supplicium post mortem

When I write the phrase little chat, it is usually in upper case, Little Chat. I think you already know what that means. It is probably time I attribute the phrase to its originator. Mark first used, upper case, early in our correspondence, but I incorrectly remember hearing it first in a vignette he wrote for me.

Our email correspondence (until he moved to Gotham) stretches to almost a thousand emails each, almost all of them saved individually in txt files with names like “fmark232.txt” [the 232nd email from Mark to me] or “tomark33″ [my 33rd email to Mark]. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a reference amongst all that, especially 15 years after the fact.

Tonight I was searching for the text of this Little Chat vignette, which I did using the Search function on my PC. It turned up many emails, and the first one I opened turned out to be the one in which he confessed that he loved me. I barely remember this email, but encountering it again absolutely slayed me. I won’t quote it. My eyes are still swollen.

I did eventually find Mark’s vignette and have posted it below as well as under the Stories tab. The scenario was Mark and Casey at the Lewises. This was an alternate reality to Home School, one we only played a few times. The idea was that Mark and Casey had run away from the Orphanage and had been found and adopted by the Perfect People (Dr. & Mrs. Lewis). I later (or was it earlier?) wrote a companion piece to his vignette, which I also posted under the Stories tab. After reading them both, I feel his is much better: more direct, less fussy and complicated, more spontaneous and full of heart. Looking at both scenarios from far away, I would say that we never lived or much played the letter of them, but the mood and heart of them were a constant feature of our life together, especially Mr. Prior’s life with Casey.

Without further ado, then, here is Mark’s piece, Wednesdays.

Wednesdays

by Mark Hastings

Sundays are for Regulars, for weekly cleaning.  Sundays are always spent together, at the Lewises.  Casey and Mark go to bed sore and peaceful and clean and warm.  Whole.  Sundays are a deep rich blue, the smell of dark polished wood, a full stomach and a feeling of belonging.

By Wednesday, that’s worn off a little.  Mr. Lewis is fond of saying, as he shaves on Wednesday morning, that Wednesday is the worst day of the week. Equidistant from the comfort of weekend.  Neither the residual freshness of Tuesday, or the slight anticipation of Thursday.  Nothing but acres of dullness.  Mrs. Lewis has Commitments on Wednesdays, so supper is usually something cold.  Mark and Casey both have School things that they hate. For Mark, it’s morning gym, ninety minutes of effort with the school Sergeant’s swagger stick flailing its response to slackness, and the inevitability of at least one vault-horse caning, ‘poer incurriger les otters’.   For Casey, double Latin in the afternoon with the psychotically sarcastic Mr. Whitworth, whose greatest pleasure is to decline irregular verbs in time with his strap-strokes, and who makes a virtue of leathering girls just as hard as boys.  Out in front of the class, but facing towards your peers so they are spared the worst witness of unprotected strapping, and can better concentrate on construe.

Mark has learned to avoid the Wednesday vault-horse, and Casey the mid-week strap, because on Wednesday evenings they have their “Little Chat”.

The children do the dishes after supper, while Mr. Lewis goes to his study, and Mrs. Lewis rests up.  There is a sense of anticipation, although it isn’t the edginess of Sunday, before the Regulars, because often a Little Chat is just that.  Even so, the dishes get done well, and quietly, on the whole, on Wednesdays.  Mark and Casey smarten themselves up, and jaunt carefully along the downstairs corridor to the study.  Sometimes Mrs. Lewis joins them, sometimes not.

Little Chats are lucky-dippy.  In the months since Casey’s arrival they have ranged from a particularly uncomfortable interview over a broken ornament (Casey), cleverly replaced on its shelf (Mark) and not discovered broken for some time afterwards (Mrs. Lewis), to a riotous game of Racing Demon in which Mr. Lewis was heard to swear when Casey stole his Ace of Spades, was sent to the corner by his family and threatened with a very hard whacking by Mark if he ever did it again.  On average, one or both of the Lewises feel that one or both of the children would benefit from a little additional discipline perhaps one week in two.

