Alice Under Discipline, Part 2

by Garth ToynTanen

  Yes Alice could well remember - she could remember too what had been done to her the first couple of times the paper work had been thrust at her and she’d refused to sign! In actual fact she had held out through no less than four attempts to get her to sign before she had caved in; she was proud of that fact. She remembered too how the documentation had carried the proviso: ‘in sound state of mind’, or something similar. Therein, she had been informed recently - unless she could categorically prove coercion - lay her only defence, the only way of reversing what had since come to pass and reclaiming what was rightfully hers.

  She could make good her testimony, try through that to prove the likelihood of coercion but risk being undermined by the expert psychiatric opinion the Church authorities would undoubtedly bring to bear, falling foul of those veiled threats and finding herself in a worse situation, perhaps even going the same way as poor Gwyneth. Or she could simply seek to invalidate the papers she’d signed by submitting to the opinion that at the time she was not of sound mind, thus letting her captors off the hook by letting them claim, as they were claiming, that she was merely a patient, a girl they were trying to help who had been found deranged and wandering aimlessly and who had had to be restrained in a straitjacket and padded cell for her own protection.

  The trouble was, the latter approach would both get the Church off the hook as regards her own treatment while simultaneously invalidating any further testimony she might be able to offer regarding those other poor souls, those other girls they’d in effect been holding captive, illegally detained. And there were those she feared with an axe to grind who would use such a diagnosis to put her right back in an institution somewhere, her stepmother being foremost among them... But this was it, she was here now, right here, right now, deep in the palace of the establishment, this marble-hall shrine to the legal profession... And the main thing was - if she wanted to be believed, taken seriously one way or the other - she had to remain calm, remain rational, she must not let them rile her, not let them make her out to be a mental case... even if she did look like one in her rag-bag institutional getup.

  ***

  Approached from along the die-straight white marble passageway the doors of what Alice took to be a courtroom made for an imposing, even intimidating, sight. As they drew nearer so the great doors’ huge brass cauliflower-like doorknobs slowly morphed into the lion’s mane heads they in fact represented. With her two court-appointed officials, strolling one each side of her, guiding her by the elbows as if she were some sort of invalid, Alice was bade take a seat within an alcove set back from the hectic bustling clamour of what turned out to be a central thoroughfare for all manner of briefcase-touting wigs, bespectacled suits and trundling rattling trolleys piled with buff files, folders and manila envelopes pushed by brown coated porters.

  The trio, Alice and her two escorts - both tight lipped young women, in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in the obligatory black or very dark grey pinstriped skirt-and-jacket suits, dark stockings or pantyhose and black heels to match - duly took their places together at one end of a short row of plush red-upholstered gilded (more likely gold-painted) metal frame chairs, the type that seemed to grace town halls and civic centres country-wide in the UK. They sat upright in a subdued line like the three wise monkeys of Chinese legend:

  The two poised, sharp-suited, blonds, their shoulder-length hair lacquered into stiff-styled submission, were definitely of the ‘speak-no-evil’ persuasion Alice had decided. Indeed they seemed reluctant to speak to her at all, appearing put out if either one felt obliged to respond to some query or comment she brought up. At best, both seemed to be humouring her with their patronising smiles and down-pat reassurances. At worst they treated her concerns with an ill-disguised pinch of salt, blatantly paying only lip service.

  It all made Alice worry that perhaps they had been pre warned or told beforehand that doubting aspersions had been cast on Alice’s reliability, that a rumour was circulating that their witness was a little ‘feeble minded’. It was as if - Alice worried - her testimony was being devalued, undermined, even before she’d had the chance to deliver it. And those presently congregated within, she thought - possibly both those awaiting her to bear witness against them and those waiting to hear, scrutinise and judge her testimony - were likely to prove of the ‘hear-no-evil, see-no-evil’ type. She tried to shake off the latter conspiracy-inspired thought, trying her best to fight against her cynicism, lest it render her powerless before she started; a shiver ran down her spine as if someone had just strolled across her grave, and she absentmindedly played with the rosary in her lap; it gave her comfort, reminded her of the word of God; chastity, discipline, obedience, she felt her lips silently mutter; involuntarily she began to recite Psalm 23 under her singsong breath, the refrain of Crimond running through her mind: “The Lord is My Shepherd, I’ll Not Want.... He lays me down to...”

