Police, Camera, Action

(Posture discipline, forced PT and hair cutting, psychological conditioning, caning)

Bong...bong...bong...

Seemingly originating from everywhere at once, an electronically-generated chime softly sung out its entraining command. The tone, a mellow, resonant gong-like ‘C’, played one octave below middle C, was as rounded and as gentle as to politely usher aside the silence rather than shatter the peace. Yet, diffusing lazily through the sparse, white and uncertain cuboid space of the room, barely had its final throbbing tintinnabulation had time to fade before it was replaced by the harshly hissing, rasp and rustle of nylon.

Spurred into conditioned action in response, like some life-sized marionette, the violet-eyed girl smartly rushed to stand within the thick black perimeter of a ring marked out on the floor. One of several such markers positioned around the room, this particular zone lay before the nigh-imperceptible outline of the door toward which she was now faced.

Pausing only to smooth out the wrinkles and creases in the skirt of her green and white striped dress and grasping the slippery fabric at the hem between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, as if contemplating a curtsy, patient 30C assumed the requisite pose. With her arms - and hence dress - held stiffly out to her sides at some forty to forty-five degrees to her body and with one foot placed in front of the other, a simple submissive inclination of a pretty head clad in a beribboned humiliatingly-anachronistic bonnet, a partial bending of the knees - and the perfect image of still-frame genuflection was complete...All that was left now was the waiting.

And so she would wait, as she had so many times before, countless times before. She would wait...and wait...and wait. She knew she would wait because they always made her wait, it was all part of the discipline you see - it was good for her. Already her plumply-feminine frame was quivering - partly in fear, partly through the sheer physical trial of maintaining that endurance-sapping pose. It hurt those now flaccid dancer’s muscles: Pointedly denied the long hours of exercise it had taken to hone and tone that frame, her physique had now taken on a much more softly-contoured feminine aspect - one that was both pleasing to the eye and that matched her now burgeoning buttocks, hips and bosom. It hurt like hell...but it hurt far less than the cane that would be repeatedly laid across her bare backside if she should capitulate to the ache in her limbs - and the shame that would burn within as, once again, she would be broken to tears.

Officially referred to as temporary waiting accommodation, this blank-walled box of a room had been home to its sole lonely occupant for a little over two months now - the girl had neither ventured nor seen beyond its walls for all of that time. Yet she, herself, had been kept constantly under observation throughout, her every action filmed and recorded. Her most basic of bodily functions had been carefully measured and logged and every behavioural nuance and response had been scrutinised and analysed as if she were some caged lab rat. Yet in a sense that was exactly what she was, a lab rat; this was a scientific study after all and she was the subject, no more than that... that she was a caged lab rat was without doubt.

Anything that might constitute a confounding variable - in other words anything that might likely interfere with, or have an influence on, an experimental outcome - had been stripped out of these rooms. Generally there would be a simple hospital bed, a small combination desk and chair, of a design seemingly more suitable for a schoolchild than for a grown woman, and a tiny, low, toilet pedestal. The latter in this case, however, had been taken out of service and presently sported a hinged lid or cover firmly fastened in place by way of a sturdy heart-shaped silver-metal padlock. This in its turn was mounted to the front and was of an appearance so obtrusive and excessively robust as could leave little doubt in the mind of even the dullest of inmates that the intention was for it to serve as much as a constantly reiterated statement of control as anything else.

The protocol was simplicity itself and written in stone: no personal belongings whatsoever, not even items of clothing, could be brought into the unit as a whole, let alone rooms such as these. Nothing was to be brought in; not books, not magazines, not newspapers - absolutely nothing. The desk was for sitting at, nothing more; no writing implements or other such materials were allowed.

Nor was there much scope for conversation; staff would come and go and might issue instructions, but no more than that. ‘Idle chatter’ was discouraged - besides, in this rather special case, the staff had been instructed not to speak to, or even acknowledge, the subject. This was a form of punishment not uncommonly meted out to recalcitrant or noncompliant subjects and was usually highly effective in its own right, more often than not negating the need for chastisement of a more physical form. Not that such efficacy would stay the cane-hand of the nurses charged with this girl’s care.

Of course due consideration had been paid to the rather atypical circumstances surrounding this particular subject, reflecting the unprecedented likely longevity of her stay. The study’s designers were well aware of the sheer unadulterated boredom that quickly set in under such circumstances. The trick was in knowing how to keep the subject’s mind occupied while remaining within the goalposts of the experimental protocol - any activity, whether cerebral or physical, had to be under the complete and utter control of the experimentalists. In this specific case that solution had earned the girl’s temporary home the new nomenclature of the training room; that melodic cue and the girl’s response to it were part and parcel of that intervention.

Long silent minutes drifted by, the girl holding the same pose, as if some fairytale princess caught and petrified at the very moment of her introduction to her fabled prince.

All the while, in truth, in that drab green and white striped uniform her appearance was more reminiscent of a modern day Cinderella, pre fairy-godmother, then of some mythic flaxen-haired beauty.

Slowly the thick heavy door lumbered opened, just the faintest of hisses announcing its imminent swinging. In immediate response that frozen curtsy was re-animated; its interrupted cycle coming to completion with the girl bobbed low and the hem of her dress held elevated to waist height and smartly out to her sides. Her head bowed in the requisite attitude of submission, she would hold that pose for a slow count of four.

The figure of Matron, her customary semi-transparent plastic apron covering the front of her white uniform dress, filled the doorway, standing as ever, arms folded, her somewhat substantial figure blotting out most of the view of the corridor beyond. Not that her charge made any real effort to see past her these days - she knew only too well how little relief that unchangingly-bleak vista beyond had to offer. The view of the blank virgin-white wall opposite, her distant recall of the barrages of floor-to-ceiling, white-painted, steel bars that stood guard at either

extreme of the short stretch of corridor outside; these things could only serve to further underline the sense of hopeless isolation that had become so indelibly imprinted on her over the weeks and months.

It was best not to think about what lay beyond past the walls and doors and bars and so she tried not to - but in so doing she was only succeeding in isolating herself further, adding in her own layer of security. But this was her coping strategy, for what it was worth, she had no choice in it. Each day would see her diligently working away at further adding to the confinement of her little internal mental dungeon and locking herself a little more securely within her own mind.

Day by day, step by step, all this time she had been gradually growing more and more withdrawn; she was loosing track, not so much of time, that sense had faded long ago, but of events, of her own actions. The freedom ‘out there’, beyond her institutional imprisonment, was too painful to contemplate; the scent of wild flowers, the butter-gold sun, the chatter of tiny children and barking of large dogs, the bitter-sweet bite of strong cider - these were sensations mourned too deeply, too intensely, to bear conjuring as memories. Yet neither could she bear any longer the blank stare of those soulless walls, nor the implacable commands of those tirelessly chiming bells and gongs that ruled her every action. She had nowhere to go, so she just folded in on herself.

Short term it seemed to ease the pain - but was it at the expense of her mind? There were times she would withdraw so completely as to no longer be consciously aware of what she was doing. But then again, she didn’t have to know what she was doing, did she? She would be doing whatever she had been told to do, whatever those gongs and bells had told her to do. She didn’t have to decide any more, didn’t have to think what to do... so she just didn’t think at all...and then, all of a sudden, she would be safely tucked up in bed, the day having passed as if in the blink of an eye, as if in a dream or in a trance.

It was this place, this room, this treatment that was doing it to her - it was destroying her, squeezing her personality from her like the juice from a grape crushed underfoot, breaking her will, fragmenting her mind.

It was what they had always intended this place to accomplish for her, what they had wanted for her all along. And yet, even as these revelations rained down upon her, at some level she was recognising the fact that she was actually quite wrong in this apportioning of blame, that in actuality she was hiding the truth from the self. They weren’t doing this to her, nor was it the place itself, not as such; they had her doing it to herself.

That was the horror of it; they had her hard at work, breaking herself down - and she was making a good job of it too. True, they had created the toolkit. But it was she who was presently wielding the mallet and chisel. All they had had to do was sit back, wait, watch and presumably enjoy the spectacle - she was well aware that hidden surveillance facilities were everywhere, both audio and visual, they didn’t hide the fact - their denial of her privacy was all part of the treatment.

She blinked and reality, for what it was worth, returned; she felt a tear splatter heavily against her dress front, another wind its way down her cheek. A soft hand was lifting her chin and another was lovingly patting the sadness from her eyes, the tissue feeling as soft as cloud.

“Come with me sweetheart; I’m here to help you” a gentle voice cooed, soothingly. The nurse’s pretty blue eyes smiled out from a face much robbed of profile by a wimple-like white headdress that left little else exposed. She spoke with the sort of patronising tone and simplistic, pacifying phrasing one would ordinarily reserve for addressing a very small and very frightened child. Yet it was not entirely inappropriate: here before her, red- eyed and cowed, was a small and very frightened child - albeit a child fast approaching the age of majority.

“There are some very nice people here to visit you. They’ve come a very long way especially to see you and they’re so excited that they want to see you right away - isn’t that nice?.

“Yes n,n,nurse.” She had been spoken to and It was a question. She knew to speak when spoken to and that questions had always to be answered - most politely. And so she answered - in simpering tones where once there might have been an outraged sneer if not full-blown tirade - despite not having fully grasped the implication. Smiling in response, the nurse continued with her oozing, rambling little pep-talk in that same childishly treacly vein:

“Yes...and they’re very important people too...and they’re all here just to see you ...that’s right, little one, little old you - I’m sure you will want to look your best for you visitors, won’t you?”

“Yes, p,p,please, n,n,nurse.”

“There’s a good girl.”

Strangely, Matron had now disappeared from sight, but her sharply enunciated cut-glass vowels could be heard addressing the nurse from some distant point. There was something amiss here, the girl could feel it - there was an unaccustomed edge to that string of commands, urgency...no, it was something more...there was clearly something wrong with her. Matron’s voice was coming in quick-fire staccato bursts, her words stumbling and tripping over one another and punctuated with mistimed breaths. She had never known Matron behave like this. To sense the woman’s control waning should have cheered her - but it didn’t. On the contrary; in actual fact it was scaring her to death.

There was sense of fluster entering into those hurriedly barked commands...no... not fluster...it was more like...more like...panic, absolute blind panic. That was it, the woman was in a state of total panic - in fact they all were, she suddenly realised. All the staff, although trying their best to disguise it and one or two succeeding seemed as if on the verge of complete panic.

Another two nurses had now arrived, practically at a run, their laboured breathing evidence of having covered some distance at haste - they were brusquely addressed, despite their obvious effort.

“Quick, get her out of there. Get her changed, showered...and for heaven’s sake get those bloody ridiculous pigtails off of her” Matron was shouting from some way off, the strain now evident in the hoarseness growling up from her throat. “...and then I want her in a standard examination gown and up into the main building A.S.A.P. There’s a standard wheelchair outside the shower room - use that; I don’t want any form of restraint to be seen in use. I’ll hold them off as long as I can. We can still pull this off if we can get it together fast enough... if we don’t... well, that’ll be that! We’ll all be through - the whole fucking place will be through, finished...and us with it! Now, get a move on for fuck’s sake!”

