It was when she saw the girl bring her lips to the edge of the sole and begin to nibble at the loose dollops there that she started to feel a cold despair come over her. Those little chunks just looked too realistic and she could see the hay was real; a little had now dropped of and skidded across the floor and she could just make out that sickly-sweetish smell of horse manure.
The vomiting didn’t begin in earnest until the girl had carved the first of the mouthfuls from the bottom of the sole with her teeth and begun munching like a cow chewing the cud. She could see the brown around the girl’s mouth, the brownish-yellow streaks on her cheeks speckled with fragments of semi-digested hay like small yellow wood shavings. Worse, now that the mess had been disturbed, that stable-block smell was coming through in all its true, horrible stomach-churning pungency. The awful liquidised fishy slop she had been fed for lunch came splattering down the front of her pinafore, some trickling down the front of her overall and missing the pinafores bib but finding its way between the overalls buttons. Involuntarily she dropped the disciplinary posture she had been placed in, wrapping her arms around her body as, sorrowfully, she retched again and again, more part-digested remnants of ground fish heads, livers and kidneys being disgorged with every mouthful she witnessed Angel scrape off with her teeth.
But the horror of what she was witnessing was also more and more merging with the agonisingly yearning hunger growing within her, a craving born of both psychological and physical dependency. The moment was not long in coming when she could no longer differentiate between the nausea born of revulsion and that due to her need for her medication. It was at this point that Alice felt her bladder empty, the warm, wet stinging sensation spreading as the close-woven fabric of the whipping drawers wicked away the urine, taking it up like a sponge and tightening still further around her bottom and thighs as a result.
In the background the other girl’s ordeal was going on and on and on. The sole eventually unclogged, it was duly licked clean until the thick chunky vulcanised sole was as black as the graphite the dense black rubber had been coloured with in manufacture. Muddy streaks and much worse were lovingly kissed and licked and plucked with pouted lips from the upper parts as the seated woman twisted her foot this way and that, providing the girl’s soft mouth with ease of access to all those awkward, little, hard-to-get-to spots. A velvet-pink tongue lapped and polished and polished and lapped until the soft pink rubber shone with a showroom spotlight gleam, polished to perfection by a pretty young girl’s tongue.
While all this was going on in the background a yellow puddle had been slowly spreading between Alice’s bended knees, rivulets wending their way to meet the more viscous pool of regurgitated goo. Now, even as young Angel’s ordeal was drawing to a close, the woman having been satisfied that her once muck-marred beautiful pink Wellington boot was in fact once again just that - beautiful - Alice was hitting an all time low. Staring at the puddle of mess in front of her the realization had suddenly hit Alice of what she had been brought down to. The thought had hit her - as if the most natural conclusion she could have come to - that here was something else she’d have to clean up, that more likely than not she would have to scrub that floor all over again. It was the instant her self-esteem had finally hit rock bottom... Or so she fondly imagined...
“Up you get, sweet little Alice. You can put your hands down by your sides now, fingertips pinching the sides of your apron, as you’ve been taught, please.”
As she rose stiffly from her knees Alice turned her head to one side, gritting her teeth and for the moment refusing to meet the woman’s smiling eyes. She felt sick with self-disgust now just as much as, if not more than, she had for the other girl and the weak-willed compliance to authority she had displayed. It was a different kind of nausea; it mingled with the more physical aspect instigated by the tang of vomit in her mouth and the smell wafting up from her soaked pinafore and nylon overall. And all of it was augmenting and building on the gut-twisting wrenching and flu-like head pounding of barbiturate withdrawal.
That latter aspect was rapidly becoming the worst of all - the sheer clammy bone-chilling shivering panic; she feared its power of persuasion, she feared that given sufficient time it might overcome even the most soul-damming sense of revulsion. She had already bent for the cane on many an occasion and learned to accept indignity upon humiliating indignity under its humbling power. She knew for sure now that it was already way past time for her medication - it could only get worse from here. Was the woman deliberately holding back on her medication or had it merely slipped her mind? Didn’t the uncaring woman realise she was sick, just how ill she really was? Her prescribed medication was well overdue now, perhaps even dangerously so. And all the woman could do was stand there now, dangling a glossy pink Wellington boot in front of her face. It was the one that had seemed unworn and she could smell the pungently shoebox-fresh scent of rubber - but she still felt sick. And she hadn’t even been aware of the woman taking off her boots, let alone changing back into her stiletto court shoes.
A person couldn’t just stop taking tranquillizers, just like that, not abruptly; that was what Dr Ecclestone said. That was always embarrassing too, meeting with her stepmother’s doctor. Nowadays, when Dr Ecclestone visited, she insisted Alice meet her in the front parlour wearing one of those hospital examination gowns that fasten up the back with ties and a pair of loose fitting disposable white crepe-paper knickers. Barefooted and with the gown coming to no lower than mid-thigh she always felt every inch the hospital patient, standing there under the scrutinizing gaze of that stern woman with those black-rimmed glasses of hers. Once the doctor was gone, though, it was always straight back into school uniform and off to the schoolroom. Indeed, she often wondered if the doctor knew what was going on. After all, the doctor had never seen the cane marks on her bottom and Mrs Larkspear was never far away, meaning she never felt particularly inclined to talk.
