Fed, Watered And Masturbated In A Plastic Tabard

The front and back halves came together over Lavinia’s hips with the tightening of the bottle-green plastic ribbon bows securing the rubbery plastic tabard’s sides. The young student nurse leaning across her in order to tie off the far side Lavinia caught again that familiar blended scent of carbolic soap, musky girlish perspiration, hospital-laundered uniform dress fabric, all juxtaposed against that vague aerosol hint the young woman always carried with her of candyfloss cosmetic sweetness. The latter was a maddening source of ambiguous fading memories of face-creams, gooey lip-gloss and hazily-recalled hair products.

The big, wet kiss planted dead centre of her forehead - that was the big surprise here, though. The hot moistened lips seemed to linger forever - the translocation from forehead to her own lips came as an electric shock. It was at the touching of their tongues - her angle nurse’s and her own - that she began to weep openly.

“Shhh, honey - you’ll get us both in trouble.”

Why was she behaving like this; not only acquiescing to having this humiliating adult feeding bib thing placed on her, but in some way feeling happy about it, more secure some how? What was more her hands were no longer secured and yet she had made not a single move to help with the proceedings, nor hinder either. She had simply left her hands where they had been placed, on top of the woollen blanket and over her lap. Now she was weeping silently like a little girl without a single inkling why, simultaneously smiling in non-comprehended happiness and salivating at the prospect of a near tasteless gruel, soon to be spoon-fed her as if she were an invalid. The question filled her with horror and she tried not to give sound to it even in internal dialogue, yet it wouldn’t go away either. Was she becoming now, so institutionalised?

Well, if there was one thing they knew about in this place it was the nature of institutionalisation - it was the main raison d’etre. The factors contributing to the institutionalisation of patients undergoing long-term residential psychiatric care were a major aspect of the research work undertaken under the auspices of the hospital’s experimental psychology unit - the doctor, herself, had told her that! Of course the investigation had always been intended to furnish an understanding of the factors that led to a patient becoming dependent on the routine and regimentation of the mental home. The rationale had always been that once such factors were fully understood and elucidated they might then be avoided or circumvented in the day to day realisation of psychiatric care and thus there would be an improvement in the likelihood of eventual rehabilitation. There were at least two problems inherent in this premise that Lavinia had noted: The first revolved around the doctor’s proposition that the best approach to the elucidation of those factors was through the deliberate induction of the very pathological state the researchers were so keen to alleviate. The second was that she, Lavinia Vitesse, herself had been little more than an assay block upon which to appraise the good doctor’s hypothesis.

All those bells and buzzers of different pitches and timbres that had, from the start, been associated with even the most routine of personal of bodily functions now made sense in the context of the conditioning pairing of one stimulus with another. Like it or not, after something greater than two years of incarceration under the doctor’s guiding hand and that woman’s constant psychological conditioning, even if not able to recognize it in herself, nevertheless young sweet Lavinia had already become as institutionalised as any mental patient might after five to ten years under lock and key.

“Please, honey, you really must try to not to let your mind wander so - that’s exactly what they want. You have to try to keep yourself focused on your surroundings. This is your reality now. I understand how tedious this place can be, your existence as a mental patient, but this is your life now, this is your only anchor to realty. I understand the escape you imagine you achieve from the tedium of the ward in your day-dreaming but consider this: To what extent are you playing into their hands by letting yourself be drawn into your own delusions so? Now, lean forward and I’ll tie your bib for you - just let your hands rest in your lap while I fasten the pretty ribbon bows at your waist. That’s the way! You know what?...I think you are coming along really nicely now! If you carry on, cooperating like this, helping me to help you, then we’ll get you through this in no time at all.

The softly-conforming PVC plastic shoulder straps of the tabard ‘feeding bib’ weighed heavily on Lavinia’s gentle shoulders - crumpling the sweat-laden flannelette of her institutional pyjamas, the increased burden now seemed to go beyond the mere physical, as if emphasising the incremental step this new acceptance represented. If being spoon-fed by an authoritatively-uniformed young woman, almost certainly younger than herself, was the embodiment of humiliation, then having strung around her neck this doubled-over sheet of greyish, semi--transparent polythene shame represented yet another onion-skinned layer of torment. Yet this was a torment she had taken on willingly enough in order to please her guardian angel in uniform blue-checked viscose.

What was it the doctor had said about neurosis? Whatever it had been, Young Lavinia could not recall in detail. But what she did remember didn’t cheer her any: wasn’t one of the symptoms of neurosis the development of an obsessive concern with the symptoms and signs of mental illness? But at what point might one consider the line crossed between a natural concern and an obsession with one’s mental health? How could she know if and when that line had been crossed? Could it be that even the act of considering such a possibility could be construed as a symptom of that which she feared most - mental illness? How could she ever know?

Perhaps the nurse, trainee or not, had it right; perhaps she did, indeed need to anchor herself somehow in the present. But what was there here, other than a monotony of bottle-green plastic drapery hanging floor to ceiling and the vague murmurings of ‘socially-mingling’ mental cases. On the other hand, the alternative was to allow herself to become lost in her own delusional abandonment - and mental illness would then surely follow.