Little Chat discipline is always the same – slipper, paddle or hand, administered in traditional manner, across the knee of the parent in the clock-ticky quiet of Mr. Lewis’s study.  It’s very different from Regulars. Canes, birches, crops and straps are banned.  Punishments are measured in minutes, rather than strokes.  Usually either a Quin, being–as Casey might explain–five minutes, or a Dix, being ten.  Mark hates Dixes, with a passion, especially when they’re paddle, and administered by Mrs. Lewis. Casey has mixed feelings about the whacking, but she loves the closeness and warmth of Little Chats, the fire glowing orange while the wind blows white outside on winter Wednesdays.

So, Wednesdays are made red, a smell of incense, a little adventure, and fun.

Think you?

My first and only encounter with a hostile authority (in scene) came during my first visit to Englandland. I stayed with M for three weeks. It was our third visit, in the sixth month of knowing each other. We played a lot that trip in the voracious way that you do when you are just starting to play. The setting was still “College” (standard issue English Public School, co-ed), and RP was making inroads with his relationship to Casey, as TL was with Mark. There was an exploration of implements, and even, sometime during the visit, experimentation with That Thing (a first for both of us, and a whole other story). M was living in a small, rented flat and working his corporate job during the day. I was mooching around, attempting to write (mostly unsuccessfully), and pretty much waiting for him to get home in the evenings so we could be together.

The scene in question arose out of some joint story-telling about a certain unpleasant prefect in the House by the name of Martin Halstead. Arrogant, sadistic, scornful, he was not to be trifled with. Via some confusion on my part about the way the hot-water storage worked in that flat, Casey managed to get on the wrong side of Halstead by using up all the hot water one morning before he got to have his bath. More out-of-scene storytelling floated the idea of being “sprung” into a scene first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to this, but I wasn’t against trying. I think I didn’t know if he’d actually go through with it.

But he did.

Malcolm McDowell's character in If never beat anyone, but he looks like Halstead here.

Early morning, I found myself awakened by a very nasty specimen in College school uniform. Martin Halstead demanded that I report to the Houseroom in full uniform in five minutes. Exit.

I hauled myself from sleep, feeling 1) a combination of scared/excited that this scene was actually happening, and 2) violated, because I’d been descended on when I was asleep, wholly unprotected. At any rate, I put on Casey’s preferred uniform (gray trousers, blazer, tie) and reported to the Houseroom.

There Halstead lit into me.

MH (with profound scorn): Just what do you imagine you’re wearing, girl?

cdm: My uniform.

MH (with even greater scorn): Girls at this school wear skirts.

cdm: We’re allowed to wear the boys’ uniform, too!

MH (witheringly): Go and change. Now. And be quick about it unless you want more than you’re already getting.

I/she went off and changed, feeling uneasy and slightly gross. Not only did a skirt afford only one layer of protection, but it also made it much easier for a creep like Martin Halstead to… I wasn’t sure what. I/she was also incensed at the injustice of it. Girls were allowed to wear the boys’ uniform. It was perfectly legal, and here he was saying I couldn’t do it! I have a tendency to get overwrought about injustice I am powerless to affect. This is why torture films, like the spate of political dramas that came out in the 1980s about South Africa and South America, squicked me. Here was Martin Halstead already demonstrating his unjust authority, and the scene had not even properly begun. I felt desperate.

I returned to the Houseroom, feeling under-dressed in skirt and gray knee-socks. Halstead delivered a searingly condescending ticking-off about my insolence at having used his bath water (as if water were reserved). I needed taking down a peg, he declared. And, he informed me, that was precisely what he intended to do.

from "The Moral Reformers"

I should say that this was in most respects an authentic prefectorial scene. School literature was full of these kinds of despots, as was M’s actual Public School. By Kipling’s standards, Martin Halstead was a pussycat. Up until this moment, I had loved reading stories like this, chapters like “The Moral Reformers” in Stalky, or even the war with Flashman in Tom Brown. Now that it was happening, however, it was having a very different effect. It was pushing my powerless/injustice buttons and winding me up dangerously.

