Chapter 14 : "The Pretty Young Mum at the Corner Shop"

Put simply and honestly: Cecily was a torture girl. She worked at the barracks and it was her job to be tortured.

It wasn't the only thing that she did, of course. She also got involved in the torture planning, the endless meetings, the practice sessions and the writing of reports, all that mundane stuff that every torture girl does; but at the core of her role was being naked and vulnerable and tied up: being tortured.

Cecily had learned early on that if she were going to survive in such a job, she would have to keep the two parts of her life strictly separate, and so she divided her mind into different mental compartments. At home she was Harriet Gordon, the woman with a keen dress sense and an inordinate sense of fun, while at work, she was Cecily Freeman, the sex obsessed spinster.

These were effectively two different women.

The notion of mothering a child was preposterous to Cecily, whereas Harriet was a wife and mother, and the idea of not having a child was preposterous to her.

Cecily was to be seen around the barracks in her sombre green uniform because it provided her with a veneer of authority, although she knew that she was at the bottom of the military food chain and expendable, a resource that could be thrown to the mincer and diced, quite literally if need be.

Harriet, on the other hand, had very different worries. She was married, although badly, and so she was insecure and jealous. She was always the life and the soul of the party, but this was because she craved the adoration, the approval. She wore outlandish, adventurous styles of makeup, and hair to attract - again - because she needed her confidence to be bolstered.

If you put these two women side by side and looked at them, they seemed as different as chalk and cheese and you wouldn't believe that they could be the same person. Yet when you looked at them more closely and you saw the patterns and similarities, you realised that the separation was simply a device because Cecily's work was uncompromising and brutal, and in her wiser, saner moments she wondered why anyone with any semblance of sanity would be part in it.

You see, she was an average woman. She had an average figure and average sized tits.

She was ordinary, mundane and average, and yet, in her alter ego, she was abused by whatever trick or stratagem her tormentor devised, and if his attacks were particularly savage or sick, then she had no recourse or comeback, no august body of impartial arbitration, no wise counsellor to listen to her frustrations and intercede on her behalf.

Harriet might have been average, then, but Cecily wasn't. She was a torture girl. It was her job. She was a victim, an object of sexual abuse. She would stumble back to the recuperation room at the end of a rough day with her uniform in rags. There would be bite marks puncturing her tits and the impression of a rubber hose bruising her torso. Perhaps she would be carried there by stretcher after an incident of brain numbing savagery, and she would sit huddled and numb and comatose in a shower cubicle, shivering and insignificant and naked, with hot steaming water spraying across her swollen and heavily lacerated private parts.

Every day, it was the same - the endless heartache, the constant abuse of her flesh. Every day, Cecily endured the brutality afresh: the electrical shocks, the boilings, the freezings, the knives, the countless surgical tools, the vintage pear, the thumb screw and even the strappado.

Every day she sat huddled on the floor of a shower cubicle, naked, alone and wretched. Every day the pain would be suffered anew. It would be endured, and afterwards, slowly, her flesh would heal, the bruises would fade.

Every day.

The problem was, Cecily's brain wasn't as clever and every time that she was raped and juiced by some over- sexed man to give him a thrill; every time the electric current screamed up her clit and dried out her pink flesh, she died; and although she washed herself afterwards and sat weeping on the floor in the shower cubicle, the dirt never completely washed off.

Bit by bit, her emotions were eroded. Her self confidence sagged. It was cut from beneath her and eaten away.

However.

Although this constant erosion sapped her spirit, it didn't break it.

That job fell to Harriet's husband, Dominic. He was the one who struck the fatal blow, for his blows weren't aimed at the resilient Cecily, but at Harriet.

Two women. Two carefully separated lives, each with their own personalities, each with their own identities and their own names. They each had their own clothes, their own characters: everything about them was unique, except that Dominic blurred the barriers and showed the women to each other.

It began by him watching Harriet as she showered and dressed in the morning. He asked her about her bruises and the strange unexplained marks, and then he casually reminded her that when she got to work at the barracks, she would be stripped naked, raped, humiliated, and made to scream her lungs out.

"Have a good day," he might conclude gaily. "And don't forget that the customer is always right."

One morning he casually questioned her about her stockings. She was taking a long time straightening them. "What's the point?" he quibbled as she double checked the seams. "They'll be on the floor as soon as you get to work. A man will tear them off of you. Do you think that it'll matter if they're not straight? Get real!"

Another day, because she refused to give him head, being tired, he drew three rectangular boxes across Harriet's midriff with red lipstick, leaving a narrow space beneath her breasts and another above her mound. In the upper space he scrawled the words: 'I suck good cock," and in the lower space, just above her slit, he squeezed the words: "Sign the left box if you agree, the right box if I need more practice; and sign the middle box if you want me to get me a good whacking."

Dominic had the power to stop it, and it would have been easy for him to have stopped it. He could have rung up the barracks and told them that Harriet wasn't coming to work that day, and if he'd just done it, Harriet would have stayed Harriet and Cecily wouldn't have woken up.

He had the power to end the crazy absurdity. He could have told them that Harriet was resigning, and if he'd done that, she'd have torn up her contract, at once, Cecily would have died. She'd have lived no more.

But Dominic chose not to do those things. Instead, he chose to tease and torment his wife. He chose to sign the middle box on her midriff and give her her whackings. He chose to ask her what it was like being raped, and to have a man's cock pounding her cunt.

