CHAPTER 12

GYM’LL FIX IT

A new day, a new torment: They were headed for another of those attic rooms within the convoluted roof space warren that ran above the disused rear wing of the house. The staircase at the point they had now reached had already assumed the same over-hot airless dry-rot-scented atmosphere that more often than not characterized the school room. Grimacing with unaccustomed effort Alice doubted the ‘fitness studio’ her stepmother had had installed would be any more conducive to comfort.

The staircase they were ascending was a wood-framed affair with bare, grey, cracked wooden treads springing underfoot and thick layers of greenish-cream and undoubtedly lead-laden paint curling from the uprights of the balustrade. Fully enclosed on all sides by plastered walls covered in yellowing, crazed and flaking paint, the staircase rose through landing after half-landing, doubling back on itself again and again, the turns tight and cramped despite the stairs being broad enough to accommodate two, side by side. The thick, carved banister rail was a dull reddish-brown, the colour more the product of the patina of age than the remnants of roughened and abraded varnish that reluctantly adhered to it. The latter clung on in raised streaky profusion over a time-dwindling undercurrent of wood stain that had long greyed with age.

In all, the stairwell was both dank and dusty and had seemingly been seldom used in recent years - it all begged the question of how anything could have been ‘installed’ by this route.

“I am a great advocate of the health advantages that come from the provision of frequent drilling and dancing lessons. As for the subject of dress for physical education: I insist upon every requirement of the instructor being met. After all; she is the expert, she knows best which type kit is going to be most suited to the activities and the curriculum she has planned. Whatever she has laid out for you, you will change into quickly, quietly and without complaint or comment.” Daphne Larkspear had very much adopted the mantel of the strict rigid governess today. A starched white blouse with high stiff collar and puffed sleeves had been teamed with a pencil thin, knee-length black skirt, flesh-coloured, high-glossed seamed stockings and high-heeled black shoes; it made for a truly imperious air. As if influenced by her own image, her natural lilting Scots accent had seemed to have partly given way to a somewhat more haughty tone than was customary.

Alice was walking slightly behind the imposing, matronly figure of the woman teacher, having found herself, to her embarrassment, being led by the hand like a naughty child. The mouse-meek Angel, presenting a slender figure of a prim damsel by comparison in her grey school uniform and white silk-like nylon apron, was being herded along in front, the girl’s head slightly bowed as was her custom and her hands crossed in front of her, the woman delivering an encouraging pat or two on her behind through her short school skirt as they advanced.

Even with her own predicament weighing heavily down on her Alice couldn’t help but feel sorry for her fellow reluctant penitent. How underweight she looked, how fragile Angel’s already delicate fine-boned features had become. With her bodyweight having been so drastically dieted off her, the poor thing looked at first glance to be no more than a particularly growth-spurted twelve-year-old. Only at a second or third glance could her true age of around seventeen - by Alice’s estimate - be divined, albeit even then perceived as a particularly juvenile-looking specimen. It was an image that wasn’t exactly contradicted by the girl’s hair. The latter - having been crimped and styled as short as a young boy’s - had now been dyed black but unfortunately had turned out somewhat mousy as a result.

Turning sharply off the top landing they pulled up at a point where the otherwise dimly lit passage had been locally set ablaze with light, the wedge-shaped shaft squeezing past a thick panelled wood door that had been left ajar. The doorway led into a small, stark white-walled room with an equally starkly-white linoleum-covered floor that gave slightly underfoot as if sprung. Glaring fluorescent strip lights arranged around the tops of the four walls provided the sole illumination, there being no window, whereupon the pyramidal plaster ceiling rose sharply like the inside of a rather low, squat church steeple. The inference of the latter was obvious to Alice; they were now under the roof of one of the two square turret or folly-like structures that stood like sentries over the corners of the disused rear section of the house.

The far wall was covered in its entirety by a single huge mirror, wherein a stern-faced authoritarian woman was ushering a pair of gawky-looking overgrown schoolchildren dressed in outgrown uniforms through a half-open door - or so it seemed. Alice quickly averted her eyes in shame; Angel had never raised hers in the first place and continued staring fixedly down at her shoes, as was her habit. This behaviour was some part of her compatriot’s coping mechanism, Alice had at some point realised. More and more often Angel seemed to be dealing with the situation they were both in by withdrawing into herself. Far from showing any concern, their private teacher-cum-tutor-cum-governess chose to not only ignore it, but at times there were certain things the woman did and said that seemed tantamount to actively encouraging the girl to become withdrawn.

To one side stood a tall leather-topped vaulting horse, to the other, standing against the nearest end wall, was a table on which waited a pair of thick, greyish yet transparent, plastic bags. The grey serge fabric, embroidered school-type badge and crest and the rubbery-looking buttons visible through the packaging told the whole story - or very nearly did. There had been one or two styling revisions following the ‘manufacturer’s-sample’ edition that Alice had come across in the basement storage cupboard all that time ago. She tried not to let the revulsion, not to mention the embarrassment, she was feeling show on her face as the memory of the rubbery aroma that had permeated the garment came flooding back.

At the other end of the room, the end furthest from the door, an opening in a partition gave onto an alcove wherein a pair of very modern-looking exercise bikes could be seen reflected in another full-height mirror.

Plimsoll Punishment and the Gym Suit

Having slipped in quietly and unannounced Karen Lamberton-Marchment stood with her back to the door, arms folded and a distant wistful smile running across her face. Her old ex-teacher, now in her employ, had now departed - off to make some alteration or other to the girl’s sleeping quarters. She rarely enquired as to exactly what the cruelly imaginative woman was up to, preferring instead the delight of surprise when the latest in the arsenal of torments she had in store for her stepdaughter was unveiled. For now, though, she was content to run an appreciative eye over this new - and, she hoped, soon to be regular - visitor to her household. And she had to admit that this gym mistress friend of her old ex-teacher’s did look the part. The woman was looking intimidatingly resplendent - not to mention implacable - in her starched white blouse, masculine-looking black tie and skin-tight beige-cream jodhpurs, a pair of polished black riding boots on her feet and a silver whistle hanging on a lanyard around her neck.

There was something so very, very alluring, about the notion of a beautiful, strong-willed woman being placed in a position of unassailable authority over a group of pretty young teenage girls, feeling perhaps unsettled, perhaps even a little out-gunned in view of their youthful loveliness, while knowing herself free from the possibility of any form of negative consequence, legal or otherwise, should she decide to impose her will over them. In such a situation it was almost inevitable that she - or anyone else placed in such an enviable position - would be apt to become a little... tyrannical. After all, hadn’t exactly that effect been demonstrated experimentally in the field of psychological science? Besides, wasn’t it one of the privileges of being an outstandingly attractive woman to be tyrannical?

As a singularly attractive woman herself, Karen Lamberton-Marchment most certainly could not see why an alluringly pretty woman should not avail herself of the privileges Mother Nature had awarded her. It was how she herself had made her way in the world; and it was how she intended to go on. Of course if the woman one chose happened to be an escapee off the UK’s ‘Sex Offenders Register’ - a predatory lesbian possessing a sadistic dominant streak, a penchant for teenage girls and an unhealthy interest in discipline for discipline’s sake - one had in one’s hands a certain recipe for abuse and exploitation...

Not that she cared, although deep down inside she felt she should have been shocked when Daphne Larkspear had let it slip. Perhaps she should have been angry that she had unwittingly allowed herself to be associated with such a woman, even if that association was so well guarded. But she wasn’t that, either. It was as if since gaining control over her stepdaughter, Alice, she had lost all sight of morality, even of the danger inherent in the situation she was creating. Indeed she wasn’t certain any longer, on the rare occasions she paused to analyse it, where her own desires ended and those of her ex-teacher began. For the present there was only the one question on her mind: What could make for a better, more apt, more ironic method of keeping young Alice in check than to let her come under the thumb of some prison-fodder dyke?

“Alice Marchment, fetch me the slipper... Don’t just stand there gawking, you stupid girl, fetch it NOW!... I SAID THIS INSTANT! It’s over there on the bench by the vaulting horse.”