  “Shhhh! Dear... You’re talking to yourself again...” It was one of her escorts, and Alice felt her cheeks ablaze with the hot coals of embarrassment.

  In the fullness of time the tall, panelled double doors swung apart admitting Alice into the presence of the enquiry... and Alice’s mouth fell open. The everyday functional aesthetic of the courtroom environment she had readied herself for, here, in this room, had been eschewed in favour of an overly ebullient display of rococo style splendour, a particularly gauche and gaudy example of that fashion’s over-kill ornamentation.

  The tribunal panel were seated around an elevated walnut horseshoe shaped bench that took pride of place at the far end of the expansive, high-ceilinged wood-panelled chamber. Behind its central apex, the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland dominated the wall, the crowned English lion and Scottish unicorn supporting the central quartered shield device glared down on the proceedings from their elevated vantage point as if in disapproval of the travesty Alice now felt certain was about to unfold.

  A short, stout blousy woman in inky judicial robes was seated at the centre, bracketed either side by the others of the inquiry panel arranged around the room as two wings. Her plump jowls joining with a double chin that rolled like a pink croissant beneath her chin, it seemed to Alice the woman possessed a dark, merciless streak, something she imagined she could see written in the woman’s sharp perceptive eyes. This old crow, she thought, possessed a dangerously soul-searching gaze, one capable of prising out, microscopically probing, the most well-buried secret.

  The woman’s eyes seemed to track her as she hesitantly approached - nervously fiddling with her fingers in front of her plain grey skirt - like a pair of unavoidable spotlights, coinciding on and picking out every blemish, pimple and carbuncle in their all-revealing limelight... No, it felt more revealing than that; it felt more like being X-rayed... all over. And drawing closer, that first-impression label she had subconsciously saddled the tribunal chairwoman with, ‘old crow’, seemed quite apt, the woman’s long sloping nose pressing out beak-like from beneath her roll-curled and corn-rowed straw-gold legal wig, a few sprigs of blatantly dyed coal black hair, intruding onto her finely-lined forehead. It was not an impression in any danger of contradiction by the woman’s tone when she spoke:

  “Take a seat please, Miss Marchment... Face forward so that we may get a good look at you, if you don’t mind. And when asked - and only when asked - speak clearly, answer concisely... and restrict your testimony only to the facts at hand, as you know of them... Thank you...” The voice was not only strident, it was raucous, roughened and made overly sibilant by the court’s PA microphone system; what with that and the black robe spread out to either side of her high-backed chair like a bird delousing in the sun, she was indeed very crow-like, the whole room like a murder of crows.

  Alice wasn’t sure how to respond, but already there was a problem; they’d got her name wrong: “P,P,Please miss... L... L,L,Lamberton, miss... Alice L,L...Lamberton - that
’s my name; Alice L,L,L...L,L,Lamberton... not Marchment... miss... I...” She blurted, nervously, her voice shaky, uncertain and uneven. It had been a long time since she’d used her given name at all, let alone the Lamberton variation of it, her father’s name and the one she had been christened with. For some reason she had particular difficulty with it, spluttering and stuttering over it to such an extent that she had almost given up at the end there, even though her much-despised stepmother’s maiden name, Marchment came flowing out unscathed; she felt sure she’d heard her stepmother’s tinkling little tittering coming from up in the public gallery, the little girlishly mocking giggle the woman reserved for rubbing her stepdaughter’s nose in some humiliation or other she had formulated.

