Alice Under Discipline, Part 2

by Garth ToynTanen

  Here all physical punishments were administered on the bare bottom. But by far the worst, the most feared, consequence wasn’t necessarily a caning or strapping or a hand spanking across a nurse’s apron covered lap, or indeed anything at all to do with physical chastisement per se. Having said that; corporal punishment did still have a role to play, but it was very much a secondary role. If it was true that it was still necessary to administer the occasional over-the-knee slippering or long hard caning while secured by wrists and ankles over the gym vaulting horse, then it was only to ensure the miscreant’s compliance with the central part of the scheme; that was where the true punishment lay.

  The term, ‘being sent to Coventry’, while often enough banded-about in conversation, is seldom appreciated for the subtle, yet terrible, form of retribution it potentially describes. But then the full scope of the sort of social isolation implied in those few words as a form of correction had seldom been explored so thoroughly nor implemented with such single-minded determination. They had their own nomenclature of course, as institutions always do - and it was chock-full of their own twisted brand of psychobabble:

  No one was ever ‘corrected’, let alone ‘punished’ - perish the thought! Not one bit of it. No, a miscreant had her ill behaviour ‘modified’. Whether a moody, petulant pampered ‘daddy’s princess’ or street-hardened arrogant gum-chewing runaway, they were not ‘taken down a peg or two’, rather a girl’s attitude was ‘adjusted’, as one might adjust a clock, sewing machine or any other appliance judged out of kilter - it was that impersonal.

  Except it wasn’t that impersonal of course. One had only to overhear any ‘case conference’ to realise that much. The passion with which the various ‘intervention options’ were discussed could become palpable at times. Indeed it was not unusual on such occasions to witness one or two of the small select group of women that went to make up the ‘core committee’ shifting uneasily in their seats and looking decidedly uncomfortable as refinement upon refinement was piled on some ‘intervention plan’ or other. Whether the agitated drumming of lily-soft fingertips and clicking together of varnished, manicured nails around the table - not to mention that certain huskiness that seemed to creep in if some particularly winsome ‘case’ was being discussed - might be interpretable as some measure of untoward disciplinarian zeal? ...Well, if it did, it undoubtedly went by some other name or clinically sanitised description - and it certainly would not be viewed as ‘untoward’ in any case.

  And where sanitised terminology was concerned, none had been more disinfected than the term applied to the institution’s take on ‘sending to Coventry’ - ‘tethering’.

  On the surface little more than an inconvenience to the miscreant concerned, there was much more to it than that. Tethering was probably the most humiliating - and certainly one of the most efficacious - of the various ‘behavioural interventions’ that could be doled out. Once ‘tethered’ a girl was not allowed to so much as glance at another girl, let alone speak to her. Such a girl was to be considered literally ‘tethered’ to an assigned member of staff behind whom she was to trail - day in, day out - looking neither left nor right but keeping her eyes glued to the floor at all times. She would be forbidden to speak, make eye contact, or participate in any activity other than to either trail along behind her ‘mentor’ or sit or stand in the corner staring at the wall.

  In some ways that was not so much unlike normal proceedings in the ‘home’. Mealtimes were probably the worst example of that. Meals were taken in a large hall-like open room known as the refectory. Dense stained glass windows lined one wall, all displaying the shadowy outline of external bars running top to bottom and all inset deep within the thick stonework behind sturdy flush-fitting white-painted wire mesh. The walls at one end of the room - a full two thirds or more of the space - consisted of roughly whitewashed plaster. At the far end where the floor level was raised and had to be surmounted by a set of polished wood steps, oak panelling ran around three sides, sharply delineating that area from the rest. This was where the overseeing nuns and staff would sit, arranged along the rear wall behind a long polished table like a study based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.

