Chapter 19: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

I figure there has to be more than one rabbit hole in the world which leads down into some weird place where normal rules don’t apply. And they can’t all lead down into the same weird place that Alice dropped in on. I’d assumed that I’d fallen into Wonderland but it seems I was wrong. The scene in front of me was totally weird but it was a completely different kind of weird to the strange stuff Alice had to cope with.

You know how in the slapstick comedy movies, they do this funny thing where they look and then look away and then go “huh?” and look back? Well I did that. Only I didn’t do it because I was trying to be funny.

Then I got tackled from the side by a small Angie-shaped linebacker. I staggered but didn’t fall over. I was kind of glad about that. I don’t think my dress would have survived me hitting the floor in Mum’s studio – it isn’t the cleanest of floors. I picked Angie up and sat her on my hip. Angie was clutching Lucy the doll. She waved Lucy in front of my face and tried to tell me about Lucy and her clothes but I was kind of distracted.

“Angel, I’ll spend time with you in a bit but I have to deal with this first. Can you wait for a while?”

Angie pouted at me and started muttering about how unfair everything was. I got the impression she’d been ignored for quite some time and she was getting sick of it. Instead of putting her back down and chasing her away like I’d intended, I walked over to Mum with Angie still on my hip.

Before I got to Mum, I had a sudden idea. I stopped and looked around.

“Angie, tell me what everybody is doing in here.”

“Um ... Mummy is painting.”

“Yes, what else?”

She giggled. “Tara is nudie. I wanna be nudie. Can I be nudie?”

Well, that dashed one theory I had.

“No, Angie. Sorry! There’s already one too many nudists in this room at the moment.”

I figured I better check all of my facts.

“Angie, tell me something else about Tara.”

“Tara and Mummy played a tying up game.” She pouted. “They wouldn’t let me play.”

Then she giggled some more. “Sam is making funny faces.”

“Yeah! That’s what I see, too. Hmm. I guess I better talk to Mum. Can you be a good girl and sit quietly while I talk to Mum?”

She pouted again. “Okay!”

As soon as I got near Mum, I looked over her shoulder. Sure enough she was busily painting what was in front of her. In other words, she was painting a picture of her naked teenage daughter spread out like a big X and tied in place while her nephew used a table tennis bat to paddle her backside.

Totally, mindblowingly weird – and wrong!

Except that Sam had stopped paddling. He hadn’t moved since he saw me enter the studio. He watched me with a nervous look on his face. It was as if he were worried that maybe I wouldn’t approve. Well, he had every right to be worried because I didn’t.

Mum spoke up. “Sam! Lift your hand back up. You’ve let it droop. And go back to looking stern. I don’t know what that expression is but it isn’t stern.”

I watched as Sam lifted the bat back up until it matched the position in Mum’s half-finished painting. That’s when I realized that Sam was only pretending to paddle Tara rather than actually doing it. He hadn’t frozen in place because I came into the studio. That was the pose he’d been holding all along. I suppose that made me feel a fraction better. But it was still weird.

Since Sam wasn’t actually smacking Tara I decided they could wait for a moment until I’d talked to Mum. I walked around to get in front of Mum. I forced my way between her and the easel – making her stop painting. I had to actually push her back a little bit so that my back wasn’t up against the fresh paint. I did not want paint on Tara’s nice dress.

“Leave me alone! What is it?”

“Mum? What are you doing?”

Mum seemed surprised to see me. I kind of expected that. She’d been so totally focused on her painting that she hadn’t noticed me come in.

“Oh! Hello, Bec! Where have you been?”

“I’ve been out, Mum. What are you doing?”

“I’m making you a present. Tara’s been very bad. She did a terrible thing to you. I thought you might like a present to show you that she’s been punished.”

I blinked a couple of times and tried to process that.

“So you’re doing a painting of Tara stripped naked and beaten as a present for me?”

Mum smiled warmly. She was clearly pleased that I had understood so well.

“That’s right, sweetie.”

