The swarthy-skinned woman in the nurse’s uniform was smiling, a particularly self-satisfied smug smile that seemed almost calculated to make the girl bristle with indignation. When she spoke it was with an educated voice, but with a notable Arabic or Middle Eastern quality to her intonation. The woman’s voice was not harsh, just calm, measured, confident and – yes – authoritative, as authoritative as if all this had been legitimate. “So, you’re wondering where you are, hmmm? Let me see – where were you when you last remember anything? Guildford, or just outside Guildford– Surrey at any rate, not too many miles south of the capital; the capital of the UK that is. I wonder – do you remember the van, perhaps a man in a balaclava, a wad of strange smelling tissue held over your mouth and nose? Ah yes, you’re nodding… Well, that will have been the chloroform – a favourite technique back in your country, I believe. But I bet you don’t remember the plane. No, of course you don’t, how could you? I can see you shaking your head, read the confusion in your eyes. But you see, you will have been full of tranquilizers and under a powerful medical aesthetic by that stage, far more sophisticated than anything your original captors might have managed.
You must understand, they would have been rank amateurs by comparison to our people. They – your original captors that is – had just been after a simple ransom, some, presumably quite substantial, sum of money for your release; they would probably have hidden you away in some remote farmhouse someplace; I believe our intelligence indicated one of them had purchased a smallholding up on Dartmoor… or was it Exmoor? I don’t know – somewhere like that; I’m not THAT familiar with your country. A few weeks – days, if you had been lucky – and the ransom would have been paid, and you most probably would have been released. Well you’ve reason to worry about them any more – they have been dealt with; by now they’ll be floating out in the North Sea somewhere. You on the other hand have – how do you people say – dropped out of the frying pan and in to the fire; I’m afraid you are a LONG way from home, far, far further than a farmhouse in some remote part of Britain, I’m afraid.
You were shipped out here in a large trunk – can you imagine that? All trussed up in the sort of wheelchair they use for transporting psychiatric patients, with an anaesthetic drip in your arm to keep you under. You were flown out here as special diplomatic baggage on board a small embassy owned and registered diplomatic aircraft along with our ambassador whom your country unwisely chose to expel. You just happened to have become the target of a bunch of kidnappers at just the wrong time, just prior to your cropping up on your country’s secret service in-danger target list, which would have occurred soon after the expulsion and which would have resulted in you coming under greater protection. But at the time of your kidnapping… well, you just didn’t rate the expense, and certain people in your sphere – shall we say - didn’t yet feature in my country’s ambitions.
With the pending expulsion of our diplomatic staff from Britain, all that changed and so we – by which I mean my country, or rather, agents of my country – sort of kidnapped you from your kidnappers, so to speak. We are an oil-rich nation, we have no need for a monetary ransom – our requirement is for something different. I guess you could say that your status has changed.
You are no longer a kidnap victim; you are now a commodity to be traded, a valuable one which the world’s press, when describing the taking of foreigners in the Middle East, tend to term ‘hostage’. And I’m sorry to say that the world of hostage taking is nowhere near as clear-cut as a simple kidnapping that might conclude in a few days to a few weeks at most. You must have read about those hostages taken in Beirut, back in the days when it was a hotbed of such things; some of those hostages were kept in captivity for five years or more… So… what I’m saying is… I don’t want to frighten you – and I don’t know where your ambitions lie – but I think you can wave bye-bye to your university placement, and probably you fiancé too; yes we know about him, and as an experienced worldly-wise woman I think I’m safe in saying you can’t expect him to stay around waiting for five years. So your situation is this: while you are in our care someone out there, who could be capable of fermenting problems in my country, could be placed under duress because we have you. The United Kingdom government know this and so this person will not be given a particular - and potentially politically sensitive – post, effectively placing that person’s political career on hold; and we would like that career to remain on hold… indefinitely! As long as we hold you here, under our control - and can show you to be alive and in good physical health - then that person’s political career will have been curtailed; permanently.
As for where you are, geographically – that is where my country has really stolen a march over your British security services. You are the guest of a Middle Eastern power, that much you know already, or will have guessed. But you are NOT in the Middle East. And where could be more secure than a mental hospital in which no one speaks English and even if they DID they’d disregard anything you might say as the ramblings of an imbecile. You’ll be feeling woolly headed as it is – that’ll be the medication our psychiatrist has you on. But step out of line, and one word from me, and she’ll up your dose until you sit drooling in your own mess staring at the walls… But, you know, I think I like you. I think I’d rather you be allowed to hang on to your intellect and awareness and use other, more personal, methods to discipline and control you. You know what corporal punishment is I suppose…. Yes I know, largely outlawed in your country. Well, we are not in your country, we are not even in mine – and in this country they have no such qualms; corporal punishment is alive and well and is even the norm in mental institutions, such as this one.
