Punishment, Prologue & Preamble

(Schoolgirl tawsed, caned in bondage, leather bound with her latex-lined directoire knickers down for a spanking or caning across a whipping horse)

The lights dim, the atmosphere darkens, then to be tainted with a faintly sooty acridity and the more pungent, stale, legacy of the upturned enamel chamber pot in the foreground. Beneath a tented ceiling of grey roof slates and grubby wooden battening, eave-nested pigeons, cooing their counterpoint to girlish weeping, fall silent as if in mourning for her shattered spirit as, twice more in quick succession, heavy leather clutched jealously in bony hands draws out a whistling arc. It is not the cutting of the stagnant air that stills them, rather it is the scream they have long learned by association to anticipate - and what a long drawn-out process that has been; pigeons are not the cleverest of God’s beasts.

...Crrrack! Crrraack!

...Arrrghhh!!!

A young woman screams; she can hear his ancient laboured wheezing, mummified and dust-dry, behind her, can smell his sweat and feel the brow-shed spray settling on her back like a fine rain of passion.

He pauses as much to allow for the blaze to spread across her buttocks as to give time for him to regain his own breath; the exertion of swinging the supple, heavy-leather tawse through the sticky, heavy air of the little garret room threatens to finally bring about the coronary that she has so often prayed would one day free her. Elfin and petite, Meredith Hewson, a late-teen child-woman, lies motionless and sobs heart-brokenly; she knows that fateful day won’t be today, it never is.

How he loves this little room, the reverend farther, the shelter which through the Christian charity of his heart he has so thoughtfully provided the waif. Tucked safely away under the eaves, the tiny steel-barred skylight is its only natural light, the narrow bed and chamber-pot-cum-commode its only furnishings; besides, that is, the thickly-leather-upholstered bench-cum-whipping-horse over which young Meredith is presently thoroughly and very professionally immobilised.

Neatly-bare arching ballerina’s feet are set widely spread with toes flat on the dusty grubby floorboards and heels hovering above. Calves, finely sculpted by nature in any case, are masterfully finished in perspiration-glossed elastic tension. Thick, broad, red-leather straps encase exquisitely-formed slender ankles. Others run across soft-backed knees and another pair sweep around the very tops of her soft, white, quivering thighs, the uppermost edges of the latter bonds lying obscured in the shadowed heavy-overhang of buttocks perhaps best described as generous but in truth somewhat over-chubby.

Despite her eighteen years, the puppy fat still lingers; and lingers there, around that peachy behind, most of all.

Youthful, roundly firm, elastic and resilient, those womanly-full out-swelling buttocks of hers taunt him, drive him and veritably seem to invite the three-tongued kiss of the tawse... and the next and the next...

She is bent tightly at the waist over the curving lip of the purposely designed whipping-horse or trestle, whereupon a fifteen centimetre wide soft leather band is tightened down securely across the small of her back. The only movement permitted her tautly-rounded, reddened and abused cheeks is to be seen in the rippled-waves of flesh bouncing and reflecting to and fro across each globe as each dances in turn to the rhythmic tattoo of pliant leather most expertly applied.

Whereas the side against which she stands rises perpendicularly from the floor beneath her abdomen, the far side falls way at some forty-five degrees to the vertical. Thickly, softly padded, the top has reformed its surface as a counterpart to the feminine contours of her torso under the persuasively-secure down-force of a further set of restraints. A band of leather, a full twenty-five centimetres in breadth, runs across her upper back and shoulder blades and holds her there in its uncompromising embrace.

Her head lies, turned to one side, facing a large ornately-wrought gilt-framed mirror, the latter tilted with apparent carelessness against the attic’s sloping dusty-grey wooden side-beams. Another band of red leather, of a breadth as if chosen to be the measure of her forehead, encircles her hairline, passing just clear of those sweetly-tipped pixie ears; lest she should be distracted from the appreciation that such a passionately-iconic spectacle so richly deserves.