  This was the top table. Here, throughout, the home’s severe-looking governess would read from an ornate lectern carved in the shape of a spread-winged eagle, her jet hair pined tightly up in a bun and her navy fitted skirt and tailored white blouse, navy bow at the neck, giving the impression of a prison wardress. Here at breakfast they tucked into bacon, sausages, eggs, smoked haddock and grilled (never fried) tomatoes, the delicious piping-hot fare served from heaped silver dishes perched over spirit lamps by some poor hapless inmate dressed in a flounced, brief-skirted, black and white waitress dress, cap and apron.

  The inmates, by contrast sat along austere rough wooden tables on dusty splinter-infested benches arranged lengthwise down the room. Here tasteless gruel-like porridge was served at every meal accompanied by tepid tap water in polythene beakers, both the polythene spoon and matching bowl permanently chained to the bench top and both often crusty with the residue of the previous meal, having been wiped over with tissue at best.

  The nuns and staff would chatter amongst themselves. The girls, though, ate in strict silence, obliged to keep their eyes averted and heads bowed throughout.

  But there was more to it when it came to a ‘tethered’ girl. A ‘tethered’ girl was even forbidden the use of the meagre, spartan furnishings - such as they were. A ‘tethered’ girl was obliged and expected to sit quietly on the floor facing the wall at all times unless instructed otherwise.

  The process of ‘tethering’ robbed a girl of that secret bond that formed between inmates; the sort of strength that was garnered and mediated through the meeting of eyes and the furtive exchange of empathic glances. For a girl to have even that tiny little shred of hope taken away was the cruellest of cruel punishments - but that was just the start of it.

  She had come across several girls who had been ‘tethered’. In fact it seemed a fair percentage had been passed through that particular mill. A girl could spend months on end ‘on tether’ and so allowed absolutely no interaction whatsoever with the other ‘inmates’. And once ‘on tether’ the gloves were off it seemed; the staff passed up no opportunity to humiliate a girl and no aspect was overlooked.

  Be as unwise as to rebel against the ‘tether’ and a girl could find herself denied the use of the toilet, for example - although at the very least she could expect to be supervised, even under ‘normal’ circumstances. Dare complain, and a young woman in her late teens - or even in her early twenties - could just as easily find herself singled out to be put in nappies. It just took a diagnosis of ‘emotional’ or ‘hysterical incontinence’ to validate that particular approach.

  In addition, a ‘tethered girl’, regardless of whether she had been considered to have had an ‘attitude’ or to have ‘misbehaved’, would also have her misdemeanour signified by what she wore. In that way others would recognise her for what she was and so automatically know how to behave towards her. She could expect to be bullied by staff, but worse, she would know that the other girls would neither make eye contact nor as much as acknowledge her presence. The complicity of her compatriots in this affair was easily enough obtained. As always, compliance was ensured through fear of taking the tethered girl’s place - not to mention a good hard caning from one of the nuns; that practically went without saying.

  The nuns were absolutely expert when it came to setting girl upon girl in this manner. Divide and rule was the credo, and all manner of psychological abuse - subtle and not so subtle - could be put to use in recruiting the girls to undermine their own sense of group unity. For example, a rumour would arise that one particular girl was a ‘tattletale’, an agent of the staff who would ‘tell’ on the rest in order to obtain an easier time of it.

  Such a ‘Chinese whisper’ would pass from one to an
other by a series of sideways glances and raised eyebrows and twisted corners of the mouth, talking - other than when directly monitored by a staff member - being strictly forbidden. The origin was always something ‘let slip’ by one of the nuns themselves of course; something ‘accidentally’ overheard by one of the girls. But once in circulation, rumour quickly became fact - and that ‘fact’ could become surprisingly ‘contagious’, affixing itself and sticking first to one girl and then another. These unvoiced accusations would spread from girl to girl with amazing virulence, until all had become equally tainted in the eyes of each other. That was the point at which a group potentially united in common adversity became a selfish, disconnected collection of isolated, suspiciously fenced-in islets.

  Similarly they were required and made to watch films dealing with all manner of aspects of ‘feminine hygiene’. In conjunction with the spread of accusations of various girls being ‘carriers’ of certain heinous infections and the need to wait a certain length of time after such and such a girl before using the toilet, this too became a method of harnessing mass mistrust for the purposes of control.