That was what was so galling about having to wear that examination gown and those huge baggy paper knickers. In all the time she had been coming to visit Dr Ecclestone had never once actually examined her. What passed for an examination consisted on her being ushered in front of an already seated doctor, the woman invariably relaxing back in one of the two armchairs set by the side of the fire, and undergoing, while standing awkwardly before her, what amounted to some sort of psychological appraisal.
The latter involved among other things all manner of probing questions, many of a highly personal and embarrassingly intimate nature. In particular Dr Ecclestone seemed to have an almost obsessive fascination with her masturbatory habits and in her ability to reach orgasm coupled with an uncanny ability to see through any smokescreen or circumvent any diversionary tactic her patient cared to invoke. She could, and did, wheedle out every tiny little detail. Words such as remorse and guilt would be used. Did she feel remorseful after the moment of release, as the doctor quaintly termed it? Did she ever feel a sense of guilt while in the act? Did that sense of guilt, perhaps even of shame, ever interfere with her reaching her ‘release’? Could she sometimes sense those feelings of shame and guilt building as ‘culmination’ approached, perhaps worry that one day she would fail to reach ‘release’ because of the way she felt and the remorse she knew she would feel afterwards?
It was all so belittling, and yet the doctor was right - those words and ideas did indeed intrude on her thoughts; she had cried herself to sleep in frustration more than once of late. Dr Ecclestone always advised her to try not to think of words such as ‘shame’ ‘remorse’ and ‘guilt’; Alice was to block them from her mind as the ‘end point’ approached and if she felt at all worried that she might not ‘succeed’ - if she felt the slightest seed of doubt begin to germinate - she was to stop there and then, lest she risk building up what the doctor called a ‘repression complex’. This was something dire that had to be avoided at all costs. She was to try to avoid failure no matter what - even if it mean
t ‘doing without’ - as each failure contributed to and made more likely the next as day followed night; that was how one developed a ‘repression complex’. It meant becoming ‘psychosexually crippled’ so that one could never again find sexual pleasure or release. In that way one became ‘sexually neutered’.
Poor Alice already felt ‘sexually neutered’; there had been many nights of frustrated fumbling she had had to call a halt to as the doctor’s warnings had come tumbling into her mind. Her room, she felt sure, was festooned with hidden sub-miniature webcams and the light was left on all night - the switch was on the outside and her stepmother always locked the door at night; ‘one can never be too safe, these days, that is why there are bars on the windows’. That was why there were all those webcams about too- supposedly. Notwithstanding all those security precautions and prying eyes she had felt, if she was very, very careful, if she kept her movements, slow, deliberate and controlled, she could do much below those thin sheets on her bed without the embarrassment of detection. In fact it had sort of surprised her that neither her stepmother nor Mrs Larkspear - Miss Daphne as she was supposed to address her - had suggested restraining her hands at night; it seemed just the sort of thing the two of them would do. With so little movement available - lest she disturb the sheets - and the ever-present concern that her furtive attempts at self-pleasure be recorded on some security tape for posterity someplace, it was little wonder it had always taken an inordinate amount of time to reach the pinnacle she sought. Nowadays that pinnacle seemed to be becoming all but insurmountable.
Dr Ecclestone always seemed to be trying to help, but her aid in this direction, when it came to her sexuality, seemed often somewhat other than helpful - if not to be downright backfiring. And then there were those unsettling aspects to the good doctor’s character. On occasion she would talk about that clinic she was involved with in some manner, waxing lyrical as to how bright and cheery it was there, how she, Alice, would feel so at home among girls of her own age.
There were pictures too, photographs Dr Ecclestone kept in an official-looking folder with a sky-blue cover carrying an embossed gold-leaf crest surmounted by the name of some sort of private hospital or institution. She would skim past pages depicting clinically-white rooms arrayed with hospital beds and corridors lined by unmarked doors with covered spy-holes and that gave the impression of snaking on forever while leading nowhere. Passing by all this frightening grimness with neither comment nor explanation she would invariably alight on some cheery shot.
One that came to mind was of what appeared to be a sunny room with four hospital type beds in view, a hand basin under a frosted glass window and a large free-standing blackboard in one corner that looked depressingly like the one in the corner of the ‘schoolroom’ upstairs. Another showed a superficially pleasant room with a circle of grey plastic school-type ‘stackable’ chairs set up in the centre and a set of girls - around six in number and all looking to be of around Alice’s own age - standing around forlornly in the background. All had been barefooted. All had been dressed in too-brief, tie-back blue and white check hospital examination gowns and had their hair, either cut short or pinned up - it was impossible to tell - covered by disposable elasticated paper mob-caps.
