The institutionalised tr.., p.69
The Institutionalised Trilogy, page 69
They must have known what was happening to her, they must have. There was that woman that used to visit her in her room, such a welcome break from the monotony - those visits had been a lifeline for her. Not that there had ever been any social aspect to them. Conversation, for what it was, consisted at most of a series of questions, most of which required simple yes or no answers and beyond which any attempted elaboration risked a stroke or two of Matrons cane.
These were dietician’s visits; they had begun well after her removal from the ‘schoolroom’ following her second episode of so-called ‘wilful non-compliance with experimental protocol’. Only after she had been incarcerated in the so-called ‘training room’ for quite some time - just how long she had no way of knowing - did the assessment of her ‘nutritional status’ and of her various ‘anthropomorphic indices’ suddenly become of such a concern to them.
How regular or irregular those visits had been there was no way of telling, but great care was clearly taken that the procedure and routine on those occasions never varied one iota, even down to the words exchanged.
Life under a Dietician’s Care
The woman always had an authoritative and somewhat haughty air about her and would walk in, pushing her trolley and accompanied by Matron, as if about to bestow some great favour, as if she expected Lavinia to quite literally prostrate herself at her feet in gratitude for her attention. She eschewed the type of uniform dress Lavinia was used to seeing Matron and her nurses wearing in favour of a fairly standard white doctor’s coat and even this would vary in length from visit to visit and on occasion would appear ill-fitting as if borrowed for the occasion. The only other concession she appeared to have been willing to make to the unit’s protocol was the adoption of the face-framing nun-like white headdress that all the staff wore; it denied the subject the distraction of all those different hair styles and colours and other such concerns that were best left behind in the world outside.
Invariably at the start of the proceedings Lavinia would have to offer up her full bedpan for inspection. This being designed for the purpose was transparent and divided crosswise so as to provide two compartments, the one to the fore collecting the liquid waste and the one to the rear, the solid - a graduated scale moulded into the plastic and running up the face of the central divider provided the means to estimate volume and size as appropriate.
The dietician would then run through a questionnaire, ticking boxes, pausing from time to time to ask that her subject estimate her stool size and texture, the quantity of urine passed, its colour, whether it was cloudy or clear and so on - and always in that irritatingly-affected 1930s public school accent of hers, with its subtle shading of fenland farm-girl that she could never quite disguise and that Lavinia could never quite pin down geographically.
As a hangover from the procedure of the schoolroom this had been nothing new to her of course, although there it had been the dormitory mistress playing the inquisitor’s role. But nevertheless it was not something that would ever lessen in lip-biting humiliation through familiarity - it addressed and assaulted the most basic ingrained levels of self-respect and revulsion.
In the schoolroom, odour was always the last category to be checked; the bedpan had to be brought up to the nose, first the front compartment then the rear. In her isolated ‘training room’ it had been relegated to the penultimate, although more stringently carried out in the hands of the dietician. Under her supervision it had no longer been acceptable to hover fleetingly above each compartment; the pan now had to be held right up to the face so that, with her head craned over it, her prettily-refined and slightly upturned nose was now obliged to penetrate well into each in turn.
The nostrils had to be flaring just above the surface of the contents before that woman was satisfied. Nor could she hide from the sight and the shame behind closed eyes; this was watched for most carefully by both women and Matron’s cane would always waiting at the ready.
Indeed, after about the third or fourth visit, the woman had wheeled in her trolley to reveal the addition of a dressing-table sized mirror fitted in a stainless steel frame and conspicuously covering the majority of one side. From that day onwards that part of the procedure had been carried out with the girl seated smartly upright on the side of her bed and obliged to face the vanity-defeating self-mocking criticism of that trolley-side mounted mimic.
Then came that part that was just for her and her alone,; tagged on to the bottom of the list - and categorised as a quick test for diabetes along with the results of the urine flow glucose and ketone strip tests that would be performed later - was one word: taste.
Still seated on the edge of her bed and required to face her own reflection at all times, she would be required to stick out her tongue; it had to be forced right out as hard as possible, extended to its utmost extent, to a painful extent, and held rigid.
An eye dropper would be used; the dietician, having first donned a latex glove, would carefully place four or five drops of the golden-yellow fluid along the centre of the girl’s outstretched tongue. She would stand there, stopwatch in hand, counting off the seconds and watching for any deviation of the girls gaze away from that of her violet-eyed doppelganger, before ordering the girl to withdraw her tongue, taste and swallow. There then would be a short series of questions fired at her, the answers to which were always to be in the form of “yes miss” or “no miss”...Was it salty, sweet, bitter or perhaps tart? And so on and so on...
