Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  Her: You so did!

  Me: We drew all night until we couldn’t keep our eyes open. I was buzzing that I had found a way to fall asleep living in the world I had just created, being able to do and say and go anywhere I wanted! But the next day, you know, Eve went ballistic.

  Her: Majorly ballistic! Remember, she grounded you? And gave you a bucket of warm, soapy water and a wire scrubbing brush. You had to scrub off every single drawing.

  Me: Yeah, I remember now. Gosh, I was devastated. We had both spent hours drawing these imaginary worlds full of amazing places and special people, and then we had to destroy them.

  Her: Yeah, it was mega sad. You both started to cry.

  Me: Yeah, but seeing the tears in my sister’s eyes, I don’t know . . . I remembered how happy my stories made her. I felt it was my responsibility to make her sadness go away.

  Her: So you grabbed a pair of knickers.

  Me: KNICKERS?!

  Her: Yeah, remember, out of the bin bags our clothes were in? You put them on your head, stuck a pencil in your mouth, pretended it was a Woodbine and became—

  Me: Edna Jacobs! The washerwoman who told stories!

  Her: Finally!

  Me: I remember. It made Simone laugh and I carried on telling her the stories we’d created even if we couldn’t see them. You know, even though we had to scrub everything off the wall, it didn’t matter because they carried on having great adventures. Yeah, because I knew I was Edna Jacobs, ‘The Washer Woman Storyteller’, and I was going to tell their stories.

  Her: Yeah, Sim was well happy and you both stopped crying.

  Me: I think I promised myself that I was going to have the same adventures as my characters and tell their tales to those that wanted to know, just to see their smile, and wipe away the tears.

  Her: Totally.

  Me: But clearly, this was a psychological reaction to the distress of being uprooted and taken from the only life I had known. Eve running away from Liverpool wasn’t because of the riots; it was because she was hiding from a domestically violent environment, so this meant that my memories of the childhood I’d had so far were fading. And clearly I had no choice but to embrace my new life of squat-dwelling storyteller.

  Her: Ugh! Psycho bibble babble!! Who cares?

  Me: But I was five.

  Her: Duh, yeah! And you already knew what you wanted to be then! What you wanted to do with your life. You just forgot!

  (I mentally saw myself crawl up to the top of the bed; she shuffled over and I lay down next to her. We both lay there, staring up at the ceiling of the house of my mind.)

  Her: Remember Joseph and his video camera? All of the plays and musicals and singing we did for him?

  Me: I always wanted to control the stage production.

  Her: You mean you wanted to boss everyone around!

  Me: Ha-ha-ha! Yeah!

  Her: Remember after that you wanted to be an actress and would sit in front of the mirror smoking a pen, pretending it was a Benson and Hedges, pretending you were some drug-crazed criminal being interviewed by an officer from The Bill. Erm, dude! Took the drug-crazed bit slightly too far.

  Me: Yeah, but my soliloquy on being a reluctant grass and informing on my ‘well hard’ gangster boyfriend was to die for. It had tears and everything.

  Her: We were good at English language and literature, weren’t we? It was our favourite subject in school. I knew I wanted to be a journalist when Miss Doughtily gave me an A for my teabag-stained Veronian newspaper and my wicked article on the scandal of Romeo and Juliet shagging each other.

  Me: Gosh, yeah! I wanted more William and I understood Chaucer, I really did; that love in heaven and pain in hell thing, I got it. Remember Mr Marsham, the English lit. teacher?

  Her: And his coloured bow ties that always matched his glasses, and his striped shirts? (In mocking posh voice) I have a fervent passion for all works Ye Olde English.

  Me: Ha-ha-ha! I felt like he was my mythical Timmy Mallet, except large volumes of text were his Thor-like weapon and the resulting feelings after reading were my solatium. I lapped up any book he would put in front of me, and everyone else would bitch and moan. But I would give a squeal of delight at the sheer volume of the works, and, nervously biting my lip, enquire as to how long we had to scale the prodigious literary mountain.

  Her: Oh my dayz! Stop, woman! You’ve got the message! We like words. We like to write! So WRITE!

  So, eventually accepting that I didn’t need to come up with a million and one reasons to write, and spurred on by mine and Teen Nay’s conversation about my mind and our memories, I started to write short stories based on my mega mental experiences. I swapped the self-empowerment class for a creative writing one. This got me out of the house and around people who wanted to share their own stories.

  It was only after I read out my first funny piece, titled Battle of the Bacofoil (it was about being angry because I had burnt my Christmas turkey), and received a round of applause afterwards, that I really started to take what Teen Nay had said seriously.

  Katie and Simone read my short stories and loved them, and after another day sitting in my room, staring at the Hollywood walls in awe of Teen Nay, I meditated and entered the ‘house’ to find her in the bedroom, sitting at a desk, holding a pen.

  Her: So you like your bedroom, then?

  Me: Very much.

  Her: And the colour – it’s sick, right?

  Me: Sick?

  Her: New word. Nothing’s wicked or mega or kriss anymore; it’s all sick – Leo told me.

  Me: Cool.

  Her: No!

  Me: What?

  Her: No one says cool anymore – so lame.

