Alice Under Discipline, Part 2

by Garth ToynTanen

  He pressed his member up against the girl’s bottom, centring it between the girl’s chubby bum cheeks, she shuddered violently. “Excellent!” he thought. Pausing to slap both cheeks violently with his palm he pressed on in - and began bumming the girl rhythmically, clawing at her backside, heavy-sagging balls slapping against her young buttocks as he pushed in and dragged out - over and over and over... He was thrilled by the notion that with every stroke he was storing up trouble for her in the future, stretching tiny tendons and muscles to the point that one day she might find herself rendered incontinent - in fact he would make that his aim, make it come true sooner rather than later.

  He looked down in wonder at her bottom, those reddening globes bouncing like beachballs: “You’ve a couple of real little beauties, there, my child; a temptation taken straight from the very sketchpad of the devil himself I shouldn’t wonder. But we mustn’t be too vain - and I mustn’t be too complacent. One can never let down one’s guard where the devil’s tempestuous works are concerned - and if I must now punish that tender bottom of yours, you must understand, child; it is His sin I am striving to expunge, His hand I am struggling to free you from under... Please believe that, my dear.”

  Stepping back, red-cheeked and still panting from his previous exertions, he raised his veined and liver-spotted hand, the thick well-oiled pliant plaited leather cord slung from its wrist strap flopping listlessly backwards behind his head under its own weight like the tail of the Great Beast himself. For a moment he paused, licking his fat lips greedily, a bead of pious sweat dribbling down his wrinkled, furrowed brow as he surveyed the temptation of girl flesh bent double before him, the girl helpless in her bonds and all the more heartbreakingly attractive for it. One hooded blood shot eye squinted at the dust-laden Cinemascope shafts of sunlight beaming across the cold-shadowed space, the other joined it in tracing back the kaleidoscopic imagery from the worn uneven flagstones to the iron railed and mesh covered Norman arch window, and the stained glass saint with his raised silver-glass sword; raised in preparation to smite the sinful; raised, as his own hand was now raised, to speak on behalf of the Lord God, chasten the flesh, pursue that unclean intent clean away. He glanced at the golden cross, at the altarpiece flickering with the reassuring yellow tongues of candlelight, the opened bluish Vaseline jar appearing opalescent, almost visionary, like a giant mystic pearl perched on the edge of the gold-threaded alter cloth. Satisfied that God was indeed at work here, expunging his guilt with His guiding hand, he brought his own, very much mortal, hand slashing down.

  The air in the little chapel hissed like the serpent that tempted Eve as the serpentine lash found its mark. A sharp concussive crack like an electric discharge reverberated off the close block-stone walls, rounded fluted pillars and vaulted ceiling and was followed near instantaneously by a soul searching scream emanating from the girl’s tossing head buried deep amongst the very darkest of the shadows. Smoke-like ghosts of her tortured features flickered around the walls and across the ceiling, projected up from the mirror he had laid on the floor beforehand, beneath where her head hung down, so that she might witness the fruits of her own vanity depart under the scourge, bear witness to her own redemption in pain and suffering.

  Surrounded by four small smoky tallow candles of its own - one set at each corner and balanced on its own waxy base - the mirror lit the pretty, though now pain-distorted face as if ablaze in yellow flame, the smoke making her cough and adding to her misery, the under-lit effect making her upturned button nose appear positively piggy in her reflection and her eyes droop-lidded and baggy, despite her youth - and the squealing emanating from her parted lips all the more ironically apt. The tears drip-dripping now, falling like rain, stippling her reflection, appeared to her as if bullet holes drilled in her soul, her cheeks so red as if bleeding lifeblood, her bloodshot eyes - yellowed and reddened in the candlelight and somehow rendered disease ridden - robbed of their natural innocent blue and looking every bit as sin-filled as his accusations of harlotry made out... Perhaps she deserved this after all... Perhaps it was her fault - just like he said, just as Mother Superior was always saying whenever she had her down on her knees, her head bobbing under the woman’s ruched-up black-on-black robes...