Then the sentence: Halstead announced I would be receiving 18 strokes of the cane. I can’t remember the arithmetic, but this chilled me to the bone. I had never before taken that much in one go. The most I’d ever taken was nine (I think, though possibly 12). But what really filled me with dread was the character I was facing. Martin Halstead was going to hit as hard as he could. He cared nothing for my feelings. Nothing would make him back off. He hated me and wanted to see me suffer. He intended to break me.

I removed my jacket as instructed and stood before the Houseroom table. I don’t remember now whether he announced the protection then or half-way through, but I was to get nine over underpants and nine unprotected. It was unheard-of in severity. Also, the lack of protection struck me as obscene. Here I was a 5th form girl with this Upper 6th form boy, and he proposed to cane me unprotected, without witnesses? There was no arguing with him, however; and perhaps I was beyond arguing. I was moving rapidly into survival mode.

I bent over, and the first stroke confirmed my suspicion that there would be no holds barred. It was uncompromisingly hard, and it was delivered with complete hostility. It was by far the hardest whacking I had ever received.

I don’t remember the stroke-by-stroke details (this was almost 15 years ago now), but I remember that I stayed in place; and I remember that my body was yelping involuntarily through most of the second half. What I remember most is what happened to me mentally. Pushed to my limit, I found myself very calm, and very cold. I was a million miles away from crying, breaking, or even actually caring. Under attack, I retreated into a concentration-camp-like deadness. I could never win in this situation; I could only hope to survive it intact. And the only way to keep myself intact was to hide that self very far away. My body might have been yelling, but the real me—the real Casey—was not there. This was happening to someone else, someone not-us. Martin Halstead got his licks, but he didn’t get us. He would never touch  us.

When it was over and I stood up, I think he was disappointed. I was utterly dry-eyed, neutral, and stony faced. Robotically, I gave the replies he wanted. I only pretended to look him in the eye when he demanded it. He did his best at a devastating after-jaw, but eventually he dismissed me.

Unperturbed, I left the Houseroom. And Casey, wearing her entire uniform—blazer, shoes, and all—got back into bed and crawled under the covers, where she stayed most of the morning in a kind of suspended animation.

I think M kissed me goodbye before leaving for work, and I think I faked it enough to reassure him. I can’t remember very well.

Later in the morning, Casey got up, and I say Casey because the adult me was nowhere to be found. She had taken charge and no amount of pulling myself together could have ejected her. Casey, still stony, got up and wrote a long and measured letter to Dr. Malcolm (the Headmaster) registering a formal complaint about what had happened that morning. She was well aware that complaining wasn’t Done. She did not care. At this point, she took a perverse pleasure in violating School Practice.

The thrust of her complaint was that it had been unseemly for Halstead to have caned her unprotected without any witnesses. She also argued that, while she may have deserved punishment, the punishment given was out of proportion to the crime, and that a common understanding of uniform had been contradicted. She appealed to Dr. Malcolm to uphold justice.

She and I went out later, around the time M was due home, so that he could find her letter and figure out what to do about it. I seem to remember later that evening (right after we got back, or later?) Casey being summoned to see Mr. Prior. She went, still dead-in-heart, figuring he, too, could do whatever he wanted to her. She was beyond caring.

But Mr. Prior was no Martin Halstead. He was distressed to have learned what had happened. In fact, he informed her, Martin Halstead had been stripped of his prefect status. He would not be tormenting anyone else. Casey, gobsmacked. Furthermore, Mr. Prior wanted to apologize personally to Casey, for having failed to keep a sufficient eye on her. It shouldn’t have happened, he told her. It wouldn’t again.

This was not the end of the trip, and we played many more scenes, though none that hostile or that severe—not then, and not, that I recall, ever (at least with me bottoming). There wasn’t any blame on either side for this scene, but we both learned something about me, and about the ice-cold survival instinct I appeared to possess.