You will doubtless have seen on television back home the ‘barbaric’ conditions prevalent in certain Eastern European mental institutions, the cadged beds, restraints and so on, the so-called ‘Victorian’ conditions reported by investigative teams sent in by various busy-body charities. Well… Welcome to just such an institution – a secure mental asylum, and one we can be reasonably certain will never be visited by any busy-body interfering charity team; you need have no worry about that; they wouldn’t even get across the boarder without our being consulted. It’s a tiny secluded place tucked well away high in the mountains, deep in highly superstitious peasant country well within the tightly-guarded borders of a tiny little Eastern European state that barely figures on the maps.
And where is the last place the British government, or anyone else, will think of looking once they find yet another of their subjects has been taken in the Middle East? An East European mental asylum, that is where. You could almost say hidden in plain sight - except you’re not going to be in anybody’s sight, safely locked up out of the way in here. You’re lucky in some ways though; you are getting your own private room. There isn’t a window and it might be a little lonely with me being your only English speaking visitor but play your cards right, act the part, and you’ll be taken out to join in with group therapy sessions with the other imbeciles. Not that you’ll understand anything of what is going on unless you have mastered their particular Slavic tongue, which I doubt; their dialect is as obscure as this land-locked backwater is isolated. And speak to them in English and you’ll get your face soundly slapped, each and every time; I guarantee it.
You have to understand the situation. There are only two people hereabouts with any command of English whatsoever, those people being myself and the state-appointed psychiatrist, the asylum’s official overseer. This is an impoverished backward land and the remainder of the staff is mainly made up of thuggish female orderlies, pretty much straight off the farms around here and of basic peasant stock whose only interest is in having a quiet life and whose view of mental health issues still tends to be governed by superstition and folk law and revolves around belief in ‘possession’ and evil. Many still think of the mentally ill as ‘shameful’ a slur on their community and country and even ‘subhuman’; it is one reason the treatment tends to be so neglectful in these places; abusive even. The only reason they will work here at all is that in relative terms the pay is so good and it puts bread on the table for their little ones. And to be honest the only reason the place runs at all is through charitable funding – and that charitable funding… you guessed it… comes by way of part of a highly generous aid package from my country, or more specifically from the particular political faction I happen to be affiliated to.
Left to their own devices and the inhabitants in these parts would most likely fall back on a policy of euthanasia to weed out their mentally ill; I really mean that! Superstitious belief in evil inhabiting those they consider subnormal is so strong that if you were to get out of here and were recognised as coming from here – and your institutional clothing will be an instant giveaway, and failing that the tattoo you’ll later be given will indelibly mark you out as an inmate – you most likely would be stoned by the women at the first village you came across. If you were LUCKY you might be brought back here. If you were not so lucky – well, not to put too finer point on it, you’d likely end up on a makeshift pyre in a clearing in the woods somewhere; and if you were fortunate you’d be dead by the time the logs caught.
But again, not to worry; no one has ever run away from here; the place is built like a fortress, equally impregnable from either direction. And you’re not the ONLY abductee my faction has ever hidden away here. We have successfully held four here over the years, two French girls, an English girl like yourself and a young American news reporter. The English girl and one of the French girls were repatriated eventually after some rather advantageous negotiation which went very much in our favour; it is wrong when your Western governments claim they won’t negotiate in these situations; they lie; they will! Eventually! I wouldn’t want to build your hopes up though; your case is different; in your case there is nothing to negotiate; you have to be held until such a time as a certain person’s political ambitions have waned… however long that might take.
And things can go wrong – there was a rescue attempt made to release one of the French girls; but the hit the wrong building, in the wrong country entirely – in the Middle East, but not even my country. Of course she had been here all along, officially registered as just another Jane Doe (or their Slavic equivalent) dementia sufferer; incurable of course; that way there is less risk of follow-up interest from outside agencies. The problem was that the building their special forces attacked was burnt to the ground in the fire fight that resulted; and there had been an ammunition dump and fuel store hidden away there; any inhabitants were reduced to unidentifiable ashes in the resulting conflagration. Since then, no matter what evidence we have produced the French authorities have refused to take their citizen’s survival seriously; they refuse to negotiate. It’s an excuse of course – the French don’t WANT to negotiate; and a tragic accident is the perfect excuse to save face in public, while washing their hands of the whole thing. But she may still one day become a useful bargaining chip, if there is a change in French policy; so she is still here, put to work in the asylum sweatshop; don’t look so shocked my dear. Where do you think those cheap clothes you find in your high street discount stores come from? Not everything is made in China you know.
