supplicium post mortem

© Casey Morgan 1995

[I wrote this story as revenge for the first story Mark wrote me, "The Benefit of the Doubt" here. Also mentioned is Mark's story "The Fishing Trip," discussed here. Further comments on this story can be found here.]

1.

MI6 was getting good. After months of failure, they’d finally begun to crack the Finnish anonymous remailer and thus zero in on some chief offenders in their own green and pleasant. A stray pervo in Birmingham, a hoard of terrorists in London, some Wilde imitators at Oxford. But even Morley, who headed the investigation, was surprised to unearth a user at the School. He was familiar with the place. And he knew the master in charge of its computer systems. So, rather than file the appropriate reports, he got on the train and paid a personal visit, in hopes of resolving the situation on the qt.

Mr. Harrison–housemaster and English scholar–was a man of many talents. After his former student had left him, he went directly to the Media Centre. In no time he had traced the account in question: Mark Hastings. Well, who else would it be? So it was that after Vth form English, Big Tim loped across the playing fields to Dr. Malcolm’s house.

“I might have know it.”

“It would seem he’s quite an accomplished documentarian,” Tim added. “I took the liberty of photocopying one or two examples.”

He dropped on the desk something called ‘The Fishing Trip.’

“And this particularly vulgar waste of good paper…”

‘The Benefit of the Doubt’ fell beside its sibling. The remainder had been tucked away in Mr. Harrison’s very secure filing cabinets.

“I suppose he must be summoned, formal interview and the rest of it.” Dr. Malcolm sounded weary. Ever since booking his summer holiday to Tangier, this all too human headmaster had been having difficulty concentrating. In particular, he was fed up with Mark Hastings and was running out of resources to meet him creatively.

“Ever since Hastings came here, he’s done nothing, it seems, but try to get himself beaten.” Tim looked at his friend obliquely.

“Hmm.” Dr. Malcolm stuffed his pipe between his teeth and bit hard. “Perhaps he hasn’t received a sufficiently strong dose.”

“Hmm.” Irony and understatement seethed on the carpet between them, though to an eavesdropper, the words would have fallen flat. These two men understood one another perfectly.

“I believe,” Dr. Malcolm murmured at last, “I know just the thing. Something to ensure he won’t be rushing back for more.”

That afternoon the House notice board contained a message:

The following LVIth former will report to the Headmaster this evening after Prep–Mark Hastings.

So it was that Mark was let in on the plans of the Masters. When confronted with the copious evidence, he didn’t bother trying to defend himself. Excuses were not his style, and anyway he didn’t like to grovel. But he was quite unprepared for the nature of the consequences.

“Come see me in three weeks time.”

Mark didn’t follow. Surely HM wasn’t going soft after all these years. Unless–God forbid–he intended to try reverse psychology, or some other contemptible tactic culled from American educational magazines.

“Rest assured you will be well and fully punished,” Dr. Malcolm told him with almost withering coldness. “Report to my study three Saturdays from now. That’s all. Good night.”

“Good night, sir. Thank you.” Mark left in a daze unbecoming to one of his experience.

Dr. Malcolm, stickler for discipline though he was, had more than a shred of conscience. The caning he’d given Hastings just five days before, after his ridiculous fishing stunt, had been a potent experience to say the least, one which would require at least a fortnight’s recovery. And although Dr. Malcolm had had more than enough of this infuriating boy, he didn’t fancy scandals. He was a historian. He knew all about the Marlborough Tunding Row and about Wellington’s Red Menace with the Romilly boys in the ’30′s.

Dr. Malcolm did not want to Break Mark Hastings, or any other person for that matter. Beating to Break was an ugly, ruinous thing. Pure destruction, murder even–if souls could be murdered while their bodies still breathed. It required a cruelty and indifference he did not possess. But Breaking with a capital B had little to do with breaking lowercase. Dr. Malcolm had before beat to the point of breaking–down or through, he was never sure which. Taking the recipient beyond what they could control, until something was ruptured, until a thing long suppressed–reason, grief, discipline, responsibility–was brought to the surface. This kind of shattering he could comfortably inflict, so long as the pieces could be reassembled, leaving the person if not intact, then whole.

