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 Victoria, 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.”
Louise scowled and, grabbing one of the man’s arms, made a cut in it and started drinking. He barely noticed. His other arm reached up and grabbed Matilda’s breast, squeezing. It looked like it hurt to Victoria.
The next night, a different man came, and the same thing happened. Matilda sat on him while the other girls cut him and drank from him like a fountain in a garden. “But I don’t want my flowers,” said Victoria to herself, watching. The girl from behind the curtain copied Matilda and sat on the man too. Matilda said if you didn’t have your flowers, you could do it all you wanted and you wouldn’t have any children. All the other girls laughed, confused, except for Louise who said, “Hugh wants twenty children,” in a serious voice. Later in the night, Victoria woke to the sound of Louise trying to do with a pillow what Matilda did with the men.
They accumulated left-behind socks, bowties, shirts, jackets, trousers, shoes, suspenders. One man left his underpants, which Louise used as a night cap. The girls tried them all on, taking turns, their bustles laying around the room like gigantic broken egg shells. How easy it was to become men.
“I could walk into a butcher’s shop and buy myself a piece of ham,” said Eliza.
One young man fainted after they drank his blood. Louise slapped him, and they poured Madame Flora’s down his throat. He sputtered, and sat up, then vomited up the Madame Flora’s all down the front of his suit.
“I’m bleeding again,” the girl from behind her curtain said weakly one morning.
“Wonderful, delightful,” said Madame Flora when she entered, looking at the bleeding girl. Her smile disappeared on closer inspection She called for one of the maids. Together, they carried the girl out of the room, blood dripping from her nightgown.
Hugh stopped by the hotel again to drop off a gigantic basket of fruit including a pineapple and three bananas. Louise ate too much and got diarrhea. She drank Madame Flora’s straight from the bottle to stop it.
“I’ll just have a small taste,” said Victoria, next time a man came. Eliza was on one arm, Louise on the other, and Matilda was sitting on him. Victoria made a cut on his foot. Blood tasted like a fresh version of Madame Flora’s, she thought.
At the end, they couldn’t wake the man up from his faint. They poured Madame Flora’s on his face but he didn’t respond.
“He can sleep behind the curtain till he’s better,” said Victoria.
“He’s dead,” responded Louise. “He’s meat now.”
They put him in Louise’s trunk.
All the blood from the man must have gone into Louise because her flowers started soon after. Wearing her stained pajamas, she ran down into the foyer to use the telephone box. Everyone in the hotel could hear her shouting into it, “FLOWERS HUGH, FLOWERS.” A few hours later a carriage from her parents’ house arrived, followed by Hugh Orville in a motorcar.
Louise took the trunk with the man inside with her. “I’ll take care of it,” she said to the other girls.
Her wedding was in all the papers a few weeks later. She had new teeth too, they looked exactly the same as Hugh’s. They both made sure to show the teeth off in the photos.
Eliza left soon after. She said she wished Thomas could see her flowers, which was a wicked thing to say even though he was dead. No one would ever now, unless she had to come back to Madame Flora’s. She didn’t have a nanny at home.