Doctor George : 01 - Nina and the Lodger (f/f)

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Doctor George : 01 - Nina and the Lodger (f/f)

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01 - Nina and the Lodger
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By Doctor George


by Doctor George » Tue Jul 15, 2014 6:11 am
Nina and the Lodger Part 1: Back to School...

Right through the Christmas holidays, the weather had been cold but without any snowfall. There was a coating of snow on the surrounding hills but none in the town itself. That all changed on the Sunday after New Year. Snow started to fall in the middle of the afternoon. The flakes were large and wet to begin with but, as darkness fell, the snow changed to fine icy granules driven by an increasing wind.

On Monday morning, Nina dragged herself out of bed when her alarm went off. She didn’t dare try to snatch a few minutes extra snooze as she knew full well that she would drop effortlessly back into a deep sleep and then have to rush to get ready for school when her mother eventually woke her. She staggered to the window and pushed her head between the curtains. The inside of the window was covered in condensation which Nina wiped using the sleeve of her fleece sleepsuit. It was still dark but she could see that snow was still falling hard. It was illuminated by the street light she could see, forming a fuzzy orange halo which shaded off to a yellowish haze elsewhere. Looking down, there was enough light escaping through the kitchen blind to show her that the back garden was under 10 to 15 centimetres of snow already.

Nina lifted the lid of her laptop and brought it up from standby. She clicked on the bookmark for her school’s website. She studied the home page carefully for the notice she expected to see announcing that school would be cancelled for the day, but all that was there was a banner saying Happy New Year and the date for the beginning of term.

Nina went to the bathroom and then dressed herself warmly. She put a pair of black long johns on under her purple woollen school tights and a white long-sleeved thermal top under her polo shirt. It was legitimate in severe weather to wear the school uniform purple tracksuit trousers for extra warmth. With her purple school sweatshirt on the effect was a little overwhelmingly purple, but presumably whoever had designed the school uniform had liked the colour. She pulled her purple and white striped hockey socks up over the legs of her trousers and folded them down to ankle level then went down to join her mother for breakfast.

“Morning, Mum,” Nina said, planting a kiss on her mother’s cheek.

Suzanna looked up from the piece of toast she was buttering. “Morning sweetie,” she replied, then, noticing how Nina was dressed, added, “Have you seen the snow? Surely school isn’t on today?”

“I checked the website. There’s nothing to say it isn’t on.”

“How are you going to get there? There’s no way I can get the car out with this much snow,” Suzanna pointed out.

“I know, but the traffic will have cleared the main roads by the time I leave, so I should be OK cycling if I can borrow your mountain bike for grippier tyres.”

“No problem borrowing my bike, but are you sure you can cycle at all in this weather?”

“I think so,” Nina said, taking the plate of egg on toast from her mother and heading for the dining room.

While Nina ate, Suzanna started her own laptop and brought up the school website. Sure enough, there was no indication that the school might be closed. She phoned the school, but the answering machine message simply stated the office opening hours as usual, suggesting that the school would indeed be open as usual.

It was just before quarter past eight when Nina finished her breakfast. “I’ll try to get out a couple of minutes early,” she said as she stood up.

“Take a look outside the front door and see if you really want to cycle today,” Suzanna urged.

At her mother’s insistence Nina opened the front door and looked out. The whole world seemed to be made up of blurred white shapes dimly seen through the swirling white of the falling snow. A brutal cold bit into her face, so she shut the door hurriedly. “I think I’ll be OK,” she insisted. “Bike tyres are good at cutting through soft snow and your bike has nice knobbly ones.”

* * *


When Nina came back downstairs, she had put on her school sports fleece jacket for extra warmth and was wearing a one-piece waterproof rainsuit as her top layer. The rainsuit was a startling shade of pink with purple panels on the underside of the sleeves and down the outside faces of the body and the legs. It had reflective strips across the back and down the outsides of the sleeves for visibility. Her head was completely covered in a pink and purple striped ski mask knitted by her cousin Theda which left just her eyes exposed. She also had her purple and white school scarf wrapped around her neck in an attempt to prevent too much snow getting inside her clothes. She had her heavy black winter cycling mittens in her hand ready to put on. Only her feet were relatively unprotected in the black trainers she usually wore to ride to school.