Running for the Door

Suddenly Lavinia’s little world of stasis and unaltered routine had become a hive of swarming, buzzing confusion...She was being hurried along the corridor now, in a semi-run, a hard slap from the nurse’s tawse across the back of her thighs having spurred her into action. They left her private little stretch of corridor through one of its end security grilles; the access gate at its centre, having already been unlocked, was hanging open, swung back against the side wall. At a trot, a nurse leading her by the hand and another following up closely behind, they rounded the corner and passed along another passageway, in all other aspects identical to the first but seemingly stretching off tunnel-like into the distance. Cell-like doors passed identically and monotonously by, one after another on their left, punctuating the wall like padded drab white sentinel monoliths and each equipped with that telltale covered spy-hole.

On their left, rectangular windows rushed past like so many carriage windows along some strange prison train. Each was as opaque as if white-washed and lay back behind its own protective plastic meshwork screen, the latter fitted flush to the wall. Each displayed that alternating pattern of light and dark-shaded vertical banding, typifying security vouchsafed behind thick externally-mounted steel bars, which had, from the outset, been the source of so much dismay for the girl - and the others like her that populated the place.

They passed through a second, then a third, then a fourth security grille; each identical in every way to the last and negotiated without need for pause, having uncharacteristically been left unlocked and swung back. Their path was dizzying, the passageway turning first to the left and then to the right and then again to the right, as if to double back on itself, before, as if having a changed its mind mid-route, it once again rounded sharply to the left.

A junction was reached, a hexagonal glossy-white sterilised space occupied by what appeared to be a nurse’s station or control desk of some sort, complete with a pair of computer terminals and a desk-phone. From here there branched off six corridors, arranged likes the spokes of a wheel.

The way immediately ahead of them was blocked by one of those ubiquitous floor-to-ceiling arrays of bars that seemed to choke the place. A large signboard to its right caught her eye, some sort of bullet-pointed list - but it was meant for the staff not for her and she dutifully averted her eyes, suddenly overcome by the sort of clammy cold dread that most would associate with spiders or snakes or perhaps rats. Besides, there was no time to dawdle; already she was being hustled towards the passageway immediately to their left. Despite the fact that it appeared to virtually double back the way they had just come they took it anyway - it was the only clear path open to them in any case.

All the other exits, from the little she could see past their locked gates, were short affairs, cul-de-sacs seemingly regularly punctuated on both sides by doors - these being set back from the walls and apparently arranged in a staggered fashion, one to the left and then one to the right, perhaps six in all in each case. One such had been abandoned with all the doors left swung outward, each thick, sturdy, white painted and - where viewed edge on - not unlike something that might secure a bank vault. The impression each passageway gave was unmistakably that of a penitentiary wing, albeit in miniature - she half-expected to see a prison officer emerge at any moment.

The steel gate through which they now passed had been left lazily half-open, as if having been hurriedly unlocked as an afterthought to a rushed departure. Partially obstructing their path, it had to be swung back as they pressed through. Ahead the passageway appeared daunting; it looked just as endless and convoluted as the one they had just come from... and Lavinia was now feeling tired, very tired.

The girl’s nylon uniform dress, long-sleeved, button-through and styled like some bizarre crossover between a 1960s ladies overall and a schoolgirl’s summer dress of the same period, was becoming sticky with sweat around her arms and armpits and around her neck where the regulation regarding the constant fastening of the top button insured the shirt-style collar was always kept neatly closed beneath her chin. The rest was kept protected for the time being by the full-length nylon slip she wore underneath and which was, in turn, spared by the elastane corselet she wore beneath that; but the perspiration was beginning to wick its way through even those layers of fabric.

What was more, her thick heavy diaper was being compressed, squeezed and rung-out with each step, as if put through a mangle. Its loathsome contents were being rhythmically and systematically pumped past the rubber leg-cuffs of her knickers to ooze and trickle down the short expanse of wobbling flesh at the top of her thighs.

The golden rivulets were disappearing relatively harmlessly into the myriad capillary channels of the fine weave of her stocking tops, as if soaking into blotting tissue - the lubrication was rendering the rasping hiss of the welts as they rubbed past each other softer, slicker and more fluid in tone.

The darker, more viscous material, though, hung in unspeakable globs around the leg-cuff elastic; the stickier of it clung to her flesh, the less so was thrown off from time to time to decorate the inside of her skirt and slip or, worse, to spray as a fine splattering of oily dark rain, conspicuously staining the bottle green plastic of her shoes and the surrounding white flooring as she ran.

But that was not the worst of it, not by long chalk: She was now quite breathless, struggling for air. Her lungs burning with exertion she was puffing and blowing like an old train and coughing like a rusty hinge. What was more her limbs were failing; her leg muscles were beyond exhaustion, the pain from each mingling together to become one vast swirling torturous sea of flame - her arms and shoulders too.

But here was a girl who had always placed great importance on fitness, who had run marathons and half marathons, who had trained for hour upon hour in the dance studio, honing her flexibility, stretching and drawing out ligaments and tendons, toning muscle. What was more, the nurse to the fore was barely breathing heavy and the one bringing up the rear, the one that had initially arrived at her room so breathless, was actually recovering her composure as they went.

For the first time in her life she actually felt fat; despite the support of her corselet her belly seemed to wobble as she moved, building up a rhythm all of its own. Her upper thighs and bottom too seemed to be weighing her down and had their own dancing rhythm for her to contend with. As for her breasts; despite their unnatural under-wired high elevation they felt heavy, pendulous. They swung first to one side then to the other, then back again, as if determined to pull her off balance, while the cups straining to constrain all that flesh, being open fronted, left both nipples and areolae free to receive the unrelenting caress of her smooth nylon under slip with every move.

And yet she had never been one particularly endowed in that department. Dancers generally weren’t and such she had always aspired to - it was that or catwalk modelling, she could never quite make up her mind. But it was in dance where her real talent lay; her future lay in the ballet, that was what she had been told - and in classical dance over-endowment was definitely not an advantage.

How had she allowed herself to get into this state, to be puffing and blowing like an old woman - and after no more than a couple of minutes of fast trotting? How had she gotten to the point where her body felt like constrained blancmange, her limbs so lardy?

They must have known what was happening to her, they must have. There was that woman that used to visit her in her room, such a welcome break from the monotony - those visits had been a lifeline for her. Not that there had ever been any social aspect to them. Conversation, for what it was, consisted at most of a series of questions, most of which required simple yes or no answers and beyond which any attempted elaboration risked a stroke or two of Matrons cane.

These were dietician’s visits; they had begun well after her removal from the ‘schoolroom’ following her second episode of so-called ‘wilful non-compliance with experimental protocol’. Only after she had been incarcerated in the so-called ‘training room’ for quite some time - just how long she had no way of knowing - did the assessment of her ‘nutritional status’ and of her various ‘anthropomorphic indices’ suddenly become of such a concern to them.

How regular or irregular those visits had been there was no way of telling, but great care was clearly taken that the procedure and routine on those occasions never varied one iota, even down to the words exchanged.

Life under a Dietician’s Care

The woman always had an authoritative and somewhat haughty air about her and would walk in, pushing her trolley and accompanied by Matron, as if about to bestow some great favour, as if she expected Lavinia to quite literally prostrate herself at her feet in gratitude for her attention. She eschewed the type of uniform dress Lavinia was used to seeing Matron and her nurses wearing in favour of a fairly standard white doctor’s coat and even this would vary in length from visit to visit and on occasion would appear ill-fitting as if borrowed for the occasion. The only other concession she appeared to have been willing to make to the unit’s protocol was the adoption of the face-framing nun-like white headdress that all the staff wore; it denied the subject the distraction of all those different hair styles and colours and other such concerns that were best left behind in the world outside.

Invariably at the start of the proceedings Lavinia would have to offer up her full bedpan for inspection. This being designed for the purpose was transparent and divided crosswise so as to provide two compartments, the one to the fore collecting the liquid waste and the one to the rear, the solid - a graduated scale moulded into the plastic and running up the face of the central divider provided the means to estimate volume and size as appropriate.

The dietician would then run through a questionnaire, ticking boxes, pausing from time to time to ask that her subject estimate her stool size and texture, the quantity of urine passed, its colour, whether it was cloudy or clear and so on - and always in that irritatingly-affected 1930s public school accent of hers, with its subtle shading of fenland farm-girl that she could never quite disguise and that Lavinia could never quite pin down geographically.

As a hangover from the procedure of the schoolroom this had been nothing new to her of course, although there it had been the dormitory mistress playing the inquisitor’s role. But nevertheless it was not something that would ever lessen in lip-biting humiliation through familiarity - it addressed and assaulted the most basic ingrained levels of self-respect and revulsion.

In the schoolroom, odour was always the last category to be checked; the bedpan had to be brought up to the nose, first the front compartment then the rear. In her isolated ‘training room’ it had been relegated to the penultimate, although more stringently carried out in the hands of the dietician. Under her supervision it had no longer been acceptable to hover fleetingly above each compartment; the pan now had to be held right up to the face so that, with her head craned over it, her prettily-refined and slightly upturned nose was now obliged to penetrate well into each in turn.

The nostrils had to be flaring just above the surface of the contents before that woman was satisfied. Nor could she hide from the sight and the shame behind closed eyes; this was watched for most carefully by both women and Matron’s cane would always waiting at the ready.

Indeed, after about the third or fourth visit, the woman had wheeled in her trolley to reveal the addition of a dressing-table sized mirror fitted in a stainless steel frame and conspicuously covering the majority of one side. From that day onwards that part of the procedure had been carried out with the girl seated smartly upright on the side of her bed and obliged to face the vanity-defeating self-mocking criticism of that trolley-side mounted mimic.

Then came that part that was just for her and her alone,; tagged on to the bottom of the list - and categorised as a quick test for diabetes along with the results of the urine flow glucose and ketone strip tests that would be performed later - was one word: taste.

Still seated on the edge of her bed and required to face her own reflection at all times, she would be required to stick out her tongue; it had to be forced right out as hard as possible, extended to its utmost extent, to a painful extent, and held rigid.

An eye dropper would be used; the dietician, having first donned a latex glove, would carefully place four or five drops of the golden-yellow fluid along the centre of the girl’s outstretched tongue. She would stand there, stopwatch in hand, counting off the seconds and watching for any deviation of the girls gaze away from that of her violet-eyed doppelganger, before ordering the girl to withdraw her tongue, taste and swallow. There then would be a short series of questions fired at her, the answers to which were always to be in the form of “yes miss” or “no miss”...Was it salty, sweet, bitter or perhaps tart? And so on and so on...

This procedure would be repeated three times, each time the same taste assay would be run through and for each test a fresh sample would drawn up into dropper once the previous had been squirted into a tissue. Of course the woman could easily have extracted a sample from one of the bottles she would decant off for laboratory testing. But without exception, each time she would make a great show of drawing up a sample directly from the girl’s bedpan - it had the greater psychological impact. She would gently slosh around the latter’s contents on the pretext of obtaining a good average sample while in truth aiming to gain and hold the girl’s attention. If there was any residue of a suitably runny consistency present at the pan’s other end she would let the dropper hover there, perhaps even let her hand drop down until the implement’s tip would dangled dangerously close to the surface, all the time watching the girl’s eyes for her reaction.