But what would break Mark Hastings? Could pain alone do it? Or was something else required? Something unexpected and alarming, mercy perhaps, or redemption–some counter-irritant given in a way he could neither anticipate nor defend? What could split through the personality to those urges so fierce and buried they required a shriek and bash to even be felt? What was it Mark was asking for without knowing it? For the one day of a different color, the one session he wouldn’t be able to endure, the singular agony that would crush him under its weight, like a woman beneath a man?

In any case, the question was academic. Mark Hastings had never broken.

In the meantime, Dr. Malcolm calculated, if anything would keep Hastings in line, it would be the suspense. Delay, of course, was part of the plan; the therapy started when the waiting began. Dr. Malcolm considered it very much in Hastings’s line to suffer the remedy for three full weeks before receiving the final dose.

In a way, he was right. At first Mark was stunned. He’d never heard of such a thing. Whatever happened to getting hanged in a timely fashion? Part of him, though, was grateful for the delay. He still hadn’t returned to normal after his last thrashing. But a 21 day Damoclesian dagger? It was perverse, surely. In term time enough happened during a single week to constitute a month in the outside world. Three weeks was near enough to rankle, but too far off to comprehend. In the end Mark managed to put it out of mind. No one can endure that degree of suspense 24-7. But it deflated him somewhat, and made him watch his steps. He behaved himself during timetabled lessons, and, as the Media Centre had all but shut down, he even made a small effort with his work. And it did something to his concentration.

His one remaining vice was a newly developed habit for lateness to prayers. This was not normally in Mark’s repertoire. The unvarying penalty was lines, and as a different prefect took attendance each night, it was impossible to acquire a reputation as a repeat offender and graduate to more diverting punishments. Multiple latenesses merely accumulated for Mark a tedious queue of Regulars (100 lines, Virgil). So when he, after sprinting, found himself late for the fifth time in two weeks, Mark turned sulky. He still owed two Regulars, and here was another. Not how he fancied spending a June half-hol. By the time he’d mounted the stairs to the chapel balcony, where latecomers were sent to avoid disturbing the service, he had worked himself into a seething temper. He was in no mood for the gods’ final infliction.

And there she sat, kicking her heels against the dimly lit pews–Casey Morgan with a fistful of attitude. He hadn’t met her in Chapel Balcony before, and he could tell from the self-righteousness oozing out of every pore that this was her first Late. He was far too testy to deal with her, and so condescended, and sneered. He got the feeling she wanted something, but he didn’t have the interest or the patience to find out what. True their acquaintance had inched towards friendship after that mutual trip to the Bench earlier in term. But by the next morning he’d managed to forget about it. Dixon and Tremlett would never let him live it down if they discovered he’d become friendly with a Vth form girl–at least given the vehicle. If he’d seduced and snogged her openly, that would be one thing. She wasn’t bad looking–neither slender nor fat, but rather squarish and muscular; nice legs, nice tits; round face, squinty eyes, slightly turned-up nose; auburn shoulder-length hair reigned back in the regulation ponytail. Not Kate Moss, but not the Queen Mum either. By all accounts she should have had plenty of boyfriends, but she remained strangely aloof. Something about her said noli me tangere. Boys didn’t discuss her, and he should know, he had as crass a mouth as anyone in the changing rooms. She just didn’t fit into the category of ‘skirt.’ Probably she was a lesbian.

“You don’t have to condescend to me, Mark Hastings,” she told him with infuriating self-possession. “If you’re not in a sociable mood, then just say so like a normal person.”

He certainly had no stomach for this kind of drivel, but something in her tone took the wind out of his retort and made him feel just a little bit ashamed. And he found himself embarrassed, though he’d never have admitted it, about his predicament with Dr. Malcolm. She’d heard the rumors of course, they were all over the school. Mark Hastings Collared By MI Vice. It had given his waning popularity a boost big enough to last him through term. But she didn’t, he thought, know the details. She didn’t know about the stories. She didn’t know a lot of things.

Which is why Mark was as surprised as she at what came out of his mouth.

“I have to report for punishment Saturday week. For the MI6 business. And I’ve been told to choose, between spray birch and apple rod.”

