supplicium post mortem

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?

My childhood tgi fantasies tended to revolve around hostile authorities, which is why I liked The Orphanage so much. The orphanage in my mind evolved out of my infatuations with Annie (as experienced in the Broadway musical), Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child, Oliver Twist, Daddy Long Legs, A Little Princess, plus any other orphanage I could find in the pages of literature.

A notable exception was Mandy, by Julie Edwards (Julie Andrews). Mandy imprisoned my imagination and my heart, but on some level made me uneasy, perhaps because it was in fact closer to me than the hostile authority orphanage. Mandy is about an orphan (named Mandy!) who has lived her whole life in a small, kind, homey orphanage. She’s allowed freedoms, has friends, and is beloved by the orphanage matron. But, she longs irrationally for something else. She climbs over the orphanage wall, finds a cottage in the woods, and secretly begins fixing it up. Long story short, in a moment of crisis, she is rescued by the landowner on whose property the cottage stands (a man on a horse, no less) and taken to recover at his big house. The man and his wife (?) fall for her. Then she gets better and goes back to the orphanage. Except now, even though she’s back with her friends and people who love her, she misses the man and his wife. It’s enormously conflicted and sad. Eventually, they adopt her. Mandy pressed somehow on a loneliness I felt as a child, even though I was growing up within a loving, caring family. In many ways, I was unable to deal with this feeling. The hostile orphanage was easier.

My orphanage (which I imagined most nights while falling asleep, which I attempted to draw in my notebooks) was called St. Peter’s. It was a special admissions type place. I (my character, whose name varied) was brought there one dark, rainy night by a priest of slight acquaintance. My mother had been an actress (the real kind, not an “actress”) but had died and left me alone, à la Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. This priest had presided over the funeral and out of pity brought me to St. Peter’s, knowing of its sterling reputation. I was about nine.

This orphanage was run by a grossly exaggerated and fictionalized version of Mrs. R, my children’s theater director, with the other children as avatars of my children’s theater friends. And in fact the children at this orphanage were chosen for their talents, and Matron made money taking us around and having us perform for people. So, even though we lived a horrible, hard life and had to scrub floors and do every kind of difficult chore and were subject to the meanest discipline, after dinner every night we were sent to the dining room and told to get on with our rehearsals. We kids organized our own shows and practiced them together. Sure, there might be rivalries amongst us, but we were absolutely united against the orphanage authorities: Matron; her scary (and retarded) brother, Jack; and the other people in her employ, who could also punish us as they chose.

There was of course a Bench at the orphanage, but you could be whacked at any time for any reason. We comforted each other in our misery and always—always—had our minds on the future when we would Run Away. Of course we would fail many times, and be severely punished for our efforts, but one day, my cadre and I would make it. We would escape, and after a period of thrilling, Faginesque adventures in The City (which would naturally include theatricals), I would happen upon the Perfect People, who would adopt me.

The promise of the Perfect People was essential, but my fantasies rarely left the orphanage. Something about the harshness and despair, coupled with the camaraderie and resistance comforted me. The dynamic with authority was important. You couldn’t win against Matron, not openly, so your only option was to resist her internally, to obey her, but not in your heart, to pretend compliance while secretly plotting your escape. The hostile authority was intoxicating for a Good Girl like me, naturally. As a Good Girl, I depended slavishly on the good opinion of the authority, unless of course the authority was a Bad Authority. Then, I could resist it, disobey it, undermine it, hate it. No wonder the orphanage was like crack to me. There I could transgress, break bounds, get into trouble and still be heroic and good. There, punishment was a badge of nobility. The heroine always suffered punishment, and yet she was always good. Win, win and win!

Perhaps you are feeling like you might be sick now. I am, too. But the interesting point is what happened once I actually began to play at age 26.

When I first started to play, APD, I wanted to be in the English school world. It was a nice blend of hostile, but not fully hostile authority. I would call it detached authority. Ideally, they were fair and not abusive, but stoicism was certainly called for. I enjoyed exploring the extent of my stoicism, and I felt a particular buzz because I had, for so much of my life, been so very fearful, particularly of physical challenges.

But—but. M’s instinct with Casey tended towards the domestic, and towards the firm and compassionate end of semi-con play. We imagined the orphanage together, but we never played it, at least not with me as the bottom. Actually, we played Casey at the Perfect People once or twice, and that “Casey” turned out not to be much fun; she was so traumatized, she scarcely spoke. She wasn’t very robust. So, whether through observation or instinct, M realized, I think, that although I had come out of the orphanage, it would not be a good place for me to visit, now.

