The treatment with the over-tight straitjacket was not meant as a replacement for the cane, rather it was an adjunct to a caning, a lead-up to it. When the time came and the blue-uniformed nurse-orderly walked in fingering the long length of evilly pliant rattan or bamboo she was supposed to ask, quite politely if she might be ‘corrected’ by a caning; the only time she was permitted to speak. And after a day or so (there was no way of really knowing how long) undergoing such physical torment, her shoulders as agonizingly painful as if dislocated, her legs - unable to be straightened - ridden with pins and needles and sciatica-mimicking electric shooting pains, she knew she’d be ready enough to do just that, just to have her bonds slackened; the removal of the straitjacket as such was not an option, not part of the deal.
Six to eight strokes of the cane taken across her bare bottom with the crotch strap unfastened and her plastic pants and terry nappies tugged down, without crying out - that was important, she’d been told, if she didn’t want those outside the room to think her crazy - and the straps holding her arms wrapped around her body would be slackened off. If she cried out, then the tension would remain until the next time she was given the opportunity; and then the caning would have to resume from scratch, usually with the addition of a few ‘penalty strokes’. Exactly why the punishment was being applied was never told her; presumably she was supposed to just sort of associate having her restraints suddenly tightened with some form of frowned upon behaviour, or some sort of lack of compliance. Nor was it ever explicitly referred to as punishment, even by the psychotherapist; in fact it was never mentioned, not even in the ‘grilling’ sessions that interspersed her ‘close confinement’ and which took place in the psychotherapist’s consultation room.
But her confinement here in the padded cell to begin with? Well, on the surface Alice had begun to go along with the regime. But it had been all too transparent; she’d made it too obvious she was trying to lull those in charge into complacency hoping for an opening to arise to allow for her escape. Of course that was why she’d flagged up that Welsh girl - Gwyneth - when the poor thing had approached her, why she’d reported back on the girl’s suggestion they should work together to abscond; she wanted the nuns on her side, wanted to please the nuns... and doctor Ecclestone of course. Alice was conflicted; but they wanted her conflicted, that was why she was in this situation now.
Forced to listen to her would-be co-conspirator’s fractured-mind wailing coming from down the corridor Alice was simultaneously being forced to confront the consequences and truths of her actions. And one of those truths was that her pretended capitulation was in reality only a subconscious denial of what was in fact the first stages of a true capitulation; a second truth was that by tittle-tattling Alice herself had become a tool of the powers running this establishment, a blind implement of that divide-and-conquer mentality they used to make the place self governing, the mistrust bred between inmates helping break down any cohesion before allegiances even had time to form.
In short young Alice was now well on her way to that state of learned helplessness and dependency the youthful psychotherapist had taken such great pleasure in telling her about, and being made complicit in her own impending breakdown. This was something Alice at some level did grasp. Escape was her one true focus, and she had to keep that in mind, despite the sense of self-revulsion she harboured, both at her own physical condition - lying helpless, knees drawn up to her chest, obediently filling her nappy like a newborn and muttering crazily to herself - and for what she had done to the Welsh girl, Gwyneth, whose hoarse throaty whining filled her ears... And the poor thing had had such a sweetly emotionally-charged singing voice - they’d had her sing psalms in the refectory at meal times from time to time - ruined now of course, the poor girl’s vocal cords most probably festooned with nodules and irreparably torn.
They were both prisoners, and this place a prison, nothing more; and Alice - and this went for all of the others, from what she understood - didn’t even know where this place, this priory, abbey or nunnery or whatever, was sited... After a while such deliberation made even the concept of absconding seem untenable; she’d be running from where? And to where? And yet, at the same time that sense of helplessness was strangely seductive, lulling... sleep-inducing... Her eyes again sore, gritty, and the lids as heavy as lead, Alice slipped once more down into the reassuringly swaddling mother’s-embrace that was slumber.
