Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

Chapter Four

That first Cambridge winter, there was a constant nip of wind chill. It was as if the city itself were animated by it: the whole place breathing cold air from the northeast, fresh and full of spirit. Deb and I would let ourselves be blown across the river to lectures like a couple of paper-chain dolls, conjoined at hands and feet, then afterwards we’d link our thick-coated arms to walk back to College at a forty-five-degree angle. Or we’d stand together, wiggling our bottoms in parallel, our mouths gaping in wide-open Os towards the wind, saying we were fish windsocks. I could really feel the rushing channel of cold air pass right through me, as we stood there performing this invaluable service for passers-by. We were vessels with a purpose. We meant something.

Other students hurried past. Most of them pointedly ignored us, but some looked at us like we were crazy. A few of the women snickered into gloved hands and whispered to each other, bending their heads close. It didn’t matter that nobody else understood what we were doing. We made sense for each other, for ourselves, and that was enough. More than enough. It was joyous.

When we stepped out into the windy streets and cars beeped their aggressive horns at us for daring to be there, Deb would slowly give them the middle finger, sometimes using her other hand in a winding motion to “crank” up the bird. She could do it without even looking round—she kept right on walking. When men revved their engines at us for attention, she would hold her hands flat above her head and tap on it while blowing a huge raspberry, like the French knight on the battlements in Monty Python and the Holy Grail—you know, the guy who tells King Arthur they won’t go questing for the grail because they’ve already got one. If the revving continued, she would start yelling “Fetchez la vache!”

I started to copy these performances of hers, and slowly we synchronized the routines until we could perform them with dance-like perfection. As if by mirroring each other we might deflect the rest of the world. Turn its evil gaze back on itself.

One night I dreamed that Deb and I really were windsocks. We were floating far above ground in a cold, thick fog that swirled and eddied all around us. At first I was afraid because I couldn’t see anything through the fog, but then it was okay because I could see Deb, and I could hear that she was laughing. Her body was a pink tube flapping in the wind, vibrant against the emptiness. I looked at my own body and it was flapping like hers, but mine was grey like the background. As I watched, it began to fade into the fog. Then the wind dropped, and everything slowed down. Eventually we were both silent and motionless. Deb remained as bright and complete as ever, just frozen. My own fish-sock body had all but disappeared, leaving a thin, grey, papery shell that would disperse in a fine ashy powder if anything ever touched it. But nothing did. Nothing moved, and I somehow knew that nothing would ever move again.

When I woke up she was right there, curled up on my floor in the fluffy pink blanket she’d taken to stashing under my bed for the purpose.

—

At Cambridge, time arrives in eight-week parcels named for the Christian calendar. The Michaelmas term, the Lent term, the Easter term. I never had much to do with the Christian religion; at school it was a kind of unexamined scenery. I didn’t know what Michaelmas was. But I went home for Christmas. Or at least, I went to my aunt and uncle’s house. There were piles of laundry in my room, and an exercise bike that looked like it had never been used. The seat still had the plastic cover on.

On Christmas Eve, my aunt drove me to the home, and left me in the cold in the middle of the brick square with my mother. My mother sat and smoked in silence, same as always, but I had fallen out of the babbling habit and now I didn’t know what to say to her. I shivered and wished I’d brought a warmer coat. My mother was only wearing navy flip-flops and a dressing gown. They looked old. For all I knew they could have been the same things she had worn for the last thirteen years, since the day she came out of hospital.

I asked her if she felt cold. She didn’t react, but it occurred to me that I had never asked her a question before. I tried some more. Why do you smoke all the time? Are you hungry? Do you like Beethoven? Do you want me to go away?

I looked down at my feet. My legs were crossed, and the top foot, the free foot, was moving around, wiggling, tracing some looping pattern of its own. It does that a lot when I’m not paying attention to keeping it still.

I sighed, and with the exhalation some stories came. I told her about my room in Hermes Court, about Humberton’s lectures, about how I’d made a friend called Deb. I couldn’t keep my face from breaking into a grin when I mentioned her.

Then something landed on my cheek. Maybe it was a snowflake. Or hot ash from my mother’s cigarette. Do you know that it’s impossible to tell sensations of hot and cold apart, when you can’t see what’s causing them? Put an ice cube on the back of somebody’s neck and tell them it’s a cigarette, and they will feel it burning.

Or don’t, because that’s a shitty thing to do. The point is, it’s easy to present people with the exact opposite of what is real. Holmes understood this. What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence, he tells