Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

‘The sandpit is where the oil is, and wherever there’s oil there’s money.’

  I rolled my tearing eyes at him. It so isn’t about the economy right now, I thought.

  As if reading my mind, he turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ll be okay. You’ve got me and JJ, you’ve got Leo.’ He gave me a reassuring smile then, shuddering, he pulled his coat collar up around his neck, muttering, ‘It’s Baltic out here, girl, winter’s coming. D’ya wanna cuppa tea?’ He opened the door and stepped in.

  ‘I’ll have a herbal, please, Dad,’ I said as I followed him.

  I wanted to believe him but I was scared. What if I wouldn’t be okay? What if I lost my memory again and she wouldn’t be there to help me?

  Simone drove her car to my house and I had to fight back the tears provoked from seeing her for the first time in eight months and knowing she was about to leave. She seemed happy, excited to go, and together with her oldest childhood friend, Wally, we drove both cars to the airport.

  In October 2009, after a quiet, dignified goodbye, I left the airport in her car and cried all the way back home. How, I thought, was I going to live a life without Simone in it, with Eve living only ten minutes around the corner from my home?

  For months after Simone left, I focused on forgiveness, and soon came to understand that in actually forgiving others, I wasn’t excusing their behaviour or saying what had happened was all right. I was in fact clearing the mental and emotional debris from my life so that I could get on with living it. Knowing this freed me to see that it was actually me I needed to forgive. For all the times I had hurt myself. Every time something bad had happened, even though it was out of my control, I had immediately felt as if it was all my fault, that I had somehow created the situation, and the voice of unworthiness would weigh in. Feeling unworthy, I’d behave in a self-destructive way, which would reinforce the belief that I somehow deserved what had happened.

  I also understood that as much as Teen Nay had appeared in my life to help me and sort my mess out, she had also appeared to heal what she had experienced all those years ago when she’d tried to kill herself. She had needed to forgive Eve for her inability to provide support and guidance during a time when she needed it the most. But more importantly, she – no, I – needed to forgive myself for not having the answers at the age of fifteen and splitting.

  It seemed that what had happened to Teen Nay when she woke up in the future, everything that I’d learned afterwards, Simone leaving and me forgiving myself, had been enough for her to heal. And one day Teen Nay left the house of my mind.

  I didn’t even notice she was gone at first; it was only after all of the months of therapy and dealing with the need to heal and forgive that I realized she was quiet with her Monty Python-esque piss-take on The Life Of Naomi. I searched for her.

  She had slipped away silently.

  So, with a quiet acceptance and a little more faith that in letting go I was making space for the new, the next day I called Eve. After a year of not speaking, she was happy to hear from me.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, I’m good, girl.’

  ‘Are you settle—’

  ‘I’ve got my own room in rehab and I’m volunteering at the museum,’ she said, speaking over me.

  ‘Oh, that’s great, Mum! I’m really happy for you, well d—’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve been on some computer courses and passed them.’ She sounded nervous.

  ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Well, I just wanted to tell you that I lo—’ I started.

  ‘How’s Leo?’

  ‘Oh, he’s good, yeah. Getting tall. He’ll be starting high school this year.’

  ‘Aaaah, tell him I said hello.’

  ‘I will. Well, I’m gonna go now.’

  ‘Okay, thanks for calling.’

  ‘Yes. Bye, Mum, and I love you.’

  ‘Thank you, speak soon.’

  ‘Yeah, you too,’ I said and hung up the phone.

  I was genuinely happy to hear that she was doing so well. And as I listened, I realized my true intention was to tell her that I loved her. It didn’t matter that in her nervousness she spoke over me or even that she didn’t say I love you back, as the phone call wasn’t for her; it was for me. It was to honour my self-forgiveness. Telling her felt like I was somehow cementing my experience and the growth I had achieved from the moment I had taken the pills all those years ago and thrown my life into crisis.

  I had found what I was looking for. What I had needed had been inside of me the whole time.

  Forgiveness.

  17

  500 Ways to Love

  Sometimes it’s as simple

  as knowing

  that to get through it

  all you need to heal it

  is love.

  N. J.

  From the moment I decided to let go of everything that I couldn’t control, I did my utmost to focus on healing my mind. When I felt something, I talked about it; when I got low I ran it, swam it, or danced it out. When I couldn’t sleep, I meditated and focused on feeling positive about myself. I stayed in therapy, and when my block of appointed sessions was finished I bought Maria a large bouquet of flowers. As much as I was going to miss her, I vowed I would never go back into therapy ever again. I was going to trust that whatever the issue, whenever there was a problem, I would have the tools to deal with it. I continued writing my diary and I listened to music that uplifted me. I read books about people who had been through crap in their lives and had not only survived, but thrived. I focused on these role models.

  I continued to write my stories.

  And then, during a sunny July day in 2010 before Simone was returning to terminate the tenancy on her house, I turned the corner in a busy Manchester city centre and bumped straight into Eve. We both just looked at each other, smiled and hugged.

  ‘Oh my gosh, you look great,’ I said to her, surprised at her appearance.

  ‘Thanks,’ she laughed, her eyes sparkling.