  Even such a natural process as menstruation was harnessed for the purpose of undermining self esteem. In this facility a girl’s ‘time of the month’ was knowledge made common to all. Sanitary towels were strictly rationed and carefully monitored and came with a thorough quizzing in front of all and sundry as regards the ‘heaviness’ of flow and so on. Similarly visits to the toilet were strictly regimented and at specified times and of course were always carefully supervised. Frequently each and every girl would find herself being intrusively questioned as to her bowel habits while waiting, a clipboard-carrying nurse patrolling up and down the prison-like queue they had to form for the single, open fronted and glass-sided toilet cubicle.

  It was fear of that ‘tethering’ thing that made her give in to the Reverend Father, far more than fear of the cane, strap or any other implement of corporal punishment that might be employed in the first instance. She’d seen what a few months ‘on tether’ could do to spirited young thing - and ‘spirit’ was in short supply in this place. Besides, a healthy, regular ration of ‘physical chastisement’ formed the scaffolding of the ‘tether’ system in any case, so defiance was not merely the choosing of one consequence over another. The regimen’s skeleton, though, was fleshed out by constant and unrelenting humiliation and the systematic dismantling of the subject’s self-worth, sense of individuality and independence; it was that aspect that was to be feared.

  It was surprising how having their staff dressed in medical-world uniforms somehow seemed to lend the regime a sort of air of legitimacy. Presented against a pastoral, almost nurturing ecclesiastical background of stain glass windows and nuns in flowing black and white habits - and all overseen by a world-renown clinical psychologist - it seemed almost natural to have such a consequence as ‘tethering’ hanging over her whenever the twin spectres of ‘wilfulness’ and ‘disobedience’ raised their heads. As a method of keeping infractions to a minimum, to a vanishingly small frequency in fact, the ‘tethering system was undoubtedly efficacious’.

  But it was the involvement of the clinical psychologist - that, however cruel it might seem, it was all supervised, validated and presumably deemed justifiable by such an eminent figure in her field - that made the system seem in equal parts as sinister as it was inescapable. And it was inescapable. Alice had little doubt now that the whole damn place was as secure as any high-grade prison one might care to mention.

  Even if she were to run - even if she could run, if she were not hobbled by agoraphobia - she would be ignobly returned, tail between her legs, to this ‘home for wayward and intractable girls’. If they had done their paperwork right - crossed all the tees and so on - it would most likely be the police themselves who would return her, frogmarching her back through the hospital gates in handcuffs and likely lending a hand when it came to clapping her in one of those old-time canvas and leather straightjackets they kept for the really intractable. If that happened, she’d never get out - they’d have won. An attempt to escape in of itself would be taken as evidence of her ‘instability’ and ‘mental incompetence’. Otherwise, why would she run away from those who were surely only trying to help her - why run from a cure?

  Well, the Reverend Father was one reason, a very good reason. The Mother Superior was another - and the institution’s resident clinical psychologist, still another. And the latter woman, Alice felt sure, was as much cause as cure when it came to the agoraphobia which had done such a good job of pining her down under her stepmother’s thumb even before she had been brought to this place. And now that she was here, behind these barred windows, shutters and padlocked bolts... Well she could either bend to their will, awaiting her chance and hanging on to hope, however faint, while inexorably changing little by little, day by day.

  Alternatively she could stand against them - and by doing so place herself even more rigorously under their control, risk binding and chaining, herself even more tightly within the institution’s mothering all-embracing incarceration, perhaps indefinitely. But to have to surrender herself again and again to the Mother Superior’s tender embrace - or that other’s, not so tender, masculine machinations - while all the while harbouring the knowledge that her stepmother was enjoying this or that cruise, function, or whatever (and always, it seemed, some snippet or other would slip past the doctor’s lips)... Totally abasing sexual slavery - was that what it took to survive in this place? Was it that demeaning mental state which had led her to commit such treachery as to condemn another to the mental torture that was ‘tethering’? And just because that person had been strong enough to risk attempting help her fight back? How could she have been found so lacking by comparison?

