Chapter XXII Apology and Aftermath

 

 

I followed her down the staircase without a word. All I could hear was the sharp click of her high heels as she made her way down the stairs and then across the hall towards the surgery.

We stepped back into the surgery now and she switched on the light. Then she stood by the operating table and waited for my next command. “Bend over the table, and lift and your coat.”

She lay herself down on the operating table without a word, looked forward resolutely into the further part of the room. With her left hand she flipped open the end of her white lab coat exposing her rounded pale cheeks to the oncoming slaughter. Then she placed her arms forward and gripped the end of the table, like a spankee pro. Perhaps she was a spankee pro?

I lay the thick dog leash gently at right angles to the crack between her cheeks. I waited, she waited, even the parrot waited. There was silence in the room. I was relishing this moment of anticipation. I sensed that she did too.

I lifted the leash again and let it crash down with some force on where I had placed it before. In the silence the blow sounded like a gun shot. Her whole body shuddered and the buttocks quivered. As I lifted the leash anew her rear took on the appearance of a symmetrically marked hot cross bun.

“One!” she called out.

 

      *               *                 *                *

 

After several angry measured strokes, I recovered my equanimity and lay down the leash. She remained in her prone position. I rubbed the offended part of her anatomy gently with a warm wet sponge and offered her a hand to help her up. She made as if to stop me. I wondered what else she wanted. Surely she was not expecting me to continue?

“Finished?” she asked.

“Should there be more?” I asked in surprise.

“You have had my apology. I want to have your assurance that you will now listen to what I have to say. About the development. If not, then you need to continue until you do.”

“Melanie, be assured. I am done. You now have my full attention.”

I assisted her to stand up, still rubbing her painful behind.

“OK,” said Melanie. “Can we go upstairs now? Frankly, I need another drink.”

“Yes,” I assured her.

“Good,” she said. I held her up as she struggled to get off the bed. Then once she had jumped off she rushed in a sprightly manner back up the stairs and straight into the bathroom. I followed her up amazed at her resilience. It was only now that I had fully awakened to what I had done, or more correctly, what she, the Tigress of Framden Council, had let me do to her. Initially I had unloaded my anger but channelled it through a ritual as familiar, apparently, to her as it was to me. The consequences of playing out my fantasy were only beginning to dawn on me.

As I passed the bathroom door at the top of the stairs, I noticed that the door was invitingly ajar. Curiosity drew me into looking through it, only to see Melanie coatless now, in fact effectively naked, with her head twisted over body, inspect the damage in her mirror. There were some six distinct bright weals across her white flesh. Six was not a massacre, but it signified a distinct mark of retaliation. “Bastard,” I could hear her muttering. “That’s gone bloody purple.”

Unwittingly I scraped against something as I stood in the door. The sound made her head spin round. “You bastard, stop peeping,” she repeated, but without any anger. It sounded like a mixture of regret and appreciation. Appreciation perhaps for the effectiveness of my performance, I flattered myself.

I stepped forward. As my face came close to hers, I finally succumbed to those rose red lips. I kissed them but she pushed me away and glared at me. Then within seconds she grabbed me violently and was kissing me, passionately and with total abandon. She pushed me back into the sitting room as we were still kissing. I was not resisting. For why should I? One fantasy realized, only to be succeeded by another.

A minute later we were on her couch. For obvious reasons she had placed herself on the top of me now. The juices began flowing freely in both directions from two opposite spectrums of the political landscape. She was still muttering “You bastard” but I was too far gone to speak.

Half an hour later, after a joint shower, Melanie and I settled down again in the upstairs flat. She had put on a flimsy see-through patterned nightdress. She still looked quite alluring. She had weathered her punishment remarkably well and had certainly felt little compunction afterwards in driving herself into a state of orgiastic abandon. Now she was relaxed, both physically and emotionally, ready to serve out more drinks. To me she was a new unrecognizable Melanie, but I realized it was a Melanie that had been there the whole time I had known her. It’s just that I had only seen the outer veneer. It was the soft meat beneath the turtle shell.