From the sidelines, as it were, Karen Lamberton-Marchment watched, wide-eyed as if mesmerized, as the gym mistress, strutting up and down like a captain of the guard, tapped the side of her leg threateningly with the leather tab of her riding-crop before then circling the pair of nervous young women like a hungry shark eyeing up its next meal. The gym instructor’s flaming red hair was sleeked back and tied in a short swinging ponytail finished off with a large emerald green bow, some sort of salon ‘product’ having been pressed into use to control the wild spiralling corkscrew tendrils that she knew to be the natural state of affairs. The woman’s pencil-plucked eyebrows and long and surprisingly girlish lashes stood as proof that that blazing early-autumn hue hadn’t originated in a bottle and she looked to posses the personality that one anecdotally associated with the trait.

In her mid to late thirties, there was a certain maturity hiding behind those striking emerald eyes that belied the woman’s relative youth. But there was also something else; a bitter spitefulness born of early years filled with deprivation and later years marred by prejudice, whether real or imagined. And deep down, if one stared into her soul, there was something darker still, something profoundly unsettling that forced one to break eye contact and that chilled the heart, perhaps deep, hidden - even twisted - desires; powerful desires that should never see the light of day.

As tall as many men - standing around six foot in the riding boots she seemed to favour - she was narrow-waisted, big-breasted and powerfully muscled beneath that feminine exterior, though wiry and shapely rather than bulky. All in all, the woman was what Karen Lamberton-Marchment, if pressed, would have described as truly Amazonian in stature. With her high thrusting melon-like breasts apparently stressing and straining the smartly starched fabric of her blouse to the limit, her waspish waist and with her generous though firm-looking buttocks plumping out the rear of her jodhpurs, this gym mistress acquaintance of her ex-teacher’s seemed to have stepped off some fantasising male artist’s sketch pad.

Indeed, it beggared belief that such a striking, individualistic and attention grabbing figure of a woman could ever hope to pass unrecognized in the street. It begged the question as to just how radical must have been the changes made to the harsh-spoken gym instructress’ facial appearance for her to have been able to slide out from under media, public and state scrutiny? Or was the whole construct - the heaving breasts, the unnaturally narrow waist and the full buttocks, everything - the product of the surgeon’s knife? Was this an extreme example of hiding in plain sight? Had this Miss Flora McBainstone once more closely conformed to the straight-up-and-down, masculinised, publicly recognised stereotype of the ‘dyke’?

Halting before the clumsy, hesitant Alice - the girl still yet to react - the gym mistress pulled her roughly forwards by the scruff of the neck, forcing the girl down into a bending posture. Without the slightest hesitation the mistress administered a couple of hard swipes of the riding switch she carried across the backs of the girl’s thighs. Alice, yelping like a whipped puppy, sprung upright as soon as released, only to be just as abruptly thrust forward and sent sprawling toward the indicated leather-topped bench and the waiting gym slipper.

Somewhat humourless if not downright militaristic, the stone-faced gym instructress was not accustomed to having to ask twice. She might be new to this pair of little tarts but this young trollop, this Alice, in particular she recognized as needing a little encouragement - the other was already as docile as a well-schooled filly, but a little additional training never went amiss. She knew well the value of asserting one’s authority from day one, and she felt confident that this little demonstration would serve that purpose.

A matched brace of parallel purple-red wheals could already be plainly seen developing just below the legs of Alice’s light grey gym suit close to where the soft flesh had already been rendered tender by the biting of the gym suit’s elasticated leg cuffs. The latter gripped the thighs with an unrelenting firmness and though broad tended to bite in quite cruelly after a time, dimpling and creating an unsightly and embarrassing roll of flesh that was most pronounced at the back of a girl’s legs, just below the overhang of her bottom.

This bulge of excess flesh could - and did - suggest the appearance of some level of obesity in even the slenderest of girls and became too the favoured target of the gym mistress’s wickedly supple riding crop. And she was accurate too. The uppermost of those two red hot lines that now traversed the backs of Alice’s thighs lay plum on top of that wave of flesh, the second, only a centimetre or so below its sibling, was notably furrowed and already swelling angrily. The sight made even the experienced Angel Larkspear wince inwardly, not merely from empathy but also from the reminder of the absurdity of her own appearance, standing there as she was, passively with her hands on her head and dressed in a costume that under other circumstances she would once have viewed as laughable.

The one piece, harrow-grey bloomer-style gym suit almost qualified as an infant child’s or toddler’s romper suit. Buttoning from neck to waist with rubber buttons in the same shade of grey as the fabric and having an integral belt fastening at the front by way of two buttons, the basic style had been taken straight from a 1930s pattern book. The original serge fabric had been retained but with the addition of seductively soft satin-finish nylon inner lining and a sandwiched layer of soft rubber cleverly integrated between the two.

Above the waist the thing was styled in the form of a loose-fitting short sleeved blouse, albeit of serge, having a demure Peter Pan collar buttoning high at the neck and adorably girlish - in the eyes of the gym mistress at least - powder-puff shoulders that were secured by buttoned cuffs. Its single breast pocket was boldly embroidered in bottle-green, red and gold thread forming something approximating to a school emblem but that was accompanied beneath by a motto and scroll apparently announcing the wearer to be a denizen of ‘St Mary’s hospital,

Psychiatric wing’ - the latter made for a bizarrely puzzling if humiliating finishing touch.

Below the waist, the garment’s appearance was one of a pair of rather stiff, pleated serge bloomers, but short legged, the fabric gathered at broad elasticated cuffs around the tops of the thighs. A fluffy little skirt, barely a skirt at all, hovered tantalisingly over these ‘gymnasium bloomers’ from the point at which the front buttoning blouse met and joined with their waistband.

This minuscule skirt was of the same fabric as the body of the garment and was very much a continuation of it, being part and parcel of the garment as a whole. It flared out in a circular sun-burst of sewn-in grey pleats but did little to spare the wearer’s blushes, being purely ornamental. In fact, in many ways this tiny travesty of a skirt was worse than useless when it came to preserving a girl’s modesty, having seemingly been designed quite deliberately to accomplish little beyond adding to the winsome appeal of a well-built girl’s bottom in the eye of the onlooker, whether she be bending or jumping or running on the spot in obedience to the trainer’s whistle. Falling as it did to no lower than midway down the upper slopes of the buttocks and being little more than a flounce, the skirt didn’t so much cover as frame the view. The little pelmet drew the eye like a magnet to both the dimpled frontage that unmistakably outlined the labia and the almost impossibly tight rear where neither a ripple nor a wrinkle could be detected when fully fastened. Other than for this scant covering, Alice’s and Angel’s long willowy legs were quite bare all the way to their little white ankle socks and the bottle-green T-strap, flat-soled school shoes, with their shiny silver buckles.

In a further departure from the original 1930s pattern - a modification it would later turn out had been specifically introduced to accommodate a certain institution’s somewhat idiosyncratic approach to feminine discipline - the heavy serge bloomers had been provided with an opening to the rear. This latter consisted of a slit that ran along the centre seam and that was ordinarily secured by way of an arrangement of two overlapping sets of vertically mounted brass eyelets tightly laced together. With the prior removal of the laces, two drawstrings - mounted to either side at the rear - could be pulled tight, resulting in the rear panel being gathered along the waistband to both sides allowing the buttocks to protrude suggestively.

This whole process could be achieved in a matter of seconds and the result was made all the more lewd by the fact that the rubber layer was exposed in this region, whereupon it consisted of a finger-width centre seam of rolled latex running up from the kite-shaped crotch to the back of the waistband. Whilst the heavy serge outer-fabric and fine satin inner-lining would be drawn aside like puckered or pleated drapes, this latex centre seam would remain in situ, the taut elastic rolled rubber back-strap buried deep between the girl’s buttocks and tending to act to ease the cheeks apart, providing for an appealing cleavage that was quite pleasing to the eye.

It should be pointed out that this was not the only point at which the protective rubber layer was exposed. Internally the silky soft white latex also came to the surface to form the lining of the wide upward-domed gusset.

The latter was a feature based on a sanitary-wear style, vintage 1950, wherein it was originally intended to support an absorbent towel although the sanitary towel, in this instance, had been replaced by an ovoid fleecy liner. This - together with the soft thumb-pad shaped field of gentle, bristle-like latex filaments located at the front of the gusset - often became a major cause of consternation, not to mention red-faced flustered embarrassment as a session progressed, as the institution within which this design had originated had discovered.

