The institutionalised tr.., p.141
The Institutionalised Trilogy, page 141
With this present subject it had simply been sufficient to stop her in her tracks that first time, flagging up the girl’s stumble and voicing her concern that she had, perhaps, detected the beginnings of a stammer in an early phase of development. She had pointedly referred to the poor girl that Meredith had seen in that film, and the other that she had met in the waiting room - a meeting carefully engineered of course. She had gone on to warn of the very real possibility and dire consequences of young Meredith heading that way. She had interrupted Meredith’s flow two or three times subsequently in the same session as they had conversed. The seed of doubt had been well and truly implanted and the suggestion had taken root practically immediately. Indeed, by the end of that first session she was pleased to be able to report in her notes that Meredith was already showing signs of changes in the rhythm and fluency of her speech pattern. Even at that early phase there had been a notable increase in the frequency of repetition and some evidence of increased hesitancy at certain points in the girl’s speech. At the end of the session, as was usual, she had contributed some advice, on the surface helpful, but on further analysis, perhaps less so.
The therapist glanced at this, her third subject of the day over the top of her gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles, taking in the girl’s obvious, flushed-face, red-cheeked discomfort. Well the room was rather warm - and the girl’s high-necked crisply-starched school blouse, with its stiffened collar teamed with the obligatory tightly-knotted school tie, looked set to throttle her.
She couldn’t help smiling to herself - the fully lined, thick barathea-weave polyester blazer didn’t help. Outside, in the open air, its added warmth might have served some practicality - here, behind these four walls, the garment’s sole function was as a tool to aid the imposition of strict discipline, a constant reminder to the wearer that she was no longer free to have a mind of her own. Well, she had given the girl long enough to stew, she considered, so it wouldn’t hurt to allow her a little leeway, just to get the ball rolling - ironically it would serve to throw her off balance, create a little psychological dissonance.
For the first time since the girl had been led in the therapist acknowledged her directly, the doctor’s voice breaking the silence making her jump is if waking from a dream:
“You look hot, dear. Before we get started, why don’t you slip off your blazer? You can hang it on the hook by the door over there - where you came in... That’s it, up you get - be careful not to crease it, mind; you know what they’re like about your school uniform here.”
She looked on with satisfaction as the flummoxed teenager worked her way stiffly to her feet, desperately and self-consciously keeping her knees pressed together as much as her callipers would allow, her movements inhibited by the reluctant hinged knee-joints of her leg braces. For a while she watched with ill disguised amusement as the girl stood fiddling cack-handed with the buttons of her school blazer, then the doctor let out a friendly little mocking laugh:
“Come on- hurry it along, dear. I’d expect a girl your age to be able to dress and undress her self without any trouble.” Seeing the young woman’s already flustered state worsen delighted the experienced therapist; a simple disparaging comment was all it had taken to leave the subject all but incapable of dealing with the blazer’s fastening.
It had to be admitted, though, that, although a simple enough task in itself, here was something made onerous by design, the buttoning notoriously fiddly. Not that the buttons were particularly small - they were the sort of thing that might be found on any jacket, albeit bottle green to match the fabric. It was just that the buttonholes were a little on the small side, relatively speaking, and had little ‘give’ and in addition the thread securing the buttons was surprisingly stiff. It didn’t help that the high, stiffened, collar of the school blouse the girl was presently wearing made it exceedingly difficult for her to lower her chin much below the horizontal, resulting in it being practically impossible for her to look down on what her fingers were doing.
Of course the judicious application of a little of the cosmetic form of botulinum toxin, a truly minute amount of the neurotoxin surreptitiously injected into the muscle at the base of both thumbs, had its part to play - not anything like enough to achieve paralysis of course, just sufficient to ensure a certain degree of awkward weakness and loss of coordination. The rest was achieved through the power of suggestion.
The physical effects of onabotulinumtoxinA, ordinarily used to cosmetically reduce frown lines between the eyebrows, would wear off in six months or so. But, through repeated suggestion, at a psychological level the spastic awkwardness would remain with her - along with a crippling speech defect and a hopelessly dithering indecisiveness. The result would be a painfully-shy persona practically wiped clean of self-confidence and self-esteem. A similar approach - albeit applied elsewhere - had led to the girl becoming dependent on her leg callipers; a judicious application of little muscle relaxant surreptitiously introduced through a hypodermic while the girl slept.
As if this were not handicap enough, even certain aspects of the girl’s underwear seemed designed to conspire to make the task all the more cumbersome. There were good medical reasons why in the case of this particular girl the open-bottomed corsellete, underpinning the whole ensemble, should have come equipped with an integral posture-correcting shoulder brace.
The latter consisted of a pair of broad straps arising from the corselette’s reinforced side seams at a point just below the shoulder blades, one issuing from either side. Each strap ran diagonally up and over the opposite shoulder, the pair of straps crossing between the shoulder blades, before returning beneath the armpit and - crossing for a second time at the rear, this time passing horizontally - running around each side to the front where each was pulled tight through a tension-adjusting buckle arrangement. It was a restriction the girl rarely questioned - after all she had been originally brought in following a devastating car crash, or at least so she was forever being told; she had no actual recollection of it. Only later had she been persuaded to sign up for what at first sight had seemed a financially lucrative option, as a candidate in a program of trials being run under the auspices of the hospital’s very own department of experimental psychology.
