Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  ‘Oh.’ She laughed. ‘It hangs up when you finish the call. It’s automatic.’

  ‘Wic-ked,’ I said, still whispering. A world with this kind of technology reached beyond the realms of my imagination. The last time I had seen a mobile phone, it had been plastic, grey, and the size of a house brick with a black aerial sticking out of the top. Frankly, I thought men in wide-shouldered suits looked like right tossers walking down the street shouting into them.

  ‘Are you okay, waiting four days to see a doctor, Nay?’ Simone took the focus off the alien technology and back onto my brain.

  ‘It’s okay.’ I smiled reassuringly and squeezed her hand. ‘I’m okay. I’ll be fine. It’s most probably nothing, just a bad headache or something.’

  My stomach rumbled again, alerting me to the fact that I hadn’t eaten yet. Does Adult Naomi not eat and is that why this body is so skinny? I wondered.

  Still, the only thing I could think of was pickled onions and cottage cheese.

  Does the future still have them?

  3

  Déjà Vu

  It’s like I know

  I have never met you before

  but I feel like I have.

  I think that’s a soul memory;

  you’re remembering the life you’ve already seen,

  the places you’ve already been.

  L. E.

  It was like déjà vu, but I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t make it go away. I had this niggling feeling that I had seen everything – the people, the places and the things – before. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t remember. And now I had to meet the child I knew belonged to Adult Naomi yet I couldn’t remember giving birth to. Simone had taken the rest of the day off work and, not wanting to leave my side, decided to take me to the school herself. I wasn’t ready to go back to the house of horrors I had woken up in, so Katie had invited us back to hers for dinner.

  ‘What shall I say to him?’ I asked Simone as we climbed into a small bubble-shaped silver car with a strange-looking number plate. I was well nervous.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I mean, you could be okay and go back to normal tomorrow and then we would scare him for no reason. But . . .’ She paused.

  As grown-up as my sister had become, she still had that same purse-lipped, narrow-eyed look when she was about to say something sensitive. ‘But . . . well, this could last longer than a day.’

  ‘It won’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘But, Nay—’ she protested

  ‘No, Sim, I’m safe,8 honest. I bet by the time I get to the doctor’s I’ll be back to normal and I’ll remember everything.’

  I secretly hoped this wasn’t the case, as I didn’t really want to remember anything about the past seventeen years. I had only been in it a few hours but I was beginning to suspect that the future wasn’t turning out how I had imagined.

  ‘I don’t think we should tell him then,’ Simone said quietly.

  I agreed, and reckoned that with Simone and Katie’s help, I could pretend everything was okay for the night at least. Until this awful feeling of déjà vu went and I would no longer be in a city I didn’t like the look of, living a life I just didn’t get.

  We arrived at the school and waited in the playground. A couple of the mothers smiled at me, but none said hello or came up to me, which Simone said was because it was a new school and Leo usually went to something called After-School Club most days. I was kinda relieved but still really didn’t want to be there.

  What if Leo did suspect something? What would I do if I couldn’t hide that I was fifteen from him?

  A bell rang and shortly after, the doors burst open and a sea of children in royal-blue jumpers ran out, noisy and excited at the end of the day. My anxiety rose sharply and I wanted to chip9. Simone gripped on to my hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Nay, you are going to be all right, okay?’ she said. ‘I trust you and Leo trusts you, and as scared as you are right now, wait until you see him. That fear will go, I promise.’

  Leo was one of the last to exit the double doors, and he came out with his teacher, hands in his pockets, bag on his back. He was much taller than I expected, with the same complexion as me and a small afro of dark brown curls. I was speechless – there was this smaller version of me, but a boy. His eyes scanned the playground and, as soon as he spotted us, he gave us the most humongoid smile.

  At that moment, something weird happened to me in the centre of my chest. I went all, like, slush puppies!10 I breathed out. He was mine. There was no way I could say he wasn’t my child. He walked like me and he definitely had that chipmunk-cheeked, dimpled, toothy grin that we were all cursed with. It was like looking at myself in one of those fun-house mirrors and seeing a three-foot version of me.