Then her smile went away and Mum went back to looking distracted and anxious. She wanted to get back to painting and I was in the way. I knew how that felt but I didn’t have a lot of sympathy. I stared at Mum. Angie sat on my hip and stared at Mum. Angie was sucking on Lucy’s arm. I wasn’t sucking on anybody’s arm but apart from that we both had the same expression on our faces. I guess you could say it was a mixture of frustrated and cross and confused. Angie was frustrated and cross and confused because she’d been ignored for too long. I was frustrated and cross and confused because Mum was being – well – Mum.

“What happens if I don’t want a present like that?”

“Of course you’ll want my present. Don’t be silly. It’s a lovely present. You’ll have a reminder that Tara was punished for being mean to you. You’ll be very pleased.”

I sighed and shook my head. I wasn’t getting through to her. I needed to try a different idea.

“What about Dad? What about Peter, Mum? What’s he going to think when he sees a painting of his daughter getting tied up and beaten?”

“Oh!”

She seemed to struggle with that. Then she dismissed it with a flap of her hand. The flap sent a little spray of paint flicking off the brush in her hand. Fortunately it didn’t land on me. It added itself to the speckled coloring of the studio floor somewhere over to my left.

“Your dad’s not here. He won’t know about it.”

“It’s a painting, Mum. Paintings don’t disappear when they’re finished. What’s he going to say when he comes home and sees it?”

“He’ll know it isn’t real. He’ll understand.”

I was beginning to think Angie had the right idea. If I had an arm to stick in my mouth, I could have chewed on it instead of just grinding my teeth together.

“He won’t understand at all, Mum. He gets really upset by things like this. You know that.”

“But he said Tara needs to be punished.”

She was pouting like a – well, like me when I don’t get my way.

“I’m sure he did, Mum. But he probably meant she should be grounded or made to wear a silly hat that says ‘I’m a bully!’ or something stupid like that. You have to stop this or you’ll make Dad really unhappy.”

I could see I was starting to get through to her.

She looked at me and then at the painting and then over at Tara and Sam who still held their poses. Well, Tara didn’t have much choice but Sam was still holding his pose.

“It does look a bit ... pornographic, doesn’t it? I didn’t mean to make it so ... extreme. I don’t know how that happened. Perhaps I could fix it a bit so Peter wouldn’t be upset.”

I snorted.

“The only way to fix it is to completely white it out and start over with something different – something not so crazy.”

I plucked the paintbrush and the palette out of her hand. I walked over to her bench and put those things down. Then I picked up the tin of white primer that she uses to prepare her canvases and a big brush. I carried them over to Mum and handed them to her. I had to do all of that one-handed because I was still holding Angie on my hip with the other arm.

“Here you go, Mum. This is the only way you’re going to be able to fix it so Dad won’t be upset. Cover it all over and start again.”

Thankfully, Angie stayed quiet. She had somehow managed to twist Lucy’s arm around to a really strange angle behind her head. Angie was busy trying to get it back to something more normal.

“Now, Mum. Get started. Cover it all. White it all out. Let’s make it so that this never happened and then Dad won’t have to get upset. Okay?”

“Okay!” mumbled Mum.

I guess it was a measure of how much I’d gotten through to Mum that she was willing to paint over what she’d done. Mum hates destroying artwork. She says even bad art should be respected for what it is.

Mum sighed and dipped the brush into the paint tin. A second later I heard the wet slap of paint against canvas. I didn’t watch. I was already walking over towards Sam.

At some stage during that time, Sam had realized he didn’t need to pose anymore and he’d dropped the paddle to his side. He hadn’t moved, though. He watched me walk towards him and actually trembled. He looked scared – as if he was afraid of what I was going to do to him.

That made me stop and force myself to calm down. I walked up to him and spoke as calmly as I could.

“It’s okay, Sam. It’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you. Didn’t somebody explain to you about Mum? It’s okay to refuse to do something she asks if it seems too weird.”

He stuttered a bit before he started talking.

“I know that, but she’s kind of scary. She wanted me to smack Tara with the bat but I told her I wouldn’t do that.”

“Did she threaten you or something?”

“No! Nothing like that. She stood there and frowned at me. It doesn’t sound scary when I say it now but it was the look on her face that was scary.”

“She actually told you to smack Tara?”

“She said I wouldn’t have to do it hard – just a little bit to bring out the red color. I told her I wouldn’t do it at all. Aunty Louise said she didn’t want to do it because she was worried she’d hit too hard.”