We did one scene early in our relationship with him as a hostile top. It taught us a lot, not least because it was such a disaster. But that is another story…

Don’t you wish you could do that more often? I can think of several conversations, subsequently requiring mind-bleach, which wouldn’t have got to that stage if I’d been able to safeword, lol.

As previously discussed, I’ve never really played with safewords. This isn’t out of any philosophical stance, but simply because they proved extraneous in my play relationship and in the few scenes I did outside that relationship. Another common practice that has never quite entered my play is the warm-up. This probably has to do with the fact that when I play, it is always–through role–real, in which case a warm-up would seem at cross-purposes, and thus on some level probably pervy. I think, perhaps, I have been missing something.

I’ve no idea why, but this morning popped into my head a memory of a trip to the doctor for planters warts. This would have been just after I met M, probably just after my first trip to Englandland to visit him (three weeks of a dark December in Surrey). Planters warts are a painful and difficult-to-eradicate infection usually in the sole of your foot, in my case in the flesh of my heel. You have to soak your foot twice a day, scrape with a razor blade down to the roots of the thing, and then staunch the blood with a salicylic acid preparation. (Sorry, graphic part over.) Let us simply say that in addition to the expected kinds of pain, I was experiencing considerable discomfort during that trip.

Eventually I broke down and visited the doctor. Doc confirmed that it had gone beyond the soak&scrape stage and that the only solution now would be to freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. He warned me: this could get quite painful, and I should let him know if I needed him to stop. I, overflowing with confidence borne of newly discovered tgi play, told him it was fine. I gave him my stoic face. He put my bare foot up on the table and took out something that looked like a blowtorch. I blanched.

Ok, he said, I’m just going to keep on with this until you tell me to stop. It’s not going to hurt at first, but then it’s going to start hurting and keep getting worse.

Me: Sure.

Doc: Oh, and you should know that the pain is going to keep increasing for a while even after I stop, so you should tell me to stop before it’s at the absolute limit. K?

Me: (gulp, nod)

This was an interesting exercise: to safeword, but to have to safeword before you’d reached your limit. You didn’t want to do it too soon, because then the treatment wouldn’t be as effective, but if you left it too late, you might find yourself in an agony you didn’t want at all. It was, intellectually, quite hot.

Not that way, perverts. This is about the other kind of playing you do with yourself when you find you have lost your playmate.

Playing with yourself is hard, as previously discussed here and here (among other places), and it is most unsatisfactory for exercising anything but your imagination (and even then only a fraction of it); but, playing with myself is what I have been doing for the last twenty months.

Mostly this takes the form of conversations between TL and Casey, or me and Casey. Sometimes Casey turns up around other people, though she is pretty careful only to show her face around people who won’t recognize her. Once, for instance, we were going around a part of a wildlife park where you could pet the smaller animals. We were with a younger relative, and Casey was “in” 100%. There was one part where there were mice and squirrels nesting inside socks. Casey started literally to jump up and down: Socks! They sleep in socks!! Younger Relative was also experiencing cute-overload, though he was a bit more stiff upper lip about it. At one point he said, Oh, it’s your inner child. I said, That is exactly who it is! Unfortunately, I couldn’t introduce him to Casey just then, lol.

As a child (APD) I played with my dolls a lot, when I wasn’t at rehearsal for children’s theater. My brother and I were close in age and played together, but he was in many ways an unsatisfactory playmate. He was terrifically stubborn (a necessary defense, probably, against my bossiness) and although he could be made to go along with my schemes, he rarely seemed to make anything up himself. Also, he was a musical prodigy so from a young age spent hours in solitary practice of his instrument. So, I played with my dolls. Sometimes, now, it feels like the same thing. The only difference (besides the lack of dolls) is that I know now what real playing is, with a real playmate who will invent with you and move the play along and surprise you and blow your mind. I know enough to miss it.

M used to play all the time, in every way, not simply roleplay or tgi. It’s hard to convey, or even to think of an example. The plastic seedling trays were labeled by him. The onions say, for instance, unyons. Maybe you had to be there.