  ‘Close your mouth, babe.’ Simone reached over and pushed my jaw up. ‘You’ll catch a butterfly.’

  I smiled. ‘Wow! I kid you not, Simone, he totally looks like me.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, nodding, ‘he’s a mini you all right.’

  ‘Wow, she had a boy,’ I whispered.

  He walked up to us, still smiling. I stood grinning at him.

  ‘Hiya, mate.’ Simone gave him a high five. ‘Public displays of affection are a no-no to ten-year-olds,’ she whispered to me out of the corner of her mouth. He high-fived her back, then looked at me expectantly. I had no clue what to do, so I followed Simone’s lead and high-fived him too. He looked at me strangely, laughed, and placed his school bag into my hand instead. It was then that I figured mothers high-fiving their sons wasn’t cool, but thought, What’s with the high-fiving anyway?

  ‘How was school?’ Simone started to walk towards the school gates. Leo followed. I stood still, watching him as he tried to keep in step, telling her of the day’s events. All of a sudden the mega-ness of what it would mean if I couldn’t leave the future dawned on me. I had responsibility for a whole other person who, at that moment, had no clue that I didn’t know him. As I watched him and my sister walk away, I started to feel something other than a desire to leave this future and be done with the whole nightmare. I started to feel that same chillness, like when I read the Irish blessing. Kind of, like, a hope that if I didn’t fall asleep that night and wake up in 1992, that if I had to spend longer than I thought in 2008, as long as I knew him, as long as I hung around this cute, happy kid, then I would be all right. It was so weird to feel so stuck in between two places. I felt like I was being pushed away from the future and pulled towards it at the same time.

  As if reading my thoughts, Leo turned around and shouted to me, ‘Come on, Mum!’

  Mum. Whoa! The word bounced against my head like a tennis ball in the drum of a dryer. ‘Mum.’ It tumbled out of my mouth. ‘This is completely, totally, mega mental,’ I said out loud and quickly made my way over to them, taking a hop, skip and a jump. He laughed at this and shook his head. I stopped and walked properly instead. By the time we had reached the car, he was happily chatting away about his day while I watched, fascinated by the way he spoke and the expressions on his face. I could have listened to him all day and night.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Mum?’

  My smiled dropped and I looked at him in shock. Dinner? Crap! Could I cook?

  Simone sensed my horror at the thought of having to feed this little person.

  ‘It’s okay, Leo, we’re going to Katie’s for dinner tonight,’ she said as we climbed into the car.

  ‘Yes!’ Leo pumped his fist in jubilation.

  ‘How was the rest of your day, mate?’ Simone asked him.

  ‘Yeah, good. Look, I swapped some new cards.’ He pulled out a large pack of colourful cards.

  I turned to him and said, ‘Cool,’ even though I had no clue what they were.

  ‘What are they called again?’ Simone asked him, probably for my benefit.

  ‘My Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Ben swapped four with me today and I got this one, look.�
� He pulled out a card and held it up to my face. It had a picture of a white dragon on it and the words ‘Blue-Eyes White Dragon’. I tried to look really impressed.

  ‘Nice one,’ I said.

  He giggled and sat back in the car. ‘I can win the next battle now.’

  ‘Wow, that’s great that, mate,’ Simone said to him. ‘Do you have any homework?’

  Oh crap, yeah. Mums ask about homework, don’t they? I was finding hiding being fifteen from him harder than I thought.

  He shook his head. ‘Just gotta read my reading book later.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll listen to you read it before you go to bed,’ Simone said. He seemed happy with this and carried on talking about his cards.

  As I listened to him chat about school and his new friends, I realized that there were a lot of things I couldn’t say because I didn’t know or understand what he was talking about. This kinda made everything feel bogus again so I watched the streets go by instead. I started to feel excluded from a life I had no memory of. I zoned out of the conversation and closed my eyes.

  The future.

  We spent the rest of the evening at Katie’s. She cooked dinner while Leo played with Dylan, Adam and Chloe. I didn’t recognize them but they were more interested in Leo than me so pretending that I was an adult in front of them was easier. Alex, the oldest, was thirteen but he didn’t want to be around any of us so stayed in his room until his dinner was ready. Every now and then we could hear him shouting from his room to someone. I thought he was having a party until Katie explained to me that he was talking to his friends through his computer.

  I just stared at her for, like, ten minutes, trying to wrap my head around what she had said. I couldn’t.

  In the end, sat on the sofa, I started to feel chilled while Simone and Katie chatted and the children talked to each other. I thought their northern accents made them sound cute and cheeky, especially when they all started arguing about someone called Hannah Montana. Chloe loved her, but Dylan and Adam were teasing her about this Hannah, while Leo stuck up for Chloe.

  Because I hadn’t eaten all day I ate early with the children and watched on in amusement and awe as Leo’s personality shone amongst his friends. I had to give Adult Naomi the most props11. He was an all-right kid, confident, bright, with a great sense of humour, which sometimes got a little silly when trying to impress the other children, who, I might add, found him hilarious. So did I. Simone gave us both a few stern words and serious looks, but he had the utmost respect for her and I shut up immediately remembering I was supposed to be the adult. Making loud slurping noises while sucking on spaghetti until the sauce flew everywhere was not funny when you’re thirty-two.

  The children finished their dinner and went to play outside while I still had a half-full plate.

  ‘I can’t eat much. I don’t have an appetite,’ I said to Katie. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, hun. You haven’t had much of an appetite the last three months. You’ve lost a lot of weight.’

  ‘Have I? Why?’

  ‘You have just got over a bad case of tonsillitis – you couldn’t swallow – and before that you had a stomach virus,’ she said.

  ‘Smegging hell!’ No wonder I was skinny.

  Simone and Katie seemed to be waiting for me to ask them about Adult Naomi’s life and I managed to ignore the pain enough to ask a few questions. I wanted to know the basics at least before I went back to 1992, but not too much detail in case my head started to hurt again.

  They told me that after moving around for a few years as a teenager, Adult Naomi had come looking for work and eventually settled in Manchester aged nineteen, and that she had been living in the city for thirteen years. So had Simone, who lived on the south side of Manchester. She said it was closer to her work.

  ‘I work for a charity that provides educational and employment support for young people leaving foster care,’ Simone told me. ‘If they have children of their own, I work with social services and if they have mental health issues, I work with mental health workers, you know, give them extra support, help them find a job or get into education.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said.

  ‘And I am a stay-at-home mum,’ Katie added proudly ‘We met when we both used to live on the same street and our kids started to play together, do you remember? About five years ago now.’

  I didn’t remember. Simone continued to explain that where she lived was more culturally diverse and provided better access to the city. Adult Naomi, on the other hand, preferred the quieter, leafier Jewish suburbs in the north of the city. Okay. So that made sense to me: we had grown up in a small town, surrounded by lots of fields, woods and countryside. Even living in a city, they explained, Adult Naomi had gravitated to the greener parts. Having a partially deaf child meant she needed better services and schools for support.

  ‘What? Hold up, wait a minute. Did you just say Leo is deaf?’ I interrupted the conversation, stood up, and walked over to the patio doors to watch him. How had I missed this? He didn’t use sign language. ‘What d’ya mean, he’s deaf?’ I turned back to Simone. ‘He doesn’t talk like he’s deaf.’ Jeez, I felt awful; I hadn’t even noticed.

  She explained that Leo had been diagnosed with something called high frequency hearing loss when he was four and that without his hearing aids he could only hear vowel sounds and would have to read your lips to understand what you were saying. But with his hearing aids on and lip-reading he had a better chance of hearing you.

  Although devastated at first, Adult Naomi had vowed to do her utmost to raise a healthy, well-rounded, confident child, and he now loved skateboarding, telling jokes and riding horses. She wouldn’t allow him to use his inability to hear like everyone else as an excuse not to succeed in life.

