EXODAI - A Shockingly Honest Memoir of Love, Obsession and Torture
"Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." (1 Corinthians 13:7)
PROLOGUE
Tonight, I am going to be tortured for the woman I love.
The woman is not in danger; she doesn’t need saving like a damsel in distress, nor am I obliged to go through with this. I choose to suffer. I will meet my torturer at 10 o’clock in a love-hotel in the heart of Tokyo. I will be stripped naked, abused, and punished.
My assailant is, in fact, the very woman I love, and I will gladly permit her to torture me to her heart’s content. She wants to see me suffer. She is my Mistress. This is not pat-a-cake whips, soft-spanking or feather-duster tickling. She will ruthlessly run me to the ground. When it is over, I shall probably be a few bruises shy of a hospital, and the clothes I wear after the session are likely to become stained with my blood.
We don’t use safe words. My Mistress believes that true suffering cannot be experienced if you have the opportunity to abort. Her euphoria erupts only when her subject caves in under torture. She will read my face and know when my limit is reached. She will observe my suffering beyond that point when, through my eyes, she can look into my soul and find true love. She will savour my affliction and bathe in the adoration bursting forth from my heart. Only my love will carry me through the endeavour. I too will become euphoric. It will not be a sexual encounter, just one of extreme agony and ecstasy, a mutual expression of love.
This is to be our first ever session. I’ve waited so long to get here and can scarcely believe it’s finally happening. I wonder if it was especially for this night that I returned to Tokyo. I gave up everything I had in Dubai, allowed fate to lead me here in an extraordinary and serendipitous way. I’ve been trying to discern whether it really is God’s will for me to be back here or if I’ve reawakened an addiction to torture.
I’m still not certain. Perhaps tonight I will find out.
CHAPTER 1
It never occurred to me that the dull and worn pages of a tired old history book could contain a glimpse of my own future. Until that moment of revelation, I thought this was just another boring history lesson.
Mrs Beckwith arrived in the doorway, hugging a large box of books. A wave of silence swept over the class as everyone ran to their desks and stood to attention. Everyone except me; I had just annihilated Sophie Middleton’s horse chestnut in a conker fight and was still gloating over my win. It took a while for me to register the teacher’s presence.
“Elizabeth!” whispered one of the girls behind me.
I spun round to see Mrs Beckwith staring at me, with her chin up and eyebrows raised. I galloped to my place and stood squarely at my desk like a soldier.
“Thank you,” said Mrs Beckwith, and she proceeded to her desk at the front of the room. She inspected the military precision of our postures and nodded. “Please be seated.”
Norwich High School for Girls was an archetypal British private school. My parents were not overly wealthy, but Daddy’s careful attention to money matters and prudent investment in property meant my two elder brothers and I were afforded a private education. My brothers were at a boys’ school where the headmaster still used ‘the slipper’ for discipline. At my school, corporal punishment had been abolished, but it was rumoured that a girl had once been spanked by the headmistress.
I had joined the school aged seven and was now in my second year. The school was housed in an old Victorian mansion, with wooden beams, tiled floors, and stained-glass windows. The corridors smelt of musty books and floor polish.
Our classroom was on the ground floor, and I had the best seat at the back by one of the large sash windows offering a pleasing vista onto the grassy playground and small wood beyond. The desks were wooden and sturdy, carved with graffiti from previous users. They had flip-top lids, and on the inside of the lid we were allowed to stick pictures and personalise our station. I had some great stickers of Winnie-the-Pooh that Sophie had stolen from the corner shop.
Sophie was my best friend. She was more a tomboy than me and had been the inspiration for my latest hobby of assembling model aeroplanes.
“Now, who would like to hand out the history books today?” asked Mrs Beckwith.
I shot my hand up like everyone else, but two other girls were picked. One was Isabella Rhodes. I watched her get up from her seat and collect a pile of books, studying the features of her pretty face and her impeccably knotted tie. Her cheekbones and slightly turned-up nose enchanted me. She moved a bit like a Dalek, taking small steps and turning her whole body in sync with her head. To my delight, Isabella approached my side of the room to hand out her share of the books.
