CHAPTER 8

THE TETHERED GIRLS

Wiping that peculiarly starch-laden, fabric-scented laundry-sweat from her brow with the stiffened cuff of her nylon work frock, Alice was again swamped with self-recrimination, as so often she was these days when put to work in this way. It was the act of treachery that had procured her this relatively light duty that furrowed her brow and turned her stomach. It was an entirely separate part of that bargain that wool-wrapped her coddled mind and oiled the tracks of her thoughts.

Her concentration slipped, slithered and skidded uneasily from track to track, from past to present to future; more often than not - as now - alighting on the recent past. But then; such was the lot of a traitor... And all the girl had been trying to do was help her... albeit in so doing to help herself in some way - perhaps aid all of them, help all of them get out of this place? No, there was no question about it; she should have taken the cane, not condemned another to something far worse in her stead...

Here all physical punishments were administered on the bare bottom. But by far the worst, the most feared, consequence wasn’t necessarily a caning or strapping or a hand spanking across a nurse’s apron covered lap, or indeed anything at all to do with physical chastisement per se. Having said that; corporal punishment did still have a role to play, but it was very much a secondary role. If it was true that it was still necessary to administer the occasional over-the-knee slippering or long hard caning while secured by wrists and ankles over the gym vaulting horse, then it was only to ensure the miscreant’s compliance with the central part of the scheme; that was where the true punishment lay.

The term, ‘being sent to Coventry’, while often enough banded-about in conversation, is seldom appreciated for the subtle, yet terrible, form of retribution it potentially describes. But then the full scope of the sort of social isolation implied in those few words as a form of correction had seldom been explored so thoroughly nor implemented with such single-minded determination. They had their own nomenclature of course, as institutions always do - and it was chock-full of their own twisted brand of psychobabble:

No one was ever ‘corrected’, let alone ‘punished’ - perish the thought! Not one bit of it. No, a miscreant had her ill behaviour ‘modified’. Whether a moody, petulant pampered ‘daddy’s princess’ or street-hardened arrogant gum-chewing runaway, they were not ‘taken down a peg or two’, rather a girl’s attitude was ‘adjusted’, as one might adjust a clock, sewing machine or any other appliance judged out of kilter - it was that impersonal.

Except it wasn’t that impersonal of course. One had only to overhear any ‘case conference’ to realise that much. The passion with which the various ‘intervention options’ were discussed could become palpable at times. Indeed it was not unusual on such occasions to witness one or two of the small select group of women that went to make up the ‘core committee’ shifting uneasily in their seats and looking decidedly uncomfortable as refinement upon refinement was piled on some ‘intervention plan’ or other. Whether the agitated drumming of lily-soft fingertips and clicking together of varnished, manicured nails around the table - not to mention that certain huskiness that seemed to creep in if some particularly winsome ‘case’ was being discussed - might be interpretable as some measure of untoward disciplinarian zeal? ...Well, if it did, it undoubtedly went by some other name or clinically sanitised description - and it certainly would not be viewed as ‘untoward’ in any case.

And where sanitised terminology was concerned, none had been more disinfected than the term applied to the institution’s take on ‘sending to Coventry’ - ‘tethering’.

On the surface little more than an inconvenience to the miscreant concerned, there was much more to it than that.  Tethering was probably the most humiliating - and certainly one of the most efficacious - of the various ‘behavioural interventions’ that could be doled out. Once ‘tethered’ a girl was not allowed to so much as glance at another girl, let alone speak to her.  Such a girl was to be considered literally ‘tethered’ to an assigned member of staff behind whom she was to trail - day in, day out - looking neither left nor right but keeping her eyes glued to the floor at all times. She would be forbidden to speak, make eye contact, or participate in any activity other than to either trail along behind her ‘mentor’ or sit or stand in the corner staring at the wall.