Nina paused at the hall cupboard and took out her helmet which she fastened on over her knitted mask.

“Still nothing to suggest school isn’t open,” Suzanna said, gesturing towards her laptop as she kissed her daughter’s wool-covered cheek.

Nina opened the back door and hesitated at the prospect of the swirling maelstrom of snowflakes outside.

“Do you need a pair of goggles?” her mother asked.

“Might help,” Nina conceded. “That way I won’t have to cycle with my eyes shut.”

Suzanna rummaged in the back of the hall cupboard and emerged triumphant with a pair of aviator-style motorcycle goggles. She helped Nina put the elastic over her helmet and settle the lenses over her eyes.

“Proper Snoopy goggles,” Suzanna said, admiring the overall effect.

“More like Tank Girl with this,” Nina suggested, tapping the side of her mountain bike helmet.

“I’m not sure Tank Girl is suitable reading for someone your age,” Suzanna pointed out.

“Oops,” Nina replied, not sounding particularly repentant as she headed out into the snow.

* * *


Nina’s estimation of the conditions proved to be optimistic. The fresh snow on the residential streets was hard work to ride through, but the mountain bike tyres gripped well and the snow yielded cleanly with the characteristic slightly squeaky sound of powdery snow. There was a brief respite in a narrow alleyway between two houses that, by some quirk of the wind, was almost free of snow.

The main road, which Nina expected to be cleared by traffic, turned out to be a nightmare. The traffic was crawling along in both directions in two narrow lanes in the centre of the road. This part of the road appeared to have been cleared by a snowplough, judging from the heaped up and re-frozen snow closer to the kerb on each side. Nina tried riding on the clear part of the road and found that she could easily keep up with the slow-moving traffic but soon realised that some of the cars she was sharing the road with were barely under control. After seeing a car in front of her skid nearly sideways, she realised how vulnerable she was. The heaped snow towards the sides of the road was impassible on a bicycle and there were too many pedestrians, mostly walking with their heads down, for her to ride on the footway.

With no viable alternative, Nina resigned herself to having to push her bicycle the rest of the way to school. With her one-piece rainsuit and her face completely covered, Nina was relatively warm and comfortable despite the snow and the biting wind, certainly more comfortable than many of her fellow pedestrians appeared to be. The weakness in her attire was her trainers. Although the snow was fairly dry and powdery, it still stuck to the nylon fabric uppers of her shoes and her body heat was enough to melt it so that her feet rapidly became wet and uncomfortably cold.

* * *


It was about 20 past 9 when Nina pushed her bicycle through the school gates. When she locked it to the bike rack there were only two other bicycles there instead of the dozens she would usually expect to see. She trudged across an almost-empty car park to the school entrance. As she approached it, she could see two figures standing under the canopy over the door.

One of the figures was wearing a shiny maroon hooded duvet coat which reached almost to her ankles with the feet of a pair of green wellingtons visible below. She held a clipboard in her mitten-covered left hand and a ballpoint pen in her right hand which was only protected by a red woollen glove. Her face, framed by the hood of her coat, was almost entirely hidden, with the edge of a red woollen hat coming down to her eyebrows and a jaunty tartan scarf in red, green and yellow covering her mouth and nose.

“Don’t worry, I’m not marking you late. This is registration as there are so few teachers in,” the muffled figure said.

“Mrs Buchanan?” Nina ventured, recognising her geography teacher’s Scottish accent.

“The clue is in the tartan,” Mrs Buchanan replied, pointing to her scarf with the pen.

“Sorry, I can only just about recognise easy ones like Black Watch.”

“No matter,” Mrs Buchanan said lightly. “And is that Nina Margrave under those layers?”

“That’s right.”

“Remind me what class?”

“8Kw.”

Mrs Buchanan leafed through the photocopied pages on her clipboard to find Nina’s class. “You’re down here as ‘K Margrave’,” she commented.

