As promised, if delayed, Yet Another extract from INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2: please understand, this is very much a first rough draft so if you find typo's / grammatical errors, please forgive me and, better still, point them out to me either by email or by way of posting a comment - the same goes for feedback, its all welcome, that's the point of the blog. 
Meredith lay lost in her thoughts, quite literally petrified and frozen in place, the bondage of her nightmares seemingly mirrored by the immobility of this new reality. This was how it always was, the dreams, the nightmares, then the awakening.
Always it felt as if a new reality had been built around her, a false reality, an illusion, a reality in which her helplessness was almost indiscernible from and as complete as in her nightmare world. Always, as if for the first time, she would glance down along her prone body and the shocking understanding of the nature of her hopelessness, the origin of her immobility, would bear down on her like some dead concrete slab. Arms set in plaster casts, modern soft resin-based casts, could do nothing but disobey her, lying straight and at 30° to her sides. Legs, similarly encumbered, rested angled toward the bed's lower corners. Even her fingers were held, each individually wrapped in its own cast, splayed out, fan-like and useless.
Memories spilled and unfurled like discarded spooled celluloid; edited dadaist highlights of confusion inter-cut with fantastical images of sojourns in some grotesquely abusive world, seemingly plucked from the mind of Poe and realised in the inflamed-red and bruised-blue pallet of chastised flesh.
Meredith Hewson; known as 'mushroom' to friends and acquaintances both, a tiny squeaky little thing – bouncy and bright as a gambolling lamb and with a smile like summer breeze nature had destined her for more. Yet, a Shropshire lass with a less than agreeable home-life to look back on, it was a somewhat hackneyed tail she had to tell.
Of course it would be simplest to lay the blame at the faux glamour portrayed in all those television shows, drawing her in, spiralling with moth-like lethality. The trends and bright fashions of Camden Market, the bars and bistros of Covent Garden; aspirationally bright beacons of such irresistible brilliance, far too dazzling for one of her innocence to see the darkness behind, far to beguiling.
To many she had been the welcoming smile behind the horseshoe bar, pulling pints with child-like wide-eyed glee; those tiny hands as pale and as perfect as porcelain - like that of the hand pumps her fingers failed to quite curl around, with their country scene decoration, all hunting pinks and running foxes.
She had brightened the day of many a jaded pen-pusher – her short stature obliging her to stretch for the ale-pumps, the effort causing those pert breasts to be thrust forward, the flesh bouncing, the cleavage distinct to the most bleary of drunken eye. Her pretty unworldly features would be moon-mist lit by the shafts of diffused sunlight filtering through the curling fern-like motifs of the Victorian acid-etched glass – the traditional public house windows and glass partitions had been retained here, along with the worn, once-red, leather seating.
She had been flirtatious, ever-smiling – then she was gone; a lover's tiff an ill-advised dalliance with her manager at that, forcing her flight.
Suddenly the London streets had not seemed so welcoming – not without money in her pocket, not without a place to call home; the accommodation had come with the job, you see…
Her mind ran back to the very first time, her first awakening to this world; it was a birth, or rather a rebirth, at least that was how it seemed now...
“The crash, sweetheart, surely you remember the crash?” The nurse's, concern had been palpable, her brow furrowing. Yet as insistent as the woman had been it had felt as if she were seeking to convince while, in some way, being unsure of her own sincerity.
Try she might she could recall nothing at the time; her immobility had almost seemed comforting in its familiarity yet otherwise there was nothing, just nothing. She could remember nothing still, at least of her history as they outlined it, nothing, that is, beyond the abuse, the beatings, something about a social worker, a friend, a young woman sworn to extract her from that hell.
Yes, the social worker; she had seemed so approachable, a woman who might care, who might believe her, who had seemed to care. The woman with the car, the woman who had promised to take her away, promised to save her from him. There was something else... what was it? A drink, a drink proffered from a flask, warm cocoa... that can't have been it! What possible significance could that have?
“You remember the crash, surely?”
In truth, she could not. There were fragments haunting her though, fragments of recollection or what seemed to be recollection; a jumble of shards, just as easily the constructs of imagination as bearing any relation to reality and feeling more like memories of what she has been told than of the actual events.
Feeling as if deceiving herself she nevertheless nodded in the affirmative; to do otherwise, to question it, would have been to risk being left starkly alone, ignored. This she had experienced many times before, being left ignored, isolated and alone in the silence of her curtain-enshrouded bed. Her inability to recall appeared to really irk the staff and as for her nightmares, her delusions as they referred to them, the merest mention was enough for the nurse or doctor or whoever was attending her to simply up and leave and many were the times she had found herself missing her next meal or diaper change after that.