As for Alice, whereas Angel had been reduced to a gawky adolescent-looking beanpole, she, not so long ago nearly as chicly svelte if more generously endowed ‘where it mattered’ was now displaying a distinct trend towards chubbiness. Although still not quite the archetypal ‘fat girl’, her plump thighs, prominent bottom and pendulous breasts made her ‘PE dress’ even more of a mockery. Both girls were already sweating profusely within the nylon satin-lined confines of their grey serge one-piece gym suits, the thin layer of latex rubber that lay between the lining and the outer serge trapping both heat and moisture. Perspiration simply dripped off their arms, legs and puffing cherry-red faces in the small room, enclosed windowless room.

Standing forlornly and clearly frightened before the oddly shaped deep-brown leather upholstered bench with its steeply-domed upper surface and stubby outwardly-angled teak legs and staring down at the discarded bottle-green plimsoll Alice knew what was coming next. But it was so unfair; she had only been a little slow on the uptake. It wasn’t her fault; she was just so tired now. All those long-draw-out hours of written impositions had been starting to wear her down in any case, but the previous night had seen her stuck at her desk beavering at an extra imposition when she should have been tucked up under the covers snoring.

It had all been so cruel: she had finally finished at who knows what time and it had been her stepmother’s housekeeper that had come to get her to lead her to bed. She had even been allowed to get changed into her night things and slip under the covers. But no sooner had the door closed and her head had hit the pillow than she’d heard the death-rattle of Mrs. Larkspear’s keys and that dreaded Edinburgh lilt: “Time to get up - another school day awaits; let’s have you bright, cheerful and bushy eyed and in your school uniform. Inspection in five minutes; and then it’s PE and then it is breakfast. Yes I said PE - physical education; something new this morning, you lucky child.” The woman’s faux enthusiasm had left her sick to the stomach, let alone the nausea that came with the level of mental exhaustion that was now afflicting her. Added to all that she was yet to be given her medication, and without her prescription she was a muddle-headed jittery mess in any case. There were extenuating circumstances; she had to say something.

“Please... I...”

“Silence girl! How dare you speak without permission?” The gym mistress had snapped at Alice with a voice that shared something of the geographical character of Daphne Larkspear herself, but that had a rougher, earthier edge to it. It was a voice that was every bit as intimidating as the woman’s well-muscled appearance; abrasive and coloured by more than a hint of the aggressive perceived character of the south bank of Glasgow’s River Clyde and an upbringing in the tower blocks of the area known as The Gorbals. She twisted away as she spoke, making it plain that she was including the other girl, Angel, in this also:

“As it is you both failed to curtsey when you came in; and in my book that’s already gross impertinence. Ordinarily an inevitable consequence of any form of impertinence would be a sound whipping - and I mean whipping. I’m talking about a sound thrashing with a riding crop across both your bare behinds - and with no maximum tariff awarded, either. The only reason you are not both strapped down upended across this whipping bench, here, right now is that this is our first session together and I want us to get to know each other... before I begin to really tame you.”

She cast Angel a withering, wintry smile: “You’ll find I believe in hard discipline and equally hard work. I can promise you that you’ll both feel the sting of the slipper across your lazy asses before we are finished here today.” Any young woman placed in her hands and over whom she had carte blanche could expect to leave her care humble, obedient, respectful and cleansed of such irrelevances as personal ambition. But in the case of this girl, Angel Larkspear, she was to go much further. She licked her lips like a cat stalking a canary locked in its cage at the thought. The notion lit up inside her something that even she had not been aware of, kindled some previously unsuspected dark desire that shocked as much as it delighted.

Her task, where the winsome and adorable young Angel Larkspear was concerned, was no less than to assist in sending the girl completely and utterly out of her mind, to break the girl’s sanity. The delicately featured, bird-like, Angel was to leave this house fit only for institutionalisation. The path was already well-paved too - a place was already being prepared and set aside for the girl on the secure psychiatric ward of a private-sector mental hospital. Darling Daphne, it seemed, had finally tired of her plaything - as she had always known she would. Darling Daphne had her avaricious gaze set on other things now and what better way could there be to clear the decks of her used-up, unwanted, cluttersome chattel than have the girl consigned to a mental hospital?

Now the way would be clear for the two of them to be together again, once more a real, true loving partnership. And what better place could there be to ‘start over’ from than with this house and the financial clout attached to the family estate and endowments that came with it? Yes there was this Lamberton-Marchment woman to contend with, the self-styled - she assumed - ‘Lady’ Marchment. But Daphne had been the woman’s schoolteacher once; she had had the woman under her thumb then, and she was already largely riding roughshod over her now. And now here she was with the woman’s stepdaughter under her cane and about to give the little trollop’s pretty, fat ass the tanning of a lifetime with a school plimsoll!

Given the option she’d condemn the girl to the same fate planned for Angel and have the girl’s stepmother here in her stead, the haughty cow bent over and touching her toes for the cane. Or perhaps she might have the stepmother and her stepdaughter restrained in cuffs and straps side by side over the vaulting horse, both of them thoroughly broken and wailing in harmony, their bare bottoms convulsing under the sting of her riding crop... Better still - the woman’s own riding crop!

Ultimately she’d like them all out of her and her Daphne’s lives, for good! She could just imagine the picture; the three of them side by side on a secure psychiatric ward. Thick bars on the windows and sturdy bolts on the doors, nurses bustling to and thro in their blue uniform dresses and white aprons and the three of them lying there, just lying there in adjoining hospital beds, Angel to one side, Alice to the other and the girl’s stepmother in the middle, all in full four-point humane restraints. Perhaps the stepmother might be in a straightjacket, her hair having greyed over the years - the other two she could imagine gently drifting into middle age; and all three unaware of the presence of each other, the curtains being kept drawn between their beds to deepen their isolation.

Having the stepmother under her cane or crop; that was the thing. How she’d love to get the woman bent over the bench where her stepdaughter would be in a trice. If she had her way with the girl’s stepmother she’d have those business suits and showy designer equestrian costumes of hers whipped off her in seconds. She’d have the woman back in school uniform and sitting at one of her own school desks in that ‘schoolroom’ of hers before she got her breath back. But it wasn’t all up to her - it was Daphne who called the shots where planning was concerned, she was the chess player of the pair. And Daphne had said they had best bide their time.

As always Daphne was right of course; left to her own devices she would go off half-cocked, shoot her bolt too soon, and it would all come tumbling down around their ears. No, she would have to content herself with the woman’s stepdaughter and trust that the rest would eventually be delivered into both their laps given time - but she’d make the little minx scream enough for two. There was no harm in taking it out on the woman’s stepdaughter in the interim; after all it was what both Daphne and her ex-pupil, the girl’s stepmother, wanted to see. But then again, there was also no harm in indulging in a little prospective anticipation either:

The woman’s house had everything going for it, everything she had ever dared hope for, just sort of built into the fabric of the building as if her deepest desires had formed part of the architect’s brief. That basement area she had been shown around, even that part that had not been pressed into service to house the girls and was still just as the architect had intentioned, naturally presented itself as a wonderfully and exceptionally austere environment. As bare as it was soulless and frigid, it was only a few iron-clad doors, white-tiled rooms, workshops and work benches away from the sort of institution she had always dreamed of.

Even the windows, the few there were, were set way above head height - other than the couple that gave out on to the two external stair wells, and all had a parade of iron bars standing guard outside. Secondary double glazing fitted internally would save a fortune in heating bills while blocking all those noisy distractions intruding from the world beyond. A thick layer of whitewash would deal with the rest - and then she’d have the whole kit-and-caboodle tucked well away from harm behind an additional internal wire mesh security grill, a big, fat unpickable padlock on each of its corners, just to hammer home the point.

There were occasions when it was positively advantageous if an inmate happened to catch the charm of distant bird song or hear the rattle of rain and the howling of the wind. On other occasions it might suit if an inmate was perhaps to overhear the distant carefree happy chattering of others of her age unthinkingly indulging their freedom, gossiping with pals, perhaps flirting with boyfriends. Either way such ‘slips’ should only ever be under the control of those in authority and serve to reemphasise the depth of an inmate’s isolation in her mind. Flora McBainstone believed an institution such as she had in mind would be all-encompassing; it should and would come to represent the totality of an inmate’s experience and world.

