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

Explains stuff like that to the camera but you won’t see him. Unless you know what he is. I mean unless you know that thing in him too. And you’ll have seen the one who makes his excuses. There isn’t a rapist bone in his body. The woman with the big laugh. She knows. Rapists aren’t made of rapist bones, they’re made of excuses and all the air. If there’s nothing left for me to breathe, I can’t talk. That’s fucking physics.

Chapter Seven

With Deb gone it always felt as though time wasn’t passing in Cambridge, but of course it was. One minute I’d be walking down the cobbled lane beside the College, wearing my navy gown, and I’d hear the Great Court clock chime the quarters. I’d think but this is exactly what it would be like if I had accidentally slipped into 1667. Then someone’s mobile would ring. That godforsaken Nokia drone, do you remember it? Duddle-uh-duh, duddle-uh-duh, duddle-uh-duh duh. Duddle-uh-duh, duddle-uh-duh…Christ. Human progress. Marked by such trails of audible trash.

Of course, if I’d strolled into 1667 it would be because I was already there, rounding that same bend, three hundred and thirty years before. Dr. Humberton had taught me about that, and how most of our beloved time-travel stories are inconsistent. You can’t “change the past”—that’s saying that something both did happen and did not happen, which is, to use the technical term, bollocks. Kind of ruins Back to the Future. But when you think about it, the whole idea of changing the past is selling hope to the hopeless, which is a cruel trick. A sick joke.

There was something so magnetic about the way Humberton said it. The way he used to ramble when he’d gone off-script. Like it wasn’t about the words so much. Sometimes, I felt like what he was trying to do would hit me in the stomach. But that might just have been me. Or rather, my digestive situation. It was getting significantly worse by this time. Whatever I ate had to run the gauntlet of acid reflux, hiatus hernia, a selection of medically interesting food intolerances, minor blood sugar issues, and irritable bowel syndrome. It was a riot in there.

I kept trying to find out what could possibly have happened to Deb. I worked through every avenue I could think of, gradually filling up more and more of the 10-pence-a-pop reporter’s notebooks from the post office. I stacked them in piles at the back of my desk, so they would always be handy to consult, and I kept one on me at all times. In these books I diligently listed all possible clues concerning Deb’s whereabouts, recording everything as soon as it occurred to me. Memories that might or might not mean anything, weird explanations that came to me in the middle of the night but seemed ridiculous by morning. Records of interviews I was covertly conducting with unsuspecting College staff.

I even went to talk to the Bursar—a man who made me intensely anxious—because I knew that he must have records of her registration. The Bursar was sitting in his overly warm little office in one of the College’s inner labyrinths, hunched over an enormous desk crammed with papers. Towards the edges of the desk, the papers had built up over the years into little walls that now defended him against student enquiries. Behind these fortifications stretched a flat morass of bills and letters. From time to time, he would rise to walk around the table and glide certain of the papers from place to place, like a minister pushing troops around a war-room map. The Bursar was a stolid man in his fifties, with white hair and blue eyes, who always wore the same grey suit. Students whispered that he was a Freemason. He was not an early adopter of email.

As on the few previous occasions when I’d had to see him to ask about rent or scholarships, most of his energy was devoted, not to the Battle of the Paperwork, but to an iced cream bun. This one had evidently come from a box at his elbow, which might originally have held a dozen. There were three left inside.

When a student enquiry came his way, the Bursar’s goal, always, was to remove the distraction as swiftly as possible from his vicinity. I had scripted my question in advance so I could put it to him quickly and clearly.

“Good morning. Can you tell me anything about what has happened to Deborah Orton? She is a current first-year undergraduate who has gone missing.”

The Bursar raised one bushy white eyebrow. He stared at the hand containing his half-eaten confection, and with practised skill balanced a viscous squiggle of emerging cream perfectly on top of the chewed side.

“Can’t share any personal information about a student. Not without their written permission. Good morning.”

He nodded at the door, and that was that.

Outside his staircase, my back to the ancient college wall, I wrote these words verbatim in my notebook. Just in case there might be something in them, something I had missed.

—

The morning after Gin told me about The Eleven, following several dull hours reading Rawls in the phallic library, I had to get something to eat. Outside the Sidgwick Site lecture rooms was a paved area that led to a little café called The Buttery. That was just a name, though. It was a café, not a real college buttery like the one next to Hall. When I had to go over there to get coffee between lectures, I always looked straight down at the paving stones, because this was one of those places that was high-risk for running into people in that awful grey zone: people I might be supposed to recognize. I’m bad with faces, but mortified when I fail to recognize someone I’m supposed to—or worst of all, call them by the wrong name. So I focused on the stones in order to have something