Last summer I went back to Englandland for the first time, and I met a couple of people whom I described to my mother as “blogging acquaintances.” Friend 1 took me out to lunch and then wandered with me through the streets of Eton. I had not wandered around Eton since I was eighteen, but it hadn’t changed much. We walked and talked, and then it started, inconspicuously. Watching a begowned teacher walking down the street carrying books, we caught our breath. “Except,” she said, “he should be carrying something else.”

Imagine a giant permission slip.

And so it continued, casually, as asides to the regular conversation: “Oh, I’d like to report to his study after games.” or, apropos of some boys in sports kit bending over to pick up gear, “Oh, you can stay just as you are, thank you.” You have probably done this kind of thing  yourself.

I think I might have burbled a bit to dear Friend 1. Simply talking this way was like being awakened from a kind of winter’s sleep. I hadn’t realized until just then how very much I missed it.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I found myself g-chatting with Friend 2. We both type as fast as we talk, so the conversations tend to be dizzying, but at one point she said something about us going back to Switzerland. It was some kind of typo, as we had never been to Switzerland, at least not together, so I joked, “We had so much fun, didn’t we?”

She didn’t hesitate: “I know!”

Me: I liked that youth hostel where we went hiking.

Her: I preferred the chalet.

Me: It was very pretty, but you know that guy broke my heart.

Her: He had the most awful sweater!

Me: So true! I was blind…I miss that rather authoritarian rest cure place.

Her: Oh, man, no kidding.

Later, I realized: she was playing with me. I had a playmate! You may think I am grasping at straws, and in fact I am, but the point is how it felt to play, even with faraway Friend 2 via text chat, or faraway Friend 1 last summer. It felt like moving after being locked up for longer than you can remember.

This week, Casey has been pressing hard, against whatever it is she presses. (viz. the experience that gave rise to Double Teamed). One way it expressed itself was a powerful desire to buy her a dress I’d tried on at H&M. This dress was so cute (gray flannel pinafore, buttons up the back, tie at waist, knee length) and I thought Casey would look so cute in it. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit very well (I have a large cup size and it was fitted in the chest). I was bemoaning this to Friend 2, saying it might fit if I lost some more weight. Friend 2 suggested I get it and put it in the back of the closet, knowing that from H&M it couldn’t cost that much. So, yesterday, we went back to the store and I got the dress for Casey, in gray and in navy. And, now it even fit.

Home we get from the store, but she couldn’t try it on yet because TL had a student. Turned out the student needed help with a Latin translation, and it turned out one of the words was verberare, which, we discovered, means to flog. It was very difficult to keep Casey in check at this news. She tore open her own dictionary and scoured the page: verberabilissumus, altogether deserving of flogging! At one point TL’s student forgot what the word had meant.

Casey: To flog!

Kid: Oh, wait, I thought it was to beat.

Casey: Right, flog, beat, whip.

Kid: What’s flog mean?

TL at this point asked Casey to fetch something from the other room while she defined flog for the kid. When Kid worked out that the criminal in his translation was being threatened with verbereris, his response was, “Wow, harsh!” Casey had to be sent on another errand at this point.

Finally, TL’s lesson ended and Casey was allowed to put on her frock. Navy blue, white blouse, navy gym knickers, white ankle socks, black school shoes. And let me tell you, Casey has never been more In for the last twenty months. My body was taken over by her, walking like her, skipping around, even – wait for it – smiling. I felt quite literally possessed by someone else. Except I knew her. I had known her. It had been a  long time.

I wrote a little bit in the past about the first scene between Casey and RP, which was the first time I ever got whacked. It was during his first trip here in the summer of 1995, and we played it as a follow up to Mark’s first scene with TL (the first time she whacked him, or anyone). The scenario was that Mark and Casey had been seen sneaking out-of-bounds into the chapel balcony (at College, where TL and RP were co-housemasters and where Casey had just arrived as a new Fifth Former from America). A bit of wrought-iron gate had snapped off in the process. Mark had been caned. Casey was offered 4 strokes of the cane or 200 lines. I think her exact words were: “I don’t want to do the lines.”

M’s first visit lasted four days. On the last day we drove out of town and went on a hike in the woods. Afterwards, I remember being in my kitchen, him shaving at my kitchen sink, the smell of his shaving foam, and this overwhelming desire to be back in that relationship between Casey and Mr. Prior. I secretly got my hands on M’s pack of Marlboroughs, and as he was shaving, I went through to the study.

