Alice Under Discipline, Part 2

by Garth ToynTanen

  But all that stuff had been a ruse. All those belittling come-backs and comments, all that verbal bullying, and yes, even the doctor’s cane (when she had surely deserved it) - all that had had a purpose. The doctor was a friend after all; a good friend it turned out - though she would still have to do as she was told if it was to all work out (the doctor knew best).

  Dr Ecclestone (Anne) had just been diagnosing her, biding her time playing out her stepmother’s plans while - having discerned the truth - all the time covering her back, always planning to tuck her under her wing like a mother hen, whisk her away from all this. She had had to make it look good; she couldn’t risk her stepmother guessing the truth. She had to get free of the place, from her stepmother’s grasp - and Dr Anne Ecclestone was going to furnish her that chance, that last, best hope.

  She had needed to be careful her stepmother, or one of the conies she had hired, did not guess the doctor had seen through their schemes, that she had changed sides. She could not risk giving away the truth; that with Anne’s aid she, Alice, was to be whisked away to the doctor’s clinic, there to recuperate, regroup. And then, with Anne’s help, she would strike back, take back what was rightfully hers, her inheritance - the great house and all that was in it, all that went with it; the stables, the lands...everything.

  Never once had it occurred just how far wrong that act had been, just how abnormal all that infantile pouting and stamping would have appeared to the eyes of an outside observer coming from what was in reality a grown young woman in her late teens. But as a way of voicing her objections, albeit what she fondly imagined to be ‘acted out’, the tantrum she had ultimately thrown had been instinctive and every bit as natural as the reasoned argument she had started out with.

  It had ended with her weeping childishly, out of control emotionally, and - allowing the doctor to take her by the hand - being led out to the doctor’s waiting car like a toddler; though the latter was not how she, Alice, saw it. It was all a measure of how far she had regressed under the alternating combination of the strict, restrictive discipline and petty rules implemented by her governess, stepmother and Flora McBainstone, the gym mistress and what she perceived as the tender if overbearing care lavished by the doctor.

  Now she was in the car, and clear of the house and the familiar gravel driveway - she was free... To an extent; she was still dressed in that infantile costume her stepmother and her lackeys insisted she be kept in - a notion she’d always understood to have originally come from the doctor herself - and those old doubts had begun resurfacing.

  She tried to focus on the passing road and the nearness of freedom but could get no further than focussing on the steady swish...swash...swish... of the windscreen wipers. it was such an easy rhythm to follow, and so hard to ignore, yet so, so tiring. She could follow the lazy swing of the wipers easily, effortlessly yet the rest of her thoughts wandered aimlessly, as did her eyes. Wherever her gaze alighted it somehow refocused, seemingly always to return to the steady beat of wiper blades and her attention to the rhythmic sound they made. It was a nice, steady, reassuring rhythm and the swishing sound helped her focus on the blades and the glistening raindrops - no, it insisted on it.

  Somehow she snapped herself back. Alice had held back her concern, her objections tempered by a sort of unconscious respect for the doctor’s authority she felt almost powerless to overcome. Even now she couldn’t muster up much more than a muttered, muted, almost childish entreaty:

  “Please, Dr Ecclestone, I’m not sure that I...”

  Before she could say anything more, though, the doctor broke in with a “Ssh!” The woman just would not shut up. She just kept droning on and on... no, not really droning, her voice had more of a kind of purring quality to it, a soporific quality. It was difficult to frame objections when the doctor spoke in this manner, difficult to focus mentally, somehow - always was.

  “You seem a little groggy, as if you just woke up from your afternoon nap, you’re just a little sleepy, that’s all, perhaps it’s the windscreen wipers, they can sound drowsy, sleepy, the way they lazily slop to and thro, they just sort of flop this way and that, as if exhausted don’t they?

