big part in my life – and every day I struggle to complete the day feeling whole, loved and right within myself. Will a day ever come when I will? And well, frankly, since moving into this house it seems to have become harder; the transition to settling down again in this city has been far from easy, coupled with the sudden loss of two cousins, the second so far removed from my life that I was searching for the news report about Sean being murdered before to see if it would sink in that he was dead. Killed, gone, murdered, and how amazing it all is. Is amazing the right word? Maybe bewildering is it! No, shocking! Yes, shocking.

  Evelyn is visiting Simone this weekend and I have come to the conclusion that I am not running away by going to Bradford with Rhonda to see her cousins. I am protecting my inner child from harm. I am recognizing my vulnerability, because I have no job, I am not settled into my home or way of life, not right within myself, certainly not strong or brave enough to deal with her. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s okay to admit that sometimes you just ain’t got the balls to do it, as much as you may want to. For fuck’s sake, I’m not superwoman, and as much as I would like to see Simone, I have no energy to smile up in their faces and play like everything in my life is okay. I’d most probably go postal. It would all end up being really dramatic and . . . oh, I don’t even want to think about it, but right now, my not being there is saying what I need to say, which is, I ain’t ready for you yet. I’m still reeling from the last whirlwind you caused when you were like the Tasmanian Devil, leaving me with a bitch of a headache and my life in tatters. No, I need more time. This is Evelyn’s and Simone’s thing, not mine.

  Charlie dying was out of my control. It was natural causes. I had a choice to be at the funeral and deal with The Sisters; I chose that. I have a choice to be here when Eve’s here; I choose not to be.

  I couldn’t believe it. Even though his dad and mine hadn’t spoken in years, in spite of being brothers, I did meet Sean once when he was little; but murdered – gosh, his poor mum. And my cousin Charlie had died. I had grown up with Charlie, because his mum was Eve’s sister. Had he died because of his epilepsy?

  My heart thumped in my chest with an uneven beat; I swallowed, closed the diary, and began to cry.

  I couldn’t read anymore. I didn’t understand half of the things Adult Naomi had written and I needed to talk to someone about it before I sent myself mental with questions. In the meantime, I had to wait for Simone to return from work and get myself together as Leo was on his way home from school. I needed to pretend everything was okay.

  Moments later, Leo came through the door as happy as any ten-year-old could be. He swung his bag down and went straight to the fridge, where he grabbed a juice carton. I stood in the kitchen, watching the way he moved. His mannerisms and facial expressions majorly wigged me out, but in, like, a really good way.

  ‘You okay, Mum?’ He looked apprehensive.

  ‘What? Yeah, I’m cool, cool as a cucumber.’ I smiled and put my thumbs up and reached in for a drink also. I couldn’t let him think something was up.

  ‘Err, okay.’ He laughed.

  I laughed with him, remembering what sounded totally normal to me must have seemed totally wack to him. I was, after all, a thirty-two-year-old mother, even though I felt like a fifteen-year-old babysitting big sister. I think he knew something wasn’t fine. His answer was to suggest we play a game.

  ‘Do you wanna go on the Wii?’

  I spat out my juice all over the kitchen floor. Leo found this hilarious.

  ‘Your what? What the smegnacious is a Wee?’

  ‘Smegnacious!’ He giggled. ‘The Nintendo Wii, Mum.’ At this, he left the kitchen and ran upstairs.

  I grabbed the cloth and wiped up the apple juice from the floor. I knew what a Nintendo was – a small grey box with two joy pads connected to it; you were no one until you’d taken on the Super Mario brothers in boiler suits and kicked Donkey Kong’s arse. But what was the Wee bit?

  Leo returned with a bright white box that looked nothing like a Nintendo. It had no buttons and, it seemed, no letterbox-type slot to stick your game in. I watched as he connected it to the back of the television. He arranged the box on the floor and pressed a button on a white, funny-shaped remote. A drawer slid open; he placed a disc inside, and it swallowed it. The words Wii Sport appeared on the mega TV screenage and he handed me a remote.

  ‘What do you wanna play first?’ He smiled at me.

  ‘Err.’ I was stumped. I didn’t even know how to work the object he had given me.

  ‘We’ll play tennis.’ He made a few gestures and pressed his thumb on the remote and these funny-looking little people appeared on the screen.

  ‘Choose your avatar, Mum.’

  ‘You do it, I like yours better.’ I shoved the remote into his free hand.