Picture my apartment as it was then: a four room railroad-style flat with no doors between the rooms, kitchen at the back, study at the front. It was August. Casey sat down in the “kid” chair, which was tucked out of the sightline from the kitchen. She lit a cigarette and pseudo-smoked it, ashing into a candle on the bookshelf. There was a box fan blowing a cross-breeze, and she took care to blow well into the fan so that the smoke would be visible, even if she wasn’t.

It seemed to go on a long time, this mouthing of cigarette smoke, the noise of the fan. And then suddenly, there he was: Mr. Prior.

“Morgan!”

She jumped six feet in the air, it seemed, having heard nothing, seen nothing. Stubbed out the cigarette. Stood up. He was gob-smacked by what he was seeing. How was it that this girl, this American girl, new to College just a few days hence, had decided to use his study, of all places, to smoke a cigarette? I don’t recall the dialogue, but it was brief. She was instructed to change into her uniform (she was wearing blue cotton shorts, sneakers, t-shirt) and report back in ten minutes.

In the dressing room, I put on her newly cobbled-together uniform. He had brought me a patch for my blazer. I’d found the blazer, grey flannel trousers, and Casey’s school shoes at the sadly now-defunct Domsey’s Warehouse. The patch had finally been stitched onto the blazer. I dressed, she dressed, trembling. We paced in the hallway. Scared. Frustrated. Confused.

On top of all this was another thread that had emerged in their earlier scene, and this was about Casey’s father. Carl Morgan was in military intelligence and was stationed somewhere dangerous, hence her being shipped off to College (parents divorced). But, she assured Mr. Prior, he was coming to visit her for half-term. He had told her so. In fact, she wasn’t going to be staying at College very long. She was pretty sure she’d be going home soon. Her dad had said so. This is what she thought about in the corridor waiting for the ten minutes to be up.

When she approached the study, RP was seated at the desk [my desk!]. He noted with grim approval her finally-arranged blazer, but got straight to his flabbergasted outrage.

“I just beat you yesterday!” he complained. What on earth could she possibly have been thinking?

“I wasn’t really smoking,” she said.

He almost did not know what to make of this. She explained that she’d only been stage smoking.

“Where did you get the cigarettes?” he asked.

Oops. Thou shalt not peach. “I’d rather not say, sir.”

RP was a Public School man and a gentleman and was prepared to accept this, for the moment. But he wanted to know why on earth she did it. It simply made no sense to him. “Were you trying to get yourself beaten?” he asked.

“No!” She struggled to explain, even to herself. “I just wanted… to be in here.” She dried up.

A silence full of so very much. And then somehow, through some genius of his, or grace, he seemed to get it, even though she didn’t. Even though I didn’t.

This time there was no choice of lines. It would be eight strokes. I can’t remember the technicalities of it, why eight, what they were apportioned for, but he told her to meet him in the Houseroom.

And so in the Houseroom [kitchen] she waited, sick and shaking before the Houseroom table. Pretty soon he came through, carrying the cane. Imagine, a man walking into my kitchen carrying a cane as if he knew what to do with it. He took off his jacket and instructed her to do the same. He took her jacket from her hands and told her to bend over the table. When she was in position, he pulled the tail of her shirt out of her gray school trousers [as previously discussed, purely for theatrical value!].

And it began.

She saw right away that he’d been going easy the first time. This hurt a good deal more, on top of the (first ever) four the day before. She was getting twice as many. He was hitting harder. I think she yelped.

Afterwards, when told to stand up, she gave the customary thank you. They shook hands. He met her eye and said, “Well stuck, Morgan.” It was sincere. There was that palpable but restrained love and care. My chest was melting like lava. I wanted more than anything to say there, with him, in that.

A little later there was a short scene in which he said good-bye to her. Mr. Prior had to take a short leave from College to sort out a personal situation. Miss Lincoln would be in charge. But, he told Casey, he would be keeping a particular eye on her. Again, the lava melting bones. Like heartburn in all your cells at once.

And one more thing, he told her. He had managed to reach her father on the telephone.

“When’s he going to get here?” she interupted, suddenly happy, hopeful, plunging entirely into that blind confidence in a rock-solid good thing.

“I’m afraid he isn’t able to come,” Mr. Prior said gently.