  Why not just keep watching? Just pay close attention to the cat’s-eyes flashing past in the road, don’t they just look like a little light going on, and off?... a little lamp going on, and off, on and off... a little flickering lamp just sort of drifting past, like the little soothing night light drifting above your bed, like the one that drifts and swings above your bed, night after night, remember how it looks, how comforting, how soothing... on and off... on and off... so compelling. Remember how it looks.” She was talking about the little child’s mobile Alice’s stepmother had hung from Alice’s bedstead; and Alice could see it clearly - as clear as her thoughts were clouded.

  Piloted by the good doctor, the saloon’s engine droned on through the night. Alice’s eyes were closed now; exactly when those heavy hooded eyelids had drooped shut, she couldn’t be sure, but shut they were and it had been a blessed relief to have given in to the tiredness. Yet her thoughts were still somehow locked onto the steady swish-swash-swish of the car’s wipers. Indeed in her mind’s eye she was still seeing the metronome-like sway of the blades and the glittering rhythmic procession of cat’s eyes that had been passing by like an endless trail of soothing quieting stars in the rain. Yes, metronome-like - the wiper blades were exactly that, exactly like the metronome the doctor would set swinging when she would interview her, exactly that same cadence too... Clack...clack...clack - swish...swash...swish - clack...clack...clack; each plumb in time with the other, the imagery interchangeable.

  Behind her shut eyes the windscreen wipers lazily slopping to and thro, exhaustedly flopping this way and that, had become now the more deterministic and unalterable swing of the pendulum bob. It was the oak-cased metronome she could see now, not the wipers, nor the watery tarmac endlessly flowing towards her, the cat’s-eyes bobbing and beckoning drowsily onward like dreamy silver-topped corks. It was her late father’s, the clockwork antique he always kept on top of his beloved Steinway - not atop the drawing room’s baby grand though, but rather set up on the coffee table in the lounge. She could see the bob swinging left, then right, then left again - over and over and over.

  Beyond the insistence of the metronome, reclining comfortably in an easy chair’s plush embrace and regarding her sternly across the coffee table, the imposing figure of Dr Ecclestone leaned back, her long, slim interlocked fingers cradling a raven haired head that was just ever so slightly flecked with a dignified dusting of grey. Through the swinging of the imaginary pendulum she could see the woman’s tortoiseshell glasses perched on her aquiline nose, her tan-stocking legs, crossed knee upon knee, emerging from beneath a fitted black leather skirt that was as smooth as black window glass save for herringbone rippling at the seams. She could see too the woman’s aggressively thrust out white satin shirt blouse, the latter finished off with a rather matronly oversized sash-like bow at the neck that lent an air of maturity beyond the woman’s years. She could see the way in which the woman doctor was, as always, impeccably made-up. Those already high and haughty cheekbones were subtly accented with the merest hint of blusher, the dark-toned eye shadow perfectly matching and augmenting the colour of her eyes and her coral pink lipstick exactly matching the pearlescent-sheen shade of her nail-varnish.

  She could see herself too, as if through the eyes of an outside observer, dressed in that skimpy undignified and degrading hospital regulation disposable open-backed paper examination gown the doctor always insisted she wear for these ‘interview and counselling’ sessions, despite Alice being in her own home, despite any examination being restricted to a verbal barrage of questions and answers. She could see herself standing there, being browbeaten by the doctor’s insightfully probing questions and desperately trying to string together a few simple words of reply while beginning to gently sway side to side in
time to the beat of the metronome. She watched as her hands, initially arranged smartly on top of her head as the doctor’s methodology required, began tiring, began sliding slowly away, as her arms, growing heavier and heavier by the moment, inexorably subsided, swinging down in sleepy slow motion to hang loosely by her sides.

  In this dream world too her eyelids drooped and fluttered shut. And in this world too the metronome remained steadfastly arcing back and forth behind her eyes, as the drowsily swishing and swashing windscreen wipers had done before it, drawing her down to yet another world. Here was a world she had never physically visited yet had experienced in this virtual manner uncountable numbers of times before. Once only glimpsed in a photograph she had been shown, in this world three or four other young women of around Alice’s age, dressed as she was in disposable paper examination gowns and matching paper knickers and with their hair crowned with elasticated paper mob caps, were gathered in a kneeling circle in the space between two short rows of hospital beds. Crouching, their heads were craning over a child’s spinning top painted with a vivid red spiral that was being worked by one of the group who was plunging its handle up-and-down in the centre, clearly under the instruction of the doctor towering over them in her white coat and with her hands on her hips.