I frowned as I tried to make sense of what Sam was saying. Then I frowned again because it did make a kind of frown-worthy sense.

“Then she gave up and asked me to stand there and pretend. It didn’t seem wrong to do that. I didn’t think about your dad.”

“That’s okay, Sam. But if you didn’t smack Tara and Mum didn’t smack Tara then who did? Her bottom is all red.”

Sam grinned. “That’s makeup! Your Mum used a whole stack of that blush stuff on her. I suggested paint but she said this would look better.”

I looked again. It really did look like a well-smacked bum – not that I’m an expert or anything. But it looked red like I imagine a bum would go after it was smacked. I reached out and ran a finger down one cheek of Tara’s bum. Tara jerked in surprise and tried to look over her shoulder at me but she didn’t say anything. I lifted up my finger and looked at it. Sure enough, some of the makeup had rubbed off onto my finger.

So Mum was making it look like Tara had been spanked as punishment without actually spanking her. This whole thing had gone from weird to totally bizarre.

Maybe I really did fall down some rabbit hole and Mum was doing her version of the Mad Hatter.

I looked at the ropes tying Tara’s hands and feet. I could see that there was cloth wrapped around under the rope so that the rope wouldn’t hurt her wrists. Mum might have tied Tara up but she’d made sure that Tara wasn’t hurt in the process. Tara was standing there with her back to me. She didn’t look uncomfortable or anything.

A little voice in my head giggled and whispered a wicked idea to me.

I looked at Sam. “Will you do something for me? Over next to the sink you’ll find a wash cloth. Wet it with warm water and use it to clean this stuff off Tara.”

Sam looked at Tara’s bum and then at me. “You want me to clean... ?”

I nodded and grinned. “Yep! It’s not going to clean itself.”

“We could always untie Tara and let her clean her own bottom.”

I grinned again. “We could. But where’s the fun in that?”

Sam still didn’t look happy so I sighed.

“If you don’t want to do it, I’m sure Angie would.”

I turned to Angie who was still sitting on my hip.

“Angie, do you want to help clean the makeup off Tara’s bum?”

Angie giggled. “Okay!”

I put Angie down and looked at Sam.

“Will you help Angie, please? Get the wash cloth for her and stuff. I want to talk to Tara while she can’t run away.”

Sam looked at me with a strange expression on his face.

“Um?”

“We have baths with Angie, sometimes. As far as she’s concerned, this will be just like that – only not in the bath.”

He shrugged and nodded at me and took Angie’s hand. He led Angie over to the sink.

I walked around and stood in front of Tara. I had to step over the rope holding Tara’s leg and duck under her arm at the same time. There was a little bit of space for me in front of Tara because she was tied across a corner of the studio. I leaned back into the corner and tilted my head to one side while I looked at Tara. She started watching me as soon as I moved into her field of vision but she didn’t say anything. The skin around her eye looked very colorful where I’d hit her last night.

“Hey!” I said.

“Hi!” she said softly.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Oh! Just hanging around!”

I smiled at her joke.

“Why did you let The Mother tie you up like this?” I asked.

“Because I deserve it,” she said quietly. “I should never have done that to you. I’m really sorry.”

I was about to say that nobody deserved having all this done to them but then I decided to keep quiet and see what else she would say. I just stared at her and stared at her until she started talking again.

“For a while I thought she was going to smack me good and hard while I was like this. I deserve that, too. I told her she should do it. But she didn’t.”

“You told Mum she should smack you? Why would you do that?”

Her shoulders moved in a kind of shrug. “Because I deserve it!”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“None of that happened,” said Tara. “So I’ve just had to stay here like this. I think this is the longest I’ve ever been tied up. I thought it would be interesting. I guess it was at first. Since then, it’s gotten pretty boring.”

“Yeah! I noticed that. Being tied up and left for a long time gets pretty boring.”

Tara grimaced. “I really am sorry.”

I nodded at her – accepting her apology.

“There’s a weird stain on the wall just next to your shoulder. I’ve been staring at it for ages and thinking about you. I figured that if you had to look at it like I was doing, you’d turn it into some drawing.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw the stain she was talking about. It was a kind of strange shape. I shrugged. Tara was probably right.

