Reserved for the Cat

A few hours’ worth of walking in similarly unsavory neighborhoods netted her more of what she was looking for; by nightfall, she had found two more establishments in which to do the same. The first was a gin palace, the second, an opium den. In both, she was able to rent rooms in which to do her work, undisturbed, once she had purchased, respectively, two full bottles of “blue ruin” and a pipe and sticky ball of black-tar opium.

She used the gin palace first, pouring the poisonous stuff out of the window, then getting to work. It was a trifle more difficult to set up a “tap” here, since the people who were systematically destroying their health, their lives, and their brains with the stuff didn’t actually live there. But she got the notion of putting the “energy sinks” into the benches that they sat on, and that worked admirably.

The next day, it was the turn of the opium den; she mashed the drug into a crack in the floor where it was indistinguishable from all the other muck collected there. What had served her well in the gin palace served her equally well here; this time she put the “sinks” into the bunks that those who could not afford a room stretched out on to fume their brains into drifting, benumbed pleasure. This was trickier than the brothel or the gin palace. Unlike alcohol, the opium did not admit the mind to anger. No, the emotion she siphoned here was bleak despair. Beneath the drug, there was the fear of not being able to raise the money for the next debauch, there was self-loathing, and more often than not, the wish that this time, the drug would end the struggle for existence. Then, of course, there were the addicts that appeared without money, suffering the agonies of withdrawal from the drug, so desperate for it and in such pain that they would do anything at all to get it.

Anything.

She walked away from the opium den with a feeling of smug cleverness.

In order to return to her new home without exciting comment, it was necessary to make a few stops and changes of clothing, going from the poverty-stricken vagrant, to a lower-class workingman, to a simple servant, to a lady’s maid, and finally, to herself. The last two changes of clothing she had concealed in order to effect the change, one in the backyard shed of a nearby house, the second in the tiny carriage-house of her own set of flats. She walked straight in from there, as casually as if she had merely gone for a stroll for the sake of the sea air. As it happened, there was no one there to note her coming in, as there had been no one to note her leaving, but she had learned over the years that remaining undetected and unmolested required the careful management of such details.

Her maid let her in, and she ordered several of her favorite foods at random and ate and drank hugely. She was surfeited on the dark energies of misery, but for the last four days her body had been subsisting on dubious sausages, doubtful cockles and oysters, and suspicious eel pies, and it craved wholesome, toothsome food.

With body and “self” satisfied, she flung herself down on a settee and watched the plump, red-faced throng parade under her windows. It amused her no end to think how little these holiday-makers that flocked to Blackpool in the season were aware that brothels, opium dens, and gin palaces existed mere streets away from where they were strolling. These, she could never feed on. There was simply too little there. One part ignorance, three parts complaisance, five parts smug self-congratulation, and a touch of anxiety that one day it might all go smash . . . thin stuff, and bitter, and flimsy as the paper they wrote their letters home on to save on the postage.

No, they had no idea that this pink pleasure-palace of a city had a dark and rotten heart. They only saw the façade. But of course, only the middle class and upwards could afford to take a holiday at all, much less one in another city. The middle class preferred to keep these sordid things at a considerable distance. The middle class did not want to know about what lay underneath the surface of anything. And it particularly did not want to know about the impoverished and desperate. It might be persuaded to part with the odd penny or two at Christmas to supply Christmas cheer for the “deserving poor,” but on the whole, these were things it was better not to think about too carefully. The middle class liked their impoverished class to be in the newspapers, not underfoot, and particularly not underfoot when the middle class was bent on enjoying itself. Opium dens had their place in sensational literature, and one could get a delicious thrill when a lecturer thundered sternly about the evils of white slavery, but when one went on holiday, one preferred to think of the city one visited as an endless panorama of delights and ignore the cockroaches that would appear if one took down a panel of the pretty scenery.

“Fools,” Nina muttered, and turned away from the window.