She had learned early on what it meant to earn the old churchman’s displeasure - the consequences paralleled those that came with raising the Mother Superior’s temper whenever that insatiable woman imposed herself upon her and she failed to fall to her knees when directed. The Reverend Father would thrash her tender rear with the belt he kept at his bedside using all the might he could muster, the sturdy yet supple leather doubled over in his hand. Twenty, thirty swipes across her bared, defenceless bottom - more? It would rarely stop until she lay limply like a broken, ragged doll, the pillow sodden with her tears and stringy wisps of spluttered saliva and he rendered breathless, coughing spasmodically and asthmatically rasping air into his wrecked, phlegm-filled lungs.
Sometimes, in the aftermath, back in the Mother Superior’s chambers, having brought in a girl under some disciplinary pretext or other he would work himself up into a red-faced frenzy, thrashing the devil from some, usually blameless, ‘Jezebel’ he perceived as plotting his downfall through the temptations of her flesh, often with the encouragement of the Mother Superior ringing in his ears. The latter was telling; they were kindred souls, the Mother superior and him, two sides of the same, double-headed coin.
Any forensic psychologist or profiler worth his or her salt could have predicted how such a pairing would feed off each other, bolstering, excusing, building on each other’s deviant fantasies, their joint deviant behaviour evolving in sophistication, becoming more extreme as each sought to replicate previous ‘highs’, finding instead the need for ever greater stimuli to climb the same ladder. Heaven, like ‘enlightenment’, like Nirvana, was ever out of reach; it would always be so, one would always want it to be so; for to summit such a pinnacle would be to leave nowhere else to explore, nothing more to attain, no further option other than to fall.
Some rewards, then, are but purgatory in disguise, like standing one-legged on precariously piled nursery building blocks, each additional brick a further fall from grace yet each bringing out-stretched greedy fingers irresistibly closer to the prize. It was a state of being in which the ultimate thrust for redemption could only be that resulting in the final downfall, and from which neither prayer nor lucre in the guise of charity might extradite the protagonists. The intercedence of the Vatican, if and when the worst came to the worst... well, that might be an entirely different matter... but that would have to wait to be seen.
As for Alice: Alice’s reward for informing on the one person who might have been in a position to have helped her had been the allocation of a lighter work quota... and more frequent access to her prescribed tranquilizers. Yet the latter, ironically, she had known, even at the time, would only result in her being rendered more woolly-headed than ever and brought even more thoroughly under the institution’s control - and under Dr Ecclestone’s thumb. In fact it had been Dr Ecclestone that she had reported the girl to.
It had been while in one of her regular one-to-one psychological evaluation sessions with the near-supernaturally insightful psychotherapist. She had never intended to turn traitor but the doctor had just sort of levered it out of her. And she had unashamedly revelled in the doctor’s lavished praise. Nodding in thrilled acceptance she had actually smiled in fawning gratitude when told, as a ‘reward’, she would be moved on to a stronger sedative, the doctor telling her: “I’m really pleased with you; I think you are coming along nicely!” She hated herself for that!
If life under the supervision of a strict guardian, as her stepmother had set herself up as, and her governess friend had been a rude awakening, life under the thumb of the implacable woman psychologist was something else entirely. She was being made complicit in her own incarceration, allowing the doctor to make her more and more dependent on her medication. And there she had been, down on her knees and actually thanking the doctor for allowing her to become ever more addicted!
Yes, that evil woman had made her kneel on the carpet in front of her chair and nuzzle into her open palm to retrieve the two sedative capsules with her lips; all the while chiding her with the warning: “...of course this new drug is a little more addictive than the one you have been used to”. And she’d actually been grateful! It beggared belief, but unfortunately it was all too true.
