A New Bed On The Ward

Knowledge: The Irony and the Ecstasy of Coercion

The chromium-framed wheelchair trundled along, passing through the silent sensory vacuum of a corridor as far removed in appearance from the white plastic-coated gloss of the sterile modernity that had characterised the department of experimental psychology as one could imagine. In this dimly-lit hallway all suggestion of the modern world that existed outside these walls had disappeared under a dull institutional cream and green paint. The latter decoration, extending from the off-white linoleum flooring to half wall-height was identical in colour to the teenaged occupant’s usual attire of equally institutionally-hued green striped pyjamas. Today, though, bare legs were the order of the day below the rough beige of a canvas straitjacket. Even her usual baggy bloomer-style knickers had been swapped for a pair of brief skin-tight polythene panties that left the majority of her substantial bottom uncovered, other than for the cruel divisionary bite of the jacket’s crotch strap - she was going to have to greet the denizens of her new home with fresh cane welts prominently on display to all and sundry.

The section psychiatrist’s white lab coat flapped and waved like a flag in a storm as she pushed her patient towards her new home - walking briskly despite her burden, her stockings swished and her leather skirt creaked rhythmically as if measuring off the distance. She was keeping up something of a running commentary as they went, pausing only when required to struggle with one of the many security grilles that bisected every passageway, one at each end, confident that her voice was the only intelligible sound her patient could hear, by dint of the microphone she had pinned to her blouse.

“You have to understand, dear: You and the other girls you have seen since you’ve been here - the other ‘volunteers’ - none of you were ever the actual experimental subjects; not as such. Your purpose, as a group, was more to act in the manner of a catalyst, if you will. The real experimental subjects were - and are - the staff themselves; the carers, the nurses, the ‘teachers’ in the ‘school’ unit, the wardresses in the prison and workhouse area, in fact all those under whose control you have been. Ironic, isn’t it? I have even had you, yourself, help train those I have put in charge of you.

But where you are going now there are no ‘volunteers’ and no need for any such manipulation. There will be real psychiatric patients and real nursing staff - and they’ll respond to you in the manner I have no doubt they will, simply because of the way I have trained you to behave and the way I have you dressed.”

In the chair the girl fidgeted dismally, her movements restricted by straps and bands and buckles and all manner of largely superfluous restraints. Her buttocks fairly burnt against the tacky leatherette seat, the fire reignited by the sting of perspiration and the throbbing growing steadily with time. Yet the doctor’s words seemed to burn deeper still, although she wasn’t at all sure she understood the implications of what was being said. The six strokes she had received that morning - and that were now coming back to haunt her - were part and parcel of what the doctor liked to describe as a ‘procedural caning’. That is, a caning given not for any particular punitive purpose, but merely as a vehicle through which the doctor might further impose her will, usually to help ensure her patient’s compliance throughout some unpleasant or humiliating procedure or - as in this case - if about to undergo some form of change of circumstance, as a way of drawing a psychological ‘line in the sand’.

Such as might warrant a ‘procedural caning’ would be a vanishing rare sojourn outside of the immediate environs of the doctor’s consultation room and her tiny cell-like living space that was set just off of it, let alone this day’s trip: This day’s journey had apparently warranted the most severe, most inhumanly-extreme thrashing she had ever received - only half a dozen, granted; but with the sinfully-pliant rattan cane wielded with all the doctor’s considerable strength and each stroke fully intended to both split the skin and shatter the spirit. The beating had been intolerable from the landing of the very first, hurtling, slashing stroke and made all the more unbearable counterpointed as it was against the backing of the harshest verbal debasement the doctor’s inventive mind could devise to accompany it. The doctor knew every psychological weak-spot to go for - and each and every derogatory word found its mark; just as her practised hand unerringly found the tenderest, most tightly-drawn, flesh to scorch across Lavinia’s naked backside, again and again.