After that, Alice seemed to slip in and out of slumber, more asleep than awake, for what seemed like a lifetime. No longer were there any trips out to the doctor’s interview room, at least not that she could remember. She had become barely aware of such regularities as feeding, toileting, changing and the rest, so much so that in hindsight she would later wonder to what extent she had been drugged during this period. But if there had been one thing she had been aware of during this indeterminate time of hangover-throbbing interspersed with sweet dreamless sleep it was that sense of constant movement, of hustle and bustle, of trundling metal wheels on flagstones, of hammering and banging and sawing and drilling and rasping scraping trowels and that building-site smell of brick dust and plaster and wet mortar and sawn stone.
But now there was a different kind of throbbing in her head, a low rhythmic throbbing that came and went at intervals, and a clattering of heels; the clarity left her feeling uncertain, disorientated, as if something were missing or had changed, some subtle attribute of her confinement. Twisting, expecting to meet with the constraint of the leash joining her straitjacket’s collar to her ankle restraints, Alice found to her surprise that not only was she now able to stretch out her legs, they did not feel numb nor overly stiff, as if she had been free of restraint for some considerable time. Gingerly testing further, she discovered that the ankle cuffs themselves had mysteriously vanished and the padlock beneath her chin which had attached the leash had also pulled of a disappearing trick.
Twisting right over on to the opposite side she was pleasantly surprised not to encounter the knobbles bumping painfully along her spine on the way, the anticipated discomfort caused by the series of chunky brass padlocks which ordinarily locked-off the roller buckles and straps like metallic vertebrae running up her back. Her arms still embraced her torso as firmly as ever, but now tensioned to a reasonable, humane, degree, and the straightjacket was just as inescapable as ever. Similarly the straightjacket’s broad crotch strap had been slackened off a little, while still leaving sufficient tension to disallow the wearer wriggling free, and the various ‘toys’ which had tortured her crotch so towards the latter phase of her fully conscious period of confinement (accessories) had been removed.
She was aware, too, that she was no longer suffering that dispiriting wet squidgy sensation, the root of so much self-disgust, but rather had been made clean, comfortable and hygienic ‘down there’, presumably well washed, powdered and creamed; there was the unmistakably comforting sensation of double-thick, warm and dry terry towelling and the odour of fresh, medicated talk filled the room. A single glance down at her crotch and thighs was enough to tell her that the ridiculously flounced and fancy romper suit-style polyester fabric bloomers she had found so unbearably humiliating had been replaced by functional, standard-issue cotton pants, as might have been handed out had she been under the jurisdiction of any psychiatric hospital anywhere in the United Kingdom. Similarly, the voluminous semi-transparent PVC bloomers she had always worn underneath the flouncy-seated romper pants had now mysteriously been transformed into psychiatric-care industry-standard rubber incontinence pants...
It was then that Alice’s astonished gaze alighted on the heavy padded door... Driven by some instinctive animal reflex, almost involuntarily, she thrust herself backwards, propelling herself urgently against the rear wall. There she wriggled herself upwards using the deeply cushioned wall for purchase, gaining her feet for the first time in... how long? Open mouthed and upright she just stared and stared, incomprehension written all
over her somehow still pretty if pasty face.
The door... the thick, padded cell door that had kept her confined for so, so long... hung open, wide open. What was more; the corridor beyond was seemingly empty, deserted. Not single footstep could Alice hear (and her ears were accustomed to straining against silence); not a single click from the nurse’s high heels teetering along on the flagstones or quarry tiling, nor the pad, pad, pad of a nun’s rubber-soled lace-up shoes hurrying to investigate. Indeed, in truth she had to admit; there was not a sound to be heard, other than for those unfamiliar and obviously distant noises which had awakened her so rudely. The coast was frighteningly, unnervingly clear... What now? What was to be done?