They had made it sound oh so attractive: Living with a small group of other girls and young women of a similar age for a few months while pretending to be back at school - albeit a boarding school, something she had had no experience of - it had all sounded such fun. Besides, it had just seemed to make so much sense at the time - after all what had she to lose; it was a residential scheme and she needed somewhere to stay while she recuperated. She was homeless, a runaway who had found herself trapped into endlessly trudging the streets, shivering, by night - just to keep warm - and sleeping under cardboard in litter-strewn filthy subways by day, when the damp city air would get just that little bit warmer.
That last part, though, the part about her having been a runaway, was not strictly speaking true: She had worked in a public house, living happily in an apartment above the bar, but she had lost the job - or rather been sacked, largely through having refused the advances of the manager - and the apartment that come with the position, so... Well, that was when that religious group, The Children of Jesus, or whoever - she could never quite recall the name - had stepped in to help. Except that ‘help’ had turned out to be a life of toil, humiliation, corporal punishment and sexual exploitation in captivity and ostensibly under the auspices of the church.
But then that woman had come to take her away, that softly spoken social worker with her silvery mug of warm, sweet hot chocolate, her nurses’ fob watch swinging enticingly and glittering on the lapel of her navy blue suit jacket, her lullaby voice and lilting drowsy words... Then there had been soft, deep feather pillows and down-filled duvets, kind soothing murmurs and mug after mug of that heavy sweet hot chocolate; there had been capsules to be taken, a trusted hand to stroke her brow, the summer breeze wafting around rippling feather-light childhood curtains to lull her and nursery pyjamas to warm her through and a children’s humming spinning top with a bold painted blue and red whirlpool spiral that would gently draw her in... and then sleep, so much sleep... sleep that went on without end... except... except... being fed by spoon, more thick, sweet hot chocolate more murmuring drowsy words:
“... Come, along, dear; sit up. There, there, just or more spoonful - down it goes, like a good girl. Now, we’ll just play our little game with your spinning top, shall we? Yes, that’s how we learn to be a good girl isn’t it... And then it’s straight back to a lovely warm deep, deep sleep - why, just look at you; you can hardly keep your eyes open...”
Except that none of that had actually happened - had it? The Parsonage or seminary or whatever it had been, the church-led charity workers, the sexual abuse - none of it! Yes, there had been a social worker - that much was true - but that poor woman had come across her holed up in railway terminus. She had taken it upon herself to help but then there had been the car smash and... well, the poor woman had just not been so lucky - not everyone could be as fortunate as she had been that day.
Then she had awoken in a hospital bed, her arms and legs in plaster. But it had been a strange ward indeed she had come around in; one with locked and bolted doors and bars on the windows, no radio, no television, no papers, no books... and no, she couldn’t use the phone; no, she couldn’t be allowed visitors...
But he had visited, hadn’t he? He’d swung his favourite leather tawse across her bare bottom; he’d taken her from behind - in both places - while she had been fastened facedown, bent across a table for an x-ray. It had been so vivid, yet it couldn’t have been so, because they said it couldn’t have been so - and they should know, they’d examine her enough... they’d examined her every time he had come to her in his robes and his cassock and his dog collar. They indulged her patiently enough - they examined her, still, after each visit, each insult; always as humiliatingly thoroughly and always with the same result.
Indeed she could remember clearly the first impressions of returning awareness when she had come around in that hospital bed. Aware only that she was lying prone on a spongy surface, she had instinctively tried to turn over, but had been unable to move. Panic had risen, she had tried to call out but a gummy residue filled her throat and her mouth was parched. Dizzily she had attempted to wipe the sleep from her eyes, yet found her arms would not obey her will. She remembered telling herself to remain calm, fighting the urge to scream.
She remembered there had been plaster casts, straps and restraints of every kind to be discovered. It had been like a voyage of discovery around her body. She had been able to wriggle her toes but that had seemed to be the limit of her mobility; even her fingers had seemed as if enrapt in something yielding yet at the same time rigid. Her arms, she had later learned, were immobilised by her sides in plaster casts. Similarly her legs, she had in time come to realise, had been set in solid plaster splayed wide with knees bent at ninety degrees and her ankles locked in gynaecological stirrups as if to give birth - not that she had ever had any such experience. And now, she worried, would she ever - who would want a psychological and emotional cripple.
Smiling reassuringly the therapist rose to her feet - her action coinciding with the girl twisting, turning and struggling with the final fastening.
“Here; let me help you, dear.”
Moving swiftly around the side of her desk and taking up position behind the young woman as the last button was finally wiggled free of the buttonhole, the therapist reached forward with both hands, insinuating her fingers beneath the blazer’s collar at the rear of the girl’s slender neck and easing them outwards under the shoulders. Lifting the school uniform jacket up and away from the girl’s back she stepped back, slipping the blazer’s sleeves down the girl’s arms, the nylon satin lining gently whispering and sliding cleanly over the long sleeves of the girl’s school blouse below. Taking the weight of the garment in her hand by its collar she passed it to the girl, simultaneously placing a motherly arm around the girl’s shoulders and guiding her toward the waiting tree of curled wooden coat-hooks that stood of to the right of the consultation room’s door.