It soon transpired, even during the intense course of love-making, when few actual words were exchanged, that Melanie was a devotee of fetish parties and had both given and received whippings and canings. Once she had glimpsed my invitation to the Love Boat, she knew what to expect from me and effectively provoked me into providing her with it. She had screwed up her courage and with Meena’s unwitting help she had brought it to fruition. But she did it for a purpose of course, not for the sheer hell of it.

In fact, she confessed that she had been intrigued by me from quite early on, just as I had to admit, that I had been by her. When I had castigated her verbally at the Wilkinson Meadow public meeting she had been thrilled but turned her feelings into hatred as she had no other way of expressing her reaction at being publicly humiliated. The news of my return to Framden Council in May had been an equally thrilling experience as she provoked me deliberately into reacting through the vehicle of sneering banter and tantrums of hate which she felt quite incapable of controlling, even though she realized that politically it was not the best policy. Yet this flamboyant hate gave her an enormous fillip in dealing with her rather mundane and crusty party colleagues, many of whom thought of her as the young nanny out to discipline them. It seems that even when she confronted me at the Planning Committee meeting, driven by her seemingly unremitting demons of anger and hatred, all along she had nursed a wish to be appreciated by me. Yet the further that she was from achieving such an outcome the more strident her hatred of me became. All I could say to this was that, likewise, despite my strong dislike of her, I had always admired her single-mindedness and her animal courage and secretly, unwittingly, I had fancied Melanie Sheldrake like hell.

It is often the case that powerful figures, such as politicians, army officers, corporate executives, judges, doctors, both male and female, often feel the need to submit their will occasionally to somebody with a stronger personality. Tired of constantly having to make decisions concerning other people who were dependent on them, they cry out for someone else on whom they could lean. Now others could judge them, and that judgement could be positive or negative, incurring corporal or material consequences, either as rewards or as punishments. At an appropriate moment the desire to suffer some humiliation, to submit their body to a subservient pose, and even to be abused verbally and physically, becomes overwhelming. Yet by the very nature of this affliction it was important to retain discretion so that the humiliation could remain private and should not undermine their haughty public image. The thought that a powerful figure such as a judge or a general should bare their bottoms and submit to spankings, may sound amusing when repeated as a private experience or amongst very close friends, but it becomes a career disaster if it becomes general knowledge. Hence the sensitivity over adverse publicity, over fetish paparazzi with long tom cameras and the constant fear of blackmail.  But this seeming aberration was also a necessary therapy that enabled them to resume their professional responsibilities with renewed fresh vigour.

For many years this need for secrecy had masked the wide extent to which these princes and princesses of darkness had indulged their sadistic and masochistic tastes. Only in the 1990s had fetishism, and particularly the abundance of leather clothes, been allowed to enter the mainstream of fashion. It was no longer a matter of shame to be seen in an Ann Summers or Agent Provocateur shop or join one of those mass fetish events such as Submission. But even at those events, the hardened practitioners enter a hidden sanctum unknown to the majority of partygoers, and can whip and torture, or be whipped and tortured, to their hearts’ content while their more innocent friends dance and preen themselves in their pale imitation fetish costumes to the tinny sound of techno-music. This world is now in open display at weekend open-air events and at the famous Framden Market by the canal locks, where stalls trade in whips, penis enlargers and spanking videos for all the world to see and buy, while famous attractive Swedish TV presenters allow themselves to be spanked publicly on British television for charity (“one smack for each lover”). Madonna, Mylene Farmer, Catherine Deneuve allow themselves to be photographed and filmed as physically and emotionally abused and these iconic images become central to their glamorous public persona and a key element in the link that binds them to their emotionally damaged frustrated loyal fans.

In many ways this kind of secrecy reflected the earlier hidden world of homosexuality in Marcel Proust’s “In Remembrance of Things Past”, a scary underworld hidden from the prying eyes of the uninitiated. Both Marcel and the innocent reader were led blissfully through the adolescent Swann ‘s Way, the coy Budding Grove and along the flamboyant and ostentatious Guermantes Way until they reached the plateau of maturity in the Cities of the Plain, where they experience a shock as they discover that the innocent world of Albertine and the knowing world of Charlus both hide dark secrets that ultimately envelop more than half the characters in the book. For suddenly the majority of Marcel’s acquaintances, not just the exotic few, appear to have flourished amid the devotees of the condemned Cities, later engulfed by the horrors of the First World War. Now in the days of Gay Pride the hidden kingdoms of the Plain have been rent open and no visas are required for entry, while AIDS appears to have become an exportable commodity in the global market for which the old city kingdoms no longer have an exclusive franchise.

