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

don’t look like someone the police would hassle over trivialities. Come to think of it, she didn’t either. I always say yes when people ask me for money, but it doesn’t help. The request itself is enough: the past is there, as if I’ve just vomited it into my mouth. The night of the Jesus College May Ball.

I can’t explain what the Cambridge May Balls mean. I suppose they are a kind of huge, lavish, all-night garden party. But that’s not it at all. You need to imagine this: hold your hand out for a moment, and in it there suddenly lands a white-hot sphere of too much feeling, too much to drink, too much food and music and wealth and power and time, too much of everything crushed together into a brilliant imploding star, and now it’s too big for your hand and you cannot hold it, rather you’re trapped inside of it. A May Ball is one summer night made of black diamonds, bottomless champagne, hot-air balloon rides, fried food, acid trips, boat swings, dancing, fireworks and flowers and floodlights and fairground music. Comedians and casinos and thousand-pound gowns getting grass-stained by the river. Acrobats in marvellously coloured outfits tumbling in and out of trees just for you. The May Balls are in June, the misnomer itself a clue that these singularities do not belong to linear time.

Most of the bigger and older colleges have one, which means that entertainers of all stripes are in demand all through May Week. What it meant for me back then, for my earthier concerns, was that I could earn enough money to eat for a month by landing a gig at one of these events. A lot of students auditioned to play the May Balls, although only a few of us needed the money. I despise competition; I tend to win and then hate myself for it. But I told myself you do what you need to do. I bought a basic Marshall and a couple of effects pedals for a steal from a disillusioned student band, and when I got my little Celtic harp miked up I’m telling you I could make it ring like there was a tiny elfin ceilidh happening inside your head. I did okay.

You had to dress the part though, to play a Ball, because after your set was done you were allowed to stay in for the rest of the night. In my case, this meant tracking down some sort of vintage finery—and its status as such had to be obvious, a loudhailer announcement that I was intentionally not entering into the game of thousand-pound gowns. I scoured the cheaper charity shops for weeks to get my outfit. Cambridge has strange charity shops, what with all the rich kids giving away last season’s barely worn designer stuff and feeling like saints about it. But I certainly did not want their year-old Karen Millen. One year I found a long-sleeved, high-necked green velvet dress, almost Victorian, but pulling goth if you added enough black eyeliner. It had no label inside, but it looked and smelled like it had been in the world longer than I had. I paired it with a detachable white lace collar. The effect was off-putting, which was the point.

On my way to play the Jesus May Ball that summer, a woman asked if I could spare some change. I had no cash on me, I was carrying the absolute minimum. The green velvet dress had no pockets. I had only what I needed for the show, and my room keys which were stashed in the case of my harp. I didn’t know to bring a mirror back then. Without thinking, I said I didn’t have anything on me: I was on my way to the Jesus Ball. And she spat on me.

I hurried away, shoulders rounding to bear this new, unfamiliar yoke of shame that fastened me to this stranger forever. At first I thought she’d made a mistake. “I am not one of them…” I said it out loud, over and over, to the rainy pavement, to my cheap black court shoes, as I tried to outpace her judgment. I was not like the rich kids. I was embarrassed at having College staff whose job it was to pick up my mess, contrite when I forgot to make my bed and they did it for me.

But she was right, and I was wrong. You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Look at the Seattle neighbourhood where I live. Gentrification is a fait accompli. We have a Starbucks Reserve. We’re all leafy streets, metal-and-reclaimed-wood eateries, houses with cute wind chimes and red pots full of flowers on their front steps. My aunt would have called it “swank.” The working class who must live amongst us to keep us functional are the kind who can be tidily tucked away in marginal spaces. We pretend these aren’t servants’ quarters, but the idea is the same. A converted broom closet, a basement, an attic shared with three others. I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.

Unlike Cambridge, Seattle has a real summer. But even when it’s far too warm to be appropriate I stuff a cashmere scarf in my work tote. When I was a kid, my comfort blanket was a cheap piece of red nylon with brown swirls of fleur-de-lis round the perimeter. My aunt bought it for herself, but I kept sneaking into her room just to curl up under it, so she caved in and let me take it. It’s in my laundry closet now. Threadbare, degrading. Picture-of-Dorian-Greying the shit out of this wealthy adult woman who wears cashmere. And I live in this cashmere scarf of a neighbourhood because of what I earn. Because of the doors that opens to me. I inherited nothing, only migraines. What I earn is a measure of the extent to which I