Yes, it did good to remind a young woman from time to time that there was indeed another world out there somewhere, a world in which a girl such as herself might come and go as she pleased and not be stifled by pedantically precise rules and petty regulations, an existence in which she might visit boutiques and fashion houses, dress in the latest styles, rather than be regimented in uniform and set to task seated at her needlework. It did good to remind her on occasion that ‘out there’ time was passing her by, even as internally her own sense of time marched to the beat of the institution’s own rhythm and dictates and had been all but extinguished.

What she was envisaging now she must have imagined a million times in fantasy, but seemingly within her grasp the vision was that much more concrete - it all suddenly seemed to drop into place. She knew now exactly what it was she wanted, what both she and Daphne wanted, what they had always wanted.

It had always been some sort of institution they had had in mind but not one in the mould of Daphne’s school, nor the ‘young offender’s institution’ she had actually taught ‘physical education’ at - that had been a well-meaning institution, for sure, but it had never been allowed to go far enough, nor she at it. In fact, now she had come to think about it - really think about it - the sudden realisation had struck her that dealing with delinquency, as deserving a cause in terms of reformation as that might be, was not the true heart-felt focus of her being. In fact the complete opposite was true; the less blame might be attached to a girl or young woman the more appealing her incarceration appeared.

Those old church-run homes and the nuns that kept the discipline with an iron rod had it right. There were many reasons one might morally cite to justify detaining a well-developed or precocious teenage girl or young woman under supervision than having perpetrated what society at large might understand as crime, even if those reasons were not necessarily appreciated in law, at least not at face value. In those days, too, there had been the prison system awaiting the real, true criminal delinquents; the ‘incorrigible’, ‘refractory’ girls the nuns chose to take in were those they saw as more amenable to religious discipline rather than in need of reformation per se.

These originally secular homes for wayward girls had been designed with the aim of reform and education in mind, to take ‘fallen women’ off the streets and return them to society as useful, educated citizens. Once they fell under ecclesiastical governance, though, these ‘asylums’ slowly mutated into little more than prisons for young woman thought too ‘forward’, sexually adventurous, behaviourally outrageous or in any way deemed ‘unchaste’ by the church fathers.

The work the inmates were put to turned out to be extremely profitable and not all that went on behind those high spike-topped walls was a model of propriety with the result that far from being released upon reaching her twenty-first birthday, many such young women found themselves effectively undergoing what amounted to permanent incarceration. Inmates were brutally beaten for the most minor of offences and under the strict and watchful eyes of nuns seemingly purposefully chosen for their authoritarian predispositions.

These girls were under the exploitative control of women who seemingly were instinctive expert behavioural psychologists and many of whom were quite capable of reducing even a headstrong girl to tears by mockery and humiliation alone. Over time the young inmates would be broken down completely, both emotionally and psychologically, in this strange punitive ecclesiastical behaviour modification facility until in the end their total submission to the will of the nuns and overseers could be the only outcome.

To most it would have seemed like a particularly exploitative gothic horror; to Miss Flora McBainstone and her ‘friend’ Mrs Daphne Larkspear it read like something else entirely. A particularly provocative and flirtatious girl could easily have been considered promiscuous and found herself, as a result, placed under the guardianship of the nuns and put to work behind locked gates and barred windows of one of their ‘asylums’. Alternatively the parish priest might have decided that a particular girl was ‘in moral danger’ with a similar result. Then there were those tales told of ‘precautionary incarcerations’ of orphaned teenage girls thought be simply too attractive or pretty for their own good - whatever that meant. Either way what it came down to was that whether or not a girl had anything to atone for, either legally or morally, once interned she could be held under lock and key without access to the usual processes and rituals of law and with no pathway of appeal nor even the means of contacting any person able or willing to speak on her behalf. It was a singularly Victorian torment, almost a form of cultural pathology, yet it was a system that had persisted well into the mid twentieth century - some would say later still - and it was a system that could be nurtured still, with care, coaxed back to life in the present.

This then would be the credo by which her ‘home’ or rather their ‘home’ - Daphne Larkspear’s and hers - would be run. And this house would be the locus for the enterprise. And what an enterprise it would be! The word ‘home’ was one of those euphemisms used by the nuns in charge of what had been in reality, back in the day, a sort of church-financed prison system - the term seemed equally at ease applied to the kind of unofficial private prison she had in mind. A prison not set for the criminal or delinquent but rather for those runaways and stray nymphets she and her partner might merely consider criminally attractive - and the more blameless the better. And if they happened to issue from wealthy or privileged parentage - as some undoubtedly would, having run away on some pouty, petulant whim - then even better still, just so long as they could be relied upon to have covered their own tracks sufficiently. Once spirited away, even the latter, with care, could become just another statistic. The others wouldn’t even rate that much interest - the big cities were full of them and all deserving; from big-breasted northern mill-town girls to blond haired Scandinavians and newly-arrived eastern Europeans.

There would be a long, long corridor, winding and convoluted to disorientate any would-be escapee. Chopped into shorter sections by securely locked bisecting iron security grilles, the passageway would be a windowless maze peppered with keyholes and the peep-holes set in non-descript iron rectangles that merged near seamlessly with the institutional beige walls. There would be a small room for each inmate, each sealed off behind its own locked and bolted iron door. But this would be no damp, dark loathsome and infested cell: She could envisage the scene in each; the glaring white walls, the disinfected sterile institutional smell, the instantly recognizable plain iron-framed hospital bed. There would be cushioned lino flooring and some sort of soft, yet featureless and near textureless, cladding on the walls and around the bed frame to prevent self-harming and perhaps a rubber or soft plastic chamber pot - what else could a teenage girl need.

Nor would there be the sort of coarse, thick blue cloth uniforms of the kind the Sister’s of Mercy would have insisted their girls wear in the days of the Madeleine laundries or the Magdalene Asylum for ‘fallen women’. Some sort of uniform was de rigueur of course; stripping an inmate of her own clothes and putting her in some sort of institutional uniform was the first best step in exerting one’s power over her - after, that is, stealing away from her the individuality of her hairstyle and replacing it with the depersonalised austerity of the prison cut. This was where the thorny issue of admission procedures really bore fruit. The psychology of incarceration was every bit as important as the physicality of locks, bolts, restraints and bars.

By the time a girl was put through a well thought out and systematic, step-wise, admission procedure - if properly carried out - mentally she will have already become a prisoner, even before being introduced to her cell. Miss Flora McBainstone believed that one should begin conditioning a girl’s mind from the moment she crossed the institution’s threshold, so that by the time the girl was handed her prison uniform, on perhaps the third, fourth or even fifth day, the girl would don the green polyester prison work dress she favoured without complaint.

She had it all thought out; a couple of years or so locked away under captivity in this ‘Home for Troubled and Wayward Girls’ she had now mentally engineered and any girl would be reduced to an automaton, totally unable to function outside this or any other institution. Yes, she could see it all: Lady Marchment had all the right connections - on the surface of it, every effort would be made to try and locate these girls. But in the type of semi-official demimonde institution she had in mind the only way out would be for a runaway waif to be claimed by a relative or other willing to take responsibility for her. But they’d see to it that there were vanishingly-slim chances of that happening.

She recalled what she’d once read about one of those historic so-called Magdalene institutions; located in Cork, Ireland, as she remembered it. An eye-witness account it was - a survivor’s account; she would ensure no such account would ever emerge from her institution: “My mother didn’t know where I was. My sisters didn’t know where I was. Nobody knew where I was”.

Those girls in those places were watched over 24 hours a day by the nuns. They were literally browbeaten into submission, to the point where they probably came to believe they belonged in ‘care’. But even if any of these girls had retained the mental wherewithal to as much as attempt to abscond it would have been difficult in the extreme, confined as they were behind a convent’s six-metre high stone walls; especially when the latter were topped with shards of broken glass embedded in the mortar and concrete. Yes, those Magdalene laundry homes of old made the perfect template for something to rise from their ashes, as it were - and given the present financial climate, the time was ripe!