  The Reverend Father was probably the worst part of it. He was the only male she had seen about the place and one who she already knew from bitter experience to be an old, debauched and repulsive pervert. His sparse white hair formed a broad horseshoe around a head that was flattened, possessing a central plateau of scaly liver-spotted pink. The latter expanse was marred further by the presence of hillock-like cyst or long-lived carbuncle of some kind that was set back to one side and rose from within its own nest of wire-like silver-grey whiteness.

  His face was loosely jowled, his watery greyish eyes - baggy beneath and topped by strangely orange-tinged upper lids drooping unevenly in rolls - were perpetually bloodshot like an old hound’s. His nose had somehow retained something hinting of past-times refinement about its upper reaches but graduated to a vein-corrupted, cauliflower-like, purplish bulb as it descended. His cheeks were ruddy and studded with spidery red rosettes of fine branching blood-vessels, his lips surprisingly fleshy but his complexion otherwise pallid. His breath she knew well as he was so often far, far too close and suggested he thrived upon whiskey and gin, though absinthe was nearer to the truth.

  She would lay there in resignation on his bed and he would turn her onto her tummy. He would then impatiently scrunch the thick white nylon fabric of the smock they forced them all to wear for bed up and over the swell of her hips, rolling the crinkling yet soft material about her waist like a sausage-skin lifebelt. There was always a large jar of lubricant cream in the pullout drawer under the tabletop by his bed. He would scoop out a liberal dollop of the opaque greasy substance with his middle finger, typically extracting a suppressed whimper from her as she would feel him part her bottom cheeks with those podgy fingers of his. Involuntarily she would tighten her cheeks as he lubricated the length of her deep bottom cleft with the stone cold Vaseline, usually earning a hard slap to her backside coupled with a horse-voiced warning to immediately relax her bottom or suffer the consequences. His finger would plunge in and out of her anus in a parody of loving coupling and then...

  Well, let’s just say Alice didn’t have to be told twice these days to automatically adopt the ‘froggy’s-legs’ position the old man demanded (he r
evelled in using such childish language). The latter posture involved her drawing up her knees to either side of her prone body until her thighs were tightly stretched apart and her buttocks - and much else besides - were lewdly presented, conveniently raised and invitingly spread for his inspection and subsequent use (another term he took great joy in his quite deliberate choice of it).

  It was at this stage that her hands were supposed to gravitate to the small of her back as if drawn by elastic - and these days they did so automatically. Her forearms she would then dutifully fold across the hollow that would form above her buttocks. Here those appendages would remain throughout, locked in subconsciously-wrought bondage in a pose of utter submission as if secured by an invisible arm binder, each palm cupping the opposing elbow.

  She would raise her hips when indicated so as to facilitate the positioning of the long, sausage-shaped bolster cushion he would pull cross-wise beneath her belly. Then, when her bottom was patted, her generous warm lips would part, ready to welcome the soft rubber soothing ring he provided for her to bite on - this precaution being in the form of a much larger version of a baby’s teething ring. The lid popping on the lubricant jar, the creaking of the ancient iron-framed bed, its springs, wheezing and whinging at the increased load as his knees came to rest bracketing her well-upholstered hips, his breath on the nape of her neck, his talon-like nails digging deep as he dragged further apart her bottom cheeks- these were the portents of what would then come.

  Her whole world had been turned topsy-turvy, now. These days she had learned the good grace to lie still while that foul, perverted old ‘man of the cloth’ - or anyone else come to that - fingered her bottom and humiliated her in any and every way possible. She had learned too the good manners to feign pleasurable mewing, to wriggle her bottom in invitingly keen anticipation of his surprisingly (for his vintage) turgid member and not to forget to voice her gratitude upon his satisfaction at the close. To not do so - whatever the cost to her self-respect - was to invite the old man’s ire!