Always, on the second and third occasions, prior to the drops being placed on her tongue, Lavinia would first be required to tilt back her head while a couple of drops were applied to each nostril in turn. As in the second part of this extended procedure, the stopwatch would be consulted and by the time she was instructed to again face forward and put out her tongue the first inklings of a trickle would be beginning to form in the back of her throat.

Although Lavinia could not possibly have recognised it at the time, she had not been the lone victim in all this that she might have seemed. Janice Silverman, herself, had been as much the victim. After all was said and done, the woman was head of dietetics in a prestigious private rest home, sanatorium and rehabilitation retreat catering for the very upper echelons of society. She was supposed to be someone who could be relied upon to act ethically and responsibly, as part of a caring profession.

Yet with each visit to the unit those professional values and ideals, once held so dear and once so cherished, had been eroded further - she had been possessed by the spirit of the place as if the very fabric of the building had some sentient will of its own.

True, Ms Silverman had always secretly harboured a certain attraction to young women whom she perceived as having a somewhat submissive bearing. It was also true that there had been occasions when she had found her thoughts running to fantasy and playfully dallying with elements that could be described as possessed of a gently-sadistic aspect. But these had been fantasies and no more than that; in her private life she had always been loving and caring, even if on occasion she could be somewhat overbearing, albeit in a motherly way. Yes, like most of us she had occasionally been host to certain...darker desires, shall we say - harmless phantasms locked in the world of imagination, where such things belong. And that was how they would have remained; had she not been introduced to this place... it had given her full rein...and power, absolute power. It had torn open her psyche, let out all those little, once harmless, desires and urges, allowed them to scatter unfettered, then nurtured them further.

She would never have considered herself cruel by nature and yet all of this - this so-called ‘dietetic assessment’ - was of her doing, her development. And every time she looked into that girl’s eyes, those pretty violet eyes, every time she saw the dread hiding there, she would feel the cruelty growing in her heart and she would know... this was not yet far enough.

If only Lavinia had known, when that dropper had last been dangled above that foulness, just how close that taunt was to reality, just how seriously her tormentor had been considering it, how the woman had thought through the pitfalls and dangers and had surmounted each one in turn. It was to have been the very next session; an earlier sample had been retained and would’ve been liquefied to the required viscosity and treated with an antibacterial and antiviral agent to remove the danger of infection - boiling would have removed the pungency, something to be avoided. A simple sleight of hand would have done the rest, swapping the bedpan sample for her previously prepared taster - the psychological impact would have been the same, as would that look of revulsion in the girl’s eyes as she submitted for the first time to her new treatment.

And submit the girl would have, that was part of the irony of the situation - for as much as she had to endure in each one of these sessions, there was little greater threat that could have been be offered up to persuade her, should she have refused, than the threat of their cancellation. Undoubtedly, a few missed sessions would have seen her on her knees begging for an appointment with the dietician - such was the level of isolation they had her under, such was her state of mind.

A Panic in the Salon

It was the wheelchair that had snapped her out of it...or rather her collision with it; she had run smack into the back of the thing. The nurse ahead of her had swung out and around it at the last moment and - having somehow managed to select the correct key on the run - was already struggling to unlock the door beyond. Standing close-in to the side wall and orientated side-on to the door and having avoided going to the trouble of detaching the key ring from her belt in an attempt to save time, the woman was now straining and cursing while hurriedly she tried to bring key and lock together. The elasticated crepe nurse’s belt she wore, being loath to cooperate and its upper edge curling down in its determination, tugged frustratingly back through the glittering taut stainless-steel key chain, prompting exasperated gasps from both women and charging dearly in wasted time for the folly of this fumble-fingered strategy.

All at once tumblers chattered, a foot and hand thumped in dull padded concert, as if in impatient retribution for the door’s reluctance, and an open palm, slapping sharply between Lavinia’s shoulder blades and near knocking the remaining breath from her aching lungs, propelled her forward.

The scene that presented itself before her was startlingly strange in its familiarity, eliciting a gasp that owed its origin as much to incomprehension as it did to surprise. Spurred by shock and driven by instinct her hand momentarily went to her mouth, only to be lowered almost immediately to join its sibling in front of her skirt. A cold shiver of dread running down her spine at the realisation of what she had just done, albeit unbidden, she assumed the stance that all good obedient institution inmates took up when waiting to be told what to do next.

Her shoes were pressed smartly side-by-side, her wrists were kept crossed in front of her dress and her hands presented with the palms facing outwards while simultaneously pressing back the nylon fabric against her thighs, her shoulders were rounded and her head bowed sheepishly as if in shame. Standing as quietly as could be managed, commensurate with regaining her breath, she looked every bit the perfect product of the institution’s regime, spirit all but crushed and personality drowning beneath endless months of relentless discipline.

She had seen enough, though, to be near certain that it was the same room: The hairdressers basin, the barber’s chair-cum-obstetric exam couch with its leg-rests and stirrups hung with leather restraint straps, their buckles glinting in the light like Christmas tree baubles, the dental surgery lighting system, with its lenses and lamps, cantilever-mounted overhead - all were shockingly too familiar.

To her left an alcove had, mounted across its width, a rail holding six transparent plastic hairdressing-salon capes. These too she had seen many, many times before; she could almost feel the thick polyurethane, soft yet heavy, sweatily adhering to her skin. She could recall too the white nylon zipper running up the back from the hem to the top of the exaggerated mandarin collar and how it would pull the latter closed around the neck - presumably originally so as to protect the clothes of the wearer, although they were always naked beneath it save for a broad, white, padded medical restraint belt worn around the waist to which their wrists would be immobilised.

It was an appalling, drowning, tent-like affair designed to drape over the chair as well as its occupant, once seated. She recalled waiting in line with the other girls from the schoolroom for her turn in the chair, hideously aware of her nakedness underneath its voluminous draping calf-length folds of transparent plastic.

A claustrophobically-enclosed, steaming, humid microclimate would quickly develop beneath that covering, causing beads of perspiration to run like glistening rivulets down skin rendered a glowing velvet pink by the warmth - little trickles that would work their way down her back to slip and insinuate irritatingly between her buttocks, others that would somehow adhere to and run over their broadly sweeping curves and that would bring a torturous reawakening to stinging freshly-laid cane-wheals.

All the while she would be trying to avoid the sight of the widespread intimacy of whichever unfortunate happened to be receiving her ‘hygienic shave’ and vaginal douche at the time. Not that she ever could avoid that sight, of course, the chair faced outwards into the room and those waiting did so in single file facing it. There would be six girls and sooner or later each and every one of them would reach the front of the queue and have to watch the nurse sitting on her little stall down between the previous girl’s legs wielding the razor. Those once dealt with would be obliged to rejoin the queue - and so it would continue until, finally, the first girl to be treated would find she was obliged to face the wide-spread femininity of the last.

Not one girl would ever leave that room dry-eyed and with her pride intact; even the most self-confident was left humbled and bowed by the experience. And it would be repeated time and time again, over and over, rubbing away at any reawakening of self-esteem and vanity as a washerwoman might work at a stubborn stain - refusing to fade completely yet bleached out a little more with each application.

But it couldn’t possibly be the same room - could it? That room had been part of the self enclosed schoolroom complex. Whereas this room lay behind a side door off of what was obviously a central thoroughfare, that other room had been reached by way of a truncated passage leading straight off the dormitory and of no more than a couple of meters in length at most. They’d never once had to leave that zone for any purpose; that sort of arrangement was typical here, it was part of what made the place so secure for holding girls who, like herself, given the choice would almost certainly have decided to end their participation in the study - no matter how generous the fee that would have to be relinquished - once they discovered its true nature and how tough it was to be be.

There appeared to be no other means of access other than the doorway through which they had just passed and in any case they had entered facing the chair just as they would have done had it been that other room - clearly any familiarity was merely an illusion born of that typically institutional obsession with standardisation in design and layout.

But then her eyes picked up on the one defect despoiling the glossed white plastic perfection of the chair. She recognised it at once; a tear in the fabric at the side of one arm. It was a teeny thing, insignificant to most and clearly overlooked by the staff, but to any starved of the sight of anything save white plastic, white linoleum and green and white striped uniforms it was a monstrous carbuncle.

She could clearly remember how she would surreptitiously run her fingertips over it, relishing the texture of the underside of the teeny hinged flap of plastic and the bubbly foam padding beneath, learning every undulation and contour of that fractal landscape, while always fearful that a nurse might see and that it would be repaired.

One hung on to such insignificant things here, they were little lifelines; even a bluebottle, or an ant come to that, would have been viewed as a wondrously fascinating distraction - not that she had ever seen one here. In fact come to think about it, she had never seen even the teeniest insect.

If further confirmation was needed it came now in the form of the narrow cylindrical shower booth standing in the far right corner. Its curved door, presently slid back and revealing the sparsely appointed plastic interior, when closed around the occupant would restrict the latter’s potential to avoid the icily spraying jets, trapping her arms close to her sides behind its tough transparent Lucite wall while denying nothing from the supervising nurse’s eye.

There had been a dark mark at the base of that booth, just a few centimetres in length. Just such a streaked, curving scar now seemed to zoom into focus, pulling into horrific slow-motion close-up just as the rest of her surroundings seemed to recede in concert - momentarily she was forced to put out a hand to steady herself.

A gyrating dissonance of past and present, of recall, logic and truth washed around her: she felt closer to madness in that moment than at any point. Yet while she felt close to insanity, all around her insanity reigned supreme. Headless chickens masquerading as nurses meandered and bumbled and collided in their haste. A breathless urgency seemed to have infected their every action with a gawkish, self-conscious ineffectualness.

Somewhere scissors clattered noisily, falling from floundering fingers and rattling around a white enamel dish. Elsewhere, a nurse, robbed of her usual self-assured composure, fiddled irritatedly with the key to one of the flush-mounted wall cupboards, bemoaning all the while the clinic’s obsession with keeping even the most innocuous of supplies under lock and key. Its double fronted doors delineated from the wall itself by little more than their outline and the keyhole lying within the borders of one, ordinarily she would have relished the additional symbolic control it gave her over her patient. The cupboard unexpectedly springing open in response to the woman’s fumbling; three half-litre polythene bottles tumbled heavily in quick succession, each landing in turn with a dull thud on the white Formica work-surface below. Two others seemed to hover momentarily around and about the valiantly juggling nurse’s hands, before one was snatched from the air and the other sent spinning down obliquely to land weightily in the plastic hairdressers hand basin abutting the wall behind the chair. In the background, its three siblings, having each rolled slowly across the worktop as if drawn magnetically towards its edge, began their own tumbling descent, each thumping harmlessly onto the yielding surface of the impeccably white linoleum flooring.

Had circumstances been different it would have been comedic - a farcical dance of neurosis; the performers sidestepping, pirouetting, weaving to and fro and in an out of each other’s path in terrifyingly chaotic orbits. As it was she was claustrophobically enclosed, disorientated, terrified and buried deep within the twisted, convoluted bowels of a privately owned secure psychiatric unit. She had been kept for months isolated, repeatedly subjected to the cutting slash of the cane across her bare buttocks until she cried like a newborn, denied the use of the toilet and placed in diapers, psychologically conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs until she salivated when the ‘meal-bell’ rang and would void her bowels into her knickers at the sound of the ‘toilet-bell’. And now this, this all pervading anxiety, this panic...It frightened her, confused her.

