The institutionalised tr.., p.55
The Institutionalised Trilogy, page 55
Those hideous callipers - or leg braces as the staff were more apt to term them - provided more then enough freedom of adjustment to allow for even the most open and exposed display of her person and the most intimate of examinations.
On many such occasions her knees would be drawn back practically parallel with her ears, stretching the sinews of her crotch and forcing those once private coral lips to gape. This would particularly be the case on those occasions when was it was required that she be shaved ‘down there’; it gave unimpeded access of the razor to that region and around her anus too. Regular depilation was a must, it was hospital regulations.
It was all about hygiene at the end of the day and it seemed that hardly a day would go by when she wouldn’t overhear one staff member or other commenting that she was not a particularly ‘clean’ girl ‘down there’, not particularly ‘fragrant’ and complaining about her ‘odour’. At such times her cheeks would burn crimson with shame at the mere thought. It was something she felt must be untrue - she had always prided herself on her cleanliness. But then again she could not fathom any reason for such remarks to be passed otherwise - even though to have allowed a patient to overhear such personal and downright insulting remarks patently smacked of unprofessional conduct. Whatever the truth of the matter, those unguarded, thoughtless remarks often served to amplify the trauma the girl suffered during those examinations out of all proportion.
At other times - and always the level of her sedation would be increased beforehand - a small plastic box would be placed on the mattress in a suitable position, close to her most sensitive and intimate regions. Two arms emerging from either side of this device carried a small wheel on a little axle slung between them, this being not unlike cotton spool in appearance and festooned all around with the softest of hand-selected eiderdown and possessing, in addition, a row of slightly longer feathers running around its centre. The positioning and speed of this infernal device being virtually infinitely adjustable - spinning madly and maddeningly, thousands of gentle feather strokes would then kiss - then later, once soaked and lathered with her arousal - slaver, lick, and suck at her person, softly caressing around and across her sensitive inner lips and clitoris.
A nurse, sitting by the girl’s bedside, would read from a script in lullaby tones, a teeny condenser-microphone pinned to her uniform relaying her voice to the speakers built into that U-shaped cushion pinning her patient’s head. Sometimes these words ran true and ever more so in more recent times. At other times - most others in those early days - her mind would rebel; the ideas coming being just too alien to her. Swamped with strangely perverted images and drowning in dreams she couldn’t possibly comprehend, she would strike out the safety of the shore - she would struggle against the sleepy tide of the sedation, fight to wake herself. She never could of course; the sedative they used was just too heavy.
Nor could she hope to go against those ideas and suggestions upon waking. The sedative they used, when given in those higher doses, universally left the patient with fogged thoughts and near total short-term amnesia and how could she struggle against something she had no recollection of? That wonderful amnesiatic effect, albeit temporary, saw to it that there really was nothing to remember; there would just be those missing hours - and even those went unnoticed in the 24-hour-lit temporal distortion of that place euphemistically known as ‘the ward’.
It could be addictive too, that sedative; it was not medically recognised as suitable for long-term use. They undoubtedly knew that - and yet they kept her on it continuously, day in, day out, albeit at a much lower dosage than might ordinarily have been prescribed. It kept her relaxed and her mind soothingly foggy - she was beginning to quite like that feeling, beginning to wonder how she could ever live without it. She would have grabbed at those little blue and gold capsules when they were brought to her, had she been able - she would have snatched at them now, given half the chance. It was a deeply humbling little addiction - and one that in truth was being encouraged by those softly whispered suggestions she knew nothing of.
The patient sling having been worked under her, a button was pushed and the hoist sprang into life, albeit remarkably gently. There was an almost supernatural element to the smoothness of its operation that was suggestive of levitation rather than lifting. Pulleys of nylon and of PTFE, a Dacron rope standing-in where a chain might ordinarily once have been expected - these advances had ushered in with them a new standard in terms of quietness of operation which belied the work done. Little more than an electric hum emanated from the crane-like structure; and even that was apt to vanish below the swish of the nurses’ dresses - that soft polyester rasp she had become so accustomed to and was now somehow comforted by.
The wing-nuts on the ratcheted mechanism at her knees, sited between the upper and lower sections of her leg-braces, had been loosened off before initiating the lift, allowing the adoption of a seated configuration as it progressed. On being satisfactory seated that adjustment would be reversed, locking the girl’s callipers in the new conformation, all safe and sound.
The wheelchair’s seat gave way markedly under her weight despite her slightness, the white leatherette proving to have an unexpectedly spongy, resilient character. The clinical chill of the plastic came to her straight away, even through the rubber of those awful, sweaty hospital issue bloomers they kept her in - or at least it chilled those fleshy regions lay to either side of the thick incontinence towel that resided therein.
This latter feature of her hospital-issue underwear was a particular bane, given the present realities of her existence. The towel was affixed internally by four straps designed and provided for that purpose - these being positioned two fore and two aft of the gusset region with the most distal of the rear pair being positioned just short of the waistband while the other sat just clear of the gusset area itself, an arrangement that was repeated to the front. The pad thus ran through the entirety of the crotch area from the rear to the front of the knickers and was kept constantly in the most intimate feminine contact with her flesh, where it tended to irritate, tantalise and tease in equal measure.