Imagine a tidal wave, searing, crushing, destroying.

“What do you mean?” said a small voice.

“He was sorry not to be able to talk with you himself,” Mr. Prior told her. “And he is very sorry he can’t come visit you as he said. He will see you at Christmas, though.”

Her lip was trembling. She blinked back tears.

“Oh. Right.”

“So,” RP continued, “it looks as though you’ll have to put up with us for a while longer.” She nodded, trying not to let the tears show. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Casey,” he said calling her by her Christian name for the first time, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she whispered. “It’s no big deal.”

When the scene was over, she went away and sobbed.

Writing about this now, especially having read other people’s scene accounts, I can see how odd it must look. The tgi gives focus to the scenes, but it isn’t really the center, or even the most powerful force. The most powerful force, perhaps, is Casey’s heart. How it longs to be with Mr. Prior in his study, somehow. How lascerated it is by her real dad, who loves her very much but cannot help but let her down. How much of a cataclysm the whole visit turns out to be, how much she loves him (M, Mark, Mr. Prior) by any name, as she has never loved anyone or conceived of loving.

He had to get on a plane later that night. I collapsed in bed and passed out from the ordeal of his visit, from overstimulation, from a kind of grief. He promised to come again, soon, October. Ten thousand years away.

But then came, as so often with him, a lucky strike extra, a gift of grace. At eight AM, my phone rang. I dragged myself from unconsciousness to answer it. His flight had been teched. He was still here. He wasn’t leaving until that evening. We had a whole extra day.

I am so grateful I never knew—then or even the morning before he died—what was coming. I knew, then, that we needed the extra day. What I didn’t know was how much we needed it. How very much.

What has Casey Morgan been up to the last thirty days? Has Supplicium Post Mortem indeed died, or is it like the plant life all around us here in Gotham, dead-looking, but not in fact dead? As with the plant life, only time will tell.

The short answer to what Casey has been up to is NaNoWriMo. Don’t run away just yet. Rest assured this is not one of those posts that will go on at length about how Stressful, how Angst-ridden, how Amazing-Super-Awesome, how Challenging this Incredible-Amazing-Super-Awesome-Herculean-Insane-Really-Insane month was. No offense to any NaNo pals, but even when I feel that way myself, reading about it from other people makes me secretly want to slap them. So, I won’t whitter on with the breathless, flushed, nauseatingly healthy glow of the physically fit after a bracing run. Screw those people (again, no offense to the fit amongst you).

As you might have gathered from the NaNo widgets, I did in fact “win”. That’s right, kids, I am a Winner. Please remind me of that when I feel like a Loser, which is pretty much all the time. When M and I used to play, often we would have to time-slip a scene. For instance, maybe the board said Marky was to report to TL at 7.30 pm for a Report, but then when 7.30 came around, M wasn’t in the right headspace, and since I wasn’t willing to have TL take the rap for screwing around with kids’ Reports, we just time-slipped the scene, i.e. did it another time, but said it was the original time. When you’ve got a constant fluid narrative going on—some of it actually acted out, some of it just discussed with each other—the time slip is an indispensable tool for keeping play and life in balance.  So (this was not actually a non-sequitur) if the actual completion of the 50,000 words was every so slightly time-slipped by a few hours (but less than 12), because we found it shockingly difficult to pull the kind of late hours we used to pull, well, then, the Office of Letters and Light* neither knew nor minded. Anyway, since we were officially NaNo rebels, writing the 50K on a pre-existing project, the little time-slip fit right in. And the point is that we wrote that many words, new words, and more importantly, we finished the key plot arc in the book. Win. *rotates finger ironically*

Depression, anyone? I was talking to my spiritual director about the annoying neutrality that has ensued. I ought to feel at the very least grateful because I wrote more on my real writing in November than I wrote since M died. I wrote a piece of narrative I’ve been thinking and wondering about for more than ten years. I’ve been praying for help getting that writing started again, injecting some life there, if possible. And, look, it happened. So why does it feel like it’s nothing?