Lavinia was only vaguely aware of her own fingers, slippery with excitement and twitching to and fro, flickering at the little bulb-like rubber hood that encased her intimate nubbin of pleasure and that strove forever to keep release just that little bit out of reach. Her young caregivers features, as she followed, enraptured, her charge’s desperate attempts to achieve sexual culmination, were a mask of confused lust, pity, embarrassment and anger - not at all necessarily in that order. This was the closest Lavinia could now expect to come to an actual, fulfilling relationship - unless nameless others decided otherwise, of course, That thought seemed to be rotting its way through Lavinia’s mind, eating at her soul. But... wasn’t this internal diatribe, in itself, destructive - a symptom of her growing neurosis? Then again; if she was to deny herself this one outlet - as humiliating as performing intimately in front of her young carer undoubtedly was - then what was left? The alternative was to let herself sink into the unthinking, long-lost, mire of oblivion enjoyed and populated by the rest of the idiotic, gibbering harpies around her. What alternative was that?

The choice was stark, but even having the notion of a choice was a form of subtle psychological torture. She could sit quietly and dwelling more and more inwards, turning it on herself and sending herself quite mad in the process or let herself be gently led by the hand deeper and deeper into mental illness by her sweetly smiling guardian angle rustling and bustling around her in her blue-checked uniform dress.

For what else could this be but some form of mental illness? Head swimming in a swirling sedative fog, her hands thrust down the front of her hospital issue asylum pyjamas, she was masturbating furiously. Her fingers were plucking and twitching urgently under her tackily-humid plastic mental-home incontinence knickers, worrying at a sutured rubber thimble-cap device designed with the sole purpose in mind of robbing her of the one thing she desired more than anything else in the world at that moment - the ability to gain sexual release.

“Stop that, now - it’s time to get you back into bed and I’m going to have to draw back the curtain”.

The command bit deep into Lavinia’s psyche; shame and humiliation now shared equal billing with hot-cheeked heavy-breathed, tear-wrenching frustration. She felt her hands being physically tugged from their private fumbling and being placed forcefully in her lap, the musky pungency of her unrelinquished arousal rising accusingly from fingertips left tacky with bodily lubrication. She was only half aware of the head and shoulders pressing thorough the opening in the plastic curtains surrounding the bed and the chair in which she was presently seated, wriggling uncomfortably in her sweat-soaked pyjamas.

“I’m so sorry, Sister - I just didn’t know what I could do to stop her”. The student nurse’s apology certainly sounded sincere enough - even if, mere moments earlier, it had been she that had been instrumental in encouraging the very behaviour she seemed now to pretend to detest - in body language and facial expression, at least, even if not in word.

“A quite disgusting display, obviously - but something not entirely unexpected in the mentally ill and something that I am afraid you are going to have to get used to witnessing if they’re left unrestrained. Try not to be too shocked by it - it is not their fault; they don’t see things in the same way as you and I. They tend to retreat into their own little world, especially the delusional psychotic patients - in fact, in some ways this can be seen as a positive sign. Firstly; this little demonstration confirms the doctor’s diagnosis and secondly; it demonstrates the patient’s acceptance of her situation in that she is clearly settling down to withdrawing within herself - something that although on the surface might appear counter productive, ironically can be crucial to the well being of the long-term patient, where release into the community is not expected to be an option.

For now, though, I want you to put her back in full restraints and she is to be confined to bed at all times for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, you are to make out a full report of this behaviour for the doctor under the heading of ‘evidence of pathological sexual obsession and obsessive-compulsive behaviour’.” The Ward Sister’s words seemed strangely devoid of either malice or anger, but rather hinted at containing a note of resignation - almost as if nothing particularly untoward had occurred and that the sight of a curvaceous young woman masturbating under close supervision was an everyday phenomenon. Well perhaps it was, given the context of a ward structured around the most hopelessly unredeemably insane.

Momentarily stepping back so as to gain the advantage of leverage, the Ward Sister unceremoniously dragged back the synthetic veil of privacy from around Lavinia’s bed with a simple single long-practiced sweep of an arm, briskly side-stepping as she went, gliding clockwise about the iron-framed bedstead with balletic grace. Age-brittle plastic sheet fabric hissed, rustled and crinkled noisily and arthritic pulley wheels screeched and creaked along dust-clogged aluminium trunking that somehow defying the passing years clung steadfastly to grey paint-encrusted threaded bolts that extended down through the ceiling like gnarled fingers protruding down from the floor above.

Even as mentally numbed as she was as a result of the incremental sedative load miring her mind Lavinia could nevertheless still appreciate the value for the young woman in covering her own back - but had it been so essential for her to act as if Lavinia was some sort of demon-possessed heretic submerged in degradation, filth and perversion and completely out of control? She could perhaps have laughed it off, perhaps putting it down to drug-induced intoxication - which of course it partially was - simply an embarrassing side-effect of the unaccustomed near-doubling of her patient’s prescribed tranquilizer. But no! It was, for some reason or other, necessary to imply by disapproving looks and sideways glances that here sat yet one more damning indictment of Lavinia’s deteriorating mental state. Just whose side was this young woman on, anyway?

