Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  ‘What, girl?’

  ‘Her courage.’ I smiled at her. ‘And yours too.’

  I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like, at fifteen, one day having your whole family there and the next they are all gone and you are on your own.

  It made me think of Teen Nay and I wondered whether what happened to Eve had anything to do with her making me leave home at that age. I wanted to know.

  ‘So is that why you kicked me out at fifteen?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘I just didn’t know what to do with you anymore. I didn’t know how to be a mum to you anymore.’

  I frowned. ‘But you learn, no one knows. I haven’t a clue what I’m doing with Leo.’

  ‘I know, but Joseph always helped me, and he was gone. When those men threatened to kidnap you, I knew I couldn’t protect you from them.’

  She was right, I had never looked at it that way before. Joseph was respected by Wolverhampton’s criminal underworld and this meant that although we weren’t his daughters, we were left alone.

  ‘All’s I could see around me was pimps getting hold of my friends’ daughters and getting them on drugs, making them work the streets.’ She paused and looked at me. ‘Your dad . . .’

  I knew what she was going to say. ‘He would’ve blamed you.’

  ‘Blamed me? He would’ve killed me. Nay, I knew I had to get you out of Wolverhampton before something bad happened. You living with your dad was my only answer.’

  ‘Okaaaay, but questioning my existence maybe wasn’t the way to go.’

  She hung her head down. ‘Everyone says things they don’t mean when they are angry.’

  I thought about all of the things I had screamed at her, the night she had got drunk while babysitting Leo. ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘You were making it so difficult for me to get you out alive.’

  ‘I almost didn’t!’ I then told her about everything that happened with the ex-boyfriend who tried to kill me and all of the drugs I did during that time. ‘I felt so lost,’ I continued, ‘and I hated you for a long time.’

  Eve went quiet.

  ‘Even my overdose attempt, I just don’t understand . . .’ I bit my lip and could feel tears threatening to form. The morphine was making me a little nauseous as well so I leaned forward.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Eve frowned. I could tell she had forgotten.

  ‘I mean, I can get over you slapping me upside the head, even telling Harry the shopkeeper what I did, or the neighbours . . .’ As I struggled to understand, my sick feeling was turning to anger. ‘But to not take me to the hospital?’

  ‘What for?’ She gave me a hurt look.

  ‘I could have died,’ I said incredulously, ‘and you didn’t care.’

  ‘What? From water tablets?’

  ‘What?’ I sat back in the bed. Water tablets? I thought. I was dumbstruck

  ‘Yeah, you had taken my water tablets – not that many, I counted them, remember?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t remember, and then I vaguely recalled that Eve actually left Thelma’s for about fifteen minutes and came back and didn’t say a word.

  ‘I took water tablets?’ I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Yeah, I told you, Nay.’

  ‘I really don’t remember.’ I paused as it all started to make sense. ‘Is that why you were so convinced I wasn’t going to die?’

  She nodded. ‘I thought you’d just pee a lot for a couple of days.’

  At that moment I looked into her face and found what she had said completely hilarious, as did she, and we both burst out laughing at the fact that my wack overdose attempt would have only done one thing.

  Prevented water retention.

  We also went from meeting at the cafe to me inviting her to mine for dinner with me and Leo. The more time I spent with her, the more I found that Eve and I could talk for hours. It reaffirmed the storytelling connection between the two of us, and when Leo gave up and went to bed, we would stay up all night drinking cups of tea, telling each other our stories. During those times, I shared with her mine and Teen Nay’s story and Eve found her own healing in it. This translated into a pride in the woman I had turned into and she would tell anybody who would listen that I was her daughter and a writer.

  As I was healing my own psychological wounds, the bad seemed to start to fade and small memories would pop up about my past with Eve, good memories.

  I sat with her one night and asked if she remembered how, when I was three years old, she used to grab my ankles while I was lying down and pull my legs up and over my head. This would cause me to fart involuntarily and I found this hysterical and would laugh until I cried.

  Or the time that she took me to an audition for a big musical that came to town and let me wear her best suit. It was white with nautical stripes and gold buttons (very eighties). The auditions lasted for hours and she stayed with me all day.

  Or the time I was heavily pregnant and she came to visit and rubbed the pain from my back while telling me that when my baby was born I would still have feelings for his father (who I had just found out had been cheating on me). ‘They will pass,’ were her exact words. She was right.

  This made me think about my own father and Marlene and how much they and the things they had said and done had contributed to how my relationship with Eve had turned out.

  I knew from our conversations that Art’s violence had got too much for her and when Marlene moved in with him and they decided to fight for custody of me and my sister, my mum made the decision to run away with us. She confirmed that it wasn’t because she wanted to take us away from Art, but more because she didn’t want Marlene to raise us.

  I didn’t blame her; I couldn’t imagine my best friend going off with the father of my children and then turning round and wanting to have those children for herself.

  ‘I don’t really remember Art ever hitting you, Mum,’ I said to her one night.

  ‘You were young.’

  ‘I do remember the fight you and he had when I was ten.’