I have read a lot, then and today, from people who achieve a kind of release or catharsis from very hard scenes, from being taken beyond their limits. It always sounds appealing in theory, but M and I both learned in that early scene that it would never work that way with me. He, as a bottom, had cravings to be pushed like that, but as a top, he concluded that a) I would never respond that way; I would merely go dead; and b) if by some extraordinary action I ever was pushed that far, the results would be utterly destructive.

I know many people are different from me in this regard, but knowing this about myself has saved me from thinking I might enjoy playing with hostile authority. Despite having organized myself around it as a child, it was, and still is, a place with nothing but damage to offer me.

And connected with this—in my retrospective mind—is RP’s instinct, sharpened over time, generally to give Casey less than she asked for. She had, and has, an enormously provocative streak, and in the beginning he sometimes mistook it for a request for lots of whacking. As previously discussed, there were times in that first year when she would bring home a pile of dockets from an absolute train-wreck of a day. Pretty soon, he cottoned on to the fact that this was an expression of anger, a self-destructive impulse, like her impulse to break things or tear up her punishment book. Pretty soon he got to the point where he would leaf through her pile of dockets, chuck them aside, and proceed to deal moderately but non-legalistically with her, giving her just enough to stop the downward spiral and not a touch more. Sometimes he refused altogether to whack her and would simply grab her and hug her against her angry will.

Where, dear Lord, is another man like this?

He wasn’t a relative. He wasn’t her godfather. He wasn’t even her guardian, but she’d been sent to stay with him in his rambling, damp house on Galway Bay. She was to call him Professor, and he spent much of his time like the professor in the Narnia books, locked away pursuing unfathomable and possibly magical matters.

The Professor lived with an Irish Setter—mad, soppy, antic. They took long daily walks and expected her to accompany them. Over the Burren, along the shore, up Connemara hills, in rain, in sun, in gale they walked.

He had no patience for petty regulations of the modern world. He bought his meat from a butcher out of the back of his farm, not licensed, but extraordinarily fresh and good. His milk came from a neighbor’s cow, his eggs from chickens down the lane. The hysterical alarms of contemporary life—H1N1, salmonella, pedophiles, climate change—meant nothing to him.

He did insist on certain courtesies. When he entered the room, she was to stand. When granted admission to his study, she was to give a small bow, more appropriate to a German schoolboy, she thought, than to an orphaned American girl. And when something she said or did indicated to him, by whatever mysterious code, that she required discipline, he administered it after the method of his childhood, with a slipper across his knee, or a worn leather strap. It was better, he said, all of it. More healthy, more traditional, more human.

Read the other folks writing this week:

• Travis King
• Rafi

Daniel was a rebel. His jeans looked like he lived in them. His back pocket held a comb and a pack of Marlboroughs. He was sultry, sharp-eyed, a reckless driver, her brother’s best friend, and a shoe-in to Harvard. Tonight he was her babysitter.

She protested for form’s sake—eleven was too old for a babysitter—but her father was firm. She spent the afternoon deciding what to wear and settled on jeans plus the sweater her dad said made her eyes look green.

Daniel let her make t.v. dinners. He let her watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High but didn’t respond to her commentary on scenes she labeled “scary/personal.” Instead he pored over his physics notebook and chain-smoked out the patio door. When he went to the bathroom, she swiped his Zippo and a pair of cigarettes.

He returned and began to hunt for his lighter. She, pretending to help, went to the kitchen. The cigarettes were hard to light. He walked in before she’d succeeded.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he balked.

She grinned: “One for you, one for me.”

Grimmacing, he took the cigarettes from her hand, took a drag, and took her under his arm. Bracing his foot on a chair, he lifted her off the floor and over his knee. His hand hurt as much as her dad’s, more. “If I ever hear of you lighting up,” he said, “I’ll give you something to make this feel like pattycakes. Got it, kiddo?”

