Chapter 1: The Minister for Smut

“Welcome back to Political Roundup, Secretary Joinard.”

So says Jott Daltum, Dogaland’s state-funded channel’s main political interviewer.

“Happy to be back, Mr Daltum,” says Joinard. He looks calm and smug in the interviewee’s chair. He’s pictured in front of a high, wide window with Dogaland’s brutalist, curving concrete Parliament in the distance beyond a broad tidal river.

Daltum drones on for a while, listing changes made by Secretary Joinard’s department. Deregulation of public space advertising standards. Deregulation of in-flagrante (nudity, erotica) imagery on television. The steady growth of the SPD, or Schoolgirl Punishment Database. Deregulation of local council oversight of schools. Deregulation of allowable punishments in schools.

Jott Daltum says, “And on that last point - and here I quote - ‘Discipline in Senior Girls Schools may no longer be overseen by Local Government, but instead, provision is made whereby deregulation may be voted for, providing sufficient numbers of Electing Parents, with pupils at local schools, so choose. If so, any combination of School Governors, Head Teachers, Department Heads and Individual Teachers may be allowed to set the rules on a school by school basis.’ In other words, Secretary, schools themselves, from here on, may be put in charge of their own rules over discipline. Like the fox being put in charge of the henhouse. Again, I quote. ‘Schools may wish to establish their own codes of practice and internal constitutions regarding disciplining students.’ And all of these punishments, in girls schools at least, must be, as established, uploaded to the national database. Accessible, apparently, to any man on any electoral register. Secretary Joinard, given this development, plus parallel deregulation of advertising standards and general in-flagrante rules -governing televisual output, ad I think we’ve all seen the results of that - you are starting to be talked of as the Minister for Smut.”

A year before, Joinard had looked affronted when pressed with similar questions. He looks noticeably relaxed now. “It’s sticks and stones which break bones,” he says. “But that label is just a short, pathetic phrase. What we’ve done is the opposite of legislate. We have lifted and removed DR’s creeping layers of state control over everything that moves. We’re taking the shackles back off, Mr Daltum! You mentioned advertising standards. By some accounts, we’ve caused a real renaissance in creative advertising. Does a burst of creativity make me Minister For Smut? Or Minister, perhaps, for Cultural Freedom?”

Jott Daltum says, “The SPD, secretary. Apparently any voter who cares to ask for access - to actual recordings of, by this point, up to thousands of schoolgirls being punished, sometimes daily - will be able to see them being stripped and spanked and caned, and sometimes worse. Should we think of that as cultural freedom?”

As Joinard begins to deflect Daltum’s question by answering one which hasn’t been asked, Yarra Corkle, watching from home, says to her father, “I know you have access.”

Molcum Corkle, closest to the TV, on the same sofa as his schoolgirl daughter, folds his arms defensively.

“I mean access to the Database,” Yarra adds, hugging her knees at her end of the sofa. “You have to have it, because Taudren has it, and he couldn’t get it if you didn’t have it. He’s not very clever at covering his tracks, Dad. I went into his room to get a school book he’d filched, and when I picked it up, it moved his mouse and his screen lit up. There was a page open showing everything he’d watched on that horrid SPD thing in the last few days. All that HP stuff, Dad, from those Traditional schools! That’s disgusting, and he’d watched what looked like tons of it! There’s whispers they’ll be starting that HP crap at my school. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? You know what it stands for, right? HP? Humiliation punishments?”

She watches her father’s eyes looking shifty. Embarrased even, maybe. Which given his TV habits makes her wonder.

Yarra frowns, then asks, “You know our lovely Mr Ullerade moved up with us,? From year ten to year eleven?”

“Yes you said you were happy - you said some of the girls even ran up and hugged him!”

“Yes - because he’s the best at the school, and everyone knows it. But so did that horrible Dickle with our parallel class. The plus class? And the people who’ll be running the school now, the Governors - Donder says it used to be a committee from Kennigwort Council, but that man there -” Yarra is pointing towards the TV and Secretary Joinard - “made it so they could have that taken away from them, didn’t they? And in this shitty town, Dad, they already did! So it’s Governors going to be in charge at our school now, and Donder says the majority are his crowd! LC! And he doesn’t know yet how much power they’ve got - but we’re all really scared that they’ll just let Pieter Dickle and the all other nasty sods do whatever they want to whoever they want!”