But that was another issue - the sedatives she was on. Four capsules, now it was! No longer was it the two per day she had been prescribed and that she had become acclimatised to throughout the time she had been staying with her aunt. Now the bombshell had really fallen - that these things were not as innocent as they seemed, that these green and gold capsules were, to quote her young trainee-nurse carer, “incredibly addictive”. These things were apparently definitely not suited for long-term prescription. But she, Lavinia, had been on them now for... how long? She had been with Aunt Julia for around a twelve-month or so, even before coming to the institution. Then there had been the originally contracted three months residence in the department of experimental psychology and then... Well, just how many renewals had there been, how many times had she been made to sign to re-undertake the ‘study’?

Then, of course, there was the period she had more recently spent under the section psychiatrist’s ‘care’, kept locked up like a prisoner in solitary confinement in the little cell-like room that lay back, hidden away, off that twisted woman’s consultation room. For how long had that been? Well, they were now clearly collating psychological reports and appraisals for perusal by her case-review panel. Given that when she had been committed it had been recommended she be given a full year to, as they had put it, ‘settle down’ before a year was to be spent ‘under observation’ to allow for the gathering of reports on her ‘behaviour’ and considering that so-called ‘settling down’ period had then been extended to two years, when she had dared speak up in objection... No, she didn’t want to think about it - all that time, all that life passing her by while her guardian, that hateful Ms Madison Daisy Bartlett, danced a merry jig around her family’s legacy.

But as much as she struggled to blind herself to the truth, the implication was obvious; clearly at least two years had somehow flown by in a sedative-induced fog. All that time they had had her on a sedative originally described to her as ‘mild’ but that in reality was not only both physically and psychologically addictive - and in those ways damaging enough - but had been systematically ramped-up over time in terms of dosage to the point at which the drug itself mimicked most, if not all, the signs and symptoms of mental illness. And what simple crude pharmacology could not provide, the good doctor’s intervention had created.

Was it any wonder, then, that when on occasion in the past she had objected to her medication - fearing, quite rightly it now turned out, it to be robbing her of her reason - the kafuffle had invariably ended with her down on her bended knees and begging for her ‘medication’ before the doctor’s desk. A couple of capsules proffered in the doctor’s hand and she would have kissed the woman’s feet - except such prostration was never foremost in the doctor’s mind. The girl bringing her lips to the mid-thigh hem of the doctor’s tight black leather skirt or even on occasion the crotch of that woman’s knickers - that was another matter entirely, one that pandered far more to the doctor’s singularly peculiar predilections.

Now even the side effect of temporary short-term amnesia was being portrayed as advantageous to her, in that for two to three hours or so following each mealtime - the point at which the handful of green and gold plastic capsules would be held out to her - all would be left empty, like a blank slate in her mind waiting to be filled. In that manner time would progress more quickly and the tedium that was mental-home existence would in that way be alleviated. But the corollary of that was; for a significant portion of her waking hours she was in effect now reduced to the status of a vegetable - or she might as well be, for all she could recall.

And it left her suggestible, of course - deeply, unreservedly suggestible, as if her subconscious was an open scratchpad to be scribbled into willy-nilly. It had been the doctor herself who had told her that. A strong dose of barbiturate tranquilizer would leave a subject helpless in the hands of a skilled manipulator. The whole notion, usually mooted in the psychological literature, that it was impossible even in principle, to hypnotise a person against her will - or to do so without her knowledge - went out of the window once barbiturate drugs were introduced into the equation. Furthermore, a trance-like state, once achieved under the influence of barbiturate drugs, could easily be repeated subsequently if the same trance-inducing influence or stimulus was reproduced. And poor Lavinia could barely remember little else than her therapist’s insistently-swaying metronome with its rainbow-faceted gemstone bob flickering in the blue-white strobe light.

Then, of course, there had been the spirals and the child’s pink-furred teddy bear the doctor had given her with its strangely-holographic Spirograph eyes that she would gaze into mindlessly, hour upon hour, enraptured, when left alone in her prison-cell room. Now her focus had become the nurse’s fob-watch, handed her that she might cradle its silver case palmed in one hand as with the other she would discreetly probe inside her PVC knickers, plucking in time to the sweep of the second hand the protruding rubber thimble encasing her bud of pleasure and thrilling to the torturously insufficient caress of the myriad feathery tongues of latex lining the interior. Always, though, it would culminate with her sobbing over the cruelty that had resulted in the surgical removal of the fleshy protective hood just so that the augmented sensitivity so produced might be artificially stifled beneath a cap of spiral-wound spring-steel-reinforced rubber, in turn designed to operate through repeated failure and the process of learned helplessness to train an otherwise healthy young woman away from her natural sexual predilections.

Conflicting desires and outcomes - it was the very underpinning of neurosis. There was the undeniable need to eat, and then the unrequited weight-gain that came with it. There could be gnawing hunger but then the doctor’s cane thrashing across her barred behind should she fail to finish every last morsel. Then, of course, there was the need to accomplish what the medical staff would euphemistically term ‘elimination’, by which was meant urination, defecation and all those other things that ordinarily one would prefer to keep private but that here were laid bare and set out for all to scrutinise at their leisure and with barely concealed amusement. These were perfectly ordinary, mundane functions of biology, yet here somehow became routinely transposed in status to that of punishment. Even the simple desire for sexual fulfilment, now striped of any formal social context, had in this way become associated with humiliation and frustration.

