The institutionalised tr.., p.53
The Institutionalised Trilogy, page 53
Meredith’s Care: An Ecclesiastical Affair
(Forced into a submissive role, dominated, spanked and caned in shame clothing, PVC and latex,. enema and diaper discipline, institutional punishment caning and spanking in leg callipers, leg braces and plaster cast bondage by dominant nurses in uniform)
(The scene: A small, scrupulously clean, sterile little hospital ward - and a tale within a tale, set a little over one week previously)
Meredith Hewson lay lost in her thoughts, quite literally petrified and frozen in place, the bondage of her nightmares seemingly mirrored by the immobility of this new reality. This was how it always started nowadays: the dreams, the nightmares, and then the awakening. Always it felt as if a new reality had been built around her while she slept, a false reality, an illusion, a reality in which her helplessness was almost indiscernible from - and as complete as - her nightmare world. Always, as if for the first time, she would glance down and along her prone body - and the shocking understanding of the nature of her hopelessness, the origin of her immobility, would bear down on her like some dead-weight concrete slab.
Arms set in plaster casts, modern soft resin-based casts, could do nothing but disobey her, lying straight and at 30° to her sides. Legs, similarly encumbered, rested spread wide and angled down toward the bed’s lower corners, with knees bent at right angles and her ankles kept elevated in stirrups. Even her fingers were held, each individually wrapped in its own cast and her hand splayed out, fan-like and useless.
Memories spilled and unfurled like discarded spooled celluloid; edited Dadaist highlights of confusion inter-cut with fantastical images of sojourns in some grotesquely abusive world, seemingly plucked from the mind of Poe and realised in the inflamed-red and bruised-blue pallet of chastised flesh.
Meredith Hewson; known as ‘Mushroom’ to friends and acquaintances both, a tiny squeaky little thing - bouncy and bright as a gambolling lamb and with a smile like summer breeze, nature had surely destined her for more than this. Yet, a Shropshire lass, born and bred - and with a less than agreeable home-life to look back on - it was a somewhat hackneyed tail she had to tell. Of course it would be simplest to lay the blame on the faux glamour portrayed in all those television shows; it had drawn her in, spiralling with moth-like lethality. The trends and bright fashions of Camden Market, the bars and bistros of Covent Garden; these were aspirational beacons of irresistible brilliance and far too dazzling for one of her innocence to see the darkness lurking behind, far too beguiling.
To many she had been the welcoming smile behind the horseshoe bar, pulling pints with child-like wide-eyed glee; those tiny hands as pale and as perfect as porcelain - like that of those pub hand-pumps with their country scene decoration, all hunting pinks and running foxes, that her fingers could never quite curl around.
She had brightened the day of many a jaded pen-pusher - her short stature obliging her to stretch for the ale-pumps, the effort causing those pert breasts to be thrust forward, the flesh bouncing, the cleavage distinct to the most bleary drunken eye. Her pretty unworldly features would be moon-mist-lit by the shafts of diffused sunlight filtering through the curling fern-like motifs of the Victorian acid-etched glass - the traditional public house windows and glass partitions had been retained here, along with the worn, once-red, leather seating.
She had been flirtatious, ever-smiling - then she was gone; a lover’s tiff, an ill-advised dalliance with her manager at that, forcing her to flight.
Suddenly the London streets had not seemed quite so welcoming - not without money in her pocket, not without a place to call home; the accommodation had come with the job, you see...
Her mind ran back to the very first time, her first awakening to this new world; it was a birth, or rather a rebirth, at least that was how it seemed now:
“The crash, sweetheart, surely you remember the crash?” The nurse’s, concern had been palpable, her brow furrowing. Yet as insistent as the woman had been it had felt as if she were seeking to convince while, in some way, being unsure of her own sincerity.
Try she might she had been unable to recall anything at the time; her immobility had almost seemed comforting in its familiarity, yet otherwise there was nothing, just nothing. She could remember nothing still, at least of her history as they would insistently outline it - nothing, that is, beyond the abuse, the beating and something about a social worker, a friend, a young woman who had sworn to extract her from that hell.
Yes, the social worker; she had seemed so approachable, a woman who might care, who might believe her, who had seemed to care. The woman with the car, the woman who had promised to take her away, promised to save her from him. There was something else... what was it? A drink, a drink proffered from a flask, warm cocoa... that can’t have been it! What possible significance could that have?
“You remember the crash, surely?” They would say.
In truth, she couldn’t. There were fragments that were haunting her though, fragments of recollection - or what appeared to be recollection. In actuality it was just a jumble of shards, just as likely the constructs of her imagination as bearing any relation to reality - and feeling more like memories of what she had been told than of the actual event.
