Best Canadian Stories 2020 Page 16

  “I don’t like it. It feels like a poison, I don’t like it coming out of my body,” said Victoria.

  “And do you like taking your Madame Flora’s?”

  Victoria would’ve blushed, if she had the energy, but she knew her cheeks remained pale and slightly green.

  “Well medicine is not supposed to be tasty, now is it?” Madame Flora said.

  She poured a glass of her tonic and handed it to Victoria. Under her gaze, Victoria drank it.

  “It is a policy here that girls share rooms, as you may have heard.”

  Victoria’s mother handed her a wine gum wrapped in a tissue as they said goodbye.

  *

  The girl in the foyer was named Louise and she was the daughter of a baron. She was assigned the same room as Victoria. They weren’t allowed to take the stairs, only the lift. The stairs were gated off. Behind the gate the red-carpeted stairs were dusty. Victoria was afraid Louise would make the lift break with all her things. There were only three floors. The halls had dim lights and were stuffy.

  Their room was on the top floor, filled with small but pretty beds, with rose-patterned bed sheets. There were lots of small mirrors, and nightstands with powders and Madame Flora’s on them. There was a marble fireplace, lit, with a decorative brass fireguard in front of it, and potpourri in little china dishes. There was a small window looking out onto the sea, and a skylight. One wall had a mural of Mother Goose on it. A small pink door led to a bathroom. There was an indent with a curtain over it, which Louise pulled back, revealing another bed. There was a thin girl with pale blonde hair and a red scalp laying in it, holding a paper box to her chest. She wore a wrinkled cream-coloured nightgown.

  “I was here first,” the girl said quietly, not looking at her intruder.

  *

  When Madame Flora left, Louise pushed one of the beds under the skylight and, standing on it, tapped it with her lacrosse stick.

  A few more girls came into the room through the door, carrying carpet bags, hats. One with black hair who took the bed beside Victoria was named Eliza, and a girl with curls was named Matilda. None of them had shared a room with so many girls before.

  They wandered around their small room, touching things. In the fireplace there was a bit of a stocking and a burnt crumpet. On the wall, behind Victoria’s metal bedframe, someone had scrawled “Mutton.” There was a collage on the wall, of horses and dogs, badly cut out of newspapers. In the bathroom was a framed picture of a lady riding a rabbit.

  Without looking at any of the girls in particular, Louise talked, taking off her coat. Her dress had a sailor’s bib and a strange cut, with low hips, it wasn’t suited to her bustle. The sleeves were short. On one arm she had a Union Jack tattoo which the other girls thought shocking until Louise said her father had it done to her when she was eight, which meant her father loved her very much.

  “After this I’m going to Fairy Palace, in Wales, to fix my teeth. My Hugh had his teeth fixed there. Then we are getting married.”

  She suddenly looked at Victoria. “Are they going to send you somewhere to fix your nose next?”

  Victoria covered her nose with one of her hands.

  Louise continued talking “They’ve fixed my hymen twice now, both times it broke from riding horses. It has to be intact just before you’re married so that a nurse hired by your fiancée can break it with a metal instrument. It’s so he won’t be put off by the sight of blood after the wedding. Your fiancée gets a certificate from the nurse saying it was done.” Victoria didn’t understand what a hymen was, perhaps a little male china doll? Victoria’s dolls had never bled, though she often checked and made them diapers out of tissue.

  Louise pointed to the collage of dogs and horses. “It’s shaped like the Kingdom of Wales.”

  “No it isn’t, I’m from Wales,” said Eliza. Louise slapped her.

  *

  There was a diaper bustle dispensary: a tin box hung on the wall. Louise pulled out diaper bustles, throwing them into the room until they were called for dinner. The dining room was full of small round tables, only two or three girls could fit at each. There were many older women there who were married. The married women were in separate, individual rooms. It made Louise angry. “Bitches,” she said. They spent most of their time playing cards in the parlour or writing long letters to their husbands and children.