Casey just looked at him, her workaday fortification dissolved. “Yeow,” she said at last.

“Any advice?” he asked sheepishly. Casey uttered something between a gasp and a snicker. Then, to Mark’s amazement, she smiled.

“I don’t think I’m qualified to advise you on that one.”

Mark moved his mouth into a line, though the actual humor escaped him.

We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, the School, as a unit, droned below. Casey unknotted her shoelaces, then retied them tighter.

“Maybe,” she mumbled, “if you explained the difference, I could flip a coin for you.”

While legions of Englishmen beneath them requested mercy and solace, Mark outlined in plain language the merits of both implements as he understood them, and Casey listened, and when he was done, she offered her opinion. And Mark agreed with her, then chose the other one.

Mark did not want mercy, and if he was to have redemption, he intended to earn it. He had undergone countless doses of physical pain, and still he sought it out, with hunger–deep and writhing. He wouldn’t have said that he liked it, but he never backed away. Each thrashing endured, each success, chipped away at the anxiety. The more he could take, the easier it was for him to believe there was nothing there to be broken. Each beating nurtured his self-confidence, until those barely tiny things no longer hissed in his brain. Because if he started dwelling on them, if he ever gazed at that unskinned digestional track, the Mark he knew might vanish altogether. Everything about him conspired to ward away those black widows, who administered their balms, like death, to the wounds of the mediocre.

2.

More than once during the next week and a half, it happened Mark and Casey were the only two latecomers. They’d sit in the balcony together, making no pretense of following the dreary services. Mark would have thought a tacit acquaintance could have been achieved. But she would stare at him so. Like she despised him. She hadn’t acted that way the first night, and she was casual and mild when they passed in the halls. Something about that balcony seemed to alter her, making her edgy and tense.

Mark was intrigued, but he’d be goddamned if he let her know it. Something about this Casey Morgan. He still found himself drawn to her, but not like he was drawn to other girls. He felt drawn to her almost as if she were a boy. And what’s more he found, before too long, that he was coming late almost on purpose (despite the staggeringly boring consequences). And he found his wrists were a little weak when he heard her climbing the stairs behind him, and his guts jerked when she would join him on the benches of that dark, grotty balcony, and give him a look at once rueful and defiant.

Mark would be the first to say that too much was made of sex at public school. Even at his previous school, which was all-male, there’d been precious little besides masturbation. No one had ever seduced him in his day, and he hadn’t gone mad with lust for younger boys. Which wasn’t to say there hadn’t been an eroticism lurking in the air. And, though he didn’t like to brood on the past, Mark still remembered that one anxious summer when he thought he might possibly bat for the other team. But all that had passed, at least for most part; his anxiety wasn’t that simple. Still a horrible, infuriating resemblance emerged–the suspicion that he was feeling towards Casey Morgan something of what he felt at his old school. Something of that–and yet something else again. A range of feelings quite outside his experience with feeling, which, being English, was admittedly narrow.

All this fell by the wayside as the days between Mark and the appointed Saturday shrunk to none. The publicity and mystery surrounding his punishment (he hadn’t shared what it would be, just that one was promised) had ensured the day’s inevitability, even if the calendar had not hauled it into the present. He felt, by now, the eyes of the whole School upon him, waiting with baited breath to learn what would become of Mark Hastings, who’d committed a felony in the outside world and an unprecedented offense by the standards of the School. Several people grumbled that he ought to be expelled. But Dr. Malcolm disliked expelling people. He felt that the failure reflected on him, as an educator. And Hastings was not deeply deviant, just thoroughly and vigorously undisciplined. He fit the profile of the classic problem child, one no self-respecting Head could resist.

He knew Mark Hastings got off on being a tough guy. He liked his beatings straight up, like his drinks, and had no time for anyone he considered wet. No cuddly compassion, sympathy, comfort afterwards. The trial and the accomplishment of survival were what got him. He liked the fear, and the soaring horror he always felt when he realized he couldn’t get out of it and that it would hurt (which, despite his long acquaintance with the cane, it always did). He liked the confirmation it gave him, starring in such a ancient ritual. It let you know where you stood. No sticky negotiations with grudges, vendettas, disapproval. He liked the catharsis of that one Greek act.