She found herself yearning for the comforting order she had come to expect, had become so used to living under. She needed the discipline now, she had come to love the strictness of the regime in a way; she didn’t want to have to think any more, make decisions any more. She had come to find a strange freedom in imprisonment - but it was the duplicitous freedom of learnt passivity, the freedom of the brainwashed.

“Come along; let’s get those things off you. Hurry girl...hurry.” Anxiety modulated the nurse’s voice, introducing a certain quavering edge were a velvety smooth confidence would ordinarily have exuded. Their part of the show was over; now it was their charge’s turn to perform...

Hurriedly relieved of hospital incontinence knickers, stockings, nylon overall, thick sweat-heavy nylon slip and corselet in that order, she was pushed down into the discomforting white, spotless leatherette embrace of that chair. The rasping of Velcro restraints filled her ears, providing a counterpoint to effort-laden grunts, exasperated sighs, the soft crackling of the nurses’ thin white plastic aprons - worn to protect their uniforms - and the rustling of their full-skirted dresses. Left for a moment to her own devices, Lavinia’s mind begun to wander...

She had possessed such pert little apple-round breasts, somehow so much more appropriate for a dancer - even if she had been somewhat sensitive about her lack of cleavage when still at school. But then, at that point in her life, she had yet to undergo the burgeoning and not inconsiderable development that had occurred since her arrival in this place....

Why oh why had she had to think of that? Unconsciously her gaze had drifted down, engaging involuntarily with the glistening-pink and sweat-streaked waves of flesh quivering beneath the misty, near-transparent, soft plastic folds of the hairdresser’s cape now draped around her. The bountifully-ripened pendulous bosom, the outwardly-swollen convex-curved little belly, rippled rather than rolled with fat, full and fertile while still safe from any accusation of obesity - and below all of that, those curving fruitful hips and swelling seat-filling bottom. She felt nothing but contempt for that body, and, somehow, it for her. In a sense it wasn’t truly hers any more - and therein lay her greatest shame. It had been grown on her, nurtured like some market garden product - and somehow without her knowledge. It had been grown over the top of that lithe, apple-breasted, taut-muscled and slim-hipped dancer’s frame that she had toiled so long at the ballet bar to achieve; submerging it, suffocating it.

Closing one’s eyes was never an option here; she knew to expect a slap to one cheek or the other if not both - never a hard brutal face slapping, just a sharp reprimanding reminder, but stinging none nonetheless. But looking up brought only the hideous overview reflected back from the wall mirror: The maturely-curvaceous, overabundance, to her eyes at least, of female flesh, all melon breasted, well-fleshed and dimpled-knee fecundity, sat awkwardly at odds beneath the rounded, double chinned doll’s head that surmounted it.

Away from the corruption of the sun, she had developed an interestingly-pale porcelain complexion rather than the sickly pallor one might have expected - and even that was presently being reinvigorated by the judicial application of a subtle, beige powdered foundation, the nurse leaning away from time to time to appraise her handiwork. The deep violet eyes gazing back from the mirror had lost none of their strikingness - but there was a fishmonger’s-slab glassy flatness, where once a holographic dusting of blue diamonds had danced with childish enthusiasm. Where once there had been careless abandon there was now abandonment of care; the wide-eyed child-woman that had bewitched so many, denuded of brows and lashes, had been left with an empty and disproportionately expansive gaze - a headlight-tethered, fear-petrified rabbit inhabited those velvet pools, not the enthusiastic wonderment of childhood ambition.

Another nurse came around to the front, blocking the girl’s damning self appraisal with the white plastic glare of her crinkling apron. Quickly the woman busied herself, applying a thick mascara-like substance around the girl’s eyes, following the natural contours of the brow-line and working piecemeal from the outside inwards, adding a little to the left eye then a little to the right and balancing out the symmetry as she went. Whatever it was, the substance was quickly drying to a fine, velvety hair-like texture on contact with the skin and gradually, with every application, where those brows had for so long been kept carefully depilated, new cosmetic replacement eyebrows began to sprout in their place.

But, the girl quickly came to realise, these proxies were not intended to follow the finely-arching line she would herself have favoured; that pretty, girlish, yet sophisticatedly feminine, look that once would have been realised and expensively maintained through untold sessions with the beautician’s tweezers. Rather, the nurse’s work was hurried; the thick, bushy dark brow-line now developing was simply that suggested by her natural brow contouring and with no concession whatsoever given to the aesthetic result.

The intention seemed to be merely to disguise the fact that her eyebrows had been shaved off, although she could presently hazard no guess as to why that should suddenly have become such a priority. The effect did at least look naturalistic, human, but it was anything but attractive: True, it was no longer the face of an expressionless mannequin staring back at her - but neither was it the glowing, fine-boned made-over beauty-mask that would once have smiled back from the cosmetic-counter mirror on the Clarins stand in Selfridges, late on a Saturday afternoon in London’s Oxford Street. But that had been in some far off, half forgotten, time when she had been allowed to wander free.

That had been a freedom that, like many young women of her age, she had taken for granted rather than as a privilege - but only in as far as one might expect the right, in western society at least; a transgression of law notwithstanding. But where she differed from her peers, others of her age who undoubtedly at that very moment would have been lining the counters at the sales or waiting patiently in the nail bar or supping overpriced coffee, was in the loss of that freedom that they still enjoyed. Indeed, it was not so much that, as the way by which she had lost it; she had broken no laws, she had gone against no authority and yet she was not free to come and go as she pleased, she was not free to choose what to wear - she didn’t even have any say as to how to style her hair, not even in as far as its colour.

How many girls of her age had been denied even a glimpse of the sun, the sky, the trees and the grass... for how long...six months, now? Nine months? Perhaps even a year? How many girls of her age had been forced to sit day after day in total silence staring at blank white walls and a misty white frosted window - and even that behind steel bars - while clothed in a sweaty, nylon green and white striped dress somewhat reminiscent of a cross between a strict boarding school summer dress and a prison uniform? How many, even if imprisoned, would have as part of their sentence the regular slashing application of a thin whippy cane across their bare buttocks; thin, red-hot curving licks of fire-ant spittle breaking the vestigial adult in her, again and again, to sobbing, bended-knee childhood?

And even in that thought there was that element of limitation; it was inherent in the word, sentence. If not for her innocence, if there had been some crime to make amends for, there would be a sentence, a term to be served, an end to it - there would be some legal limitation applicable, a tariff, she would have some legal rights. As it was, three times she had thought she had made it through to the end - and three times she had been given further documentation to sign, effectively agreeing to begin again from scratch, from day one. There were disclaimers, release forms and more recently - and worryingly - that ‘voluntary admission form’ effectively changing her status to one of ‘elective psychiatric patient’, whatever that might mean.

Of course, it would have been all too easy to point out to her that it had been her choice whether to sign or not. After all, every agreement she had signed had been liberally strewn with legalese assurances as to it being of her ‘own free will’ and without ‘coercion or outside influence’. But such criticism would have been unfairly levelled. After a night spent standing, strictly supervised, in the corner at the end of her bed, with her hands on her head and six freshly-laid incendiary tram lines throbbing beneath her skin-tight latex knickers, she could hardly be expected to have been thinking clearly. Indeed, with the subtly alluded promise of twelve more rattan strokes to come and another sleepless night spent corner standing; when the time had come, she had hardly been able to scribble her name fast enough.

In truth, though, in some ways her freedom could be said to have been not so much been taken from her as lost to her. It was such a precious thing she had lost, yet she had lost it so carelessly, standing by and watching as free will was eroded - and barely missing it. In fact, freedom had begun to slip from her grasp the very first day she had met the woman she would one day come to call ‘aunt’.

It had become eroded further the day she accepted that woman’s invitation to take up a room in her home; it had been long gone in its entirety by the time that overbearing, manipulative woman had begun to impose those curious dress restrictions of hers. It was a jarring revelation, but one that raised more questions than it answered. Not that she would have accepted the obvious conclusions, no matter how unassailable the logic; that she had, in some way, been set up, manipulated over that period in such a way that the path leading her to her present predicament had been the only one truly left open to her.

The muffled clickety-clunk of a key turning in a lock somewhere to the rear snapped her out of it. Her eyes were drawn back to the mirror, dreading contact with her own. Pointedly focusing past her own reflection, fearing the trauma her reaction to the sight might bring, she glanced over her shoulder just in time to catch sight of the door behind easing ajar. From somewhere beyond the narrow opening a disembodied voice hissed urgently:

“For gods sake get a move on, will you - they’re on their way... they’re heading this way right now! We need to get her upstairs ASAP and looking as normal as possible! Matron says to forget everything else, just get rid of those pigtails and get her into her own clothes, if they’ll still fit her.”

There was a dull thud as the door again closed. Around and about her the chaotic fluster of hands, bodies and implements redoubled. Two hands reached forward from behind her head and - grasping one pigtail in each - pulled firmly out to the sides. A second nurse, wielding shears, stepped in from the side and - bobbing in an out and dancing to either side of the first so as to avoid that woman’s arms - sliced cleanly and efficiently through each braid in turn at a point close to where it had been tied off. The terminating stubs of plaited hair, with their broad nylon-glossed green and white striped ribbon bows still intact, were let fall to the floor, coming to rest with a surprisingly solid sound, having been rendered rigid by the saturation of super-glue that had kept their childish adornments safe from interfering fingers.

The pair of hands that had held the plaits now began hastily, yet dexterously, un-braiding the remainder of each, working up from the now truncated ends towards the girls scalp, the nurse’s plastic apron crinkling and hissing back and forth across the buttoned front of her polyester uniform dress as she laboured.

Moments later a device, rather reminiscent of a smallish kitchen mixing bowl, was unceremoniously dumped, upturned, on her head. Manufactured of some tough glossy plastic and as white as everything else in the room, it gave the impression of some bizarre catwalk creation, differing, as it did, from the kitchen utensil by being formed of a closely grouped circle of petal-like segments. An unbroken circular band ran around the circumference of its rim and overlapped itself to one side, whereat a key-like screw fitting could be manually turned to adjust the fit and placement on the subject’s head. This latter adjustment having been duly made, the strange plastic pudding-basin skullcap was rendered closely fitting, encircling her head just above the pretty little elfin points that God and nature had gifted her ears.

All in all, the whole could have been likened to something that might once have been of utility to a milliner in the fitting of a new creation - though somehow it seemed unlikely that a new hat was in the offing here.

The nurse stood to one side, leaning close enough for the girl to feel her breath on her cheek and steadying both herself and the girl’s head by way of one hand pressing down on the centre of the plastic bowl-hat contraption. The scissors emerged from her hip pocket attached to a length of glittering silver-linked chain - they caught the light in mirror-finish star-like flashes in the way that only surgical-quality stainless steel can, the intention now only too obvious. There being little need for the woman to unclip them from their clasp she quickly set to work, slicing along the hairline above the girl’s left eye and working across the forehead to above the right, leaning across the front and trailing the thin cold steel chain across the girl’s cheek and nose as she went and using the plastic ‘pudding bowl’ contraption as a guide. Then, roughly pushing the girl’s head over to the right, she returned her attention to the left-hand side, working along and over the left ear before, pressing the girl’s head forward until her chin rested on the thick rubbery polyurethane of the hairdresser’s cape, she worked her way around round the back.

