Making Her Home Her Institution
It had been bad
enough seeing all her designer stuff go off in bin liners to the charity shop,
screwed up like so many worthless rags, things her doting father had bought
her. The more everyday items had gone up
in smoke in the incinerator; she’d been made to toss them in herself. She’d put up a fight, mainly verbal and
accompanied by much foot stamping and histrionics, a struggle from which her
bottom was still paying the price, the throbbing bee-sting of twelve red-purple
welts, the aftermath of not one but two sessions with the cane, each a
no-holds-barred six-of-the-best thrashing now indelibly etched in her mind like
a scar.
She’d been
pulled back in to the room by her ear, painfully twisted, like a miscreant
child, her new room, this new room which had been prepared for her right at the
top of the house, tucked away at the back behind a whitewashed barred window, a
plain institutional looking room with a hospital style bed and a child’s
combined desk and chair abutting a wall and very little else – and pushed
towards her new things, the pile folded upon the rubbery gloss of the PVC
covered mattress.
They’d stood there,
the two of them, arms folded, while, visibly shrinking in defeat like a wilting
shrub and stiff with pain and still disbelieving the situation, she had dressed
in the unfamiliar garb, each thread seeming as she was drawing upon herself an
ever increasing burden of humiliation along with the fabric.
They’d smiled
when she’d eyed the sturdy lock on the door, a square slab of bronze coloured
metal inset within a door which, although like any other in that part of the
house from the outside, being of heavy oak, was lined with beige steel on the
inside framed within a trim of broad-headed rivets like a prison door – there
was even an inset eyehole, disguised on the outside behind a rectangular brass
plate marked ‘private’. And this new ‘bedroom’ she had been assigned – two
floors up from her old one, when she had used to stay here - was indeed
‘private’; crushingly still, agonizingly quiet, oppressively close-walled,
mind-numbingly bare and bereft of decoration.
Removed from mainstream education before having had the chance to sit
those all-important final exams, and no longer at an age obliged by law to
attend any particular establishment in any case, this was where her schooling
was to recommence she had been told. Or
rather, her schooling would recommence in the rooms adjoining this one, the
small cluster that sprouted off the top landing, the whole being self-contained
and set aside from the main house by the door at the foot of the stair, itself
a daunting obstacle of reinforced oak and furnished with a heavy duty lock.
When she’d
winced at puling up the knickers ‘skirt first, dear, knickers after’, the chill
of crinkling plastic stinging like ligament or a spray of nettles over the
inflamed pulsating furrows left behind by the cane, her already plump and full
bottom having seemingly swollen to twice its normal size, at least in her
mind’s eye, both women’s smiles had broadened.
Their smiles had broadened still further, to Cheshire Cat ear-to-ear
lip-splitting grins, her guardian’s amusement particularly ill-disguised, the
woman barely stifling a snigger, when she’d shuddered, visibly cringing, on setting
eyes on one of her new ‘bedroom’s’ very few forms of ornamentation, the cane,
heavy leather strap and Scottish two-tongued tawse which hung side by side on
their wrist straps on the wall at the foot of the bed, where she would see them
first thing on opening her eyes.
Then she’d tried
to make a break for it. But the door had
been locked of course; it had locked automatically behind them; if she’d
thought about it she’d have realised she’d heard it click. And one of the women, the new woman her guardian
had employed, this tall woman with her hair up in a bun in that old fashioned
way and dressed head to foot in a nurse’s uniform seemingly from a past gone
age, had stepped forward, still smiling sweetly. She remembered how the woman’s slender
fingers had been playfully toying with the keys dangling from a chain hung from
a chromed clip on the side of her elasticated belt, the belt’s filigree
butterfly-styled ball-clasp buckle starkly glistening under the fluorescent
lighting, her other hand raising the thin bamboo cane she still held by her
side, using its tip to point to the bed, taping its slender tip, the message
loud and clear, against the PVC mattress, her starched white bib apron crisp
against the blue and white checkered pattern of her uniform dress, rustling
like damp leaves, her dark stockings – seamed, ‘fully fitted’ nylons; another
element from a bygone age - hissing
together, the woman, big breasted, broad hipped, even though probably in her
early thirties at most. Yes, that had
been her third caning – her guardian anchoring her over the side of the bed by
the shoulders and flinging up her shaming, humiliatingly juvenile pleated skirt
and yanking down those ridiculously horrid high-waisted, plastic-lined short-legged
bloomer-style interlocked cotton school knickers that she had only just pulled
on, with her other hand.