This procedure would be repeated three times, each time the same taste assay would be run through and for each test a fresh sample would drawn up into dropper once the previous had been squirted into a tissue. Of course the woman could easily have extracted a sample from one of the bottles she would decant off for laboratory testing. But without exception, each time she would make a great show of drawing up a sample directly from the girl’s bedpan - it had the greater psychological impact. She would gently slosh around the latter’s contents on the pretext of obtaining a good average sample while in truth aiming to gain and hold the girl’s attention. If there was any residue of a suitably runny consistency present at the pan’s other end she would let the dropper hover there, perhaps even let her hand drop down until the implement’s tip would dangled dangerously close to the surface, all the time watching the girl’s eyes for her reaction.
Always, on the second and third occasions, prior to the drops being placed on her tongue, Lavinia would first be required to tilt back her head while a couple of drops were applied to each nostril in turn. As in the second part of this extended procedure, the stopwatch would be consulted and by the time she was instructed to again face forward and put out her tongue the first inklings of a trickle would be beginning to form in the back of her throat.
Although Lavinia could not possibly have recognised it at the time, she had not been the lone victim in all this that she might have seemed. Janice Silverman, herself, had been as much the victim. After all was said and done, the woman was head of dietetics in a prestigious private rest home, sanatorium and rehabilitation retreat catering for the very upper echelons of society. She was supposed to be someone who could be relied upon to act ethically and responsibly, as part of a caring profession.
Yet with each visit to the unit those professional values and ideals, once held so dear and once so cherished, had been eroded further - she had been possessed by the spirit of the place as if the very fabric of the building had some sentient will of its own.
True, Ms Silverman had always secretly harboured a certain attraction to young women whom she perceived as having a somewhat submissive bearing. It was also true that there had been occasions when she had found her thoughts running to fantasy and playfully dallying with elements that could be described as possessed of a gently-sadistic aspect. But these had been fantasies and no more than that; in her private life she had always been loving and caring, even if on occasion she could be somewhat overbearing, albeit in a motherly way. Yes, like most of us she had occasionally been host to certain...darker desires, shall we say - harmless phantasms locked in the world of imagination, where such things belong. And that was how they would have remained; had she not been introduced to this place... it had given her full rein...and power, absolute power. It had torn open her psyche, let out all those little, once harmless, desires and urges, allowed them to scatter unfettered, then nurtured them further.
She would never have considered herself cruel by nature and yet all of this - this so-called ‘dietetic assessment’ - was of her doing, her development. And every time she looked into that girl’s eyes, those pretty violet eyes, every time she saw the dread hiding there, she would feel the cruelty growing in her heart and she would know... this was not yet far enough.
If only Lavinia had known, when that dropper had last been dangled above that foulness, just how close that taunt was to reality, just how seriously her tormentor had been considering it, how the woman had thought through the pitfalls and dangers and had surmounted each one in turn. It was to have been the very next session; an earlier sample had been retained and would’ve been liquefied to the required viscosity and treated with an antibacterial and antiviral agent to remove the danger of infection - boiling would have removed the pungency, something to be avoided. A simple sleight of hand would have done the rest, swapping the bedpan sample for her previously prepared taster - the psychological impact would have been the same, as would that look of revulsion in the girl’s eyes as she submitted for the first time to her new treatment.
And submit the girl would have, that was part of the irony of the situation - for as much as she had to endure in each one of these sessions, there was little greater threat that could have been be offered up to persuade her, should she have refused, than the threat of their cancellation. Undoubtedly, a few missed sessions would have seen her on her knees begging for an appointment with the dietician - such was the level of isolation they had her under, such was her state of mind.
A Panic in the Salon
It was the wheelchair that had snapped her out of it...or rather her collision with it; she had run smack into the back of the thing. The nurse ahead of her had swung out and around it at the last moment and - having somehow managed to select the correct key on the run - was already struggling to unlock the door beyond. Standing close-in to the side wall and orientated side-on to the door and having avoided going to the trouble of detaching the key ring from her belt in an attempt to save time, the woman was now straining and cursing while hurriedly she tried to bring key and lock together. The elasticated crepe nurse’s belt she wore, being loath to cooperate and its upper edge curling down in its determination, tugged frustratingly back through the glittering taut stainless-steel key chain, prompting exasperated gasps from both women and charging dearly in wasted time for the folly of this fumble-fingered strategy.
All at once tumblers chattered, a foot and hand thumped in dull padded concert, as if in impatient retribution for the door’s reluctance, and an open palm, slapping sharply between Lavinia’s shoulder blades and near knocking the remaining breath from her aching lungs, propelled her forward.
The scene that presented itself before her was startlingly strange in its familiarity, eliciting a gasp that owed its origin as much to incomprehension as it did to surprise. Spurred by shock and driven by instinct her hand momentarily went to her mouth, only to be lowered almost immediately to join its sibling in front of her skirt. A cold shiver of dread running down her spine at the realisation of what she had just done, albeit unbidden, she assumed the stance that all good obedient institution inmates took up when waiting to be told what to do next.
