Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  I promise I will learn.

  I promise.

  Love always,

  Naomi x

  As I slipped into sleep, I realized that my questions had been answered. I knew as much about Adult Naomi as I needed to know and understood her as much as I ever would. I understood why she had made the decisions she had made, why she had surrounded herself with those so-called friends, and I now knew about her painful wounds inflicted by others that she had struggled to make better, to heal. I no longer felt sorry for her; I just felt major respect for what she had been through and the fact that she had survived it. I didn’t need to know any more.

  I had gained access to the house.

  I found myself wandering in the darkness, through the hallways, searching for the light, asking one last question.

  Why fifteen?

  9

  Looking Through the Darkness

  Sometimes it’s scary,

  sometimes it’s a fight,

  but you’ve got to feel

  through the darkness

  to find the light.

  L. C.

  I woke up still thinking, why fifteen? Why was I now in the future at fifteen? I mean, it’s not an age to swing your pants about.

  At first, before I wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to be an actress. I was a bit of a drama queen, yeah, but I also thought I’d be a good actress because I was a bundle of nerves when I was a kid. I used to do this strange thing every time I would get tense: I’d smile, but more like bare my teeth, so what better profession to go into than acting?

  I was thinking this while I ironed Leo’s uniform the next morning and made him a sausage sandwich, remembering all that had happened to me from the age of ten. I walked with Leo to school and thought about my school and how it was a safe haven for me, how much I loved being there. And how much I loved going to my friends’ posh houses and feeling safe under their roofs with their ‘normal’ parents.

  When I first woke up in the future Simone told me about Adult Naomi’s small two-bedroom council house being a place of safety, a sanctuary for her. Even though it wasn’t the house I thought I’d be living in by the time I was thirty-two, it was beginning to have the same effect on me. I felt safe when I was in this house. Was this the same for Adult Naomi’s mind? Was this the reason I kept seeing the house, because she had felt the need to create a sanctuary for her mind, to give it a place to escape to?

  As I turned the key in the door, I thought about Adult Naomi’s diaries. I so got why she carried on writing. So much was going on inside of her head and if she couldn’t speak her mind to people, she needed to get it out somehow. And then I had this thought that maybe if I carried on writing in them, then it might help me. It might even be what Adult Naomi needed to come back.

  I found her 2008 diary in the drawer of the small table next to her bed. I sat on her bed and opened the diary to the next blank page. As soon as I started to write I began to remember what some of my life was like, and the words just quickly spilled out of me, like they were waiting to be written.

  15 June 2008

  Dear Adult Naomi,

  If one day you read this, I want to let you know that I get it. I understand why you left. I hope one day you come back, but in case you don’t, I think I should carry on the diaries for you, and because I think it will help me. If I remember stuff about me, then maybe I will know why I am here, you know? Anyway, I thought I would write what I can remember, which isn’t much; it seems my head has been filled with your stuff the past couple of months. Today I started to think about mine, so here goes . . .

  Last year . . . well, no, the year before . . . well, when I was thirteen, I kinda stopped hiding behind books. Remember I had that party, in the big hall, and I wore that hat and red lipstick and I thought I looked like Janet Jackson? I felt well kriss! It made me more popular at school; people wanted to know me and invite me to their parties. I felt free, you know, when I was around them, my friends, in their big posh houses. I could be myself. And then remember drama club, me acting? Playing someone else always felt better than being me. I could be whoever I wanted to be.

  And then when I was fourteen everything changed. Do you remember the summer of the musical when I ended up on the front page of the local newspaper and singing on a kids’ television show? The show was filmed in Manchester! No way, Jose! And you ended up coming to live here! I was also chosen for the grand finale and sang the closing number in the musical. I loved that summer – my time to shine. I felt well confident, had kind of a big head, but it was all frickin’ fantastic.