Some part of the house could easily be adapted to form part of a compound, screened from the outside world.  Her vision had now expanded to become a live-in ‘rehabilitation’ facility for ‘runaways’, structured in the mould of a re-secularised version of those Church-run ‘Magdalene laundries’ of old-time Ireland - an entire complex.  Saying that; she would still include a church or chapel along with the school, work house and ‘domestic training’ buildings - there was a lot to be said for religious discipline and training, even if for highly cynical and manipulative purposes.  The whole was already effectively walled, in but an extension could easily be added to the top of the already high wall at the rear of the area to ensure the girl’s containment. 

 The girls could be taken to the schoolroom or the church or chapel in their school uniforms or to the work house in their work dresses and pinafores and the entire walk would be within the fenced in area - it would become their entire world, their entire existence.  Of course there would be a hand-picked all-female staff to guide them along the way between one building and the next, ensuring strict silence, decorum and perpetually downcast eyes be maintained throughout.  All gates and doorways would be securely chained and padlocked before and after their passing; and a great show made of that fact.  And there would be very prominent - and very obvious - cameras surveying and guarding every inch of the way.  There would be no discreetly tucked away modern sub-miniature marvels here; the perception of perpetual surveillance was as important as the actual facility.  

 But under the regime she had in mind, underpinned by the sort of measures that currently served so efficaciously to detain young Alice and Angel, she doubted any girl would attempt absconding even in the absence of many of those security provisions.   Indeed, the day-to-day control wielded by Lady Marchment, aided and abetted by that Dr Anne Ecclestone woman, over those two girls lives within the facility represented by the household as it stood at the moment was exemplary. Never had she seen the twin tactics of humiliation and psychological pressure employed so skilfully, nor so unrelentingly. The subtle psychological bonds that held those two girls under their control were stronger by far than any of the bars Lady Marchment had had bolted across the windows or the locks she had had put on the doors. Both were hamstrung by neuroses, corralled by phobia and tethered by dependency - one for her mistress’s approval, the other on her need for pharmacological solace.

As for the schoolwork side of it; she did not see education for the girls she would house as a priority, at least not traditionally academic education, even if the backdrop and trappings would all be in place, from the uniforms to the desks and blackboard, to the teacher’s gown, mortarboard, and - of course - cane or tawse.  The focus would be more on a girl acquiring a sufficiently submissive demeanour and attitude in all things than on academic achievement.  The schoolroom and its regimen she saw more as a tool designed to concentrate a girl’s mind on the former through the culture of strict discipline and obedience such an environment naturally fostered.  It certainly wasn’t about ‘improving minds’, ‘building self confidence’ and ‘encouraging independence’ - quite the opposite in fact, especially where the latter two factors were concerned.  

 A dependent girl - in whatever form that dependency took - became by her very nature an obedient girl; and she put great store in obedience.  A girl didn’t have to love her, or even like her (she could hate her for that matter), a girl simply had to obey her in all things, blindly and without question, no matter how demeaning, no matter how wounding to the pride.  The fact that such a girl, plucked from the fold and given her personal attention, most certainly would come to love her, given time, was yet another example of the forging of psychological chains by dependency of a sort.  She would leave a girl, a once independent free spirit, in a situation in which she would be lost without an order or command to guide her and quite incapable of independent existence.

 In that way she saw it more important that her girls - as she was increasingly now beginning to view them in her mind’s eye - were trained and schooled in domestic duties and chores than schoolwork per se. Chastisement for having a wrinkled dress and apron or school uniform was as important as that for failing to keep up in the classroom - perhaps more so in some respects.  Of course her girls would be loved, some even given a kiss goodnight, but there could be no telephone calls, no mail and no outside contact - total immersion was everything.  Food would be nourishing but not necessarily palatable; but it would be eaten, every mouthful, or be returned the next meal - and the meal after that if necessary - until it was eaten; the will had to be broken starting day one if a girl was to become a well-adjusted ‘settled’ detainee.  The late teens were a late age to start, but tackling finicky eating made for a good jumping off point.

She could almost hear the prison-grade cane slicing through the air, that whooping rising low whistle that it made, a whimpering, desperate teenager pleading for clemency as counterpoint, the distraught girl’s voice rising in a long, high wail of soul-destroying torment in response to the inevitable swish and crack of rattan on resilient young bottom flesh. Yes, a good caning or the use of the paddle was as good a cure for defiance as anything else and would be the mainstay of control.  Yet this too would be underpinned by constant repetition of the institution’s credo, instilling in their minds their need for ‘guidance’  until the fact of their deserving of punishment ‘for their own good’ becomes a given.

And they should be taught a good, strong work ethic - though her take on ‘work ethic’ was a singular one. As in everything else, she believed this ‘work ethic’ should contain a strong discipline component. Indeed, she’d have those girls scrubbing brick floors on their hands and knees with a toothbrush by the time she was finished with them... Just as she would have that girl, Alice’s, jumped-up stepmother down on all fours if it were up to her - that over-blown ‘Lady Marchment’ person.

Yes, she thought of herself as a ‘strong personality’, that Karen Marchment. But she’d known plenty of those of ‘stout determination’ brought to their knees by the right approach. And her old friend and confident, Daphne Larkspear, knew exactly the right approach to deal with the likes of Lady Marchment... Besides, it wouldn’t exactly be the first time Daphne had had that woman down on her knees, as she understood it. And once under Daphne’s thumb a girl was hers for life! That was what Daphne always claimed, anyway - well perhaps now they’d see just how true that claim was, and how much was just bluster... Just how long-lived was Daphne Larkspear’s influence...

Back to Reality

Alice felt a palm press firmly between her shoulder blades, urging her forward and down to take up a bent posture, lying across the bench, the woman leaning over her from behind and retrieving the rubber soled plimsoll in the same movement. It took only seconds for the woman to pull the laces from the rear of Alice’s gym suit’s closefitting bloomer-styled lower section and draw aside the flaps containing and constraining her burgeoning, full rounded buttocks. The girl’s bottom cheeks were left exposed other than for a sausage of rubber that, running up the centre from the gusset to the elasticated waistband, filled the deep cleft, squeezing and pressing the sweat-drenched globes obscenely apart.

Behind Alice’s back the bottle-green school plimsoll was raised high in a meaty hand attached to an even meatier, well-toned arm; an arm well accustomed to exercise of every sort. For a moment the gym shoe hung in mid air, the rubbery sole bending under its own weight - then it was brought swooping down; hard! Swipe after unhurried, uncounted, rubber-soled smacking swipe the gym mistress landed over the same area of Alice’s tender bottom. She was beginning to really gasp with pain from the second or third slashing swipe and was begging beseechingly by the seventh or eighth. Even after the twelfth swipe had coaxed a husky throated scream from her lips, still the springy bottle-green plimsoll continued to belabour her bared bottom; the woman’s arm seemingly tireless.

“Further over... further than that! And keep those legs straight! You will soon learn, young lady, that I expect my girls to remain in position throughout their punishment.” The hash spoken mistress underlined her remarks with a rapidly delivered series of sharp slaps of her palm across the back of Alice’s plump thighs, each in turn, before again raising the plimsoll. The well-practiced gym instructress smiled with undisguised fulfilment as she watched the embossed outline of her open palm and fingers begin to rise in shameful shades of reds and purples on the girl’s flesh before once again bringing the gym slipper slashing down. “And you certainly do not stand up until I give you express permission to. If you should jump up, perhaps place a hand in the way to fend off a stroke or do anything at all to avoid or delay punishment... Well’ then it all starts again - right from the start.”

She brought the gym slipper down another two or three times in quick succession, before once again standing back, admiring the fruits of her labours. The girl had been reduced to tears; that was the main thing. The girl had learnt that she couldn’t ‘take it’, that there was no point to being stoic - being ‘brave’ would only serve to prolong the punishment. The next time she would be that much easier to break down, that much more readily reduced to tears.

And indeed poor Alice was sobbing pitifully enough now; it was music to the gym teacher’s ears: “Right! You will remain in that position, legs spread and knees straight, until I tell you to get up. And when I do give you permission to straighten up, you will not rub, or even as much as touch, your bottom. Any girl that went in for that sort of thing after her punishment when I was teaching instantly earned herself a re-run... from scratch! The same is going to go for the two of you, too! Make no mistake. I am going to tame the two of you until you are both as obedient as a pair of well-schooled fillies in the dressage ring by the time I’m finished with you.”

