Alice Under Discipline, Part 1

by Garth ToynTanen

  Indeed the shower cubicle’s design allowed for a full and unobstructed, three hundred and sixty degree monitoring of the occupant or occupants. Given that all controls - water temperature, flow rate and all - were situated externally, being sited remotely on the wetroom wall, Alice could be forgiven if her initially received perception was that here was something that was concerned as much with control and ‘discipline’ as with hygiene. It was an impression that could only be reinforced by the additional fact that the cubicle’s door could be locked from the outside, the two halves of the chromed rectangular catch being the only feature detracting from perfect transparency.

  Alice found herself being half coaxed, half shoved through the opening in the shower’s cylindrical wall to join Angel, the latter browbeaten teenager having stepped in without protest when instructed. The door having closed behind the two teenagers with a resounding glassy click, Alice was relieved when what came next was not the breathtaking gasping torment of icily spiking jets she had feared and expected and but rather a reassuringly gentle drizzle and then downpour of soft, warm, scented sudsy water.

  Shyly Alice tried to keep her distance from her showering companion as she begun to soap herself down, her cheeks burning with shame. Yet within the enclosed space however carefully she tried to manoeuvre, her arms and legs tended to entangle with those of Angel, the two girls’ bodies becoming involuntarily pressing together, slithering flesh on soapy slick flesh.

  Music had started flowing from somewhere and was as soothing and sensuous as the warming scented soapy rain. From somewhere the gym instructress’ voice floated, merging in with the gentle strains; not the harsh domineering tones that seemed to ordinarily characterise the woman, rather a reassuring lilting tone, seductive and filled with earthy passion.

  “I don’t want to see you soaping yourselves - it is surely easier to soap each other. Run your hands over each others breasts, lift them, soap beneath them - that’s it. That’s it Angel, run your finger between Alice’s bottom cheeks, draw little circles around her rose-bud as you’ve been taught... Alice Marchment! Don’t you dare clench your bottom, relax it at once. And I don’t want to see those eyes closing either - continue soaping Angel’s darling little breasts and look into her eyes while you are doing it... Look at how pretty she is, think about how her velvety soft fingertip is making your bottom squirm, how delicious it feels...”

  Outside the ovoid cylindrical shower cubical the gym instructress was prowling around and around, circling the cubicle. Simultaneously, as she strolled she was toying with the diabolically pliant cane she was carrying, making quite sure both girls caught sight of that fact, keen that they should both understand the implication.

  “Now kiss! Angel, Alice, kiss each other...come on, full on the lips.”

  Alice felt herself blanch - Angel embraced her readily and brought her warm lips to hers, Alice pulled away, repulsed, twisting away as much as the cramped space would allow. The gym teacher’s tone changed so abruptly that to Alice it was as if she had been struck by lightening:

  “Right, that’s it! Both of you... out of the shower...NOW! Alice Marchment... And you too, Angel Larkspear! Get yourselves here in front of me...yes, right here, right now!... Bend and touch your toes... I’M TALKING TO BOTH OF YOU! Angel, you have Alice to thank for this. And Alice; you just think how unfair, how selfish you have been in causing me to have to punish poor Angel as well as your self. Would it have been so hard for you to have kissed the poor girl; you could see how much she was dying to kiss you!”

  The gym teacher lent the full weight of the cane into Alice’s waiting buttocks, the pliant hickory bending as it passed whistling through the air before springing back and adding its whip-like component to the slashing cut. It was a real sizzler, scorching, up and under the tender fatty tissues of the overhang of Alice’s full buttocks, the cane cutting deep into the crease where the girl’s bottom met the very tops of her thighs. The stark naked girl sprung rigidly bolt upright like a coiled spring released from its tether, her scream rending the steam-filled air asunder and her hands desperately clutching at her agonizingly burning buttocks.

  “Right, we’ll have that stroke again - closely followed by eleven others, I think. Bend and touch your toes again, girl... AT ONCE CHILD! I said, at...” The gym instructress’ barked order went unfinished; it never had time to clear her lips.

