Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  The diaries were in chronological order, so I worked my way backwards from 2008 to 1995. There was a two-year gap between 1993 and 1994 where she didn’t write at all. I worked out that it was when she was seventeen, eighteen and nineteen. I asked Simone what happened to her then. She said it had a lot to do with LSD and magic mushrooms. Yeah, Adult Naomi had taken this hippie trippy thing way too far.

  Still, I read on. Each diary had about eighteen months’ to two years’ of her personal thoughts and her innermost secrets. Some of it was fascinating; some of it was horrifying; some of it was a bit tapped at times. Some I thought was hilarious and some of it was really sad – not saddo sad, but, like, unhappy sad.

  There were times I had to put the book I was reading down and breathe deeply. These were her memories, her beliefs, and her experiences of a world as she saw it. Stuff about the people she had chosen to be around, the relationships she had, the jobs she had worked in, and the men she had tried to love. While reading it I kind of hoped it would bring back some memories, or I would get a feeling of déjà vu, but nothing happened. It was like I was reading all these different stories and they made up a book of someone else’s life.

  In the evening, Simone and Katie sorted me and Leo out with dinner and distraction. Leo was oblivious, which I thought was cool; it must have meant that he felt safe with me. His year-six homework was a cinch, although I was confused over the whole Americanization thing again, asking Simone when it had stopped being fourth-year juniors.

  We also played lots of his wicked Xbox and Wii games when Simone had to work late or when he didn’t wanna leave our house because it was raining outside.

  Each day was like some weird Quantum Leap episode. I wanted so badly to remember and figure some things out, all the time scared of what I would find.

  Adult Naomi’s diaries told me how she had met Leo’s father and what, after promising herself she would never have children, had led her to be a mother at twenty-one. She used to have this, like, saddo desperate need to be loved by him and he was a bit of a div to her. In fact, no, a total tosspotting smeghead at times. She had found out he had been cheating on her when she was eight months pregnant and she broke it off with him. It also felt like a constant battle to get him to spend time with Leo outside of the six hours every other Sunday he seemed to think was enough. He wasn’t there for parents’ evenings or Leo’s extra-curricular activities, and she’d get stressed on Sundays because he wouldn’t call if he was running late or wasn’t able to come at all. He also didn’t offer to help out with extra expenses for Leo, thinking twenty pounds a week for maintenance was sufficient. And when Leo was four years old, he told her he never wanted to spend time with Leo on his own because it made him feel guilty about his other three children.

  Even I knew, at fifteen, that was complete and utter pants. The mentalism of it all was that Adult Naomi couldn’t see it. In one of her diary entries she wrote, ‘I know I have in the past tried to force him, bribe him, persuade him, love and hate him into being a proper father to Leo and nothing has worked – it may be that nothing will ever work – but I am not going to stop trying.’

  He even had the complete crapness to attack her mind whenever she caught him in a lie, calling her crazy and mental. I read that they argued while she was in the hostel the night after she had confided in him about the bipolar-bear mentalism and losing her home. He had gone to the gym instead of picking Leo up. Why hadn’t he offered her and Leo a place to stay? I just found myself getting angrier and angrier the more I read about him and decided that he wasn’t worth my time or energy. I so far hadn’t met him since waking up in the future and, going from what I had read, I sooooo didn’t want to.

  But after calming down, I realized that as much as her choice in father had been a mistake, having Leo was not and never would be a mistake. He was too kriss biscuits20 of a child to ever regret, and besides, it seemed Adult Naomi had done a good enough job without him anyway.

  I moved on.

  I read about the friends she had made over the years; some long gone, others still around. It seemed she forgave people but didn’t forget, and was really loyal to the peeps she loved. Even when these so-called spars lied to her, used her, and totally Jekylled21 her.

  Eventually, she just seemed to give herself a hard time and kept promising that she would learn her lesson from every experience or mistake so as not to repeat it again. Exsqueeze me? I thought. Even I know it ain’t totally your fault when someone is acting like a complete wackass and you don’t see it coming! Why would you blame yourself for people’s mental tosser issues?