“There now - just you hang it up over there like a good girl; just as I told you....That’s it! Right, now that you are a little bit more comfortable why don’t you come and take a seat?”
She watched with undisguised satisfaction the girl’s struggle to lift her arms high enough to catch the collar of her blazer over the first of the curved scrolling hooks that circled the top of the coat-stand, having first fastidiously refastened each of the four buttons - a pointless exercise but one that was required by the discipline of the place. It was obvious that whoever had adjusted the deportment-correction straps of the girl’s corsellete that morning had been diligent indeed in her duties, a fact made even more apparent as the girl momentarily turned side on, turning - somewhat reluctantly it must be said - to return to her seat.
The doctor could clearly see that the girl’s shoulders were pulled back by her undergarment’s integral shoulder brace to a, quite frankly, ridiculous extent, causing her young yet full bosom - already exaggeratedly sculpted by the high-set under-wired bullet-bra cups of her foundation garment - to be thrust forward into her candy-striped school blouse and the straining bodice of her gymslip. The juvenile, open-sided design of the latter - approximating to the appearance of an apron’s bib, both fore and aft - seemed to enhance this enforced display of exhibitionism to an extent that was clearly the cause of great self-conscious embarrassment to this ordinarily modest teenager. This was something that could be read from her face, both in her sullen expression and the patchy red flush colouring her cheeks. The reason for her slow reluctant manoeuvring became more apparent when she was front-on, facing the impatiently waiting woman and making her way back across the floor.
Now freed of the confines of her school blazer, the plastic-glazed card hanging around her neck was in full view and swung to and fro over the swollen fullness of her bust, the text announcing to the world that here was a young girl to be pitied, a sufferer of a potentially debilitating speech defect. Her steadfastly-pursed lips hid part of the reason for that deficit, at least in so far as the little-girl lisp she had now acquired but that the doctor was yet to hear for herself - the rest resided fully in her mind, yet was growing step by step and session by session.
Watching the embarrassed and encumbered young woman’s stiff-legged gait the therapist couldn’t help a gently sympathetic smile coming to her face - even taking into account the girl’s mature hips and shapely legs those metal leg braces did a remarkably good job of turning her into a paraplegic child, both in terms of her appearance but also - and more importantly, as far as the experiment was concerned - in terms of her psyche. She could see that the girl was reluctant to make eye contact, that given the choice she would most likely have hung her head, staring down at her shuffling feet in their ugly school shoes and padlocked steel calliper stirrups and hoping for the ground to swallow her up.
Of course the crisp, stiff-collared school blouse took care of that latter option; its high collar was ingeniously stiffened with hidden plastic inserts with such efficacy that it allowed little more freedom for the girl to drop her chin than might a cervical collar. To the therapist’s mind there was something to be said for the latter, had one been fitted, psychologically speaking, but then again there was also something to be said about the overall look of that school uniform. Besides, the doctor knew full well that once the day was through and the girl was returned to her bed on the ward, a cervical collar would be waiting for her along with her night things. For some reason the thought sent a shiver down her spine, a pleasant thrilling little tingle. It had to be said, though, that the thrill was not so much due to the image forming in the therapist’s mind of the cervical collar itself, so much as in the way it would be fastened at the girl’s throat, with a metal clasp and bronze padlock, and the manner in which it would in turn be fastened to the bed’s headboard rails by the leather leash running from its rear.
There were four of them there on that little side-ward, each with the label “stutterer” plainly displayed on a signboard hanging on the wall above her bed, the wall opposite being emblazoned with huge black letters spelling out the one simple instruction that ruled the roost: “NO TALKING!”. The latter was merely a routine part of institution discipline of course, and was designed to make the subject feel more introverted and isolated within her self. The former, besides acting as a constant reminder to the subject herself of her condition, was largely placed there as a reminder to the various members of staff that, if addressing a girl so labelled for whatever reason, it was to be seen as an opportunity to reinforce the ‘therapy’ that the girl was receiving in such sessions as these. In turn that implied picking up a girl on any verbal stumble, any repeated syllable or word or hesitation and have her repeat the sentence from scratch, reminding her to place her tongue firmly in the roof of her mouth while considering what she was about to say, advising the girl not to begin speaking unless she was absolutely certain she wasn’t about to stutter, then castigating her if she did then stutter or stammer.
It was surprising just how diligent the nurses and other staff had become over this matter, and how quickly. Indeed; many had gone on to develop their own approach and it was not uncommon for one of the group to receive a sharp stinging slap to the side of her cheek as a way of reinforcing an instruction. This was not something that was of concern - at the end of the day anything that helped keep up the psychological pressure was advantageous.
“...Remember to sit up straight, mind - nice and ladylike with knees and ankles together, as I’m sure you have been taught; we don’t want to have to look at your knickers all the time.”