  There were large bottles of Madame Flora’s surrounded by tiny bottles and oranges as table centrepieces. Oranges were said to help with the constipation that too much Madame Flora’s could cause. They were served bowls of mashed potatoes with sugar and milk, or bowls of white bread with sugar and milk, cups of tea with sugar and cream, and more oranges, there were bowls of peeled oranges and orange jelly, crumpets, tiny pots of jam, cabbage and boiled carrots, rice pudding. Victoria sat with a pudgy girl with dark circles under her eyes who said, quietly, “I’ve not stopped my flowers for the same reason as everyone else. Have you ever been in love?”

  Victoria thought of her father, her father’s butler, and her father’s friends, and said no. The girl ate too much cabbage and rice pudding and had gas. She told Victoria that she knew a girl whose flowers stopped after she saw a dead man in a ditch, but she was cured at Madame Flora’s, and that she herself would never be cured, which she said with a little giggle Victoria didn’t like.

  After dinner, the girls were told to go to bed. Rest was the most important thing. Louise stuck a photo of Hugh, a real lock of his blonde hair glued to it like a toupee, in the middle of the dog and horse collage. “He has more dogs and horses then all that,” she said.

  Louise’s hands were surprisingly dainty and pudgy, with expensive feminine rings, including her engagement ring from Hugh Orville. Her nails were polished, red and sharp like vole’s teeth.

  Hugh Orville turned up the next day. Madame Flora wouldn’t let him visit, but he left gifts for Louise with her—a stuffed swan toy, a box of chocolates. He drove around the hotel in his motor car playing a popular song Louise loved called Tinky Tinky Too Too, a duet between a trumpet and a theremin. Louise moved from window to window, waving and dancing. Hugh was stunningly handsome. He wore a blue kerchief and a fur coat like Louise’s, flashing his new teeth from Fairy Palace. Louise told everyone he was a duke.

  *

  Eliza had several black dresses, all velvet or silk, they all looked similar but she wore the same one every day until it smelled, as well as to bed, merely changing her stockings and bustle, discreetly in the morning. Matilda’s dresses were exceptionally ugly, Louise told her. They were of calico, brown, mustard yellow, pink.

  Each girl had her own way of taking Madame Flora’s, of standing the nasty taste. Eliza liked to mix Madame Flora’s with black tea, Matilda with tonic water, so it was weakened, she only put a drop or two in. Victoria copied her. The girl who slept behind the curtain and wouldn’t say her name put it in milk, so that it was a pink colour. Many in the dining room put it in their porridge.

  Louise took a straight teaspoon in the morning, with lunch and before bed, without complaining or grimacing.

  She had an iron ball which she licked and threatened to throw at the other girls. Her nanny at home had given her the ball as an anemia cure and she was addicted to it, but Madame Flora took it away, saying it was bad for her, as were greens. “Spinach is poisonous. My tonic is the only safe source of iron for women.”

  Each evening, a maid came and took away their bustle diapers and dirty laundry in a cart, and examined the bed sheets and blankets for stains. It didn’t feel as cruel as when Nanny did it, tuttering and sighing. There were so many girls at Madame Flora’s. It wasn’t personal.

  Louise, who wore trouser pajamas to bed, talked into the night. There was nothing else to do, besides reading magazines.

  “I saw a man eating a boiled egg, he grinned at me as he done so.”

  “I sniffed a rasher of bacon,
once, in the kitchen at home.”

  “Hugh killed eight pheasants and a fox last spring.”

  *

  There was a middle-aged woman who sat herself in the lift and wouldn’t come out. Others squished buns through the brass grating, to make her eat, but she wouldn’t let anyone pour any Madame Flora’s in, she called it devil’s juice. She wasn’t married. Madame Flora put some of her concoction in a spray bottle and sprayed the woman with it but she turned around and crouched in a far corner of the lift. Madame told them to ignore her and look away when they passed. There were queues for the one elevator left. The woman screamed and shook the lift during the night and silently paced during the day. Louise spat orange pips at her whenever she passed by the lift.