  Adult Naomi had analysed and dissected and picked apart her experiences over and over, read self-help book after self-help book, attended empowerment classes, workshops, and therapy sessions. I was exhausted just reading about it. She had, like, this desperate need to figure out her ‘motivations’, to ‘transform’, to continually force herself to ‘change and grow’. She was always worrying about the effect the past had on her and how it was going to affect her future.

  In my opinion, she was demonstrating severe Molecule-Mind saddo behaviour. Which made her find comfort in mood-altering drugs, therapy, films and books. It also seemed she had a slight addiction to painkillers and every now and then she would quit the weed just so she could convince herself she wasn’t an addict. It seemed like being addicted to something was the only way Adult Naomi felt she could control stuff that had seriously damaged her mind mojo.

  Her relationship with Simone was very close, but they lived on the opposite sides of the city because most times they ended up becoming what she called ‘co-dependently’ close. She said they had ‘boundary issues’.

  After running away and marrying the postman (seriously?), my mum, Eve, would visit once a year. She lived in London and her drinking seemed to, like, mash everything up. Adult Naomi put it like this: ‘Seeing Eve is like holding up a mirror to everything dysfunctional that existed in our childhoods.’ So, by the age of thirty-two, Adult Naomi had not spoken to Eve properly in four years. I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I needed to know what had happened. Maybe her friends would help me.

  Dean. He was the first of Adult Naomi’s friends I contacted.

  I had read in the 1995 diary that when she was nineteen she had moved to Manchester to live with the daughter of a Scottish-Jewish family called the Goldfeins. It didn’t say why she had moved to Manchester and the daughter was no longer in Adult Naomi’s life (this seemed to happen a lot with her girlfriends, I noticed), but Dean, whom she had met at the same time, was.

  From her journal entries, I could tell that her relationship with him was very important and she well loved him, like a friend or a big brother.

  While reading the diary entries, I got a nice déjà vu every time he was mentioned and he always seemed to make her laugh and tell her really wack jokes, which she found hilarious. When she was with Dean, she laughed until her stomach hurt, so I liked the sound of him.

  He seemed like a safe, chilled guy and when I finished reading about him, I imagined him lying on one of those narrow boats with one foot in the cool water, floating downstream, chewing on a blade of straw, the sunshine on his smiling face, not knowing where he was going, but flowing with it nonetheless. When she had told him her problems, he was totally real with her, told her straight, and left her with what she called a ‘Deanism’.

  When I read his last words to her before she left the building, I knew I wanted to speak to him. Those words were, ‘Sis, it’s just a hump and you’ll get over it.’

  That evening, I found his number and called him while Simone was helping Leo with his homework.

  Having not spoken for weeks, he was pleased to hear from me. He went silent when I had to explain to him why.

  ‘Wow, sis, that’s some serious stuff.’ He had a really strong Manchester accent.

  ‘I know . . . I mean, I know I know you . . . but I don’t remember you.’

  ‘Awesome. Far out. What a trip,’ he said
slowly.

  ‘I know, but Sim’s looking after me and Leo’s sooooo cool.’

  ‘Wow, this is as rare as rocking-horse shit.’ He paused and his voice went an octave higher. ‘Don’t take the brown acid,’ he mocked in a strange American accent.

  I didn’t know jack about what he was talking about, but his laugh made me wanna laugh.

  ‘I know!’ I chuckled.

  For the first time, I could see from someone else’s point of view that there possibly could be a funny side to losing your memory. It was far out; it was the stuff of science fiction movies and bad acid Woodstock experiences (he explained about Wavy Gravy). It was also fascinating and awesome and scarily funny. I mean, who does this really happen to? Who gets so stressed that they actually lose their memory?

  ‘Sis, you’ve gotta chill the fuck out, seriously,’ Dean said. ‘You know what? Fuck the world and just do what you wanna do for real. It’s time for Naomi to take care of Naomi. You can’t keep getting stressed out like this.’