  Panting with the exertion the old man raised the plaited leather switch again and again; he was dolling out a real biblical thrashing, and he had a suitably biblical validation to impart; a ‘man of the cloth’ there were always certain theological arguments he could apply to justify his actions. It seemed the Bible was full to brimming with excuses to discipline his ‘flock’, to ‘excise the Devil’ being just one; the irony added to the suffering somehow... perhaps that was why he troubled himself... or was it just to ease his own conscience. Crying out in pain, writhing in her bonds like some dark-ages penitent, she decided it was the former...

  “You must repent, my child... repent... R.E.P.E.N.T - repent...” He punctuated the spelling with a rapid back and forth, to and thro, crisscrossing of the laying-on of the lash, slashing the pliant rubbery implement across each of her perfectly taut, tight, globe-like bottom cheeks in turn. “The Bible says: ‘the blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil’... Proverbs 20:30 my dear...”

  All the religious indoctrination she had been exposed to since finding herself detained here must have been working, for regarding the hypocrisy of the old pervert’s words, a suitably apt riposte wrote itself into her pain and humiliation fogged mind: Ill-advisedly she found herself muttering it out between breathless sobs; catching her words he leaned close to listen. Already his right hand was reaching for the prison-weight cane lying along the cloth-dressed stone altar slab, his left almost absentmindedly let fall the lash-like plaited leather switch he had been using to the floor; his wine-laden, gum-rotted breath heavy and corpse-sweet in her nostrils made her want to retch. “...And shall cut him asunder... and appoint him his portion... with the hypocrites: and there shall be weeping and... gnashing of teeth... Matthew 24:51...” she murmured between shuddering, shoulder-shaking breaths, her lungs rattling, filled with crypt-dank air and fatty-acrid candle smoke - all that soot was making her wheeze; she could see the jet particles rising, dancing like gnats around her face.

  Along with the weight gain, muscle-wasting and general loss of aerobic fitness - they wouldn’t let her keep up her exercise régime, saying there was ‘insufficient scope within the day’s itinerary’ and besides her concern over her appearance ‘smacked too much of vanity’ (an attitude she now understood was a mortal sin in itself) - it seemed she now had asthma to contend with. As much as anything else it appeared she was allergic to certain animal fibres, the most obvious culprit being the thin horsehair mattresses and horsehair-stuffed pillows that filled the narrow iron-framed cots in the dormitory. The others had at least a fitted rubber sheet over the mattress to lie on; her mattress cover - and two other girls who were clearly (to her mind anyway) similarly afflicted - had been taken away, ‘in case an allergy to rubber is to blame’ as the dormitory mistress had said.

  The later was a particularly buxom, wide-beamed stern-faced nun - supposedly medically-trained - who habitually dressed in the navy blue uniform dress and white apron of a British hospital matron and who usually was to be found swanning around her domain of beds, examination couches, enema and douche bottles, bedpans, commode chairs and all the rest with a slender crook-handle school cane in her hand as if it were an extra God-gifted appendage. She was a formidable woman at the best of times, to put it mildly, and certainly not one to be argued with, not if you didn’t want to feel the bite of her cane across your backside - and she never stopped at anything less than six, even for the most innocent of infractions. Which was why she had said nothing when her single coarse woollen blanket - so noxiously smelly that the rumour whispered between those few that still dared whisper was that the blankets were actually washed in the pooled liquid contents gathered from the bedpans and commodes - was unceremoniously swapped fo
r an even coarser one woven from horsehair ‘lest a sensitivity to the lanolin on the wool be the problem - a very common allergy’. As if any residue of the animal’s natural oils would have survived all the decades those old red and yellow striped grey blankets had been in existence, the countless necks they had been clutched tightly around against the biting winter chill, the sweat they would have soaked up in the summer when the lack of ventilation caused by the bolted shut wire-covered windows really told.

  Latterly there had been the additional requirement to deal with that one-piece woven horsehair ‘combinations’ be worn beneath her ‘foundations’ and ‘stays’ - but this stipulation applied to all girls, not just herself and those other two; quite besides the effects on her breathing, the scratchy, prickly fibre brought her up in hives, and in the most unfortunate and private places. The Reverend Father’s own private stipulation of befrilled and beribboned lacy choir-girl surplus, the ankle-length frilled-necked cassock with its close-fitting waist and sleeves and - more to the point - the old-fashioned navy blue flannel schoolgirl knickers he insisted she report to him wearing underneath had actually come as something of a relief, or would have if he hadn’t then added he wanted a horse hair vest worn ‘to ensure you keep warm’. The knickers initially he had tugged up so tight that the material had pulled deep into the declivity between her cheeks, her now-plump thighs spilling out from beneath the elastic of the legs. He had soon tired of that; a few slaps of his hand across the back of her thighs and down they’d come.