Now permanently confined to bed, the pounds were piling on - she could now actually feel her hips beginning to stretch her pyjama bottoms, despite all that excess fabric. The cane stripes that had been left behind as a legacy of the doctor’s attentions had long-since faded - but only to be replaced by the torment of a constantly irritating intimate itch. The reason-eroding madness that was uncontrolled rampant thrush itched, burnt and nagged at the warm damp intimacy between her legs - limbs kept just that little too far apart by chained ankle restraints to provide the comfort that might otherwise been achieved through the rubbing together of nubile coltish thighs. It had to be said, though, that this latest torment was through no negligence on behalf of the staff the place employed. Few, her own nurse included, could have been more vigilant when it came to changing the strangely plastic-feeling quilted panty-liner the hospital provided, but... Well, Lavinia couldn’t quite get it out of her mind that the awful incessant irritation had only arisen in the first place when her carer had first begun to provide that bluish-tinted quilt liner. Coincidence? Well it had to be... didn’t it? How many days - or had it been weeks - had that been ago?

Secured in a hospital bed, there was little reason for the staff to even bother drawing around the curtain surrounding her little cubical of space. She could hear those others shuffling around in their hopelessly ill-fitting pyjamas and huge bag-like plastic bloomers, could sometimes make out their inane low whispered chatter - anything other than the most inane passing of the time would be stamped upon as quickly as would the raising of a voice. She could envisage them grouped between the beds, each burdened with the spirit-quenching humiliation of having to hitch the flopping waistband of her green-striped hospital issue pyjama trousers, muttering deluded nonsense and too browbeaten to do or say much else. Other than for feeding and toileting, during which the bed’s iron-railed back rest would be raised, placing her in a seated position, the majority of the rest of the time was spent flat on her back and staring aimlessly up at the ceiling. Day after endless day was now spent desperately scanning the off-white plaster desert of the ceiling for any new crack, blemish or flake of loose paint yet to be catalogued, categorised and counted.

The one saving grace was the coming of that time of day when she would be sat up to be given her tranquillisers. The chain securing her left wrist restraint to the bed frame would be slackened off at that time - allowing her just sufficient degree of freedom for her hand to reach her mouth if craning forward her neck. She would snatch greedily at the four pretty little green and gold capsules lolling around in the nurse’s velvety-pink upturned palm, voraciously wolfing them down chased by a gulp or two of the faintly disinfectant-tainted milky-white high-calorie liquid nutritional supplement, the plastic beaker shakily held up to her lips. And she knew what was in the drink now; they had told her. In fact, the Ward Sister had made a point of personally informing her.

She was now only too well aware how every mouthful was adding to the expansion of her bust, hips, bottom and the double chin that so troubled her and was somehow the worst part of it. The baggy pyjamas did a fair job of disguising the rest of it, despite her expansion; while they might have grown a little snug of late here and there, they would not be allowed to remain so for long. Whenever it might be she would be issued a fresh pair, she would simply be handed a much larger size. In the meantime, each gulp helped bury her dancer’s frame still further beyond redemption - just as each day spent restrained in bed or hobbled to the point of little more than a spastic shuffle robbed her limbs of their hard-won flexibility and strength. She knew all of this and yet she would drain every last drop from the beaker. It was such a good way of teaching obedience, such an effective way - if she failed to swig it down, or worse, if she were to knock the beaker to the floor as she had on occasion in the early days, the consequences would be simple: There would be no pretty little green and gold capsules the next time... or the next, or the next after that.

A couple of days of the gnawing hunger that was withdrawal - shivering, sweating and writhing in her restraints - and she would be ready to pretty much do or say anything. That approach had tamed that particular aspect of the vestigial rebellious streak that still somehow infected her far more quickly and more thoroughly than even the doctor’s cane or leather belt falling across her chubby backside could have. Not that any of this meant she was now exempt from the kiss of the switch, far from it: Once she had become more tractable, ready to acquiesce to eat or drink whatever might be placed in front of her, she would still have to ask to have her behaviour corrected by means of the cane first - it was one of the worst parts of it and really served to engrave that feeling of utter defeat in the mind. A caning under such a circumstance left a truly indelible mark in the psyche, as it was intended to. The withdrawal would be equated with defeat and the pain of the cane and the caning, in its turn, became paired in the mind with the horrors of withdrawal; in that way each contributed to and underpinned the growing dread of the other.

And it was in no sense any aberration that they would relax her restraints at the time the nurse with the drug trolley did her rounds. Taking her prescribed medication was virtually the only thing a patient was allowed to do for her self. It had absolutely nothing to do with relaxing restriction and allowing some degree of freedom but, conversely, everything to do with reinforcing in the patient’s mind her acceptance of the hospital’s control over her. It worked too! Daily, like it or not, young Lavinia was slowly slipping deeper and deeper into the ward’s routine... and under her angelic-faced young carer’s control... no... her spell... It was an aspect of ward life she was still loath to admit to herself; that tingle she felt inside, the hot flush she felt infuse her cheeks, the accelerated pounding of her heart and the blood throbbing in her ears whenever the pretty young nurse smiled that smile of hers - however condescending that smile seemed, however humiliated it made her feel.

