Under the Poppy

Small Beer Press

Easthampton, MA

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2010 by Kathe Koja. All rights reserved.

www.kathekoja.com | www.underthepoppy.com

“Mercury Dressing” from
Mercury Dressing: Poems
by J.D. McClatchy, copyright©
2009
by J.D. McClatchy.

Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Small Beer Press

150 Pleasant Street #306

Easthampton, MA 01027

www.smallbeerpress.com

[email protected]

Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koja, Kathe.

Under the poppy : a novel / Kathe Koja. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-931520-70-6 (alk. paper)

I. Title.

ps3561.o376u53 2010

813’.54--dc22

2010025912

First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Text set in ITC Caslon.

Paper edition
p
rinted on 30% recycled paper by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, MI.

Cover design by Base Art Co.

Cover photograph by Jonas Jungblut.

Author photo
©
Rick Lieder 2010.

To Chris, for the trade

And to Jane, who gave me the room.

But suddenly he disappears,

As so much else has down the years . . .

Until I feel him deep inside

The emptiness, preoccupied.

from “Mercury Dressing,” J. D. McClatchy

ACT ONE

THE FLOWERS OF THE STREET

1.

The room is small but chilly, the coal grate piled low. At the table together, scarlet damask and black tea, her shining pince-nez, his cheroot: Rupert with the night’s receipts, Decca the month’s accounts: “Adderley was here again?” Her pen’s steel nib makes a disapproving sound,
scratch-scratch.
“Was it for Lucy? Sometimes I think she tries to fall ill, tries to ferret out the most diseased—”

“Not Lucy.” He dwarfs the dainty duchess chair, its carved arms and wan petit-point roses: long legs, tight-squared shoulders, the sober frock coat and glass-polished boots of a prosperous undertaker. Black hair to his collar, a deep groove between his eyes, at odds with his young man’s face. “Omar. An abscess.”

“Then Omar can pay for the doctor himself, next time. Or switch to the spoon.” Fox-colored hair piled high, secured with silver combs; on her violet silk breast are several pins, pinked topaz, opal, silver-gilt, and, pinned inside her bodice, a miniature blue eye in a circle of gold, a lover’s eye, far more opulent than the others. “More tea?” She pours without waiting for an answer. He takes the whiskey glass instead, he rubs his forehead. “Your head…. Call Vera, let her see to you.”

“Fucking doesn’t ease a headache.”

“It relieves tension.”

“I am not tense.”

Lips parted to dispute this, she closes them again.
Scratch-scratch.
“The fire screen in the parlor wants replacing, the carpet there is fairly scorched through.”

“Mmm.”

“Did we do well tonight?” She glances briefly at the door. “It seemed a thin crowd when I was on the floor.”

“Well enough, considering.”

She glances toward the door again. “Redgrave was in early, I saw him sporting with Pearl.”

“Yes…. What do you look at?”

“Nothing.” And then both hear it, the noise of commotion past the muted hum and thump of the dwindled downstairs crowd, the upstairs rooms: a girl’s voice, Pearl’s voice, high in protest—“No, sir! Stop! Sir!” Not playacting—the heat of actual distress as Rupert stubs out his cheroot, Decca half rising: “Let Omar deal with it. Rupert, let Omar—”

—but bald Omar is already at that door, half-bandaged arm, rapping with the truncheon’s handle: “Hey! All square in there, Pearl?”

A smothered cry from within as another door opens, a vexed and peering guest from the Blue Room across the hall, the whore Lucy behind him, trying to jockey him back inside. Decca arrives, hand outstretched in futile warding, as Rupert turns the knob, Omar at his shoulder—

—to peer through the guttering darkness, no candles, just a dim and flickering tallow light, and see the whore Pearl, wide-eyed and bare, trying to claw up the wall and away from a lean-muscled man in a white plague mask and a lumpy, determined dwarf, still half-dressed, who appear to be assaulting her simultaneously: the dwarf’s arm is aiming up her back passage, the man is pounding at her front and “What harm?” Omar says, looking to Rupert stilled a step past the threshold as “They didn’t pay for two!” cries Pearl. “The little one, he didn’t pay!”

Rupert nods, one step closer through the cloaking dark as Omar grasps the dwarf by the neck—“Hey, messire”—but “No!” shrieks the dwarf, a high and terrible voice, though his ugly head lies flaccid in Omar’s grasp, black hair and rolling eyes staring backward at the three of them, like a felon pursued to ground. “No, no! Don’t make me stop, she’s tight as a virgin!”

“Let’s go, messire!” as the masked man still pounds busily away, long hair slapping his naked back, Omar tugging at the dwarf, tugging harder and “Jesu!” Omar’s shout as the dwarf’s head pops loose into his hand, pink blood spurting across the sheets, he throws the head from him with a curse and Pearl goes mad, the hideous half-clothed body still attached to her by its arm, its hand still jammed inside as Rupert reaches, grabs a leg and pulls—

—and stumbles backward from the force as the masked man shouts with laughter, as Rupert flings the body to the floor, stares at the bed, at the man on the bed, who tugs aside his mask and “Shhh,” he says sweetly to Pearl, who is retching now into the sheets beside him. “Shhh, it’s just a toy.”

“It’s a God damned puppet,” Omar cries.

“Hello, Rupert,” the naked man says.