In some ways that was not so much unlike normal proceedings in the ‘home’. Mealtimes were probably the worst example of that. Meals were taken in a large hall-like open room known as the refectory. Dense stained glass windows lined one wall, all displaying the shadowy outline of external bars running top to bottom and all inset deep within the thick stonework behind sturdy flush-fitting white-painted wire mesh. The walls at one end of the room - a full two thirds or more of the space - consisted of roughly whitewashed plaster. At the far end where the floor level was raised and had to be surmounted by a set of polished wood steps, oak panelling ran around three sides, sharply delineating that area from the rest. This was where the overseeing nuns and staff would sit, arranged along the rear wall behind a long polished table like a study based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.

This was the top table. Here, throughout, the home’s severe-looking governess would read from an ornate lectern carved in the shape of a spread-winged eagle, her jet hair pined tightly up in a bun and her navy fitted skirt and tailored white blouse, navy bow at the neck, giving the impression of a prison wardress. Here at breakfast they tucked into bacon, sausages, eggs, smoked haddock and grilled (never fried) tomatoes, the delicious piping-hot fare served from heaped silver dishes perched over spirit lamps by some poor hapless inmate dressed in a flounced, brief-skirted, black and white waitress dress, cap and apron.

The inmates, by contrast sat along austere rough wooden tables on dusty splinter-infested benches arranged lengthwise down the room. Here tasteless gruel-like porridge was served at every meal accompanied by tepid tap water in polythene beakers, both the polythene spoon and matching bowl permanently chained to the bench top and both often crusty with the residue of the previous meal, having been wiped over with tissue at best.

The nuns and staff would chatter amongst themselves. The girls, though, ate in strict silence, obliged to keep their eyes averted and heads bowed throughout.

But there was more to it when it came to a ‘tethered’ girl. A ‘tethered’ girl was even forbidden the use of the meagre, spartan furnishings - such as they were. A ‘tethered’ girl was obliged and expected to sit quietly on the floor facing the wall at all times unless instructed otherwise.

The process of ‘tethering’ robbed a girl of that secret bond that formed between inmates; the sort of strength that was garnered and mediated through the meeting of eyes and the furtive exchange of empathic glances. For a girl to have even that tiny little shred of hope taken away was the cruellest of cruel punishments - but that was just the start of it.

She had come across several girls who had been ‘tethered’. In fact it seemed a fair percentage had been passed through that particular mill. A girl could spend months on end ‘on tether’ and so allowed absolutely no interaction whatsoever with the other ‘inmates’. And once ‘on tether’ the gloves were off it seemed; the staff passed up no opportunity to humiliate a girl and no aspect was overlooked.

Be as unwise as to rebel against the ‘tether’ and a girl could find herself denied the use of the toilet, for example - although at the very least she could expect to be supervised, even under ‘normal’ circumstances. Dare complain, and a young woman in her late teens - or even in her early twenties - could just as easily find herself singled out to be put in nappies. It just took a diagnosis of ‘emotional’ or ‘hysterical incontinence’ to validate that particular approach.

In addition, a ‘tethered girl’, regardless of whether she had been considered to have had an ‘attitude’ or to have ‘misbehaved’, would also have her misdemeanour signified by what she wore. In that way others would recognise her for what she was and so automatically know how to behave towards her. She could expect to be bullied by staff, but worse, she would know that the other girls would neither make eye contact nor as much as acknowledge her presence. The complicity of her compatriots in this affair was easily enough obtained. As always, compliance was ensured through fear of taking the tethered girl’s place - not to mention a good hard caning from one of the nuns; that practically went without saying.

The nuns were absolutely expert when it came to setting girl upon girl in this manner. Divide and rule was the credo, and all manner of psychological abuse - subtle and not so subtle - could be put to use in recruiting the girls to undermine their own sense of group unity. For example, a rumour would arise that one particular girl was a ‘tattletale’, an agent of the staff who would ‘tell’ on the rest in order to obtain an easier time of it.