Her shoes were pressed smartly side-by-side, her wrists were kept crossed in front of her dress and her hands presented with the palms facing outwards while simultaneously pressing back the nylon fabric against her thighs, her shoulders were rounded and her head bowed sheepishly as if in shame. Standing as quietly as could be managed, commensurate with regaining her breath, she looked every bit the perfect product of the institution’s regime, spirit all but crushed and personality drowning beneath endless months of relentless discipline.
She had seen enough, though, to be near certain that it was the same room: The hairdressers basin, the barber’s chair-cum-obstetric exam couch with its leg-rests and stirrups hung with leather restraint straps, their buckles glinting in the light like Christmas tree baubles, the dental surgery lighting system, with its lenses and lamps, cantilever-mounted overhead - all were shockingly too familiar.
To her left an alcove had, mounted across its width, a rail holding six transparent plastic hairdressing-salon capes. These too she had seen many, many times before; she could almost feel the thick polyurethane, soft yet heavy, sweatily adhering to her skin. She could recall too the white nylon zipper running up the back from the hem to the top of the exaggerated mandarin collar and how it would pull the latter closed around the neck - presumably originally so as to protect the clothes of the wearer, although they were always naked beneath it save for a broad, white, padded medical restraint belt worn around the waist to which their wrists would be immobilised.
It was an appalling, drowning, tent-like affair designed to drape over the chair as well as its occupant, once seated. She recalled waiting in line with the other girls from the schoolroom for her turn in the chair, hideously aware of her nakedness underneath its voluminous draping calf-length folds of transparent plastic.
A claustrophobically-enclosed, steaming, humid microclimate would quickly develop beneath that covering, causing beads of perspiration to run like glistening rivulets down skin rendered a glowing velvet pink by the warmth - little trickles that would work their way down her back to slip and insinuate irritatingly between her buttocks, others that would somehow adhere to and run over their broadly sweeping curves and that would bring a torturous reawakening to stinging freshly-laid cane-wheals.
All the while she would be trying to avoid the sight of the widespread intimacy of whichever unfortunate happened to be receiving her ‘hygienic shave’ and vaginal douche at the time. Not that she ever could avoid that sight, of course, the chair faced outwards into the room and those waiting did so in single file facing it. There would be six girls and sooner or later each and every one of them would reach the front of the queue and have to watch the nurse sitting on her little stall down between the previous girl’s legs wielding the razor. Those once dealt with would be obliged to rejoin the queue - and so it would continue until, finally, the first girl to be treated would find she was obliged to face the wide-spread femininity of the last.
Not one girl would ever leave that room dry-eyed and with her pride intact; even the most self-confident was left humbled and bowed by the experience. And it would be repeated time and time again, over and over, rubbing away at any reawakening of self-esteem and vanity as a washerwoman might work at a stubborn stain - refusing to fade completely yet bleached out a little more with each application.
But it couldn’t possibly be the same room - could it? That room had been part of the self enclosed schoolroom complex. Whereas this room lay behind a side door off of what was obviously a central thoroughfare, that other room had been reached by way of a truncated passage leading straight off the dormitory and of no more than a couple of meters in length at most. They’d never once had to leave that zone for any purpose; that sort of arrangement was typical here, it was part of what made the place so secure for holding girls who, like herself, given the choice would almost certainly have decided to end their participation in the study - no matter how generous the fee that would have to be relinquished - once they discovered its true nature and how tough it was to be be.
There appeared to be no other means of access other than the doorway through which they had just passed and in any case they had entered facing the chair just as they would have done had it been that other room - clearly any familiarity was merely an illusion born of that typically institutional obsession with standardisation in design and layout.
But then her eyes picked up on the one defect despoiling the glossed white plastic perfection of the chair. She recognised it at once; a tear in the fabric at the side of one arm. It was a teeny thing, insignificant to most and clearly overlooked by the staff, but to any starved of the sight of anything save white plastic, white linoleum and green and white striped uniforms it was a monstrous carbuncle.
She could clearly remember how she would surreptitiously run her fingertips over it, relishing the texture of the underside of the teeny hinged flap of plastic and the bubbly foam padding beneath, learning every undulation and contour of that fractal landscape, while always fearful that a nurse might see and that it would be repaired.
One hung on to such insignificant things here, they were little lifelines; even a bluebottle, or an ant come to that, would have been viewed as a wondrously fascinating distraction - not that she had ever seen one here. In fact come to think about it, she had never seen even the teeniest insect.
If further confirmation was needed it came now in the form of the narrow cylindrical shower booth standing in the far right corner. Its curved door, presently slid back and revealing the sparsely appointed plastic interior, when closed around the occupant would restrict the latter’s potential to avoid the icily spraying jets, trapping her arms close to her sides behind its tough transparent Lucite wall while denying nothing from the supervising nurse’s eye.
There had been a dark mark at the base of that booth, just a few centimetres in length. Just such a streaked, curving scar now seemed to zoom into focus, pulling into horrific slow-motion close-up just as the rest of her surroundings seemed to recede in concert - momentarily she was forced to put out a hand to steady herself.