It was equally true that, practically on sight, she had disliked that other girl, her would-be saviour. That the girl had risked eye contact - strictly forbidden - even a fleeting, coy smile, had somehow made it worse. Quite why she couldn’t say. Perhaps it was the girl’s temerity that she, Alice, herself, just didn’t possess. Perhaps it was that she had somehow sensed that this girl still had in spades much of that which had been so lovingly ground out of her by the domineering triumvirate of her stepmother, the governess her stepmother had hired and doctor Anne Ecclestone. Then again, perhaps it had been another form of jealousy entirely. Perhaps it was as much due to the girl’s pretty-pretty doll-like looks.
The girl possessed the same cute, wrinkling nose, looks as the actress, Gwyneth Paltrow. Indeed she shared a close enough resemblance to have worked as a teenage-era look-alike, had she been free to do so, had she not have been somehow incarcerated in this place. To have actually been baptised ‘Gwyneth’ was perhaps a twist of fate too far for credulity - yet that was indeed the truth of it. Hailing from a secluded Welsh valley village her given name had been largely due the say-so of her grandmother, a woman so steeped in the past as to hardly have heard of the actress, let alone be influenced in her decision by the woman’s celebrity. Not that Alice herself had been at the time, nor would likely ever be, privy to any of that.
But the young woman’s inheritance - for she was past the stage when most would call her ‘girl’ - was not all Welsh valleys, mountain tops, sheep and pretty tinkling waterfalls. There had clearly been a sprinkling of Scandinavian in with the Celtic genes. Strawberry-blond wavelets and curls framed her small heart-shaped face - seemingly in wilful defiance of the rigors of the ‘hospital cut’ she sported - and a faint string of freckles bridged her ‘cutie-pie’ upturned nose. She even projected that indulged diva-style petulance one might expect of the out-grown child-star. In a previous incarnation she had undoubtedly been the archetypal self-appointed smartest girl in the room. Haughty and competitive, even in the institutionally stifling environment that characterised the ‘home’, outside of its ragged glass-shard-topped walls she would have been mistress of the compulsive cutting snipe, the back-talking queen of the classroom or lecture theatre pile.
And she was not without a modicum of acting talent - not quite up to her name’s sake perhaps, but good enough in her amateur way to have been ‘noticed’. But there are times when it is better not to have been ‘noticed’. She had not been so much plucked from obscurity as plucked from the threshold of fame to be ignobly slung into obscurity - reduced from a ‘name’ to a number at the stroke of a Biro across the bottom of a ‘psychological appraisal’ form. But then, that history too lay outside the knowledge of Alice or any of her incarcerated compatriots - and would stay that way.
At first Alice had taken pleasure in the other girl’s fall from grace. The girl was stripped of the privilege of the more sophisticatedly styled dress she was allowed to wear, a prim high-collared button-through nylon frock-style overall like the rest of them but one possessing a tailored bodice and a knee-length pencil skirt that allowed at least a modicum of vanity to be preserved. They put her in a flounced micro-skirted twist on a child’s prim gingham school summer dress with layered white petticoats, ribbons in her plaited hair, and frilled white plastic rumba pants on show, bulging around heavy folds of terry-cloth nappy fabric. And then she was placed on “tether”!
She was not to speak, nor as much as glance at anyone or anything to either side of her passage as she went, but rather was to keep her eyes fixed on her black patent Mary Janes at all times, steered from behind by a staff member’s hands on her shoulders. That was how she was to go about from then on - steered like a pet led on a lea
sh. It was total ‘social exclusion’; she was essentially supposed to disappear as far as all other staff members and her compatriots were concerned - not only seen-and not-heard but seen, not heard and not acknowledged. In short; she was to become solitary among the throng.
To begin with - and to her guilty chagrin - Alice had found it somehow uplifting observing the girl’s abject misery as she was led around like a puppy on its leash. Only as time passed did the recriminations set in, only as she had begun to note the girl’s obvious deterioration, especially mentally, had the truth begun to finally hit home - that in watching that poor wretch shuffle past she was in fact staring at a premonition of her own future.