At first Alice hesitated, fearing a trap, fearing running in to waiting staff members, and the fearful, long hard caning that would undoubtedly follow. Then some sort of instinct took over and she threw herself at the ajar door, levering herself through with her canvas and leather-bound shoulders. Stumbling from the padded cell, tripping through the heavy-set half-open door and catching a foot on its raised floor sill, she crashed against the stonework of the corridor wall outside. The serendipitous collision both served to keep her upright and orientate her in the right direction - an important factor given the fact that the convoluted, twisting and turning passageway had been deliberately designed to disorientate any would-be absconder - much of the impact ironically being absorbed by the thick leather and canvas of the straitjacket.
Instinctively perhaps, despite the unfamiliar sound being frightening, she ran towards what seemed to be the origin of the rhythmic low rumbling and thump, thump, thumping which had initially brought her around. The cacophony seemed able to propagate through the structure of the building itself nearly as easily as it funnelled along the corridor, despite the heavy stone mediaeval construction; a sort of low-pitched whhoop, whhhop, whhoop, whhooop.
Waddling along, bare-footed, bow-legged partly from the unaccustomed exercise asked of her weakened legs, partly because of the bulky double terry nappy pinned under her rubbery pants, her heart pounding, Alice rounded a shadowed corner. Her heart sunk and her chin dropped; she had traversed perhaps four, perhaps five yards and already her way was barred. To so quickly have encountered an obstacle was heartbreaking: But then the sap rose once more, her heart sped in her chest and she hurried forward, shuffling lest she slip without the use of her arms to break her fall.
The old floor to ceiling gate barring her way, its red-painted vertical railings peeling and rust-scabbed - Alice had suddenly realised - had been left ajar, just as the door to her cell had been. The gap left was narrow, obliging Alice to twist fully side-on in order to sidle through, her wrapped-around arms constrained within the straightjacket’s unrelenting grasp making her too broad to pass otherwise. Even then it proved a tight fit; she tried using the leverage of her shoulders to open up the gap further, but to no avail; in the event she had to struggle royally to squeeze past.
Try as she may, as Alice wiggled her way through, the old iron grille or gate proved just too stiff to budge on its neglected and rusting hinges. The gateway’s reluctance to move coupled with the dust-frosted cobwebbed drapery filling in the narrow gaps between the sturdy bars, making it look like a Hammer Horror film prop, together suggested that here was some sort of alternative or disused access point, a pathway ordinarily kept locked shut:
The latter was an impression not contradicted by the rusted padlock left swinging from its open clasp as if in haste. A closer inspection would have revealed that the lock itself was intact and un-tampered with, though the clasp had been sawn clean through: The broken hooked remains caught in one of the straps or bindings at the rear of Alice’s straitjacket and rattled to the floor behind her as she pulled clear. The sudden unexpected clatter made her start, causing her to stumble and to hit her head on the side wall in her effort to stay upright, grazing her forehead and cursing her useless, restrained arms.
Having negotiated the iron grille, a couple of dozen or so paces further on, and around a second blind corner, she encountered a plain white-painted wooden door, this one mercifully left wide open and hooked back. She gave out a sigh of relief; she’d had enough of cobwebs and spiders! Gingerly Alice stepped through into what she took to be some kind of storage area.
To one side there was a neat shoulder-high stack of wire-sprung iron frame bed bases, the angle-section frames painted that institutional sort of creamy-beige all things institutional seemed to be, the wire link-mesh and the coil springs supporting it glinting like factory-fresh chrome under the fluorescent strip light.
To the rear - from Alice’s viewpoint - beyond the bed frames, there was a line of folded beige metal chairs looking as if marching out from the side wall, alongside a tall, precariously teetering, tower of grey plastic stacking chairs; the latter looked like a great grey sea wave on the cusp of breaking, the stack curving outwards towards the top and stabilised only by side-on friction between it and the end wall.
To the opposite side of the area there was a stack of hospital-style navy and white striped mattresses, all apparently unused and still hermetically sealed within their manufacturer’s polythene wrapping, a medical supply company’s paper label prominent on the side of each. And straight ahead, centred between all of it lay salvation.