Another cracker week for 3F—well done, writers! Read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• PapaTomLA
• S - welcome! (and a promising new blog)
• Graham
• Dominoxx

Casey was turning nine, and at each birthday, memory grew fuzzy. If she had once been fifteen, or thirteen, or ten, recollections carried no more authority than a dream. Even if she protested (I’m eleven!), Mr. Prior dismissed such wishful thinking: Don’t be ridiculous. Casey is nine, full stop.

Now that she was nine, Mr. Prior said, she would be old enough for the cane. Only the junior cane, and only if she was very naughty.

I’m not naughty. I’m good! But I don’t care. And anyway, at least I’m too old —

She was not too old, he’d interrupt, for anything. Not too old to have her temperature taken that way, not too old for That Thing, not too old to be put across his knee, and not too old to sit on it afterwards.

Mr. Prior would never be in league with her false maturity, he told her, any more than he would condone her false modesty, false niceness, false anything.

She didn’t see why he bothered so much. He had his real kid to care about, his real kid to buy birthday presents for. Not her.

This notion made its way down the pike almost as often as I’m-too-old, and Mr. Prior afforded it about the same respect. You are my real kid; I love you as if you were my own. He would hold her, at times wiggling, until she gave up, gave out, gave in. Surrendered to a birthday, again nine, again his, still loved.

Read other folks writing this week:

• the marvellous Rafi
• the marvellous PapaTomLA
• the marvellous Nettagyrl
• a warm welcome to the marvellous Graham Grey

She was a transparent liar. She never lied about things she had done, nothing deliberately mendacious, but she had trouble admitting what was inside her chest. She thought he had paranormal guessing muscles, but he could see it all on her face, in the blushes, the set of the mouth, the water in the eyes, everything.

A war waged inside Casey Morgan, between what he wasn’t always sure. Between niceness and the truth. Between the cruel task-master and the little girl. Between the noxious demons he brushed, forcefully, off her shoulder – oh, he believed in demons. He knew their power, their seductive corrosion, their allure – between the devils at her ear and the huge, throbbing heart.

Counter-irritant: that’s what it was when he put her across his knee. There might be a bit of discipline, a bit of reassurance, a bit of atonement, and a bit of calming-down about it, but more than anything, the spanking drew the sting of a pain deeper inside, the kind he couldn’t salve directly. When she cried – whether after a long, hard slippering or a light application of his hand, which was what she needed most of all – when the tears issued forth, warm rain drops on the knee of his trousers, he loved her, so much that it hurt. She almost cried holes in his trousers that first year, so many tears so long held in.

God, could he not hold her again, that girl, that heart?

What is Flash Fiction Friday?

Read other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• Melen’s Rayne
• Nettagyrl
• PapaTomLA

— Farmboy, move that planter over here for me.

— As you wish.

— And those crates, farmboy, take them down the cellar.

— As you wish.

* * *

— Farmboy? Do you see the table and chairs down there? Bring them up and set them up in the garden.

— As you wish.

* * *

— Finished are you, farmboy? Then go to the pump and wash yourself, thoroughly.

— As you wish.

* * *

— Leave your shirt there, farmboy, and fetch me that riding crop… Now bend over that, there, and count these out for me.

— As you wish.

* * *

— Stand up, farmboy, and look at me. I want you to wait here until the clock tolls the hour. Then put on your shirt and come into the house. There you will find a girl who has been impertinent. Deal with her as her father would, if he were here. Please.

— As you wish…

Microfantasy Monday is the brainchild of Sweltering Celt. The theme this week was heavy lifting.

He sat in the wing-chair, window open, admitting the sounds of assassin croquet. A timid rap on the door announced his second-eldest.

“Justin said you had a question?” Her tone conveyed mistrust of her younger brother, in this and everything.

He gestured to the footstool. She approached but did not sit.

“What?” she demanded, injured innocence.

“I’m wondering,” he said idly, “whom you are texting in the middle of the night.”