She lies saintly; a martyr to lust and temptation, to one man’s sexual repression, to an antiquated religious dogma so self-righteously-twisted as to be able to translate and translocate the shame of one onto the blame of another with terrifyingly justified ease. She lies with arms secured back along her sides, broad leather bands encircling slender wrists and elbows and with the crown of her head angled down into the filth of the boards, the fungi-musk scent of dry-rot rising as a bass note to feminine perspiration - and the more metallic lingering relic-tang of his earlier abuse of her person.

Crrrraack! Yet another slap of the intolerant leather leaves its imprint, the three flesh-tanning tails of the tawse each sharply resolved in bruising red-blue relief. In the reflection before her, the twisted mouth agapes anew in a long and silent scream. A searing white flash blinds her thoughts, shatters further her being and again scatters the shards of personality she still scrabbles to gather to her.

More tears fall. A muddy grey mire of dust and decayed pigeon droppings, now further diluted, spreads its margins and deepens its incursion into the arid underfoot dirt. Fated to retreat in drying, only the brown tide-ring will remain to one day tell her story - this one and its myriad brethren lying around and about.

The mental scars run deeper of course, crisscrossing well-rutted through thoughts and memories; ruts worn deeper still and added anew with each abusive act performed upon her - and with the subsequent beating such perversions naturally earned her.

It wasn’t even sex, not as such, not as she understood it to be. If he could only bring himself to ‘use’ her as nature and God - yes, surely God, even his God - had intended. It would be just as abusive, it would be rape just as certainly; she found the old man repulsive after all.

And certainly she would earn just punishment for the temptation she presented him just the same - hers was the devil’s flesh, she understood that now - but it would at least be a natural act for all that, not some vile perversion of nature.

She might then have been left with some semblance of self-respect, some sense of pride in her femininity, at the end of it all. And, yes, perhaps she might even be granted some modicum of relief from that eternally nagging frustration that accompanied her every waking moment, and her dreams too; those twisted phallic-daemon landscapes from which, pursued by yearning, she would again and again be chased, slithering sand drenched in sweat, back into the darker reality of that dingy little attic and the unending hours of enforced Bible study - all that she might be purged of her sin.

And she would be purged of sin in a different way too, before his every visit. She was no stranger to the enema bag’s nozzle, of having to lie facedown on top of the little bed with knees drawn tightly up and buttocks pushed invitingly skyward, the latter naturally parted by the enforced position, yet parted further still by the latex-gloved hands of his housekeeper.

Crrraaack! He has switched sides, the strike lands across the opposite buttock cheek; the silent cry comes again dryly in her throat, little more than a hoarse squeak now. She is cried-out now, finished, yet the beating continues; it has to, it is an exorcism more than a mere punishment. And he has to exorcise the devil from the two of them, drive out the beast from within himself as much as from within the miscreant lying before him.

Always he keeps one eye tilted skyward, towards the roof beams above; he is, after all, a man of the cloth, he knows well the symbolism of the roof, the symbolism of charity, that which covers a multitude of sins. His other can’t avoid view of the origin of several of those sins; he has violated her there, mere moments before, and his thick seed trickles now from between those deliciously fleshy peach-mooned buttocks. Yet, if there should be some penalty, a penance demanded, then it is she who must pay.

It is the girl who must be punished for the possession of that puckered rosebud, surely the devil’s-embellishment, that it should have driven such insane lust into God’s own servant. And this it had, time and again, demanding that she be chastised time and again; those once perfectly flawless globes were now marked and marred by countless strappings, canings and horsewhippings, just as that rosebud, set between, stretched and distorted by countless repeated and persistent violations, seemed plundered of the dewy youthful innocent freshness it once possesed.

Whhhoosh! She cringes in her bonds, nerves tearing, shredding, expectantly waiting the impact, the strike that never comes.

WWhooosh! Whhhoosh! Whhhoooossh! The stagnant, heavy atmosphere is rendered asunder again and again and again, the three leather tails forcing still-air through turbulently split and twisted paths and each offering up its own whistling overtone to the diabolical aural assault; these are mere practice swings, nothing more.

Time and time again her buttocks tense, attractively dimpling. She tugs impotently at her bonds, her eyes squeezing tightly shut as if she might cower unseen behind their wrinkled screening.