I was not sure whether I was comfortable or not with the revelation that Melanie Sheldrake was a practitioner of the same dark arts as myself. Certainly, I was only vaguely aware what life experiences in her childhood had driven in this direction. During our lustful explosion downstairs she had revealed that her parents never beat her (in fact her sickly mother had died before she was 10), but that she had been beaten with a leather belt when she visited her grandmother in Poland during her summer holidays and found that all her Polish cousins had been subjected to the same regime. Yet her Nan, who had been in the forests with the Home Army partisans during the War, had been a loving and kind person, often giving her treats and affection, something Melanie had failed to experience with her more remote English father. These childhood paths lead inevitably to the dark forest where, once the wolf bites, Little Red Riding Hood remains captive to these anal urges.

 I was more concerned about how far would this push the most energetic member of the opposition into my own private world? How would it affect our political relationship as we sparred and battered each other on the public stage and in council committees? As with Meena, there was now a secret that bound us together, but a much darker one. Could it rend us further apart? Would we now always have a secret understanding? Or a deeper contempt for each other?

“Peter?” Yes, she was calling me Peter now. That was already a change in relationships. Our mutual hatred had been so strong that we had never called each other by our first names, even in private.

“Yes, Melanie?” Calling her “Melanie” also sounded strange after what we had both gone through in the past.

“You’re probably thinking what happens to us now, Peter?” she said, watching me intently as she sat in the armchair opposite me with a glass of wine in her hand. She had plonked an extra soft cushion under her bottom. “You’re probably thinking: Are we now in a secret world of mutual recognition and secret deals, like the free-masons? Or are we to continue vigorously slating each other in mock verbal jousts in the Council chamber?” The clever woman had jumped right into my train of thought without even waiting for that train to slow down at the station. “Well, let me tell you that on one issue we must try and cooperate. You know which one I mean. If we do not then another secret society will win the day. One that I am sure you are NOT a member of, just as I am not.”

“Please don’t talk in riddles, Melanie. You have caught my attention so please explain what you mean in words of one syllable.” 

“Then listen, Peter. What I say is on the best authority and you must trust me over this. The Pinkerton Plaza is being ramrodded through by Sheremovsky, the Russian oil tycoon, who is intending to use this development as his own private enclosed fortress, from which all except his cronies will be excluded.”

I lifted my eyes to the ceiling in mocking disbelief. She observed my gesture in a fit of anger. “Hey, you promised to listen to me without comment. So listen! Or do we have to go downstairs again for a longer session!” The spankee was now threatening the spanker.

“No fear,” shuddered the spanker. “Please continue. You have my undivided attention.”

“There are plans for deep basements and underground passages which we will not see on any plan,” she went on; “the site uses we are supposed to approve will be nothing more than a piece of paper covering up for the real ones. All those ambitious plans which you saw at the site visit are a bluff. His intention is to build something entirely different and to fool the public and the Government into accepting this. Should the authorities get wise to this then they will bribe all opposition away by supplying the Government with cheap oil and monopolizing oil equipment sales to our own oilfields in the North Sea.”

“Melanie, you’re out of your mind. How could the Council be fooled in such a way? You saw the maquette – the large scale model at the site visit. How could something as meticulous as that be a bluff? And Sir William Tallis is a world class architect. How could he lend himself to such a bluff?”

“Look, Peter,” she turned on me quite fiercely again. “Do you think I would have submitted myself to all this unless I needed to engage your attention? So listen and don’t interrupt! You owe me that much! You mention the three dimensional model? Where was it during the public meeting today? You mention Tallis? Where was Tallis today?”