Feeling as if deceiving herself she would nevertheless nod in the affirmative; to do otherwise, to question it, was to risk being left starkly alone, ignored. This she had experienced many, many times before - being left ignored, isolated and alone in the silence of her curtain-enshrouded bed. Her inability to recall appeared to really irk the staff - and as for her nightmares, her delusions as they referred to them - the merest mention was enough for the nurse or doctor or whoever was attending her to simply up and leave. Many were the times she had found herself missing her next meal or diaper change after that.
And yet it was those dreams, those nightmares, that were the clearest representation of reality to her, her reality; certainly they seem more real to her than her present surroundings and the fuzzy pseudo-memories filling her head. There was a certain vivid and unmistakable clarity to their recollection, the clarity of truth and conviction.
Deranged? Deluded? Well, such were the murmurings and whispered accusations that, on occasion would come to her from beyond the protection of the curtains surrounding her bed - times when they were certain she was asleep and beyond caring; “...such a shame, but quite deluded of course, poor girl”.
Yet it was all so real, so detailed, so, so clear to her: first there would come the probing wiggle of an investigative forefinger, then the thickly-gelling lubricant, ice cold, the digit urging in an out, in an out, twisting and turning, embedded to the knuckle. Then would come the sensation of building warmth, blood-flow stimulated by the mild irritant mixed in with the gel. Finally that podgy finger would be withdrawn and the first taunting rubber-touch of the enema nozzle would announce its imminent violation of her.
Every few weeks there would come the added discomfort of the first use of an increased diameter. In time she would become acclimatised, her sphincter gradually stretching to accommodate it. Then would come another increment, then another and another - each adding to the soapy humiliation of the laxative the piquancy of torment that came from the knowledge that any improvement in her comfiture came only at the cost to be surely levied her in the future by way of the legacy of her stretched and weakened muscles - and that it was all for the benefit of him, for his perverted pleasure.
Every detail was present there. If only in the world of dreams, if only the manifestation of her delusion, then from whence came the design, the knowledge and experiences that could make manifest the physicality of the illusion with such convincing Technicolor realism. What could a girl of her sheltered background know of such things? How could, even in conjecture, she conjure the sensation of her gently rounded belly swollen with foully-cramping fluid, or her youthfully elastic skin stretched paper-thin. And what of the softly-urging latex-covered, podgy, farmer’s-wife fingers massaging, compressing, squeezing as if to exude the decorating icing for some filthily perverted demon-cake or, perhaps, in some exaggerated parody of milking the beasts she had once had the duty to?
Then the was the voiding into the metal pail, the metallic ringing imparted to the initial fluidic-splattering fall of her wastes, the stink in the compact surroundings of the room - the tiny skylight could not be opened to improve the ventilation - and the cramping stomach muscles and twisting agonized bowels.
Finally it was she herself she saw in her mind’s eye carrying the galvanised bucket through the house so that all and sundry might see - and she herself who would have to scrub it back to the pristine sheen of its manufacture in the yard outside in full view of the household.
She remembered how he had absolutely despised the way she had been dressed when they’d found her. He’d said it was the way they were always dressed, her type; young tearaways, young runaways hanging around the city’s stations and bus shelters on cold winter nights.
And it had been the coldest night of the coldest snap that most could remember when he had come across her. She had seemed easily the most desolate amongst the gathering huddle, easily the most destitute, desperate, bedraggled and forlorn.
Then there were her looks; the pretty elfin face, the slight build, the short stature, the childish yet maturely-contoured and well-cushioned frame, small breasted yet with hips and buttocks promisingly fecund and swollen and rounded with chubby resilient youthfulness.
The denim, though, he just hated; women in trousers just left him cold - let alone jeans. He couldn’t abide by anything that suggested other than sheer soft femininity - the slightest hint of boyishness in dress was an anathema to him. It was all to the more curiously contradictory and contrary therefore that the wretch she remembered bent and sobbing before him no longer possessed the wavy cascades of tawny light brown locks she once had to hide her tears behind but rather a short tousled pixie cut. The latter was styled around her ears and tightly tapered into the nape of her neck; the intent most clearly being to enhance that childish elfin look, the side parting, seemingly inadvertently, introducing an element of boyishness beyond anything that might be brought by even the most masculine cut jeans or dungarees.
That hated denim and the rest of her outfit of that time had been easily dealt with. His housekeeper, Mrs Veronica Merryweather-Cortez, being possessed of a rather traditional, if old-fashioned, outlook herself pertaining to such matters - and not being exactly enamoured with modern attire and the like - had been of the opinion that the girl’s belongings might simply fail to resurface from the launderette, having become ‘lost in the wash’ as, unfortunately, things all too often were locally. As she’d put it; “one can always blame the gypsies...it’s usually them anyway”.