Starting Friday afternoon Mark began feeling the customary dread. The fear and excitement, the urge to cut and run, it all coursed through him with the snippets of gossip infesting the dining hall. Everything was as he should wish it.

Why was it, then, that he woke Saturday morning with a curious numbness? The subterranean suspense building over those three long weeks had somehow disrupted his routine. He couldn’t feel the usual adrenaline. His mind wasn’t focused. All that energy had slipped through his fingers. And as he walked across the playing fields to Dr. Malcolm’s house that afternoon, Mark could only think of his allergies.

By anyone else’s account the setting was Arcadian. In England the sun only comes out one a week in summer, and it had that July morning. Clear blue skies, blazing heat, Cricket, and the bitter smell of roses. It made Mark want to puke.

He walked quickly, impatiently, as if the whole thing was an annoyance. Mark still hadn’t grasped what was about to happen to him. A birching from the Head would be bad. Horrible, if the truth was told. Certainly beyond his quite extensive experience. But even as he strode through cut grass, and sneezed, it didn’t seem real. He walked as if in a cotton-headed dream, his real self sequestered, his attention adrift. Not a posture for one about to be sacrificed for the satisfaction of the whole School.

Imagine the nasty shock he got when, upon being admitted to Dr. Malcolm’s house and ushered to the study to wait for him, he found, swinging her legs vigorously and chewing the inside of her lip, Casey Damn Morgan.

3.

Casey had got a nasty shock herself that morning. She’d been looking forward to going swimming in the afternoon, then pumping her sources for news of Mark Hastings’ comeuppance. But just before lunch, Mr. Harrison had called her into his study.

MI6 had an interesting footnote to their investigation. One more account, also through that Finnish server. Even more undeniable evidence: stories, letters, Usenet postings. Casey couldn’t contain her embarrassment. And to be confronted with the hard copies by Mr. Harrison. Running through the entire interview, like a draught, was the shadow of her trip to the Bench earlier that term. The acceptance the incident had brought her seemed years away from this hot, itchy interview. She’d expected it to last, that things would forever be squared away between them. Because Mr. Harrison was unlike her teachers in America, who treated her distantly for days, even after she’d served her detention. That very afternoon she had felt from him a recognition–at last after seven months in this cold, strange, sarcastic school.

But old habits die hard. After four or five days the memory wore off. People stopped talking about it and life returned to normal. The marks, however, remained–not only remained but explained themselves like a dying rainbow for the next three weeks. In the face of normality she forgot about that acceptance and felt only hot alienation each time she caught sight of herself. And that estrangement mingled with shame, which, unendurable as it was, mutated, late at night, into a form of self-loathing. Because she had let this happen, not only let it happen but submitted willingly, even (her mind whispered) hoping she might… Not unlike her first up-the-skirt-and-down-your-trousers: thrilling, terrifying at the time with an exhilaration that lasted several days, but by the next week, when she and the boy in trousers had drifted apart, enough to make her teeth hurt.

And she couldn’t stop thinking of Mark Hastings, not now, not any time during the last three weeks. She remembered, during her scathing interview with Mr. Harrison, something Mark had said that day on the Bench. She’d asked him why he submitted, so quixotically, to his beatings. It was machismo, surely?

“Maybe,” he’d said. “Or maybe because you deserve it.”

Casey was far too self-righteous ever to believe she deserved anything. But today. The shame and burden of Mr. Harrison’s excruciating discovery seemed almost too much to bear. Despite herself, she wanted him to like her again. And for the first time she saw that this might be the only vehicle. If given the chance, she wasn’t sure she would take an alternate punishment. For the first time in her life she was beginning to feel that an appropriate measure of physical pain might be the only solvent for this oppressive awkwardness.

When told to report to HM’s quarters at 2.30, Casey felt sick with fear. But an insubordinate strain couldn’t wait to get there. She knew Mark Hastings would be there too, and for what. It relieved the burden, in a way, to be hauled up with him. The isolation was gone. She didn’t have to feel guilty and ashamed, at least not about the fact of receiving punishment. Instead she felt quite the opposite. The fame of being caned with Mark Hastings, for the same chic offense, no less, would confirm her as one of them–those prickly, oblique, masculine people she’d lived amongst this last year. Mark would respect her. And this time he wouldn’t be able to let it slide. Because she’d been nailed by the Vice squad, same as him.

