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

the back of the plastic chair, smoothing its folds before reaching her arms into the blue fuzz of my gift. It fit her beautifully; a little baggy, but in a classy way. She pulled her hair out through the crew neck, and it fell down her back like rays of golden sun in a perfect sky. She changed back into the pink one for lectures though.

I suppose the family lunch must have gone all right, because she didn’t mention it again and things went back to just how they had been. Her clothing, too—I never saw her wear the blue sweater after that morning.

The week after her birthday, Deb came running to my room to tell me she’d won the annual College fiction prize for a short story she’d written. Of course she had. She was all dreams and wonder. I gave her a hug and we agreed to celebrate by going to Formal Hall in the evening.

Formal Hall cost about as much as I could usually afford to budget for three days’ food, so I didn’t do it very often. We had to wear our navy undergraduate gowns to attend, so whenever Deb and I were both going, we’d get ready early, pull our gowns up over our heads, and roam around the corridors of Hermes Court saying we were the ghosts of dead bats who’d just popped in to use the toilet and we were done now thank you very much only we couldn’t find the exit. We’d pretend to try and follow the green “fire exit” arrows, which as it turned out led you in a circle around the entire second floor. We found this hilarious at the time, although now that I think about it, that could potentially have been a problem. We flapped up helplessly against the walls, and slammed into passers-by who were rarely as amused as we were. We were completely sober, this was just how we were with each other. Like nitrous oxide.

On the occasion of Deb’s literary victory, our riotous laughter en route from Hermes Court to the Hall steps brought us briefly to the attention of Dr. Rumpole, a rather miserable-looking senior chemistry Fellow. He raised his eyes, as if to pray for defences against this invasion of his College.

“If you can neither understand nor respect the meaning of the undergraduate gown,” he snipped, bony forefinger poking into my right shoulder, “you should not be permitted to wear it.”

The rebuke punctured me all over, but as we walked away across the Great Court cobbles, more sombrely now, Deb whispered into my ear, “Rumpole Scumpole, stick it up your bumhole.”

I took her arm and pressed it to my side, and we marched proudly in to her prize dinner.

—

The weeks ran round in their circuits and Deb and I trotted along to their rhythm, their structure as it pertained to us. Humberton’s lectures on the problem of other minds marked the beginning of my week, although they were on Tuesdays. Other people’s timekeeping conventions didn’t matter.

Humberton was always immaculately dressed for lectures, but in a way that took you a while to notice. He usually wore a white shirt and juniper-green tweed jacket, with blue jeans that showed he wasn’t trying too hard and brown leather shoes that were evidently expensive but not new. His jeans were often dusty where he’d rubbed his chalky palms. When it was warm in the room, or when he was getting excited about his subject, he’d take the jacket off and set it on the back of a chair, rolling his shirtsleeves up to the elbows to reveal tanned arms and a broad-faced gold watch. If we were sitting in the front row, I’d be able to smell his blend of fresh sweat and muted aftershave. It was a relaxing smell, damp and woody like soft rain in a forest.

In the lecture rooms, students perched at long wooden desks with long wooden benches attached. These arrays filled the room with parallel immovable rows. They were terribly uncomfortable places to sit for an hour. In most lectures I sat at the back, so nobody was looking at me and I could shuffle frequently to ease the abdominal pain that always came with sitting on such a hard surface. But for Humberton, Deb and I sat up front, and it was worth it.

He often got excited, and went off topic. One morning, he began explaining to us a conception of time as extending infinitely in one direction but not the other.

“So the question is: can you imagine time having a beginning but no end? Let’s say time had to get started—we can say it started with the Big Bang. But now that it’s going…”

The jacket came off.

“…there’s no stopping it. Time is never going to end. The future just goes on into infinity. Now, some people feel uncomfortable about this, but often that’s just a general discomfort with infinity. They can’t wrap their heads around the thought that something will never end. Not just that it’s possible for it to go on forever—people are usually okay with that—but that it actually does go on forever. Well, if that troubles you, if you can’t picture it, you could think of it this way. An infinite line looks like…”

He turned to the chalkboard with a smile, and drew a circle.

“…this! It’s just a circle with a bad memory.”

The other students all laughed. I suppose they didn’t think it mattered. They were wrong. It mattered. It gave me bad butterflies in my stomach and I had to step out of the lecture for a moment.

I stumbled on autopilot down to the women’s toilets in the basement. I knew it would be cooler there. And it felt like the natural direction for me to head in. My digestion always having been somewhat ropey, I spend a lot of my life in toilets. Toilets are very important. Do not underestimate them. My trust in an institution can be measured quite accurately by