Victoria Sees It

whether I will sit down on the seat of its toilets. If I’m in my own home or in a hospital, I just sit right down. In those early days at the University, I would wipe the seats over with toilet paper, then sit down. In nice restaurants, I put a layer of paper down over the seat and then sit on top of the paper. In the public lavvies around Cambridge, I would not sit down under any circumstances. There I hovered, developing excellent thigh muscles in an unauthorized variant of chair pose. I judge toilets, too, when there is nowhere to put my bag (not on the floor or on the cistern—that’s disgusting). If there is no such place, what I get from that is that you don’t want women to be comfortable in your space. We have to carry all this extra baggage around, the least you could do is let us put it down for a second to crap in comfort.

In the building that housed the philosophy lectures, the gents was on the second floor, but the ladies was at the very bottom of the stairs, on a level below what you’d assume was the lowest one. This basement was a small, poorly lit space with yellow-grey tiled walls, and floors that were always a little damp. All that was down there was a cleaning cupboard and the ladies’ toilets, and it was one of the places I felt safe in this building. Perhaps it was the smell of institutional disinfectant. And men had no reason to go down there, which meant that it was usually empty. The cleaners only came at night.

There was always a lot of graffiti in those subterranean toilet stalls. Layers of semiconscious scribble, accreting below the radar as the official conversations went on above ground. It generally comprised a range of uninspired variants on the same two thoughts: X loves Y and Z is a slut. Except that, on this particular day, I found someone had written:

You would think from all this wit

Shakespeare himself came here to shit.

And that, my friends, may well be true

For Shakespeare had to do it, too.

This is how genius works. It’s an optical illusion generated by the way our brains process contrast. Light and dark. Blue and gold. Whatever: we will adjust to anything as a baseline. Little things look huge when there’s fuck-all else going on.

I got myself back into Humberton’s lecture as soon as I could. I hated to miss anything. I quickly tuned back in to his language, back in to the process of making detailed, tidy notes in my A4 pad, to be filed in my blue ring binder marked Philosophy of Mind once I got back to my room. Deb and I joked about Humberton but he wasn’t a bad lecturer, really. He was interested in all kinds of things, so he went off on tangents that were interesting. He talked a lot about books. He said you can’t read the same book twice because you’re different. He said books are just mirrors. I think he meant they’re good for seeing what’s behind you. They say Machiavelli wrote a mirror for princes, and really that book is just a Rolodex of historical role models. So Ruling Italy for Dummies is all about the rear-view. A prince is meant to figure out how to go on by looking backwards. And not just how to go on for himself, but for the whole damn country. How can that be a good idea? Unless you want everything going round in circles.

The only other lecturer I could stand was Professor Bell. We didn’t really think about the same kinds of things at all, but because she was the only woman who taught me, she became a kind of role model, and a kind of mentor. You know the way women do when they’re the only one. That’s why I went to her for help.

This was well into the Lent term, during the whole situation with Dave. Apart from Deb, I had never told anyone about Dave. I only told Deb once, and we didn’t bring it up again because I didn’t want to, but Deb had said maybe I should talk to Bell about it.

Do I have to explain Dave? Dave was a boy in my year. Or do I mean a man? I mean, he was eighteen or nineteen, like the rest of us. But no, Dave was a boy. I don’t mean that as a pejorative—it’s not a bad thing to be a boy. And man is hardly a term of approbation. Anyway, Dave had been taught to be whatever he was. His early education had evidently included lessons in persistence.

Dave was a minor irritation at first but he would not stop. It started with loud comments about my being “so fit,” which he didn’t mean. He wasn’t even saying it to me, but for the benefit of whoever else was nearby. He’d pretend to swoon, or make humping gestures in my direction. Then he started throwing small objects at me in lectures. I ignored all that but I decided to talk to Bell when the holding started. Holding my arm while he talked and laughed, holding me in place when I wanted to leave. I don’t want to talk about Dave. Dave is boring. He doesn’t matter. What he was doing, it’s so common. You can fill in any of a million Daves. Choose your own Dave. It’s Bell who matters.

Bell agreed to meet with me one day after her lecture, and we found a spare room. A few printed handouts were still strewn about, remnants of the students’ dash to the exit, this small careless mess only serving to emphasize the order of the room. The day’s chalk dust was trying to settle, suspended for a moment in time by the treacly afternoon sun.

Somehow, in that room, all my words got suspended, too. The air became thick with them, like tiny