I am still asleep when the Master brings something down for breakfast. I don’t hear him coming. Suddenly I wake up and he’s there, addressing Loretta bossily. “I’ve cooked a double portion. You share with the new girl. Be good; I’ll be back tonight…”
He shoves a tray with food and water through a hatch at the bottom of the barred door. Or so it appears to me, listening carefully to the scraping sounds. Some other supplies have been shoved back and forth over the concrete floor just before that, a pail with water taken out, another shoved in.
Then a key is turned in the lock of the hatch, apparently, and shortly after that the man’s footsteps recede. “So he doesn’t even enter our prison to feed us,” I tell myself. “We’re like dangerous beasts kept in a cage…”
For breakfast we’re having overcooked spaghetti with some cheap tomato sauce, obviously something out of a tin. The whole thing lukewarm. But I am hungry and wolf down my share, that is: what’s left after Loretta has finished eating and passes the pan and spoon over to me. The first mouthfuls of food and water are painful to swallow, because of last night’s throttling, but the pain eases after a while.
“Do we always have pasta for breakfast?”
“Not always. Sometimes rice with a curry sauce from a tin, or baked beans… Oh yes, and a couple of pills. Reach out for the tray, here are yours.”
“What kind of pills are these?” I ask a little apprehensively.
“Oh, you know, just a vitamin pill… and ‘the pill’.”
“You mean like a contraceptive?”
“Yeah, that’s it!”
“Well, I have never taken that before, and I was raped last night, so it might be a little late.”
“I know, but take it anyway… Just feel around on the tray, there’s two pills right in front of you.”
We are both sitting on the concrete floor in front of our beds. The chains attached to the wall above us don’t allow us to touch, but Loretta passes things on to me by pushing the tray over to my side. So I find the pills and take them with a sip of water, hoping it is nothing more sinister than a contraceptive and multivitamins.
“Now let me guess: dinner will be more of the same, right?”
“Yes, the Master must have a lot of crates full of tins in stock… and biscuits and chocolate bars, of course. We have a portion here that we’ll have to share and make us last until dinnertime…”
After eating, we wash and groom ourselves from a pail of water, brush our teeth with Loretta’s toothbrush and paste. We have to wash up our breakfast utensils with the same water. “A bit disgusting,” Loretta admits, “but it can’t be helped.”
Then I want to get dressed. The previous night the rapist brought me back almost naked and manacled me while the clasp was still chocking me. After groping around I find my clothes in a heap at the foot of my bed, but it is not so easy to put them on. With my knickers and my skirt, my sheer tights and my shoes, there is no problem, but because of the chains I cannot put on my bra, my blouse and my sweater, so I have to tie something around my shoulders in such a way as to be as decent as possible.
“And now what?” I ask.
“And now nothing. We have to wait. We have to amuse ourselves. I don’t have anything to read at the moment, apart from my dictionary.”
“But the lights are on?”
“Oh yeah. They were switched on when the Master came down and they’ll be switched off when it’s time to go to sleep…”
“And that’s how you’ve been living for a year now?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I find the days so long that I almost look forward to a fuck with the Master in the evening”
“Oh! poor thing. I’m really sorry…”
“Well, last night he didn’t touch me, and then he came back with you a couple of hours later.”
“Was that the first time he didn’t rape you?”
“No. Sometimes he skips a day, and sometimes, as I told you last night, he just has a quick one in here…”
“And when he skips it? Does he still bring you food and all that?”
“Yes. I have no complaints there.”
“A pretty conscientious fellow, huh?”
Now I ask Loretta to describe herself, the surroundings, the layout of our prison and of this so called ‘pleasure room’. Loretta speaks haltingly, in a roundabout way. She seems to have trouble focusing on what she is saying, but she does expound at some length on the fact that she herself is very pretty and that she has beautiful hair: a “mane” of blond, wild, curly hair, “quite smashing, in fact.”
Meanwhile I explore our cell, for as far as I can reach, but apart from some spectacular rattling of chains, the results of this probe are meagre. We talk about the daily routine, what the Master looks like, his tastes and his habits. Loretta tells me that the Master is something of an exhibitionist, and likes to show off and brag about his cock, “But with you being blind, I guess he won’t have much fun on that account…” Loretta tells all she knows, and in the end she reflects: “What a funny thing it is, Daisy, that a man like that never seems to tire of fucking someone he doesn’t even like, day after day after day…”
“I’m glad you still find that strange, even after all you’ve been through…”
“But the strangest thing of all, you know, is that after he’s done, he just goes on and on playing with my hair… Like he can’t get enough.”
“Well that’s good… It sounds like, in a perverse way, he’s really infatuated.”