Of course the most intolerable of thrashings and perceptive of berating verbal attacks in turn called for the most stringent of restraint, if the unendurable was nevertheless to be endured: In due course, the familiar, almost comforting, flannelette of the pyjamas and humid clinging PVC knickers had been replaced by the hard chafing of canvas against defenceless bare flesh, the breath-crushing implacable tautness of a myriad leather straps, buckles and fastenings and the shoulder-wrenching torsion of a straitjacket’s sleeves enwrapped around her torso and pulled so tight across her chest as to all but cut off the circulation from her arms. The rough canvas crotch strap had been cruelly twisted around its own axis multiple times so as to lessen any impedance it might offer to the doctor’s favoured instrument of correction, before being pulled back between her legs and buckled so tightly as to widely part her buttock cheeks and pull up deep within the cleft of her nether regions, whereupon it was prevented from sinking deeper still only by the surgically sutured rubber masturbation prevention device she was fitted with.

Thus attired she had been bent over the school desk that sat in the corner of her cell, her legs widely spread and with ankles secured by leather cuffs and chains to the floor-mounted eyebolts. The leather restraint belt had been tightened across the small of her back and then the straitjacket’s collar fastened by way of an iron ring sewn in the rear to a length of stainless steel chain that was anchored in turn to a ringbolt in the wall before her at about desktop height.

She had screamed the place down from the first stroke to the last. Then, caned into a state of sobbing contrition she had been trundled out of the shining plastic world of the department of experimental psychology and its immediate environs, tightly strapped in a restraint-wheelchair, her eyes covered by a black velvet sleep mask and with headphones gushing torrents of white noise in her ears.

Arrival

Suitably disorientated and having been wheeled deep within the rarely-visited confusion-laden, coiling depths of the grand old hospital’s Victorian architectural legacy Lavinia had finally been divested of eye shields and earpieces and restraints. The doctor now had her walk, barefoot and straitjacketed, the rest of the way, worming through the zigzagging meshwork of the dismally-institutional, windowless asylum corridors towards the permanently locked entrance of her new home.

Her eyes having now adjusted, nothing could have prepared Lavinia for the strange hollow sense of hopeless despair that now met her deprived senses. It hung in the air along those dank windowless corridors like something physical. It was as if rotting, dust laden, velvet drapes were floating in the stagnant air like dark cobwebs, sucking the light from the dim wire-caged domed lamps that were mounted a little above head height at regular intervals along the way on upwardly-curving iron stalks that seemed to grow almost organically out from the walls. The latter brought to mind the beseeching upturned hands of the damned and somehow cast shadows so little demarcated, one from the other, as to give the impression of one long continuous shadowy pool of gloom. It was as if the legacy of the starkly-mismanaged and abusive horror that had been part and parcel of the Victorian mental asylum system had somehow struggled across the barriers of time - or for some reason been skilfully recreated.

With the doctors arm draped around her shoulders guiding her, the overpowering embrace of the straitjacket robbing her of breath and her bare feet numb with cold padding on the unforgiving stone floor she was steered through the last two security gates, rounding yet another corner between. Ahead a long strip-lamp cowered under a greyish metal hood at ceiling height, its light fanning down over a pair of substantial-looking reddish-brown wooden double doors inset with large porthole-style wire-glass windows and flanked to one side by an elderly looking brass bell push. The latter was mounted on what appeared to be a painted metal surround, a greyish slightly reflective surface in evidence here and there in deep pits where years of discoloured, creamy enamel-like paint had flaked and chipped. Above, the words she dreaded most were stencilled over flaking white-painted brickwork in thick black capitals having that unmistakably 1940s utilitarian look to them.

Coming closer, yet now psychologically shying away, her gait shortening to something substantially less than that afforded her by the tether linking her leather ankle cuffs, she could see now those damning words repeated on a age-roughened white-turned-beige rectangular Formica plaque mounted beneath the window of the right hand of the pair of doors.

Long-term Secure Psychiatric Ward: The nineteen fifties typeface looked perfectly at ease given the material of the signboard with its four darkened brass headed screws affixing it, one at each corner.

