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

lesson, a tennis racket, blue science overalls—there was one provided if you couldn’t bring it from home. It’s not exactly that I couldn’t tell the difference between me and the other girls, but it was all below the surface, and usually it didn’t matter.

Sometimes we’d be taken to historic stately homes on school trips, and the other girls oohed and aahed at the grand dining rooms and ballrooms, while I felt at home in the servants’ quarters. In cool underground pantries, with huge sinks for washing clothes or dead animals for table. Kitchens with great blackened fireplaces and roasting spits, shelves and shelves of bright orange copperware, long, thick wooden tables bearing the marks from years of chopping. Low-ceilinged servants’ halls, where I’d picture a footman belting out waltzes on an out-of-tune upright piano, the maids dancing after the evening meal was cleared away. Attic bedrooms, tucked out of sight on back stairs, where two tiny beds took up the entire floor, and I’d imagine shoving my own little suitcase under one of the beds and wondering who my cellmate might be. These were the spaces that felt right to me. But I didn’t mention things like this to anyone.

There was one time I made the mistake of telling a girl my best dress had only cost ten pounds, and she yelled the fact out loud to everyone in the room. She didn’t mean anything by it. She didn’t know. Another time I showed a different girl my prized necklace of clear plastic crystals, a treasure from childhood. When I put my eyes up close, I could see the light refracted into little rainbows by each gem. She said it looked like it came out of a Christmas cracker. She was right. I could never bear to look at it again, all its magic evaporated—without that, it was worthless. People have this tendency to ruin things.

Still, at school it wasn’t necessarily money but cool that made things magical, made people special. I didn’t care about being cool, beyond the basics of avoiding extermination, so it didn’t matter what I had or didn’t have. There were all kinds of expensive extra-curriculars going on but I didn’t really miss them because I was happy enough by myself. When I finished reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes for the fourth time, I discovered the piano rooms. These were tiny closed spaces arranged in sequence on both sides of a long corridor. This corridor wasn’t exactly infinite like in the hospital, but it led to an underground tunnel in one direction and a broad hallway in the other, so it felt all right. The piano rooms were safe houses, where I could wait as long as I needed. We couldn’t afford lessons but I sat improvising for hours, music that was good enough to pass the time without really going anywhere. I learned to pick out the tunes that I hummed to myself for walking, for going up stairs, for turning corners. At first the tunes were simply themselves, then over time I made them more and more complex, layered with harmonies, subject to variations of mood, tempo, and key. I figured out how to play the songs the other girls liked, too, and then they’d ask me to play for them while they sang. This was as close as I got to popular. If I say “I didn’t have friends,” that comes out sounding wrong: it’s not like there was something I wanted that I lacked.

Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not a misanthrope. Humans amaze me collectively. This usually happens in big cities, from the balconies of high-rise apartments. What people are capable of, from that height and distance, has a wonder to it. I feel it at dusk when the gold light catches a hundred windows at once, and the tiny cars on city streets flash and dart like fish in a tide pool. But it must be said I do not care for humans close-up. What comes at me from them is always confusing, and most of it is scary. Their thoughts and speech always seem to be transmitting on the wrong frequency. Does that make sense? I try to pace myself to match other people’s rhythms but I am always interrupting them, cutting into what they say. Or they’re doing the same to me. So then we stop and try again, but we both start talking at the same time. Like when two people meet in a corridor and do the side-stepping dance for a bit too long, until it’s not funny anymore and there’s just this kind of desperation to escape each other. There is a constant low-level pain in social life, like indigestion or a headache.

I prefer dogs. And cats. They make sense. I cannot abide the idiocy that says you must be either a cat person or a dog person but not both.

—

In Cambridge the ground shifted. You don’t ignore wealth there. I was hanging out with millionaires and I couldn’t afford new shoes. The zeitgeist came to my rescue to some extent, as the after-effects of the recession meant I could get away with grunge as a look. Worn-out floppy black sweaters and scuffed black jeans, all day every day. Throw that on over a cheap black tank top, add a metric ton of black kohl pencil along your lower lash line, and you were doing something in the vicinity of that singer from Garbage who everyone thought was cool.

The College housed all of its students, so on the one hand I didn’t have to worry about finding accommodation, but on the other I was stuck in close quarters with the millionaires and they were stuck with me. Minor royals from countries I’d only vaguely heard of, and the children of famous people. They tended to be loudest. I had ticked “low cost” on a form asking what kind of accommodation I would prefer, and been allocated a tiny bedsit in a complex called Hermes Court.