“I’ve always been called Nina, but I’m really Katrina Margrave for official purposes,” Nina explained. “I might well change it officially when I’m 18.”

“OK, that’s you ticked off, Nina. Miss Kowalska is one of the few teachers in this morning, so you can go up and see what she’s doing if you like.”

“Is school actually open today?” Nina asked. “I checked the website before I left and it didn’t say it wasn’t.”

“Technically, we’re closed, but it was almost 9 o’clock before any of the admin staff could get in to change the website and to answer anyone phoning in,” Mrs Buchannan explained. “You can go home as soon as you like as long as there is someone there or you can stay on here for a bit. There are free hot drinks and soup in the canteen and some of the teachers are organising activities to keep people amused.”

“Thanks – I think I’d like to warm up before I try going back home,” Nina replied.

The other muffled figure spoke for the first time. She was dressed in a pink one-piece ski-suit with the hood up and the lower part of her face obscured by a white scarf. “I want to check your temperature before you go any further, Nina. Step inside and we’ll do it under cover.”

Nina recognised the voice as Miss Holmroyd, one of the sports teachers, who was also one of the school first-aiders. She followed as the teacher pushed the entrance door open and stepped inside.

“It’s an intra-aural thermometer,” Miss Holmroyd said, “so I need to get at your ear.”

Nina took her mittens off and tucked them under one arm then lifted her goggles up onto the front of her helmet and unfastened the chin strap. She re-fastened the strap and used the helmet as a basket to carry her mittens and then her knitted mask.

Miss Holmroyd pushed the thermometer into Nina’s right ear, waited for an electronic beep and then withdrew it. “You’re well within the normal range,” she said as she examined the display.

“Some people weren’t?” Nina asked.

“Two hypothermic and a few borderline so far.”

“Badly so?”

“No, nothing that a hot drink and a blanket wouldn’t sort out,” Miss Holmroyd assured her.

“Thank you,” Nina said, turning to go up to her classroom. “Oh, and Happy New Year to both of you.”

* * *


Arriving at the bank of lockers outside Miss Kowalska’s classroom, Nina took off her soaking wet trainers then took off her rainsuit. She unwound her scarf from around her neck and was surprised to find it was almost dry once she shook off the few remaining snowflakes clinging to it. She shook the rainsuit as dry as she could and hung it in the locker. Not surprisingly, Nina’s socks were as wet as her trainers so she peeled them off. The feet of her tights were wet too, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. She hoped that a pair of clean dry white sports socks would at least allow her feet to warm up. She also put on the pair of white canvas gym shoes that she usually kept in the locker. Nina debated putting her grey school skirt on, but decided that she was much more comfortable with the tracksuit trousers on and by the same token, decided to keep her hooded fleece on as well and hung her scarf back around her neck for good measure.

Nina closed her locker, picked up her schoolbag, which was much too wet to put on her back and gathered up her trainers, socks and balaclava.

When she entered the classroom, Nina found Miss Kowalska sitting at her desk and only six girls in the room, sitting in two huddles of three, clearly studying something closely.

“Good morning, Miss Kowalska and Happy New Year,” Nina said, confident that she wasn’t interrupting a lesson. “Is it OK if I put these on the pipes to dry?”

The thick iron pipes which supplied the radiators with hot water ran the length of the room about 30 centimetres above the floor and often did service for drying clothes. Nina added her items to those already there. As she stood up again, she noticed that there was a pair of narrow skis propped up in the corner of the room and a pair of Salomon ski boots tucked under the pipes next to them. “Are the skis yours, Miss?” she asked, impressed.

“Yes,” Miss Kowalska confirmed, “hence the outfit.”

Nina had noticed the heavy sweater that her teacher was wearing, with its bold Norwegian pattern, but hadn’t taken in that she was wearing knee-length breeches with socks similarly patterned to her sweater and that had a lightweight ski jacket hung on the back of her chair.

“I’ve never had the chance to use them around the town before,” the teacher continued. “At least, not in this country.”

“More practical than my bicycle turned out to be,” Nina pointed out. “I ended up pushing it about 2 kilometres.”