* * *

Things didn’t look promising when Mark entered the study.

“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” he’d demanded. Casey had somewhat expected this reaction. She knew she was intruding on an event he’d anticipated all month. Until that moment, it had been his very own funeral. But that, she reckoned, was life. It was about time he acknowledged her, even if it infuriated him. After all the curiosity she’d felt towards him, it was about time he got saddled with some in return.

“Same thing as you.”

Mark pursed his lips together, gave a quick glance down the hall, then sat opposite her in a straight-backed chair with his arms crossed.

“What?” he grunted. “Spill it.”

Casey had no idea if Mark ever felt anything as soppy as guilt. She rather suspected it was something else altogether with him when he spoke of deserving it. He bought into the whole system, he played by the rules, and when he lost he expected, wanted, the consequences. To question this was to question the entire basis for their little society. She thought it best to stick to the facts, and in forty-five seconds she’d given the precis.

Mark, in the end, had little to say. His beady glare got lost in the telling, and when she was done he hauled himself over to the couch and sat next to her, with a couple of feet between them.

So it was that they waited, for over twenty nerve-wracking minutes. Neither had any idea where HM was, or what was detaining him. Which was probably for the best. The truth would have wounded Casey’s pride, and Mark would have been thoroughly disgusted.

* * *

HM was deep in conversation in his back garden with a very dear friend, and Old Boy incidentally, who was paying a visit to the School during his annual pilgrimage to England. He was acquainted with young Casey Morgan. She’d first come to his attention when he’d received a copy of the School’s semi-annual literary magazine, which he was sent in gratitude for his generous donations to the School. He’d been struck by one of her poems, “Spilt Milk,” and had written her a short note expressing his admiration. A correspondence had sprung up between them (and luckily for him MI6 had not cracked all accounts from the Finnish server). But it was pure coincidence that he should be visiting the Headmaster on the same day that Casey Morgan was brought to Dr. Malcolm’s very perturbed attention.

“Send for her, too.” Dr. Malcolm had told Tim gruffly. “I’ll settle this once and for all.”

The OB inquired, delicately, and was enlightened just as delicately. And because he felt some responsibility for Casey, and had indeed heard from Casey herself about her first caning some weeks before, he couldn’t help but plead her case. He had no idea what his friend was like on the business end of a cane, but he tried to ensure that if the Headmaster wasn’t going to have mercy, he’d at least have compassion.

* * *

Which wasn’t far off from what Casey was hoping. And after twenty minutes her resolve crumbled; she spoke.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to take this,” she murmured. Even that whisper made Mark jump, slicing as it did through the Wilsonian silence. His stomach lurched. He crossed his legs.

“How much worse will it be… than before?”

Mark had never heard of such a question. Unabashed, obnoxious, American. The entire conversation was quite non-code.

“Considerably worse,” he told her flatly.

“But how much worse is considerably?” She just didn’t give up.

Mark opened his mouth for the final withering, but she cut him off, nerves of steel.

“Exactly,” she said.

Extraordinary.

Mark wasn’t about to get into speculation, and he’d no interest in nursing her fears. This wasn’t the way the day should be going. He was the one with an epic beating coming to him, one he still hadn’t been able to grasp. He was the one who ought to be having center stage.

“Why don’t you run away again?” A low blow, he knew, but one she deserved.

Casey just raised her eyebrows. She knew her parents would support her if she did. They were Quakers, from staunch pacifist stock; odd as it sounded, they were blissfully ignorant of this element in an English education. But even Mark could see she wasn’t running. She looked like she fully intended to stay. But she just couldn’t let things rest.

“I still don’t see why you take it,” she said.

Mark shrugged. If she didn’t get it, he could never explain. Americans were wholly unfamiliar with the concept of humility. So attached to their Rights were they.

Get caught, get caned. Yes, Mark, most very certainly. But this would be more. Surely something he couldn’t imagine, yet.