This was to be the two teenager’s first early morning PE session with the stony faced Miss Flora McBainstone; the first of what their privately hired home teacher, Daphne Larkspear, planned would henceforth become a regular, daily part of their regimen, her employer willing. Flora McBainstone ran the session like a boot camp in miniature: Arduous drilling was punctuated and synchronised by the regular pistol crack of the gym mistress’s pliable bamboo cane across each of their bare bottoms and ear-splitting blasts on her whistle. Running-on-the-spot was accompanied by terse demands to “get those knees higher! Lift those feet higher! ...higher than that, Alice, higher still, Angel”. And all to the rhythm of leather on flesh, as the backs of each girl’s thighs received the attention of the woman’s long-tailed tawse.

Star jumps were driven with a flick or two of the gym mistress’s riding crop across bouncing bottoms and both fronts and backs of thighs. Press-ups were pushed to exhaustion and beyond as the pink faced panting girls were goaded again and again to perform “just one more repetition - come on, one more”, the cane cracking down repeatedly across one or other girl’s backside until once more her inhumanly burning arm and chest muscles would raise her shuddering and sobbing from the floor.

Alice’s large breasts, unsupported by anything other than the blouse-like upper section of the gym suit, jiggled and tumbled and rolled as she jumped, jack-knifed and high-kicked in obedience to the instructress’ shrill whistle. Her rump was burning as if afflicted by a thousand beestings, the legacy of oft-repeated slaps from Miss McBainstone’s rubber soled plimsoll, the two well delineated half moons of her bottom bared and protruding obscenely, thrust out through the opening in the rear of her gym costume’s bloomers. There were tearful rhythmic gasps and breathless moans coming from her cherry lips and those of Angel, her partner in punishment and both were crying softly, yet openly, the tears dripping down their cheeks and mingling with the tacky tracts of sweat.

Callisthenics had pretty much disappeared in the late 1800s, early 1900s, but not in this cruelly surreal ‘here and now’. Here those monotonous callisthenic exercises were de rigueur, queen among Miss Flora McBainstone’s ‘tool kit of discipline’, especially adapted to wear down, discourage and stifle ambition rather than ‘build character’. But then she didn’t require ‘character’; all she required of a teenage girl was that she should be quiet, demure and passive and that she should submit to her mistress’s demands, and those of others if placed in authority over her.

Alice was close to breaking point and for an instant stood flat-footed, her body refusing to move. From behind there came a loud retort like the crack of a pistol or starting gun. The pain didn’t come all at once but slowly spread until the whole of the left cheek of her bottom burned with fire as if branded by a hot thin white hot iron. There came in rapid succession a second and then a third sharp report, one associated with a similar branding across the right cheek of her buttocks and the third sizzling right across the backs of her legs, just above her knees. She was back star-jumping in an instant, astonished at her own reserves of stamina, the gym mistress further encouraging her clumsy pupil with a couple of hard open-palmed hand slaps across Alice’s bare thighs.

“Yes, child; it’s surprising the effort a riding crop can coax out of a girl. And I’ve broken in more than my share of young fillies with this one, I can tell you.”

“Such a lovely bottom,” The woman gym instructor’s voice was breathless, throaty. She reached out her palm, running her surprisingly soft fingers over the cheeks of Alice’s bottom, gently kneading the soft flesh, the moony resilient skin now ridged with the pattern of the gym slipper’s sole and criss-crossed with the thin tracks left by the riding crop.

“It must have been so smooth and lovely once. Such a shame there has been so much marking that is permanent. Mrs Larkspear, your stepmother and now me - and we all love nothing more than punishing your big fat bottom! And it’s such a perfect bottom to thrash. In fact just as I am given to understand Angel has been dieted down to a stick insect, I think I’m going to have to put together a weight gaining diet for you, my girl, put a bit more lard on that already chubby fat bottom of yours. In fact I think I’m going to make you into a real tubby - so much more feminine; all big pendulous swinging breasts and big fat broad hips. You’ll make the perfect partner for Angel with her boyish hips, flat-chested look and short hair. One boy, one girl - just as it should be!” The gym mistress laughed softly, as if enjoying some private joke, one that was presently beyond Alice’s understanding, before going on:

“Make no mistake, Alice Marchment - I am going to thrash and thrash and thrash that bottom of yours during these sessions; every morning. Before walking across she had plucked a cane from the dark wooden rack that was screwed to the back of the door, a stout, polished and devilishly flexible hickory rod of around a meter and a half long and now toyed with it, aware that the target of her attentions could see it in the mirror she was presently facing. “Touch your toes please, Miss Marchment - knees straight.”

The stroke took Alice’s breath away; she sprung up, clutching her burning rear and already bawling like a baby. “You flinched when I touched your bottom. I won’t have that; it shows the wrong mind set. When you are in this room that big fat bottom belongs to me. If you have a problem with having a woman touch it you are just going to have to get over it; no lad or man is ever going to be touching it. There is going to be no room for men in your life; the way your life has been planned out for you, you are always going to be under the control and supervision of a strict woman or women. When I touch you I expect you to smile; I expect to see the mist of desire in your eyes, I expect you to welcome my touch... and to show that welcome in your expression. Now strip and then it’s into the shower with you; and you, too, Angel. Turn your gym suits inside out and fold them neatly, then place them side by side on the table over there with the crotch panel or gusset uppermost for inspection. When you have done that, follow me.”

Obediently both girls began to slowly strip, folding their gym costumes as instructed, their faces scarlet with shame as much as with discomfort and the exhaustion of their enforced exertion. Both girls’ bottoms were a pitiful mass of thin purplish-red wheals edged with raised swollen ridges rising above the smooth flesh, much of the rest patterned with the tell tale reddened tread of the plimsoll. Painfully they both hobbled out the ‘gymnasium’ door before being herded along the corridor by their new gym mistress towards a second door, this one marked ‘Gym Shower’ in big bold raised navy blue capitals on a white enamelled plate.

“Hold hands, please, girls. “Ordinarily I would expect a girl to take her chastisement with decorum. If she should spring up in the manner you just did, Alice, she could expect a good couple of extra strokes or so. I decided to let you off this once, this being your first time with me; but only under the understanding that you do exactly what I say. Fail to stick to the letter of what I tell you do and you can expect a very thorough thrashing right here and now - twelve good hard strokes, and starting again from scratch should you as much as look as if you are going to bob up. Now, I said hold hands. That’s better! You are going to be holding hands together every where you go from now on - I have had a word with your teacher, Mrs Larkspear about it, and Alice’s stepmother.”

She watched the two teenagers teetering along hand-in-hand and as naked as the day they were born with a wistful yet satisfied smile on her face. There was no mistaking that the gym mistress was pleased with what she envisaged as a first faltering step towards her introducing the duo to full-blown lesbianism. It would take time, but the setup here was near perfect for remodelling impressionable young minds; what with the isolation, the closely controlled environment, the discipline and scope for domination and the sense of shared injustice she knew both girls would harbour in their minds. It was the latter, in particular, that would do most to form the bond between the two.

In her previous employ it had all been about instigating an exacting, structured formula of care and discipline in a healthy, all-female environment with a strong emphasis on developing feminine attitudes of humility and obedience. It had been a system that had just sort of evolved organically rather than having been designed at the outset, actively promoting all lesbian acts as ‘natural expressions of fellowship’ between the young women in their care. But it had been these more inventive forms of discipline she had helped put in place in that establishment that had begun to attract lurid interest in certain quarters, not least of which had been the gutter press.

The shower room proved to be a white tiled wetroom carved out under the usual high sloping ceiling that mimicked the steeply sloping steepled roof characteristic of the rear aspect of this part of the house. The space was starkly yet indirectly lit by fluorescent tubes that were recessed out of direct eye line within channels running around the tops of all four walls at ceiling level.

Towards the rear of the room a toilet pedestal rose seamlessly up from the flooring almost as if rooted in the tiling. Providing for what the gym teacher’s friend and colleague, Mrs Daphne Larkspear, liked to term ‘supervisory toileting’ the latter sparkled in the harsh light in all its transparent moulded Plexiglas glory, the water within clearly visible and shimmering with the rippling vibrations of the entering group’s footfall. Rather than being placed against the wall facing outward, as one might expect, the receptacle was set some half a meter out from it and faced towards it, whereat a full height mirror was recessed in the wall itself and reflected both the pedestal and the room beyond.

