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

plane to the next. I imagined the pattern must repeat to infinity, lift off into a skylit heaven, blues and greens rarefying to white light.

I lost a helium balloon in that stairwell. Once its string slipped the grip of my sticky fingers, even my uncle couldn’t stop it. So up it went, and up it stayed, clinging to the invisible limit of the skywindow until it fell, deflated, weeks later, all dreams of escape spent into the sublunary air of my aunt and uncle’s house. It dissipated down towards me as I waited below, daring myself to stand there long enough to catch the dead husk of my prize.

—

That shadow of the house couldn’t follow me in hospital, though. Perhaps the disinfectant smell kept it away.

As I wandered the corridors humming my made-up tunes to myself, they began to take more specific forms. Tunes for walking straight along, tunes for turning a corner, tunes for climbing stairs. Tunes for doorways. Some of the doors that flanked the hospital corridors were closed, and although they had little windows at adult eye level, my own eyes were nowhere near. These doors were so much wall—I would never have opened one. But when they were already open, I’d stand and stare through, often into strange spaces. Entire rooms full of old beds and strappy equipment that looked like it might be for holding a person down. A ping-pong table with no bats or balls. A shelf of faded romance novels. I found small discarded treasures on floors, too. Even money sometimes. And once—one wonderful time—a little blue plastic Care Bear with a cloud on his tummy. I wasn’t allowed branded toys—they were “tacky” and “commercial” and cost money we didn’t have. I took him home, bathed him assiduously, and carried him in my pocket for years.

If I found myself in the hospital canteen and had 30p to spare, I would buy the delicious roast potatoes. I ate these so fast my chest felt like it was going to burst for a few beats, until a good swallow moved the starchy mass along and freed me up to cram in another forkful. Sometimes the hospital corridors smelled of those canteen potatoes. Sometimes other scents hung around: the perfumes of the sad women, coffee out of the machines, cigarette smoke. But underneath the changing surface notes was that clear, constant disinfected smell, the scent of the blue floors that sparkled like a hall of fame. I found these plastic pathways magical, with their little flicks of glitter under the brilliant lights. These corridors were the endless passages from the fantasy game I was occasionally allowed to play on my uncle’s computer. Bright, clean, simple magic that can take you anywhere.

Somewhere on another level, all the things that mattered to my family were going on. Hospital space was infinite. It had room for them so I didn’t have to.

Anyway the little shit talks all the time. Talks at me, talks about me, talks for me. Wears me. Like the whole nine months she was growing in my body, eating it away and it’s the same now. Whenever she starts talking. I instinctively flinch, like someone’s going to hit me in the face, only inside. I’d never let her see it. I’d never let her see anything.

Now she has my life just like she had my body. Hollow shells. All my stories—she’s never even heard them and somehow they’re hers to tell.

No, it’s fine. It’s not like I’m using them.

Chapter Two

And then it was gone. The home didn’t have those infinite corridors, it was just a pathetic brick square. You could only walk around and around inside it, and all the nurses immediately knew who I was. I walked round the whole square the first time we went there, and burst into tears when I came back to where I’d started in less than two minutes.

Contained inside the brick square was a garden that felt like a fake smile. It had a couple of brown plastic benches planted in the centre, facing each other. My mother would smoke on one of these benches for hours every day, until her left hand grew a gross yellow bump on the back of its middle finger and her blonde hair went grey. Around the time the bump appeared, people started describing her as “stable.” She was always thin, but she got thinner. I suppose objectively she smelled disgusting, although I quite liked the way she smelled. Whatever the weather, she’d be there in the middle of her small square world, silent, letting nothing out. I’m not even sure she exhaled the smoke.

I sat beside her on the plastic bench and talked. I wasn’t really talking to her, to be honest, I just sat there and said things. But it was easier than talking when my uncle was around.

When my uncle got angry he called me a “stupid little girl.” Every word of it stung in a different way, because he meant each one as an insult. But he was just wrong about “stupid,” and it showed that he didn’t know anything about me. I was clever. I was especially good at English and maths. So although we didn’t have any money, when I was eleven my aunt encouraged me to sit the entrance examination for an all-girls boarding school.

On the morning of the exam we got up at 4 a.m. to drive the seventy miles to the school. My aunt helped me get ready in a new linen dress from the Red Cross shop, and she piloted me in her decrepit blue Beetle through the school’s wrought-iron gates, up a long winding driveway, into a discreet car park tucked behind the main school building. Then we followed arrowed signposts, with a string of nervous girls and parents crocodiling into a huge gymnasium. Here there were highly polished, spotless wooden planks underfoot, and floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides. One side gave out