Behind her, unseen, he is pirouetting around with surprising agility and a lightness of foot belying his age. He is exploring the cramped space beneath the tent of angled roof timbers with the tawse’s backswing, seeking to best accommodate its arcing envelope, striving to optimise the degree of freedom in its wielding and maximise the inertia imparted to the flailing leather.

Whhoosh! Whhhoooossh! Whwhooosh! Still more practice strokes: He is twisting his body, shifting his weight from foot to foot and swinging the leather strap first this way and then that, forehand then backhand then forehand again, exploring ever-broadening sweeping arcs and looking for all the world like some daemonic tennis professional.

Her nerves are stretched to their tensile limit, fraying, splitting, failing - she cries now as she never has before, screams her near-silent squeaking, hoarse, scream as if in pain beyond the mere psychological, as if each blow were indeed landing. This is a procedure he runs through at practically every such session; over time this singular brand of psychological torture has done more to break her to his will then almost anything else, more even than having to satisfy his filthy housekeeper’s perverted lusts.

For an infinitesimally short, infinitely long, heavily-pregnant moment there is silence - all is still, deathly still... then... then...

The moment is irreversibly shattered: Ccrrraack! Crraaack! Cer,rrraack! Cerrr,rrraack!!! Forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. Right buttock, left buttock, right buttock, left buttock: a never-ending staccato rain of flesh-searing pistol shots, going on and on and on... Her eyes are wide open now, bulging, her mouth gaping in eternal mindlessly-soul-wrenching scream.

He is shouting now, raging and hollering in punctuated rhythm, red-faced, demented by anger, a strange anger, an anger born of confused and displaced guilt.

“Unholy slut! Harlot! Devil-spawned temptress of filth...”

Cerr,raack! Cerra,aack! Crrrrraack! Cerrr,rrraack!: forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. Sheets of blinding pain flash across her eyes in jagged electric-white bolts - unimaginable pain, pain beyond enduring. Then slowly, ever so slowly, cruelly slowly, the diabolical suffering he is inflicting begins to recede, fading along with his accusing, cussing voice. All is swirling about her, spiralling down into the welcoming arms of the abyss and the long-promised safety of the darkness. She is losing consciousness, blacking out as she has so many times before, so very many times, blacking out...blacking out... blacking... out...

A Telephone Rings and Dice are Cast

The scene changes and time passes - now sun-lit, the mood lightens: A baronial drawing-room, panelled in oak and scented with white lilies: A woman stands in a floating breeze-blown cloud of sea-green chiffon before a massive Arts and Crafts fireplace, one eye on her reflection in the mirror mounted above. Lithe, statuesque and leaning nonchalantly by her left elbow against the mantel, she has a telephone handset pressed to her ear on that side and a 1930s bakelite telephone balanced precariously on the upturned palm of her right hand, her right elbow resting on her hip - the impression formed is of some living art-deco bronze. It is an impression further crystallised by her bobbed hair; having long forsaken modernity, preferring instead to become the absolute epitome of 1922. The potential for severity in the latter styling is eased by the deceptively-casual dark brown fronds lying in carefully arranged ringlets on her forehead and ears.

Placing the telephone on the mantelshelf she toys playfully with the handset’s braided brown cotton flex, twirling it back and forth between the forefinger and thumb of her now freed right hand, her poise betraying the unmistakable inheritance of aristocracy, old-money flowing where others have blood. Beyond her, the winter sunlight beams, dusty-fanned in a multitude of hues, through stained glass depictions of fantastical Arthurian hunting scenes - the sweeping bay-window oversees the snow-dusted garden, the cliff-tops and, finally, the sea, the Solent; that narrow channel separating the gentile, lost-age world of the Isle of Wight from the mainland Hampshire coast.

How often the most miniscule and context-deprived fragments of conversation, mere snippets half-heard and caught perhaps in passing by, are disproportionately empowered to mislead and to arouse distrust where none was founded. Then again, on occasion it happens that an office or drawing room door left carelessly ajar lends substance to airy conjecture, fleshes-out the bones of long-held suspicion. Perhaps it is a contextless one sided remnant, muffled by soft furnishings, plush Asian rugs and heavily-hanging tapestries. Perhaps it is an early middle-aged woman, telephone handset held preciously in her manicured hand, her voice cultured, educated and self assured.