She crossed her arms. “No one. And if Justin says different, then you should talk to him about lying.”

“Differently,” he correctly. “Do you mean to say you aren’t texting after bedtime?”

“I’m not stupid, Dad.” Her voice exasperated, and so very plausible, as usual.

She’d talked him into the unlimited plan, promising to pay for it herself with earnings from her job at The Sno-Kone, and having agreed she would not violate her bedtime. He’d agreed, unwisely he saw now. He’d never been through this with his eldest daughter, who was too busy with her violin in Aspen this summer to be tempted by technology. His soon-to-be tenth grader, however…

“This plan is excellent,” he said. “You can’t exceed the limit, so we can avoid the run-ins that plagued us last year.”

She blushed and scowled. “That was the point, Dad.”

He reached for a paper on his desk. “Also, they provide the most helpful itemized bills, date, time and source of each text.” She blanched, and then burst into tears. “I think you’d better go cut a switch,” he said, setting the gas bill back on his desk.

Read other folks writing this week:

• Travis King
• Frenchies
• Rafi
• Nettagyrl
• Papatomla

She waited on the bench outside the Rector’s study. With summer, and with the bench in regular use again, he had ordered it moved outside, in the rose garden, next to his French windows. She thought there was probably some theological reason for this, but that was not the most compelling mystery to her just then. The sky was still bright. It felt odd to sit out-of-doors wearing pyjamas, dressing gown, and slippers.

She wondered if she should have taken the imposition – 300 lines for not having her report done – instead of the note home. She wasn’t sure what the Rector would have to say about it. Mr. Prior had always taken a light attitude to her shirking schoolwork, as he thought she took school far too seriously in general. The Rector had unusual views, but as this was her first docket home, who could guess?

She’d delivered it to him when he returned after evensong, and she thought it a poor sign that he’d frowned and told her to be waiting on the bench at bedtime. She was learning the names of some of the garden occupants; that tree, for instance, an ash. In Stalky, the implement of choice was something called a Ground Ash. If it had anything to do with this tree, it struck her as barbaric. The cane in the Rector’s hatstand was thin but stingy.

The French windows opened. He beckoned, face softer, lips pursed. She left the scented garden for the study.

Read the other folks writing this week:

• PapaTomLA
• Vanimp
• Rafi

The wind blew from the golf course across her pink bedroom as Bad Timmy faced a disgruntled Father in the piano room.

“Casey?”

She jumped and, heart pounding, peeked around her dollhouse to see a man, wearing a tweed jacket. His furrowed brow softened.

“You look like your picture,” he said, his voice a tenderness she had never known.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Mr. Prior. We haven’t much time.” He beckoned to her. She dropped Bad Timmy and emerged from behind the dollhouse, smoothing her grey linen Little House on the Prairie dress.

“A fondness for costumes already, I see. What were you doing back there?”

She blushed, thinking of Timmy’s impending spanking. “Nothing.”

Suddenly, he stood before her, cupping her face in his hands. “Naughty,” he admonished.

“I’m not! I’m good!” Her heart thudded with a sudden air of emergency.

“Nice, Casey, isn’t the same as good.”

“I’m not bad!”

“You just fibbed to me, didn’t you?”

Fear hovered. She didn’t even know this man, yet she dreaded him thinking her bad.

“And did you have permission to take that Twinkie from the bread box…? I thought not.” He put his arm around her and hugged her hard. His jacket blew backwards as if tugged by strings. “I’ll be back,” he said. “You won’t always be alone.”

She grasped him without knowing why. He was fading – melting? – now almost gone, his English voice a whisper in her ears: “Tell the truth, little Casey…always love…”

Apologies to Audrey Niffenegger for this one. I was in mind of her Time Traveler’s Wife. The picture Mr. Prior refers to is currently my Twitter icon.

Check out other stories from this week:

• vanimp
  
• Thursday’s Child
  
• PapaTomLA
• swimnaked