Placed in the wheelchair, her useless hands now dangled over the ends of the armrests, plaster-enwrapped fingers splayed fan-like. It was true that the resin-based nature of the casts tended to make them softer and more resilient than had they been fabricated in the more traditional plaster, but they were still not flexible enough to do much to ameliorate, in any real sense, the totality of the girl’s immobilisation.
Analogous to the mechanism surrounding and supporting her knees and that allowed angular adjustment to her leg braces - a plastic hinge arrangement linked the casts fitted around her upper and lower arms, this providing stability to her elbows. The similarity ran to the wing-nut and ratchet adjustment of each limb’s conformation and by this means the required right-angle bend at the elbow so as to allow for a seated posture had been introduced. Again this just involved a simple re-tightening of a wing-nut each side by finger and thumb in order to relock each limb in the required new attitude.
Having secured an entire plethora of straps and bands around the limbs and torso of their patient - some of Velcro and some secured by buckles and all seemingly unnecessary, considering the circumstances - she was deemed ‘ready for transfer’.
This ‘transfer’, when it finally came about, turned out to be somewhat disappointing; it was not quite the lengthy excursion that all those preparations, precautions and fuss might have suggested. Indeed, this sojourn consisted of little more than the length of the ward - a decidedly limited dimension - then the negotiation of a substantial, securely locked door and a fairly narrow passageway stretching all of ten metres or so, the latter requiring traversing in single file, one nurse leading the way, the other pushing the wheelchair and bringing up the rear. If she had harboured hopes of some glimpse beyond the confines of the hospital, then the frosted glass of the two windows that they had passed in the ward and then the windowless passage had dashed them in their entirety.
In that way, their destination was, if anything, even more of a let-down; four bare white walls stared back at her as she was pushed across the threshold, unadorned in any way and notably uninterrupted by any window.
They had set out in the opposite direction to the ward’s security-grille-guarded exit and she had guessed from the outset that they were not actually going to be leaving the unit as such - but she had expected something more, somehow, than this near empty box of a room. Being of perhaps four metres on a side, its only occupant stood bang slap in the centre; a padded examination couch or table of around waist height and having a most singularly sinister appearance glowed there as if spot-lit, its white plastic top dazzling to the eye.
This latter furnishing, noticeably bolted to the floor, was arranged longitudinally within the space. Hinged at its centre, it had been left with the end closest to the party folded down in a manner not unlike a drop-leaf table, the extreme edge reaching down close to the floor and the whole having the form of a horizontal ‘L’.
Releasing her from the imprisonment of her wheelchair, they stood her up against the contraption, her legs once again straitened, knee joints locked and with her calliper-encased legs pressed firmly up against the folded-down vertical section of the table. A short explanation followed, delivered in a hurried flurry and giving the impression of some fast approaching dead line. It flowed past her largely without comprehension; she felt muddled, foggy, as she so often did these days.
It was something to do with their needing to have an X-ray of her back in a particular orientation and - as she was overdue for an anal exam - ‘killing two birds with one stone’.
She was placed in a standing position, bent at the waist with arms stretched above her head, her elbow joints having been locked out now as had been her knees, the latter by way of the callipers. A broad Velcro-fastening band was then drawn tightly across the small of her back and another pulled across her shoulders and upper back, the latter being of some thirty centimetres in breadth and seeming superfluous considering the enforced rigidity of her extremities.
Her chin rested in a raised U-section cushion, provided for that purpose. A cap of criss-crossed leather or plastic straps was fitted over the top and back of her head and firmly secured by way of buckles at its sides - this, stabilising her head, allowed the neck brace to be released at the rear and in turn allowed her head to be tilted back such that she would then face forward.
Despite their apparent redundancy, leather straps were then fastidiously buckled at her wrists, elbows and again close to her shoulders, the fastenings struggling to accommodate the plaster casts at those points. Her legs were similarly restrained, drawn out into an embarrassingly exposed exaggerated inverted ‘V’ conformation by straps positioned around her ankles, knees and upper-thighs.
There was something disturbingly familiar about it all; all that attention to detail, all that complexity of preparation and restraint while so obviously unnecessary. It was something she thought she recognised from somewhere, something she felt she had experienced before, in some other place, long, long ago. There was something ritualistic, even fetishistic about it all - the notion near instantly froze her blood, petrified her heart and near unhinged her mind.
Finally, as if in answer to an unasked question, she felt fingers toying with the broad elastic waistband of her knickers. With a concerted smoothly sweeping action a pair of hands was dragging the tacky latex from her bottom - peeling the clinging fabric free of the latter’s fleshy overhang with a sound not unlike a young girl’s breath drawn softly through lips pursed with uncertainty - then away from, and down, her thighs, to end stretched wide between her knees.
Meredith Hewson’s mortification was tangible; in her mind’s eye she could see clearly the heavily saturated towel at the crotch dragging down the gusset, revealing its loathsome and embarrassing contents to all. Why did it always have to be this way? Why couldn’t they clean her up first, at least change the towel if not the knickers? Would it be so difficult? Didn’t they care at all about her feelings?