  One morning they came down and the lift was empty and clean again.

  *

  On his second visit, Hugh brought Louise a miniature golf set, which she set up in the parlour.

  “Exercise is the enemy of your flowers, Louise,” Madame Flora said, taking Louise’s golf club as she took a swing. Louise was so despondent that Madame Flora made an effort to provide entertainment. Victoria couldn’t see how Louise could be bored. There were so many ladies’ magazines to read at Madame Flora’s—The Modern Priscilla, Dainty Day, News for Ladies—in big stacks everywhere. Victoria’s nanny had sent her some popular poems written out on card paper, she had written them herself in brown ink. Victoria ripped them up. She was scared of Nanny visiting Madame Flora’s like Hugh did, of Nanny circling the hotel crying Victoria Victoria.

  The town was full of hotels, shopping arcades, stalls selling postcards, seashell art (“Don’t touch the seashells girls!” said Madame Flora) and novelty tea sets with the royal family on them. There were rides and other amusements. Madame Flora hired a long, covered rickshaw pulled by two cyclists to bring the girls around. The seats were very small, and metal, Louise struggled to fit in one, so she balanced herself on the back of the seat, her legs hanging down the arms. She harassed the cyclists, telling them to go faster, or slow down when she saw something that looked amusing, especially the butchers’ shops which had striped curtains covering the windows and signs that said ‘Gentleman Only’. “What do they sell eh?” She muttered, “Sausage. Eggs. Snouts.”

  Victoria half-covered her ears to make herself look good, but was intrigued by what Louise was saying. Louise could only be distracted from the butchers’ shops by a carousel on one of the piers.

  Madame Flora said yes to a ride on it, and made one of the maids run back to the hotel and get some soft paddings to put on the fake animals before the girls sat on them. “Sideways, girls, sideways, like you do properly on a horse.”

  She nodded to the carousel owner once she checked all the girls were rightly seated, but after it had gone round a few times, Louise changed positions on her zebra, so both legs hung down different sides. She had taken her bustle off and sent it flying. It resembled a swan as it fell into the seawater. Madame Flora shouted for the carousel to stop. By the time it did, Louise had wrapped her legs around the pole of the zebra, laughing wildly.

  Madame Flora didn’t let them go out anymore after that, saying it would use up the energy needed to restore their flowers. Someone came and gave a lecture on ferns, bringing samples in misty glass jars.

  “I don’t want my flowers again, ever, I just want out of here. I never want babies,” muttered Matilda, touching one of the glass jars.

  Madame Flora could tell at a glance the difference between menstrual blood and blood from a wound. When Matilda told the maids she had her flowers again, and held up her sheets, Madame Flora came in and pulled up Matilda’s nightgown, exposing her diaper bustle. Her legs and stomach were covered in small cuts.

  “How could you do this to yourself, sweetest of hearts? We just want to help you get better, don’t we treat you well?” asked Madame Flora. They examined her for cuts each week. They put bandages over the ones she had and checked to make sure she didn’t rip them off and reopen the wounds.

  *

  As Louise continued to act restless, Madame Flora hired two performers: a couple with their small dog, who wore fancy hats and sang and danced and were popular in all the seaside towns. Madame Flora placed a velvet railing to separate the girls from them. Louise made them sing “Tinky Tinky Too Too” twice, stomping her foot along so loudly the floor shook. Everyone was relieved to see Louise entertained, but the couple’s dog went missing by the end of the show and they caused a fuss Madame Flora thought to be upsetting to her clients.

  “Doggy, doggy!” they cried. “Where is our Doggy!” The man begged Madame Flora to let him carry around a piece of cheese to lure it out from wherever it was hiding. Madame Flora told them they were disgusting and made them leave without payment.

  “Must have gotten out,” said Louise. “Must have drowned in the sea.”

