Chapter 2. Amelia Jane in the Pens
Eventually the dreaming ended.
I began to awaken slowly. I seemed in a state of semi-paralysis, but my senses, at least, seemed to be working.
I smelt mustiness, and dampness, and an unpleasant earthy odour. My limbs felt cold. I could feel something cool and damp against my fingertips and body.
I tried to recollect events. I had been almost raped on the tube. I had been drugged in a taxi. I had been manhandled into a plastic pod, one of many.
Surely that hadn't, couldn't have, happened?
I tried to end the dream. I must be late for my work at the investment bank. I needed to get up, not lie here. Mr Smith was always cross if I did not get to work in time.
But I was not in my bed! I was lying on bare wooden planks, cool and damp to my touch. I heard voices, and whimpering.
The numbness slowly faded from my extremities, and I found that I could move my fingers once more.
Gradually I began to make out something from the dim glow. I began to regain the ability to move my neck, and slowly, painfully, rotated my gaze to see my surroundings.
I saw bars of metal, vertical, uncompromising.
I felt dizzy. Something seemed wrong with my weight. It did not feel the same. Something was different at the very heart of the forces working on my body. At the time I put this feeling down to my weakened state. My questing fingertips moved on my limbs.
I felt the anklet that had been given me as a present. Was it yesterday? It could have been weeks ago. I did not know. There was another on my right ankle! I found similar, smaller, devices encircling my wrists. I felt a slight weight at my ears. My hoop earrings were still there, they had not been removed from me at any rate.
And there was something around my neck! I felt it. A necklace, plain and smooth to the touch. But it had a lock!
I put my head to the bars and looked out into the dim light.
I found myself to be naked in a suspended cage with slatted wood below and cold metal bars on all other sides. The cage was hung about four feet from the floor and was about four feet in each direction. Thus, I could not stretch out my body. There were many such cages in the room. Most contained a nude female occupant. Some were asleep, some awake like me, looking around, as if overawed to find themselves thus and unsure how to react.
I was caged like an animal!
It was cold and smelly. I heard quiet weeping and sobbing amongst the caged naked girls. At one point there was shouting and screaming. A man walked along a walkway and shouted. I heard the sound of a whip then a scream. I gasped in horror. They had whips. I have always been very fearful of whips.
I listened. Some of the girls were speaking English, but some spoke other languages. There were a number of men now, walking along a series of connected walkways above the cells. I heard the men speak.
A man was walking on an iron walkway above me. I knelt. One cannot stand upright in the cages.
"Please," I called up to him, "Help me."
He did not acknowledge me.
He poured a liquid into a funnel at the top and it flowed into a small trough-like gutter on one side of my cage. It was water, fetid and unpleasant but I was thirsty, and gratefully drank. In another funnel was poured a thicker fluid with a smell of oatmeal. It was thin enough to flow slowly into another gutter on the other side of the cage. I did not know what it was, but I was terribly hungry.
I sniffed it. I was so hungry. Yet I could not eat an unknown fluid, from a gutter.
I was so hungry. I gathered a small piece in my lips, and onto my tongue. It tasted of little, but was, I supposed, food. Yet perhaps it was drugged or even poisoned. I must not eat it.
I was so hungry. I swallowed some.
It was a watery porridge, lumpy and tasteless. It had not been seasoned. It was a basic form of sustenance, a fodder, as might be fed to an animal.
I was from London, one of the great restaurant cities of the world, I could not possibly eat unsweetened, unseasoned porridge from a gutter.
I was so hungry. I lapped at the unpalatable fare with my tongue.
It tasted of almost nothing, but was so good. Before I knew it my tongue was pressing against the bottom of the guttering, all of the porridge gone. There had been little enough of it.
I still was hungry, though a little less so than before. What sort of creature would obtain her sustenance from cold unseasoned porridge presented in a guttered trough?
I shuddered to think what might be going to happen to me.
I no longer thought that I was dreaming; one does not dream of eating porridge from a trough. It is too mundane, too prosaic, too horrifying, too humiliating, too degrading.
I tried to collect my wits. What could I do? Where was I? I was seemingly in a wood-floored barred hanging cage, suspended, with walkways above, upon which walked gaolers who provided my food and water. I was nude, apart from necklace, anklets, cuffs, and earrings. I was frightened, cold, and despite my meagre meal, still hungry.
Did I fall back asleep? Perhaps the porridge had indeed been drugged. I awoke to the clump of passing footsteps on the walkways.
Some of the girls were shouting, kneeling in their cages. All were awake now. I did not shout. I am not a brave girl. I waited, in my tiny cage, to see what would happen.
More men were on the walkway. The shouting stopped. There was sobbing, and some whimpering. Girls were being removed from their cages, pulled out by the men, and made to crawl on hands and knees down to the end of the walkway that passed at the top of the cages and through a door guarded by one of the men.
There they spent some time before being brought back to the pens and another batch of girls removed. Sometimes I heard muffled screams from behind the door. Some returned in tears. All looked shaken. Next it was my turn. I looked sympathetically at my cage neighbour as she, returning, was lowered into the cage. She looked distraught. There were two symbols written in blue on her left breast. Her breasts were full and attractive.
My cage was opened and I was lifted out. I met the eyes of the man who lifted me out. It was the man from the taxi! I almost collapsed to all fours on the walkway. My eyes were wide. A switch poked me gently on my rump.
I was to proceed him on the walkway on all fours. I did so. I knew the door to which I must crawl. Once more he poked me with a switch. I must crawl faster. I must not dally on my way. I reached the door.
"Steady little animal," said my handler. I supposed that he had been chosen to supervise me because he could speak my language. I stayed on all fours as he opened the door. He poked me again with the switch. I was to proceed. I saw that he had a whip at his belt.
Behind the door was a plain room. A man sat at a simple desk. I was reminded of Professor Jones at college, although I had never entered his office nude and all fours. I remembered that awful day when I went in to his office to try and negotiate a higher examination grade.
I looked at the man behind the desk more closely. It was Professor Jones! My tummy turned upside down with shock.