But those four little capsules were simply delicious - for a while a merciful and loving mist would descend, caressing her mind like a breeze drifting through a meadow and flower fairies fluttering through leafy glades. Time would pass quite mindlessly for a while - how long there was no way of knowing, but perhaps for some disconcertingly-long period: On at least one occasion she had found herself receiving what was apparently the last spoonful of that standard bowl of mush that the institution had the cheek to describe as food, having had no inkling whatsoever of being fed. She had recalled only being patted patronisingly on the head by her pretty young trainee-nurse carer and told sweetly that she had been a “good girl” and then overhearing the Ward Sister congratulating the smiling young woman. It hadn’t been so much the Ward Sister’s comments as her charming young carer’s reply that had shocked her so at the time and kept the memory fresh in her mind.

“I think you’ve done a good job there! Your patient is coming along really well now - I’m really quite pleased, quite impressed actually”

“Thank you sister - I’ve had to withhold her medication on a couple of occasions, as an aid to behaviour modification, but there has been a marked improvement in her compliance since”.

Did any of this imply her guardian angel was more implicit in this then had seemed at first sight? It was a thought Lavinia found easy enough to shrug off, since it was one she did not want to consider in the first place - daren’t consider. Her sanity depended on it - just as her mental health now hinged on her mentally-categorised catalogue of ceiling plasterwork defects. The trouble with that was, those lovely calming capsules of peace and the short-term temporary amnesia they unleashed along with their chemical solace - she could never quite be sure which cracks, stains and paint chips she had spotted before; just as she could never quite recall what she had been thinking just prior to receiving her medication each day.

It was the sheer tedium of the regimen that was so deadly to the soul, although of course it was purposely designed that way. It was the reasoning behind the doctor having placed her here: so that the rigid control and sheer unrelenting, unwavering tedium of mental-ward routine could continue the process of breaking her psychologically that had begun all that time back with one simple suggestion let slip by her aunt in conversation - that she, Lavinia, might just have the early stages of something Aunt Julia euphemistically called a ‘problem’.

That one tiny seed nurtured through the hands of Aunt Julia’s psychotherapist acquaintance had been enough to place her under her aunt’s control and subject to that formidable woman’s notion of domestic discipline - kept dressed from the skin outwards in the most infantile take on early 1960s strict English boarding school uniform her aunt could devise, with her hair put up in braids and tied with ribbons and subject to a strict regime of corporal punishment. Under her aunt’s guidance she had become so socially isolated as to have not only lost contact with every friend and acquaintance she had ever had but also to have actually got to the point whereupon she had had no real idea of the date.

Now that she thought back it was absurd: Aunt Julia had actually got her to the point where not only would she not leave the house but she had been loath to even as much as leave her bedroom. Then Aunt Julia had moved her up into that little attic room that she had prepared especially for her, with its hospital-style bed, single whitewashed window and institutional looking furnishings. That woman had then drawn the heavy black drapes - forbidding her from pulling them back lest the sight of the open sky should bring on one of her ‘attacks’ - donned her old hospital matron’s uniform, turned the key in the lock... And lo and behold; the pernicious process that would one day culminate in her being restrained in a psychiatric ward had begun its course. And then she had come, or rather been brought, to this place...

She had to get her thoughts off that path, get her thoughts in order. And that last recollection in particular had made her shiver in horror. What could be more macabre than the sudden realisation that one was bound - nay, chained - tightly and helplessly in a hospital bed, isolated in a secure psychiatric ward dressed in filth-encrusted institutional pyjamas and soiled plastic pants, known by and referred to only by a bureaucratically assigned numerical designation and with a sign over the bed instructing patients and staff alike to ignore anything one might say? Well, there was one thing more chilling she could think of - and she had just thought of it: It was the notion of not as much as having the slightest inkling of where in the country the hospital was actually situated, let alone where within the structure the ward was sited - or come to that, even what the hospital building or buildings looked like from the outside.

Aunt Julia had brought her up in her car; leaving at dusk and arriving in the dead of night. Lavinia had been asleep practically before they’d left the driveway and had slept deeply the entire journey with the seat reclined, a heavy blanket draped over her. She vaguely recalled padded headphones resting on her head and one of her aunt’s psychotherapist friend’s dreamy and drowsily-voiced relaxation tapes wafting from the old Sony Walkman clipped to the belt of her gymslip, the woman’s voice exulting her to ‘be a good girl to please Auntie’ and to always do as she was told and droning on and on sleepily about how warm, comforted, cosseted and secure being dressed in her school uniform made her feel.