  In her mind’s eye, Alice was now one of that group. Her glassy eyes were locked on the centre of that seductive spiral as it spun and spun and spun drawing her dizzily inward and downward. Now she was part of this world she somehow knew that a gentle jingling nursery rhyme was issuing over and over from chimes within the brightly coloured metal spinning top and that all the group, herself included, were softly and quietly singing in lisping childish voices some sort of adaptation of the well-known words. She had now become aware, also, that only the girl working the spinning top actually had her hands free - all the others, once again herself included, were wearing over the upper part of their regulation examination gowns a sort of quilted bed jacket that doubled as a lightweight straitjacket, their arms wrapped around their waists.

  At the same time as all this, at yet another level - that odd viewpoint of being an outside observer - she was still aware of seeing herself standing, gently rocking and with eyes closed, before that coffee table and the implacably authoritative woman doctor seated across it from her. Mostly she was aware of that faint look of barely disguised patronisingly sympathetic amusement playing around the woman’s glossed lips and of the way that look always made her feel so belittled, so humiliated.

  Seeing that particular expression crossing the doctor’s face alone somehow always seemed enough, in of itself, to siphon away the very essence of her will. The woman could unlatch those fingers, languidly beckoning with a crooked finger of one hand while indicating her lap with the index finger of the other and Alice knew she would wordlessly move around to the doctor’s side. She knew that the woman had only to gesture in that manner and despite the humiliation she would drape herself compliantly across the woman’s knees, letting her gown drape open at the rear while docilely clasping her hands behind her head and waiting for the woman’s stinging palm to begin its work; slapping out a rhythmic tattoo across her bare backside.

  The latter level of submission was a measure of just how powerful the doctor was as an authority figure, how strong willed she was, and how utterly impossible it was to defy her. It was also a measure of how unquestionably right it was that the doctor should discipline her in such a manner and how morally correct it was that she should be spanked across the woman’s knee, or that of her stepmother for that matter, for the slightest infraction. Similarly righteous was the manner in which her discipline was not only expressed in the essentiality of her wearing school uniform, the examination gown or whatever else she was given to wear but that she should find the experience acutely humiliating in the extreme and that that sense of shame and embarrassment should grow with time rather than abate through habituation.

  “There’s a good girl.” Alice Lamberton became dozily aware of the doctor’s velvety hand briefly brush against her thigh. The woman’s soft fingertips had momentarily danced and trickled across the exposed flesh just below where those hateful acetate bloomer-style knickers her stepmother made her wear peaked out from beneath the all too brief school uniform skirt, their slickly-smooth silvery-white sheen incongruously juxtaposed against the fine serge nap of the pleated hem. Involuntarily she let out a breathless, drowsy whimper and was rewarded with another brief caress, one of the doctor’s fingers tracing out the line of the leg opening where the cruelly tight elastic cuff dimpled the flesh and her voice reiterating that term of praise once more: “Good girl”.

  The road ahead appeared reassuringly empty and Dr Anne Ecclestone allowed herself a sideward glance, her eyes momentarily dropping to where her free hand was now gently trickling back and forth, the cadence knowingly synchronised to the swishing-swashing sighing of the windscreen wipers. A wickedly thin-lipped smile crossed her face: In her imagination she was already seated in her office, the girl bent like a hairpin across her lap with that so sweetly abbreviated little pleated skirt of hers flipped up and those high-waisted, satiny, pearlescent-white knickers settled around the tops of her thighs. She’d deliver a stinging hand spanking until that chubby bottom turned a deep maroon red... then the tawse... or she’d hold the little tart down by the wrists across her desk, squatting by its side, force the girl to look into her eyes while one of her nurses laid into the girl’s behind with the cane.