  The crow-woman chairperson spread both hands on the bench before her, her shoulders rising as she leaned forward, a faintly audible slap of palms on wood signalling her impatience: “Your Honour... You address me as Your Honour... dear.” Her crowing voice had softened at the very end, an attempt at a reassuring smile creasing her thin-lipped, powdered face, subtle blusher and foundation battling with late-forties-going-on sixties lines; and losing. She looked quizzically across at the usher, a series-eyed, pointed-chin man in his mid to late forties; papers rustled:

  Rising to his feet, the usher smiled, indicating the seated girl with the corner of the folder he held in his hand: “It seems the witness’s surname was changed by deed pole at the request of her stepmother upon that lady’s reverting to her former title of Lady Marchment, your honour - and with the young lady’s later agreement upon her having come of age...”

  “Ah yes, Lady Marchment...” the chairwoman said thoughtfully “...thank you usher”. Glaring obliquely at Alice out of the corner of one eye, as if it were Alice under investigation rather than giving testimony, she turned her head to whisper with the all too familiar tall and striking bespectacled figure to her right. Then turning back, that struggling sympathetic attempted smile twitching around her lips, she again addressed Alice, all too clearly fighting back irritation that bordered on anger; already! “...So Alice L,L...Lamberton it is” she mimicked “if it keeps you happy - but for the purposes of this hearing’s records...” she shifted her attention to the stenographer as she spoke “...the witness’s testimony will be entered under her legally recognised name; Miss Alice, Poppy, Elizabeth Marchment.” She fixed Alice in her gaze accusingly: “And you, young lady, will restrict yourself to answering the questions that will be posed and calmly delivering your testimony to the best of your ability.”

  Alice noted the chairwoman’s less than subtle emphasise on that adjective - calmly - as is if she expected the proceedings to become emotionally charged on Alice’s part, even hysterical; she would show them, though; she would remain calm no matter what! But there seemed so many preconceived impressions and opinions about her washing around - poisoning the air - it seemed to Alice more than ever that the chances of her allegations receiving an impartial audience were becoming vanishingly small. Looking up from fidgeting with her rosary, Alice’s eyes met with one of the two reasons her jaw had dropped and her mouth had gaped open like an idiot when she had been led in - one of two figures, seated side by side on the chairwoman’s right. Involuntarily she averted her gaze, staring down at her lap and the set of jet beads strung with the sign of the cross she’d been allowed to keep with her; she touched the cross and instantly the Apostle’s creed popped into her mind; she had to be prompted by the chairwoman to bring her back to the here and now.

  There was something very sinister indeed going on here: This had to be an awful lot more than a simple case of a huge and powerful institution closing ranks, Alice reflected glumly. This was a case of an all but totally unassailable establishment-endorsed organisation in effect being given leave to perform its own housecleaning, with all the reputation-cleansing, face-saving shenanigans that was likely to lead to. It beggared belief: two of the central players, the main perpetrators - at least in terms of Alice’s experience - co-conspirators, seated right there, on the very tribunal panel purportedly convened to investigate the institution they had so very much been part of. And it was an involvement which presumably, Alice realised with horror, only she knew of.

  To be the complainant or whistle blower under such circumstances could prove a very dangerous place to be. It was the kind of daunting, foolhardy task which could earn a person such as herself a more-or-less permanent residency as a guest of the type of facility the priory infirmary’s ‘sanatorium’ had been seeking to emulate, albeit on a small scale; straitjacket and all! And there was at least one person seated on that bench who could make that happen, if she was careless enough to point a finger. To make matters worse, there were a least two other faces up there on the panel who were familiar; not perpetrators, for sure, but visitors, Alice felt certain. Whether either one of those knew of the central pair’s involvement, the fashionably dressed attractive woman seated on the chairperson’s right hand with the title ‘professor’ emblazoned on the card in front of her and her far younger PhD colleague , seemed unlikely.