Actually there always seemed to be something about uniforms on those tapes: Nurses’ uniforms looked authoritative, nurses were in charge, in control, a woman in a nurses’ uniform would seem to tower over her, the thought of a nurse in uniform standing over her made her feel weak, submissive, shy and blushing, unable to make eye contact, unable to answer back, she would be unable to find the right word, would stammer embarrassingly. The school uniform her aunt made her wear, on the other hand, would make her feel all warm inside, the soft voice would assure her, it would make her feel as secure as if hugging her favourite teddy, yet it would also make her feel small, insignificant, submissive and obedient like a small child sucking its thumb. She had to do as she was told when she was wearing her school uniform: It embarrassed her, made her feel childish, made her cheeks redden in shame - but wearing it pleased her aunt and pleasing Aunt Julia was the most important thing in the world to Lavinia. Wearing her school uniform would make her feel as if wanting to be obedient - the woman’s voice would insist - and an obedient Lavinia was the most pleasing thing in the world to Auntie Julia. So an ever more placid Lavinia would obediently dress in her childish school uniform and simper and suck her thumb and... It had just sort of sunk into her consciousness: Even now, at the thought of herself dressed in that gabardine pleated-skirted gymslip she felt her right hand involuntarily tug against the wrist cuff and chain restraining it, her hand rolling into a ball with thumb protruding and her lips puckering as if to receive it.

Whereas those tapes were as detailed as they were specific where her school uniform was concerned, nurses’ uniforms were a more general, vaguely defined affair. Nurses, generally, were to be seen as unassailable figures of authority, to be obeyed implicitly and without question at all times and under all circumstances; doctor’s in white coats, the same.

Lavinia’s school uniform, on the other hand, would be described item by item: The tight little woollen vest, the liberty bodice with its thick rubber buttons running down the front and broad elastic suspenders whose ugly metal clips held up the itchy opera-length lisle stockings and that dug in to her thighs when she sat. Then, there were the thick high-waisted bottle-green interlocked cotton school knickers with their broad rubbery leg-cuff elastics that would bite deep into her flesh and the strange rubbery texture of their lining. Everything would be outlined in almost fetishistic detail, through to the buttoning of her crisp starched blouse - button by button - the fastening of her gymslip and finally the donning of the rubber-lined gabardine raincoat, belt pulled tight, all buttons fastened and hood up with drawstring tied in a neat bow under the chin, come rain or shine.

Each detail of dressing was followed stage by stage; from the pulling on of the itchy woollen vest, the buttoning up of the breast-constricting and ironically named liberty bodice, the time-consuming fiddly attachment of the bottle-green lisle stockings to the three suspender tabs each side and then wiggling into the constriction of the seemingly slightly undersized yet full-bodied stretchy knickers. The latter, at that stage, had formed a strange undergarment indeed; a sturdy interlocked cotton-polyester mix on the outside and a soft caressing satiny fabric on the inside with a thin layer of latex sandwiched between. The latter emerged as a thin fringe of soft short hair-like protrusions along the centre line of the kite-shaped gusset and along the back seam, where a little bunch of such fibres would settle disconcertingly around her anus. A ring of evenly spaced buttonholes ran around the circumference of the broad waistband and were designed to engage with a ring of rubbery buttons running around the waist of her liberty bodice, ensuring an unrelentingly snug fit that conformed to every nook and crevice of her person - nine fiddly buttons that had to be unfastened and fastened every time she needed to attend to her ablutions and the fastening of each described in detail on the tape.

Each stage and action involved in robing or disrobing was associated with some idea, sensation or emotion and with that ever-present tendency towards obedience, submission and childish insignificance. The latter tendency had seemed to grow and become more tangible with each layer, with the result that with the repeated playing of the tapes, each time she went through the ritual of dressing in this hideous, humiliating outfit she was left a little less able to argue back the next time Aunt Julia ordered: “Go and change into your school uniform, there’s a good girl”.

She pulled herself back to the present: Something about today felt a little different somehow from the usual routine ambience of the ward - and that difference was underlined by the drawing around of the green plastic curtain surrounding her bed. Of course Lavinia could know little of the Ward Sister’s itinerary but that authoritatively redoubtable woman’s upcoming vacation was a cause célèbre not to be dismissed lightly by those with the innate appetite for control. In that way, the young nurse charged with Lavinia’s care - trainee or not - was little different from the rest when it came down to it. The blue-uniformed student nurse, with her honey-blond curls dripping from beneath her starched cap and white plastic bib-apron fastened business-like around her trim waist was in like a shot, all breezy cheerfulness and best of intentions. It took only moments for velvet soft fingers to slip beneath the stiff fabric front of Lavinia’s pyjama jacket, softly, lovingly twisting, pulling and kneading and tormenting nipples and areola too long starved of physical attention.

“I’d make it like this for you every day if I could - you know I would, don’t you?”

Reaching in to the left hip patch-pocket of her blue-checked uniform dress and smiling as sweetly as the day she was born the student nurse plucked, snuggled in her palm, a rubbery, black, butterfly-shaped device, dangling in front of her patient’s eyes. Lavinia could do little but gaze as if mesmerised at the proffered device as, with a flick of the young uniformed girl’s thumbnail across a discreetly inset switch, the thing seemed to come alive in the nurse’s fingers, dancing in her soft palm to the strains of a vibrating drowsy summer bumble-bee hum - disconcerting, yet somehow softly enticing, somehow so... tantalizing.