  ‘You’ve put on weight and your skin is glowing, you look so healthy.’

  She patted her small round stomach. ‘It’s all the bloody food they feed you in rehab.’

  ‘Cool.’ I nodded in approval.

  ‘Everyone here eats pies and bread.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I laughed, ‘it’s a Manchester thing.’

  She nodded and laughed with me.

  ‘So how’s it going? Like, with rehab and stuff?’

  ‘Ahh, it’s good, Nay, I’m getting a lot of help.’

  We stood in the middle of the busy city centre while Eve asked about Leo and I told her how different things had been for the both of us since the amnesia and how I was learning to live a life without drugs. She told me that she’d been carrying on with therapy and that she was still working in the museum.

  ‘It’s not easy, though, sometimes,’ she said. ‘I still can’t sleep properly, but I’m not going on the medication they keep offering me, no way.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’ll find a way to sleep properly again, I know I will,’ she said adamantly.

  We spoke about Simone and how much we were looking forward to seeing her, and Eve invited me to come along to the rehab centre and see her when Simone came home. I said I would. We hugged again and as I left, I felt something I had never really felt about my mum before. I felt inspired by her.

  When Simone came home, we went together to see Eve and she showed us around her room. It was a good size, comfortable with a single bed and pink walls. She had made it her own, with her perfumes and books, and on the cabinet next to her bed was a picture of the three of us standing together, smiling. She took us around the rehab centre, introducing us proudly to everyone there. She seemed happy; she had made friends and she was sticking to her programme.

  I was still very wary and still going through my own healing, so I wanted to maintain a distance, but about a week later,
during a day out for lunch and shopping, as I watched her laughingly recount her adventures in rehab to Simone, Leo and me, it struck me that I’d got my storytelling ways from her. Finally, seeing a part of myself in her, I was intrigued and wanted to know more. I reckoned it would be okay to keep in touch with her when Simone went back to Dubai.

  So I called Eve every now and then, to see how she was doing. She was still sober and had changed jobs to volunteer at the homeless centre. She was also being invited to give talks to women about her own experiences with alcoholism and homelessness. Her key worker at the rehab centre told me these talks were inspiring and were helping her with her own self-esteem and confidence.

  She had also joined a theatre group and invited me to her first performance, a play called 500 Ways to Love.

  I went with Leo, nervous and holding on to a bunch of flowers as I watched her perform. When Eve came out with the rest of the cast, Leo and I looked at each other and smiled.

  ‘This is weird,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but she’s trying.’

  ‘Is this a musical?’ he whispered in my ear as the piano began to play.

  ‘Errr, I think so,’ I replied.

  ‘Can Nanna sing?’

  ‘I have no clue,’ I said, ‘but we’re about to find out, son.’

  When she proudly belted out the first song, Leo and I looked at each other and breathed a sigh of relief. She was really good. And as I watched her it became apparent that she was making a sincere and brave effort to make her life better. Again I found it inspiring and I realized she was actually on the same journey as I was, a journey to heal the pain of her fractured past, and underneath it all, she was looking for who she truly was.

  Around this time, I let go of my friendships with Rhonda, Maeve and Danielle. Since the amnesia I had been slowly pulling away from them; I felt the more I wrote and the less I smoked, the less I had in common with them, and the communication between us slowly came to a halt. I’d decided that these relationships were no longer reflecting where I was in my life. I’d also found that in forgiving myself, I let go of feeling responsible for those friendships, and responsible for Eve’s alcoholism or any relapse she could have in the future. Seeing her in rehab, I’d realized she was a grown woman and could take care of her own needs, and so could I.

  Seeing the positive changes in her, I was happy for us to meet up every now and then for lunch in a neutral place, and slowly get to know each other. Our conversations took on a healing form that I wasn’t aware of at first until I wrote about them later when I got home. One rainy day we met in a cafe, the warmth and background hissing of the coffee machine creating a kind of cocoon, and sat for hours while I told her more about the amnesia and she told me about her life.

  ‘I did bond with you, you know,’ Eve said suddenly. ‘I mean, I remember the midwife coming to see me when you were first born, and telling me someone must have loved me when I was a baby, because I bonded so well with you.’

  What happened then? I wondered, but didn’t say anything, just sipped on my herbal tea. The moment felt fragile, and too precious to break.

  ‘I just . . . it just seemed like everyone wanted to take you off me.’

  ‘You mean my dad?’ I asked her.

  She nodded, tears welling in her eyes. ‘Nothing was ever good enough; he used to come in and if he didn’t like the way I’d dressed you, he would change you and then take you out for hours. I would never know where you were.’

  ‘Is that why you told me he wasn’t my dad?’

  Her tears spilled and I watched them roll down her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, Nay, I really am.’ I handed her a tissue from my bag. ‘I never meant for it to come out like that.’

  ‘So who is this other guy then, the one you said could have been my father?’

  She wiped her face. ‘I was seeing him before your dad, but I know, I remember now, I know the moment you were conceived. But I was confused back then; I was young, we were on our own, I didn’t have anyone to teach me about sex.’ More tears spilled. ‘And I told Marlene that you might not be your dad’s and she went and told all of his family, your nan and granddad, everyone.’