  The bench running along the wall by the door went over with a crash on the tiled floor as, hurtling past the gym mistress and powered by blind desperation and panic, Alice made a break for the passage outside, shoving the bench between the gym mistress and herself as a diversion. Where she was going to run to, given her state of undress, she hadn’t considered. She thought only to put enough distance between herself and the dyke of a gym teacher to grab some clothes and get out the house. Thanks to the efforts of her stepmother, though - and that woman’s ex-schoolteacher friend - ‘clothes’ in this case pretty much came down to a choice between a humiliatingly childish take on a school uniform, drop-seat pyjamas and plastic pants or a horrendously ridiculous looking gabardine raincoat thing that had a hood and that smelled of rubber even more pungently than the gym suit did.

  She had used every ounce of strength to twist her way out of the powerful gym mistress’ grip and with her legs shaky from the unaccustomed exercise they had just been put to and verging on cramping and her bottom going into involuntary spasms she feared she wasn’t going to get even as far as the door at the end of the passage, let alone negotiate the twisting staircase beyond.

  But Alice needn’t have worried on account of the gym teacher. Even when eventually she appeared at the shower room door the woman seemed unaccountably loath to hurry. Therein, though, in of itself hung a story; that the woman apparently saw no need for haste.

  Reaching the door at the far end of the dimly lit passage the shivering, naked Alice grabbed at the large bulbous brass handle, twisting, turning and pulling in one single action. Nothing happened; neither handle nor door would budge. The door was old yet solid but the lock was new, chunky and decidedly modern. She turned as she heard the boards creak close behind. Never before had she felt so alone: her knees trembled then begun to give way; panting for breath she vomited then involuntarily urinated as the gym teacher slowly advanced, the woman’s hard features set with determination, her thin cruel lips pressed tightly together. Alice couldn’t believe she had been abandoned by her stepmother to be delivered into the hands of this obviously mentally disturbed and deranged woman and left to the twisted woman’s perverted devices - not even her foul-minded stepmother could have done that; surely!

  Cornered, Alice’s panicked inner-beast kicked in - the animal that lives within all of us. It was not a conscious decision; it was instinct. Without any conscious involvement she would climb over the oncoming woman if necessary to escape, run or claw right through her. In a split second she had turned with her back pressed against the firmly locked door. Practically spitting venom and her eyes wide with terror while blinked with self survival Alice Lamberton launched herself at the confidently advancing gym teacher as if fired from a catapult. Thrusting herself off the door with both her buttocks and hands and instinctively aiming for the gap between the woman and the wall she threw her arms forward, gaining momentum, flailing wildly with open hands and clawing at the air with nails that had been safely disarmed long beforehand, having been clipped to the quick.

  To Flora McBainstone the oncoming sensually overweight teenager’s prison yard rush was just that; a directionless, unfocused and haphazard attack. All wobbling buttocks, swinging pendulous breasts and windmill-whirling arms, her head swinging to and fro like an angry bull, the teenager’s anguished onrushing aggression was easily parried. With the practised agility of the mental ward orderly she had once actually been she side-stepped at the very last moment. Tripping the girl with her foot she simultaneously swung around, rotating her arm of the same side so
as to allow her to land her closed palm across the back of the girl’s neck, relying on the blindly onrushing teenager’s own momentum to hurl the girl to the floor. She followed through without pause, dropping down with her bended knee pressed into the small of the fallen girl’s back and yanking the girl’s right arm up behind her back in a debilitating, painful hammer lock.

  Flora McBainstone had learned the rudiments of Ju-Jitsu when she had for a period been employed in a psychiatric hospital out in the Philippines. Little more than a prison for the ‘mentally unsound’, the place had been a filthy roughhouse of an establishment and the skills she had learned, the tools of the trade. Those skills had stood her in good stead then, but she had added to - and honed - her expertise considerably since.