“Except, the thing is,” I said, “if I were tied up like you and forced to look at it, I wouldn’t be able to draw – on account of being tied up!”

Tara grimaced. “I really am sorry!” she said – again.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell her to stop. You could have gotten her to stop really easily. You’ve done that before when she’s tried to get you to do something weird. She would’ve stopped if you told her to.”

Tara looked puzzled. “Why would I do that?”

I shook my head in disbelief. Sometimes I don’t understand Tara.

Tara suddenly jerked and tried to look behind her.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Angie, your baby sister, is washing your naked arse because you’re too helpless to do it yourself.”

I said that kind of harshly.

“Oh!” She blushed a little bit. “Oh! You mean like this morning when I washed you? Didn’t you want me to do that? I’m sorry.”

“No!” I sighed. “That was fine.”

I thought about it and shrugged.

“I guess I didn’t mind that. You were fine. I just wish I didn’t get like that in the first place. It bothers me, sometimes, that I get so completely helpless that my family has to wash me and dress me and everything. But I figured, with you being tied up, you could get to find out what it feels like. It’s like a metaphor for what my life is like, sometimes. You know, aware of what’s going on around me but unable to do anything about it.”

Tara wriggled a bit in her ropes. “This is a really weird sensation. Angie’s being pretty – um – enthusiastic.”

“I wanted Sam to do it,” I said. “He would have been gentler. On the other hand, it would have been extra humiliating for you to have a nine year old boy washing your bum. He didn’t want to do it.” I sighed. “Remind me later to thank him for refusing.”

Tara squeaked and her eyes went wide. Then she shuddered and closed her eyes.

“She just washed down my crack,” whispered Tara.

I giggled and watched as a blush spread slowly over Tara’s face.

Then I leaned around Tara’s side and spoke to Angie.

“Hey, Angel! You’re doing a good job. Do you think she’s clean yet?”

Angie took a break from her scrubbing and stepped back. She looked very carefully all over Tara’s bum and then nodded to me with a very serious expression on her face.

“I made Tara’s bum really clean,” she said.

“Good girl! Well, maybe you could put the cloth back in the sink and grab that towel over there. We can’t leave Tara with a wet bum, now, can we?”

Angie giggled and scampered off.

I stood up and returned to my place in front of Tara.

“So, how did the wedding go?” asked Tara.

“It was amazing.”

“I love your hair like that,” said Tara. “You look good in the dress. In fact, you look awesome in the dress. But I don’t remember the rubber boots being part of the outfit you borrowed from me.”

I laughed and reached my arms up over my head and did a kind of wriggling dance. It was a lot harder to dance with the rubber boots on. Also, there wasn’t a lot of room in that little corner.

“I took the pumps off when I got home. They hurt my feet.”

“Yeah! They tend to do that. So tell me about the wedding.”

I giggled. “I kissed a boy, Tara! I kissed a boy! Like, with tongue and everything.”

Her eyes went wide! “Shut up! You did not!”

“It’s true! I kissed a boy! And he kissed me!”

I wriggled again and laughed in delight.

“Oh, Tara! I’m so happy I could burst.”

“Tell me everything!” said Tara.

Tara was still standing spreadeagled with her feet and hands tied but she listened and asked questions like we were sitting together on the couch. She did pull some weird faces every so often as Angie dried her backside with a towel.

The whole conversation was a bit – well – it was the kind of conversation a person has after falling down a rabbit hole.

Once I’d filled Tara in on all the important details, I leaned around Tara and asked Angie if she thought Tara’s bum was dry. Angie put her serious expression on again and tilted her head to one side. She examined Tara’s backside very carefully and then proudly told me she was finished. I grinned at her and ruffled her hair.

“Off you go, then. Hang up the towel and go play with Sam for a bit. I want to talk to Tara some more.”

Sam cleared his throat. He’d sat himself down off to one side and was holding Lucy in one hand. Lucy’s arm was no longer twisted around behind her head. Apparently Sam had taken pity on poor Lucy.

“Um, Bec? Don’t you think we should untie Tara?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “I guess we’ll have to. I want to put it off as long as I can. This is fun.”

“Um, Bec? You know how you shouted at your Mum for tying up Tara and doing stuff to her that would upset your dad?”