  Bloody hell, I thought. I knew Marlene had been Mum’s friend back then and had been so involved in our childhoods but this was on another level.

  ‘But I remember, I do, Nay, I remember when you were conceived, on the sofa, me and your dad.’

  ‘Err, too much information!’ I held my hand up in protestation and laughed.

  ‘You are definitely his,’ she smiled. ‘Your granddad knew. When you were born he held you and he said you were a Jacobs.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mum, I know who I am.’ I thought about Egypt and Teen Nay’s realization about names and vibrations. ‘I am more than my name, I know who I am.’

  I got around from the table and hugged her tightly.

  We carried on meeting once a week in a cafe and months later, while I was in and out of hospital for an operation for fibroids in my womb, I really started thinking about being a woman, about my identity, and how I’d been given a second chance to be a teenager and what it had meant to me. It made me reassess the mothers I had in Eve and Marlene, and wonder more about Eve’s childhood, given the mother she’d had. It made me question the mental illness in the family – what it meant coming from my mum’s side of the family and having to deal with mental illness, or the ‘curse’ as it had been called for generations. Having the operation on my womb, depending less and less on Art, and Simone being away, all meant that I depended more on my own self to sift through the complex emotions that emerged before, during and after the surgery. It opened me up, not literally (although that did happen), but emotionally and mentally to Eve’s own story, her abuse issues and the resulting alcoholism, and then to The Matriarch’s mental illness. I discovered a new level of healing in hearing their stories and when I began to write about them.

  For the first time, I wanted to know more about Eve’s own mother, especially in light of the fact that she had told me that someone must have bonded with her when she was a baby. I knew it was a sensitive subject but I felt I needed to know more about The Matriarch’s mental illness. While Eve visited me in hospital I asked her about the grandmother I had never got to know.

  ‘She was a looker, my mum, really pretty. She had long, straight jet-black hair, gorgeous skin and these big hazel eyes. We get our cheekbones from her.’

  ‘Really?’ I tried to imagine her as a young woman; she sounded quite glamorous.

  ‘She loved expensive perfumes.’

  ‘That’s where you get it from then,’ I said, thinking of all the times I used to try and sneak a spray of my mum’s Opium perfume when I was a teenager.

  ‘And bags,’ she added.

  ‘That’s where I get it from,’ I said, thinking of my growing obsession with bags.

  ‘She ran away from Ireland when she was pregnant with me and came to Manchester, to have me,’ Eve started hesitantly.

  ‘You were born here?’ I was shocked and carefully sat up in my hospital bed. ‘I always thought you were born in Liverpool?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, she met my dad when I was six months old and he took her to Liverpool and married her.’

  ‘Oh wow.’ I was shocked to hear after all these years that the man my mum called Dad wasn’t her real dad. I wanted to ask more but sensed Eve didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘Do you think she might have come here because she was pregnant?’ I stuck to questions about The Matriarch instead.

  ‘Maybe, I’m not sure. She was eighteen when she came here. She had a good family, but I heard that her brother was stabbed and killed at a cricket match and she was never quite the same after that.’

  She went quiet for a moment, and stared at the hospital floor. ‘It was okay at first.’ She looked up at me. ‘My mum, she was a good mum, she was good to us . . . well, the first four of us, we . . . I had a childhood.’ She stopped, thinking back. ‘She used to dress us
in our finest; we were well looked after.’

  ‘I like the picture of you four with your dad, the black-and-white one.’ It was the only picture of the oldest sisters that survived throughout the years and Eve had had copies made for me and Simone and framed them as presents.

  ‘Yeah, it just all changed when she had the other four children; that’s when it all went wrong.’ eve started to get upset, so i reached over and held her hand.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum, you don’t have to explain.’ I had heard enough over the years about what had happened to The Matriarch’s children and some of it was downright horrendous. Piecing it all together now made things a bit clearer. Maybe she’d had severe postnatal depression after the later pregnancies and this had actually triggered the mental illness. ‘She was ill,’ I said, trying to comfort her. ‘It wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been so mentally ill.’

  My mum nodded. ‘I loved them both, Nay. My dad, he was a good man. He used to take me to Dublin to stay with my grandma and granddad – I still know the address.’

  ‘Really?’ I tried to imagine this large African man walking down the streets of Dublin with these little children trailing behind him visiting his in-laws. The neighbours’ curtains must have been twitching. ‘Maybe one day I’ll go and see if I can find any of the Irish side of the family,’ I said.

  Eve smiled. ‘I had a good childhood at first, but by the time they came to take us all away I was fifteen; my mum just couldn’t look after us all anymore and my dad had just died, so they took everyone away and some of my sisters were babies and I never saw them again.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to her?’

  ‘I think she went back to Ireland after that.’

  We both sat in silence for a while because we knew what had come next. The Matriarch had been institutionalized and had died.

  Thinking about my own issues with my own mental health, I felt a sudden compassion for this woman I had never known. ‘You know what, Mum?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be here if she had never been brave enough to leave Ireland and have you, so if I ever think of her I’m not gonna think of the bad stuff. You know what I’ll think of?’