  Pulled almost bodily to her feet, the wrist lock the gym instructress had placed on her leaving little option but to follow, Alice now found herself being dragged by her ear back to the ‘gym’ and then across the room, one arm still being held painfully where it had been yanked up her back. Just seconds later she was being rudely thrust towards one side of a squat rectangle stool.

  The latter, up until that moment, had remained out of sight in the alcove at the end of the room, where it had been tucked away to one side of the pair of exercise bikes. Posed before a wall mirror - and with a second mirror positioned lying flat on the floor and facing upwards between it and the wall - this stool had a thick, domed reddish-brown padded leather top that appeared cracked and worn soft as if through generations of usage. Festooned with all manner of straps and buckles, the furnishing was very much a fixture, being bolted firmly to the floor. Each stubby leg was fixed in position by a square black iron flange plate or collar that sprouted from its foot and which, in turn, was bolted to the floor by six large hexagonally headed bolts.

  With almost uncannily inhuman strength, or so it seemed to Alice, the gym teacher threw her down bodily across the low stool with a move that was half tripping, half judo throw. Alice landed squarely across the stool’s top, her abdomen impacting painfully with the surprisingly firm leather and knocking the breath out of her. A single truncated, terse phrase of explanation echoed in her ears, mingling with the glittering array of stars that suddenly seemed to burst across her eye line as her vision narrowed to a panicked tunnel: “...Yes, a genuine Victorian whipping stool, young lady...” the gym instructor’s voice, terrifyingly calm. “You’re going nowhere but down on all fours, my chubby little piglet, then we’ll see what a cry-baby I can make of you.”

  Before Alice could recover Flora McBainstone was astride her, using her weight to pin her down. The gym mistress quickly buckled two tan leather cuffs around Alice’s wrists that were in turn fastened by two sturdy straps to the right and left legs of the so-called ‘whipping stool’. Then another, far wider leather band was thrown across the small of Alice’s back. It was only as Miss Flora McBainstone was tightening this latter strap around Alice’s waist that Alice made any real attempt at remonstrating, frantically begging and pathetically trying to wiggle free. But it was all too little and far, far too late.

  The broad, padded strap passed across the small of Alice’s back before disappearing under the top of the squat leather-topped stool table, at which point it engaged with a sturdy iron buckle, hidden out of sight to one side. The latter buckle was quickly pulled uncommonly tight, to the point of breathlessness, thereby rendering all further struggle pointless. Only now were those other straps and fastenings that trailed and coiled along the floor at the rear of the stool and between its solid-looking, square section wooden legs fastened and pulled tight around her ankles and across the backs of her knees, drawing her legs and buttock cheeks apart and adding the shame of intimate exposure to the sense of helplessness that Alice had now been overcome by.

  Straightening up Flora McBainstone stepped back, her practised eye admiring the scene: The girl, Alice, had a magnificent bottom. It was going to be shear joy to thrash such a girl secured over the whipping stool. There was such sensual pleasure to be derived from the humiliation and chastisement of young ladies. It was something she would have gone back to prison for once upon a time - but not now, not here, not in this setup. Here she could heap indignity upon exploitative indignity - and with perfect impunity!

  She tapped her fingers pensively to her lips: Should she start off with the long, slender school cane or perhaps a lighter, ‘warm-up’ leather strap or tawse, or progress straight to the heavy duty Victorian prison cane she had acquired in that sale room all that time ago? The Victorian’s knew a thing or too when it came to quelling a girl’s rebellious spirit. In those days a girl who was reared by a dominant, harsh stepmother or strict overbearing governess, would have been completely indoctrinated by this point, the principal of submission to authority drummed deep into her subconscious. Well, she’d just have to make up for lost time. There were dozens of ways in which a recalcitrant girl of Alice’s age could be brought to heel - and she knew all of them. She had practically invented some. Others - those thought too extreme even for the establishment she had previously been at - she had merely refined, albeit as much through fantasy as anything else. But despite the latter reservation, she didn’t doubt that in reality, as in imagination, those methods would soon see even the most headstrong girl quivering with dread.

  “Mercy, please have mercy, Miss!”