I am now sitting on the floor in front of my iron cot, leaning back on my arms, the chains stretched. “Tell me Loretta, erm, Lorry, if you also sit like this, can we touch one another with our feet?”
“Well, I dunno… Let me try.” The girl shuffles forward on her behind, and it turns out that we can touch quite well…
“Wait,” I say, “I’ll take off my shoes. You take off yours if you’re wearing any…”
“I only have a pair of wooden clogs. By the way, why do you wear such sensible shoes, Daisy? It’s so ugly!”
“Well, as a blind person you want to be able to feel where you’re walking, so you’re never going to wear high heels or wooden shoes. But in the summer when it’s really hot, I like to wear those Indian flipflops that are all the rage at the moment, the flimsier the better…”
Now we sit on the floor in the middle of our cell, facing each other, and I find that I can massage the girl’s legs with the soles of my outstretched feet. I can reach almost to the top of the girl’s thighs. “Wouldn’t it be a lark if I could arouse you sexually with my big toe? We could cuckold the Master!”
Loretta giggles, and starts caressing my legs as well. “You’re an all right lady, Daise.”
“Tell me, Lorry, why do you always refer to that pervert as ‘the Master’?”
“In the beginning he just kept hitting me until I called him that… Now it’s become a habit, almost second nature.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry! When I hear this, it makes my blood boil…”
“I know… and it makes you wonder, again, what’s eating a man like that?”
“I think it’s a problem all men have. They’re randy. They’re obsessed about sex, but they just can’t accept that the object of all this desire, women, are also human beings, with a mind and a will of their own. A lot of them just can’t handle that… You ask any man what he really wants, deep down, and you’ll find that his secret wish is to be like King Solomon and have a thousand wives. A lot of young wives, a few more mature; Chinese ones, Negro ones, Swedish type and Spanish; blondes, brunettes, redheads; plump and skinny ones and everything in between… And all of them only too willing to do all the tricks their king and master asks of them. And he, of course, finds that when he doesn’t need them, they should just leave him alone…”
Loretta giggles again. “You have a way of putting things, Daise…Would you say that my father is also like that?”
“Oh yes. I’ve talked to your father often enough to know that he’s a real man…”
“And your own father?”
“Hard to say! A gentle, quiet banker. But probably him too, yes…”
“Can we ever win from them, do you think? I mean from men?”
“Well, at least we can try. We must fight back. The good thing is that men are rather predictable in that way. The Master treats us like dangerous beasts, precisely because he’s afraid of us… Now I want you to describe this clamp he uses to throttle us: how does it work?”
Loretta finds it difficult to describe and explain. Apparently there are two half-circle elements with a hinge, that close around your neck, and there’s some kind of ratchet mechanism—you can hear it clicking—by means of which the Master tightens it just so you almost choke, but not quite…
“So you might say that this looks like an oversized handcuff, yes?”
“A handcuff? Now that you mention it, yes. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing.”
“But how does he release it? That’s the main question…”
“I don’t know. That part always happens in my back, of course, so I can’t see it. All I can say is that he can release the clamp instantly when he wants to.”
“Exactly. So there must be some kind of latch that frees the ratchet at once. Now, tonight the Master is probably going to take me away with him again. I want you to look closely when he puts on the clamp. And when he brings me back, how he releases it. I’m pretty sure you can figure out how it works. You see, what is new is that we are two now. We can work together; gather all the information we need… And then one of these days, if I could knock the rapist out during a transfer, you could unlock the clamp for me, even though my hands will be manacled in my back… For instance, when he brings me back, and we’re all three together in here, in the cell.”
“All right, but how do you want to knock him out, with your hands tied in your back?”
“I was thinking of a headbutt or something, hitting the base of his nose with my forehead as hard as I can…”
“Okay! That sounds good.”
“But for the moment we have to observe and prepare…”
“You know, Daise, for a blind person, you’ve got pretty good ideas.”
Now at least Loretta sounds hopeful, I reflect. That’s a good thing.
As soon as I get my vocal cords under control again, I say: “You seem to think that you’re very clever, but I find you pathetic…”
“Oh really? But you’re the one who’s tied down with her legs wide open, and I’m the one who’s going to shave your bush…”
“My point exactly! Your whole life is dominated by your most base instincts. You seem to devote an awful lot of energy to satisfying your animal lusts.”
“And what’s wrong with that? By the way: you’d better keep still or I’ll cut up your pussy with this razor… You can’t see it of course, but it’s sharp!”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong, apart from breaking every law in the book. When I married for the first time, my husband and I were both eighteen years old and madly in love… When we kissed, our lips would tingle! Now, those first times that we went to bed together, that was something… A fuck to die for! Each and every time! And that’s why I’m not afraid of dying anymore. My life has been fulfilled…”
“Be careful what you say, girl. I might very soon oblige you about dying.”