Perhaps ten weeks had passed - though she couldn’t be sure - before the girl had really, noticeably, began to withdraw into her shell. Those bright, sharp, sparkling, observant and intelligent eyes - eyes that had never missed a trick - had dulled, become fish-like and disinterested. All those hours spent obliged to stand or sit meekly, staring blankly at the floor or the wall, had begun to weave their mind-unravelling magic. By this point they had already got her tamed. She had already learned to follow along like a house-trained puppy, no argument, no question - and without as much as a glance towards either the nun or nurse or whoever else happened to have been placed in charge of her or her surroundings... But they were not satisfied - the girl was to be made ‘an example to others’ not least of whom was Alice herself.
After maybe nine months had passed Alice overheard the staff gleefully discussing how the girl had begun wetting the bed. Ten weeks or so after that, and the proud, intelligent teenager had been left an empty dried husk. This once rebellious young woman would now sit passively, not moving a muscle unless approached by a nurse or perhaps one of the nuns, at which she would then cringe against the wall, submissively shrinking back, her eyes wide in mindless terror...
It was only at that point that they finally put the girl in a straight jacket. Alice had seen the orderlies bring it in. She had watched wide-eyed the girl standing passively with her arms outstretched to receive the garment, all hope lost from her dull eyes. She had felt her blood chilling as the leather straps were tautened, the buckles had squeaked in protest and the tightening canvas had creaked. And throughout the girl herself had not even struggled, nor as much as uttered a grunt of protest. She had not as much as shaken her head even when told she was “off to the ward” and they were leading her out past the security grille to the waiting ‘secure transfer wheelchair’ with its wrist and ankle cuffs and that poncho-like thing that buckled around the patient’s shoulders.
‘The ward’: It was a commonly used staff euphemism for one of the ‘conventional’ areas of the hospital, that part of the secure psychiatric wing that everybody knew about - a real mental ward in a real mental hospital. It was also something that had passed her by when she had first heard it, all that time ago. It had just been something the doctor had let slip yet at the time had meant nothing. Now it made her blood run cold whenever the words popped up in her mind. The doctor had once said something about her stepmother perhaps coming to visit her one day; “once you are all safe and sound... in the ward”... Oh my god!...
Her mind had jumped back to the present. She was still in the laundry - and thankful for it. But for how much longer? How long before she too was put ‘on tether’? How long before someone, somewhere, trumped up an excuse? Did they need an excuse? Churning through the pile of gym uniforms, leotards, institutional work clothes, oddly infantile ruffled plastic pants and once cardboard-crisp school blouses, their green and white striped man-made fabric now crumpled and sweat stained, she paused, looking up. The blank misty-white window nestling behind its sturdy metal gauze protection met her gaze - and the sight was somehow reassuring.
Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, this time careful not to mar the sleeve of her uniform dress, the thought struck her: The real world was still out there somewhere, miles away and yet just the other side of these painted stone or concrete walls and those others surrounding the institution. Or it might be closer still if this facility was indeed sited within a private psychiatric clinic, as she had overheard let-slip - a world within a world, as it were.
That was how she had to proceed. She had to constantly remind herself of that latter fact while somehow ignoring the fact that her stepmother and her cronies were also still out there somewhere, undoubtedly gloating over her fate. But if she was determined of one thing it was that this - whatever this was - was not going to be her fate.
And she had an ace up her sleeve. She could be confident that one other knew at least something of what had been going on. And that other could be relied upon one-hundred-percent to alert the relevant authorities to her disappearance from her ancestral home. Yes, there was no way her stepmother would be able to pull the wool over that girl’s eyes or fob her off in any manner whatsoever - of that she was certain; she had to be certain. She had to stay focussed on that one hope... no, not hope - certainty.
But if only she knew... but perhaps soon enough young Alice Marchment would... Perhaps soon enough, perhaps all too soon, she would learn what had become of her half-sister. We shall see...