  ‘In Marlene’s house?’ she asked.

  I nodded. ‘I was so scared. I thought he was going to kill you.’

  ‘Do you understand why I had to get you and Simone away, Nay?’

  I thought about the sexual abuse and the men I was around when she did take us away, but I didn’t blame her for moving me to a place where she thought I would be safe. She was a young woman on her own with two children. She trusted the wrong people to help her and I understood why.

  As she shed new light on my childhood, I realized that I had waited so long for an explanation that by the time I got it, it didn’t matter. I had already given myself the acceptance, guidance and love I needed. Teen Nay had got what she needed from my future. Looking back now, she knew and I knew that leaving both Liverpool and eventually Wolverhampton was the best thing we all did.

  But what I reckoned was that starting with her own abuse as a child from The Matriarch when she was mentally ill, Eve had begun to repress her natural sensitivity and empathy and then eventually feared it. She feared the vulnerability of it and the pain she felt when people abused it. She didn’t know what to do with the pain, so she smoked and drank it down. I could see myself in her.

  I saw the pattern clearly and how we had eventually found ourselves, as women, trying to relate to each other while dealing with historic issues of abuse. Eve had been abandoned in her relationships, experienced even more domestic violence, and had tried her best to navigate that.

  I was trying to deal with sexual abuse, our own damaged relationship, my relationship with my dads and the driving need to mentally escape from it all.

  She was searching for the love she had lost to The Matriarch’s mental illness in the way I had mothered her when she was drunk, and I was looking for the love I had lost to her alcoholism in my female friendships.

  Through our conversations, there were times when tears welled up in her eyes and I could see the mortificatio
n on her face when I told her my stories, but I felt I told them in a way that didn’t blame her. Because I honestly didn’t. Not anymore.

  I came to a quiet acceptance that Eve did her best, given what she knew at the time. She didn’t get it right all of the time, and sometimes it went horribly wrong. But she came from a different generation. A generation where it was commonplace to knock your woman about if she got out of hand and a time when, if you couldn’t look after your babies, you gave them away. Where if you had issues of abuse, there were no counsellors, and where if you had mental health issues, you were locked away and forgotten about.

  And through all of that, I looked at the women my sister and I had become and had to admit that whatever she’d done, somewhere in all of the pain, she’d done something right.

  I also knew it was painful for her and Art to hear me talk about the sexual abuse. Any mother or father must feel so many mixed emotions of hate and anger and guilt when realizing they hadn’t protected their child from such terrible hurt. But as I finished writing mine and Teen Nay’s stories, I hoped in some way they both knew that I was protected – by a very powerful force, much bigger and stronger than anything else that was inside of my mind. It protected me and it was the same force that gave me the courage to release the pain.

  Release it so I could finally see a life with healing, a life with self-respect, and a self-love I never thought existed.

  A life with a good future.

  My future.

  EPILOGUE

  A Beautiful Mind

  What we are today comes from

  our thoughts of yesterday

  and our present thoughts

  build our life tomorrow.

  Our life is the creation of our mind

  BUDDHA

  Three years later

  4 July 2013

  Dear Teen Nay,

  I know I haven’t written to you in almost four years but I wanted to write now to let you know that I get it, I understand everything. I have come full circle and this week I had a conversation which made me realize what you were showing me when you woke up in the future. In my future.

  It happened again! No, not the splitting, but the stress, and I stopped it before it got bad. Looooongggg story, and has to do with Marlene’s brief reappearance, me rescuing a young Czech girl from what I thought was a slavery situation (she was mentally ill and had run away from home) and trying to write a new book. After five months of surviving on four hours’ sleep a night, I ended up manic and hallucinating that the flowers on the duvet were turning into butterflies and flying off.

  This time around I asked for help. I didn’t lock myself away and try and figure it all out myself. This guy, Chris, is this amazing psychiatric practitioner, who for the first time ever figured out my mind and explained everything to me.

  I was referred to his department by my doctor and Chris was the man I needed to see. I am glad it was him because I had to know – I needed to know – exactly why my brain does the things it does. Why my mind reacts the way it does. My questions eventually led me to the answers.

  Chris reckons the first doctor made a mistake in diagnosing me with bipolar disorder. He explained about the neurological pathways in the brain that get stronger every time you do a new thing and if you stop doing that thing the pathway dies down, except mine doesn’t exactly, and when I get stressed, every pathway, including the LSD ones, opens up full throttle and fires on all cylinders. This, he said, presents symptoms of being manic but what happens with my mind (the hallucinating) apparently doesn’t happen to people with bipolar. He reckons that when I used to feel depressed it was the sheer exhaustion of my brain being in a continuous fight-or-flight mode. He said it’s a survival mechanism.

  He also explained that I don’t have dissociative identity disorder because every time I have split, I have stayed me; okay, so a different age, but essentially my identity has remained intact.