Isabella was my ‘prison girl’. Lately, I’d been fantasising about her getting captured and thrown into a pit of flames. I’d always loved the image of a damsel in distress and had been inventing stories in my head since the age of four. Inspired by an old movie in which a lady got tied to the railway tracks, at nursery school I would hunt down girls and trap them in the corner of the playroom to observe their distress. At primary school, I had been obsessed with a girl called Claudia Price. That was when I first conceived the term ‘prison girl’. I perpetually chased Claudia at break time chanting, “Claudia Price in prison.” I dreamt about pursuing her on horseback and lassoing her into captivity.
As Isabella approached, I sat erect, eager to catch her eye. Unaware, she brushed past, placing a dilapidated history book on my desk. I sank back into my seat and looked at the book. It was thin and small with a pale blue cover. Medieval England it said on the front, with a number written in felt-tip pen in the top right-hand corner. I probably had the most dog-eared copy in the set. Good. I preferred the old ones. They sat flat on your desk because the stitching had loosened, and they contained more interesting scribbles in the margins which I could read to help pass the time. I hated History.
Once the books were distributed, Mrs Beckwith instructed us to turn to page three: ‘Life in Medieval England’. I looked at the clock and sighed. Forty minutes until Art. Sophie turned round in her seat and caught my attention, producing a fresh conker on a string from the inside pocket of her blazer, nodding with a smirk. It was a whopper alright. I grinned, remembering my win, and mouthed the words no way to her. She giggled.
“Sophie!” snapped Mrs Beckwith. Sophie spun round. “Open your book!”
“Yes, miss.” Sophie fumbled with her book. “Sorry, miss.”
I cast another glance at Isabella. She’d returned to her seat and was sitting in perfect posture at her desk, holding a brand-new copy of the book open on the relevant page. Mrs Beckwith sat on the teacher’s desk, crossed her legs, and asked someone to begin reading from the start of chapter one. Resting my head on my hand, I turned my eyes to the window. I decided to invent a new fantasy about Isabella based in the small wood I could see. There was a tree there with thick branches that were rather pleasing in shape. It was the perfect place for someone to be strung up by their wrists and have horrible things poured down their back. I soon lost myself in a very pleasant daydream.
“Elizabeth, please continue.” The words took a while to pierce my thoughts. “Elizabeth?” Mrs Beckwith looked up and removed her glasses. I jumped to attention and grasped my book, clueless as to where we might be in the chapter. I flipped to page four and stared at the text, desperately trying to remember the last words I had heard. Mrs Beckwith’s eyes fixed on me like lasers.
I whispered under my breath to my neighbour. “Where are we?” My neighbour tutted and pointed to the start of a paragraph on page five. I began to read out loud from that point and the tension subsided. Mrs Beckwith replaced her glasses and looked back down at her book.
After I had read aloud for five minutes, someone else was called upon. It was then that my attention wandered to some comments pencilled in the margin on page seven. Are you stupid? Yes, turn to page 20. No, turn to page 65.
I turned to page sixty-five. A picture of a man on a platform with his head and hands clamped in a large wooden contraption jumped out at me. The pencil markings formed an arrow pointing at him, labelled This is you. Eagerly, I turned to page twenty to see what role I would be given if I were stupid. Here the pencilled arrow pointed at a cow ploughing a field with a yoke on its back. This is you. This was less interesting. I flipped back to page sixty-five and studied the picture. The man’s ankles were shackled in irons attached to the wooden stand. Underneath the picture were the words ‘The Pillory’. I pulled up my chair and pressed in closer to my desk, wrapping my arms around my book so my neighbour couldn’t see.
Captivated, I read about the pillory. Criminals were clamped into it and passers-by were invited to pelt them with rotten eggs and vegetables. The emphasis seemed to be on humiliation. I read and re-read the passage several times and examined the picture carefully. I imagined, not Isabella, but myself being confined in this device and the very thought of it thrilled me.
It was my first introduction to the apparatus of torture and punishment. It appealed to an innate desire in me to be restricted and tied down. I had no idea what bondage was, but I enjoyed thinking about it and it stimulated me. Since the age of six, I had been developing a fantasy about being strapped to a raised table in a Star Trek themed white room. My classmates would be gathered round leering over me as a contraption descended from the ceiling threatening to cocoon me into complete captivity.