  It made me well sad to read that things didn’t get better with Mum, but last year I offered her out24, remember? I’d had enough of the beatings I’d received over the years; belt, slipper, umbrella, you name it, if it was in the vicinity when we were in the throes of an argument, she would reach for it and go ballistic. Oh, and the constant blaming me for everything that Joseph’s kids or Simone did wrong . . . well, I just had to stick up for myself more. It just felt so bloody unfair, you know. And then there was that time I told her I was sick of her smeggin’ hitting me and to get outside where we would fight one on one with fists only. I was crapping myself but she walked away mortified and didn’t hit me again. Well sad, but I kinda understand why things turned out the way they did.

  But then things went a bit mental, didn’t they? Remember when I applied to a stage school in London and they wrote to me saying my application was successful and would I come down to London to do an audition? Mum said no full stop.

  Wasn’t gonna be a famous actress then, so I kinda went off the rails and started to argue with the teachers. I wore more make-up (God, remember the way Mrs O’Shea used to go on at me about my red lipstick? Didn’t she call me a harlot?) and I accidently on purpose spilt bleach on my gross nun’s skirt so I could buy a shorter one.

  Remember totally fit Robert Harris? And the rest of the crew? And then the boys that liked me from that estate me and Lydia used to hang out on? Well, I didn’t wanna be rescued then, I just wanted to snog boys! And then I started to lie to Eve about where I was, so that I could stay out late on a weekend.

  In the end I was skiving off school ALL the time. Remember I didn’t turn up for a month near the end of fourth-year seniors, until one day I went in out of boredom and Mr Frye, the head of year, sat me down and told me that if I didn’t buckle down and actually attend school, I was gonna fail all of my GCSEs?

  I don’t know why but it worked, didn’t it? I started to make an effort to study hard, catch up and pass my exams. It was gonna be a cinch, I was gonna sail through the exams. I was on the right track for all As by the end of the fifth year and sack it, if I couldn’t be an actress, I was gonna be a journalist and travel the world reporting on people and places.

  So what happened?

  What happened to me? I wish I could remember.

  Love,

  Teen Nay x

  There were still more diaries to look at, and one in particular that I wanted to read – a red diary. I knew instantly when I found it at the bottom of the box that it was from 1991 and 1992. This was the diary I’d written in and the only one left in the collection that I hadn’t read yet. But I stuck to Simone’s advice that I should take a break and instead concentrated on writing my own entries in the 2008 diary instead.

  During the days I immersed myself in Leo’s world, walking him to school, watching him skateboard, playing Xbox games with him and sometimes taking him to the park where we would swing on the swings and tell each other stories.

  I even went to the massive Tesco and tried to get my head around all of the choice. Leo pretty much liked the same things as me so it was easy to shop for him and as I still couldn’t figure out what my stomach wanted, I stuck to soups and sandwiches and jacket potatoes. These were the only things stopping me from hurling all over the place.

  A letter came one morning reminding Adult Naomi of the psychology exams she was supposed to take, but there was no way I w
as gonna be able to do them. I thought telling the uni people that she had disappeared from her own mind and I had taken her place might have sounded a bit too tapped so I put it away.

  I avoided most of Adult Naomi’s friends because I sooooo didn’t wanna talk to them. Not in a bad way; I just didn’t know what to say to them. And I thought if I didn’t smoke a spliff at some point, they would suspect something. If any of them called for something and they couldn’t get through, they called Simone anyway and she dealt with them.

  Katie and I spent some evenings talking about all the things I had read in the diaries. She knew more than I thought and filled in a lot of the blanks for me. But she confirmed that everything the diaries told me had happened to Adult Naomi was real and that she had been through a lot of it on her own. It still made me well sad, but almost, like, in awe of her as well, that she’d survived all of that crap and was still here. Well, technically, but not mentally. Still, I had to give the woman serious props!

  Like with Dean, Katie and I somehow found the funny side of it all and I laughed like a moron into my herbal tea. If I didn’t laugh, I would have cried, and I was so over crying.

  Simone came and stayed and we had a lazy weekend watching Adult Naomi’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer box sets. During the episode where Buffy’s mum dies, Simone’s mobile phone rang.