Sideling around to the girl’s right-hand side she now swapped hands. Manoeuvring the girl’s head hard over to the opposite side with her left hand she went to work with the scissors in her right, slicing along the hairline from above the girl’s right eye, over her right ear to meet up where she had left off at the rear. Little more than a minute had elapsed but in that time Lavinia’s near-shoulder-length growth, calculated to reach a nice institutional collar-length when in plaits - and itself only a meagre, teasing reminder of the magnificent thick waist-length mane she had once sported - had been reduced to a ridiculously short, monk-like remnant.

To Lavinia, throughout, there was a certain numb sense of resignation - the real pain had dissipated long ago, having reached a zenith the day that they had first reduced that rare and wild waist length loveliness of hers to the tamed, mundane and child-like conformity demanded by the institution. But there was more to come...

Somewhere a roughened humming buzz started up, sounding like a wool-muffled swarm of bees. A hand again pressed her head forward and her chin down against her sternum. A warm vibrating sensation, somehow comforting in its way, began stroking up the nape of her neck, lovingly caressing and conforming to the elegant inward curve before, halting with a bump against the plastic cap’s tight rim, dropping back - only to start upward again a moment later along a parallel route. Then, one at a time, the fleshy shells of her ears were folded back and down, surprisingly gently given the haste, allowing the progression of the clippers up and around and along the bowl’s guiding perimeter.

Seconds later and it was all over. The butterfly thumbscrew having been slackened off - loosening the cap’s diabolical plastic grip on her head - the ‘bowl’ was popped off, revealing a ‘hairstyle’ that even in Lavinia’s numb state brought fresh tears to silently well up in her violet eyes. Velcro restraints were peeled away from around her wrists, elbows, waist, ankles, from over her breasts and chest and she was ushered out of the chair.

Still draped in the heavy, ankle length polymer cape, sweat trickling down the backs of her knees and her curves embarrassingly and unflatteringly outlined in grey-tinted semi-transparency, she was ushered out through the door and briskly propelled along the corridor and into the waiting lift, a nurse walking either side, one taking up the rear and supervising her every move.

A key was dragged out on a chain from the hip pocket of a nurse’s dress and inserted and turned in a lock. With a pneumatic sigh, white plastic-padded doors slid shut and a shuddering unaccustomed momentary loading of the knees told its story. For a few moments after that there was barely any perceptible sensation of movement at all, just a gentle vibration coming up through the floor and an occasional slight sideways movement. Then, to the accompaniment of a hissing and faintly metallic grinding, another passageway opened up before them.

The contrast could hardly have more stark. Where previously there had been featureless, perspective-defying, white, where there had been spongy linoleum, yielding vinyl-padded walls and discreetly-inset indirect lighting, there was now richly patinaed reddish-brown wood panelling, thick ruby-red carpeting, hanging oils and watercolours and tastefully positioned spotlights and up-lighters. But there was something else too - for a split-second the girl was at a loss, then the impression resolve itself; fresh air! It was the nature-tainted taste of fresh air, real air, not the sterile purified air of the secure unit in which had been for so long kept.

Nudged out from behind and almost reluctantly shuffling forward, unsure of the true nature of this new situation, she noted immediately to her left a door hanging open; beyond she could just make out a comfortable, reassuringly-girlish bedroom, simpering in soothing pinks, lemon-mousse yellow and meadow-flower blue. Only the dark solidarity of the steel bars, shadowed in grey against the sun-butter yellow of the frosted window, itself fringed by soft blue flounced curtains, dared entertain anything untoward. It was a young girl’s bedroom, pure and simple...If, that is, such were to be bound up in the protection of a hospital’s secure psychiatric wing and placed under lock and key. The thick door, wood panelled on the outside, softly padded steel on the inside, the sturdy tamperproof lock, the covered eye hole with its brass hinged plate; all these things had their own story to tell.

Laid out on a light, frothy and frilled nylon duvet of quilted cornflower-blue was a selection of clothing that would have been instantly recognisable to any teenage girl living in any era since the late 1950s. There was a pair of well worn blue jeans, a selection of T-shirts, a black leather jacket and - on the floor, half-covered by the flounced edging of the divan - her old battered sneakers. Her own old trainers, the ones she had bought in that market so long ago and had worn so long that she had beaten them into submission, were just sitting there, waiting for her like a pair of faithful terriers!

Unceremoniously she was shoved through the door and thrust towards the bed - her escort retreating, to be only moments later replaced by a solitary nurse. Unlike the anachronistic all-white uniform Lavinia had become accustomed to seeing in the unit, this latter woman was wearing the everyday uniform of the hospital proper; a tightly belted, trim-waisted knee-length long-sleeved dress, in a light-blue viscose mixture with its contrasting white buttoned cuffs and mandarin collar trimmed with light blue piping.

A matching light-blue tippet covered her shoulders and was decorated by the hospital badge embroidered in dark blue, maroon and gold thread, as was the breast pocket of the dress below - although the latter was presently covered by the bib of her starched white apron.

Her spun-gold hair was pulled back into a no-nonsense bun, firmly pinned and topped off by a curving high-fronted nurse’s cap. The latter, edged with a light-blue piping so as to match the dress and decorated with three, light-blue, one centimetre wide lines running around the top at the front, seemed to add to her stature, underlining an authoritative appearance that began with her high-heeled court shoes and built upwards from there. An elastic petersham ribbon belt worn atop her apron completed the image, its ornately formed ball-clasp, in the form of silver filigree butterfly wings, catching the light and the girl’s eye both and fairly hypnotising the girl, holding her swaying silently in its thrall.

Lavinia was still standing flummoxed, awkwardly shifting her weight and aware of her nakedness under the heavy folds of the hairdresser’s cape, when the nurse reached for the zipper beneath her chin and began smoothly drawing it down. Snapping out of her trance - for such it was, even if her senses were too dulled to recognise it - she made as if to move the woman’s hand aside. Having sensed a change in the air she was eager to capitalise on that to reclaim some small modicum of self-reliance, at least in as far as taking over the task of disrobing for her self.

The nurse reacted with long-suffering patience, softly tut-tutting to herself and gently but firmly taking the girl by the wrists and guiding her arms back down to her sides. When her charge again reached up to the fastening, she simply spoke - her voice soft yet authoritative and tinged with a pitying, almost apologetic, tone - yet let the girl continue.

“Now, now... you know how fiddly you find these things. Why, just look at you, all fingers-and-thumbs... fingers like sausages, you have... fingers like sausages. Now, come here and let me help you with that.”

Unaccountably the zipper tab slipped from Lavinia’s grasp. She persisted...and it happened again - and yet again. Moments later and with a sense of childish frustration mounting in her to the point where she was beginning to feel that there was a real danger of her stamping her foot in tantrum, she found herself left with little option other than to acquiesce to the nurse’s wish to aid her.

Divested of the plastic cape - and under the instruction of the nurse - she began struggling with dressing in articles of clothing which, while clearly her own and having presumably been sent from her home, seemed somehow to belong to some past existence - and to be a least two sizes too small to boot.

Her hopes of regaining some sort of self-reliance were quickly dashed when she reached for the zip fastener on her jeans and again when it came to lacing up her trainers. At both these points in the proceedings the nurse again voiced her concern that Lavinia was finding it all rather ‘fiddly’, repeating the rather unkind comments made earlier as to how Lavinia was a little ‘awkward’ and possessed ‘fingers like sausages’. And on both occasions the girl did indeed find herself, as if fulfilling an inescapable prophecy, inflicted with a spastic clumsiness of such an extent that she could do little but stand passively and be dressed as if she were a child - and her, a young woman in her late teens.

True, there had still been some fight left in her even then: she had persevered with her laces to the point at which she had very nearly become hysterical. A sharp slap across the face soon had her sitting patiently and resignedly on the edge of the bed while the nurse, kneeling, fastened her training shoes for her. She was put in her place then; she might well be about to go home, or at least that’s how it appeared, but for the time being she was still very much under the authority of the hospital and of its the nurses.

The nurse, satisfied that all was now in order, left, locking the door behind her, having first instructed the girl in some detail as to how she was to wait quietly sitting on the side of the bed and having impressed upon her the importance of sitting smartly upright with her hands crossed demurely in her lap and with palms uppermost.

And so Lavinia Vitesse was left sitting, alone and with no little temerity in this strangely surreal wonderland bedroom, squeezed uncomfortably into her familiar, yet oddly unfamiliar, home-clothing that no longer seem to fit and as far way from reality and from home as ever she had been - the bars on the window were a constant reminder that normality was a privilege that they could still keep from her if they so chose.

Out there somewhere she had financial interests, family responsibilities, belongings, a home... and a guardian fuelled by avarice, a woman only too willing to take it all from her if she did not mount a struggle. But that was how she had been persuaded to join this project in the first place - for the financial reward that would allow her to mount a legal challenge for her inheritance, not to mention pave her way through university or dance classes or whatever. But here she now sat helpless, while outside who knows what that woman would be getting up to, how she might be spending her way through the family coffers, what she might be doing with the family home. While she remained in here she could do nothing, while she remained in here she didn’t even have an identity beyond a dehumanising patient identifier, a mere number.

The door at half-opened; near silently save for the faint rasping of wood and metal on carpet pile and the plaintive squeak of a neglected hinge. From the subdued and shadowy passageway beyond, the all-too-familiar stern features of Matron duly appeared. Notably the somewhat dated, calf-length white polyester dress and latex bib-apron she customarily wore in the unit had now been exchanged for the more conventional navy-blue uniform of the traditional ward sister or hospital matron. The woman, having only partially stepped through the gap as if reluctant to become fully part of this odd fairytale world, stood now half-in and half-out the room and practically side on, steadying herself and holding the door ajar and with one hand, while with the other she wagged a single finger, addressing the startled girl as if in accusation. She hovered there just long enough to issue one singularly enigmatic warning - then was gone, as suddenly as she had appeared, leaving the door to slam shut and lock automatically behind her.

“You are to say no more than you have been told to - no more than that... I’m warning you! Keep that mouth shut!” She’d hissed between her teeth in parting.

Quite who it was she shouldn’t speak to, she had no idea. As to what she shouldn’t speak of; without doubt it was the unethical ill-treatment she had received at their hands in the unit.

For while a contemplative quiet descended - from somewhere outside she could hear the unaccustomed sound of the crunching of wheels on gravel and the low throaty grumble of a vehicle’s engine. More distantly there was the more familiar, granular sound of the sea washing back and forth across a shingle beach. The latter had been an ever-present feature in the unit - its soft rhythmic sighing was so strangely constant, too constant, too regular somehow, unnaturally regular - as unvarying as the metronome her therapist would leave running on her desk, as regular as her own breathing that would seem to involuntarily synchronise with it. Compelling, lulling - she could almost hear the cooing voice of the therapist, the mantra repeated in sessions beyond number and recited over the insistent, never varying, tick-pause-tock, tick-pause-tock, tick-pause-tock, the little bejewelled pendulum cycling through all the colours of the rainbow then back again, over and over and over and over...