Such a ‘Chinese whisper’ would pass from one to another by a series of sideways glances and raised eyebrows and twisted corners of the mouth, talking - other than when directly monitored by a staff member - being strictly forbidden. The origin was always something ‘let slip’ by one of the nuns themselves of course; something ‘accidentally’ overheard by one of the girls. But once in circulation, rumour quickly became fact - and that ‘fact’ could become surprisingly ‘contagious’, affixing itself and sticking first to one girl and then another. These unvoiced accusations would spread from girl to girl with amazing virulence, until all had become equally tainted in the eyes of each other. That was the point at which a group potentially united in common adversity became a selfish, disconnected collection of isolated, suspiciously fenced-in islets.

Similarly they were required and made to watch films dealing with all manner of aspects of ‘feminine hygiene’. In conjunction with the spread of accusations of various girls being ‘carriers’ of certain heinous infections and the need to wait a certain length of time after such and such a girl before using the toilet, this too became a method of harnessing mass mistrust for the purposes of control.

Even such a natural process as menstruation was harnessed for the purpose of undermining self esteem. In this facility a girl’s ‘time of the month’ was knowledge made common to all. Sanitary towels were strictly rationed and carefully monitored and came with a thorough quizzing in front of all and sundry as regards the ‘heaviness’ of flow and so on. Similarly visits to the toilet were strictly regimented and at specified times and of course were always carefully supervised. Frequently each and every girl would find herself being intrusively questioned as to her bowel habits while waiting, a clipboard-carrying nurse patrolling up and down the prison-like queue they had to form for the single, open fronted and glass-sided toilet cubicle.

It was fear of that ‘tethering’ thing that made her give in to the Reverend Father, far more than fear of the cane, strap or any other implement of corporal punishment that might be employed in the first instance. She’d seen what a few months ‘on tether’ could do to spirited young thing - and ‘spirit’ was in short supply in this place. Besides, a healthy, regular ration of ‘physical chastisement’ formed the scaffolding of the ‘tether’ system in any case, so defiance was not merely the choosing of one consequence over another. The regimen’s skeleton, though, was fleshed out by constant and unrelenting humiliation and the systematic dismantling of the subject’s self-worth, sense of individuality and independence; it was that aspect that was to be feared.

It was surprising how having their staff dressed in medical-world uniforms somehow seemed to lend the regime a sort of air of legitimacy. Presented against a pastoral, almost nurturing ecclesiastical background of stain glass windows and nuns in flowing black and white habits - and all overseen by a world-renown clinical psychologist - it seemed almost natural to have such a consequence as ‘tethering’ hanging over her whenever the twin spectres of ‘wilfulness’ and ‘disobedience’ raised their heads. As a method of keeping infractions to a minimum, to a vanishingly small frequency in fact, the ‘tethering system was undoubtedly efficacious’.

But it was the involvement of the clinical psychologist - that, however cruel it might seem, it was all supervised, validated and presumably deemed justifiable by such an eminent figure in her field - that made the system seem in equal parts as sinister as it was inescapable. And it was inescapable. Alice had little doubt now that the whole damn place was as secure as any high-grade prison one might care to mention.

Even if she were to run - even if she could run, if she were not hobbled by agoraphobia - she would be ignobly returned, tail between her legs, to this ‘home for wayward and intractable girls’. If they had done their paperwork right - crossed all the tees and so on - it would most likely be the police themselves who would return her, frogmarching her back through the hospital gates in handcuffs and likely lending a hand when it came to clapping her in one of those old-time canvas and leather straightjackets they kept for the really intractable. If that happened, she’d never get out - they’d have won. An attempt to escape in of itself would be taken as evidence of her ‘instability’ and ‘mental incompetence’. Otherwise, why would she run away from those who were surely only trying to help her - why run from a cure?

Well, the Reverend Father was one reason, a very good reason. The Mother Superior was another - and the institution’s resident clinical psychologist, still another. And the latter woman, Alice felt sure, was as much cause as cure when it came to the agoraphobia which had done such a good job of pining her down under her stepmother’s thumb even before she had been brought to this place. And now that she was here, behind these barred windows, shutters and padlocked bolts... Well she could either bend to their will, awaiting her chance and hanging on to hope, however faint, while inexorably changing little by little, day by day.