And yet it was those dreams, those nightmares, that were the clearest representation of reality to her, her reality; certainly they seem more real to her than her present surroundings and the fuzzy pseudo-memories filling her head. There was a certain vivid and unmistakable clarity to their recollection, the clarity of truth and conviction.
Deranged? Deluded? Well, such were the murmurings, the whispered accusations that, on occasion, came to her from beyond the protection of her curtains, times when they were certain she was asleep and beyond caring; “…such a shame, quite deluded, poor girl”.
Yet it was all so real, so detailed, so, so clear to her: first there would come the probing wiggle of an investigative forefinger, then the thickly- gelling lubricant, ice cold, the digit urging in an out, in an out, twisting and turning, embedded to the knuckle. Then would come the sensational of building warmth, blood-flow stimulated by the mild irritant mixed in with the gel. Finally that podgy finger would be withdrawn and the first taunting rubber-touch of the nozzle would announce her imminent violation.
Every few weeks there would come the added discomfort of the first use of an increased diameter; in time she would become acclimatised, her sphincter gradually stretching to accommodate it, then would come another increment, then another and another, each adding to the soapy humiliation of the laxative the piquancy of torment that came from the knowledge that any improvement in her comfiture came only at the cost to be surely levied her in the future by way of the legacy of her stretched and weakened muscles and that it was all for the benefit of him, for his perverted pleasure.
Every detail was present there - if only in the world of dreams, if only the manifestation of her delusion, then from whence came the design, the knowledge and experiences that could make manifest the physicality of the illusion with such convincing Technicolor realism. What could a girl of her sheltered background know of such things? How could, even in conjecture, she conjure the sensation of a gently rounded belly, swollen with foully-cramping fluid, of youthfully elastic skin stretched paper-thin, of softly urging latex-covered, podgy, farmer's-wife fingers massaging, compressing, squeezing as if to exude the decoration for some filthily perverted demon cake or, perhaps, was it in some exaggerated parody of milking the beasts she once had the duty to? Then the was the voiding into the metal pail, the metallized ringing imparted to the initial fluidic-splattering fall of her wastes, the stink in the compacted surrounds of the room, the tiny skylight could not be opened to improve the ventilation, the cramping stomach muscles and twisting-agonized bowels. Finally it was she herself she saw carrying the bucket through the house so that all and any might see, she herself who would have to scrub it back to the pristine sheen of its manufacture in the yard outside in full view of the household.
He had absolutely despised the way she had been dressed, the way they were always dressed, her type, the young tearaways, the runaways that hung around the stations and the bus shelters on the cold winter nights. And it had been the coldest night of the coldest snap that most could remember, she had seemed the most desolate amongst gathering huddle, the most destitute, desperate bedraggled and forlorn. Then there were her looks, the pretty elfin face, the slight build, the short stature, the childish yet maturely curved frame, small breasted yet with hips and buttocks promisingly swelling and rounded with chubby resilient youthfulness. The denim, though, he just hated; women in trousers just left him cold, let alone jeans. He couldn't abide by anything that suggested other than sheer soft femininity, the slightest hint of boyishness in dress was an anathema to him; it is all to the more curiously contradictory and contrary therefore that the wretch so often bent and sobbing before him no longer possessed the cascades of wavy light brown locks she once had to hide her tears behind but rather a short tousled pixie cut. The latter styled around her ears and tightly tapered into the nape of her neck; the intent most clearly being to enhance that childish elfin look, the side parting, seemingly inadvertently, introducing an element of boyishness beyond anything that might be brought by even the most masculine of jeans or dungarees - such irony
The jeans and the rest of her outfit of that time had been most easily dealt with; his housekeeper, possessed of a rather traditional, if old-fashioned, outlook herself in such proceedings and not being exactly enamoured with modern attire of the like, was quite comfortable with the idea that they might simply fail to resurface from the launderette having become ‘lost’ as unfortunately things sometimes were. Mrs Veronica Merryweather-Cortez, a remarkable woman of an equally remarkable name. Herefordshire born and bred with broad hips and a buxom maturity of frame clearly at odds with her claimed thirty eight years of life and possessed of the ruddy apple cheeked complexion of a country woman, her coarse russet hair kept, on the main, beneath a plain, ‘sensible’, headscarf, she looked to more likely belong on some remote outlying farm as within the confines of the parsonage.