  But why I am writing this is because after all this time he finally figured out the amnesia. He said it was something called dissociative amnesia, followed by dissociative fugue. Apparently this is a person’s inability to remember past events or important information from their life and it includes confusion and loss of memory about their identity, and in extreme cases even leads to them making up a new identity. Chris said that this psychogenic fugue is linked to severe stress, which could be the result of traumatic events, extreme violence or abuse. I burst into tears when he told me, not because I was sad but out of sheer relief and joy that I had finally got an answer. He said it was very rare and difficult to diagnose if not seen there and then.

  In the end, he closed my file and basically told me that I no longer needed to seek psychiatric help because there is nothing wrong with me, I just have a very unique brain that works in a very unique way and I need to learn how to adjust to it and accept that as fact. Do you know what he said before I left his room? ‘Naomi Jacobs, you are a remarkable product of a remarkable life.’

  I sat in the car for an hour after, absorbing everything he had told me and thinking through everything from the beginning. From the moment you woke up in the future.

  You set me on a new path, showed me that I had a beautiful mind, that I could heal it and you know what? I HAVE!

  I thought I got it, but I suppose as always life is a school and once you think you’ve learned the lesson, the universe goes, Hmm, really now, Jacobs? Well, let me test that theory. I got stressed again, I stopped sleeping, but this time somewhere inside of me I carried what you said and I continued to move forward. It doesn’t matter whether we reach our ultimate goal; it’s getting through the struggle that matters; it’s the struggle to strive and to survive, to thrive and be more than we are. And this, all of this, who I have become from writing this, writing your story – no, our story – has been its own reward. This has been my journey, a long and winding paradoxical path in the quest to heal my mind. And in the very struggle to heal my mind, I now see that I have.

  I’ve healed my mind.

  And I have done it in the most remarkable way. My own way.

  So here I tell you that life has changed for the better.

  I have a whole new set of friends that I think you’d like, a bunch of crazy, sexy, cool cats (yeah! I listened to TLC) who I have much in common with, who accept me for me and bring a supportive, loving vibe into my existence, and they include Nat and Marcy! I have been on a few dates – no one special as yet – but you’d be pleased to know, not a razor blade in sight. I trust my choices and know that I am safe in those choices and that they come from a place of balanced selfhood, not victimhood.

  Eve has remained sober, and when she looks back on her own life, she has reached a place of forgiveness and harbours no bitterness towards those that hurt her. She tells her stories and laughs loudly from the pit of her belly when she does. She has been a thespian of the stage, appearing in regular productions, and has even taken part in radio interviews talking about her theatre experiences. She continues to work hard at her sobriety and inspire those around her. Including me.

  And get this! For the first time in my life I invited Eve and Art around to my house and on Christmas Day, together with Simone, Simone’s friends and Leo, we all sat down and ate Christmas dinner together. It was a little tense at first and I was a bit anxious but they were friendly towards each other and it was a lovely day.

  We are all in a place now where our time spent together is based on quality not quantity. Eve has developed her own relationship with Leo and even our cat Sophia. And time seems to stop when we sit up all night telling each other our stories. I love it. She calls me her best friend!

  So I look at Eve now and think if she can do it, if she can turn her life around (and she’s been through a lot worse than I ever have) . . . well, Eve’s a beacon of hope for even the ones who have no hope.

  My relationship with Simone has also changed. She came back from Dubai for a summer visit with tales of jumping out of aeroplanes, driving racin
g cars on Formula 1 tracks, climbing the Himalayas, and washing elephants in the rivers of Sri Lanka. More importantly, after spending seventeen years looking after everyone else, putting off her own dreams and aspirations, she got some much needed time to play catch-up with herself. Although she cares, she is no longer my carer, and although I still hurt at times, I no longer feel I need to be rescued by her.

  What else? Leo is off to sixth form, has a job and still likes skateboarding, and you know what? In spite of everything I have been through, I have somehow managed to protect Leo’s own mental health, and whenever I doubt myself I need only look at how wonderfully he has turned out and know that in all of my mountains and valleys, my peaks and troughs, I did something right. I have a nearly six-foot-tall, skateboarding, comedy-loving, joke-telling, artistic, Yoda’s-underpants-like-wisdom-giving son who says: ‘When it comes to who I am, Mum, I am just happy being me.’

  Oh, and I have been to many concerts since Paris and even thrown myself right into the middle of mosh pits, getting squashed without freaking out! You would be proud of me!

  What else? The world is still global, there are still wars, and people are still wearing ridiculous fashions, but you know what? It’s still a beautiful world because there will always be good people that see something special in another person and really want that person to succeed in life, because they know they deserve it. You were that person to me and now because of you I have people like this in my life. So I reckon as long as people like this exist, this world will be okay and we’ll figure things out.

  You’d be happy to know that Mr Tetley came back and Britain still loves its tea despite the coffee shops.

  Oh yeah, Gaddafi is no longer, Egypt is in turmoil, as are parts of the Middle East, but I reckon as long as there are men like Ahmed and Bebo, there will always be hope for the future. The US did elect a black man for president and he’s doing his best, given the state of the world today.

  And by the way, Old Man Mo was right about Serket. I am protected, protected by a beautiful mind that took me and shielded me from the bad and only brought it out when it knew I could handle it.