  Of course she realized now none of this - all she had been through - would have happened had she not fallen under the care of doctor, now professor, Ecclestone, finding herself first trapped against her will in a church-managed charity home for wayward and intractable girls sited in a remote and secluded priory, then confined to that establishment’s sanatorium. It was true she had gone with the good doctor voluntarily, tripped happily enough in to the passenger seat of her car that cold wet night, but at the time she had seen it as a chance to escape from her stepmother’s clutches. But from the moment she had dimly become aware of that prick in her upper arm an intervention and rescue had become an abduction; and Alice had unknowingly switched status from ‘runaway’ to abductee, and the whole sorry, damning tale took on a far more sinister twist.

  She’d come to perceive Dr Anne Ecclestone as her saviour and the calming medication that manipulative woman prescribed - oddly and counter-intuitively - as strengthening her resolve through allowing her the space she needed to think and regroup by relieving her of her overwhelming neurosis. Even now she was loath to admit to herself that her ‘neurosis‘ had likely been an invention of the doctor herself, and the medication she had been prescribed had in effect enslaved her, her growing dependence - and her stepmother’s control of the supply - placing her ever more firmly under her stepmother’s thumb, subject to her will.

  Dare she now stand up and point the finger? Or would the mud just come sloshing back all over her? But if she failed now to finger this camouflaged nemesis, how could she expect the testimony she was to give against the rest of them to stand up? How, indeed, could she even begin to narrate the story without naming Dr Anne Ecclestone and her latterly recruited and dangerously vindictive sidekick, Dr Andrea Stavrolidese?

  At long last she knew the latter woman’s name - and she at the very least had to pay. That sadistic woman had, as near as damn it, been single-handedly responsible for having chased that poor Welsh girl, Gwyneth, out of her wits. She had quite deliberately instigated a regimen designed to achieve exactly that end, to drive the poor thing out of her mind, just to test some hypothesis that she could take a perfectly healthy young girl or woman and turn her into a mental patient, systematically destroying her mental health in the process. Except it didn’t quite work like that. Alice knew, because the woman had started to work on her, too, towards the end. The woman believed in the carrot rather than the stick (or at least as much as the stick - the cane she’d carried had always been close at hand).

  You didn’t drive a person out of her mind, rather it was a case of gently, yet firmly, guiding her down that path, in a stepwise fashion, step by step, little by little, encouraging her to accept some aspect or other of her worsening mental state before leading her on to the next. You rewarded the exhibition of the relevant symptoms with care love and attention and only punished when there was some overt attem
pt to fight back - and even then, more often than not, simply by the withdrawal of that love and attention rather than by the cane. It was an insidious process which began with something akin to the ‘tethering’ system already in use in the institution, whereby you simply sent the subject to Coventry, that is pointedly ignored her, forbade her to speak or allow others to speak to her, perhaps limit her to whispering if needing to question her... And yes, the cane was much in evidence at this early stage.

  The next hour or so turned into kind of a judicial purgatory for the increasingly bamboozled Alice as she found her words being twisted and aspersions cast, first on her truthfulness, then on her mental health. Alice’s ex-boyfriend’s conviction and subsequent jailing for narcotics ‘possession with intent to deal’ was dredged up, the silting mud being slung in her direction steadfastly adhering, along with the only partially disguised suggestion that she might have been involved herself and indeed been fortunate not to have faced prosecution. Her history of addiction to prescription tranquilizers and sedatives was brought up and turned against her, - over and over, time and time again - despite the fact that this unfortunate affliction had come about through no fault of her own.

  And even while she was speaking the proceedings and the room around her seemed to intermittently fade and return, leaving her once or twice lost for words and wondering what she had just been saying. The notion that she was wading through a series of imagined flashbacks and false memories came and went but was impossible to shake entirely, leaving her uncertain even as to the validity of her own testimony at times, her confidence steadily waning.

  Alice’s assertions that she had been manoeuvred, manipulated, into becoming dependent on tranquilizers by her stepmother (worthy of consideration by some; just; a few quizzical expressions about) with the collusion of a ‘health professional’ (considered increasingly unlikely; the allegation triggering one or two wry amused smiles) and that her stepmother might have been responsible for framing her boyfriend (a couple of audible titters) were near enough disregarded out of hand: