The thing was; at other times these little tokens of favour were apt to be dolled out in a quite random fashion in any case. A girl could find herself fawned over, patted, smiled at, encouraged, at one moment, then find herself pulled up over some really tiny, insignificant petty infringement the next by the very same staff member. And in such a situation, more often than not, a punishment would be awarded out of all proportion to the crime; a half dozen or so with the cane, say, knickers down, for having her school tie slightly crooked if under instruction in the school room, or the top button of her uniform work dress unfastened if in the workroom, or even something as simple as having caught the eye of another girl; and all while the woman concerned would mutter about how let down she felt, how he girl had disappointed her.
But Alice herself had unwittingly fallen foul of that first approach, found herself set up as the Judas of the group. Another girl, a serious-eyed but winsome plump blond with an over-broad behind and an upturned nose - one of the vast majority whose name she had no idea of - had tried to appropriate a tool from her workbench; the silly thing should really have known better, since all such implements were each attached to the back of the workbenches by fine but strong stainless steel linked chains. In the event the desperate girl’s surreptitious attempts at twisting off the chain from the handle of an awl - presumably intending to put the tool to use in some sort of escape attempt - had been thwarted, both by the unexpected resilience of the chain and by having been spotted.
It had most probably been one of the eagle-eyed overseers who had seen it; certainly Alice hadn’t seen anything untoward as regards any of her fellows having drawn attention to the girl’s activities. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that as they had filed out of the workroom - the girl concerned having been treated to a prolonged and drawn-out thrashing with a heavy leather strap across her bare behind while fastened by her wrists and ankles over the so-called ‘flogging horse’, this being a prologue to being placed on tether - a nun had patted Alice’s bottom, smiled and treated Alice to a cheery “good girl”.
It had been the fresh-faced and decidedly pretty young nun, Sister Evangeline; unlike the inmates, nuns had names; the girls were only ever ‘the girls’. Even the eldest of them - a tall, slim brunette with high cheekbones and an out of proportionally-large bustline whom Alice estimated to perhaps be in her mid-twenties - was only ever referred to or addressed as ‘’girl’. Alice had seen her wince once or twice when patronisingly told she was being a “good girl”, but she wouldn’t dare open her mouth of course; unless it was to suck on her thumb. She had tried to abscond and been sent to the infirmary’s sanatorium for a period; she had been sucking her thumb at intervals ever since she’d returned.
Sister Evangelina and one of the other nuns seemed to take a particular interest in Alice’s welfare for a while after the incident with the girl in the workroom, praising her work, patting her bottom. And Alice had found herself lapping it up. It had cheered her... until that is she caught the withering, hateful glances from the other girls; then it had started to sink in. One particular girl had seemed to glare more intently, more hatefully, at her than the rest and when in time it had been Alice’s turn to be pulled up - one of the buttons fastening the front of the skirt of her work dress had come undone and she hadn’t noticed - it had been that girl who seemed to have suddenly come in to favour. Alice for her sins had suffered a dozen agonizingly stinging swats with the Scottish tawse across her bottom while upended over Sister Evangeline’s lap.
Then the fragrant Sister Evangeline had turned her attention to another of the girls - the new girl, Gwyneth - and Alice had experienced first the pain of rejection, then pang of jealousy, and then... well, downright irrational hatred towards the blameless girl herself. And as over time she did actually witness certain acts of betrayal - and come to suspect others - Alice found herself growing to actually despise her fellow detainees; she certainly trusted none. It was part of the reason that when that girl Gwyneth had whispered her name to Alice and then asked Alice in return for hers, had offered her hand in friendship, Alice had shot up her hand, reported the girl for breaking the no-talking rule. It was how the game was played; mutual distrust locked each of them into her own little cocoon, and the drive to please made each one of them part of the establishment, each becoming in essence one of the links in her own chain.