Alternatively she could stand against them - and by doing so place herself even more rigorously under their control, risk binding and chaining, herself even more tightly within the institution’s mothering all-embracing incarceration, perhaps indefinitely. But to have to surrender herself again and again to the Mother Superior’s tender embrace - or that other’s, not so tender, masculine machinations - while all the while harbouring the knowledge that her stepmother was enjoying this or that cruise, function, or whatever (and always, it seemed, some snippet or other would slip past the doctor’s lips)... Totally abasing sexual slavery - was that what it took to survive in this place? Was it that demeaning mental state which had led her to commit such treachery as to condemn another to the mental torture that was ‘tethering’? And just because that person had been strong enough to risk attempting help her fight back? How could she have been found so lacking by comparison?

The Reverend Father was probably the worst part of it. He was the only male she had seen about the place and one who she already knew from bitter experience to be an old, debauched and repulsive pervert. His sparse white hair formed a broad horseshoe around a head that was flattened, possessing a central plateau of scaly liver-spotted pink. The latter expanse was marred further by the presence of hillock-like cyst or long-lived carbuncle of some kind that was set back to one side and rose from within its own nest of wire-like silver-grey whiteness.

His face was loosely jowled, his watery greyish eyes - baggy beneath and topped by strangely orange-tinged upper lids drooping unevenly in rolls - were perpetually bloodshot like an old hound’s. His nose had somehow retained something hinting of past-times refinement about its upper reaches but graduated to a vein-corrupted, cauliflower-like, purplish bulb as it descended. His cheeks were ruddy and studded with spidery red rosettes of fine branching blood-vessels, his lips surprisingly fleshy but his complexion otherwise pallid. His breath she knew well as he was so often far, far too close and suggested he thrived upon whiskey and gin, though absinthe was nearer to the truth.

She would lay there in resignation on his bed and he would turn her onto her tummy. He would then impatiently scrunch the thick white nylon fabric of the smock they forced them all to wear for bed up and over the swell of her hips, rolling the crinkling yet soft material about her waist like a sausage-skin lifebelt. There was always a large jar of lubricant cream in the pullout drawer under the tabletop by his bed. He would scoop out a liberal dollop of the opaque greasy substance with his middle finger, typically extracting a suppressed whimper from her as she would feel him part her bottom cheeks with those podgy fingers of his. Involuntarily she would tighten her cheeks as he lubricated the length of her deep bottom cleft with the stone cold Vaseline, usually earning a hard slap to her backside coupled with a horse-voiced warning to immediately relax her bottom or suffer the consequences. His finger would plunge in and out of her anus in a parody of loving coupling and then...

Well, let’s just say Alice didn’t have to be told twice these days to automatically adopt the ‘froggy’s-legs’ position the old man demanded (he revelled in using such childish language). The latter posture involved her drawing up her knees to either side of her prone body until her thighs were tightly stretched apart and her buttocks - and much else besides - were lewdly presented, conveniently raised and invitingly spread for his inspection and subsequent use (another term he took great joy in his quite deliberate choice of it).

It was at this stage that her hands were supposed to gravitate to the small of her back as if drawn by elastic - and these days they did so automatically. Her forearms she would then dutifully fold across the hollow that would form above her buttocks. Here those appendages would remain throughout, locked in subconsciously-wrought bondage in a pose of utter submission as if secured by an invisible arm binder, each palm cupping the opposing elbow.

She would raise her hips when indicated so as to facilitate the positioning of the long, sausage-shaped bolster cushion he would pull cross-wise beneath her belly. Then, when her bottom was patted, her generous warm lips would part, ready to welcome the soft rubber soothing ring he provided for her to bite on - this precaution being in the form of a much larger version of a baby’s teething ring. The lid popping on the lubricant jar, the creaking of the ancient iron-framed bed, its springs, wheezing and whinging at the increased load as his knees came to rest bracketing her well-upholstered hips, his breath on the nape of her neck, his talon-like nails digging deep as he dragged further apart her bottom cheeks- these were the portents of what would then come.

