Chapter Twenty Three
Q. What did Annie say when you got back in?
A. She was torn up between being furious her plan didn’t work, that I didn’t end up with a stranger but a family member, and delighted that we had yet another hold over Phil. “He’ll be so useful,” she kept saying, and I didn’t know why or understand why, not for ages. She was red faced and a little breathless, so I knew she’d been jthere when I got spanked. I envied her that ability, imagine, being able to dominate and submit at the same time! Must have been multiple orgasms going on, while I only had the one.
Q. And your parents never found out?
A. Do you know, it seems odd these days to hear them called ‘your parents’ when we knew they were adoptive parents. But never mind, no, they never found out.
Q. Don’t you find that odd?
A. No, of course not! I told you, they had no real interest in us, we were decorations, additions to their perfect lives. Mother had her salon visits, her afternoon soirees, her Oxfam hunger lunches and all the other fund raising things she was in to, and Father either had ‘conferences’ in the evening with clients, or he was at the golf club. Mother joined the Golf Club too, became part of a ladies team, and we saw hardly anything of them. She got our cleaning lady to come in more days and to cook dinners as well, would you believe, the days Mother was playing golf. Mind you, we didn’t mind, we got to eat things like sausages and chips, beans and beefburgers, Mother would have had a fit if she’d known! But we enjoyed it. I even got to put on a little weight.
Q. I assume Annie hadn’t stopped the vendetta?
A. Oh no, it increased. She switched tactics, having made sure old Gran Webster was on her way out, she started on the other grandparents, we had both of them still, Gramps and Gran Livitt, who after all were responsible for our Mother not being able to have children, or so Annie reasoned. She began a campaign against them, the whispering phone calls, the occasional pizza delivery in their home town, the brochures through the door, the whole bit. We knew about it because they would come round and complain bitterly about the campaign being waged against them. They blamed it on next door, because they’d fallen out with them, or Gramps had, shouting over the fence, all that kind of thing, all over the cars they insisted on working on in their front garden. All right, it lowered the tone of the neighbourhood but - there are other ways of dealing with it rather than shouting over the fence for half the street to hear! Gran said she had never been so ashamed in her life as that day.
Annie said later she wished she’d been there, she could do with learning some new swear words. I didn’t agree with her there, I thought she knew plenty. I’d heard most of them usually directed at Niall when he knelt at her feet after a whipping, and she did give him some terrible whippings!
Q. Where were these?
A. In the garage as before. Worked quite well, nice overhead beam to string people up. In a manner of speaking.
Q. Did you get whipped?
A. What a silly question! Of course I did, it was what I lived for!
Q. You said when you came back Annie was angry but pleased, because she had another hold over Phil. Did she make use of that then?
A. Not immediately, what she did was –