by DJ Black
"Dr Barton?" the voice on the other end of the phone enquired.
"Yes, hello? Who is this?" Dr Barton asked looking at his watch. He really didn't have time for this.
"I am... Smith, from Department H." There was a long pause.
"Oh one of those people." Dr Barton sat in his desk chair in resignation. This was going to take a while.
"Sorry to trouble you but we have a problem."
"Naturally. And I am Barton Acme Solutions Ltd, apparently," Dr Barton said dryly.
"Well yes," the voice became defensive. "You are when it comes to it. We do after all fund you quite well."
"You fund me for behavioural research and personnel profiling, nothing else."
"Be that as it may, we do have a problem. A girl..."
Dr Barton sat back, the last 'girl' and all that followed immediately coming to mind.
"...No one dangerous, well not really," Smith continued. "But she is rather anti-social and she has fallen in with a rather dubious group. We have picked up this little gang and we are holding them under the appropriate legislation but..."
"She is a patsy and you have nothing on her," Dr Barton finished.
"Exactly. She knows too much to just let her go and she is being rather difficult. Not the sort we can just pay off with a signature on an official secrets paper."
"Who is she?"
There was a long pause and Dr Barton could hear the nervous shuffling of papers.
"We don't actually know. As I said, she really is not a criminal and we have absolutely no record of her. She goes by the name of Uber-bitch, a kind of punk nickname."
"You don't say, and there was I thinking she had eccentric parents." Dr Barton upgraded his sarcasm impatiently. "What exactly do you want me to do?"
"Take her in for a while. See if you can persuade her to be more cooperative, you know the kind of thing."
"I do. But I rather suspect that you don't. Alright, when does she arrive? She is arriving isn't she? I mean this phone call is to tell me, not ask and you already have her in transit I'll be bound."
The man on the phone coughed.
"She will be with you shortly after midnight."
Dr Barton snorted once and put the phone down.
"Jane, we have a guest arriving in three hours," he called.
Jane Ellis appeared at once and offered him a quizzical look.
"She is called Uber-bitch." Dr Barton pursed his lips.
"One of those. How nice." Jane rolled-up her eyes.
Uber-bitch sat in the back of a nondescript black government car between two large boring 'suits'. No one had spoken throughout the whole journey; a journey that had taken them from the boring grey office block somewhere near Birmingham, to somewhere out in the sticks.
Finally, after a long drive through a tunnel of trees the car turned into a driveway. At the end was a large brick house. Not quite a manor house, but large enough to feature in one of the drippy TV shows about people in top hats.
The car made a loud crunching noise on the gravel and Uber-bitch was reminded of Bindley where she grew up. Not a promising start, she thought.
The woman who answered the door was old. She must have been at least 35. She looked a bit like Nicole Kidman, only not as skinny and definitely not as elegantly dressed. Uber-bitch had expected a reaction from her, but the woman did not blink as she ushered them in.
"What a dump," Uber-bitch sneered as she stepped through the door without even looking.
"Judging from your appearance you will feel right at home here then," said a rather grim man who was waiting inside.
Uber-bitch glowered at him as he signed some papers so that her escort could leave.
After the men from Department H had left, Dr Barton regarded his new charge with interest. Underneath the rags, spiked purple hair and face piercings, he could tell she was only 20 or 21 at most.
"Remind you of someone?" he said to Jane Ellis.
Jane just smiled and shrugged.
"When do I get out of this dump?" the girl sneered.
"Obey the rules, cooperate enough to convince the spooks that you will at least half honour anything you sign and you will be gone in a month with a fat government stipend no doubt."
The girl seemed surprised to get a straight answer but not to be undone she came back with: "You can shove your rules."
"The rules are fairly fluid, mostly it is just a matter of common courtesy, but ultimately I decide what they are and when they have been broken. Disobey them and you will be punished."
The girl was visibly shaken at the word punished. Almost as if she had never heard the word before, but she soon recovered herself.
"Figures," she sneered yet again.
"I am Dr Barton. This is Ms Ellis and you are?"
The girl slowly raised her right arm and clenched her fist leaving a solitary finger sticking up. Then she smiled.
"Your name please. Just one of the courtesies I mentioned," Dr Barton persisted.
"Uber-bitch," the girl offered defiantly.
"No I don't think so. Your real name."
"Uber-bitch," she repeated with another vulgar gesture.
"Very well. We will call you... Emma. And you will answer to it. Am I clear?"
"Fuck you."
"You have had a long journey and I expect you are tired. So I will let that pass. From tomorrow, that language will not be tolerated. Am I clear?"
The girl blew him a mocking kiss.
"Ms Ellis, show Emma to her room and see that she uses the shower. As for her clothes, well the biker's jacket looks expensive and may be salvageable after cleaning. As to the rest... well you know what to do."
"What about the...?" Jane asked gesturing at her face.