I pouted at him.

“I didn’t exactly shout.”

“Well, if you leave her tied up, aren’t you doing the same thing? Won’t your dad be upset with you?”

“Oh!”

I thought about that and then sighed.

“I guess so.”

Inside my head, a little Bec stamped her foot and said, “but I wanna...”

“I’m sorry,” said Sam. “When they told me about not doing what your mom says if it sounded weird, they said the same thing about you.”

I sniffed. “I was hoping they’d forget that little detail.”

A thought occurred to me. “So why didn’t you untie Tara?”

“I offered but she didn’t want me to. Nobody told me I could ignore Tara.”

“They should have. Tara’s as messed up as Mum and me.”

“She said it wasn’t the first time she’s been tied up. Is that true?”

“Yeah! Tara and I have sometimes played games like Hostage or Kidnap or whatever.”

“Isn’t that a bit – you know – odd?”

I shrugged. “I’ve never thought about it. We’ve played all sorts of games over the years. Most of them don’t involve somebody being tied up. But if it makes sense in the game, why shouldn’t we?”

I looked at Tara who had gone back to staring at the wall.

I sighed. “I guess we better untie her.”

When I reached for Tara’s wrists, she sighed and twisted her wrist then she slid her hands out from under the ropes. I stood back and watched as Tara reached down and tugged at the ropes around her ankles for a moment and then stepped free of the ropes.

She looked at me and shrugged as she rubbed her wrists. “Mum isn’t as good at tying knots as you are. I think we need to get her to practise some more.”

I looked at her. “You could have got free whenever you wanted. Why didn’t you?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Where’s the fun in that?”

I looked around. “Where are your clothes?”

“Over there!” Tara pointed to a small pile off to one side.

I walked over and picked up a handful of shredded cloth.

“Um?”

“Yeah! Mum tied me up first and then decided she didn’t like my clothes. They didn’t fit her idea or something. She couldn’t take them off me because of the ropes so I told her to use scissors rather than going to all the hassle of untying me and tying me up again. At first she just cut them into shreds and left them hanging off me. But then she decided that look didn’t work so she cut them off completely.”

“You told her she could cut up your clothes?”

Tara shrugged. “They were getting a bit small anyway. It was stuff you wouldn’t have liked so I would’ve ended up throwing them out or whatever. Maybe I’ll be able to guilt her into buying me something new.”

“It all sounds awful. I’d be so embarrassed.”

Tara shrugged. “It wasn’t too bad. Having Sam watching didn’t help. But after maybe, I don’t know, maybe five minutes or so, I got used to it. I asked Sam to turn up the heating a bit but apart from that I wasn’t worried. I figured you posed naked for those paintings on your walls so I was just doing the same thing.”

I thought about one painting in particular and blushed.

“I didn’t pose for all of them – only one of them, really. Mostly, Mum did them from her imagination. I absolutely did not pose for the one of me touching – you know – my boob.”

Tara giggled at me. “Okay! I’ll take your word for it. It looks pretty real though. Are you sure Mum didn’t see you doing it sometime? Maybe she was painting from memory.”

I blushed and pulled a face at Tara. She grinned back at me.

I shook my head. She was teasing me and I fell for it.

I poked my tongue out at her. Then I ran my eyes down and up Tara’s naked body.

“I don’t know what we can do now. I guess you should wait here while I run back up to the house and grab something from your room for you to wear.”

Tara shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll walk up to the house like this. It’s just as well Dad isn’t home. He would freak if he saw me like this. Since Dad isn’t around, I’ll be fine. All you have to do is distract Dan so I can duck into my room. Where is Dan?”

“Dan’s in his room.”

“Well, good! That makes it easy. I can streak through the back yard and into the house. Nobody but us will ever know.”

“I found your shoes and socks,” said Sam.

He had picked them up from behind a pile of unused frames. He handed them to Tara.

“Thanks!” she said, and smiled at Sam.

Tara squatted and put her shoes on. She seemed completely comfortable being naked in front of him. I shook my head in disbelief – again.

“There!” she said as she stood up. “I’m ready to go.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s kind of cold outside.”

Tara shrugged. “As long as we don’t stop to admire the scenery, I should be okay.”