And why had she come if she didn’t understand? Why had she returned for her sixer that day? Fear, certainly. The need to eradicate it. But that wasn’t everything. There were also the stakes. Casey played high risk Poker. She was someone who peered over cliffs. She was captivated by the thought of taking a fall this supreme, of not escaping, of surviving.

“I’ll give you a tip,” Mark said at last. “Don’t try to take it and fight it as well.” She starred at him, flushing, flabbergasted. “When you want to stop and analyze, when you want to say This isn’t me, that’s the place to enter.”

4.

“Morgan,” said HM upon entering the room, “I’ll deal with you first. Mr. Harrison, if you’d be kind enough to take Hastings upstairs at wait for me there.”

“Certainly, Headmaster.” And then they were gone.

It took all the nerve Casey had just to stand up.

She’d had six from Trotman, but this would be different, whether she knew it yet or not. (Despite Trotman’s optimism, there hadn’t, in fact, been blood. The pain had been worse than she had ever known, or imagined for that matter, but the skin had not been broken.) But even though Trotman was a budding little sadist, he was only 18. He hadn’t been at it for long. Dr. Malcolm, you could say, was a virtual PhD on the subject. This was going to be something to remember.

He delivered the lecture in abbreviated form. The legality of it all. Lucky she wasn’t being prosecuted, let alone expelled. Her punishment, he assured her, would be commensurate. Casey felt a wave of nausea…

“Been caned before, Morgan?”

“Once sir,” she managed.

“How many strokes?”

“…Six, sir.”

“I see.” He was familiar Trotman’s work; he knew precisely what he was facing. “In that case I think twelve are in order. A dozen of the finest. Anything to say?”

It was all Casey could do to keep from actually crying. She couldn’t speak. So she shook her head. Dr. Malcolm was perhaps feeling compassionate, because he let this slide.

“Right then, jacket off, kneel over the back of the chair.”

As she’d once seen Mark do, Casey knelt. It was worse, she found, than bending. It accentuated her submission. Inexplicably she remembered the Headmaster at her old Quaker school. She’d overheard him, one day, talking to her best friend Emily. After reviewing Emily’s worst report card ever, Barclay Gates considered the one passing grade. “Well, perhaps we don’t need a post mortem just yet,” he’d said. “It’s still breathing.” At that moment Casey had desired failure, ravenously, perhaps for the only time in her life. But despite her jealousy, she had been transformed by Barclay’s goodness, however vicariously received. She had heard him that dimming November afternoon treat Emily not as a teacher or a parent, or even exactly as a friend. He’d avoided the pitfalls of disciplinarian and approached, with a terrifying insight, the source of her under-achievement. He’d outwitted every one of those thirteen-year-old defenses and come to consensus with Emily on what she truly wanted, and, more importantly, what she already possessed. He had persuaded. Like a good Quaker he had waited on the light of God, and then, having found it, clutched.

Bent over a chair in Dr. Malcolm’s study, feeling the tap of his cane on her too-thin school trousers, was a different Casey Morgan. She felt the first one had been gradually, and would be today entirely, sacrificed to this hard, formal machine that had ground its gears for centuries to produce England’s elite. That had its own logic. That thrived, as it laid upon the alter its dearest and best.

When she heard the swish she knew she’d made a mistake. When she felt the crack, she wished for Barclay Gates. And once the first fire had spread through her body, she knew it was the end of the old Casey Morgan.

* * *

Dr. Malcolm had an expert eye. He saw right away that his student was fighting it. This was not unusual. She wouldn’t relent. So when, after eight, she hadn’t given in, he made an adjustment for the final four.

Whether he gave her what she needed is anyone’s guess. The Headmaster gave her what he thought she should have.

* * *

The aftermath was not so simple as before. This one took her beyond what she could control, far beyond, certainly. No question about it. She was breathing heavily as she stood up, but still she fought every breath of the way. She managed to contain the tears in Dr. Malcolm’s study, even though they hadn’t run their course. She saved the flood for later, and, after ducking into a disused summer-house on the edge of his property, she let loose and bawled–sharp, fierce, head and heart, everything.