CHAPTER 9
SANATORIUM CONFINEMENT
As much Alice feared being ‘put on tether’ she feared more being transferred to the care home’s infirmary sanatorium. One way or another she had learned - or rather, been encouraged to learn - that the sanatorium section was run with an iron fist by a particularly domineering matron (or House Mother, as was her given title) under the guidance of an extraordinarily authoritarian psychotherapist. At least here in the workhouse she could wear relatively ordinary and real and proper clothing, even if the garb did go to make up an extraordinarily ugly and unflattering institutional uniform. In the sanatorium the poor unfortunate inmates wore sensible striped pyjamas seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day - sensible in that the masculine looking button-through jacket and trouser ensemble was devoid of waist elastic or drawstrings for ‘safety’ reasons. But of course what that was really all about was yet another method of exercising control over a girl, imposing constraints and imposing discipline.
It was far easier to control a group of difficult-to-handle teen girls when they were dressed in deliberately outsized pyjamas, with arms that dangled way past their fingertips and trouser legs that extended so far past their ankles as to present a serious tripping hazard. A girl could not cut much of a figure, nor present much of a problem, when both her hands were kept occupied in hitching up a waistband that continually threatened to fall around her knees and tugging up trouser legs continually tangling around her feet and ankles like a hobble. And she’d even heard whispers that a girl could easily find herself placed in a straitjacket once they had her there in the infirmary sanatorium, if she wasn’t careful, if she was particularly petulant, if she was foolish enough to fight back against the régime!
And that was what the sanatorium was all about in reality, she’d heard, dealing with those more difficult-to-handle girls that came along ever so once in a while. That tiny section leading off the infirmary had little to do with sickness or disease; unless of the course rebelliousness and disobedience could be labelled as illnesses. But then there was that school of thought adhered to by certain members of the staff that held that behavioural aberrations of any form could be considered as a type of mental illness. And it was a school of thought that the woman doctor who ran the place definitely subscribed to.
Everything about the institution, the care home or industrial school or however one cared to term this place, was about instilling conformity and unquestioning obedience to authority.
Where the cane and the strap and the over-the-knee spankings failed or left off, the sanatorium with its tedious medical procedures, constant rounds of psychological testing, questionnaires and intimately probing interrogative interviews would take up the slack. In fact they didn’t a
ctually do much at all to a girl there, not physically. Yes, there was the cane and the strap for talking and other forms of non-compliance - and there was a strict rule of absolute silence enforced on the ward - but the rest just came down to making a girl sit and wait, and wait, and wait...
Alice knew all about that firsthand now; her worst nightmare had now come true. Alice, you see, had tripped up once too often. She’d got caught out trying to talk to that Welsh girl, Gwyneth; feeling sorry for her, feeling sorry for having gotten her in to that private walking psychological torment called ‘the tether’ she’d tried to make contact, catch the girl’s eye with a wink and a raised eyebrow, whisper her own name across when the woman supervising the girl had had her back turned and the girl was down on her hands and knees in her overall and matching tabard, scrubbing brush in hand. And Alice’s approach had been duly flagged up - by the girl herself - that blessed elfin Welsh pixie!
Alice had failed to take into account the effect residing in this establishment could have on a teenage girl. She hadn’t taken in to account the way in which the unrelenting régime of punishment, discipline and psychological manipulation could leave a girl turned against and competing with her peers, vying for favouritism, striving to please this or that nun, mistress or overseer while distrustful of her comrades, those around her who were in the same boat. She should have known better: Betrayal, snitching, was commonplace among these unfairly confined girls; or at least it suited the powers that be that it should appear so.
If ever a girl was ‘tripped up’ or caught out over an infringement of even a minor rule or stipulation you could be sure that a hint would be let slip at some point, inferring that some manner of treachery had been to blame, that someone had put her hand up or ‘blabbed’. Often for a while afterwards it would become noticeable that some girl or other appeared to being treated with some degree of favouritism; perhaps an extra ration at mealtimes, a noticeably lighter workload or reduced emphasis on meeting her quota in the sewing room or a smile from a certain nun - usually the one who had done the catching-out - an encouraging pat on the head or an affectionate pat on the bottom.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 2 Page 13