“Well, anyway, you’re pathetic. I’m pretty sure you never could find a girlfriend; you can’t keep a girl happy; you have to lock us up!”
“Okay, now I’ve heard enough from you… It’s time for some serious work…”
I have been tied down on what Loretta calls the rack, one of the contraptions of the so-called pleasure room. (“We know only too well who’s pleasure we’re referring to,” I said to her.) It’s just an iron frame double bed, fitted with the leather shackles needed to tie someone down spread-eagled. But the reason why Lorry calls this setup “the rack”, is an added feature: a solid wooden beam attached transversally to the frame of the bed, so that when your ankles are attached to it and the shackles pulled tight, your legs are forced wide open, at almost a right angle with your rump.
In the meantime the rapist has finished shaving my bush, and he announces: “Now: didn’t I tell you that I intend to make you change your tune, girl? And you already know about the horsewhip, right? You can’t see it but I have it right here. So now that your legs are wide open, I’m going to whip that nice pussy of yours until you beg me to fuck you…”
And immediately I feel the sharp sting of the first blow on that most sensitive part of my body, that the contraption I am tied to forces me to expose. The pain literally takes my breath away.
“Okay, missy, now I want to hear you say ‘I beg you: fuck me, Master!’ Come on! I want to hear you say it!”
Another blow. “Ouch! All right! I beg you: fuck me, Master?”
“That’s better, but I want it more sincere, more heartfelt!”
A few blows of the horsewhip follow, and each time I repeat “I beg you: fuck me, Master!”
Then finally the rapist seems satisfied; I can hear him put down the whip; and in a girlish voice I now add, “… pretty please, darling Master?”
“Don’t start me again, girl! Anyway, you’ve given me a tremendous hard-on, thank you very much. You girls are lucky that I’m so easily aroused. Time to gag you.”
“Yeah, well. Please don’t stomp me in the stomach. I’ll open my mouth if you ask nicely…”
But the man punches me anyway. And then he lies down on top of me. Apparently he is very much into shaved pussies, deep penetration, and the missionary position. Of course, deep or not deep, under normal circumstances a man would be supporting his weight with his elbows, but the Master just wallows with his whole weight on top of his victim like a big fat pig, grunting and panting, taking his time. Probably something to do with the Tantric sex practices he learned from Tiger and Piglet.
I try to remain detached. “Undergo the whole thing with the clinical attitude of a true physical therapist,” I admonish myself. The rapist, I now observe, is rather fat but not very tall. In fact, he must be a lot shorter than me… “That could be useful to know someday.”
I also note that I am only being gagged at the last moment, when the man needs to get physically close to my face for intercourse, and I draw the conclusion that he is afraid of being bitten. “The reason he stomps me in the stomach is not only to force me to open my mouth, but to debilitate me by making me gasp for air. He’s afraid I might bite his hand while he’s putting the dog’s-collar in my mouth…” To explore the setup further, I now focus my attention on my rapist’s neck.
When the man finally starts exerting himself, I discreetly nuzzles his shoulder, the inside of his neck, feeling my way around with my nose and my cheekbone. “If only I could bite him, just as he’s working up some steam, his heart pumping nicely, his blood pressure up. Then if I could bite right… here, I should be able to section the carotid artery… The blood would just squirt out and the man would bleed to death within minutes. Wonderful!” But of course this only proves that the man is right to be very careful. “He won’t forget to gag me in a hurry… Maybe if I manage to engage him in a very distracting conversation… Or on the contrary, keep so quiet that he just forgets that I’m even there… On the other hand, I would still be tied down to the rack, with no means of escape. Difficult!”
While I am being frogmarched back to the cell with the clamp almost throttling me, I carefully observe what happens. Because of the chocking device, the man appears to be in a great hurry to undo and retie the different sets of leather straps and handcuffs involved in each of these transfers. As a means of speeding up the proceedings, it seems to work both ways… He is perhaps being rushed along just as much as his victim. Interesting!
As soon as the man has left us alone, and when I can speak again, I croak, “Did you manage to see how the clamp works, Lorry?”
“No! I’m sorry, Daise! The Master was standing in the way. On purpose… He was keeping an eye on me and he made sure I couldn’t see what he was doing.”
“Oh! well, it doesn’t matter, darling… Another time maybe… There’s another thing that you should be able to tell me: are your wrists thinner than mine?”
“My wrists? Yeah… It’s hard to tell as we’re always manacled, but I’m definitely much smaller and slighter than you… Why do you ask?”