Her whole world had been turned topsy-turvy, now. These days she had learned the good grace to lie still while that foul, perverted old ‘man of the cloth’ - or anyone else come to that - fingered her bottom and humiliated her in any and every way possible. She had learned too the good manners to feign pleasurable mewing, to wriggle her bottom in invitingly keen anticipation of his surprisingly (for his vintage) turgid member and not to forget to voice her gratitude upon his satisfaction at the close. To not do so - whatever the cost to her self-respect - was to invite the old man’s ire!

She had learned early on what it meant to earn the old churchman’s displeasure - the consequences paralleled those that came with raising the Mother Superior’s temper whenever that insatiable woman imposed herself upon her and she failed to fall to her knees when directed. The Reverend Father would thrash her tender rear with the belt he kept at his bedside using all the might he could muster, the sturdy yet supple leather doubled over in his hand. Twenty, thirty swipes across her bared, defenceless bottom - more? It would rarely stop until she lay limply like a broken, ragged doll, the pillow sodden with her tears and stringy wisps of spluttered saliva and he rendered breathless, coughing spasmodically and asthmatically rasping air into his wrecked, phlegm-filled lungs.

Sometimes, in the aftermath, back in the Mother Superior’s chambers, having brought in a girl under some disciplinary pretext or other he would work himself up into a red-faced frenzy, thrashing the devil from some, usually blameless, ‘Jezebel’ he perceived as plotting his downfall through the temptations of her flesh, often with the encouragement of the Mother Superior ringing in his ears. The latter was telling; they were kindred souls, the Mother superior and him, two sides of the same, double-headed coin.

Any forensic psychologist or profiler worth his or her salt could have predicted how such a pairing would feed off each other, bolstering, excusing, building on each other’s deviant fantasies, their joint deviant behaviour evolving in sophistication, becoming more extreme as each sought to replicate previous ‘highs’, finding instead the need for ever greater stimuli to climb the same ladder. Heaven, like ‘enlightenment’, like Nirvana, was ever out of reach; it would always be so, one would always want it to be so; for to summit such a pinnacle would be to leave nowhere else to explore, nothing more to attain, no further option other than to fall.

Some rewards, then, are but purgatory in disguise, like standing one-legged on precariously piled nursery building blocks, each additional brick a further fall from grace yet each bringing out-stretched greedy fingers irresistibly closer to the prize. It was a state of being in which the ultimate thrust for redemption could only be that resulting in the final downfall, and from which neither prayer nor lucre in the guise of charity might extradite the protagonists. The intercedence of the Vatican, if and when the worst came to the worst... well, that might be an entirely different matter... but that would have to wait to be seen.

As for Alice: Alice’s reward for informing on the one person who might have been in a position to have helped her had been the allocation of a lighter work quota... and more frequent access to her prescribed tranquilizers. Yet the latter, ironically, she had known, even at the time, would only result in her being rendered more woolly-headed than ever and brought even more thoroughly under the institution’s control - and under Dr Ecclestone’s thumb. In fact it had been Dr Ecclestone that she had reported the girl to.

It had been while in one of her regular one-to-one psychological evaluation sessions with the near-supernaturally insightful psychotherapist. She had never intended to turn traitor but the doctor had just sort of levered it out of her. And she had unashamedly revelled in the doctor’s lavished praise. Nodding in thrilled acceptance she had actually smiled in fawning gratitude when told, as a ‘reward’, she would be moved on to a stronger sedative, the doctor telling her: “I’m really pleased with you; I think you are coming along nicely!” She hated herself for that!

If life under the supervision of a strict guardian, as her stepmother had set herself up as, and her governess friend had been a rude awakening, life under the thumb of the implacable woman psychologist was something else entirely. She was being made complicit in her own incarceration, allowing the doctor to make her more and more dependent on her medication. And there she had been, down on her knees and actually thanking the doctor for allowing her to become ever more addicted!

Yes, that evil woman had made her kneel on the carpet in front of her chair and nuzzle into her open palm to retrieve the two sedative capsules with her lips; all the while chiding her with the warning: “...of course this new drug is a little more addictive than the one you have been used to”. And she’d actually been grateful! It beggared belief, but unfortunately it was all too true.