  “Madam - I prefer you to address me as madam... And strapping you down for a caning is showing mercy, as far as I am concerned. Cruelty would be having you bend for the cane and having to restart the correction again and again and again - although, that is what you can expect next time. Except, if my previous experience with girls like you is anything to go by, there won’t be a next time; one of my canings while strapped down across the whipping stool is usually all it takes!”

  Leaving the sobbing Alice strapped down over the padded leather whipping stool the gym mistress disappeared for a moment through a side door, returning seconds later with a heavy-duty bamboo cane, long, heavy, yet still diabolically pliant. The first stroke slashed in like the strike of a coiled snake, and with the bite of one too, or the coordinated sting of a line of angry hornets strung out across her wide fleshy haunches. Systematically she worked her way over and then down the slope of the girl’s buttocks, each stroke leaving behind it a thinly bleeding purplish weal. Again and again she stepped forward, twisting her body and building momentum as she lashed her cane into the girl’s quivering bottom, each stroke landing with an equally ear-splitting whiplash crack.

  At first the Alice twitched and pulled spasmodically in her bonds then, slowly reduced to blubbering jelly, she lay passively as the last couple of strokes slashed in, urine trickling down her thighs as once again she lost control of her bladder. Finally - to her everlasting shame - as what would prove to be the final cut landed, she felt her bowels, too, move and her defeat was complete. She knew she would never defy this woman again; indeed she would never defy anyone ever again.

  Looking down at the prone, brokenly weeping girl the gym mistress beamed that predatory thin-lipped smile she had once been so infamous for. It was the look the paparazzi had clamoured for, the dark spirited, mug-shot portraiture the tabloids had been pleased to make front-page space for. If she could have read the sobbing teen’s thoughts she would have concurred wholeheartedly. She could tell at a glance that young Alice Marchment - or whatever her stepmother cared to call her - was ready to do anything to avoid a repeat performance. The girl was at the point at which she would willingly suffer any shame, go through any indignity, perform any act, however denigrating, however degrading that her present tormentress might think up. And Flora McBainstone could think up plenty to test that conjecture - and in the fullness of time she undoubtedly would, too!

  But oh, to test the poor young thing’s stepmother’s limits, if placed in the same position - the haughty, over-starched, over-blown ‘Lady Marchment’. That was the challenge. That woman might well still
think of herself as in control but it was Daphne Larkspear who was beginning to press the buttons, jiggle the woman’s strings. And like a reluctantly rehabilitated marionette, stiff with disuse, she was unwittingly beginning to dance at the prompting of the puppeteer’s fingertips.

  She could see the symptoms; Daphne had the woman right where she wanted her. She could tell Daphne was busily working the magic which, although never entirely successful when this ‘Lady Marchment’ character had been her pupil at that prestigious school of hers, she had much refined since. And it was working; it could be seen in the deference the woman now showed to another who was in essence her employee. It could be read, too, in the tone of the latter’s addressing of her employer, the manner in which Daphne’s tone had changed:

  What had once been hints, tips and suggestions had been gradually taking on a weightier gravitas of late, becoming more forceful in nature, gradually morphing into what were for all intents and purposes orders... And although she clearly didn’t realise it herself, Lady Marchment was beginning to follow those orders... In the background Daphne Larkspear was busily proving a point, a point she held in parallel with the eponymous heroine of the Muriel Spark novel - The Pride of Miss Jean Brody: She had had a girl in her hands at an impressionable age - and that girl indeed was hers for life... Or would be soon enough... Unless of course some outside interested came into play. Only time would tell.

  For Alice her only hope now for freedom lay in the one person who knew something of her situation; that the girl concerned might come looking. For her stepmother a similar hope lay simply in her own sense of self-determination; that she might wake up to her ex-teacher’s manipulation of her.

  For Alice, though, there was one other ‘out card’ that was yet to be played, one she was not even vaguely aware of. If that ace came up it would consist of a most unexpected avenue, entailing the most unlikely of alliances and with the strangest of allies...