Dr Barton hesitated.
"The scrap iron and hair you mean?"
"Yes."
"We will talk about that tomorrow when Emma is more receptive."
"Hello. I am here you know. And anyway my name is not Emma," the girl said belligerently.
"Hello Emma," Dr Barton said with a smile and walked away.
Jane was almost surprised when 'Emma' followed her up the stairs.
"Do you need food?"
"The suits gave me a burger, didn't they?" the girl said sullenly.
"The suits? Oh. Did they? Good."
The girl was impressed, not that she would admit it. The room was way beyond anything she had ever been offered before.
"The shower is there." Jane pointed. "If you slip off your things, I'll see what can be done with them."
"No way."
"Well you can hardly shower with your clothes on."
"I didn't say I wanted a shower."
"Dr Barton was quite clear on that point." Then sniffing she added, "With good reason."
The girl crossed her arms defiantly.
"Take a shower or I will be forced to bath you," Jane sighed.
"Now wait a minute if you think..."
"Alright madam." Jane seized the girl by the ear and dragged her out of the room and down the passage.
The grubby punk girl squealed all the way, only breaking off to launch into a tirade of foul language. Their final destination was a large clinical looking bathroom at the end of the hall. It was tiled from floor to ceiling, a picture of institutional bathing.
Jane pinned her charge face down over the edge of the huge bath and turned on the taps. Then with some difficulty while the bath filled she began to strip the girl.
"You can't do this you fucking bitch," was the most articulate she got during the next 10 minutes.
Once the bath was filled to Jane's satisfaction she hauled the girl to her feet and unceremoniously dumped her into the bath water. For a moment, the alien heat seized her wits, and then she recovered enough to begin another tirade.
Jane dunked the girl under and held for a slow count of five and then lifted her head by her short hair. This time she was ready with the soap, which she shoved into the girl's mouth. The resulting violence took Jane by surprise as she was punched and kicked. The kicks were luckily rendered ineffective by the water.
Jane turned the struggling serpent and shoved her face forward over the edge of the bath rim so that her bare bottom was clear of the water. Then seizing a bath brush brought it down hard in short rapid swats across the girl's behind.
"Ow! What are you... shit that hurts," the girl exclaimed, spitting out the soap.
Jane followed up with another brisk spanking until the girl's angry shouts gave way to moist spluttering.
"All right, stop, please."
"Better," Jane retorted, examining the projecting red bottom as she did so, still holding her firmly in place.
"Now are you going to let me bath you like a good girl?"
"I'll take the shower."
Jane began the spanking again.
"Alright," the girl wailed.
After a good dozen sound splats to her rear, Jane allowed the girl to fall back into the water where she sat sullenly glaring at her and breathing heavily.
"Can I bath myself?"
Jane ignored her and began to scrub.
"Please."
"Alright. But you had better be clean or I will bring you straight back here."
The next day the girl stood before the full-length mirror in her room examining her bottom. There were two tender dull red patches on the under side of her cheeks and at the edge of each patch were small black bruises where the brush had caught her. The punishment's spore transfixed her and engendered some strange feelings she did not want to face.
Instead, she turned back to the floral cotton dress that had been laid out for her on the bed. She contemplated going to breakfast in her underwear, but found she was a little afraid of Dr Barton and his consequences.
"I wonder if he knows I was..." she spoke aloud but could not say the word even to herself.
She felt silly and awkward as she walked into the room. Apart from hails of good morning, which she did not acknowledge, no-one spoke. So she helped herself to some bacon and bread from the buffet.
She sat gingerly at the table and hated that her discomfort must have been written on her face. Not that anyone appeared to notice.
"Well? What is there to do here all day?" she said sullenly, desperate to fill the silence.
Dr Barton looked up from his newspaper and studied the girl carefully before he spoke.
"To begin with, we will remove the..." He drew a circle over his face with his hand. "Then Ms Ellis will do something with your hair."
"No fucking way."
"Oh dear," Dr Barton sighed, putting his newspaper down. "Ms Ellis."
They both stood up and Jane walked towards her.
"What? Look I'm..." The girl looked frantically from one of her hosts to the other, suddenly worried that she may have gone too far. What had Dr Barton said the day before?
She had no further opportunity to contemplate as she was hauled from the breakfast table by Ms Ellis and out into the hall. She was taken to what appeared to be Dr Barton's study, where he had arrived ahead of them.
"Take your dress off," Ms Ellis ordered.
"No. You can't... what ever you are going to do. You can't."
"Emma. Remove your dress, lower your knickers and bend over the desk for your punishment," Dr Barton said commandingly.
The girl could see that he was holding a cane.
"You have got to be fucking kidding."
Dr Barton put down the cane and walked briskly towards her. He grabbed her by the nape of the neck and firmly led her to a chair in the corner where he sat down.
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