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

followed him everywhere, loudly attempting to converse in the same kind of language he used, with mixed results. Once I had left Cambridge, I felt bad about how Deb and I had called him Dr. Bumberton behind his back. I did it in the same puerile spirit in which, in those early College days, I had pretended to hate any music that was popular. Now that I am a teacher myself, I try to remember: Your quietest student does not love you least.

His door was closed, but that didn’t mean anything. All the doors on that corridor were always closed, because of the constant low mumbling and grumbling from the open-plan grad student workspace opposite. They were mostly grumbling about the fact that their workspace was open-plan.

I knocked, and waited.

—

I had a long wait ahead of me. Humberton, it turned out, had left town right after his last lecture and was on sabbatical for the next two years. I waited outside his door for fifteen minutes in hopes that he’d turn up, before I wandered over to the librarian on duty. I hate approaching people to ask for information, but sometimes it is necessary. She told me what some part of me already knew: there was no hope to be found there. Deflated and defeated, I went back to my rooms, fell onto the bed, and went straight to sleep as the College clock chimed for noon. At this time I had started to abuse sleep as others do drugs, bingeing for days then making ill-advised attempts to go cold turkey.

I woke briefly at 3 a.m. to the sound of a few late revellers, probably returning from a sweaty bop in the Dodson Party Room, vomiting happily in the hallway outside my door and bragging to each other about how direly they’d done in exams.

“…the whole night before Histology with this absolute scrubber from Girton…”

I recognized the voice of Pierre from my matriculating class. Pierre was a medical student who had hit on me in freshers’ week. I’d gone to the Freshers’ Bop, because it was down on the freshers’ week timetable as the activity for Friday evening. It was a mistake. The party room was a nasty underground square, like a concrete bunker, and it wasn’t nearly big enough for the number of people trying to dance inside. The music was miserable and loud. Everyone was squashed together in near darkness with just a few flashing lights at one end of the room.

Not knowing what else to do with myself, I bought an orange juice for £1.50 from the “bar,” which was really just a few second-years tucked in a corner with some cheap vodka, juice, and plastic cups. Then I decided to leave. As I was trying to get back to the exit, Pierre bumped into me. I think it was an accident the first time, but then he kept doing it and laughing.

“I’m trying to spill your drink,” he yelled over the incessantly repetitive string sample of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve. “Then I can buy you another one! I’m Pierre!”

“That’s stupid,” I yelled back as he shook my hand.

He laughed and shrugged, and I noticed that his hair all went straight upwards. I wondered if he spent time making it do that.

“I guess I’m stupid then!” he shouted directly into my ear. It hurt a bit. I couldn’t tell if he had a slight French accent, or if I was just imagining it because of his name.

“I don’t expect so, if you’re here!” I tried to get closer to his ear so I wouldn’t have to yell so loud. But just then the music shifted. Whoever was working the CD player had skipped ahead to “The Drugs Don’t Work,” and Pierre thought I was leaning into him to slow-dance. He enthusiastically put an arm around my hips and pressed them up against his own.

I squirmed away. “Ugh! Sorry, I mean, no,” I mumbled, “I have to go.”

He laughed again and said, “Want to come back to my room?”

“What? Oh! No, that’s…that’s fine,” I said, and tried to back away towards the door. But there were so many people packed in on all sides that there was no space to back into.

I persisted in my efforts to leave, and Pierre kept dancing as if I were his partner. When I finally managed to pull away he started singing along with the track, miming heartbreak. Then two other men appeared, one of them whacked him on the back of the head and the other one handed him a plastic cup, and he went off with them into the crowd.

The next week, Pierre joined a drinking society and never spoke to me again. I remembered hearing he’d become a promising boatie, a possible future Blue. Now here he was, outside my door, swearing and belching. There were so many worlds overlaid in the corridors of Hermes Court. From most of them I only heard these strange echoes. I hadn’t been wrong, there was just a slight French inflection in his voice.

Eventually, the future doctor drifted back out of earshot. There was always a legend floating around that one year a few of the med students had taken their corpse out for a night on the town. As I re-entered the half-sleeping state, my mind fed me a grim fantasy of Pierre and his laughing friends dressing up Deb’s dead body, parading her around The Mitre and The Baron of Beef. Pierre playing bar skittles at The Maypole, like I’d seen him do in freshers’ week, but with Deb draped over his shoulder like a rag doll.

—

The next weekend was that of “Suicide Sunday”—after the end of exams, before the appearance of the first results. Undergraduates flung themselves into the Cam, ran topless along King’s Parade, sprayed champagne from bridges. Some of the brave ones even stepped briefly onto the Great Court grass until corrected by the hawk-eyed porters, guardians of turf that wasn’t theirs. But that