Molcum doesn’t let on - he has no intention of doing so anytime soon - but he knows more about Yarra’s school, about those moves in the background, than he’s ever admitted. One of Taudren’s friend’s dads - Molcum had picked up Tauds late from their house one night, before the end of the last school year. And he’d got into a conversation with Garrold Munnet, Taud’s friend’s father. There hadn’t been much rush - Taudren was playing upstairs with his friend, and it wasn’t that late really - so Munnet had offered him a drink in his study. And the man knew a lot!

”Votes coming up, important ones, Corkle.” He’d called hum Corkle, like Molcum was some kind of colleague or something. So Molcum had called him Munnet back.

“Parents on the electoral register - with a kid at a school - will get to vote about school policy soon. Did you know that, Corkle? New rules. Coming soon - not long now, pinging back and forth between parliament chambers. Not just about the boys school, Corkle. My boy said - you have a girl at Kennigwort Upper?”

He’d nodded. He did.

“Yes yes, same here. My younger girl, Miki. Now, let me just bend your ear a bit, Corkle...”

Yarra speaking pulls Molcum from the memory.

“Yulla Cottle, she was in the showers when I was, yesterday. I could see her, down here -” Yarra points to her crotch - “she was really red raw, and I asked her how it happened, and she said, that bastard Dickle’s started wedgying them this term. Wedgying, dad? Teachers? Wedgying schoolgirls? For nothing, they said. Like when they’re coming into class and they’re barely even late. Just even passing in the corridor! And I even saw him do it! Just yesterday! This girl from his class. He’d actually taken her skirt away! She had to go all around school like that, in just her shirt and her knickers - that sort of thing’s started happening too - and Dickle crept up behind her, grabbed her knickers from the back, then just yanked them! Hard! Not some boy at a bus stop, her grown-up teacher! She didn’t even know he was there till he did it. And she wasn’t doing anything. And when she screamed, he just said it was for what she’d done before, to make him take her skirt away. You could look that one up, that’s probably on that database now. They all wear those cameras hung around their necks. All that started last year.”

Her dad coughs into his hand, looking sideways as he does it, like he’s trying to find something he might say back.

“Yulla told me,” Yarra carries on, “when he first had to wear one, he nearly stopped hurting them. Last year, when they came in. He’s one of those bastards who used to do it loads, at the boy’s school, till the local council stopped them, I heard. He must have been scared that if people really saw that - what he was doing - he’d get it in the neck. But nothing ever happens! There’s not one of them stopped it, they’ve only got worse! Now he knows there’s no hand going to slap it all down - like it’s all thumbs up - he does nasty stuff to them all the time!”

Yarra glares at her dad.

“Why did you let him have access? Taudren? Why did you even apply to get access?”

Molcum says, “I think Taudren fancies going for teaching now, Yarra. A lot of men seem to!”

Yarra can hardly believe what he’s said. “Yeah,” she says. “And they’ll probably let him. One of the questions on his application form will be, ‘Are you a nasty little sadist who wants to hurt schoolgirls as much as he can? Tick yes to be considered.’ And the next one down will be, ‘On a scale of one to ten, how much does a sad little wanker like you want to shame and torture innocent schoolgirls? Only applicants answering 10 need apply!’ Seriously, Dad, the stuff on his list looked like all the worst ones he could find on that thing! I ran the mouse over one he’d watched. It wss one girl who’d been punished by six different men! That’s six men at once? They’d caned her and paddled her, just for a start! And the punishment she’d had, it had loads of these H- punishment markers. The timeline had gone on for three hours, Dad! And loads, and loads, of people had watched it!”

“They’re talking about adding subset listings. I read that,” says Molcum. “he clears his throat. “sBecause everyone eems to keep asking for it. Asking say what’s meant by other.”

She knows he’s just admitted that she’s right. He’s watched stuff himself