Doubtless that girl, Gwyneth would have been led to understand that Alice was one of the ‘pets’, one of the eager-to-please lapdogs who could be relied upon to inform. Doubtless too, therefore, the girl would have seen any approach by Alice as a potential trap, being set so that she might be punished further. And even if she didn’t fall for it, even if she ignored Alice’s overtures, how could the girl have been certain she wouldn’t then be punished for not ‘flagging up’ their agent’s (i.e. Alice’s) behaviour? In that manner, then, the girl might well have reasoned it out as a potential double-trap, a trap within a trap. Or perhaps simple revenge.
But despite all this reasoned scenario, the fact remained; how could Alice have been sure, how could Alice be sure now, that Gwyneth herself wasn’t part of some trap, had been reporting back her every move - and those of the other girls - all along? Perhaps she was just making excuses for her. Whatever the truth, the fact of the matter was, she realised, that her last few sparks of compassion had landed her in her nightmare, here, in the sanatorium.
At night she waited tucked up in a hospital bed, sedated into a deep dreamless slumber. By day she waited sitting in an upright plastic chair by the side of the bed - at least until the mid-afternoon nap came, along with another handful of sedative capsules. She sat endlessly waiting for mealtimes, for the arrival of the bedpans, for the trundle of the wheelchair to transport her to yet another one-to-one therapy session with the psychotherapist - a mindless trip down unending twisting and turning featureless white passageways to an equally mindless and featureless white office where a single inset ceiling lamp burned above a white desk. There a condescendingly smiling and attractively made-up woman, a tight black leather skirt and fitted white shirt-blouse and tie showing under her open-fronted white coat, would probe and prod and pick at mental scabs still forming over the scars of uncountable previous grilling sessions.
And the worst that could happen to a girl was to have that woman doctor take a personal interest in her ‘case’. Then there wouldn’t even be the distraction of the routine of the ward to alleviate the tedium; the bell that rang to signify mealtimes, that other of a different pitch that signified the distribution of the bedpans and that jingled continuously throughout their use, the somnolent low resonant mournful gong that accompanied their going off to sleep and the harsh rasping buzzer that would wake them to another mindlessly boring day of waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
Somewhere in between there would be an embarrassingly detailed and intimate bed bath, performed by a nurse with a white plastic apron over her royal blue uniform dress, or there might come a shrill whistle. The latter, blown by the House Mother in her calf-length navy-blue hospital matron’s dress and starched white apron was the signal to gather in the narrow gangway between the ends of the two rows of bed, to be shepherded in single file past the usually-locked security gate and into the windowless room beyond, where a semi-circle of white plastic stackable chairs would be waiting gathered around a freestanding blackboard adorned with some words or phrases.
The doctor would be there too, of course, her white coat flapping about her customary leather skirt, cotton blouse and black tie, her high-heeled court shoes tip-tapping on the white lino as she strolled about brandishing a crook-handled traditional school-style cane in her hand as a pointer to the words chalked on the board. Then she would start them off in a gently lulling singsong voice reciting the words on the board like a sort of hypnotic mantra, all the girls being obliged to follow word by word, note by note softly singing over and over whatever the particular phrase of the day happe
n to be:
“Obedience makes for satisfaction, conformity makes for happiness...” The doctor herself, having started off the flow, set the cadence and dictated the melody would then herself stop. She would simply stand there tapping one word at a time in sequence with the tip of her cane, her deep blue eyes magnified behind her horn-rimmed glasses roving around the crestfallen and glassy-eyed faces, constantly checking that no girl took her eyes off the blackboard; not even for an instant. Then, from time to time and without breaking the rhythm she would softly yet commandingly sing out some instruction or other: ‘hands-on heads, left index finger to your nose, right index finger to your nose, hands overhead, fingertips touching, hands on knees, touch left breast, touch right breast...’