It was equally true that, practically on sight, she had disliked that other girl, her would-be saviour. That the girl had risked eye contact - strictly forbidden - even a fleeting, coy smile, had somehow made it worse. Quite why she couldn’t say. Perhaps it was the girl’s temerity that she, Alice, herself, just didn’t possess. Perhaps it was that she had somehow sensed that this girl still had in spades much of that which had been so lovingly ground out of her by the domineering triumvirate of her stepmother, the governess her stepmother had hired and doctor Anne Ecclestone. Then again, perhaps it had been another form of jealousy entirely. Perhaps it was as much due to the girl’s pretty-pretty doll-like looks.

The girl possessed the same cute, wrinkling nose, looks as the actress, Gwyneth Paltrow. Indeed she shared a close enough resemblance to have worked as a teenage-era look-alike, had she been free to do so, had she not have been somehow incarcerated in this place. To have actually been baptised ‘Gwyneth’ was perhaps a twist of fate too far for credulity - yet that was indeed the truth of it. Hailing from a secluded Welsh valley village her given name had been largely due the say-so of her grandmother, a woman so steeped in the past as to hardly have heard of the actress, let alone be influenced in her decision by the woman’s celebrity. Not that Alice herself had been at the time, nor would likely ever be, privy to any of that.

But the young woman’s inheritance - for she was past the stage when most would call her ‘girl’ - was not all Welsh valleys, mountain tops, sheep and pretty tinkling waterfalls. There had clearly been a sprinkling of Scandinavian in with the Celtic genes. Strawberry-blond wavelets and curls framed her small heart-shaped face - seemingly in wilful defiance of the rigors of the ‘hospital cut’ she sported - and a faint string of freckles bridged her ‘cutie-pie’ upturned nose. She even projected that indulged diva-style petulance one might expect of the out-grown child-star. In a previous incarnation she had undoubtedly been the archetypal self-appointed smartest girl in the room. Haughty and competitive, even in the institutionally stifling environment that characterised the ‘home’, outside of its ragged glass-shard-topped walls she would have been mistress of the compulsive cutting snipe, the back-talking queen of the classroom or lecture theatre pile.

And she was not without a modicum of acting talent - not quite up to her name’s sake perhaps, but good enough in her amateur way to have been ‘noticed’. But there are times when it is better not to have been ‘noticed’. She had not been so much plucked from obscurity as plucked from the threshold of fame to be ignobly slung into obscurity - reduced from a ‘name’ to a number at the stroke of a Biro across the bottom of a ‘psychological appraisal’ form. But then, that history too lay outside the knowledge of Alice or any of her incarcerated compatriots - and would stay that way.

At first Alice had taken pleasure in the other girl’s fall from grace. The girl was stripped of the privilege of the more sophisticatedly styled dress she was allowed to wear, a prim high-collared button-through nylon frock-style overall like the rest of them but one possessing a tailored bodice and a knee-length pencil skirt that allowed at least a modicum of vanity to be preserved. They put her in a flounced micro-skirted twist on a child’s prim gingham school summer dress with layered white petticoats, ribbons in her plaited hair, and frilled white plastic rumba pants on show, bulging around heavy folds of terry-cloth nappy fabric. And then she was placed on “tether”!

She was not to speak, nor as much as glance at anyone or anything to either side of her passage as she went, but rather was to keep her eyes fixed on her black patent Mary Janes at all times, steered from behind by a staff member’s hands on her shoulders. That was how she was to go about from then on - steered like a pet led on a leash. It was total ‘social exclusion’; she was essentially supposed to disappear as far as all other staff members and her compatriots were concerned - not only seen-and not-heard but seen, not heard and not acknowledged. In short; she was to become solitary among the throng.

To begin with - and to her guilty chagrin - Alice had found it somehow uplifting observing the girl’s abject misery as she was led around like a puppy on its leash. Only as time passed did the recriminations set in, only as she had begun to note the girl’s obvious deterioration, especially mentally, had the truth begun to finally hit home - that in watching that poor wretch shuffle past she was in fact staring at a premonition of her own future.