My spiritual director is wont to draw upon literature for illustration (whether he does this always or just with me, I don’t know), and his view was that a) feelings at the end of things were unpredictable, and b) not being able to value the valuable was, simply put, a maneuver of evil upon us when we are vulnerable. He recalled The Screwtape Letters, which I adore. In them Lewis so dramatically and comprehensibly helps us imagine the way evil works upon us. I love Lewis’s imagining of Satan as a kind of drab, far-removed civil servant jeffe, Screwtape. The hapless Wormwood is coached on his almost medical mission viz. his Patient (i.e. the person he is attempting to corrupt). Screwtape and Wormwood are not inspiring murder, rape, fornication, theft, genocide, destruction, or anything particularly dramatic, but instead they work upon the Patient by gently suggesting things to him that lead him by hairs away from what is true and ultimately good.

by Moro Rogers http://kambodiahotel.blogspot.com/

So here am I, 50K later, and do I feel satisfaction at good work? Do I even feel gratitude? No, I don’t, because the Wormwoods of this world are whispering in my brain: It’s not that big of a deal. You’ve done that before, so big whoop. 50,000 horrible words are nothing to be proud of. You may have written all that, but it’s not a book, and since you remain entirely confused, will probably never become one, especially as the one person you could rely upon for good advice is dead. And anyway, even if you did finish it, it will just go the way of the last one—nowhere.

Recognizing this as a form of evil helps, I think. Self-doubts, perhaps, ought to be analyzed, disputed, argued around. Evil, however, must simply be turned from. And so I turn. It hasn’t brought an onrushing of joy. I’m not sure I’m capable, yet, of such an emotion. But it has allowed me to start rereading the drek that was so unbelievably bad it felt that my fingers should fall off from typing it. And, you guessed it, the drek is not as bad as it seemed at the time. In fact, it’s good in places. I say this not to brag, but to encourage those of you who wrote some or all of the 50K, but are so embarrassed by your efforts that you can’t bear to go back and read it. Something happens to work written that fast. It may not be brilliant, and large swaths of it may call for laughter, but when you go back to it, the writing will contain things you have no memory of putting there. So, if you don’t reread, you can’t enjoy them. Message: man up and read the shit. If you are thinking to yourself, Well, it’s fine for Casey to say that, she’s a good writer, but I’m not, I have one word for you: Screwtape.

Those of you who aren’t into all this writing business, normal service will resume… at least I hope it will.

* The HQ of NaNoWriMo

gotta love Kate Maberly as Mary Lennox

I’ve been giving some thought to the subject of blog comments. We all like getting them. They make us feel heard and appreciated. Conversely, it’s easy to feel, when a post receives few or no comments, that people don’t love you.

I try not to go down this path, and I try not to beg for comments. It rubs against my wasp upbringing. Nevertheless, I can see that my posts don’t get as many comments as many of the blogs I read. What is it about my writing that discourages comments, I wonder? Is it my wasp reserve? Is it that apparent self-sufficiency that made people in college like and respect me, but never fancy me? Or perhaps I don’t give readers a place to enter? Perhaps I overwhelm them with too much reading.

Blogging isn’t a popularity contest for me, even if it sometimes feels like one. My goal is not to build a readership so I can sell books or feed a pay-site, both legitimate motivations, if not mine. Nevertheless, I can feel despondent when there aren’t many comments. This is inappropriate—or, since I despise that PC word, misplaced—because people who comment on my blog are not there to provide me with mass love. Even online friends, while they might express great support and affection, cannot genuinely love me, or vice versa.

But do I really believe this last statement? As a writer and reader, I know sometimes deep connection and in fact love can occur through the written word. For instance, I have first known and loved many of my students through their writing. Reading someone’s writing can be far more intimate than spending an evening with them down the pub or at dinner. And I would say I feel love (philia) towards blogging and twittering friends whom I have never met in the flesh. How does this compare to the love of in-person friendship tested over time? I am not yet in a position to say.

And the blogs I read that get several comments per post–these writers know many of their commentators well and have played with them (or more) in a most intimate, real-life fashion. So they are “real-life” friends, certainly more tightly bound to each other than I am to them. Thus, perhaps my aloneness in life is partly reflected in the comment traffic on this blog.