Those words instantly engendered in her the darkest, clammiest dread. She began to back away, despite the thrashing she had so recently received and the unspoken threat of more to come. But then, unlocked from within, as the pair approached one side of the sturdy dual iron-reinforced wooden construct swung inwards as if to admit them. Suddenly she had the overwhelming urge to turn to run - as if there could be anywhere to run to; even if taken to the hospital gates she would run back inside of her own volition, the doctor had proved that much to her. It was certainly too late now; deep down she knew that despite that sense of overpowering dread, the doctor’s hold over her would prove stronger. When ordered she found herself stepping briskly forward - albeit urged over the threshold by a swift cut of the doctor’s cane landing smartly across the backs of her thighs.

The doctor had gone to great pains to grant her the opportunity to fully soak up the atmosphere of the place in order to help her, as the doctor put it “better adjust to the mindset of the psychiatric ward” - it was the rationale behind having walked her through those dark Victorian asylum tunnels rather than simply depositing her, still restrained in her wheelchair, straight here on the ward as she could have done. Nevertheless there was much more here to adjust to than even the stark foreboding atmosphere of the passageways they had just traversed had suggested.

Passing through those outer double doors - although like traversing into a more modern era as compared to the Victorian passageways she had just experienced outside - was still somewhat akin to entering a realm several decades out of phase with the modern world. An outer anteroom held a small reception desk and chair to one side and a long low bench to the other. Directly ahead lay an inner set of double doors, identical to the outer pair other than for the addition of a set of three vertically mounted iron bars covering each window and also kept locked. Between these two sets of doors and bisecting the space between the desk and the inner set, was the most stringent of the layers guarding the ward’s security; a heavy hinged gate constructed of thick vertical iron bars, its heavy Victorian-era integral lock backed up by the reassurance of a hefty modern brass padlock.

In this airlock-like never-world - between decaying Victorian mental asylum stonework and the closeted isolated world of the long-term secure psychiatric ward and all points beyond - all things seem to belong in the 1950s or early 1960s. It was an impression that, although the stunned young patient couldn’t possibly know it, was largely correct. Indeed until relatively recent times this whole area had languished unoccupied since a brief resurgence of its utilisation as a secure unit - back in the dark old days of early nineteen fifties psychiatric practice - had finally ground to a not so graceful halt sometime in the early Sixties. Since that era the ward had lain literally frozen in time with most of the furniture, fixtures and fittings left in situ. Then around fifteen years ago it had been rehabilitated by dint of a private sponsorship deal. Funded and managed by the aforementioned sponsors and with proceeds going largely to those behind the ownership of the hospital per se the ward had, on the sponsor’s insistence, been pressed into service on a shoestring, with whatever it lacked being drawn from long-forgotten storerooms and augmented by acquisitions made by the sponsors themselves through various surplus and salvage sales.

A cold-faced unsmiling woman was seated behind the reception desk, clipboard in hand, her anachronistic vintage uniform lit by an Anglepoise lamp taken straight from an early 1960s medical drama film set. This, as Lavinia was about to discover, was the Ward Sister. Rising to her feet and scribbling something on her clipboard the dour woman gathered up a bunch of keys before exiting through into the ward proper, pausing only to glance back at the doctor over Lavinia’s shoulder:

“I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes with your patient, to get her ready. Just ring the bell when you are ready to bring her through, doctor, and I’ll have her bed ready. The pyjamas and knickers you sent over are waiting for her there on the bench, as you requested.”

“Thank you, sister. I’ll have her ready in a jiffy”

So, this was her new home, the ward ... the secure psychiatric ward - the thought brought a chill to the girl’s bones, even through the over-warm covering of thick canvas over heavyweight institutional flannelette. The urge to run was suddenly on her again, overpowering yet even more futile now. Momentarily she shuffled her feet, feeling the warm spongy linoleum beneath her bare soles, feeling too the tug of the tether joining the thick fleece-lined leather cuffs encircling her ankles and the torso-gripping pressure of the straitjacket and becoming suddenly all too aware of the burning in her shoulders caused by the tight constriction of her arms pulled so tightly around her body. She suddenly felt breathless, a leaden weight pressing down on her, a feeling akin, she imagined, to the condemned standing on the gallows waiting for the hangman’s noose. The thought had struck her: The doctor had termed the aim of her stay in the doctor’s ‘seclusion’ room as ‘re-education’; it had been supposed to develop in her the mindset the doctor would ‘expect of a mental patient’ so that she might be transferred to a ‘proper mental ward’ ready to slip in seamlessly with all the other ‘mental cases’ with ‘no questions asked’.