And so it would go on, the girls chanting in strange singsong unison voices, the doctor issuing seemingly random instructions and then singing out ‘good girls’ as she would watch her little captive group obey her. Her cane was of course always close at hand to correct the unwary; the girl whose attention might perhaps wander or the individualistic rebellious freethinking type who might perhaps be foolish enough to try to retain some degree of recalcitrance. But after several months her need to bare a girl’s bottom would have dwindled to practically never. And as for freethinking side of it; that was exactly what this type of group therapy exercise was designed to work against.
The constant stream of instructions, sometimes contradictory, while the girls were obliged to continue with their singsong recitation, was designed to distract their conscious minds, allowing the content of whatever the mantra happened to be that day to worm its way into their subconscious while at same time serving to instil unquestioning obedience. After an hour or more she would have them in a trancelike state, even the most independently minded of them blank-faced and glassy-eyed - and not one girl would return to her bed free of the little rhyme or slogan running around inside her head.
CHAPTER 10
FINAL CHAPTER?
OR LAST STRAW?
It had been the patient’s moans issuing from the padded cell next door to her own that had awoken Alice. She knew, almost without needing to think about it that it was that Welsh valley girl, Gwyneth, the girl she had been responsible for getting ‘put on tether’. She knew too, instinctively, the rationale behind the girl having been placed in the very next room - and just why someone had neglected to shut the observation flap in the door, the closure of which would have rendered the room totally soundless.
Listening to the poor thing’s mutterings and mumblings Alice found it difficult to remind herself that neither herself, nor the poor thing next door, were real mental patients, that this wasn’t a real psychiatric institution, but rather simply formed part of a small medical facility set within the walls of a priory, a church-run charity home ‘for the valuable and feckless and the morally weak’. Above all she needed to stay focused, try her best to find a way out, before her will too was broken, her mind too became eroded away and she became just another of those menial simpletons they had working their lives away in their laundry, muttering psalms, prayers and Hail Marys.
Echoing, reverberant, screams were winding along the stone-flagged hallways now, the sounds of weeping and sobbing too - every now and then an outburst of crazy kookaburra laughter. How she yearned to cover her ears, but the straightjacket they had put her in had other ideas. All she could do was lie there on the padded flooring on her side, maintaining the foetal position she had been in ever since she had last been ‘seen to’, however long ago that had been.
Just previous to that time, the last time Alice had been awake, there had been a different sound issuing from the cell next door, a sort of warm humming, thrumming sound that occasional rose or fell in pitch and that occasionally, too, had a rough buzzing edge to it. The electrical whining sound, sometimes as low-pitched as the hum from an electricity substation or transformer, had been accompanied by a soft, sensual feminine sighing, almost sobbing, sometimes rising to a wailing girlishly intimate crescendo as the thrumming too rose in pitch, became more insistent - only then to fall away to a flustered peel of “please, please, please...” as the pitch, too, dropped away. It had seemed to go on for hours, the slobbery sobbing sighing building to throaty gasps and wailing and then subsiding again - sometimes to real tears of sorrow - in time with the rising and falling of the thrumming sound. Sometimes the strange symphony of anguish would be accompanied by high-pitched pleas of what sounded like “no more... no more...”, at other times by desperate moaning throaty exaltations not to stop whatever it was that was going on; “please... please don’t stop... not again, not again... please...!”
Between these two extremes at times Alice fancied she caught the voice of the new young psychotherapist, the light tinkling girlish laugh she had, a sort of pitting awkward giggle, at other moments, she would overhear distinct snippets of speech: “...just look at the picture... that’s it... what beautiful breasts she has... what a lovely bottom”. Then the thrumming pitch would drop, accompanied by all manner of breathy entreaties. Then the sound would rise again a little: “... now tell me how lovely you think those breasts are... tell me how it would make you feel to run your hands over that bottom... come along, just whisper... and I promise I’ll not stop this time...”