Miss Kowalska winced sympathetically then said, “I’ve given the girls some crosswords to unfreeze their brains. You can join in if you like.”

“Come and join us,” Nina’s friend Vicky invited. “We’re really struggling here.”

Nina crossed to one of the groups of girls and pulled a chair into position, so that she could see the paper they were working on. “This looks like the crossword that the local paper publishes,” Nina commented, recognising the format.

“It is, but these ones haven’t been published yet,” Miss Kowalska confirmed.

“I sometimes do these with my Mum – they’re quite difficult,” Nina said.

“We’ve managed about a third of the clues, but we seem to be stuck,” Vicky explained, turning the paper so that Nina could see more clearly.

Nina read the clues in silence, then said, “This one across the top. The clue is ‘Alex went south from California, but no-one believed her’. Could that be CASSANDRA? Nobody believed Cassandra in the Trojan war story, it’s the right number of letters and we’ve already got the A on the end, but I don’t see how it fits the rest of the clue.”

“Well California would give CA and south would give an S, but I don’t see where SANDRA comes from,” Vicky commented.

“I know,” said Jo, one of the other girls in the group, “Sandra is short for Alexandra and so is Alex.”

Steph, the fourth member of the huddle, dutifully wrote it in. “Well done, Nina – that gives us lots of initial letters for down clues.”

“Group effort,” Nina pointed out modestly. “And I see why you were struggling.”

“ ‘Support for injured member’ is SLING,” Steph announced, writing it in.

The girls worked on, racking their brains against the crosswords, until about quarter past 10, Vicky said, “We’ve only got two clues left, but I think we’re stuck, Miss.”

“Us too, but we’ve got three left,” said the spokesgirl for the other group.

“Why not swap and see if you can finish each other’s?” Miss Kowalska suggested. “If you’re still all stuck at half past, we’ll call it a draw.”

“I didn’t know we were in competition,” Nina said, surprised. The other girls laughed good-naturedly.

The sheets of paper were exchanged and the concentration resumed. Two of the three remaining clues in the new crossword yielded fairly quickly but the last one was stubborn: ‘Some require a tailor-made lasso.’

“Miss, I think we’ve got the right letters for the last word, but it’s not a word any of us know.’

“Take a chance and write it down – you sometimes just have to do that with crosswords. You can check in the dictionary afterwards.”

“OK, we’ve either finished or blown it,” Steph said, writing in REATA.

“We’ve got the same problem,” the other group admitted. “We’ll take a chance too – ‘Look up a seriously toxic tree’ – UPAS?”

Miss Kowalska stood up and walked to the two groups of girls who turned their crosswords around for her to read them. “Both absolutely right, so it’s a draw.” she said. “A reata is a kind of lasso or noose and the upas tree is the Java poison tree.”

“Did you actually make these crosswords up yourself, Miss?” Nina asked.

“I did – it’s called compiling a crossword,” Miss Kowalska admitted. “That’s why I was able to give you ones that aren’t published yet.”

“And English isn’t your first language is it?”

“No, we spoke Polish and German at home. I learned English at school.”

There was a stunned silence, then Vicky summed up the group reaction with, “Wow!”

“OK, girls, I’m ready for a coffee,” the teacher said, sidestepping the implied compliment, “who else is coming down to the canteen?”

By mutual unspoken consent, all seven girls stood up.

* * *


Nina elected to have tea, not being much of a coffee drinker. After chatting with her friends in the canteen, she decided to go to the art room, one of her favourite haunts in the school.

The school had a slightly surreal atmosphere with so few staff and students there and none of them engaged in normal schoolwork. Nina was glad that she had decided to disregard the formal uniform requirements in favour of warmth as the school heating system was no match for the low temperature and fierce wind outside. The corridors were decidedly colder than Miss Kowalska’s classroom had been, so she pulled the hood of her fleece up and nestled her chin down into her scarf.

As she approached the art room, Nina was delighted to see that there was light visible behind the glazed panel above the door. Certain that she wouldn’t be disturbing a class, Nina quietly opened the door and let herself in. She stopped, rooted to the spot with her mouth open until someone said, “Shut the door, Nina – you’re letting the cold air in.”

