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

Watson. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done. And then, Never mind.

On this occasion, though, I told my mother nothing but the truth.

While we were down from Cambridge that winter, Deb and I sent each other long letters with no words. Instead we would draw ridiculous cartoons of impossible animals, or philosophers we were studying, or people we knew from lectures, or each other. We’d stick small objects like toenails and dead flies to the pages with Sellotape, then seal up these missives in bulging envelopes and take them to the post office counter to be weighed in case they needed more than the standard first-class postage. We didn’t need any help to decipher each other’s signals. They were perfect.

Whenever I received one I would take it to my room and close the door, and laugh with such abandon that one day my aunt knocked gently and asked if I was okay, which made me laugh so hard that I couldn’t answer her for a while, and she came in just to make sure.

She had such an anxious look on her face. It wasn’t like her to be a worrier.

—

Back in Cambridge for the Lent term, College life started to fall into a routine. We studied Plato’s Meno, a compulsory set text on whether virtue can be taught. There was also Hume and J. S. Mill. There was never a book by a woman. I had only one female lecturer, Professor Bell, a stern-looking woman in her fifties with short grey hair and a dry academic manner. She taught Descartes and Spinoza, and had such a posh accent that she said fah instead of “fire,” and ears instead of “yes.” Someone told me she was the daughter of a duke and could use a title if she wanted, but she preferred “Professor.” I thought her lectures were okay but she always struck me as a bit cold in her manner.

As spring did its best to take the edge off the Cambridge wind chill, Deb and I discovered a shared secret love of McDonald’s breakfasts. Their hash browns, surely the world’s worst balance of fats and carbs to usable nutriments, became a weekly guilty pleasure. But these outings were as much about escaping Henry VIII’s stale gaze and the institutional fried smell of Hall mornings as they were about anything. I’d heard that if you were locked in a McDonald’s and it was all you had to eat and you had to stay alive, your best bet would be to eat all the packets of tomato ketchup because at least there are some vitamins in there. This was in the days before McDonald’s tried to greenwash its menu with token salads. (They’re only there so we all feel better about going into McDonald’s. You know that, right? Nobody eats them.) The hash browns, glorious golden-brown grease patties, were followed in my own case by a day or two of gastric pain. Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid, one time or another. I suppose I found the price reasonable. My gut was usually unsettled in any case. I blamed that on the cigarettes, the cheap wine, and my overall questionable diet.

Deb’s birthday fell in March, and I decided to buy her a blue sweater. I had been saving for a month to get something good enough for her, and when I saw the right one in the window of Monsoon I instantly imagined Deb in it. How she would be beautiful in this colour; in something new. The price tag gave me cold feelings—I’d never spent so much money on clothes in my life. But sometimes you’ve got to take a risk. I bought some of the most expensive wrapping paper at Heffers, the prismatic kind that’s hard to fold and doesn’t stick to Sellotape very well. I hid the package nervously in my underwear drawer.

On the eve of Deb’s birthday she slept on the floor of my room. She was unusually serious this time, and said her parents would be coming to take her out for lunch.

“I don’t know how it’s going to go,” she half whispered, reaching out to hold my hand in the dark.

“I thought you liked your mum?” I whispered back.

“I love her. It’s not that.”

Deb sighed and slowed down even more than usual. “It’s…there are things I’m supposed to do one day. Have to do. They’ll want…to make sure I’m not attached…”

“What?”

I could hear she was crying gently. “I can’t. I’m not allowed to talk about this. Never. Not to you. Well, I mean, not to anyone. I’m not supposed to get close to…Oh god,” she sniffed, “I can’t. Please, forget it. Please. And promise me you’ll never tell anyone. Promise me, like your life depends on it. Don’t say anything to anybody. Not anybody, okay? Not even me. Never mention this again.”

She was in deadly earnest now, and I was suddenly frightened.

“Promise, Victoria.” Her voice wavered.

I had never heard Deb talk like this before. I squeezed her little hand tighter, and promised with my whole heart. Then I held on to her hand like it was a precious thing until gradually it relaxed its grip and she drifted off. I only half slept through the remainder of the night. The time was blank and dreamless.

—

When we woke up a few hours later, Deb went back to her room to get ready, then we went for a special McDonald’s birthday breakfast on our way to lectures. I squished the holographic parcel, already bursting its inadequate Sellotape bonds, into my backpack with my files for the day.

As we walked to our seats with our plastic trays, I said, “Before our hands get all greasy, can I give you something?”

Deb pulled the package open with no difficulty, and shook out the blue sweater. She smiled, and said it was very pretty.

“Try it on!” I urged.

She pulled off the soft pink cashmere she had on and set it gently down on