At either side at the pedestal’s rear - that part closest to the entering group - chromed stirrups were suspended high up on short stainless steel or chrome chains, each sporting an adjustable metal retaining clip from which dangled an open brass padlock. At the very rear of the pedestal - just behind the seat and at about the point that conventionally the cistern would be attached - a pair of what looked to Alice suspiciously like police handcuffs hung from their centre chain, the latter threaded through a ‘U’-shaped shackle set within the upper surface of the pedestal body itself.

The shower itself dominated the very centre of the room. Just about spacious enough to accommodate two smallish adults and rising from a stepped pedestal in the floor to where it merged with the ceiling the cubical took the form of an elegantly curved oval tube. Fabricated in transparent toughened glass, unencumbered by any form of structural framework besides the glass itself and featuring a curved glass door, the water issuing from a shower head mounted in the ceiling directly overhead, privacy had clearly not been the main objective listed on the designer’s brief.

Indeed the shower cubicle’s design allowed for a full and unobstructed, three hundred and sixty degree monitoring of the occupant or occupants. Given that all controls - water temperature, flow rate and all - were situated externally, being sited remotely on the wetroom wall, Alice could be forgiven if her initially received perception was that here was something that was concerned as much with control and ‘discipline’ as with hygiene. It was an impression that could only be reinforced by the additional fact that the cubicle’s door could be locked from the outside, the two halves of the chromed rectangular catch being the only feature detracting from perfect transparency.

Alice found herself being half coaxed, half shoved through the opening in the shower’s cylindrical wall to join Angel, the latter browbeaten teenager having stepped in without protest when instructed. The door having closed behind the two teenagers with a resounding glassy click, Alice was relieved when what came next was not the breathtaking gasping torment of icily spiking jets she had feared and expected and but rather a reassuringly gentle drizzle and then downpour of soft, warm, scented sudsy water.

Shyly Alice tried to keep her distance from her showering companion as she begun to soap herself down, her cheeks burning with shame. Yet within the enclosed space however carefully she tried to manoeuvre, her arms and legs tended to entangle with those of Angel, the two girls’ bodies becoming involuntarily pressing together, slithering flesh on soapy slick flesh.

Music had started flowing from somewhere and was as soothing and sensuous as the warming scented soapy rain. From somewhere the gym instructress’ voice floated, merging in with the gentle strains; not the harsh domineering tones that seemed to ordinarily characterise the woman, rather a reassuring lilting tone, seductive and filled with earthy passion.

“I don’t want to see you soaping yourselves - it is surely easier to soap each other. Run your hands over each others breasts, lift them, soap beneath them - that’s it. That’s it Angel, run your finger between Alice’s bottom cheeks, draw little circles around her rose-bud as you’ve been taught... Alice Marchment! Don’t you dare clench your bottom, relax it at once. And I don’t want to see those eyes closing either - continue soaping Angel’s darling little breasts and look into her eyes while you are doing it... Look at how pretty she is, think about how her velvety soft fingertip is making your bottom squirm, how delicious it feels...”

Outside the ovoid cylindrical shower cubical the gym instructress was prowling around and around, circling the cubicle. Simultaneously, as she strolled she was toying with the diabolically pliant cane she was carrying, making quite sure both girls caught sight of that fact, keen that they should both understand the implication.

“Now kiss! Angel, Alice, kiss each other...come on, full on the lips.”

Alice felt herself blanch - Angel embraced her readily and brought her warm lips to hers, Alice pulled away, repulsed, twisting away as much as the cramped space would allow. The gym teacher’s tone changed so abruptly that to Alice it was as if she had been struck by lightening:

“Right, that’s it! Both of you... out of the shower...NOW! Alice Marchment... And you too, Angel Larkspear! Get yourselves here in front of me...yes, right here, right now!... Bend and touch your toes... I’M TALKING TO BOTH OF YOU! Angel, you have Alice to thank for this. And Alice; you just think how unfair, how selfish you have been in causing me to have to punish poor Angel as well as your self. Would it have been so hard for you to have kissed the poor girl; you could see how much she was dying to kiss you!”

The gym teacher lent the full weight of the cane into Alice’s waiting buttocks, the pliant hickory bending as it passed whistling through the air before springing back and adding its whip-like component to the slashing cut. It was a real sizzler, scorching, up and under the tender fatty tissues of the overhang of Alice’s full buttocks, the cane cutting deep into the crease where the girl’s bottom met the very tops of her thighs. The stark naked girl sprung rigidly bolt upright like a coiled spring released from its tether, her scream rending the steam-filled air asunder and her hands desperately clutching at her agonizingly burning buttocks.

“Right, we’ll have that stroke again - closely followed by eleven others, I think. Bend and touch your toes again, girl... AT ONCE CHILD! I said, at...” The gym instructress’ barked order went unfinished; it never had time to clear her lips.

The bench running along the wall by the door went over with a crash on the tiled floor as, hurtling past the gym mistress and powered by blind desperation and panic, Alice made a break for the passage outside, shoving the bench between the gym mistress and herself as a diversion. Where she was going to run to, given her state of undress, she hadn’t considered. She thought only to put enough distance between herself and the dyke of a gym teacher to grab some clothes and get out the house. Thanks to the efforts of her stepmother, though - and that woman’s ex-schoolteacher friend - ‘clothes’ in this case pretty much came down to a choice between a humiliatingly childish take on a school uniform, drop-seat pyjamas and plastic pants or a horrendously ridiculous looking gabardine raincoat thing that had a hood and that smelled of rubber even more pungently than the gym suit did.

She had used every ounce of strength to twist her way out of the powerful gym mistress’ grip and with her legs shaky from the unaccustomed exercise they had just been put to and verging on cramping and her bottom going into involuntary spasms she feared she wasn’t going to get even as far as the door at the end of the passage, let alone negotiate the twisting staircase beyond.

But Alice needn’t have worried on account of the gym teacher. Even when eventually she appeared at the shower room door the woman seemed unaccountably loath to hurry. Therein, though, in of itself hung a story; that the woman apparently saw no need for haste.

Reaching the door at the far end of the dimly lit passage the shivering, naked Alice grabbed at the large bulbous brass handle, twisting, turning and pulling in one single action. Nothing happened; neither handle nor door would budge. The door was old yet solid but the lock was new, chunky and decidedly modern. She turned as she heard the boards creak close behind. Never before had she felt so alone: her knees trembled then begun to give way; panting for breath she vomited then involuntarily urinated as the gym teacher slowly advanced, the woman’s hard features set with determination, her thin cruel lips pressed tightly together. Alice couldn’t believe she had been abandoned by her stepmother to be delivered into the hands of this obviously mentally disturbed and deranged woman and left to the twisted woman’s perverted devices - not even her foul-minded stepmother could have done that; surely!

Cornered, Alice’s panicked inner-beast kicked in - the animal that lives within all of us. It was not a conscious decision; it was instinct. Without any conscious involvement she would climb over the oncoming woman if necessary to escape, run or claw right through her. In a split second she had turned with her back pressed against the firmly locked door. Practically spitting venom and her eyes wide with terror while blinked with self survival Alice Lamberton launched herself at the confidently advancing gym teacher as if fired from a catapult. Thrusting herself off the door with both her buttocks and hands and instinctively aiming for the gap between the woman and the wall she threw her arms forward, gaining momentum, flailing wildly with open hands and clawing at the air with nails that had been safely disarmed long beforehand, having been clipped to the quick.

To Flora McBainstone the oncoming sensually overweight teenager’s prison yard rush was just that; a directionless, unfocused and haphazard attack. All wobbling buttocks, swinging pendulous breasts and windmill-whirling arms, her head swinging to and fro like an angry bull, the teenager’s anguished onrushing aggression was easily parried. With the practised agility of the mental ward orderly she had once actually been she side-stepped at the very last moment. Tripping the girl with her foot she simultaneously swung around, rotating her arm of the same side so as to allow her to land her closed palm across the back of the girl’s neck, relying on the blindly onrushing teenager’s own momentum to hurl the girl to the floor. She followed through without pause, dropping down with her bended knee pressed into the small of the fallen girl’s back and yanking the girl’s right arm up behind her back in a debilitating, painful hammer lock.