A stabbing electric crackling snapped her back out of it... Her eyelids had floated flutteringly shut and she had been drifting with fluffy white clouds of pleasure, images of pretty white-uniformed nurses popping in and out of her mind and the thought coming and going and running unbidden through her head over and over again about how ‘nurse’s uniforms equalled authority’ and how natural that order of things was. Nurses, doctors, Matron herself; these were people who knew best, figures of unassailable authority to be obeyed implicitly and without question, all for her own good, all for her own benefit, no one else’s.

The burst of noise that had startled her had seemed to issue from somewhere beyond the door, from somewhere out in the corridor. It came again, louder this time and accompanied by a bleep; a hissing burst of electronic static and a tinny telephonic voice, the speech distorted granular and disjointed. A few seconds more passed and then once again there came a pip-pip-pip tone and a burst of noise, but now it was accompanied by louder and more full-bodied voice, female, professional and controlled; a voice trained to convey information accurately, concisely and clearly:

“...confirmed, control, we’re there now. We’ve just arrived outside; awaiting the key holder’s arrival before proceeding further”

There came the rattling of a key in a lock and the door burst open... Violet eyes, saucer-wide and startled, stared back in disbelief. Framed in the now wide-open doorway was again the imposing figure of Matron, but now flanked by two other women - and very much now relegated to playing second fiddle. To either side of her, hanging back perhaps two paces to the rear, stood two statuesque female figures in high heeled courts and dressed in the impeccably-pressed navy-blue serge skirt, starched white cotton blouse and navy and white checked cravat typifying a British woman police officer.

“...and this is the last room on this level. As I believe I told you earlier; this is the only room occupied at present. You can see for yourself the lengths the clinic has gone to for the patient’s comfort - we have nothing to hide here, I can assure you. I’m absolutely certain this can’t possibly be the girl you are looking for, officer, but please... be my guest: By all means question her if you so wish. I should point out though, you do have to take into account the child’s mental state - she has been diagnosed as a compulsive fantasist and therefore is given to manufacture the most elaborate tissues of fiction.

Unfortunately, as in most such cases, there is a tendency for the patient to be quite clever in the way that her fabrications are structured. Patients presenting with this condition are often highly intelligent and very plausible and it takes quit some experience to be able to reliably disentangle the reality from the fantasy at times - definitely not a trivial matter, believe me.”

Lavinia felt herself bristle at the use of that term ‘child’ - she was a full-grown young woman of marriageable age, after all. Then there was the rest of the stuff Matron had just said - the woman was undermining her from the start, making her out to be some kind of psychiatric case. But she wasn’t, she was a volunteer in a clinical research study. Sure they had her effectively registered now as a ‘voluntarily admitted patient’, but that was just a question of nomenclature, a ‘bureaucratic convenience’ someone had once described it as.

In that moment she wanted to throw herself at them, to shout out: “I am Lavinia Vitesse, It has to be me you’re looking for; somebody somewhere must be missing me, surely somebody must have reported me missing by now. They’re keeping me locked up here against my will”. The words ran through her mind, were practised on her tongue. The action, though, was stillborn: In the presence of Matron the sheer force of that woman’s will held her in place, back upright, head submissively tilted down and hands demurely crossed, palms uppermost in her lap.

As it was, the onus of taking action was to be shouldered by the police officers themselves. Clearly unwilling to be fobbed off at face value or perhaps already in possession of information or evidence that they had yet to divulge, they squeezed roughly past the older woman to confront the girl directly, without further ado.

From a broad, black patent-leather belt tightly cinching the waist of each, a radio crackled, beeped and occasionally buzzed angrily. To the rear a set of handcuffs conspicuously swung to and thro across amply cushioned blue-serge-sheaved buttocks, making for an intimidating statement indeed. Here were two women that undoubtedly meant business - and they would not take no for an answer, not even from Matron.

The tallest of the two women police officers, a willowy brunette, turned back toward Matron, addressing the woman in a tone that Lavinia would never dare use nor, up until now, even imagine any one else using with her either.

“Well, I think we should leave the assessment of her mental state up to the experts - don’t you?”

The other, a blonde blessed with the never-ending legs of a catwalk model, meanwhile turned towards Lavinia and taking her by one arm began to guide the girl up on to her feet. She spoke sharply, her voice carrying a surprisingly authoritative edge, considering the kindness of her actions, leaving the girl a little nonplussed but also in little doubt that this was not yet the time to speak up - nor was it the moment to do anything more or less than obey.

“Come along, dear, up we get. You’re coming along with us - there are some people that want to meet you, ask you a few questions. It’s nothing at all for you to worry about, dear. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourself back home by this time tomorrow, if all goes well for you.”

For the first time Matron’s calm exterior was showing signs of strain; she pushed forward, a look of worried concern folding lines across her forehead.

“You can’t just take her out of here like that - you obviously just don’t understand! Why do you think she is kept on a secure wing? She is a repeat absconder, carrying the risk of harming herself and maybe others too.”

The brown haired officer looked puzzled: “But our understanding from the paperwork you presented us with earlier - and also from what you yourself told us outside - is that she is registered as a voluntarily admitted patient. Surely then, she could just walk out of here at any given time of her own free will - how could that in any way, shape or form be considered absconding?”

“What you fail to understand, officer, is that our responsibility is first and foremost to our patient. There are clauses written into the agreement she signed when she first came here that allow us to take certain...contingencies, into account - if they should threaten the patient’s safety or, indeed, the safety of others.”

“Well, under the circumstances I do have the authority to handcuff her - at least until such a time that we understand in sufficient detail what is going on here. I take it that would be a sufficiently stringent security measure, given that she is going to be escorted by two police officers and your good self?”

A nod of confirmation and an exchange of confident smiles and moments later Lavinia Vitesse found herself shuffling along a carpeted corridor, teetering on the brink of salvation, yet with the cold steel of regulation police handcuffs firmly securing her wrists behind her back and another pair clamped around her ankles for good measure, restricting her to a frustratingly mincing little ballerina toddle. Truly an innocent abroad - if this was some form of rescue, then why was she afflicted with such a foreboding sense that somehow, in some way, she was being led further than ever from freedom?

Wide Open Spaces and the Professors Three

Lavinia was guided through a side door, a police officer to either side. On the other side of that heavily panelled oaken door lay the real world, the outside world. The scents and sounds of a world so long denied her waited there, impatiently poised to greet her.

A rich heavily-laden swirling mixture sprang at her as the door swung back - almost immediately her starved senses were being virtually pummelled into a vertiginous collapse. The scents of roses, mown grass, hollyhocks and jasmine, mingled intoxicatingly with ambient notes of old leather book bindings, carpeting and pipe tobacco in an ever-shifting aromatic landscape. Heavy, wine-red velvet drapes hung floor-to-ceiling to the rear of the darkly panelled room, struggling uselessly to hold back the exuberant summer sun - mischievous stray golden strands of daylight flickered across the green flocked wallpaper to either side wherever finger-folds of fabric allowed ingress to the summer breeze. In the far distance there were sounds, all sorts of sounds; birds sang, treetops rustled and somewhere a lawnmower buzzed and droned, the sound coming and going and sailing on the rising wind.

To most these would have been mundane things, commonplace sensations; to Lavinia, freshly released from the enforced silence of the acoustically-dampened surrounds of the unit, these were cause for wonderment and wide-eyed glee, for jubilation and child-like excitement... But also cause for nausea, the nausea of the sorrowful child, who, given ad libitum access to the confectionary jar, has come to appreciate too late the wisdom of the old adage ‘everything in moderation’.

For a brief moment she could scarcely contain herself: She wanted to know everything there was to be known, she wanted to throw herself at those drapes, drag back the thickly lined curtains and throw open the windows beyond - she wanted to greet the summer with open arms, embrace the trees, the bushes, the leaves, the open spaces... the open spaces... all that open sky, stretching on and on... open, empty and vertiginous... fearful, spinning, gyrating nauseating... the crowds, scuttling spider-like, loathsomely spider-like... and there would be pavements and people and towns and crowds and large swirling open spaces...

Even as her knees buckled she felt the two women’s arms coming up beneath her shoulders, taking her weight and guiding her down on to an ornately carved upright red-leather-upholstered chair. High-backed and with barley-sugar twist legs it stood central to the room and before an imposing and near room-spanning desk of a similar design and constructed in a rich mahogany.

Seated, she now found herself facing three high-backed armchairs waiting vacant on the far side of the grand table in front of her. These latter, being in richly-tooled dark green leather and each being surmounted by a crest picked out in gold leaf, to her mind presented an almost throne-like aspect. It was something, she quickly found, that was as unnerving, in its way, as what lay beyond that curtain. She felt glad of the presence of the two policewomen who had now taken up position to either side, immediately to her rear. Outside the serenading and the mowing and the rustling continued; doubtless too, the sun still smiled.

Eventually three elderly and rather tweedy gentlemen emerged from a side door. All brown leather elbow patches, diagonally-banded ties and combed-over hair, each carried with him a near-identical black leather wallet-styled folder. Two had theirs tucked high up beneath their arms but one held his in his left hand and swung it in rhythm with his stride; the light caught gold-tooled lettering and an embossed device of the appearance of a coat of arms as he walked.

It all looks very official, Lavinia thought; these were clearly people that mattered, people that got things done - now something would happen, heads would roll for the way she had been treated...surely.

A waft of pipe-smoke preceded them to their seats and nodding in acknowledgement to the two police officers, they took their places, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the nervously fidgeting girl, although seated right before them. Folder-wallets were duly unzipped without ceremony or comment and for a time they amused themselves, shuffling through notes, forms and papers, one of them, having momentarily glanced up at the girl at some point, opining to his colleagues something about her “ample hips” and about her “bottom barely fitting on the seat”.

“Says here, she is a dancer, ballet apparently, or rather she has ambitions in that direction; quite a promising talent apparently.”

“Can’t say she looks that much like a dancer, not to my mind anyway; not that I’m an expert you understand. Nevertheless, it has to said, the young filly’s not exactly emaciated is she? I would imagine she will have put on a bit of weight while she’s been here...but even so.

“All that good nourishing hospital food I suppose. Still, a few good square meals won’t have done her any harm, not at all. These girls today - they starve themselves, especially models, dancers and the like, all skin and bone; they look positively skeletal, some of ‘em - most unattractive. It’s good to see one with a bit of meat on her, if you ask me. Although...I have to admit she’s probably a little too plump to be taken seriously as a dancer.”

“Perhaps a belly dancer? You know - the days of the harem and the old sultans and all that...they liked them big back then”

Somehow, at that jape, professional decorum began to give way to hilarity. All three men’s faces, beaming with amusement, looked fit to dissolve at the drop of a hat into childish fits of giggles, despite their creaking antiquity. And then it happened: one, desperately stifling his laughter behind his arm and wiping tears from his eyes with his jacket sleeve as he did so, gave way to a full-bodied guffaw. The effect was as infectious as it was instantaneous: a gentle feminine chortling could even be heard coming from the two police women, despite the natural empathy one might have expected them to have with their young charge’s plight.

Feeling the tears come to her eyes Lavinia rocked forward, head cradled in her hands. Two firm hands immediately pulled her back into her seat by her shoulders. Incredibly, the police officer to her right, eschewing the sympathy that any in such a predicament would surely have expected to receive instead issued a terse order; Lavinia was to “pull herself together”, she was to “sit up straight” and keep her arms on the arm rests.