www.kate-maberly.com

This morning I was trying to get up at quarter to five, but my mind was absorbed by thoughts of casey. Jessica’s post last week about getting teary in scene stimulated my imagination about how I anticipate casey might feel playing again. Sometimes I imagine her going to a Lowewood day, or some other group scene of a not-too-adult nature, perhaps with England people. But, I don’t imagine her having fun as they do. I see her pretending to have fun but actually feeling terrifically alone and small and orphaned and abnormal; wanting RP and feeling that she must have been very wicked for him to go away; hearing a voice in her head telling her she can’t ever be like these people, telling her they will never understand or love her like he could, that she is just a bore to them–”You OK, Casey?” “Oh, yes!” smile-smile–And if she ever got seriously told off or pink-slipped (or whatever it is they call it when you get sent for to be whacked), she’d be sitting there thinking: See, you are bad, and no one can love you, and these people will never invite you back, and RP won’t be there to love you later, and neither will Marky, and if you hadn’t been so selfish and bad they’d still be here. And the tears would be streaming down her face, like they are now, and these people who were just wanting to have a fun day together wouldn’t know what to think, and would find me way too much work and un-fun, and no one would take me aside and sit me on their knee like they did Jessica, and let casey sob her heart out on their shoulder without them feeling used, and then, when she’d recovered, get her over the hump by telling her that she wasn’t bad at all, but she had been slightly naughty and really ought to take the penalty for that, and then give her a firm but sensitive punishment otk, and then look after her with a kind of housemaster’s-daughter benevolence and firmness all the rest of the day, encouraging her gamely in any cheekiness that might incur penalty because they recognize it as a sign of health, not something that needs true scolding.

www.kate-maberly.com

Except then these people would have to not go away, because if they did (for instance by living in another country, or by being busy and/or married), it would just make her feel more alone and orphaned and wicked.

And so this is why I have not let casey play RL even though I go to parties and meet people who would put me over their knee if I wanted. Because in the realest sense, tgi isn’t play for casey, or for me. At least not in the way most practitioners mean it.

The coal burned brightly in the grate, but the room was cold, leaking the gale which blew down Wester-Ross. Mr. Prior had summoned her for a Little Chat, which Casey found unfair on holiday. Worse, he had announced uniform inspection. She hadn’t worn her uniform in forever. The iron at the cottage was temperamental. The whole proposition irked her.

“Come here,” he said, beckoning with crooked finger, his voice friendly, mock-stern. She shuffled towards him, rolling her eyes. “A bit less of that, thank you!” he snapped. She sighed, pointedly.

He switched on the extra light and began to take issue with her clothing. Did she call those shoes polished? What did she think she was doing with the knot on her tie? (This as he retied it for her.) And what, pray heaven, did she call those? He pointed to her shorts.

“The iron was stupid!”

He crossed his arms and stared at her. “I think you had better rethink your approach, young Casey. Your uniform is a disgrace—disgrace, and we’re already due a chat about several matters.”

“What?” she protested.

“You know perfectly well what,” he replied dryly. She sulked. “Turn out your pockets.”

“What!”

“Now.”

She sulked mightily as she emptied her blazer’s long-unexamined pockets of whatever they might contain.

“Chewing gum…detritus…cigarettes, Casey? And matches for the win, is it?”

“I—I didn’t know—”

He took her by the ear. “Let’s take all that as read, shall we? It’s clearly long past time for our little chat.”

• Rafi
• Graham
• Dominoxx
• PapaTomLA

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

I saw you every morning at the track last week. You taught at the soccer camp installed on the AstroTurf. I was the girl with the dogs – yes, those dogs.

Your accent struck me as Glasgow softened by a proper education. Fit, brown hair, six two and change, you commanded those six-year-olds with the most charming sense of fun.

“Fishy-fishy-fishy come and play in our sea. Sharky-sharky-sharky, you can’t catch me!” How did you lead them and never patronize, encourage without sing-song? You had the touch, the reflexes to hold them in your thrall without ever revealing the extent of your power. I’m like that, too, in the classroom. It takes nerve, concentration, and a kind of love.

I rather fancy that pirate ship game: “Climb the ropes! Spyglasses out! Climb back down! Captain on deck!” See, that’s where it could get interesting, if a stowaway were discovered. Too young for the Cat, you’d have to find other methods of correction, and instruction.

Or maybe something closer to home: you a gifted Captain of Games, me a weedy 4th former who’s never played proper football. You’d make me love it, and never let me slack – somehow.

So few people know how to play, from instinct, with generosity and conviction. So few people are a natural, with a crowd of kids, or a recalcitrant project. Don’t go back to Scotland yet. Let me make you pizza while you play with my dogs. Let’s see what other games eventuate.

Check out other missed connections this week:

• PapaTomLA
• Frenchies