“...Yes, yes, I quite agree...”Aha...quite...yes, initially for three months, you say?...Oh, yes, definitely, I’d jump at the chance! The girl can join her cousin there...a few years? Would that be possible? ...Hmm, years you say!”

A smile sweeps across her lips and sweetens her cheeks into apple-ripe plumpness; unseen yet implied in her voice and encoded in her intonation her positivity is read with clarity at the far end of the line - her caller, encouraged apparently, responds accordingly.

“...A few years, you were saying? How many years, exactly? ...Well, in principle, yes, just so long as I can be assured of regular feedback...Oh, you know: video recordings, written reports, that sort of thing - I’m sure you can use your imagination as to the sort of thing that would be my cup of tea, so to speak.... Aha, aha,...Why yes, yes of course!... No, not really; I completely understand the ‘no visitors’ rule, really I do: that is exactly why I would want regular reports to be sent to me - with the utmost discretion, of course.”

The woman’s sigh is impatient and clearly is interpreted by her caller as requiring further clarification. To the distant casual eavesdropper the earpiece seems to cackle and crackle in a high-pitched, parrot-screech travesty of speech, the intelligence eroded by distance - but the tone of concern travels intact.

Tut-tutting to herself, the woman is swift to parry her caller’s fears: “I think I have grasped a clear enough impression of your rationale by now. A cosy little group of young ladies, kept completely out of contact with the outside world, totally isolated in every way in fact: Its that concept of yours again - ‘total immersion’, I believe you called it last time we spoke...

No I hadn’t realised that the ‘no talking’ rule had been extended to include the dormitory area. What wonderful discipline, quite delicious - all those chatty teenagers, each surrounded by other girls of her own age and yet all sitting in isolated, brow-beaten silence...Yes, quite... just like Cistercian nuns, but with the fear of the cane and the strap to replace their religious conviction... I positively love it!”

A giggle momentarily interrupts her flow: there is a self-conscious, almost self-apologetically nervous edge to it.

“...Yes, hypothetically speaking, I can well imagine that there would be a danger of certain long-term psychological... complications, shall we say, arising if a girl was to remain under such a regime as you have described over the sort of timescale that you are talking about. Again, hypothetically speaking, one could well imagine it possible that a certain personality type, if made privy, would derive a certain...frisson from all of that - and from reading the psychiatric reports in particular.”

Bringing her hand to her mouth and balling her fingers into a fist she stifles a markedly excited cough, her cheeks a little too coloured now for her comfort; as might tell of one having inadvertently spoken just a little too freely.

“Sorry about that, a bit of a frog in the old throat I’m afraid...Now where were we?”

The handset again buzzes like an irritated electronic gnat in her ear.

“...Well, what can I say? A little bit of discipline will do the child the world of good. But tell me...these uniforms you spoke of before, what do they consist of exactly? Really, what, on a girl of her age? How marvellous, what a sight!

But you do realise, don’t you’ that she would be old enough to marry - if circumstances were different, you understand...Oh my God! How the little strumpet’s going to love that - I don’t think...No, no, no objection at all. It was just the thought of, of...Well, they’re virtually young women at that age, aren’t they - and to imagine that you have them there, under lock and key and dressed like that! How clever, how utterly, utterly splendid!”

Again that nervous cough of hers has come to the rescue - her next thought goes unspoken; and if overheard, who knows the consequences. But how easy it is, given all that we have eavesdropped on so far, to imagine something along the lines of ...

“To think of that little harlot, dressed like that - oh my God! And kept under corporal punishment? Perhaps stood in the corner, like some schoolchild with her hands on her head - no, better...with a dunce’s cap on her head, far more apt - and with half-a-dozen tram-lines burning across that chubby behind of hers to boot...oh my God...OH MY GOD!!”

Perhaps the true sentiment, whatever it might have been, is better left unspoken - some things are all the more interesting for being left to conjecture.

But whether conjecture and reality be related or not, if we were now to have the temerity to peer around that heavy oak-panelled door or through the gap between its substantial hinges, we might well see her shuffling awkwardly away from the open fire, cheeks burning as red as the coals that provide for the supposed source of her discomfiture and telltale beads of perspiration coalescing on her brow and just beginning to meander down.