Re-gathering their thoughts, an air of professionalism having once again resettled on the proceedings, each of the three elderly gentlemen now took time-out in turn to introduce himself to the patient. Each, it appeared, was a professor of psychiatry and had been drafted in from one university hospital or another at the request of the police to form an ad hoc independent, impartial investigative committee.

The bony-fingered man presently puffing away on his pipe and occupying the centre seat, being the senior figure present, was to be the chair and would be asking most of the questions on behalf of his two esteemed colleagues. Tapping out his pipe into a silver receptacle and adjusting his half-moon spectacles he now leant forward, regarding the girl with a grave and almost accusing aspect as he began:

“This panel has been convened to investigate certain allegations that have come to light as regards the abuse of patients under psychiatric care in a number of privately owned and run institutions, of which this is but one such under scrutiny. In addition, I have also been authorised to inform you that, in this particular case, the police are also investigating a number of missing person cases that have been loosely linked, in one way or another, to the immediate vicinity of this hospital.”

Lavinia felt the hackles rise at the mention of ‘patients under psychiatric care’. It had been bad enough that they had poked fun at her. That as a result she had broken down in tears as readily as she had, was even worse - it laid bare her weakness, her fragility, something she had always hated in herself. Now something else worried her: Would it also have been seen by them as evidence of mental instability?

There had been no apology forthcoming, they had just continued on as if nothing had happened. But now, even worse, something else was going wrong; they were clearly labouring under the misconception that she was a psychiatric patient. But she wasn’t, she wasn’t! She had come here voluntarily to take part in a clinical trial, albeit under the auspices of a private clinic’s psychiatric wing. She was a volunteer subject in a scientific study, not a volunteer psychiatric patient. She had to continually remind herself of that, it was important: She had definitely not come to this place with the intention of becoming a self-admitted psychiatric patient.

Certainly more than once they had persuaded her to renew her term of residence. Certainly there had been papers to sign - and of these there had been that document pertaining to a change of status, as they called it, and yes, it did in theory have the effect of registering her as a voluntarily admitted patient. But they had assured her it was just a legal nicety, a formality - it was just a way of sidestepping certain limiting provisions that were presently stifling medical research. The thing was just a bit of paper, that’s all it was; it would be cross-referenced and linked with the other documentation pertaining to her status as a medical research volunteer - all record of it was to be destroyed upon her eventual release. At least that had been the agreement as she remembered it.

But there it was, that phrase again; upon her eventual release. Deep down she knew it was all parcelled-up in that phrase, the way they had her thinking about it, the way she just accepted it, just accepted that one day she would be released - that one word seemed in itself to virtually imply they had a God-given right to hold her otherwise. She would be released when it suited them to release her and not until - that’s what it implied. It implied she was not free to leave of her own free will, any more than she had been free to refuse to sign that ‘change of status’ document. She had just received six stripes from Matron’s cane across her bare bottom when they had passed the pen into her shaking hand: another six would have been awaiting her had her signature not scrawled out across the page.

The professor cleared his throat, the sound jolting the girl back to present, and continued:

“Primarily our purpose here today is to assess your suitability and reliability should you be called upon as a witness and also to ascertain something of your experience of this establishment. First of all, before we start I feel I must apologise on behalf of the panel for what occurred earlier; please be assured that no one here intended to be hurtful to you in any way. I’m afraid my learned colleague here does rather enjoy something of a reputation as regards his rather inapt sense of humour, but I can assure you; from this moment on all proceedings will be carried out with the highest degree of professionalism - you have my word on that.

Now, to get the ball rolling, I would be grateful if you could let us have your full name please.”

For a moment Lavinia hesitated, a number and a letter were forming on her lips. She felt her tongue rolling around the initial letter of the name, its tip repeatedly touching the roof of her mouth, curling. Then she felt its tip touch the back of her teeth and her lips part; despite her best intentions and for the second time that day. “30 C” came blurting out.

“30C? What do you mean by that? Is that your room number here or your apartment or house number perhaps?

“No...sir; it, it, its mm,my, my p,p,p....”

“Well, never mind that for now. For the moment all we want to know is whether or not you can state your full name.

Now, take your time and just try again...nice and slowly. Try not to gabble and stumble over your words...and if you do feel yourself beginning to stammer, just pause, take a deep breath and then start over again, there’s a good girl. We all know that you suffer from certain, how shall we say...problems. We all understand - really we do. By way, I’m quite happy for you to address me as sir rather than professor if you prefer; less formal don’t you think?” The inference behind that last remark was obvious and again Lavinia felt herself bristle with indignation.

“La...Lav...Lav...Lavin...” She felt her cheeks burning; it sounded as if she was trying to trill her way through a song. “La...La...Lavin...ia, A,A,Anne, V,V, Vitt...esss...sir.” She had half-staggered, half-trilled her way through it, her voice timid and small and contrasting notably with the strong intonation with which she had previously rendered her patient number.

Pens scribbled and scratched, papers were again shuffled through and notes consulted and corrected.

“So, you’re saying that your name is Lavinia Anne Vitesse, is that correct?”

“Yes, s,s.sir”

“Are you sure, girl?” It was the mirthful gentleman that had so upset her earlier adding his penny’s worth - and there was something irritatingly chiding about his tone.

For a moment Lavinia felt like screaming, then bursting into tears, then screaming again, her fists clenched and teeth grinding and gnashing: What did they mean, was she sure? How could she not be sure about her own name for heaven’s sake; it was such a stupid question. Once, so long ago it seemed now as if part of a different lifetime, she would have told him so in no uncertain terms. Not that she had been a hellcat or anything but...well, it had just never been in her nature to suffer fools gladly.

“Yes, s.s,sir” came the eventual reply - timid and submissive despite her anger and emotional turmoil. Nervously, she glanced up. Briefly her eyes met the intense steely-grey gaze of the panel’s chairman, tarrying just long enough to register the latter’s oddly aghast and taken-aback expression before , just as quickly, she averted her gaze to again regard her shoes.

Those branded trainers, that she had struggled with such difficulty to lace, seemed strange to her after the bottle-green plastic Mary Janes of the institution’s uniform - they seemed out of place and she felt out of place in them. Just as her burgeoning figure felt out of place squeezed into the blue denim jeans that Matron had told her had been sent in from home.

She had recognised them of course, they were unmistakably hers, yet they couldn’t accommodate her waistline, couldn’t even come close to it. Ever resourceful; Matron’s solution involved a length of ribbon, produced from her hip pocket, which, when looped between two belt loops and fastened with a large bow at the front, bravely strained to keep closed the waistband, albeit sadly failing to fulfil that task by some four centimetres and leaving the zipper gaping. Lavinia knew the tiny, pink, frill-fronted panties they had somehow persuaded to reluctantly accommodate her chubby bottom were peaking through that gap; the professor, his colleagues...they could hardly miss them - the sheen of the tightly stretched nylon glistened, caught the light, actively seemed to fish for the attention of the eye.

Her breasts, too, felt out of place. Pendulous and heavy behind the taut fabric of the ill-fitting T-shirt and missing their customarily reassuring, if somewhat artificially over-elevated, support, they felt somehow foreign, to her. Their mass was something she neither recognised nor remembered.

And then there was the matter of her rather pronounced curving belly, the role of flesh oozing around and above the denim’s waistband. All that excess flesh felt alien to one that had always been as lithe as she had kept herself; she was unprepared for it, had been unaware of it. It had crept up on her; the corselet they had kept her in, that all the girls had to wear as part of the institution uniform, had served to disguise the weight gain - that and the sparsity of mirrors. Now devoid of the comforting firm support of her foundation wear it felt as if she were dragging around with her some sort of parasite that had somehow attached itself to her without her knowledge and now hung heavily around about her, tiring her, dragging her down.

Her figure, her body, felt out of control... she felt out of control, uncomfortable in these surroundings, uncomfortable in these unfamiliar clothes, uncomfortable in this unfamiliar body and, yes, uncomfortable with the prospect of freedom. The plastic Mary Janes, the uncaring cold nylon touch of the green and white striped prison-uniform-like dress, the reassuring clinching of a corselet fitted so closely as to render her breathless in response to anything other than the gentlest of exertions - the realisation that she was actually missing the familiarity of her uniform triggered a cold wave of dread to run through her. What the hell had they done to her?

“Wha...?” She had been dragged back to reality, her train of thought derailed before it could damage her composure further. The panel’s chair had resumed his address... but now more as something of a tirade; there was an edge of irritation, almost anger, in his tone.

“Now, once and for all, I have to make it patently clear: If we are to be of any help to you at all, you must be absolutely honest with us - absolutely honest. There is no point in any fabrication; you’ll only be caught out in the end. It is vitally important that you are completely truthful...and I mean completely. I can put it no more simply than that - you must tell the truth. Have I made myself clear?

“Yes, sir.”

“Good! Now, I must ask you one more time: Are you certain that you are Lavinia Anne Vitesse; do you honestly believe that to be your name?”

This was madness; they were treating her as if she was insane, as if she didn’t know her own name. All at once she was angry, near to tears and, yes, scared, really scared, terrified.

“Yes, s,s,s,sir” She had wanted to shout it, to spit it out with venom - in the event her voice could barely lift itself above a whisper.

The professor looked down at his notes then, lifting his head, gestured for one of the two waiting policewomen to come across to him. For several minutes the two of them pored over a thick wad of documentation together. A photograph was produced and what looked like a page from a newspaper, the policewoman nodding as if in solemn agreement before returning to her partner and with the latter’s aid retrieving something from her partner’s shoulder bag. Lavinia heard the rustling close behind her head yet, frustratingly could see nothing.

Returning to the table the officer laid out something before the professor who, nodding his approval, indicated that it should be shown to Lavinia.

“You see, either you are not being absolutely honest with us or, alternatively, you genuinely believe you are being truthful - in which case we will have no option other than to...how shall I put it...reappraise the situation.

You see; you cannot possibly be Lavinia Vitesse. Why do I say that? Well, I’m not sure how to put this but...well, it’s because, sadly, Lavinia Vitesse is no longer with us. The evidence is right there in your own hands, young lady. Lavinia Vitesse died - she committed suicide on a beach; one not that far from here as it happens. We have records here of her suicide note, witness statements and - more importantly - the court’s decision. In your hands, there, you have facsimile copies of several newspaper pages covering the story and taken from several well-known, reliable broadsheets. What else can I say; if you can’t believe your own eyes, what can you believe?”

There was a letup then, a short respite but a sufficient adjournment as to allow her to fully digest the evidence in her hands - and digest it she did. It was all there; the account of her own death, her suicide, the photograph of the pitied young woman - lithe, attractive, so full of life and so, so unlike herself. It was time spent whimpering incoherently, staring aghast and uncomprehending at the newspaper cuttings lying in her lap. It was time that all too soon came to a close - the screwed-up cuttings were prised from her white-knuckled grasp, a sharp slap to each cheek brought her mind back to attention and the interrogation began anew.

She was questioned at length and probed for more and more detailed answers. Again and again she would burst into tears and bring her hands up to her face in despair. Again and again she would begin rocking backward and forward listlessly; on occasion attempting to suck on her thumb, yet having it sharply brushed away from her mouth and her cheek slapped in retribution. Again and again she had to be sternly told to sit up straight, to keep her back straight and to keep her arms firmly in place upon the arm rests while looking straight ahead.