  Her voice, though, gave no hint of all that internal tension and had lost none of that reassuringly authoritative yet soporific tone:

  “...yes, yes... we’ll soon be out of all that terrible, shivery cold rain...we’ll soon have you all tucked up in a nice, warm comfortable bed, a nice warm comfortable hospital bed. Such deep, deep, soft mattresses they have, those hospital beds, just like floating on clouds, heavenly clouds of soft, warm drowsy cotton wool.” She smiled to herself as she cooed on and the engine droned.

  “Such a good girl; you’ll be so warm, feel so safe, so at home in your comfy winceyette hospital pyjamas. You’ll feel so, so relaxed as your heavy tired, weary head sinks into the pillows, lovely rubbery cushions, so good, so easy to sink into.”

  Her smile broadened as she muttered her sing-song way through that last part: ‘Warm comfy winceyette hospital pyjamas’ indeed. That part was not quite true, not for this one: This one was going to go directly into a straightjacket, or very nearly so. And she’d feel happier having the girl with her, in the clinic. Sure she’d start young Alice off as one of the clinical trial candidates ensconced in the psychology research unit but she’d make well sure the girl was one of those officially registered as a voluntarily admitted patient to the hospital per se.

  In a couple of months or so she would become old enough to do so off her own back; she’d have the documents all drawn up ready. And by then the girl would be more than ready to sign anything she might be handed. From that point she’d soon gather enough clinical evidence to ensure any further decisions along those lines be well and truly taken out of the girl’s hands; it would be all done and dusted and indelibly official. In such a situation, given the nature of the institution in which her research unit resided, the police themselves could be relied upon to bring back any misguided young woman who managed to abscond. Not that that was likely given the level of security - they could offer a ‘troubled young woman’ a secure home indeed.

  Shuffling in the yielding soft leather of the car seat, snuggling down, the girl at the doctor’s side sighed heavily, her thumb absentmindedly slipping between her lips. Finally giving in to deep, dreamy, creamy sense of pleasure, her concerns lost somewhere in the centre of a red spiral painted on a childhood toy, Alice Lamberton slipped still further down into the deepest of deep sleep. She was completely unaware when, perhaps half an hour later, the doctor pulled the car over into a lay-by. She was perhaps just barely aware of the needle’s sting in her up
per arm, the introduction of the intramuscular sedative deep into her medial deltoid masked by the doctor’s prior dabbing on of a transdermally absorbable local anaesthetic; certainly the idea of an insect sting or bite would repeatedly return in dream form.

  Later, even months later, Alice would retain vague recollections of pitying, concerned faces, and the doctor’s earnest reassurances in reply. There would be dream-like flashbacks of listlessly sitting, trundling in a wheel chair, head lolling, tongue too lolling like a deadweight in her mouth, drooling, her chin being wiped with bunched tissues. And there would be intrusive memories of what would seem to her to have been a ferry of some type, the rolling of the sea, gulls crying above, soaring, hanging stationary on the wing; a sea crossing then... No, two sea crossings; sometimes she would visualise a smaller, far less comfortable vessel, more gulls, the smell of old fish - and nets in the hold... She would remember nets of green nylon and of orange and a reclining stack of large orange ribbed balls pierced by black and white stakes like giant versions of the floats used in angling topped by small plastic flags and circular blocks of cork, and varnished planking streaked with silver scales and trails of dried blackish-red...

  Then - and this would always seem anachronistically unlikely - a horse and cart of some kind, a peasant’s farming cart, cartwheels and wooden axils creaking, smelling of old cabbages and muddy potatoes and piled with folded, empty potato sacks. Finally, an imposing, impossibly towering gate of dark wood; in fact twin gates set between even higher stone pillars and decorated by the huge carved image of the cross, half represented on each side and splitting down the centre, and high stone walls, like a castle’s walls or some medieval stronghold’s, stretching off to either side well into the distance, a church steeple topped by a stone cross looming overhead, and a single church bell solemnly booming calling the faithful to prayer... And the nuns... the nuns and their pray books and their black-beaded rosaries... and all that chanting... the incessant, never ending chanting...