Perhaps ten weeks had passed - though she couldn’t be sure - before the girl had really, noticeably, began to withdraw into her shell. Those bright, sharp, sparkling, observant and intelligent eyes - eyes that had never missed a trick - had dulled, become fish-like and disinterested. All those hours spent obliged to stand or sit meekly, staring blankly at the floor or the wall, had begun to weave their mind-unravelling magic. By this point they had already got her tamed. She had already learned to follow along like a house-trained puppy, no argument, no question - and without as much as a glance towards either the nun or nurse or whoever else happened to have been placed in charge of her or her surroundings... But they were not satisfied - the girl was to be made ‘an example to others’ not least of whom was Alice herself.

After maybe nine months had passed Alice overheard the staff gleefully discussing how the girl had begun wetting the bed. Ten weeks or so after that, and the proud, intelligent teenager had been left an empty dried husk. This once rebellious young woman would now sit passively, not moving a muscle unless approached by a nurse or perhaps one of the nuns, at which she would then cringe against the wall, submissively shrinking back, her eyes wide in mindless terror...

It was only at that point that they finally put the girl in a straight jacket. Alice had seen the orderlies bring it in. She had watched wide-eyed the girl standing passively with her arms outstretched to receive the garment, all hope lost from her dull eyes. She had felt her blood chilling as the leather straps were tautened, the buckles had squeaked in protest and the tightening canvas had creaked. And throughout the girl herself had not even struggled, nor as much as uttered a grunt of protest. She had not as much as shaken her head even when told she was “off to the ward” and they were leading her out past the security grille to the waiting ‘secure transfer wheelchair’ with its wrist and ankle cuffs and that poncho-like thing that buckled around the patient’s shoulders.

‘The ward’: It was a commonly used staff euphemism for one of the ‘conventional’ areas of the hospital, that part of the secure psychiatric wing that everybody knew about - a real mental ward in a real mental hospital. It was also something that had passed her by when she had first heard it, all that time ago. It had just been something the doctor had let slip yet at the time had meant nothing. Now it made her blood run cold whenever the words popped up in her mind. The doctor had once said something about her stepmother perhaps coming to visit her one day; “once you are all safe and sound... in the ward”... Oh my god!...

Her mind had jumped back to the present. She was still in the laundry - and thankful for it. But for how much longer? How long before she too was put ‘on tether’? How long before someone, somewhere, trumped up an excuse? Did they need an excuse? Churning through the pile of gym uniforms, leotards, institutional work clothes, oddly infantile ruffled plastic pants and once cardboard-crisp school blouses, their green and white striped man-made fabric now crumpled and sweat stained, she paused, looking up. The blank misty-white window nestling behind its sturdy metal gauze protection met her gaze - and the sight was somehow reassuring.

Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, this time careful not to mar the sleeve of her uniform dress, the thought struck her: The real world was still out there somewhere, miles away and yet just the other side of these painted stone or concrete walls and those others surrounding the institution. Or it might be closer still if this facility was indeed sited within a private psychiatric clinic, as she had overheard let-slip - a world within a world, as it were.

That was how she had to proceed. She had to constantly remind herself of that latter fact while somehow ignoring the fact that her stepmother and her cronies were also still out there somewhere, undoubtedly gloating over her fate. But if she was determined of one thing it was that this - whatever this was - was not going to be her fate.

And she had an ace up her sleeve. She could be confident that one other knew at least something of what had been going on. And that other could be relied upon one-hundred-percent to alert the relevant authorities to her disappearance from her ancestral home. Yes, there was no way her stepmother would be able to pull the wool over that girl’s eyes or fob her off in any manner whatsoever - of that she was certain; she had to be certain. She had to stay focussed on that one hope... no, not hope - certainty.

But if only she knew... but perhaps soon enough young Alice Marchment would... Perhaps soon enough, perhaps all too soon, she would learn what had become of her half-sister. We shall see...