Straight ahead of her a single, though longish, flight of white concrete steps, flanked by a white painted iron banister rail, led straight up to a half-open door, its brass globe-like doorknob somehow lit up like gold, almost as if glowing with warmth; it took a few moments for Alice’s eyes to acclimatise and the realisation of what she was seeing to sink in. Carefully climbing the stair, awkward and unsure of her footing in the bulky immobilising straightjacket, up ahead she now saw the yellow rush of blessed, though imperfect, daylight challenging the clinical blue-white analysis of the naked fluorescent tube behind her. And that apocalyptic, dangerous, cacophony was growing ever-louder, seemingly with every step she was taking; a great tumultuous clattering, rhythmic swish-swishing and mechanised whistling and whining, now joined by distant telephone-quality staccato bursts of barked speech; masculine speech, gruff, warning, commanding.
Reaching the top of the stair Alice found herself emerging into the infirmary proper, but not through the double doors and connecting passageway through which she had originally been brought in from the main building, nor from the stairwell she had been led down when first she had been confined to the sanatorium. She found herself instead outside a small anteroom at the opposite end of the infirmary from the interior double swing doors leading through to the rest of the complex and side-on to the external entrance which she knew led straight out to the world of glorious daylight. After ever so long - so long that she couldn’t even imagine how long - being confined under the perpetual shadowless blue-white monotony of 24 hour fluorescent lighting her brain fairly begged for any kind of natural illumination; sun, moon, cloudy, clear, it wouldn’t have mattered. Even seeing the pearly-yellow light bulbs in the dark green enamel lampshades hanging over the beds seemed a kind of relief.
Alice hesitated before stepping out of the shadows, terrified that at any moment a nun or the supervising infirmary nurse would appear from somewhere, grab her by the scruff of her straitjacketed neck and sling her straight back downstairs back in to the padded room she’d come from. The nurse was a formidable figure. In reality a nun with medical training, complete with headdress but with her black habit replaced by a belted navy blue hospital matron’s dress, she would ordinarily have been sitting at her Formica-topped desk facing the short row of beds; but the desk was presently unoccupied, though the anglepoise reading lamp was still on, which was worrying. Scanning the room Alice could all too clearly recall the ‘afternoon naps’ restrained under the covers by wrist and ankle cuffs, the nightly sponge baths, the one-piece, footed, sleeper which fastened with a tamperproof zipper up the rear but which featured a buttoned flap over the backside allowing ea
sy access for spankings, canings, hairbrush thrashings and all the rest.
The latter thought made her shudder - that ‘sleeper’ thing had been a horrible garment, horrendous, designed for just one thing... well, two things; control and humiliation, though they were most definitely linked. Fabricated of an oft far too warm polyester fleece, the region around the bottom, hips and thighs had been lined with a soft, rubbery polythene material and the arms had terminated in mittens which had seemed peculiarly, unnecessarily, stiff and which therefore largely rendered the hands useless and the patient unable to carry out even the most basic of tasks for herself. And that flap over the bottom; that feature hadn’t only been to facilitate corporal punishment (though there had been plenty of that - often under the flimsiest of pretexts); ‘all the rest’ included the administration of colonics, enemas, suppositories and an assortment of pessaries for that intimate ‘other place’.
And then, suppository in place, there would have been a trip to one of the commode chairs. There had been three of those, set up in a line facing a large mirror bolted to one of the walls. Alice recalled how each had been of a dark green-painted tubular steel skeleton construction which was furnished with a plastic toilet seat set over a transparent plastic cylindrical receptacle, the latter being embarrassingly viewable from all sides. There had been locking cuffs to take the ankles which hung like stirrups on short chains from either side of the seat at the rear, and the upper parts had been styled a little like a very upright armchair, possessing a high leatherette-covered back which sported a broad chest strap and padded arms which carried restraints for the wrists.... But, she suddenly realised, where the commodes had been there was now an extra desk, and where there had been a wall mirror there was now a bookcase furnished with what looked like chick-lit novels, albeit of the clean, innocent variety, and various classics and a pleasant pastoral gold-framed watercolour up on the wall.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 2 Page 16
