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 thigh
s 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?
Alice Under Discipline, Part 1 Page 24