  Me: (Feeling like a really out-of-touch mother.) Well, I like the bedroom, thank you, and the furniture. (She had gone all out and my savings had suffered.)

  Her: Well, how about it, then?

  Me: What? Writing? I am!

  Her: Duh, yeah! But—

  Me: Wait! Why are you still here?

  Her: Who cares? Don’t wanna go back to that small town anyway! Write the story!

  Me: What?

  Her: Yeah, write about what happened to me; peeps have sooooo got to know.

  Me: Are you serious?

  Her: As serious as your barf-worthy dress sense! Write the story, my story – no, our story – and tell people.

  Me: (light-bulb flash)

  Her: (laughing) And make sure you write to me and tell me how it all goes!

  This, I believe, is when Teen Nay and I bonded and started to merge. And this was the beginning of everything changing.

  Months passed and the writing was keeping me focused. I was putting everything that had happened to me, and to Teen Nay, in order. I still wasn’t sure how to deal with my friends, so I used the writing as a reason for my sudden unavailability, until I could figure something out. Through the writing class I found work volunteering on some short-film sets as a prop and set designer and I began to look forward to going to bed and trying to get a good night’s sleep, fresh for the next day.

  Structure was forming in my life and that structure was slowly revealing a purpose. I was starting to climb out of the black hole that had threatened to consume me for most of my life, and I began to see that perhaps Teen Nay was right. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me and I could find my way; find my path, my purpose. But if so, how?

  I found that in writing her story, I was gradually starting to see that maybe some positivity could come out of what I had seen as somewhat of a traumatic experience.

  And then, in a heartbeat, everything changed again.

  Eve came to live in Manchester.

  Apart from this one time, when Simone had attempted to build a bridge between us on her graduation day, I hadn’t seen Eve properly for almost four years.

  And now, because her alcoholism had grown increasingly worse and she was about to lose her job, Simone had invited her to live with her and had offered to help her get into a rehabilitation fac
ility. I was in shock.

  Eve moving to Manchester six months after my amnesia made me anxious and conflicted. Part of me wanted to fall into her arms and tell her everything I had been through with the memory loss, but the other part said, No, don’t trust her, this isn’t real.

  Simone had told her about the memory loss but I had never asked what Eve had thought about it. I was having a hard enough time with everything that had just happened, fearful it might happen again at any moment. Despite Teen Nay encouraging me to give up smoking, I turned to weed, the only thing I thought would help me cope. But one night, I realized it just wasn’t having the same mind-numbing effect it used to.

  It was strange seeing Eve for the first time; she had lost a lot of weight and looked pale. I’d gone round to Simone’s from the film set where I’d been working to pick up Leo. Eve offered me dinner and we made small talk as I ate. She asked questions about Leo and tried to get to know about my life, but it felt strained, forced almost. I wanted to leave as soon as possible.

  When Leo and I got home, I kept thinking about Eve and how disjointed everything seemed. After all but disappearing from my life for fifteen years, had she really returned, attempting to play a role that was no longer necessary? It didn’t feel right. I was scared and felt helpless, so called Nat, Marcy and Katie for comfort; they agreed that it wasn’t paranoid thinking and that I did have valid reasons not to trust her. Eve was an alcoholic. She had been a functional alcoholic for a long time during my late childhood and adult life and I had learned through years of experience of living with her that what she said, and ultimately what she did, could never really be trusted. It had made things hard because I still loved her unconditionally. But that love meant that I also carried this sense of responsibility a belief that I had either created or somehow contributed to Eve’s alcoholism.

  As I had got older, I came to realize that in order for her to continue the cycle of self-abuse, she had to blame everyone, other than herself, for what she did. Sometimes that would include my sister or me. Even though I did everything to make her feel as comfortable as possible, even buying her favourite alcohol and weed when she visited, the blame was always there. Sometimes I would try to have a conversation with her about how worried I was about her drinking but she would always cry and accuse me of judging her. If I asked her advice about something, she would somehow feel that I was blaming her for running off with the postman when I was eighteen and disappearing to London, and she would cry again. I just always felt worse about myself afterwards so stopped trying.

  Still, even though I knew the blame was coming, it always hit me like an unexpected slap in the face. After years of this, aged twenty-nine, I couldn’t take the stress this unpredictability brought, so I wrote her a long letter explaining how her alcoholism affected me and then I cut her out of my life. This was four years ago and now . . . now she was back and I had no clue how to deal with her.

  One night, after a day of prop and set designing on a Blackpool film set, I had told Leo a story and put him to bed. Then, in the quiet house, I tried to think back to the time – around 1993/4, when I was seventeen or eighteen years of age – when I realized my mum was an alcoholic. It was all fuzzy, and as there were no diaries to refer back to, I decided it might help me to write down what I could remember.

  29 December 2008

  Dear Teen Nay,

  Remembering has been difficult because at first I couldn’t find one reason as to why, or even when or how it started. But now I realize it has just been a collection of experiences that when grouped together one day made me realize that Eve did have a drink problem. Maybe it is the same for her – that there isn’t just one reason why she drinks; maybe it’s lots of reasons rolled into one. Maybe.