Flora McBainstone had learned the rudiments of Ju-Jitsu when she had for a period been employed in a psychiatric hospital out in the Philippines. Little more than a prison for the ‘mentally unsound’, the place had been a filthy roughhouse of an establishment and the skills she had learned, the tools of the trade. Those skills had stood her in good stead then, but she had added to - and honed - her expertise considerably since.

Pulled almost bodily to her feet, the wrist lock the gym instructress had placed on her leaving little option but to follow, Alice now found herself being dragged by her ear back to the ‘gym’ and then across the room, one arm still being held painfully where it had been yanked up her back. Just seconds later she was being rudely thrust towards one side of a squat rectangle stool.

The latter, up until that moment, had remained out of sight in the alcove at the end of the room, where it had been tucked away to one side of the pair of exercise bikes. Posed before a wall mirror - and with a second mirror positioned lying flat on the floor and facing upwards between it and the wall - this stool had a thick, domed reddish-brown padded leather top that appeared cracked and worn soft as if through generations of usage. Festooned with all manner of straps and buckles, the furnishing was very much a fixture, being bolted firmly to the floor. Each stubby leg was fixed in position by a square black iron flange plate or collar that sprouted from its foot and which, in turn, was bolted to the floor by six large hexagonally headed bolts.

With almost uncannily inhuman strength, or so it seemed to Alice, the gym teacher threw her down bodily across the low stool with a move that was half tripping, half judo throw. Alice landed squarely across the stool’s top, her abdomen impacting painfully with the surprisingly firm leather and knocking the breath out of her. A single truncated, terse phrase of explanation echoed in her ears, mingling with the glittering array of stars that suddenly seemed to burst across her eye line as her vision narrowed to a panicked tunnel: “...Yes, a genuine Victorian whipping stool, young lady...” the gym instructor’s voice, terrifyingly calm. “You’re going nowhere but down on all fours, my chubby little piglet, then we’ll see what a cry-baby I can make of you.”

Before Alice could recover Flora McBainstone was astride her, using her weight to pin her down. The gym mistress quickly buckled two tan leather cuffs around Alice’s wrists that were in turn fastened by two sturdy straps to the right and left legs of the so-called ‘whipping stool’. Then another, far wider leather band was thrown across the small of Alice’s back. It was only as Miss Flora McBainstone was tightening this latter strap around Alice’s waist that Alice made any real attempt at remonstrating, frantically begging and pathetically trying to wiggle free. But it was all too little and far, far too late.

The broad, padded strap passed across the small of Alice’s back before disappearing under the top of the squat leather-topped stool table, at which point it engaged with a sturdy iron buckle, hidden out of sight to one side. The latter buckle was quickly pulled uncommonly tight, to the point of breathlessness, thereby rendering all further struggle pointless. Only now were those other straps and fastenings that trailed and coiled along the floor at the rear of the stool and between its solid-looking, square section wooden legs fastened and pulled tight around her ankles and across the backs of her knees, drawing her legs and buttock cheeks apart and adding the shame of intimate exposure to the sense of helplessness that Alice had now been overcome by.

Straightening up Flora McBainstone stepped back, her practised eye admiring the scene: The girl, Alice, had a magnificent bottom. It was going to be shear joy to thrash such a girl secured over the whipping stool. There was such sensual pleasure to be derived from the humiliation and chastisement of young ladies. It was something she would have gone back to prison for once upon a time - but not now, not here, not in this setup. Here she could heap indignity upon exploitative indignity - and with perfect impunity!

She tapped her fingers pensively to her lips: Should she start off with the long, slender school cane or perhaps a lighter, ‘warm-up’ leather strap or tawse, or progress straight to the heavy duty Victorian prison cane she had acquired in that sale room all that time ago? The Victorian’s knew a thing or too when it came to quelling a girl’s rebellious spirit. In those days a girl who was reared by a dominant, harsh stepmother or strict overbearing governess, would have been completely indoctrinated by this point, the principal of submission to authority drummed deep into her subconscious. Well, she’d just have to make up for lost time. There were dozens of ways in which a recalcitrant girl of Alice’s age could be brought to heel - and she knew all of them. She had practically invented some. Others - those thought too extreme even for the establishment she had previously been at - she had merely refined, albeit as much through fantasy as anything else. But despite the latter reservation, she didn’t doubt that in reality, as in imagination, those methods would soon see even the most headstrong girl quivering with dread.

“Mercy, please have mercy, Miss!”

“Madam - I prefer you to address me as madam... And strapping you down for a caning is showing mercy, as far as I am concerned. Cruelty would be having you bend for the cane and having to restart the correction again and again and again - although, that is what you can expect next time. Except, if my previous experience with girls like you is anything to go by, there won’t be a next time; one of my canings while strapped down across the whipping stool is usually all it takes!”

Leaving the sobbing Alice strapped down over the padded leather whipping stool the gym mistress disappeared for a moment through a side door, returning seconds later with a heavy-duty bamboo cane, long, heavy, yet still diabolically pliant. The first stroke slashed in like the strike of a coiled snake, and with the bite of one too, or the coordinated sting of a line of angry hornets strung out across her wide fleshy haunches. Systematically she worked her way over and then down the slope of the girl’s buttocks, each stroke leaving behind it a thinly bleeding purplish weal. Again and again she stepped forward, twisting her body and building momentum as she lashed her cane into the girl’s quivering bottom, each stroke landing with an equally ear-splitting whiplash crack.

At first the Alice twitched and pulled spasmodically in her bonds then, slowly reduced to blubbering jelly, she lay passively as the last couple of strokes slashed in, urine trickling down her thighs as once again she lost control of her bladder. Finally - to her everlasting shame - as what would prove to be the final cut landed, she felt her bowels, too, move and her defeat was complete. She knew she would never defy this woman again; indeed she would never defy anyone ever again.

Looking down at the prone, brokenly weeping girl the gym mistress beamed that predatory thin-lipped smile she had once been so infamous for. It was the look the paparazzi had clamoured for, the dark spirited, mug-shot portraiture the tabloids had been pleased to make front-page space for. If she could have read the sobbing teen’s thoughts she would have concurred wholeheartedly. She could tell at a glance that young Alice Marchment - or whatever her stepmother cared to call her - was ready to do anything to avoid a repeat performance. The girl was at the point at which she would willingly suffer any shame, go through any indignity, perform any act, however denigrating, however degrading that her present tormentress might think up. And Flora McBainstone could think up plenty to test that conjecture - and in the fullness of time she undoubtedly would, too!

But oh, to test the poor young thing’s stepmother’s limits, if placed in the same position - the haughty, over-starched, over-blown ‘Lady Marchment’. That was the challenge. That woman might well still think of herself as in control but it was Daphne Larkspear who was beginning to press the buttons, jiggle the woman’s strings. And like a reluctantly rehabilitated marionette, stiff with disuse, she was unwittingly beginning to dance at the prompting of the puppeteer’s fingertips.

She could see the symptoms; Daphne had the woman right where she wanted her. She could tell Daphne was busily working the magic which, although never entirely successful when this ‘Lady Marchment’ character had been her pupil at that prestigious school of hers, she had much refined since. And it was working; it could be seen in the deference the woman now showed to another who was in essence her employee. It could be read, too, in the tone of the latter’s addressing of her employer, the manner in which Daphne’s tone had changed:

What had once been hints, tips and suggestions had been gradually taking on a weightier gravitas of late, becoming more forceful in nature, gradually morphing into what were for all intents and purposes orders... And although she clearly didn’t realise it herself, Lady Marchment was beginning to follow those orders... In the background Daphne Larkspear was busily proving a point, a point she held in parallel with the eponymous heroine of the Muriel Spark novel - The Pride of Miss Jean Brody: She had had a girl in her hands at an impressionable age - and that girl indeed was hers for life... Or would be soon enough... Unless of course some outside interested came into play. Only time would tell.

For Alice her only hope now for freedom lay in the one person who knew something of her situation; that the girl concerned might come looking. For her stepmother a similar hope lay simply in her own sense of self-determination; that she might wake up to her ex-teacher’s manipulation of her.

For Alice, though, there was one other ‘out card’ that was yet to be played, one she was not even vaguely aware of. If that ace came up it would consist of a most unexpected avenue, entailing the most unlikely of alliances and with the strangest of allies...