  ‘You’re raising a bit of an extreme sports kid,’ Simone laughed.

  ‘Got no fear, that one,’ Katie added. ‘He’s the bravest child I know.’

  I stared out through the patio windows at Leo doing back and front flips on a large trampoline and laughing every time he landed. I felt a small hint of curiosity for Adult Naomi’s life beginning to develop inside me. I wanted to know a bit more about Leo. I couldn’t even remember giving birth to him. Simone explained that it had been a water birth. The relationship with his father? Katie just took a deep breath and blew out a gust of air. Her expression said, You don’t wanna go there, but I learned that he was still a part of Leo’s life. So I didn’t ask any more about him because it made my head hurt too much. Besides, he wasn’t fit Robert Harris so I didn’t want to know. And just like my mum and my stepfather, if Leo’s father wasn’t around all the time, then I was beginning to guess that something was most probably wrong. I felt sick to my stomach.

  I was still so not happy with what they were telling me. Adult Naomi had not been eating or sleeping properly for three months. Apparently, before the stomach virus and tonsillitis she had broken up with some French dude called Henri, which, according to Katie, had devastated her. She’d thought he was the love of her life. I nearly fell off my chair when she told me Adult Naomi had only spent two weekends with him in Paris. I mean, hellooo?! Just as bogus was the fact that Adult Naomi was unemployed, doing a degree she was struggling to finish, and living in a two-bedroom council house, driving a beaten-up Fiat Brava. What the smeg was going on? I couldn’t help but think that this was sooooo not the way things were supposed to go. What had gone wrong?

  ‘You keep a diary!’ Katie exclaimed. ‘You have done for as long as I have known you, actually.’

  ‘I don’t think you have ever stopped writing in it. Do you remember?’ Simone asked.

  I didn’t. As far as I was concerned, at that point in time I had only been keeping a diary for five years. I needed somewhere to hide all my secrets and talk about all the stuff going on at school. Who I thought was fit and who was rank. What happened at Sara’s party when we played Spin the Bottle. What the Mega Smegs were wearing on ‘wear your own clothes day’ at school
and how they thought they were acting all stush.12

  Apparently, Adult Naomi had continued writing them and had over twenty years’ worth of diaries. I reckoned it was majorly sad that she still kept a diary. Hearing Katie and Simone tell me about Adult Naomi’s life was easy – I didn’t know her and it had nothing to do with me. I so didn’t want to read her diary. I definitely didn’t want to feel anything for this person whose future was completely alien to me. Besides, I was afraid of what I would find out.

  Sack this, I thought. Leo is cool and everything but he’ll be fine with Simone and Katie until Adult Naomi comes back. I’m definitely going back to 1992 tonight.

  Katie sensed my unease. ‘Well, you don’t have to read them just yet; it might be a bit much for you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Too much, too soon.’

  I realized I was too tired to take any more in and Simone said she would take me and Leo home. I didn’t want to go at first. I kinda felt safe at Katie’s, but had no choice. I had to get to sleep that night and get back to 1992.

  Katie offered dinner again for the next day and Simone said she would leave work early to collect Leo from school. I was cool. By tomorrow Adult Naomi would be back in her body, her mind, her life, so I didn’t have anything to worry about.

  I got up from the table.

  Don’t think about it, Nay. Just go back to the house, find some pyjamas, climb into bed and sleep, I thought.

  My body agreed. Yes, I was leaving the future. If I could find the doors in my dream again and walk through them, then I would get back to 1992 where none of this had happened and change things so that the future wouldn’t turn out so bloody bogus.

  After hugs and reassurances from Katie – I kinda liked her and felt a bit sad knowing I wouldn’t see her again – we said our goodbyes to her family and Simone drove us back to the house.

  ‘I’m tired, Mum,’ Leo said as we climbed into the car. ‘Do I have to read my reading book?’

  ‘No, mate, it’s okay. Just have a bath and go straight to bed,’ Simone answered him.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you can read it tomorrow.’