Abigail Morgan wants to die. Quite literally: she wants to die. Abi is in pain: her legs and thighs hurt and her bottom hurts. She cannot so much as turn over in bed without pain searing though her.
And she is frightened. The looks she has received from girls such as Donna May and Ruth Bowers have left her in no doubt: sooner or later another ordeal is coming her way.
The only consolation Abi can draw on is that her terrible sexual frustration has been temporarily assuaged. No longer does her clitoris call to her every night like a lamb that has strayed from its mother.
But Abi knows that is only temporary. In a few weeks she will be experiencing that burning need for relief as keenly as ever. But with no prospect whatsoever of assuagement.
She wants to die: but how? There is no rope for a girl to hang herself with; there are no pills to overdose on; and how on earth can you drown yourself in the showers with at least two Wardens watching you?
There was a girl once who tried to kill herself. Somehow she had managed to jump from a window. She broke her ankle. And when she returned from the hospital she was thrashed. Because in Hazely it is an offence to try to commit suicide.
Never again in her life does Abi want to feel a cane or a riding crop on her legs or her backside.
For the first few days after the thrashing nothing happens. All the girls are too chastened. They shuffle around with pain written large on their faces, submissive and docile. In the showers, and in the evenings when they stand to attention beside their beds, the red stripes across their thighs are a highly visible reminder of what happens to girls who break the rules at Hazely.
No-one - not even Donna May - has the stomach for night-time reprisals.
But after a week the pain is starting to wear off: sleep comes more readily to the chastened girls, and some of them start muttering darkly about the time for revenge. Donna May refers frequently to 'Abigail's Plan', deflecting attention away from the part she played in ensuring that the plan was implemented, and after various whispered consultations a night is agreed, two nights hence, when Abigail will, as Laura Marsh poetically puts it 'reap the whirlwind'.
Not every girl wants a part in this. Eve Thomas, who still feels she was partly responsible, in that her fainting fit did not convince Miss Bulstrode, refuses to scapegoat Abi Morgan. Suzanne Clarke is too scared to sneeze, let alone be out of bed after lights out. Fay Dudley believes they have all suffered enough: as do some of the other girls. There is even a moment when Donna and Ruth wonder if there is any appetite for reprisals. But they receive support from an unlikely quarter, the usually pacific Kelly Watson.
Kelly Watson has suffered more than most. Apart from the pain itself, and the fact that she had to endure one more stroke than the others, she feels she has humiliated herself. She has always been self-conscious about her body. When she first arrived at Hazely Reform School the thing she hated most was having to be naked in front of the other girls. Naked in the showers and washrooms, naked in the gymnasium, naked in the Dormitory. She felt the eyes of the other girls, and of the Wardens, staring at her, critically, sneeringly. Over time she has become used to it. But during her punishment she felt more exposed than ever. She recalls the way she flailed around, the way she pissed herself, her total lack of dignity. Her friends try to console her: no-one can keep their dignity in such circumstances. Nevertheless, Kelly feels especially humiliated.
It has always been this way. She has always hated her body, the odd mismatch between her upper and lower halves. She would give years of her life to have a body like Karen Frayn, or Clare Davenport, or to be petite and shapely like Sienna Sharples. She wouldn't even mind if she was just big: men, she had been surprised to discover, were often attracted to larger girls. But not to larger girls with next-to-no tits.
In a way it was her body that was the cause of her being in Hazely in the first place. So unused to admiration was she that when a man told her that these days there was a niche for every body type, and that girls like her, being a rarity, were much sort after for modelling, she gave him more credence than she should have done. He had offered her a modelling job, shown her a wedge of banknotes as thick as a house brick, and when she had demurred - she wasn't a complete fool - had shown her the business card of what looked like a genuine modelling agency. Kelly, who did not make much money on her market stall, had been flattered, and had agreed to go to his studio.
The studio had turned out to be the living room of a flat, decked out with lights, cameras and cushions. The 'modelling' turned out to mean having sex: not only with the man but with three of his friends, two of whom didn't speak any English. When Kelly tried to back out the man told her his friends had travelled a long way especially for this, and would not be pleased to be let down. He also offered to increase the payment.
They must have all been on Viagra, they were at her all night, sometimes in pairs, sometimes three of them together, penetrating her every orifice. Their favourite scenario seemed to involve two of them holding her legs open whilst she struggled and a third one fucked or finger-fucked her. It wasn't nice sex: there was no tenderness and no respect: they treated her as an object to be used as they saw fit, telling her what to do, grudging her even a break for a drink of water. And filming everything. Even when she went for a piss a man with a camera followed her.
It was dawn before they were sated. Kelly was sore: her arse and cunt had had enough fingers and cocks inside them to last her a lifetime. She was mightily relieved when they told her she was finished: she could get home, have a shower and go to bed.
But they weren't quite finished. The final shoot, the man told her, involved all four men simultaneously pissing over her.
She had tried to say no. But she hadn't been paid yet, her resistance was low, they promised her a shower afterwards, so what was one more final degradation?
She lay in the bath with a camera pointing at her. The sides of the bath were cold. Then the four men who had been getting their sexual pleasure from her all night stood in a line, pointed their cocks at her and pissed all over her. The stench was horrible: they aimed at her face, at her nose and mouth, and despite all her efforts some of it got up her nose, into the back of her throat and into her mouth. The men were all laughing as she choked and spluttered and swallowed. Piss began to pool in the bath: she was lying in it, her hair was doused in it.
The shower turned out not to work: she did her best to cleanse her face with tumblers of cold water, then gave up, resigned herself to going home stinking of piss, and went to collect her money.
At which the men roared with laughter. One of them said something in a language she did not understand, and the original man translated:
"He says you should be paying us. How else is a girl like you going to get a man to fuck her?"
She made a fuss: there was a row during which the men threatened to get nasty. And Kelly staggered home empty-handed.
Two nights later she went back, armed with pieces of cloth soaked in paraffin which she set alight and pushed through the letterbox.