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

and donating her own pillow. It took up all the remaining floor space in my tiny bedroom. I never heard her snore, but we didn’t have to share for very long. I started at the boarding school that September.

—

The school was huge. Better still, it was full of corridors and tunnels and passageways. There was even a footbridge over a busy road which connected the main building to another, newer block with multiple levels. This meant you could wander all over the entire complex for as long as you needed to, all the while appearing to be going somewhere. It was wonderful. During break times and lunch hours, I’d walk around humming to myself, imagining I was really an old woman who’d been given this one chance to go back in time and see what her secondary school used to look like. Sometimes I narrated it to myself. Ah yes, this is where the home economics teacher tried to show us how to use a sewing machine, and Stephanie sewed a needle right through her finger. Poor Stephanie!

In the evenings, the other girls made friends. They watched Grease on repeat in the TV room, pored over teen magazines, did each other’s hair, and secretly passed round romance novels with all the sex scenes dog-eared. I read a huge brown hardback volume called The Complete Sherlock Holmes, with original illustrations from The Strand. It took me a very long time. When I had finished, I started it again.

Everyone shifted their conversations to whispers when I came close, and there were a few girls who walked into me on purpose. I vaguely registered this as strange, but I didn’t quite get the message until one November morning in the first term. I’d spent the twenty-minute morning break walking around in the cavernous underground locker rooms, eating a bag of crisps and thinking about the haunting catechism from “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”:

Whose was it? His who is gone.

Who shall have it? He who will come.

(What was the month? The sixth from the first.)

Where was the sun? Over the oak.

Where was the shadow? Under the elm.

How was it stepped? North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.

What shall we give for it? All that is ours.

Why should we give it? For the sake of the trust.

As the bell rang for the end of break and I came in to French, I saw that someone had written in large white letters on the chalkboard:

Victoria is a major wazzock.

Every social body has a kind of immune system, for killing off unwanted entities. I had to learn to evade it, and so far I hadn’t learned anything.

I got careful after that. I worked out who were the right people to agree with, to look and act like. This system worked just the same as the other rules, really. The ones that the teachers made up. Except there wasn’t a list of them written down in a booklet and handed out on the first day, so it just took me a bit longer to get square on the details. The most important thing was just to shut up or disappear when I couldn’t get it right.

On exeat weekends, my aunt took me to visit my mother in the home. On the plastic bench, surrounded by her cigarette smoke, I started talking to her about boarding school. My teachers, classes, homework, exams. I was started early on French, in the upper third, and I remembered being told that my mother used to speak French a long time ago. So I practised on her. Je m’appelle Rien. Ma tante n’est pas ma tante.

I started talking to her about boys eventually, but only because I was supposed to. All the other girls were talking about boys by then and if you didn’t they called you a “lezzie.” This was one of many available forms of social death, like being square and not knowing the right songs. The seas of lava beneath a few floating stones. I saw a lot of girls fall in, and while some of them seemed to get another life, others just went away and I never saw them again. Once I had a handle on the rules, I found I could hop from stone to stone without really going anywhere, but without falling off either.

When I told my mother about school I sometimes told the truth, sometimes made things up. Generally my babble was a mix of both. It didn’t matter, after all. I didn’t look at her face much, because there was no point. There was nothing to learn there.

There was only one time I thought I saw her face move at all, and I’m not even sure if I imagined it. It was for a fraction of a second, what these days they call a “micro-expression.” And it wasn’t her mouth that moved, only something in her eyes. It was after A levels, when I told her I had met the conditions of my offer and would be going up to Cambridge that Michaelmas term to read philosophy.

I wondered if maybe, just for a moment, she felt proud of me.

Don’t call it “home” for fuck’s sake, I’m not a child. This is the home. The definite article. You need to understand the significance of that. How can I explain? To Sherlock Holmes you know she is always the woman. Like there is only one. Only one moment. The moment when I nearly told her. About me. I mean, about her. About us.

Of course I could have told her at any time. I could tell her anything. But what purpose could it possibly serve?

Chapter Three

Being poor wasn’t really an issue until Cambridge. Looking back, the girls’ school must have worked hard to level certain differences. If you needed something for your classes—cupcake trays for a cookery