“My apologies - that frog again - it must be the weather. One does try to keep the old pile heated but there are all those drafts everywhere one goes - you know how it is with these old places. Anyway, I digress: It goes without saying that first and foremost I will have to consult with my legal advisors, just to clarify things vis-a-vie control of the trust fund and the running of the company, that sort of thing. But otherwise, legal stumbling blocks notwithstanding, what you are proposing promises to be a perfect conclusion to the business. Yes a most apt conclusion and - not meaning to suggest any impropriety, if you get my meaning - a mutually satisfactory one at that, I would imagine... Wonderful, I’ll get back to you on that point just as soon as I have clarified the legal ramifications...”

A foot has nudged closed the door; we hear no more save indistinct low murmurings propagated soggily through dense tapestry and heavy-oak panelling. Life is so often like that; the most salient points are so often those frustratingly left in most need of interpretation and clarification. Therein lays the root of uncertainty - ever the bane of the eavesdropper.

All Safe and Sound: Hospital Bed Bondage

Once more, the scene shifts, but now the time remains the same: This room is brightly lit, dazzlingly lit - as bright and white as heaven itself. This, though, is anything but paradise. Amidst the aseptically-perfumed bare functionality, typifying a hospital ward, a pretty and petite elfin teenage girl stirs - tawny hair all tousled and bed-headed, lips full yet petulant. A young woman to whom, at this moment, life is even less certain and to whom reality has never been harder to grasp.

At this moment in time all she is certain of is that she is uncertain - in equal measure, both as to her location and her circumstances. Or at least she thinks she is uncertain; for although at some level she is sure she has never been here before, some part of her acknowledges a certain spark of familiarity - and that is a sinister flame indeed that it seeks to ignite.

It is a strange and terrible world indeed that greets young Meredith Hewson’s awakening. The last thing she can remember is being with him, in his hands, under his strap - the pain, the unendurable pain, but now...

...White! All white! Everything! Everything is white! White curtains are drawn around the bed, a common-or-garden bar-sided tubular framed hospital bed, albeit with its chromed sidebars and grey metallic framework safely sheaved in a protective covering of soft matte-white padded plastic.

Through sleep-bleared eyes and blinked-back tears the ceiling above defies focus, a depthless, pitiless, expanse of nothing. A glance to the left and the right provides little beyond a glimpse of featureless walling and an obtusely-viewed misty day-white rectangle, perhaps a metre or so to her left, the window somehow reassuring by its presence.

Throughout the night she had been tossing and turning fitfully, her head swinging left and right then left again, back and forth across the pillow, leaving trickles of saliva behind as traces of her distress upon the soft latex pillowcase - the rubber-padded PVC neck-brace, presently constraining her movement, had been placed on her only after some hours, purely as a precautionary measure. Soaked in sweat, the rivulets trickling down and pooling beneath the latex bed-covers, from time to time her dark brown eyes would startlingly snap open like surprised roller blinds, gazing wide and uncomprehending from beneath curling dark lashes before, just as suddenly, disappearing behind defensively collapsing eyelids. Then slowly, ever so slowly, those lids had lifted again, fluttering, flickering, uncertain, those big velvet-brown eyes swinging back and forth and scanning for any hint, any clue that might separate dream from wakefulness; the apparent normality of the situation seemingly too abnormal to fit her rationale of reality.

Now, leaning over and across from the right-hand side of the bed, from the patient’s perspective, a nurse flashes a friendly and reassuring smile, welcoming yet also tainted mildly with concern. A hospital nurse, a quite conventional, quite normal hospital nurse, her white plastic apron softly crinkling over the perfect polyester-white of the button-fronted uniform dress beneath:

“Welcome back, sweetheart.” The young nurse’s words are like treacle and whispered in consideration of her patient’s patently alarmed state.

“...Wha...wha...where?”

“It’s all okay, honey...everything’s all right now; we’ll look after you. You’re in hospital, dear. And it’s a very special hospital - you’re so lucky to have been brought here. You’ll be quite safe here, quite safe now. Quite, quite safe....”