  “How... How,,,” Uncharacteristically lost for words the disbelieving old self-styled God’s Shepard spluttered and stammered out his outrage. Suddenly he was beside himself in rage, shrouded in red mist. That his own teachings should have been spouted back at him by such a wanton creature... Why, it was... it was... heretical, blasphemous! “... How, how dare you... How dare you quote the Lord’s word at me, harlot” he spat, unchristian venom staining every word like the bilious yellow discolouration of his fingers and the rings around his staring bloodshot bagged eyes; “How dare you, festering-sin-ridden daughter of Satan that you are, misappropriate the scriptures, sully The Word with your forked serpent’s tongue!!”

  His thick Irish brogue always strengthened in anger; it became harsher, more grating, aggressively migrated northwards from his native Eire, becoming more Belfast soapbox-thumper than Dublin coffee house debater, leaving him sounding like a 1970s Unionist figure at the height of ‘the troubles’, though back then - as a young seminary priest in Londonderry, where he had lived most of his adult life - his allegiance had always been staunchly Separatist; a Sinn Féin man through and through, Catholicism oozing from his pores: He hated the English. He hated the Welsh too, with their elitist little fundamentalist protestant and Baptist chapels - even in London they had to have their own churches, he’d seen one such of these ‘capeli’ for himself, sited behind the hustle-bustle of Oxford Street in Eastcastle Street... In fact he hated any form, any expression, of reformist (as he rather anachronistically still saw it) bloody puritanical Protestantism; Bloody Martin Luther! What a better world it would have been, had he never been born.

  In some ways this almost pathological intolerance was forgivable, though not justifiable or at all Christian. After all, his father had perished in a Unionist sectarian bombing while visiting him during a particularly brittle and incendiary period. His Mother - unfortunately all too easily identifiable as a so-called ‘papist’, as was the slur spat out - had been attacked on the street by a group of enraged women on her way to the hospital in the aftermath. And his two younger brothers - twins, barely out of school, both largely apolitical and anachronistically tolerant of religious belief up to that time - then became swallowed up in the conflict as a result. Heading north themselves, seduced by the mystique of the provisional IRA, these two blameless young lads were both subsequently been put down at the hands of the British, summarily executed on the street (as he saw it) by the Royal Ulster Constabulary backed by a contingent of the British army. It had all been too much for his mother; the final straw.

  Left blinded in one eye and wheelchair-bound as a result of the Belfast street attack, his mother had become a broken woman overnight. Her mind torn apart by grief, she’d had to be institutionalised at that point. Having moved to the UK to be closer to émigré relatives living in North London’s Kilburn area - home to a large Irish diaspora community (diaspóra na nGael, in Gaelic) at the time - it had accordingly been a British hospital she had then been confined to: She’d subsequently taken her own life - an unforgivable act in the eyes of the Catholic church, and in direct contravenance of his teachings and her own faith - when in the mid-nineteen eighties the ‘Great’ British Government had announced they were to close down the hospital, the only home she had known for the previous ten years, as a result of their ‘care in the community’ scheme. She’d stockpiled some portion of her medication for weeks beforehand apparently, washed it all down with a goodly swig from a bottle of poteen he’d once smuggled in for her while visiting.

  Father Kenneth Aloysius Mcmacmarghn had been distraught at the news, the balance of his mind dubious ever since; though such worries were easily glossed over in such isolated communities as this one. And Father Kenneth Aloysius Mcmacmarghn had been the recipient of a Gregorian doctorate in theology in his time, before he went mad (not that anyone around him would ever use that word) was a polyglot, speaking ancient Greek and Hebrew among other tongues, besides the expected Latin, and was steeped in philosophical thought: a learned man. It was ironic, really; if it was God’s work, then it was the work of a very humorous, mischievous deity indeed; it was little wonder He would set out all this wobbling feminine temptation before him, to test him, to test his resolve to thrash and whip and cane the sin from it.