A remarkable woman of an equally remarkable name, the old man’s housekeeper was a truly redoubtable woman. Herefordshire born and possessing a broadness of the hips and a buxom maturity of frame seemingly completely at odds with her claimed thirty eight years of life, her ruddy apple-cheeked complexion and coarse russet hair - kept, on the main, beneath a plain, ‘sensible’, headscarf - spoke of a country woman far more likely at home on some remote outlying farm as to be found domiciled within the gentile confines of a Surry village parsonage. Yet here she was and here she had been for many a long year, residing happily enough and steeped within parish culture - after all was said and done, the work she helped carry out, the charitable work, the Church’s work, offered something she would have been hard pressed to find under any other circumstances.
Over the years she had come to know the buildings, the grounds and the church itself inside and out; she had explored it all. All the little nooks and crannies, all of those secret, dark little places that the public never see, she had seen them all. She knew her way around better than most, probably as well as she knew the old man himself, probably as well as she understood those peculiar peccadillos of his, perhaps even more so. And she understood his predilections ever so well; his yearnings were her raison d’etre after all, something they could both share on the deepest darkest levels yet neither would ever speak of.
She knew exactly what was required, exactly what would please him...and exactly where to look for it. An ancient carved black oak chest dominated the vestry’s end wall, squatting all but forgotten, despite its substantial bulk, in the dusky shadows beneath the tiny Norman-arched stained-glass window. Strictly speaking an oak coffer, it featured quite beautiful carved and arcaded front panels, each having an intricate inlay detail of flowers picked out in a variety of different woods and rarely appreciated, being near permanently under a thin layer of dust and tinted by the patina of age. The iron banding running around the sides and over the curving hinged lid was pitted and blackened with age and as dark as the wood itself; to the front a typical hand-forged mediaeval tongue clasp was secured by a very modern and substantial padlock.
It was from the latter, rarely visited, cache that Mrs M, as the old man was want to address her, was able to conjure up her singly peculiar solution to the problem of clothing the girl. It presumably had only ever been intended as a temporary stopgap; for with every will in the world even that woman, with her archaic views, could hardly have considered such dress appropriate for - or acceptable to - a modern girl of Meredith’s age and background. It had been extracted and selected from a pile of ecclesiastical vestments dating back to perhaps the 1950s or early 1960s, if not earlier - to more prestigious times for the little parish church, when congregations swelled to the rafters with uplifted voices and on occasion spilled out into the churchyard beyond and when it had even accommodated its own choir.
The princess-line dress she selected, despite Meredith’s obviously small stature, had not appeared to the girl at the time to be the smallest there; she had felt certain she had seen at least two or three of a smaller size that had been glanced at and then rejected while the woman was rummaging. She had stood there shivering in the thin cotton nightdress they had given her, grateful to receive anything that would provide some warmth and - more importantly - cover her embarrassment; even some ugly church dress, just so long as it was to only be a temporary arrangement.
And ugly it surely had been: featuring full length sleeves with overlong cuffs at the wrists, each fastening with three buttons in line, it was ‘easy fit’ in the extreme; indeed, it fairly drowned her small figure in its heavy black fabric. An embroidered metallic gold Latin Cross decorated the region roughly corresponding to her left breast and was one of the few features allowed to alleviate the jet-black severity of the thing - the others being an arc of short stiff white frills around the top of the mandarin collar, the matching sprays of frills around the cuffs that extended down to the upper parts of her hands when she was standing with arms to her sides and a large white button oddly sited to the rear of the collar. The latter’s function, enigmatic at the time, was to become clear enough at a later date and perhaps would have become clear more immediately had she noted the matching buttonhole at the dress’s hem, at the rear where it was picked out in white thread as if some proudly decorative feature of design.
At the sides and from a point approximating her waist, heavy, absolute-black, thickly-draping folds hung, spread out and fell to the hem swinging barely clear of the floor, forming between each a series of vertical, wet-puddled and shadow-lined valleys, each somehow darker still.
To the front, once clear of her bust’s perky overhang, the dress hung straight and true, pulled taut by lead weights sewn into the hem, with barely a hint of any contact with the form beneath, giving scant regard for style or flattery. Seemingly dozens of small, tediously and unnecessarily fiddly, black-satin covered buttons, in reality sixteen in all, fastened it from the slender curve of her throat to her neat little ankles; light shimmering off the skirt’s surface would ripple like moonlight off a night-time sea as she moved, those buttons giving the impression of so many small boats bobbing and weaving at anchor in the dark.
The fabric, while as smooth as heavy black satin should be, concealed an inner lining of another material entirely, this having a texture approaching that of a rather coarse velvet, and therein hung the seed of another problem; not only was the whole loose-fitting ensemble ugly, heavy and hot to wear but the constant prickly-heat sensation of the inner lining quickly came to make its wearing intolerable. To her chagrin the material had seemed particularly coarse in the region running over her nipples and the latter’s hardening in response only served to further augment their constant teasing.
She had winged and whined and bitterly complained; it had felt as if the constant grazing irritation, the prickling and the brushing back and forth, would serve to drive her quite insane, or so it had felt at the time, although she was later to encounter challengers to her sanity that would all but drive such concerns from her recall.