What was she evacuating? Pain maybe. Terror. Or maybe something of the grief that comes with transmutation. Because she wasn’t sure she wanted to be this person.

And just as this was starting to wane, another surprise hit Casey Morgan. She found that despite the pain (or perhaps because of it) her mind was still wrapped around Mark Hastings. Something about the preceding thirty minutes had increased that magnetism, not weakened it. Even with her stuffy head she couldn’t help but imagine the room upstairs where Mark had been taken. She was pretty sure he’d be made to undress, and take it unprotected from the start. She wondered how long it would take him to reach that knowing-he-was-in-trouble stage. And she wondered if, this time, his panic would overcome him.

And she thought she could hear, somewhere not in her ears, pieces of what they were saying.

“There will be no set number of strokes, Hastings. For almost two years you’ve been pushing me to my limit, and this is it. I intend to birch you until I’m fully satisfied. Anything to say?”

She thought she saw Mark, too stunned to answer.

“Well?” she heard.

“N-no, sir.”

The silence penetrated her. And her brain heard the Head, cool and distant, uttering.

“Fine then. Mr. Harrison, would you please prepare him?”

Casey thought she could see it all.

* * *

But surely this was an over-avid imagination, unhinged by unprecedented pain. Surely she was wrong thinking this one would be different. Surely every beating got through to Mark. Surely that’s why he sought it out in the first place.

But if it was getting through, why would he come back for more?

Why had she?

Well she hadn’t, exactly. She had never in a million years imagined she wasn’t secure in her electronic vice. Her second encounter with the school cane had not been voluntary. Quite.

* * *

Twenty minutes later Casey saw a figure moving across the lawn. She darted out the door of the gazebo, but she couldn’t make a clean break without being seen. So she crouched behind it, hidden by the lattice work, and waited, backside still screaming, for the coast to clear. But it didn’t clear. She heard the crunch of footsteps through tall grass and the scrape of the gazebo door opening. Through the lattice, she saw one of the benches teeter, then be steadied by a hand on the floor. The wrist above the hand wore a school blazer, and she knew whose. Although she could only see the space between the bench and the floor, she could tell Mark had sprawled across the bench on his stomach and was breathing heavily. The breaths became more staggered, and sharp. And then, before she’d realized the transition, they had voice behind them. A guttural, un-socialized sound, spooling up from the base of the spine. And she saw, on the cracked floor, drops, like milk dripping off a table, darkening the cement with puddles, distinct and inconsequential, as if a human person was trying, with molecules, to wash away the sins of the world.

29 June, 1995

[And here is an excerpt from Marky's response to the story, as reported by M]

It was cheeky of me to steal your Bench.  It was an unexpected privilege to be allowed to share the Chapel Balcony with its owner.  That in itself has raised some more complicated questions which time, I suspect, will answer.

Mark was indignant, tho’, at the suggestion that “Dixon and Tremlett would never let him live it down if they discovered he’d become friendly with a Vth form girl”.  I told him these things were necessary for the development of the narrative, but he was unmollified. Because of what he sensed in Casey, and because of the way she came back to Trotman’s study, he is adamant that, if that was how they felt–which he doubts–they would have been told to ‘fuck off’, in the language of the changing rooms.  When you reach the Lower VIth, you’re not quite so run-with-the-crowd, he says.

And he was as angry as I’ve ever seen him at the suggestion that, “by next morning, he’d managed to forget about it”.  “How dare she,” he said, “of course I wouldn’t have forgotten it!  What does she think we are, back in the Dark Ages, or something? We gave her the benefit of the doubt, and she came aboard. She may have felt crap about it afterwards, she might even have tried to get out of the boat and swim for the shore, but once you’re in, you’re in.  The marks may fade, but you can’t un-cane someone.  I don’t care how stand-offish she was afterwards, Life Had Changed Forever.”  I felt by that stage he’d probably made his point, but Mark doesn’t give up. “That’s why the stuff outside the Headmaster’s Study was wrong.  I would never have made that ‘running away again’ jibe.  And when Dr Malcolm appeared, I’d have tried my best to persuade him that most of it had been my idea, that Casey deserved to be treated leniently.”