  ‘Okay.’ Seeming to accept this reasoning, he took the remote from me and I watched, eyes glued to the mega screenage, as he chose hair, skin colour, and the clothing that best represented me. He then named it Nay. I had to pretend like I knew what he was doing, but I really wanted to scream, Oh my dayz! What the hell is this futuristic box thing where the players look like you and it’s got no buttons? What he showed me next almost floored me. To imagine in the future you would actually stand in front of a television, use a remote control as a tennis racket and play an opponent as if you were on a court; it was something I expected to see in a frickin’ George Lucas film, not in the living room of my house. And certainly not in my lifetime.

  I followed Leo’s example and every time he swung his arm with the remote in his hand, the ball would bat to the other side. My side. I missed the serve several times while screaming and squealing like a total s
pazoid. I couldn’t get my head around the crazy reality of me interacting with the television. I expected Arnold Schwarzenegger to appear in a latex tennis suit and pull off his fake head while running through a maze screaming, It’s the future, Nay, and your son has just initiated you . . . Oh, and I’ll be back.

  We played for most of the afternoon. He changed games from tennis to bowling to golf and then boxing. I laughed so hard I almost wet myself (apparently this had something to do with having a 9lb baby, Katie told me one night). Leo was a veteran at the games, so I lost most of the time, but my competitive streak came out and I refused to give up. It was the first time since I had woken up in the future that I was actually having fun. When we took a break and flopped down on the sofa, I looked over at a sweating, giggling Leo.

  Adult Naomi had done one right thing with her life. He was very smart and fun to be around and I could see why everyone was so proud of him. The words ‘I love you’ burst out of me and I gave him an awkward hug and a kiss on the cheek. His response was to push me off him and wipe his cheek in disgust while still giggling. He jumped up off the sofa, said, ‘Better take my uniform off,’ and disappeared out of the door.

  Oh Jeez, yeah, I forgot. Mums tell kids to take their uniforms off when they get home from school, don’t they?

  Leo popped his head back around the door and said, ‘I love you too, Mum,’ and ran back up the stairs.

  Nice one! Top one! Sawwwted! As I sat basking in the glow of this new slush puppy squidgy feeling, my mind turned to Eve, my own mother. A woman I had nicknamed the Wicked Witch of the West Midlands and assured everyone who would listen that although I loved her (being her daughter, there wasn’t much choice in the matter), if I wasn’t born to her, we would not be friends and I would never have anyone in my life remotely like her.

  Why weren’t we ever like this? I thought. Wasn’t I a cool kid like Leo?

  I just never got my mum. I never understood her love and was scared because I couldn’t figure her out. I had a sense that there was a time when she had loved me, but all of that had changed when we left Art and the life we knew in Liverpool and moved to Wolverhampton when I was five years old. As I got older our relationship grew more intense, aggressive, and became filled with so many insane arguments that I was convinced she hated me and wished I had never been born. I often lay awake at night wondering if she’d prefer it if I was dead.

  And then it hit me. Why was Eve so far away from Adult Naomi? Why wasn’t she a part of her grandchild’s life? Mine and Simone’s lives? What had happened?

  I followed Leo upstairs and sat in the bedroom, reading another diary entry while he was getting changed. I sooooo wished I hadn’t, because he reappeared moments later and I had to swallow down the sadness I was feeling.

  20 October 2006

  My first night in this awful place, and there is only one question I have. Am I being punished? Did I do something so terribly wrong that I deserve the life I am living? Do you want me to suffer? I don’t think I can do this anymore. I do my best and yet it’s never good enough? Over and over, I make the same mistakes and choose that which is so, so, so wrong for me. I have failed Leo; I have failed at life; I am a failure. I must have done some bad things to be punished in this way. My karma must be so negative, so full of pain. I must have hurt so many people because I am hurting enough for a hundred souls.

  The past couple of years, in fact, my whole life has been full of unreliable, untrustworthy people, family and friends whom I have loved unconditionally; I have tried to express this to them and yet I am constantly being attacked, shamed or ridiculed for being me. I just don’t get it! Why? Why did I come back here? To this madness, this insanity, to a city so grey and depressing? To live in a hostel with my nine-year-old and beg pennies off the social? My home, Greece, my business and my car are all gone. I miss my home so much. I miss the safety and security of my living room, and my sofa, my bed. I miss my home.

  All the choices, all the mistakes that I have made, and I end up here, in this place. We’ll most probably be sent to a crap flat on some fucked-up council estate; there’ll be me on my own trying to keep Leo safe, and my control-freak sister (I am so bloody angry with her) who thinks I’m always in crisis and needs me to make a plan! When I think things can get no worse, that I can sink no lower, they do and I do. I’m being punished, right? This is a cruel joke; this is a nightmare and I haven’t woken up yet. So if I’m being punished, make it stop, please make it stop. Please take me tonight, please. I can’t wake up tomorrow. I can’t go through another day. I don’t have the strength anymore. I can’t do this anymore, I just can’t, I really can’t.