Nina pulled herself together enough to turn and push the door shut behind her. She turned again and stared at the sight that had pulled her up short. Miss Pennywright, her art teacher was sitting securely tied to an old wooden chair which was raised on a small platform in the middle of the room.

The chair was one that Nina had seen and drawn many times before in the art room, a survivor of classroom furniture from many decades ago. It was robustly built with a solid wooden seat, slightly splayed legs which were braced by stretchers. The backrest was supported on wooden spindles. Some of the deeper recesses of the decorative turning on the legs and spindles still retained traces of the original varnish but mostly the chair was bare wood discoloured and polished to a dull sheen by the many hands that had touched it over the years.

Miss Pennywright usually wore one-piece cotton overalls for teaching, art being a messy sort of subject, but today was dressed in a startlingly atypical short dress with a flared skirt, high nipped-in waist and long sleeves, an emerald green skater dress that would look more at home on a teenager. Her legs were covered by a pair of over-knee socks in alternating light and dark green stripes. It was hard to tell from the short length of thigh visible, but Nina thought Miss Pennywright must be wearing a pair of chocolate-brown nylon tights under the socks, closely matching her skin colour. Her feet were in a pair of grey high-top converses and the tops of a pair of grey socks could just be seen inside them. The shaved brown dome of Miss Pennywright’s head was covered by a wig, styled in a short bob and in the same shade of green as her dress.

The art teacher was quite efficiently bound with smooth white cotton rope. Her hands were out of sight behind the back of the chair from Nina’s point of view. There were bands of rope around her upper arms and chest and the back of the chair both above and below her bust. Another band went around her and the chair at waist level and another over her lap and under the chair seat. Her legs were bound at the ankles and below her knees and Nina could see a rope attached to Miss Pennywright’s ankle binding, going below the braces linking the chair legs and up behind her, presumably to her wrists.

As a finishing touch, Miss Pennywright was gagged with a white cloth. It had been folded into a fairly wide band across her cheeks but pinched together to go between her teeth. When she turned her head, Nina could see that the gag was secured with a cartoonishly large knot behind her head and the ends of the cloth sticking out stiffly behind.

Two people were drawing Miss Pennywright. One was Dr Darkwood, Nina’s chemistry teacher, and the other was a girl named Monica, several years older than Nina. Both were regulars at Miss Pennywright’s after school life-drawing class.

Nina managed to remember her manners enough to say, “Good morning everyone and Happy New Year.”

“Ah-oh Mee-ma,” Miss Pennywright mumbled in reply. “Ah-ee oo ee-ah.”

“And the same from me,” Dr Darkwood said, laughing at her colleague’s efforts.

“Me too,” Monica added, trying to control her own laughter so that she could draw.

“I’ve been working on a manga,” Dr Darkwood said, swivelling round on her chair to face Nina, “and Miss Pennywright pointed out that some of the frames don’t look quite right when people are tied up. I tried tying up a Barbie doll with string as a model – I’ve got one that has properly articulated knees and ankles – but it still didn’t bend the way a real person would. I tried with an artist’s wooden lay figure, but that was even worse. Miss Pennywright offered to pose for me instead. We were going to do it one evening, but with school disrupted by the snow, we decided just to go ahead today.”

“I just came in to say ‘Hi’ and found this going on, so I had to do a drawing,” Monica explained.

“Do you want to join in too?” Dr Darkwood asked.

“Yes please,” Nina replied enthusiastically as she went in search of a drawing board, clips and paper.

Nina stalked around looking for an angle to sketch, eventually choosing an oblique view behind Miss Pennywright. She settled herself down on her favourite seat, an old-fashioned artist’s ‘donkey’, a small wooden bench with an adjustable easel built into one end of it. It was necessary straddle the donkey in order to use it, which was usually a little inelegant in a skirt, but perfectly practical in her tracksuit trousers.

Miss Pennywright glanced over her shoulder to see where Nina was sitting. Her wrists were tied side-by-side with her hands hanging relaxed with the fingers slightly curved. She clenched her hands into fists and asked, “Ow’at?”