  I so agreed. Adult Naomi had taken herself way too seriously for too long and then beaten herself up constantly over other people’s tosserness. I mean, she had never intentionally harmed anyone; nobody had died, so why in a world full of such crap and confusion had she made her life more miserable with this mega dumping truck of guilt? No wonder she had someone like Dean in her life; she needed him.

  We carried on talking for another five minutes, but I had to end the conversation when my head started to hurt because I was trying too hard to remember him.

  He was safe, though, well funny, and I said goodbye to him with my sense of humour sorted. If Adult Naomi didn’t come back, I knew I would definitely keep him in my life no matter what.

  One of her other close friends was on a cruise ship somewhere deep in the Pacific Ocean and was incommunicado. Her name was Georgina and I liked the sound of her in the diaries and was interested to meet her when she got back to the UK. The same could not be said for her other spars, though. I didn’t quite understand the friendships. But if I wanted answers, I had to meet them.

  A couple of Saturdays later, on a bright, warm day – Leo was with Simone overnight – I decided it was time for me to brave the outside world and find my way to Adult Naomi’s other friends.

  I could still remember how to drive, but wasn’t confident enough to put my fifteen-year-old self behind a wheel. Simone had given me directions and the numbers of the buses and trams I needed to take. I nearly fell backwards through the set of doors on the futuristic bus when the driver told me how much it would cost to get to the city centre. I’d never been on a tram before so it was a bit of a novelty to ride on one when I got to the city. It was rickety and bounced you around a bit, but it helped me see a little more of Manchester.

  Manchester. I had only ever been to Manchester once. My dad had taken me when I was thirteen and my uncle Jack got married to his new wife, and I remembered how my aunties had kept sniggering and whispering that his new father-in-law looked like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.

  It looked so different now. There were lots of factories and cotton mills that had been turned into apartments sitting next to old valleys densely filled with trees and spring flowers. The canal was lined with bars, clubs and shops. Brand-new apartment buildings and offices, and a large shopping centre, towered over the hundreds of people coming and going.

  I sat on the tram watching Adult Naomi’s world fly by until a man sitting opposite me smiled. ‘I knew it was going to be you,’ he said. Is he talking to me? I thought. Oh crap, does he know Adult Naomi? I turned around to make sure he wasn’t talking to anyone behind me. His eyes had a strange glassy stare, so I gave him a half-smile. ‘I’m sorry I . . . I don’t remem—’ I stammered.

  ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘I’ve had so much work on. It’s been too long; we are due a drink, darling.’ He shifted in his seat, looked the other way, and carried on talking.

  There was a five-second delay and then I realized he wasn’t talking to me; he was in fact talking to his headphones, which must have been connected to his hidden mobile phone.

  I’d seen this when I was in Simone’s car driving along the streets of the village. At first, when I had noticed people walking, talking and laughing to themselves, I’d assumed they were bonkers. Like Loopy Larry, our town ‘crazy’ who walked around unshaven, with tired yellowing eyes and grey hair, asking, ‘Do you have a penny, missus?’ every time he saw you. We would tease him as kids and run away from him, laughing. But one day, Eve told me what had turned him crazy. He was highly intelligent and had a psychology degree but when his brother died he suffered a heavy mental breakdown, from which he had never recovered. I never laughed at him again . . . Simone explained that Adult Naomi hadn’t actually moved to a city full of Larrys and told me about hands-free mobile technology.

  This explained why nobody on the tram batted an eyelid when a random stranger started to talk to himself. But seriously, in a world of Bluetooth, how do you separate the sane from the crazy if everyone is walking around talking to themselves? And what was with the headphones? It seemed every other person had a pair stuck in their ears and escaped into a world of downloaded music; everyone in their own worlds, like the new social networking stuff, was making people severely antisocial.

  One thing I did notice, though, was old people were still open to the world around them. When I made eye contact with a foge22 on the bus or on the tram, they smiled at me, they made a comment, they even sparked up a conversation about the weather. They weren’t afraid to talk to me. I mean, even I knew sometimes it was good to talk to a random stranger – so long as you weren’t on your own and the stranger wasn’t a man in a red cap. For a second, I wondered why I always imagined crazed serial killers wearing red caps and then, as I noticed a white-haired woman in her sixties watching the world go by, I kinda hoped all the old people in the world stuck around for a little bit longer, just so people didn’t forget how to talk to each other.