Finally she snapped; she could take no more. She began to blurt out everything about her treatment and then about the schoolroom. And once started there was no stopping her, not whispered threats from the nurse at her side, not face slaps, not even the thought of Matron, her warnings and her waiting cane - nothing would stop her.

It was as if a dam had burst. There was to be no turning back of the flood waters now - the truth would be out for all to hear and she would have to worry no more about Matron and her cane. Why, they will probably arrest the sadistic bitch after this, she thought. Somehow her tirade - once embarked upon - begun to clear her fogbound thoughts. For the first time since entering this room she felt as if she knew what she was doing. A clear path of action had opened up before her and she fully intended to pursue it to its conclusion...she had little choice now in any case - the die had been cast.

Even her customary stammer had left her - cruelly, quite deliberately induced - ordinarily it crippled her once eloquent speech, robbed her of her self confidence; now it had seemingly evaporated, its shackles having fallen away somehow. Gaining in confidence by the second now she glanced up for reassurance, her gaze fully meeting that of the panel members for the first time and...and...she fell silent...she stuttered once, then twice, then in an uncontrolled staccato machinegun burst. Then the incoherent blubbering whining, thumb-sucking and rocking resumed - and this time she was allowed the latter comfort.

The earnest, pleading gaze of those pretty deep-violet eyes had merely been met with quizzically-raised eyebrows, looks of incredulity and doubtful, almost laughing, derision. For a moment, other than for the girl’s beaten, continuous, softly-sobbing whine, there was near-complete silence - then one of the men loosened his tie, another cleared his throat.

“So you say they have this...place? Some sort of secret hidden complex where you have been kept locked away. Some sort of schoolroom, several girls like yourself - and of a similar age, going by your account - kept dressed in school uniform and made subject to strict discipline and corporal punishment? Half a dozen teenage girls caned and strapped across their bare behinds for the slightest transgression?”

“But...why? What would be the point exactly?” The other old professor now piped up, his voice quavery, his jacket, blackboard chalk dusted. “And where is this place you describe? You told us earlier that they had kept you in a basement. Yet...this room you have just been describing...you say it had some sort of glass ceiling and it had windows, apparently illuminated by daylight, or at least partially so? You also say you could often hear the rain falling - virtually every day from what I gather. The trouble with that is... well, how should I put it... you mustn’t think that I’m accusing you of lying, not as such, but you must be mistaken in some manner. You see, it has hardly rained at all over the last couple of months or so - in fact there has been something of a drought on; hosepipe bans, restrictions on washing cars, that sort of thing. Besides, just think about it for a moment; what sort of basement would have much to show by way of windows, let alone a glass ceiling? From my experience, basements and cellars and the like are generally below ground, my dear - there is little point in having windows and a glass ceiling if you are underground.”

“Besides, we have all been shown around the basement area; it’s where the kitchen, laundry and storage cupboards are, no more than that” the taller of the three men, the one to Lavinia’s right, now chipped in. “And these other girls, what were their names, who were they?”

“I,I,I d,don’t know, s,sir. We all had numbers, sir, j,just n,n,numbers, we were j,just n,numbers. We don’t...I mean, we didn’t have n,n,nnames, sir.”

“Well, what did they look like then; try to describe them at least, surely you can do that for us.”

“Th, they, I m,mean we, all looked the s,same, sir. We had to w,wear these, these awful, awful uniforms, it was so, so humiliating, you don’t understand, sir, ugly g,green s,sstriped n,nnylon d,d,dresses with Victorian b,bonnets. They kept us l,looking like st,stu, like st,stu,stupid, like little ch,ch,children, sir. Th,th,they p,put us in d,d,diapers, wouldn’t let us use the, the, t,t,toilet, made us use b,bbedpans while they watched us.”

“Stuff and nonsense, surely” the taller gentleman huffed “the girl is quite clearly hopelessly deluded”.

“I’m not so sure - it could well be some sort of distorted view of a real incident; something so traumatic that her subconscious has had to dress it up into some sort of nightmarish fantasy in order to try to make sense of it.” The ‘chairman’, seemingly a little less willing to take things at face value than his two esteemed colleagues was keen to probe deeper. Now regarding the timid girl before him over the top of his spectacles with a quizzical glint in his eye, he went on:

“Now then, dear; what about their hair colour, the colour of their eyes - what can you tells us about things like that?”

“We, we, we w,weren’t allowed t,to m,m,mmake eye c,contact, sir. There were p,p,punishments, sir, su, such awful, awful t,tterrible p,p,punishments...please, pleeese, p,p,lease take m,me away from here, p,please, I’m bb,bbegging you, sir, I’ll do anything, sir, anything you w,w,want, anything. Please, sir. I’ll be good, sir, I’ll be a good girl, really I will”

“She’s just gibbering, now; it’s all nonsense, surely. The silly little fool is just wasting our time.” The surlier of the two policewomen had chipped in now. She was beginning to feel a little uneasy and her irritation showed in her voice. It didn’t stop her reiterating her stern reprimand of earlier; once again ordering the girl to sit up straight and to keep her arms in position on those rests. Rather than becoming more sympathetic as time wore on, her attitude if anything seemed to be hardening further - whether through some sort of protective mechanism has to remain conjecture, but she had definitely now acquired a keener edge to her clipped tones.

“... And keep looking straight ahead, girl, and sit up straight. It’s very rude to keep covering your face when you’re being spoken to. These are very important people and they have come a very long way to speak to you. I’m not at all certain you appreciate the seriousness of this investigation - and your situation. We really must have the truth, the absolute truth, not some nonsense cooked up in that silly little head of yours”.

“Now, now; it really is all right, you know. I’m sure she’s trying her best - aren’t you my dear?”

“Yes, sir. Bu, bu, but, y,you m,must be,b,believe me sir, you have t,to, sir, you j,jjust have t,to, sir.”

“Fine, fine. Now, just a couple more questions and we’ll be all done and dusted. What about their hair?

We know you said they made you keep it styled in pigtails, but what about the colours, the other girl’s hair colours; were there blondes, brunettes, redheads?”

“Everyone looked the same, sir, everyone’s hair was black, everybody’s was black, only ever bl,black...I,I...” She was sobbing uncontrollably now, blubbering, spluttering through a deluge of tears...I use t,t,to, t,to have, s,s,such be,be,bbeautiful hair, it was so b,b,beautiful, so, so b,bbeautiful...”

The taller man interjected, his voice, like the female police officer’s, somehow strangely devoid of sympathy:

“I have a question, if don’t mind: So, there you were, in this schoolroom you talk of; there are school desks, chairs, a teacher - and you are all dressed in some sort of childish school uniform. Tell me, were there lessons - well of course there were - but what did they teach you, what sort of thing? You must have been taught something, surely, if you were in some sort of school.

“You don’t understand sir. It was all n,nonsense, all j,just n,n,nonsense; they made us learn n,nnonsense, ru,ru,rubbish, m,m,mindless gi, gi,gibberish, over and over and over. Lists of n,nnumbers, endless m,m,m,multiplication tables that m,made n,n, no sense, over and over and over again. Just over and over and over...”

Again a hand pressed down on her shoulder, again seemingly over-firm and restraining rather than comforting, but able to quell her growing agitation nonetheless; particularly when backed up, as now, by an authoritative command to “quieten down”.

Both men scribbled down a few brief notes before turning their attention to a series of loose-leaf folders. Lavinia, dumbfounded by the sudden shift of attention away from her self, could do nothing more than sit and listen open-mouthed to the deliberation that followed. The psychological minutiae of her ‘case’ being banded back and forth across her was so fogged with scientific terminology as to have been meaningless even to the clearheaded young woman that had been set on this twisted path so long ago, let alone the poor fragile young thing that sat quivering before them now, lost in a forest of carefully cultivated and nurtured neuroses. Arguments arose and were duly satisfied, opinions crossed and re-crossed in a thrust and parry of intellect beyond her questioning - hospital records were consulted, written statements gone over and ethics committees’ conclusions analysed. Both policewomen in turn raised queries and had questions to ask of the various forms of documentation presented, earnestly writing up their contemporaneous notes as they went.

Eventually there came a pause in the proceedings, all three learned men whispering quietly to each other for several minutes.

Then fell the bombshell...

The chairman, consulting his notes as he went, had a statement to make:

“After due consideration, we are in agreement: Sadly, we have to report that, in our opinion, it is highly unlikely that this young woman would make a reliable witness. Furthermore, we believe that - in her present highly volatile and unstable psychological condition - to move her from this institution would be detrimental in the extreme to her mental health.

Indeed, we believe that at present, the patient represents a risk both to her own and others’ safety and would therefore recommend her continued confinement in this institution for the foreseeable future, essentially indefinitely - this situation to be reviewed on a six monthly basis.”

“What?...No!.. No! No! No! Please, p,p,p, please n,n,no. You, you...you d,d,don’t know what you’re doing! It’s a ,m,mmistake... it has to be a m,m,m, mistake - I don’t understand. What’s going on? Please, please what’s g,g,g, going on? Please I, I, I don’t understand? I’m not a p,ppatient, n,,n not a real patient. I c,c,came here as a volunteer here, a t,t,ttest su, su, subject, n,n, not a real patient, but th,th, they... they wouldn’t let me g,go home, they m,m,made me sign up a,a,again, and again and again. My stepmother...it’s all her fault, I’m sure it is. My stepmother... the, the, the b,bitch, she’s taking everything from me, stealing it all, and I’m stuck in here, I can’t do anything about it...they won’t let me speak to anybody, no one at all... It, it’s all a m,,m,mistake, please I don’t know what’s going on...What is going on? I, I, I... Oh please, pleassss... “

For a moment the professor seemed as if wrong footed by the outburst, perhaps in some way moved - having extracted a white linen handkerchief from his suit pocket he was dabbing at the corner of one eye as if to mop a tear. Yet, in close-up those eyes betrayed more a hint of hilarity than empathy. If emotionally equivocal, his next words would soon tip the balance...and elicit a shattered scream from the girl.

“Fine... well, if that doesn’t suit you young lady, then we’ll just have to make some allowances for you. How about we make that review period every twelve months - would that suit you better? Yes, I believe we will do just that. I’m going to record the recommendation that your case be reviewed every twelve months... the first review period to start after an initial twenty-four month interval to allow for you to...how shall we put it... readjust, yes, readjust, a very apt term I think, under the circumstances.”

It was the combination of outrage and panic, in equal measure, which provided the strength, the startling abruptness of the move proving more than enough to temporarily overcome the combined strength and weight advantage of the two women restraining her by her shoulders in her seat. Wriggling free of their grip she thrust up and out from the chair, almost throwing herself across the room in the process. Knowing full well that Matron was likely waiting beyond the door immediately to her rear - that through which she had entered - she headed straight for the side door through which the three learned professors had arrived. In a scant two seconds she had squeezed passed the end of the tribunal table and was out through the heavy oak door beyond, hearing the satisfyingly solid thump of it closing securely behind her...Then she stopped dead in her tracks, frozen mid-stride...It couldn’t be! She knew it couldn’t be...all her senses told her - it couldn’t possibly be so...and yet...and yet...