Silence, blank and dead until the boom of Omar’s laugh, aghast, relieved, Pearl wipes her mouth on the sheet as Rupert stares at the man, a stare like a blow, turns viciously on his heel and leaves the room and “All’s well,” Decca says to the watchers in the hallway, half a dozen peering and unnerved, Vera and Jennie and Vladimir, their tricks and johns—until Lucy starts laughing, Lucy from the Blue Room laughing and clapping and “Bravo!” she cries, and the others relax into shrugs: Why, it was just a joke, a show, just another peculiar amusement at the Poppy, no cause for anyone’s concern.

Decca turns, peremptory, to Omar: “Go fetch Velma, have her change the linen in here. Take her too, yes,” as the nude and trembling Pearl climbs to her feet. “And
you
,” sharp in their departure, as the door shuts decently behind them, as the unmasked man retrieves his fallen accomplice, setting the head politely on a chair, “oh you imbecile,” helpless and smiling, crossing the room to gather him into her arms.

Lucy

So I am working this man, you see, watching the little clock by the bed frame, I aim for just six minutes and no more to do the job. Which is what they pay for really, those six minutes, no matter how long the business really takes.
Umphf-umphf -umphf
, he’s a fat one, fat jelly roll underneath me, I don’t like the fat ones usually, they’re much harder to bring on. But sometimes you get lucky, sometimes they swoon, and you can go through their pockets while they catch their wind. Sometimes they even die. Last month one died on Vera, she was milking his prick and boom, he fell right over on his face. Their hearts give out, you see, because of the fat.

This one, he wants a fairy tale, he wants me to pretend I’m an angel from heaven, whistle like a canary and wear little white wings on my back. All right, I don’t mind, the feathers itch but he pays extra so I get extra. They always want you to pretend to be something, act out some sort of play; that’s why they come here, to the Poppy.

So there I am, an angel fucking a fat man and thinking maybe I’ll be lucky and he will die and I can pilfer him before Omar or Decca get there, especially Decca. Omar I could bribe, he’s still friend enough to take money or a handful of snuff or dope to keep his mouth shut. But what he really wants is to be a manager, stop sleeping in the back rooms, start sleeping
With Decca?
I say to him,
you want that cold cunt wrapped around you at night?
And he laughs. I think what he wants mainly is to be Mr. Rupert, but that’ll never happen. Omar works hard, yes, downstairs and upstairs, but he likes the drink and the snuff and even, sometimes, the needle, he likes to take Pearl, or Jennie, or both of them together. He likes his fun, does Omar. So he could never run a place like the Poppy, not the way Mr. Rupert does.

UNDER THE POPPY, it says on the sign, with the picture of the poppy flower, dark red painted but to me it looked black when I first came here, and I wondered, What kind of flower is it that grows black? I didn’t stand wondering for long, though, it was freezing, snow up to my ankles, leaking into the cracks of my boots…. I remember those boots, they were Katy’s, I had to stuff them up with paper just to keep them on my feet. Katy, my sister, who had the only pair of whole boots in the house, the only new dress, the only bed. Because she shared it with our father. Not long after I came to bleed, he started in looking at me, too. I told Katy that if he ever touched me I was going to kill him, but she said No, Lucy, he’ll hurt you. Just go. Go to the city, you’re a likely girl, you can get some kind of work there for sure.

What about you?

I’ll be fine. I know how to handle him.
Handle him! She had already had one of his whelps, thank God it was born dead. Dead and ugly.
Come with me
, I said, I begged her, but in the end I went alone, wearing Katy’s boots, carrying Katy’s coins wrapped up in a bit of wool under my dress, and the little silver mirror she gave me to ward off the evil eye. Sometimes at night I still wake and think,
I should have killed him anyway, I should have killed him quick before I left.
Did he punish her, because I ran away? I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to Katy. May be she had another baby. May be she is dead. She used to braid my hair, when we were little, and put flowers on the ends, and sing me songs about the fairies in the trees:
Watching out for you/And watching out for me.

So I went to the city, and started in whoring: first on my own—that didn’t last—and then for Mr. Angus at the Europa. It didn’t take me long to see that he was cheating me, cheating all of us girls, charge ten and give us half a dollar, but when I complained he hit me:
Every day I see a dozen like you,
he said.
You don’t like it here? Go back to the Alley.

The Alley was where they gathered, the girls without pimps, the ones right from the country, or too old for a house, or stuck hard on the needle, or whatever. Cigarettes rolled in newspaper, sleeping where they stood, wiping themselves with their hands—no, no Alley for me. But I won’t be hit, either, not just for talking. So I went to the Palais, and Miss Suzette.

“Miss”! She must have been forty if she was a day, a hard forty too, grooves all over her face, her tits like bags of old rags, carnelian earbobs and that rose sachet, ugh, like someone’s grandmother in a coffin. She never hit anyone, her punishment was to starve: get smart, no dinner for the day; steal, or fight with the other girls, or try to cut yourself, no dinner for a week. I got along with her all right, especially when she found out I was lettered. She used to have me in her rooms with the newspaper to read the advertisements to her, the news of the day. At first I thought she meant to try to touch me, which would have been all right, I don’t mind that. But what she really wanted was to learn to read! Isn’t that funny? She knew a little of her letters, how to spell her name, and she could cipher perfectly. But she could barely put two words together…. She wasn’t happy, when I figured that out. She didn’t starve me, but she started giving me the worst of the customers, the ones no one else wanted, the ones who never wash or who took forever to bring on, then complained afterward that you were too quick. She let that go on for a week until I went to her rooms—dust everywhere, mice in the featherbed stinking of rose sachet—and Miss Suzette, I said, you can keep giving me these bastards from the bottom of the barrel, and I can leave. Or you can let me help you with your letters, and I can stay.