  I remember fragments. Like when I was about seventeen, and me and Sim refused to babysit for the neighbour’s kid so that her and Eve could go out together. We had this heated argument, and Simone grabbed a bottle of wine out of the fridge and smashed it on the concrete path in the garden.

  And then I realized that all of those times when she would go missing, and we would knock on the neighbours’ doors looking for her, finally made sense. She liked to have a good time, she liked to go out, she liked to have a drink. I didn’t even mind her drunkenly slapping me across the face and telling me she loved me when she, Aunty Gina and Aunty Becca would return from the club. It was fun watching them dance in the kitchen and make fried egg sandwiches while they laughed with each other about what happened in the shebeens. It all seemed to go very wrong when Joseph left. Her drinking got worse overnight and then she started doing things that were beyond embarrassing. I suppose the smashing of the bottle was Simone’s brave protest. At that point, though, I was so detached from my reality. I was leaving to live with Aunty Gina in London and I held so much anger towards Eve for kicking me out because things had gone really wrong in Liverpool with Art and I wasn’t speaking to him.

  I just wanted to get as far away as possible from everything, including my own mind.

  I reckon the pain I was supressing evolved into resentment, and every time I went back to Wolverhampton to visit her and my sister and saw that her drinking had worsened, I became more detached. And then when Joseph disappeared, well, she just toppled over the edge of her grief and fell head first into a barrel of lager-filled despair, and began to drink every day.

  The more I wrote about my experiences with my mum, the more I began to unearth all of the negative emotions I had buried over the years. And as I wrote, I could see exactly when it was that I had let go of the idea of her ever being a mum to me.

  I was eighteen and living with Lou, trying to get the money together to go to Canada, when my ex-boyfriend – the original emotional vampire – chased me down a set of stone steps. I fell, he dragged me up off the floor, pinned me up against a phone box and bit and sucked on my neck until he left a large red and swollen mark. I was so distressed and scared that when Eve came up to see Lou the next day, Lou told her what had happened. Part of me wanted Eve to go over and slap him up the side of his drug-addled head. But I think because of her fear of a situation that probably seemed out of her control, she drank instead and I got high.

  That was the day I realized I was no longer her responsibility and that she was never going to be the mother that I wanted or needed. Not long after this, I got so stressed as a result of the stalking, violent, crack-head Dracula that I lost my two part-time jobs, started taking a lot of ecstasy, acid and speed and eventually had a nervous breakdown. I went back to live with Art and put as much physical and emotional distance as I could between Eve and me. Which was easy considering she had left to live in London, and had slipped deeper into her alcoholism.

  Three years later, when Leo was born, I did try to build bridges and she would come to Manchester to see us once a year. But because of her drinking, I began to dread her visits. They just caused more harm than good.

  The last chance saloon was when she tried to put Bacardi Breezer in Leo’s Power Ranger cup, claiming it was like juice. My son was eight! That, together with her drunken revelation that Art wasn’t my real father, pushed me over the edge. I started to do lots of cocaine and had my second nervous breakdown. I was twenty-nine.

  I decided the only thing I could do was to cut her out of my life for good. And I told everyone who didn’t know me that I was grieving the death of my mother.

  It was the only way I thought I could cope.

  And now she is back and I don’t know how to deal. I really don’t know how to deal. I don’t know what to do and I don’t want to let you down but I don’t know what to do.

  I need help.

  Adult Naomi x

  Writing to her like she had written to me helped me remain aware that Teen Nay was watching from the sidelines and it was up to me to protect her. I had to be her Serket now. She had blamed herself for starting all of this and wanted to make things better, and I was beginning to suspect that she was sticking around to see if I was going t
o follow through on what she had started. In all of this, me writing our stories was my way of helping her realize that she had been full of potential, although she had buried it seventeen years ago.

  And then it all changed. Again.

  I had tried, I really had. I even let Simone bring Eve up to my house for dinner a few times. Every time they would come she would bring me flowers, or a nice vase to put them in. So I knew she was trying as well. But I found it awkward and intense. So much had been left unsaid and I wanted to confront her, but felt I couldn’t because she was in such a delicate place. I needed something to happen. One night I got what I had asked for.

  Missing her company and desperate to spend some time alone with her, I called Simone to see if she wanted to go to watch a film at the cinema. Just the two of us. Leo was already staying at her house and she asked Eve to keep an eye on him for a couple of hours. I was reticent at first; Eve was acting excitable and I suspected she may have already been drinking that day. But I didn’t want to accuse her and for her to feel victimized.

  Leo was outside playing with his friends when I arrived, so I quietly told him that if anything happened he should go to Simone’s friend Marianne’s house and she would call me straight away.

  I suppose I wanted to let Eve see that in spite of everything that had happened, I could still make attempts to trust her. My attempts were in vain. When we arrived back from the cinema, I checked on Leo, who was still playing at his friend’s house.

  ‘Just letting you know I’m back, son.’ I popped my head round the bedroom door, seeing he was on the PlayStation with his friend Tom. Leo nodded.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah, but Nanna was acting funny.’

  My heart started to pulse. ‘Funny how?’ I already knew he meant she was drunk.