Now, the reason you’ll get your face slapped if you speak English to any of the staff is… Well, I know I shouldn’t have – but it adds in an extra layer of security; both the asylum overseer and I have let it be known that in your tongue – through your mental derangement - what you are doing is placing curses on their heads. Yes! As much as utter a word and these primitive folk will take that as invoking ill luck – unless they counteract it by ‘slapping the daemon away’ of course.
Oh the American girl? You ask about the American girl? Well I said that despite all their rhetoric the Western powers will eventually negotiate a hostage’s return. Well, that is not necessarily the case with the Americans; they have proven a stubborn adversary, whichever faction has been in charge of the Whitehouse. Our young up-and-coming news gatherer was one of last of the hostages taken back in the days of the Beirut turmoil. You look shocked, pale, legs turning to jelly… Yes, it WAS that long ago! And yes, she IS still very much alive, and she IS still here, securely held within these walls. She was a very young but highly promising journalist back then, on her first foreign assignment, and the very youngest ever to be sent to report on such a theatre; something of a literary prodigy by all accounts, with a golden future beckoning, and practically straight out of college. I don’t suppose when she left the States she expected to spend the next… Allah, knows how many years – I don’t like to think about it, it sends a chill down my spine – locked away in an Eastern European mental institution, branded as a hopelessly delusional psychiatric patient, completely and utterly cut off from the outside world.
Just think about it for a moment – she doesn’t even know the internet EXISTS, at least as it is today, let alone ever having used it! In all those years she will never have read a book, nor seen a newspaper, nor heard a radio; and she won’t have put pen to paper since she was made to write a confession of ‘spying’ way back in the day – after quite a brutal series of having her bare buttocks caned apparently; that’s something she’ll have got used to over the years; they use the strap and the cane quite liberally in here, you’ll find if you’re troublesome. I doubt she could even sign her own name now, let alone write copy for a newspaper column. She has become very adept at sewing, though, in the asylum workshop. She is not what you would call ‘young’ now of course – her best years are behind her, both in looks and in her faculties; all that close stitch work has pretty much destroyed her eyesight, to the point at which she has become extremely short sighted; and of course, for safety reasons glasses are not allowed in the asylum, so she does have problems getting around. And being hunched over at the workbench for long hours seven days a week has rounded her shoulders; the poor diet has seen that model-girl figure fade prematurely… But her mind has gone in any case… she rocks back and forth, she giggles incessantly, she drools… And the sad fact is; back home her name is all but forgotten. Yes for a while there were public campaigns to keep her case alive, yellow ribbons tied around trees, press campaigns, hand-on-heart promises from prominent politicians – all that sort of palaver – but in the end the press and the public and the politicians just lost interest in her story, and her profile just quietly faded away. Meanwhile, behind these impenetrable high walls, her intellect was slowly fading away in concert, her fierce independent streak being systematically curbed through a régime of spanking, caning, humiliation and other forms of punishment designed to produce an easily handled, dispirited and docile mental patient.
The American girl was stubborn – she fought back. This doesn’t have to happen to you. Yes, the staff will treat you like you’re an imbecile, and you won’t know what is going on or what is being said to you, which will make you appear like and imbecile, but go along with it, let them spoon feed you or put you on a bedpan and stand over you to supervise, and with my help you can hold it together. I will keep you in here, under my personal care, as much as possible, help protect you, help you to keep yourself from coming apart at the seams. But you will need to learn to do exactly what I say, obey me to the letter. And I will expect certain things from you in return, certain – shall we say - personal favours, which we can go into later.
You can expect to spend time in a straightjacket and eventually start attending ‘occupational training and rehabilitation’ just like many of the other patients - we can’t avoid that, we have to keep up the appearance of just another mental patient - but I can ease you through all that too. ‘Occupational training and rehabilitation’ is I’m afraid just code for the asylum sweatshop, but you’ll be able to swap pyjamas, gown or the straightjacket for proper clothing for the eighteen hours a day you’ll be working there. You’ll be kitted out with a work dress and apron – the workshop uniform. You’ll also be assigned a very ridged, very tough work quota, one that you’ll find hard to meet; and you can expect to feel the workshop overseer’s cane on your bare bottom at the close of day if you fail to meet it. But I can help you get through that as well. What’s that you say? It’s slave labour? Well yes it is! And if you want to consider yourself as becoming a slave, then by all means be my guest, go ahead… doesn’t help much, does it? And there is nothing you can do about it in any case – yes, you are locked up in a mental asylum; yes, you are being enslaved, in a sense; that is the reality of your situation. Yes, it is also true that on paper you are a political hostage in what to you must seem some crazy Arab conflict; but your situation is so long term that in essence, yes, you are for all intents and purposes enslaved – whether it be to a daily work quota, or the whimsical designs of a very attractive Arab – actually Persian – nurse with agenda of her own and who holds your very sanity in the palm of her hand.