  Sadness wedged in the back of my throat like a piece of dry bread and remained stuck there until Simone walked into the house. I was happy to see her and she was happy to see me. She made us spaghetti bolognaise for dinner and we sat and ate while she and Leo told tales of their day. I listened intently, thinking about the diary entries I had read earlier on. I had so many questions yet was afraid of hearing the answers. After dinner and some light TV (I was adjusting slowly), Leo went for his nightly bath while Simone and I washed the dishes. I told her about the diary entries I had read and questioned her about the drugs. She explained that Adult Naomi had started to smoke weed from around sixteen but even when the craving was great, she had never smoked around Leo. Simone didn’t like it when she smoked, as she always saw Adult Naomi’s life taking a turn for the worse when she did. She wouldn’t sleep or eat properly and she would eventually slip into deep depressions. She then started doing cocaine when she moved into her big house and met Sasha and Noelle. I didn’t know who she was talking about and felt nothing when she said their names.

  ‘Lovely women, but shallow,’ Simone stated.

  ‘Shallow?’ What was she on about?

  ‘Yeah, lots of money, big cars, bigger houses. But no amount of money or designer clothes can substitute for a life of substance, Nay.’

  ‘Yeah, like, shame. Even I know that,’ I said.

  Simone explained that Adult Naomi had gone through a lot in that house. When Leo was three she finished working for the haulage company and tried the Chinese medicine degree. She didn’t like that so she went to college and did a diploma in alternative therapies instead. She then set her own business up with some money from the Prince’s Trust when she was twenty-six and moved into this ‘big house’ when she was twenty-seven. Adult Naomi was earning good money and hanging around with friends who were also living the champagne and cocaine lifestyle. It made me think of that comedy Absolutely Fabulous, except this was far from funny. Simone told me that she was a highly sought-after healer and teacher of holistic therapies, and that she had also developed and sold her own cosmetics. And she was at university doing her psychology degree.

  So she was trying to build an empire! Cool.

  This lifestyle had apparently been her downfall so she had moved to Greece to live with Marlene. This hadn’t worked out so she came home and ended up homeless in a hostel, still taking drugs, trying to get her life together.

  The entry I had read from the 2006 diary was written the night she moved into the hostel. The other entry was from her 2007 diary and was the last time she ever did cocaine. Simone informed me that Adult Naomi and Sasha did a load of pure-cut Columbian cocaine one night and she vowed she would never take another line of coke unless she was actually in Columbia itself.

  Exsqueeze me?

  Judging from the 2008 diary, she hadn’t continued, but I was still totally grossed out that she had even started down that path. Simone said the diaries would explain more and that I needed to read them to find out why she had made the choices she had. I silently dried the dishes as I listened to her try and fill in the blanks. It was difficult for her because there had been long periods of time when Adult Naomi hadn’t spoken to her and she hadn’t known what was going on in her life.

  ‘I know. I was, like, seriously raging at you at times. Our relationship has been majorly messe
d up, hasn’t it, Sim?’

  ‘Hmm.’ She nodded and sighed. ‘Sometimes, and then sometimes it’s been great, but we’ve tried, Nay. We have been on our own from a young age, you know.’

  ‘Sim, what’s with me analysing my problems all the time? God, it can send you all a bit mental.’

  She laughed and dried her hands. ‘Before you lost your memory, you were doing a self-empowerment class for women. You were really trying to get your life back together. Erm, and, well, girl, you’ve always been deep, a thinker; it’s the psychologist in you, and the weed.’

  ‘Yeah, but even I know that’s just, like, a bad combination, you know?’ I placed the dried dishes in the cupboard.

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s definitely been to your own detriment sometimes.’ She looked at me, troubled. ‘I mean, you’ve been that stressed, you’ve lost your memory and you’re trying to deal with it all by yourself.’

  ‘Well, it’s got to bloody stop.’ I threw down the tea towel. ‘Naaa, maaan, this is, like, complete PANTS! I need to stop the drugs and smoking, this body needs some serious exercise, and, you know, to be a bit more healthy, and all this analysing is sooooo saaaad, and going for men who are like Dad or Joseph . . . ugh, gross Mr Morose.’ I stuck my fingers down my throat in mock throw-up fashion. ‘I mean, forget boys, woman, sort your sad smeggin’ life out!’