  The city centre was manic and as I stepped off the tram I almost got swept away in a sea of people. It was overwhelming and my head started to hurt as soon as I tried to think where to go, so I sat on the metal bench at the station, trying to get my thoughts together. There were young mothers pushing strange-looking tiny prams with three massive wheels past people laden with shopping bags. I didn’t know if it was possible but the Goths standing outside a rock music shop seemed to look more serious and stand with more of a hunch. I mean, after black, there’s not really any other way to go, but I swear their clothes looked blacker, their eyeliner thicker and their hair greasier. I wondered if those were the emos, the new Goths Simone had told me about? She’d also told me that the Farrah-trouser-V-neck-jumper-wearing crew (usually with no shirt and a gold chain on their hairless chest) had been replaced by Burberry-cap-wearing-tracksuit-clad ‘chavs’ with silver chains around their necks.

  I studied the shop windows; they were full of the bizarro ‘embellished’ bags, shoes and jackets covered with metallic gold and silver studs I had seen in the magazines. The mannequins had no faces, and were again dressed in the weird coloured fashions I had seen in Adult Naomi’s wardrobe. Primark, All Saints, H&M, Zara, Mango, American Apparel; bandage, boho, rock, girly, country chic. So many different stores, so many different styles and so much choice; how did you know where to go? It had to be confusing to know which style to choose and which shops to shop in, which look was yours. How did you keep up? Where was C&A?

  After studying the people and the shops for a while, my brain seemed to settle into a quiet buzz. It was then that I noticed the coffee shops, four of them in my three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sight, all walking distance from each other. Costa, Starbucks (wasn’t that a character from Battlestar Galactica?) Nero and Coffee Hut! Why was there so much need for coffee? When did Britain become a nation of coffee lovers? What had happened to Mr Tetley?

  I was curious – maybe this was why Adult Naomi was seriously into coffee – so I made my way to t
he nearest one. It was mega busy. I stood in the queue, feeling mesmerized by all of the cakes on offer, the sandwiches, the breakfast rolls. When I looked up at the boards behind the counter my jaw almost hit the floor. There was a list of coffees as long as the eighteen-metre bus I had just ridden on. I had a coffee conundrum. All this choice again.

  Eventually, I saw the more familiar hot chocolate and settled on that. While I waited, the woman behind the cash register served the man stood in front of me.

  ‘What can I get you, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll have a medio non-fat double decaf latte, medio soya milk mocha with cinnamon and a grande americano with vanilla to go.’

  I watched the woman touch the screen. It was just like the phone – no buttons again. She repeated his order. She didn’t even tell him how much; he just put his cash card in the little machine and punched in a few numbers. They didn’t exchange another word.

  ‘What can I get you?’ She looked straight at me.

  ‘Erm.’ I turned to her and then looked at the board. ‘Err, a hot chocolate, please.’

  ‘One hot chocolate; stay in or take out?’

  ‘Err . . . in?’ I asked her.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Err . . . no.’ I was relieved to hear at least this drink was still the same.

  ‘Do you want full-fat, half-fat or non-fat milk, or soya?’

  ‘Full-fat?’ I took a guess.

  She pressed on the screen again without saying a word. ‘Do you want whipped cream and marshmallows?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ I smiled.

  She repeated my order. I then nearly fell face first into the biscotti when she told me my drink would cost almost a fiver! FIVE POUNDS! For a hot chocolate! Are you kidding me? I wanted to ask her. Is this, like, a joke? First the magazines, then the bus fare, and now this?

  But I could tell by the impatient look on her face that she wasn’t joking. I gave her a dirty look (like inflation was her fault) but she didn’t notice, took my money, and shouted, ‘Next!’ I took this as my cue to move on; no small talk, no friendly banter. Again, it was the same weird, detached feeling I’d felt in the supermarket. All of a sudden, buying a hot chocolate seemed a lonely affair. I didn’t let it stop me, though. I thought of the old foges on the bus.