  *

  Victoria thought once they were in their bedroom Louise would pull the dog out from under her dress, but she didn’t. “I’m not interested in mutts,” she said. Hugh had Bassett hounds, corgis, and Dutch partridge dogs he imported from the Netherlands despite the heavy taxation. They could hear the couple shouting outside the hotel. “Where is our doggy! Bitch, Bitch!”

  A few days later the dog was found dead in one of the halls. Madame Flora was livid at the thought that there was now “meat” in her establishment, the hall was cordoned off, and the girls heard she burnt the dog in the kitchen oven. Victoria wondered if she was afraid to put it in the trash. The smell of burnt hairs and flesh wafted up through all the rooms, and Madame Flora filled her establishment with electric fans and more bowls of potpourri.

  None of the girls told Madame Flora about the time, in the chaos of getting up and getting dressed, a sausage rolled out onto the floor of their bedroom. A first they thought it was a dried turd.

  Louise picked it up and ate it before Madame Flora and one of the maids entered the room, having heard their screams.

  No one knew who left the sausage, except it couldn’t have been Louise because she would have eaten it beforehand. She ate things as soon as she received them because she knew she would always get more.

  There was no change in Louise’s pallor since eating the sausage, nor was she sick. All the girls that had been in the room watched her closely.

  *

  “What about girls who have too much,” Victoria asked in the dark, in bed one night.

  “Too much what?”

  “You know, too many flowers.”

  No one replied, except for Louise who said, “You need a license stating you are male to buy meat, but I once heard about a woman who dressed up as a man and bought a rack of lamb and was arrested. Maybe the girls who had too many flowers were arrested too.” Louise chuckled loudly, the sound filled the room like a horrid fart.

  “Or died because they didn’t have anything left in their bodies,” said Matilda. “Maybe their hearts came out with their flowers.”

  After some silence, Eliza whispered.

  “There was a boy Thomas, he loved me, he cut himself, on his arm, and let me drink the blood, he did it a number of times, on his legs and his arms, he said it doesn’t count as meat, I started to get better but he died of infection from one of the cuts.”

  *

  A week later, Louise was shouting “In here!” standing on a chair below the skylight. “Open the latch,” she growled.

  It was one of the rickshaw cyclists. Louise had sent him a message through one of the maids, perhaps.

  He had put on cologne and it filled the room. He had sweat stains under the armpits of his beige suite, a fresh and red young face, and a little moustache that had been waxed and curled with care.

  He took off his trousers and underpants but left on his jacket, shirt, bowtie, shoes and socks. He lay on his side on Eliza’s bed, looking at them all and making kissing sounds. Eliza got up and sat beside Victori
a, clutching her arm. “I want her to do it,” he said, pointing to Eliza.

  “Sit up,” she said to him, and he did, spreading his legs wide. She went in-between.

  He winced, but they couldn’t see what was going on, her head was in the way. The man moaned.

  “His thingie’s in her ear,” whispered Louise. Eliza turned around, blood on her lips. The man’s thing was all sweaty and there was blood all over his thigh, where she had bitten. Louise went over but he said, “I’ll come back tomorrow night,” and zipped up his trousers, not thinking of the blood, as if he didn’t know he was bitten.

  There was a bandage over the bite when he returned.

  “The other thigh,” he said.

  Louise didn’t bite, but tried to use her nail scissors. The man screamed and said “No, use your lips and teeth.” She did, but made a show of cleaning her face off with a hanky and perfume afterwards and all the other girls knew it was because he was working class.

  The girl from behind the curtain came out and drank some too. Matilda and Victoria didn’t.

  *

  “Bring a friend tomorrow then,” Louise said to the man as he left.

  The young man didn’t come back the next night, but another came and knew what would happen, taking off his trousers too. After Eliza and Louise drank, Matilda took off her bustle, climbed up on the man, sitting on him, and moved around in an odd manner that made the man giggle and whelp.

  “What are you doing,” said Louise.

  “I don’t want any blood,” said Matilda in a breathy voice. “I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.”