  It was Nat and Marcy, our long-lost cousins. They had found each other at first through a lost family website and had got in touch with Simone a few months before, but Simone hadn’t told me about them because she didn’t want to cause any more stress or put pressure on me to remember, given the state of my brain. They had both been born to my mum’s younger sisters and adopted out as babies and were searching for the family they never knew.

  When Simone told me about them I wanted to talk to them, so called them the next day. It was really nice to speak to them both. When I was little I used to think about one day seeing my cousin Nat again. I didn’t remember her, but in a weird way remembered loving her, and I kept a picture of her, part of a photo that was taken of us when we were babies and her Mum had lived with us in Liverpool for a while. It was an old picture split into four and I found out after all these years that she had kept the part of the photo with me in it. The bond had never been broken, and another cousin, Marcy, appearing was an added bonus.

  I chatted to both of them for about an hour. They explained that some of the family spazzed out majorly when they turned up looking for them, but I was made up that they had found us. Eve’s side of the family were so fractured and distant. Living in different parts of the country and not seeing or talking to each other for years meant that the younger ones hadn’t really grown up with the older ones, so they weren’t close.

  There were seven sisters; Evelyn was the eldest, then Paula, Gina, Annette, Rebecca, Meryl and Betty. United, they were a force to be reckoned with, a force that could rip a village apart and lay waste to everything. But divided, if they had a falling out, well, no one wanted to get in the middle because they knew it wasn’t worth their lives. I called them ‘The Sisters’, although I only really knew two of my mum’s sisters: Aunty Gina and Aunty Rebecca, who still lived in Liverpool and would sometimes visit us in the summer.

  The story I used to hear being whispered was that ‘The Sisters’ were young girls when their African father died and they were all taken into foster care or adopted out. Their Irish mother, who I called ‘The Matriarch’ but had never met, was severely mentally ill and eventually disappeared back to Ireland to die in a psychiatric home for the elderly.

  The life my mother and her sisters had before they were orphaned caused each and every one of them some form of psychological, emotional and physical damage. It was never talked about, but it came up in some way or another when they were older. It seemed that some of their kids had also been affected, including the ones who were put into care when they were babies.

  I wanted to know more so called Nat and Marcy again a couple of days later.

  It was so cool that I could now get to know these two beautiful women again. It was something about the future I had to look forward to. They were the same age as Adult Naomi and didn’t smoke weed! I loved that they were related to me and we could be friends. And even if we hadn’t been in each other’s lives from when we were babies, it was like there was an invisible thread that bonded us to each other that I knew would last a lifetime. Nat and Marcy arrived at just the right time.

  Still, talking to them reminded me of the whispered conversations I would overhear between ‘The Sisters’ when I was little. They kinda had a totally crap time with ‘The Matriarch’ and I found out that mental illness had coursed through the family tree like an erosive poison. Some of ‘The Sisters’ had escaped the legacy of mental illness with learning difficulties or addiction issues. Others had suffered the full onslaught, and had ended up institutionalized because of it. Learning this helped me understand a few more things about the bipolar-bear stuff that Adult Naomi had to deal with. It also made me wonder whether this legacy meant we were all, at some point, destined to suffer a mental breakdown, depression, or addiction in our lives. Or was it simply because of what we were told by people around us and the way we were brought up? Either way, it was becoming clearer to me that maybe everything wasn’t totally Adult Naomi’s fault. Maybe that’s why I was here, to figure out how to live a life without it all going mental and feeling like I might wanna kill myself.

  But again, why fifteen? I couldn’t remember much about being fifteen. One night, when Leo was asleep, I lay on my bed and I tried to remember, but it all felt like a blur. I turned over and saw the red diary lying on the floor. I knew the answer to the question was in that book.