That these concerns remained internalised was probably just as well: Yes, they certainly did care. Indeed, her feelings were of paramount consideration and no, it would not have been difficult to have cleaned her up beforehand. Beyond these answers she would not have appreciated, liked, nor necessarily have understood the responses - it was best she be spared the fruits of her curiosity for the time being...
Suddenly they were gone - just like that. She was alone, abandoned in silent vulnerable isolation; no words had been spoken in explanation, no light-hearted inter-colleague banter had been heard, the only clue to their departure being the softly-padded thud of the door closing behind them.
She was alone - open and secured, helpless...and waiting.
How long it had been she had no way of reckoning, yet her feeling was it hadn’t been very long; though what such a relative term might actually mean to one confined as she was, is debatable.
Strangely, she hadn’t heard the door open, nor its muffled re-closing - yet somehow, for some reason, she sensed she was no longer alone. For a while she couldn’t be certain; there was something there, a slight muffled shuffling perhaps - then her very bowels twisted, mangled in fear, in utmost dread...
It was the wheezing that came to her first - dry, like old parchment, like the rustle of drought-fallen leaves. Then the cough came; not quite a death rattle, although she had so often prayed it was. Decidedly masculine, it came in excited staccato bursts, the nervous asthmatic constriction of elderly bronchi.
Then it came closer, that unseen, uncertain presence, the breathing, laboured and heavy; moist foetid breath lapped around her neck and hung there like rotting strands of seaweed, then dangled down her back, then sniffed and snuffled between and around her buttocks, bony fingers, the nails ridged with time, easing the globes apart.
Her mind had become as frozen in terror as her body had been immobilised by more physical means, her last cogent thought being one of utter disbelieve. How could it be him, here, in this place, in this hospital? How could he have gotten to her even here? She knew it couldn’t be him of course, not really - how could it? It had to be some sort of hallucination, the sort they were always warning her of, that she always denied yet they insisted she suffered. Had they been right all along? Yes, that was it - it was just another of her delusions, it had to be, just had to...
She waited, what else could she do; even that scream of hers wouldn’t come, it froze somewhere along her throat. That scream had always torn through the air before, rang deafeningly in her ears. But that had only been in her nightmares. That’s what they told her they were - and they would punish her if she ever said otherwise.
They had so many ways of punishing her - and all for her own good: They could withhold her meals or not let her sleep. They might simply ignore her for days or even weeks on end - and that was by far the worst. No one speaking to her, not smiling, not even acknowledging her own smile; it was subtle but effective and in so very many ways. No, she could only wait - the scream wouldn’t come anymore, those punishments had been too effective. And what if it was all just another of her nightmares?
But this was no nightmare, they were never in the here and now, never in this setting - yet how could she be certain? No, it had to be a nightmare, another derangement. That is what they said they were, derangements, figments of a sick mind - and she was not allowed to object, she was not allowed to question that fact. That was what was stifling her scream, slowly dismantling her reason thought by thought, belief by belief...
Gnarled arthritis-clawed fingers kneaded and prodded the flesh around her most intimate regions as so often they had before, exploring, teasing.
Then a hesitation - the pause she knew from experience would be the calm before the storm, an uncertain meandering countdown, time itself seemingly hanging pendulous in space and quivering before the coming tempest; a most agonising prospect for any woman. And then... AND THEN...
The hiss filling her ears barely registered before the sharp firecracker-retort pierced the air, momentarily dulling her hearing. There was a brief moment filled with that odd contrary numbness that does sometimes precede the first lick of flame. Then came the first of the hornet-stings, angry, simultaneously spreading and evolving along a single red pencil-width line drawn neatly across the centre of both buttocks and wrapping around to their sides, where the whippy plastic cane’s almost supernatural deformation had allowed the stroke to extend.
Now the scream came - now not even the discipline of the nurses, of this place, could hold it back.
That hissing sigh came again and again and again: a top-register hiss, as softly-sighing as the lightest, finest gentle drizzle falling on still waters - and on the most breathlessly beautiful of summer evenings. So inoffensive in itself, a sound of little relevance to most - and, quite frankly, new to this girl - each such sigh nevertheless heralded a full-blooded spit of acid as if from the mouth of some foul blaspheming demon - acrid and incendiary enough to sear the flesh and mortify the soul both.
She had once been all too familiar with the leather kiss of the strap and the fiery spitting-tongues of the tawse - whether in truth or in imagination. But this, this...This was unimaginable, indescribable and utterly unbearable. This was not like the heavy slap of leather - there was hardly any discernible impact at all in fact. No these were cuts, like untold thousands of razor slashes or myriad fine paper-cuts infused with bee venom. It stole away her breath, was destroying her reason.
That scream grew now louder still, more and more shrill, more and more heart-rending: it became monumental, reverberated off the walls and around her mind. Then slowly, oh, so terribly slowly, it began to diminish, fading down to a horsed and broken whisper, then further still, until just sobs, shuddering and heartbroken, filled the silences still punctuated by that unrelenting hiss-crack, hiss-crack, hiss-crack rhythm.