“What, so you could be even more of a hero?” I asked.  “And in truth, could you ever in a million years have said something as perceptive and intelligent as, ‘when you want to stop and analyse, when you want to say–’”.

“All right, all right,” Mark said, crossly.  “You’re going to get into terrible trouble with your inverted commas in a moment.”

And the truth was, of course, that he was simply looking for reasons not to read the important bits, the bits that looked inside his own soul, either directly or–even more deviously–through Casey Morgan’s eyes.

I don’t know if you’re right about the reason for punishment, that ‘chipping away at the anxiety’.  But I think you probably are.

I do know that you have caught, with absolute precision, my feeling for you, being a range quite outside my experience. Delightful, worrying, exciting, frustrating, different.

Please God, let her not leave him alone.  Please God, let her come in, and hug him, and draw strength from him, and give him strength in return.  Help him show compassion, this time.  Let it, just for once on this godforsaken, lonely planet, be worth his weeping.

Tell us that’s how it ends, please?

[And so, this is what I wrote.]

epilogue – rain

People have said that the summer-house was haunted. Not because anyone had died there, but because so many people–lovers, families, friends–had lived such charged moments in that lead-paned shelter, waiting for the rain to stop. There have been no sightings, no actual specters, but those who, for whatever reason, have found themselves there engaged with those things so tiny they thunder, have felt a presence. Some thing, some one, multiple someones perhaps, lurked just beyond the limit of vision, or on the other side of the glass, made blurry by sheets of rain.

Mark had been to the summer-house before. He knew about its haunting. That is why he came.

* * *

The sun outside was an uncontested bully, permitting no cloud so long as it blazed. The thing it couldn’t pierce, though, was a cold, clammy brain. One in irons. One remembering… When you want to say, This isn’t me–That is the place to enter.

Casey entered that day on the Bench. But the entry got lost afterwards in the crushing bureaucracy of her brain. Like a vaccine that requires three doses, the first time did not suffice. The funny thing was, as soon as Casey heard this advice out loud, as soon as Mark informed her brain, she couldn’t take it. And she resisted every step of the way. Like a person told not to think of pink elephants, she couldn’t help it. And as she peered through the trellis at the puddles collecting beneath the bench, she was still fighting.

When she stood up to make her escape, she was rewarded with a shaft of pain–dense and sharp–beginning in her backside, shooting all the way up the spinal cord to the cerebellum. That is when she heard it. Somewhere not in her ears there was talking.

Don’t let her leave him there… Maybe the ghosts. Maybe her brain. Maybe we who are watching but cannot affect.

And she heard hissing, When you want to say…

And she heard a breath…

* * *

Casey Morgan turned around. She circled the gazebo. She pushed on the door. And once inside the world changed utterly. It didn’t turn a different color, but the noise fell away, leaving only the hot, horrible, atomic action which must be lived.

Casey felt her shoes dissect the cement circle which separated the summer-house from the earth. She couldn’t see it properly; her corneas were covered in sheets of tears. Something had stripped the skin from inside her, leaving only blood and nerves.

Even though the door had scraped against the floor, Mark did not look up. Nothing for him in the world besides this fire in the heart, pressure in the head, ache in the throat that felt like splitting.

At the side of that weeping boy, Casey dropped. Her knees split open, and she felt the blood start. Her shoes were too tight, strangling circulation. She left them alone. She gave in to the drowning, and she found, under water, not suffocation, but breath. And with that breath she gave the final quarter.

Only Mark Hastings heard the sound. Maybe he was born with the right kind of ears.

It’s me, he heard her say.

She cupped her hands under that bench and caught the salt water, small and scorching.

Then out came an arm, like a tentacle, a trap. A blue-blazered wrist caught the back of her neck and dragged it down, to the bench, to the source.

Mark drew her head against his–burning with fever, shuddering like Malaria. And he held her so fiercely, so hard, that it split the personality, his and hers. And that rage, that grief, that co-suffering stuck, like atomic bonds, quasars and quarks meeting their match.

But unlike Casey, Mark had a voice. His breath still came, and he used it.

“I know it’s you,” shot into her ear. “I know it is. And this is me.”

[And then, because he had to have the last word, Marky wrote a follow up called On the Other Side of the Clouds.]