Then another thought struck her: That last part implied that the staff here would be unaware of her past and of her guardian’s plotting against her - with her aunt’s collusion it now appeared. She might perhaps, if she stayed calm and went along with it for a while, be able to explain her case, get herself re-evaluated psychologically by some outside authority. But then the realisation again bit home that the fact that she was standing here in a straitjacket waiting to be led to her bed could only mean the doctor was now happy with her handiwork. The doctor herself had told her outright that the technique she was employing amounted to a form of brainwashing and that it built upon firm foundations already laid down under the guise of the behavioural psychology experiment she had been taking part in. The doctor had also admitted that she had been building upon work that had been surreptitiously carried out on Lavinia at the hands of her aunt and her aunt’s psychoanalyst friend even before she had first been brought to the institution.

In truth the doctor had left her with few tools to convince even the most naive student nurse of her ‘normality’ let alone hardened psychiatric ward staff whose sole concern was most likely to ensure she stay safely locked up. After all; she stammered uncontrollably, to the point of to all intents being rendered incomprehensible. She was an overweight compulsive eater. She was a compulsive masturbator with a fixation on women’s knickers so strong that she insisted on carrying around a soiled pair given her by a nurse - the lace-trimmed black satin could be seen poking up from the leather collar of her straitjacket where the doctor had tucked them after agreeing she be allowed to take them to the ward with her.

What was worse was that she was now hopelessly addicted to sedatives that increasingly left her woolly-headed and in an almost trance-like state. It was a process that again had started when she had been in her aunt’s hands but had worsened out of all proportion under the doctor’s care.

Her aunt had used the dependence she had developed as a lever to instigate a stepwise programme of progressively gaining control over her that involved the gradual imposition of her aunt’s very special take on what she called ‘home discipline.’ In her turn the doctor had used the suggestibility induced by stronger and even more addictive doses to shortcut the path of inducing a hypnotic state in her - as had her aunt’s psychotherapist friend, before her - taking full advantage of the short-term amnesiatic effect of the narcotic to ensure the girl could have no memory of any post-hypnotic suggestion left behind. Moreover, where she was about to enter, she had been told that far from weaning her off her dependency, she would be offered incrementally stronger doses that she would be expected to take herself, voluntarily, with the sure and certain knowledge of becoming progressively ever more woolly-headed, until that befuddled trance-like state became an every day occurrence.

In short, this place was the next phase in the plans they had for her: she was here to receive a different form of ‘re-education’. She had already been thoroughly trained to think of herself as a ‘mental patient’. Now she would be equally thoroughly institutionalised, to the point of being unable to carryout even the simplest of tasks for herself and joining a carefully domesticated herd of glassy-eyed docile psychiatric patients. The doctor seemed to have read her mind.

“A year or two in here and you’ll be quite indistinguishable from the rest - why, I’ve already got you drooling, sniffing girl’s knickers and in a straitjacket. You are probably wondering what I am going to be doing to you next - the answer is nothing, nothing at all. I’m not even going to be visiting you for a good while - no, not me; I’m going to be off on a nice long vacation.

I’ll just leave you here for a while, and all these nice friendly smiling nurses and other good people will finish the job of breaking you for me.” Smiling the domineering woman psychiatrist took Lavinia by the chin, tilting her head back until her prettily frightened violet eyes met the steely determined glint of those of the doctor. “Let me see you. Hmm, you see, there’s still a little hope left alive in those eyes - but by the time I return that glimmer will have faded... I can guarantee that. Now... let’s get you ready and then it’s off you toddle, to your nice comfy bed.”