That was when the gasping and wailing had started in earnest, the pitch of that thrumming buzzy hum rising up like a swarm of bees... It hadn’t been the first time of course - it seemed to be something of an ongoing programme involving the resident of the next room, poor Gwyneth - a daily procedure that seemed to have been going on for weeks. But whatever was being done to her, all that attention the girl was wallowing in made Alice feel envious; the strategy in her case now seemed to be to simply leave her alone - deadly alone.
Being in the straitjacket was like being shut in some kind of rib-crushing, breath-denying canvas, leather-strapped and steel-buckled corset - but one in addition set with padlocks. The enforced posture, knees drawn up to the chest, had almost been comforting at first but had now become a modern variation played on the theme of the mediaeval torture known as the ‘Little Ease’. Popular with the Tudors and early Stuarts, in those times the latter consisted of a tiny cell or cage-like accommodation within which the prisoner could neither stand nor sit, nor lie down but could only crouch in ever-increasing agony. The irony here was that there was plenty of room in the white box of the padded cell - from Alice’s viewpoint it seemed an uncomfortably huge and empty vacuum - just that she was prevented, forbidden, from making use of any of that potential freedom; that was the real cruelty.
The jacket’s sleeves were devoid of openings allowing for the passage of wrists and hands, the free ends being sewn closed and terminating with reinforced leather tabs or straps which dangled from the tips of her imprisoned fingers. These would be secured by a uniformed nurse who - having dragged the hotly resisting Alice’s arms across her chest in the manner of a self-hug - would then buckle the sleeves behind Alice’s back, before slipping a padlock through a ‘D’ ring on the buckle.
There had been a time Alice would have continued to struggle even at that point, often dropping to the floor and squirming around in the vain hope of making the proceedings more difficult for the nurse and the two novice nuns who usually attended her. The long hard caning that would invariably follow, with her arms anchored out of harm’s way in the jacket and her held down bodily across the hospital-style examination couch they had outside the padded room had eventually done the trick.
Nowadays once her arms were fastened she just gave up. She would now stand passively while the nurse and her two Sisters of Mercy attendants buckled her straightjacket up the back, a padlock popped into each of the ‘D’ rings locking-off the several roller buckles and clicked shut. Nowadays the nurse barely creased her starched cambric apron or her calf-length ‘hospital blue’ dress, nor was there danger of her dislodging her high-fronted cap or of perspiration dampening he
r uniform dress’s high ‘mandarin-style collar. The nurse’s cane was always still very much in attendance, though, swinging on its wrist strap from a silvered clip on the side of her elasticated webbing belt, a bunch of keys dangling from the other and a filigree ball-clasp buckle you could see your face in, if not for its ornate butterfly wing design, in-between.
The leather reinforced collar would be last - following the crotch strap, of which more later - simply two ‘D’ rings pulled together at the rear and wedded by yet another of those golden burnished-finish brass padlocks so beloved of the establishment. There was even a ‘D’ ring at the front of the collar from which a leash would be attached by way of one of those padlocks, this one bigger than the rest, unnecessarily bulky; she supposed it was to make it more obvious, so that she might see it each time she glanced down, be reminded of the hopeless totality of her captivity here, the unassailability of their control over her.
Her arms were pulled as tight as a tourniquet beneath her breasts. Her hands, her palms - even the individual digits all but completely immobilised - were pressed to the sides of her ribcage as if fixed in place by some kind of supernatural adhesive; such was the power of her helplessness. There were all manner of ratcheted locks and tamper-proof buckles, all contributing to her control, all relieving her of the responsibility of self-volition, the trouble of self-direction; there was a kind off peace to it, a listless, sleepy feeling of submission which somehow paralleled an intensity of powerlessness which should really have been downright terrifying. And yet having been deprived of all means of resistance, once she had calmed down, in place of panic she was left instead with a sense of relief, as if soothed by the negation of the obligation to resist. It wasn’t sane; it was a worrying thought...
Alice Under Discipline, Part 2 Page 14