“Look, sweetheart: I don’t have very long to explain - but I want to do something to help you get through, to help you keep yourself together. I know how you must feel - so, so long without a boyfriend; I think I would have gone completely out of my mind by now. This thing, if pressed up against that rubber thimble-like hood thing they’ve stitched in place over your little love-bud, would bring you off again and again. I’ve asked around and this device is as good as it gets in discreet personal satisfaction. I’m certain I can make it unobtrusive enough to get away without anyone else being aware. After all, so long as you do as I tell you - to the letter, mind - I will be the only one involved in the more intimate aspects of your care. The thing is, though: how do we keep it in place so it can keep you suitably... distracted? Entertained? At least until the battery runs down?”

The pretty, honey-blond, nurse gave a little knowing giggle before continuing:

“Now... I daren’t release or slacken your wrist restraints for the time being - it would be more than my job’s worth. But on the other hand, if you could only bring yourself to trust me, just a little, if only you could find space in your heart to let me in, to accept my honestly well-intentioned motives at face value... What I am trying to get at is this: although I am only a lowly student nurse in the psychiatric context and a year or so your junior, I have already built up a substantial background in psychology, culminating in a first class honours degree from Oxford. Right now I am working on my doctorate. What all this implies is that, happily for you, my written reports and my word are both taken quite seriously here, despite my youth - almost as if I were a senior member of staff in fact. Going back to this device, here: If you were, through me, to request yourself to be placed in a straitjacket - perhaps under the pretext of your concern that some compulsion, perhaps an urge to self-harm, was beginning to overwhelm you - it would be taken seriously; especially if my report was to validate your concern.”

The nurse went on, her voice sweetly teetering on the sing-song tones of the practiced hypnotist:

“Look; I know you view the restriction of a straitjacket as yet another step down the path to surrendering yourself to your mental illness. But both you and I know the truth - so why should it matter what anyone else thinks, just as long as we get you better, just as long as it helps us get you out of this place? At the end of the day, all that matters is pulling you free of the injustice of this place, getting you back out there and taking your place in society one day. If you were to allow yourself to be placed in a straitjacket for a short period - and I would ensure it would be brief... How shall I put it? It has a crotch-strap, and if that particular restraint were to be correctly tightened between your legs.... Well, you could try rubbing your intimacy against the strap itself, of course. But if you were to have this butterfly-wing device thing here buzzing away pressed up between your legs and held in place by that strap? What can I say? Just think bout it - the prospect sounds delicious; doesn’t it? Just imagine it; held in situ and buzzing away undetected beneath the layers of canvas and the flannelette of your mental-home pyjamas. What with your plastic incontinence pants and the thick, soft terry-cloth nappy they make you wear now - the sound would be all but undetectable; even up close!”

The young nurse had now balanced the food bowel she had brought across with her on the covers above Lavinia’s lap. Then, leaning across the front of her patient, she used a proffered spoonful of the slush that customarily doubled as breakfast, lunch, dinner or what have you, here in the secure psychiatric unit, as a pretext to use her body as a shield. In a flash the young woman had slithered the tantalising vibrating rubbery thing down the perspiration-dampened front of Lavinia’s pyjama bottoms, under the loose waist of the baggy plastic knickers worn beneath and into the crotch of the thick terry-cloth panty-liner. The hum was soft, yet still detectable from below the woollen weight of the single hospital blanket that covered the bed and clearly not something that would escape the notice of the Ward Sister’s keen senses if she were present. The sensation was gentle, yet breathtaking after the denial of so much in the way of sensory stimulation - of any sort, let alone of an overtly sexual nature. In seconds Lavinia found herself sighing wistfully.

A second spoonful of bland soy-based nutrition was taken greedily between Lavinia’s lips as this time deft fingers, insinuating themselves through the gap between two of the grotesque rubbery buttons fastening her pyjama jacket, began luxuriously massaging one of her fast thickening thimble-hard nipples between their torturously soft satin tips.

The student nurse’s voice was thick with undisguised excitement, low and breathy: “There now, isn’t that nice?”.

All at once there came that tumbling confluence of conflicting emotions Lavinia had felt only once before - in the hands of the unit psychiatrist, in the locked privacy of the consultation room; or rather the private prison cell the doctor had had constructed as an annex to it. She could torture herself by her own denial of pleasurable release. Or she could surrender to the urging of her own body at the hands of another woman, turn against a lifetime of learnt and accepted cultural and sexual moirés and taboos - and in so doing, become something she had been brought up to despise. Glancing to her left she caught sight of the pleasant bosom swell stretching out the viscose-glossed blue and white check pattern of her carer’s uniform and felt her heart pound in her ears as yet another spoonful of chow headed towards her lips. There was just something about the way the dress fabric caught the light, something about the tight elasticated nurse’s belt, the swinging silvery fob watch pinned upon a swollen breast, feminine curves filling out a nurse’s uniform, no-nonsense combed-back hair behind a starched white cap...