“That’s just coincidence. Smallbridge told me that the model had been damaged. And Tallis? I believe he was ill. He’s not necessarily obliged to appear at every public consultation over every project he supervises. He did have his sidekick here this evening, Lamsden or whatever his name was.”

“That’s just the beginning of the lies and excuses we are going to get. I have it on good authority that Tallis has walked out on the scheme. This will be revealed next week, certainly before the Planning Committee meeting. You can believe the story about the model but I’ll bet you anything, even another beating like today, that you will never see that model again. It has served its purpose at the site visit. You want to bet on that? If you’re right then you wallop me. If I’m right I do the same to you. And boy, will I enjoy that.”

This was precisely the kind of challenge I would normally have taken up but I wanted to hear her out, so I ignored it. “I remember they took pictures of us inspecting the model.”

“Yes, I dare say there will be pictures of us looking at the model so that its existence will be acknowledged. But the model itself will no longer be subject to public scrutiny, because it won’t exist.”

“But Smallbridge said…”

“Smallbridge is a shit. He is the upper class twit – wise guy – who charms people into making the scheme palatable. This is how Sheremovsky always does his work: pretty girls, upper class twits, plenty of sexy parties, lots of food and vodka, blackmail, violence and piles and piles of money. Money talks. Money, violence and blackmail. That’s what is behind all those little whores and people like Smallbridge. And that money is already talking in our Council.”

“You mean Chris Finneston? I have already asked to remove from the project. I think he cooperated in creating the project so that it was dovetailed to our Borough Plan.”

“Absolutely right. We are on the same wavelength at last. You’ve removed him, you say? I didn’t know that. He was representing the Council tonight.”

“Yes, but it’s the last time. Just a couple of hours ago I asked Grayson to remove him.”

“Grayson?!! Well you can ask the Poisoned Dwarf as much as you like but he won’t let Finneston go.”

“Why not?” (I suddenly remembered Ted Grayson urging me to put off removing Finneston).

“Because Grayson is on the payroll too.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And don’t think I’m politically biased. Algie Batchelor is too. I badgered him into admitting it yesterday. That’s why he did not turn up today. That surprised you didn’t it? Upset your little plans to keep me out, you little schemer!” She was grinning now.

“Of course,” she went on. “Your friend Emil was in this up to the hilt.” (“No”, I protested at the attack on my friend’s honour, but she ignored me.) “And so is Owen Draycott. I did not know that he was going to resign today. I wasn’t warned about that. And there are others. Councillors probably and certainly some Council officers, in planning, highways, education. I have the names. Your dour Scottish Mayor, Misery McClintock. Your own Scrutiny Committee chair, Kitson, was in on it, but he just kept quiet and urged support because of those two schools which will supposedly be saved by the development. A load of tosh. Anyway, he fronted Meena to do his dirty work. I have no doubt that Meena did not have a clue that she was being set up.”

“Melanie, this is just too unreal. Who gave you all this information?”

“That’s not the point, Peter. They are all getting their comeuppance but we need to make a stand publicly and to save the Council from utter disgrace. Batchelor, let me tell you, will resign quietly, at our group meeting next week. Don’t say a word about it now. Promise? Mind you I don’t know whether your side of the Council can be saved after the lurid events with Emil. I still can’t believe what happened there. Believe it or not I felt sorry for him. He was a bit of a clown. It was a real own goal.”

“I still can’t believe this,” I said, shaking my head.

“Peter, just promise me this. For the next 2 or 3 days. Keep an open mind. I’m not asking you to oppose the scheme. Not yet. Just don’t push the scheme forward, publicly or otherwise. You will learn more. Just keep your nose clean. Don’t accept unexpected gifts, like cars or holidays. Back pedal if you have to. In fact, you will probably have a lot of back-pedalling to do in the weeks to come. Prepare yourself for it now.”

I could not believe this woman. I wondered if she was just mad. Hidden bribes? Unexpected gifts? Holidays? Stupid indeed.

Holidays? I suddenly remembered my Mother’s sudden turn of luck. Her Caribbean cruise! What was behind that? Suddenly, for the nth time in this seemingly unending drama I felt cold sweat appear again on my forehead.