But that had all
been days ago, a lot of days ago – they’d said they’d leave her for a bit, give
her a ‘cooling off period’, let her ‘settle in’. Not that she’d be seeing much of her
guardian; the woman had told her she had a lot of travelling to do ‘on
business’ and in any case, her office space was down on the ground floor, and
she doubted she’d have much time or inclination to make the stair climb up to
the top floor very often; “…perhaps once a month once I’m back I might pop by,
perhaps every couple of months… Who knows?”
.
And she was
never truly alone: “bed is for sleeping
on, the desk is for sitting at – you do not sit on the bed, and you sit up
straight at the desk… bed at night, desk in the day, that’s how it works.” She DIDN’T know how it works. She didn’t know how, if she sat on the bed
during the day, or got up from the desk to stretch her legs, they could know –
or someone would know – and very quickly the door would burst open to admit a
bustling uniformed figure brandishing the cane, or on occasion selecting the
strap or the tawse from their respective hooks, slamming her broad behind down
on the mattress with a hissing of escaping air from within and that odd rubbery
squeaking the thick PVC made, the bed’s side rails – the side rail being folded
down when the bed was not in use – rattling like discordant bells, and patting
her apron-covered lap… and as she now knew, and already at some level partly accepted,
god forbid that she should refuse to simply flop herself across the woman’s
knees, her palms and toes touching the
floor. A strapping, hand spanking or the
tawse – even if hard – was infinitely more bearable than one of the woman’s
‘good hard canings’ or ‘six of the best, touching your toes’.
And if she thought that getting her back in
school uniform had been triumph enough for this pair of implacable women who
had now ‘taken her in hand’ she was sadly mistaken. She was beginning to realise that, as
crushing to her self-esteem as being put in school uniform undoubtedly had been
– especially as she had not worn a uniform when she actually HAD been at
school; a ‘progressive’ establishment forever trumpeting the benefits of ‘free
expression’ and decried by her new legal guardian as a ‘pampering waste of
space - it had been merely the first step in her guardian’s scheme. Now she had that woman standing over her,
that stern, busty woman in her hospital nurse uniform, white cap on her head,
starchy white cuffs stiff around her wrists contrasting with the pale-blue and
white check of her long-sleeved dress, a disposable white plastic bib apron
today, with her white elasticated crepe belt fastened over the top, the
butterfly buckle like burnished frozen quicksilver, brandishing an equally
silvery pair of chromed scissors, her intention all too obvious, even without
her words.
“Time for a
trim, hmm? Or should we take some
carbolic to that face again first – you can always trust carbolic soap to give
a patient that well-scrubbed fresh faced look.
Why, I do believe that even after all THIS time I can STILL detect a
trace of makeup – this really won’t do… this won’t do at all! And we’ll have to cut those nails – we can’t
have a patient harming themselves – a patient with long nails is a danger both
to herself, and others. But first we’ll
get that hair cut – a proper regulation hospital cut, quick and simple and
above the ears. Don’t you fret, honey,
it’ll be nice and even – see I’ve brought a bowl… We’ll just plonk it on your
head and cut around it, just like we did in the hospital I worked at; we didn’t
stand for any nonsense there, I can tell you.”
Why did she keep
referring to her as her ‘patient’?
Somehow it was even more galling than the situation as it was – and that
was bad enough.
“Didn’t your
guardian tell you I’m from a psychiatric nursing background? No?
Well I have a LOT of experience dealing with recalcitrant patients, and believe you
me they all learn to do as they’re told in the end…”
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