  My stomach began to hurt. Those pages gave Adult Naomi’s mind a safe place for all of her innermost thoughts, her secrets. It seemed that the more she wrote year after year, the more she was able to keep those sides of her hidden from view, like a snail crawling into its shell. Adult Naomi didn’t want to share, didn’t want to be revealed. She was vulnerable, sensitive, and spiritually aware, and her secrets were hidden deep in the pages of her journals.

  These new words I had learned – insomnia, depression, mania, listlessness, apathy, detachment – were these the only ways she could survive? And through the diaries I could see that the only people she felt safe to love were Simone and Leo.

  It was time. I reached over, picked up the red diary and opened it. I could feel my heart beating. Outside, it began to rain.

  Thursday 18 April 1991

  This is totally bogus and I am in major shock and I really don’t know what the hell to do. I wish I could go back to Liverpool to Dad’s and it be Easter all over again cos I sooooo don’t wanna be here right now with all this crap going on. I go back to school today to find out that while I was away, ALL – yes, ALL – of my friends have accused the group of boys in our year of sexual assault. What the F**K??? When they told me what happened, I believed them. When you tell a boy to stop, or NO, you don’t like where they are putting their hands, then they shouldn’t laugh and carry on. But the whole school has turned against my friends and I felt like everyone was watching me to see what I would do, whose side I would choose. We’ve gone from the most admired to the most hated in the space of a week. I was horrified when they told me, felt like my stomach was eating itself over and over all day! And now that I’m home, I’m, like, devastated that this has happened. I am caught in the middle. I tried to protect my friends from the school, explaining to everyone their side of the story, but the WHOLE school thinks they were wrong for telling the teachers. Then I tried to protect the boys from being expelled and explain to them where my friends were coming from, that they went too far and that they should own up to what they did, but they didn’t wanna hear it, saying it was harmless fun and the girls weren’t complaining at the time and they didn’t do anything wrong. I even tried to talk to Mrs O’Shea but she told me I wasn’t there and parents and THE POLICE were involved and I couldn’
t do anything for them! I blame myself, seriously! Why did my dad ask if we could stay an extra week in Liverpool? Why did mum say yes? I could have protected the girls. The boys wouldn’t have dared do anything if I was there. Especially after me kicking Malik’s arse in second year when he hit Simone. The boys know not to mess with me. I feel so bad for everyone, and kinda angry as well ’cause, like, why the hell did they go in the classrooms with the boys in the first place? What were they thinking? If I was there, it wouldn’t have happened. There’s nothing I can do, and I feel well sad about the whole thing. The boys are up in front of the governors and, like, EVERYONE hates my friends now. It’s all gone really wrong, and I don’t know what to do. Everything’s changed and I can’t make it right again. There’s no one that can help me make it right again.

  I didn’t remember any of this as I was reading it. The page that followed was blank and the next entry was written four days later.

  Monday 22 April 1991

  We are in hiding. No seriously, we are in hiding. I’m sat on Reece’s and Niamh’s bunk bed drinking a Cherry B. I’m still in my uniform. Louise has just given me the drink after I asked if my mum was gonna die. Know what she said? ‘I really don’t know, Nay.’ I mean, what the SMEG!!?! I mean, what if she does, like, die? What will we do then? I don’t wanna live with my dad. I love him and Marlene but I so don’t wanna leave school and my friends. And totally smeggin’ wack if they kill my mum. I mean, she didn’t do anything wrong.

  We have to stay here at Lou’s house until it’s safe to go home. I mean, it might not be ever. We might have to do another midnight flip and get out of here, if they aren’t convinced that my mum didn’t steal their drugs. I mean, of course she didn’t take their stupid cocaine. My mum is a ganja baby and she likes a drink, everyone knows that, but these horrible men are saying that she and her friend took it and now they want to kidnap her and torture her until she gives it back to them. I mean, like really torture her – we’re talking about wires hooked up to car batteries and stuff. God, I mean, she only went to their house for a drink and a spliff and then they came to our house on Friday after school and questioned me, asking me where she was. Bobby B was with them – think he showed them where we lived – and he whispered to me to go inside the house and lock the door and not to answer it if the men came back.