He chose to ask her about everything: about the men who raped her, what they did, how she felt, and he'd relay this information to his friends and to Harriet's friends, and he'd enjoy the power that this brought him.

He told the guys at the pub and the old folks at Church about Harriet and what she did, although it wasn't Harriet but Cecily. He told the teacher at school, the shop assistants and the pretty young mum at the corner shop. He did it to shock them, to offend them, to frighten them, and while most of these friends were suitably shocked and offended and frightened, the red headed mum who worked at the corner shop listened in awe, and she dreamed of being a torture girl like Harriet.

Dominic was her friend because Dominic had stumbled across her at the grocery store and he'd flattered her. He'd asked her her name and she'd confided that it was Meg. He'd asked about her children and she'd told him that she had two, a boy and a girl, and that the father had deserted her, and that she found it difficult to be a single parent.

Dominic had seemed to understand her plight. He understood everything. He came in every evening, and he paid her those special attentions that a man gives to a woman who's gagging for his cock, and then, one day, he mentioned his "girlfriend" and what Harriet did at the barracks, and he noticed Meg's reaction, how it put fire in her belly.

So he upped his ante. He was blunt and clinical and he described in detail the horrors his "girlfriend" endured, and Meg listened in awe, avidly, and she was in ecstasy.

She didn't understood why Dominic's stories had such a strong powerful effect on her belly, but she knew that she liked the pretty feelings. She counted the hours and minutes to his next visit, and as Dominic's accounts became increasingly frank and excessive, so did Meg's behaviour.

Soon, he'd enter the shop and she'd hastily unbutton her dress, button after button, until it was unbuttoned all the way to the waist.

She was breathless. She was wanton. It didn't matter whether there were customers in the shop, or children. "It's so hot," she'd stammer and then falter, and Dominic would lean across the counter. He'd choose a copy of Playboy or Hustler from the magazine counter, and then he'd ogle Meg's cleavage and he'd tell her about the things that his "girlfriend" must do.

Meg would become confused and stressed as Dominic turned the pages of his magazine and stared at one or other of the models, and he'd point at the breasts of this one or the pussy of another, and he'd tell Meg which ones he fancied and why. He'd order her to describe to him her own breasts and pussy, and then, if she did a good job, he'd recount stories of intrigue and espionage, racy ones about Harriet being tortured by big brooding men in distant corners of the globe, of being stretched on a rack or impaled naked in an iron maiden, and Meg would drool as she'd listen to these tales, and she'd shiver in silence.

At some point Dominic would slide his palm into her dress and he'd cup her breasts, and immediately Meg's stomach would churn and become knots because he'd be describing to her what a torture girl did at the barracks, and how the big brooding men would become intimate, and how they would feel her all over.

Dominic would feel the weight of Meg's breasts, their texture and firmness, and as he headed rapidly towards the conclusion of his story, he'd observe the glazing of her eyes and the shaking of her lips, the hardness of her nipples, and he would gradually pinch and pull each of them in turn, extending them to several times their normal length, stretching Meg's tits, and Meg would sweat and growl and moan, until the end of the story when Dominic would lean across the counter, he'd pull her towards him, and he'd kiss her with urgency and force.

"Who are you?" she'd whimper weepily, and then he'd show her a centrefold picture and he'd make her study it carefully. "Please sir," she'd swallow. "What do you want?"

He'd smile. "I want the truth."

She'd swallow nervously, glancing again at the picture. "Don't hurt me. Please sir. I beg you."

He'd stroke her cheek, doing so softly. "I'm sorry, Meg. It's my job to hurt you. You don't want me to neglect my job..."

Then, he'd turn to a shelf close to the counter and he'd shuffle through a random assortment of toys and he'd pick out a child's water pistol, and he'd extract it from a yellow cellophane wrapping, and with Meg watching, he'd point it at Meg's open top, touching her sweaty skin with the barrel of the gun, and he'd move it slowly towards her breasts.

"You'll tell me the truth, Meg. Sooner or later. You'll tell me everything I need to know. Whatever it takes... because you're a spy..."

"My children..." Meg would murmur softly, shutting her eyes and imagining herself being forced to obey several brooding men each of whom held a gun to her skin. She imagined that they were surrounding her and making her undress and pose like the Playboy model in the picture.

"Fuck your children," Dominic would reply, picking up a pair of plastic hand cuffs from the same shelf that he'd found the pistol, and he'd tear them from their cardboard mounting and he'd open the bracelets and dangle them for her to look at. "You're coming with me, Meg."

He'd ease the gun beneath the edge of her bra and he'd push it inside. "Lock up the shop, Meg," he'd whisper softly, "You're under arrest. You're coming with me for questioning."

And with that, he'd snap the bracelets around Meg's wrists and lead her out to his car. Her top would be still open and her bra would be showing and her shop still unlocked. There were people observing from their windows, bored young housewives in smart suits and ready-to-go hair, spotty teenagers with baseball caps and baggy blue jeans, and haggard old men. There were others walking along the pavement, naive girls in non existent skirts and a gaggle of children just being children, but he ignored them all, and he pushed Meg into the car, doing so roughly, dispassionately. "Before the night's out," he hissed at her, slamming the door of the car. "You're going to understand what happens to a woman suspected of being a spy, because, you see, I hate spies, and you're a fucking spy, Meg, and so help me, I'm going to prove it, and when I do, I'm going to drop you into the mincer... You're going to find out all about the mincer, Meg. By the time tonight is done, you're going to find out what I do with a woman when I get her out of her clothes."