An ancient carved black oak chest dominated the vestry's end wall, squatting all but forgotten, despite its substantial bulk, in the dusky shadows beneath the tiny Norman-arched stained-glass window. Strictly speaking an oak coffer, it featured quite beautiful carved and arcaded front panels, each having an intricate inlay detail of flowers picked out in a variety of different woods, rarely appreciated, being near permanently under a thin layer of dust and tinted by the patina of age. The iron banding running around the sides and over the curving hinged lid was pitted and, blackened with age, was as dark as the wood itself; to the front a typical hand-forged mediaeval tongue clasp was secured by a very modern and substantial padlock.
It was from the latter, rarely visited, cache that Mrs Merryweather-Cortez was able to conjure up her singly peculiar solution to the problem of clothing the girl; if only as a temporary stopgap, for with every will in the world even she, with her archaic views, could hardly have considered such dress appropriate for, nor acceptable to, a modern girl of Meredith's age and background. It had been extracted and selected from a pile of ecclesiastical vestments dating back to perhaps the 1950s or early 1960s, if not earlier, to more prestigious times for the little parish church, to when congregations swelled to the rafters with uplifted voices and on occasion spilled out into the churchyard beyond, to when it had accommodated its own choir.
The princess-line dress she selected, despite Meredith's obviously small stature, had not appeared to the girl at the time to be the smallest there; she had felt certain she had seen at least two or three of a smaller size glanced at and then rejected while the woman was rummaging. She had stood there shivering in the thin cotton nightdress they had given her, grateful to receive anything that would provide some warmth and, more importantly, cover, even some ugly church dress as long as it was to be only a temporary arrangement. And ugly it surely was: featuring full length sleeves with overlong cuffs at the wrists, each fastening with three buttons, it was ‘easy fit’ in the extreme; indeed, it fairly drowned her small figure in its heavy black fabric.
An embroidered gold metallic Latin Cross decorated the region roughly corresponding to her left breast and was one of the few features allowed to alleviate the jet-black severity of the thing, the others being an arc of short stiff white frills around the top of the mandarin collar, matching sprays of frills around the cuffs that extended down to the upper parts of her hands when she was standing with arms to her sides and a large white button oddly sited to the rear of the collar. The latter’s function, enigmatic at the time, was to become clear in time and perhaps would have been so more immediately had she noted the matching buttonhole at the dress’s hem at the rear where it was picked out in white thread as if some proudly decorative feature of design.
Thickly-draping folds, the wetly-puddled shadows lying between even darker and serving to underline the gloss of the fabric where the light shimmered off its surface like moonlight of a black sea’s swell, hung and spread out from a point approximating her waist to the hem swinging barely clear of the floor. Once clear of her bust’s perky overhang the front hung straight and true with barely a hint of any contact with the form beneath, giving scant regard for style or flattery; seemingly dozens of small, tediously and unnecessarily fiddly, black-satin covered buttons, in reality sixteen in all, fastened it from her throat to her ankles.
The fabric, while as smooth as heavy black satin should be, concealed an inner lining of another material entirely, this having a texture approaching that of a rather coarse velvet, and therein hung the seed of another problem; not only was the whole loose-fitting ensemble ugly, heavy and hot to wear but the constant prickly-heat sensation of the inner lining quickly came to make its wearing intolerable. To her chagrin the material seemed particularly coarse in the region over her nipples and the latter's hardening in response only served to further augment their constant teasing.
She had winged and whined and bitterly complained; it had felt as if the constant grazing irritation, the prickling and the brushing back and forth, would serve to drive her quite insane, or so it had felt at the time, although she was later to encounter challengers to her sanity that would all but drive such concerns from her recall. Finally, her patience pushed to the limit, it was Mrs Merryweather-Cortez who was to yet again to save the day; it was simple, one of her own old cast-offs, a full-length slip in white nylon and as smooth as the girl's own skin.
Panelled and darted, with a seemingly hopelessly narrow waist and a pronounced tapering, beyond the curvature that allowed for the swell of the wearer's hips, so as to terminate at knee-length with a tightly-circular hem, the impression was of a garment of the early 1960s and designed to be worn below the pencil skirted fashions of the time. It clung to her hips and thighs like a second skin, the tight hem coming to rest tightly girdling her legs just above her knees.
The effect, whether intentional or not she had no idea, was to restrict her once tomboyish stride to a somewhat sedate and femininely-gentile shuffling gait that could not but reinforce the image of docility they were clearly striving to achieve for her.
Then there had been the question of underwear. The best that they had had to offer in terms of ‘underpinnings’ as Mrs Merryweather-Cortez was apt to quaintly describe the more intimate of garments was a pair of that woman’s own rather elderly cast-offs; a pair of white rayon directoire knickers, the waist far to large for her petite frame and, having been washed and re-washed into submission long ago, their waist-band had been left completely devoid of any residual elasticity in any case…
To be continued
Copyright (c) 2008 Garth. P. ToynTanen
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