The closest to the camera, Alice remembered, had been angled almost side-on, providing an ample view of disposable paper knickers covering a plump full bottom that jutted out from where the back of the gown didn’t completely close. In fact the two halves of the rear of the gown hadn’t even remotely met. With only three butterfly ties, one at the neck, one at around the height of the girl’s shoulder blades and another at the lower part of the mid-back, the whole of the girl’s bottom would have been on show at the rear if not for those thin, paper knickers. Not that the latter covered much - and what they didn’t cover strained incredulity. Three or four raised, thin red tracks could just be made out, emerging from beneath the side of the powdery-white paper of those loose-fitting panties. Trailing around the side of the girl’s peachy behind these had had all the appearance of the marks of the cane, the ‘stigmata of discipline’ as Miss Daphne had once remarked. And in the far background, beyond the milling group, another of those frosted windows could be seen covered by thick white-painted bars. In fact there had seemed to be steel bars featuring somewhere in the background of most of the photographs, now she came to think about it.
The place looked anything but pleasant; in fact it looked more like a prison, or at least some diabolical cross between a hospital and a prison. She often wondered why Dr Ecclestone would show her those photos if she were so keen on her going there, ‘under her care’ as she put it. Surely those shots would have seemed certain to put anyone off - they made the place appear downright sinister. And Alice certainly had no desire to be permanently attired in a far-too-revealing examination gown, paper knickers and that ridiculous paper hat thingy. She doubted that could really be the case, but that was the unfortunate impression given by the doctor’s photo selection. She had never seen anything else worn, other than in one shot that had a blue-uniformed nurse in the foreground.
Decapitated by the photographer’s poor framing Alice remembered that the nurse had looked as if to have come from an earlier era. A white bib apron with a silver fob watch pined over the breast at one side had been covering a royal blue dress with a high-buttoning white collar and was cinched around the waist by a typical elasticated nurses belt which fastened with a nickel plated clasp shaped like a giant ornate butterfly. The latter had not been that unlike the belt Miss Daphne sometimes wore, other than hers had a much less ornate clasp- and of course featured a tawse hanging from a clip at one side, which the nurse’s belt decidedly had not. The nurse’s belt had featured a sinisterly jailor-like bunch of keys hanging on a silver or stainless steel chain, though - And that was just like Miss Daphne.
But keen on Alice going there Dr Ecclestone patently was, for some reason. She had actually said on several occasions when she had been giving Alice her photo presentation tour of her clinic how much she’d love to have Alice, as she put it ‘under my supervision’. At such times, leaning forward in her chair, she would as often as not give Alice a reassuring pat on the bottom that to Alice was anything but reassuring; the woman’s hand lingering far too long for Alice’s comfort.
What were depicted in the doctor’s photomontage were apparently scenes recorded from an ongoing study of the efficacy of behavioural modification therapy in the rehabilitation of those displaying ‘addictive personality traits’. To Alice it all sounded - and looked - a little too much like being shunted off into a psychiatric hospital for her liking. After all; what were all those bars on the windows all about? She didn’t trust her stepmother as it was - and she wasn’t so sure, now, that she trusted the doctor either. She certainly wasn’t about to allow herself to be tricked or manoeuvred into committing herself into a private institution of some sort or other - she wasn’t that naive.
Those unsettling thoughts were still running through her mind when the terror really began to strike home. A small resealable polythene bag had been plucked from somewhere and was being waved under her nose and then drawn slowly back, like a carrot being offered a stubborn donkey. Suddenly, as abruptly as it had appeared it was gone, snatched away by a hand as quick as any street magician’s. The woman teacher stood back, playfully toying with the empty bag. Empty bag! The bag was empty! It took a moment for that fact to sink in - Alice could only stare, open mouthed. It was the way her daytime prescription would normally be parcelled, in one of those resealable transparent bags, but there was no foil-backed ‘bubble pack’ and no sign of the two fat capsules of calming serenity the latter would of held either.
“Och! Not to worry lass...” There were times the woman could sound like the eponymous overbearing Scottish teacher in the 60s film ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ - Alice had seen it once on television, and under different circumstances might have found the comparison amusing;
certainly worthy of backchat. Muriel Spark, the novelist, had had her character mouth the words: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life”. That was where Daphne Larkspear differed from the fiction: Obsessively possessive and dictatorial, she didn’t require a girl be any particularly impressionable age to weave her spell; there was no backchating Daphne Larkspear.
“...I left your medication on my desk. I was going to give you your capsules before I brought you in here but it seems it somehow slipped my mind. As I say; not to worry, child. We’ll get this lesson done and dusted, get you cleaned up all nice and smart in your school uniform, and then we can pop back in the classroom and you can have your medicine. How does that sound?”
Alice Lamberton did not care at all for how it sounded. She needed her medication now, right now, not later. And she wanted out of these ruined things she had on; she was covered in sick - the nylon overall was sticking to her skin because of it - and she’d wet her pants, or rather she’d wet her whipping drawers. And that told another story: She wouldn’t have been put in a pair of those whipping drawers the woman had come up with unless there was a reason - and there was only one raison d’être for whipping drawers; the name said it all. She groaned, and then began to gently weep, ever so gently. She hated herself for that, too, this character she had developed of bursting in to tears at the drop of a hat.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 1 Page 20