“Well, I’m interested in the workings of those leather straps that the Master keeps tying and untying on a daily basis. After all this time there must be a dent in the leather where the buckle is fixed around your wrists. But for me it probably needs one or two holes extra, and there’s no indentation in the leather yet… So maybe somehow I could induce the Master to tie me too loosely, without him even noticing…”
“Ah yes, that’s clever thinking…”
“Well, it’s one of the possible strategies to explore, you know. Another thing I’m interested in, is the door that gives access to this dungeon from the outside. Have you ever seen it?”
“Yes, I did… I like ‘dungeon’, by the way, that’s exactly what this place is, huh?”
“So you weren’t unconscious when he brought you here?”
“Oh no. But I’d rather not talk about it…”
“Oh, sorry! I understand: painful memories… But you see, it strikes me that just now the Master brought down the food before he took me to the pleasure room. So obviously he doesn’t want to make two trips… So is the entrance to the dungeon hard to operate?”
“Yes. The door is concealed behind a closet, you know, a cupboard that is fixed to the door, and the whole thing is very heavy, made of concrete or something, and hard to move…”
“Rather like a bunker door, then? All right. Good. Now think carefully. Did the Master use a key, or did he use a code to open that door, do you remember?”
“A key! That I remember! He opened the cupboard, removed a few things, and stuck the key in at the back somewhere. When we were inside, he closed the door and turned the key in the lock on the inside… That key is part of those that he carries with him on a key ring, together with the keys of the door of our cell and of the hatch. And then there is also a key that fits all the handcuffs, hanging on a chainlet attached to the keyring.”
“Excellent! That’s great news. We must find a way to get hold of that keyring. And imagine the difficulty if there had been a numeric lock with a keypad and the Master had the code in his head…”
“You’re right! I’ve never thought of that. So you’re really making plans for an escape, huh?”
“Well, let me put it this way: I’m certainly reviewing all the options.”
We two prisoners settle into a daily routine. After breakfast, the morning toilette, and washing up, I insist on a serious workout session—what I call “chain-rattling callisthenics”—for at least an hour. “Apart from the chain-rattling,” I say, “I want to hear you panting, Lorry. You really need some exercise…” As a physiotherapist, of course, I’m an expert at this kind of thing and I know an endless number of effective movements to bring enough variety into these sessions.
The same thing applies for massage, the next item on the agenda. Sitting across from each other at the end of our chains, we can touch one another’s legs with our feet. I first rub Loretta’s legs to relax her, before Loretta tries the same moves on her teacher—me. “You’re really good at this stuff,” the girl marvels, “where did you learn all this gymnastics and massage stuff, anyway?”
“Well, I’m a professional physiotherapist! You don’t even know half of what I can do…”
“A therapist, really? So you’re a masseuse… But how’s that even possible? You’re blind!”
“Never underestimate the capabilities of the disabled, didn’t I tell you? Besides, it’s an old tradition for the blind to do massage; it’s one of the many jobs that suit us perfectly…”
“What are the other ones, then?”
“Telephone switchboard operator! Actually, there aren’t many of those anymore… No, but you know, nowadays blind people can do almost anything they set their mind to. When I was young it was much harder to find a suitable trade.”
Having taken care of the body, we now turn to training the mind. “Let’s first concentrate on the dictionary, Lorry.” To start with, we help one another for a while to memorise the definitions of new words that the young girl reads aloud for us both. Then we like to play a game that I have devised: taking turns, we submit a difficult word, and the other has to tell its meaning. Even if you don’t know, you have to try anyway, give any definition you can think up, and that’s the fun part: it really makes you laugh when you find you have it all wrong. Of course I know a lot of words, but my challenger has a dictionary and she can make her queries really hard… Then, when it’s my turn, I have to come up with a challenge from memory alone. And so, most of the time, we end up playing pretty much even.
I marvel at how smart the girl really is. “Tell me, Lorry, why did you hate school so much? Why did you run away from home?”
“Well, it’s going to make me look pretty stupid, looking back, but the thing is, you know, they make you wear a dumpy uniform, something really pathetic. And then one day you meet these girls dressed like Gipsy queens, really beautiful, and you just never want to go back to school again… And those hippie princesses tell you ‘come with us, you can stay at our commune, there’s room for everyone, no worries’. And you follow them, and there’s no going back. And now here I am, in the Master’s clutches…”
Loretta asks me about what is going on outside. “Are the hippies still going strong? Are the freaks still hanging out all over Notting Hill?”
“Oh yes! You can smell the pot all day long, and at night of course… And you can hear the strumming of guitars… It is still one big Gipsy camp out there!”
I tell her about the sit-ins at Speaker’ Corner to legalise marijuana, and I describe the extraordinary cover of the Beatles’ new LP: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band<