So, slaving away in the workhouse will at least help keep your mind alert – you should think of that point. And working with me – not defying me – will help keep your sanity; after all, you don’t want to end up a dried-up middle aged husk, drooling like an idiot, like the American woman… Think about that a while! But step out of line, defy me, in ANY way, disobey me… And I’ll see to it you are put through a régime our psychiatrist and myself have specifically designed to deliberately bring about the sort of rapid psychological decline the American woman suffered. We will see to it that you are reduced to a grinning, drooling imbecile. After all, it is only evidence of your continued PHYSICAL survival that is the key to my faction’s aims – your mental state is neither here nor there to us, unless you can prove yourself useful in certain other ways of course!
Now, I believe you love stage acting and have ambitions – and no little talent, I’m given to understand – in the world of modern dance? Yes? You can tell we’ve done our homework! Well, what if we were to allow the staff here to put you on one of the wards, one of the wards the outside world seldom sees, where they still have the cage beds? What if we let them – for the sake of piece and quiet, you understand; and your own safety – lock you in one of those cage beds, one of the short child-sized ones with insufficient length to straighten out your legs, in which you’d be obliged to lie with your legs tucked up to your abdomen hour after hour, and with you all safely snuggled in a straightjacket, gagged with a child’s pacifier and with a pair of thick latex bloomers over a terry cloth nappy. Now say we keep you like that for months or even a year or more – we have easily sufficient time on our hands; you’re not going anywhere soon, believe you me! And then we finally let you up. And do you know what we’d find? Most likely that your tendons will have shortened, your knees will have stiffened, and you’d likely never be able to fully straighten your legs again! What do you suppose THAT would do to your dancing prospects? And you could still be put to work in the workshop, sewing or whatever, from the comfort of your wheelchair… Yes, where did you think the idea came from? Yes, you guessed it – like the American woman! SHE was defiant. And THAT was what was done to her here; two and a half years spent cramped up in a short caged bed, defecating and peeing in her nappy, while still in her very early twenties, with the cot turned to the wall so she had nothing to look at but the whitewash and left alone in an empty, exceedingly quiet room.
On the other hand we could look the other way, so to speak, and let the staff take you to the surgeon to have you sterilised – they are very big on the sterilisation of the ‘mentally defective’ in this country… In many ways they are so backward it beggars belief! Or shout and struggle and who knows? Electric shock therapy – what we would call electroconvulsive therapy, but put to use for behavioural corrective purposes – cold water treatments, even a lobotomy could be on the cards if you were to kick up sufficient fuss! But I would never let any of this happen of course, not so long as you remain obedient to MY wishes… But as I have said before, step out of line, go against my discipline, and…
So what is it to be? Are you ready to become my quiet, accepting little mental patient? Good! I can see you nodding your agreement, though there is something fierce in those eyes, something that doesn’t quite agree – well, THAT will have to go! I don’t want to see defiance, of ANY kind! I want to see smiling, accepting eyes – and a quiet docile attitude… So shall we begin work right there, with beginning putting out that fire behind those eyes, extinguishing that spark? Hmm? You look confused, like you don’t know what I’m getting at. Well, you can see that I’m patting my lap, and you can see that I’m also reaching for something in my hip pocket – yes, that’s right, it’s a hairbrush, a heavy wooden-backed thing. So, now that you’re getting the idea, why don’t you come drape yourself over my knees, and we’ll see if we can’t start getting you acquainted with the concept of surrendering to your first hairbrush spanking? No, not like that, not walking; down on the lino, on your knees, and shuffle across to me – THEN drape yourself over my lap… That’s it! What a good little mental patient you’re going to be! If only your fiancé, your friends and relatives could see you now, dressed in a straightjacket, bent over a pretty Persian nurse’s lap in a mental hospital and about to get a nice long hairbrush spanking…. What shall we say? Eight, just to get the ball rolling? Now, ask me nicely – say ‘please nurse, please spank me’ – and we’ll get on. Mind that you count each whack and call out the number clearly, and say ‘thank you’ after each one – and if you lift your toes from the floor, cry out or attempt to roll off my lap, it all will start again, from scratch…"