  Livid now, his face ruddy as much with foul temper as exertion (and the excitement he consciously had to suppress, consigning it to the back of his mind) the Reverend Father brought the crook-handled cane he had retrieved from the altar arcing down and swooping around into the restrained girl’s defenceless cheeks, the many-ridged pliant bamboo cracking sharply across the centre line of both heavenly-rounded globes. The girl screamed a shrill scream of desperation greater and more piercing than any she had ever produced before, her vocal cords surely shredding. He had thrown off his jacket now, showing he meant business. Having rolled up his sleeves, and having swung his arm back behind his head for another strike like a golfer teeing off, pausing a moment to let the previous sink in (most important, that) he smiled to himself - never mind ‘choir girl’, her vocal cords would be so covered in nodules she’d barely be able to speak other than with a husky high croak before long; but he loved that sort of earthy huskiness; a real cock-sucker’s voice. He’d have to start her training in that direction soon. He’d start her off gently of course; first of all on its own; only then, once she became more experienced, less fazed by the act, he’d move on to making it second fiddle to having ‘taken her’ conventionally first... But it was so much more satisfying to have sodomised her beforehand. He brought the next stroke slashing in, swinging the long length of finger-thick yet pliable bamboo down and around as before, just like a golf swing; he was good at golf, despite his antiquity.

  His mind racing now as if possessed and sweating profusely he flexed the cane between his hands, the two ends almost meeting; it was heavy, so-called ‘prison weight’ yet as flexible as one of half its diameter; all thanks to the pickling, he reflected. Standing over her, staring down at the candle-flickered reflection of her face in the mirror lying on the floor he felt his old flaccid member once again begin to twitch into life, as if miraculously resurrected; a sure sign from above if ever there’d been one, surely a sign that all was right with the Lord. Feeling vindicated he wondered if he shouldn’t have her bring her tongue to the thing at least, just let her have a taste of her own bottom’s corruption - just this once, just to give the filly the idea of how it felt to be being broken
in, before he got down to her real training over the next weeks and months... Not yet, a few more strokes of the cane, then she’d be ready; another half dozen or so, just to purify her thoughts, and she’d be amenable to anything! And if not, if the Devil still proved to inhabit the petulant, pouting little fool; well, there’d be no harm in another dozen or so more - there were always the smelling salts if worst came to the worst. He slashed in another strike - then two more in quick succession, these in criss-cross fashion as he had a little earlier with the leather switch: That, scream, deafening in such an enclosed space; he was almost glad he was becoming a little hard of hearing; but was it not a littler hoarser this time, a little huskier, or was it his imagination. No, definitely a little hoarser; he’d have to stop, pause a moment, remind her of how she should strive to look after her voice - the voice of an angel a music teacher had once told her apparently - advise her to apply a little self-discipline to avoid crying out so.

  Perhaps he should encourage her with the promise of a few extra stripes for each time she called out? Hmm? Singing and athletics wasn’t it (or was it athletics and singing? What order did she rate her greatest loves and ambitions?). Well he never had been one for the sort of swooping angelic-chorus type of vocal style this girl favoured. He still felt sure she was destined to be his favourite choir girl though - why, he’d have to get her in here for ‘choir practice’ daily from now on; he’d square it with the Mother Superior later. After all, it was his duty as choir master; he could still keep those vocal cords nice and active, even if the athletics aspect of her ambitions and aspirations couldn’t be supported and fulfilled in this place. Deciding to put off for the moment imparting his professional voice-coaching advice, he swished in yet another stroke of the cane, perhaps even harder this time, inspiration adding power to his arm, augmenting his strength; it was caning that kept him limber he sometimes thought, even more so than golf... and that other thing he enjoyed so much about all this: Yes, he thought, definitely throatier, in fact quite hoarse really - he slashed in another stroke, quickly this time, not giving her time to recover - what a shame! He smiled down at her reflection - and sullenly she looked up at him, the man who had mastered her, her full lips moving, something croaky, some sort of plea most likely, issuing - he flexed the cane as he spoke.