A soothing twisting tug of her nipple between the gentlest of gentle thumb and fingers coincided with the lukewarm touch of the porridge around her mouth and she involuntarily responded with an open-mouthed sigh of pleasure, sucking the contents from the rubbery white spoon held in the nurse’s hand with wanton gusto and ignoring the dribble trickling down her chin. To Lavinia the nurse seemed to breathe rather than whisper in her ear, the young woman’s sweet hot breath causing a shiver to run down the length of her spine until, rather strangely, seeming to cause her anus to contract, triggering in turn a wave of pleasure to twitch back and forth between her legs:

“It will always have to be under my supervision, of course, and once the curtains are drawn. It will have to be under my control, not yours - you’ll have to accept that: I will be the one taking the risk after all.”

Lavinia felt herself nodding her agreement dumbly, is if being worked in some way like a marionette, all her strings being pulled at once. A thrill was running through her, a strange kind of thrill - and all based somehow around those words; being under “supervision”, being under the nurse’s control. It was all about those words - what was happening to her? The nurse was still talking, the pleasure was still building; and there seemed nothing she could do about it, except accept the humiliation... no, no... enjoy the humiliation, luxuriate in the shame and debasement of being brought to orgasm against her will and under the close supervision, under the control, of a young woman younger than herself.

“I can tell how long it’s been for you. I can help you; I can show you what you can do yourself to get around that cruel, nasty thing they have fitted you with. But you will have to learn to do it in front of me, under my instruction - do you know what I am talking about?”

Lavinia thought that she did - yet wished in a way that she didn’t. This woman, this student nurse, little older than a school-leaver, was hinting about her masturbating in front of her, under her carer’s approving gaze. It was madness itself, a descent into degradation, to the point of debasing herself in front of others. It was out of the question - and yet...

Another spoonful of tasteless hospital chow had been delivered to her lips and she was chomping on it gladly - another squeezing twisting tug brought breathless pleasure throbbing through her lust-stiffened nipples, both now responding in concert - and she found herself nodding her acceptance, cheeks burning in shame. The nurse’s nimble fingers were now dancing in turn around first one nipple, than the other, and then back again. Down between Lavinia’s legs the teasing vibrating butterfly throbbed against the rubber hood covering her clitoris, sending the thousands of tiny latex filaments lining its interior into a wavering spasmodic frenzy even as she munched on the last spoon-fed mouthful of gruel.

Then, with an agonising moan of pleasurable despair exiting her lips, Lavinia felt her guardian angel’s fingers slip briskly free from her pyjama jacket. It was somehow little surprise: after all her sweet uniformed angel could control every other aspect of her existence. She could hardly blame her, though - she was undoubtedly carefully monitored herself: she could hardly have a semi-orgasmic mental patient screaming the walls down, at least not while the cause was so blatantly audible. The impersonal electric buzz of the butterfly vibrator was one thing. The caring, loving touch of those hands, those tender words; there was nothing detached or impersonal there - and it made all the difference.

“Doesn’t it just make you want to cry, doesn’t it make you want to bring yourself off? I feel for you, lying helpless, locked up in this crazy place, I really do. I mean: I go home each night to a guy who loves me - a very special guy, who loves me in a very special way. He just makes me feel so... special - what can I say?

I don’t think I could stand it locked in here, night after night, with no social contact let alone physical love, no relief from the monotony, the nagging ache ‘down there’, the constant unfulfilled urging- I think I would go quite insane, dear. That is what worries me. How long has it been for you? I mean to say: this is an all female ward. Even the staff, here, is all female. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to as much as set eyes on a man, any man let alone your boyfriend for... How long?”

“I, I, I am, am not s...” The nurse had brushed Lavinia’s lips, gently, ever so gently, just two tissue-soft girlish fingertips - the effect had been far more dramatic: halting her patient in her faltering tracks, silencing her near instantaneously.

“You must be careful not to be seen speaking to me; even if whispering. You are not allowed to speak unless spoken to, so you’d give the whole game away if the Ward Sister was to see or hear you. You are supposed to be being kept incommunicado at the moment - even I am not supposed to talk to you more than the absolute minimum required to get my job done. Good girl for remembering not to raise your voice above a whisper though - it shows that you’re coming along just fine. That aspect of your treatment worries me too, the social isolation - its as if somebody, somewhere is out to break you mentally, to send you spiralling even further into mental decline; and that’s exactly the way to do it, too! I can’t do anything about that for the time being, other than what I am already doing for you by way of these little one-way chats of ours. I can do something about the sexual frustration aspect of your torment.

For now, though, our little butterfly friend will have to fly away home - but if you can help me, to help you... well, I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t back soon... and who knows? I think next time she might be able to take you where you want to be. Do you think you could do that for me?”

So saying the nurse, leaning across to gather up the empty feeding bowl and rearranging her patient’s blanket to disguise her true purpose, deftly plucked the pulsating toy from the crotch of Lavinia’s knickers, simultaneously flicking the off-switch with her pinky-nail. Tears of frustration welling up and words of entreaty balancing precariously on the tip of her tongue, Lavinia somehow managed to nod silently her willingness to cooperate. Had it been the Ward Sister or even the doctor she would have struggled on, she felt sure. But this innocently-sincere blue-uniformed angel was giving her nothing to struggle against and she knew that step by step the young nurse was bringing her deeper and deeper under her control.