Now in front of me was an image that resonated perfectly with my fascination for entrapment and humiliation. I was spellbound. I leafed through the preceding pages to see what else I could find. There were more pictures similar in nature. So much to take in. Not wanting to miss any of it, I made my way to the beginning of the chapter (‘Crime and Punishment’) and carefully read from there. It was a trove of material.
I found sketches of men imprisoned in the stocks, criminals stretched on racks, and dishonest bakers bound to sleds with their bad bread wrapped around their necks. I inspected the tight cords around a person’s torso and tried to imagine their humiliation as they were paraded through the town to be mocked and assaulted. I was mesmerised by the images and tuned out completely from the voices of my classmates still reading from chapter one.
When the lesson was over, I rushed out to tailgate Mrs Beckwith. I wanted to see where she put the box of history books. Unfortunately, she took them with her into her next class. Damn. But I hatched a plan. When Art was over, I sped back to the classroom to wolf down my packed lunch. Sophie was all over me demanding I take her on in another conker fight, but I had bigger fish to fry. I wanted to visit the school library and find the history section. At the first opportune moment, I scuttled away and ran upstairs.
The library was empty and quiet, except for the distant cries of girls in the playground. The history section was located at the far end. I sat down cross-legged on the floor. My school tunic offered minimal leg-cover and my thighs were bare against the itchy hessian carpet, but I wasn’t deterred. I began to pull out books from the shelf and prise them open. Some had developed a mouldy smell, their browning pages curled and speckled with dark spots. It seemed they hadn’t been opened for years.
I examined the contents page of each book, searching for chapters on the medieval age or on criminal punishment. When I found a promising chapter, I trawled through it, page by page, seeking out pictures depicting punishment and torture. Some of the books were delightfully rich in substance. I gazed at the scenes, being careful to hold the book upright with my back to the bookcase so no one passing by could see what I was ‘reading’.
My lunchtime visits to the library became a regular habit, and gradually I exhausted all the material available on the shelves. The images I found in these neglected books became a source of inspiration for my bedtime fantasies about bondage and humiliation.
By the age of ten, I had begun to wonder why every time I imagined such scenes, I felt the urge to pee. I would get up and go to the toilet, only to find I had nothing to urinate. I had no idea why, nor any notions about sex.
*
One day during lunch break, instead of visiting the library, I invited Isabella Rhodes to sit down with me for a chat. I’d concluded that my feelings towards her were a form of love, and I wanted to tell her. I led her into the school cloakrooms for some privacy. We sat on a bench surrounded by hanging shoe bags filled with kits. Everyone’s bag was immaculately clean, and an aroma of laundry detergent hung in the air, mixed with the smell of rubber plimsolls stored in the cage lockers below. In this discreet location, we wouldn’t be disturbed for a while.
Isabella was as pristine as ever. Her dark hair fell in perfect alignment and framed her face like a painting. She reminded me of the Mona Lisa. I wanted to reach for her hand and hold it, but I didn’t dare.
“I want to tell you something,” I said. Isabella nodded and smiled. She had no reason to dislike me. I was a popular child. “I think in our hearts we are all able to love everybody a little bit. Of course, in a big part of my heart I love my mummy and daddy, and my brothers too. And I love all of my friends, I suppose. I even think there’s a tiny, tiny bit of my heart that loves Miss Fawcett.” Isabella chuckled. Miss Fawcett, the headmistress, was very strict and we all loathed her. “But the biggest part of my heart…” I paused, perhaps for effect, but more likely because I was nervous. “The biggest part of my heart loves you.”
Isabella’s eyes widened. She held her hands up to her face and giggled with embarrassment. Then she realised I wasn’t joking.
“I think you’re beautiful,” I added.
“Thank you, Elizabeth,” she said.
I think she was actually flattered. It didn’t disappoint me that the attraction wasn’t mutual, and it never occurred to me it would be. I wasn’t expecting my love to be reciprocated. Whatever Isabella truly felt, she kept it to herself, but she seemed intrigued and certainly didn’t make me feel bad or weird. For my part, I was overjoyed. I’d expressed my love. My attraction to her was entirely natural and I had no reason to question it.
At the same time, however, I did feel guilty about my other fantasies – the ones about being tied up, that made me want to pee. Those would take a lot longer to understand and to reconcile.