Nina looked at her teacher’s hands, noting that she was wearing thin knitted gloves almost the same shade of brown as her skin and which were long enough that the tops were hidden by the three-quarter length sleeves of the green skater dress. She pondered the question for a moment then suggested, “Try one hand clenched and the other flat?”

Miss Pennywright relaxed her right hand.

“Other way, please,” Nina requested.

With Miss Pennywright’s hands in the position she had requested, Nina started drawing. She was aware that the pose would probably only last until Dr Darkwood had finished her own drawing, so she worked rapidly using a thick charcoal pencil, concentrating on form, light and shade rather than detail.

“I’m going to be done in about another two or three minutes,” Dr Darkwood announced, confirming Nina’s thoughts.

“Fine by me,” Monica said, “I’ll be in danger of overworking this if I do much more.”

“Fine by me too,” Nina agreed, “I’m just doing a quick impression, so I can stop any time.”

Nina and Monica actually put their drawing things down before Dr Darkwood and watched as she applied the last few touches to her drawing

“Done!” Dr Darkwood announced emphatically. “Could you two untie Miss Pennywright while I pop out and spray this?”

Murmuring their assent, Nina and Monica left their seats and set to work to release their art teacher from hers. The rattling of an aerosol can being shaken could be heard from the corridor outside, then the hiss of spray fixative being applied to Dr Darkwood’s drawing. None of the knots had been pulled especially tight, so it took only a few minutes to free Miss Pennywright completely.

“That feels better,” Miss Pennywright said as soon as the gag was out of her mouth. She rubbed her wrists briefly then added, “I think a quick comfort break is called for,” and left the room.

While Miss Pennywright was away, Nina took the opportunity to take her own drawing out into the corridor to fix it. Dr Darkwood had just finished as Nina opened the art room door. She handed over the can of fixative (actually supermarket own-brand extra-hold hair-spray). Nina laid her drawing on the old newspaper that Dr Darkwood had left on the vinyl tiled floor, shook the tin vigorously and applied a light misting of spray. She had just picked the drawing up again when Miss Pennywright came trotting along the corridor, hugging herself.

“Cold out here,” the art teacher commented as she opened the door and returned to the art room.

“We could put the heater on for a bit,” Dr Darkwood said.

“I was just about to suggest that,” Miss Pennywright agreed. She picked up the photocopied draft pages of Dr Darkwood’s manga and flipped through them. “This one next?” she asked?

“If it’s OK with you, Layla,” Dr Darkwood replied.

“It was my bright idea in the first place, Chrys,” Miss Pennywright pointed out with mock resignation. “Where do you want me?”

Dr Darkwood replied by turning to Nina and Monica. “Could you two get the glass-topped table set up?”

The glass-topped table was a piece of equipment that had been in the art room for as long as anyone could remember. It had originally been intended as a dining table, probably some time back in the 1970s. It consisted of four chubby cylindrical aluminium legs linked by rectangular-section aluminium braces at the top. Erecting this part of the table was a simple matter involving lightweight components and eight wingnuts. The tabletop was a different matter; it was a single sheet of toughened glass about 90 by 120 centimetres and over a centimetre thick. With a weight of about 30 kilograms it was an awkwardly-slippery two-person lift.

Nina had helped put up the table several times before and Monica, being older, many more times, so they both knew what to do and worked together efficiently to manoeuvre the components of the table out of the store room and assemble them. While they were doing that, Miss Pennywright and Dr Darkwood set up a large electric fan heater that was kept at the back of the same cupboard.

Although it was unwieldy, the glass-topped table had several important uses. Mostly it served as a useful lightbox, with the addition of a lamp on the floor underneath it. It occasionally appeared in drawing exercises involving transparency and reflection. Sometimes it was used in situations where the subject matter was to be lit from below and it was this latter function that Dr Darkwood had in mind. The scene from her manga that she was redrafting at Miss Pennywright’s suggestion was one where her protagonist was hogtied on top of a grating with light coming from underneath.

“All right – do your worst, Chrys,” Miss Pennywright said.

She hoisted herself onto the table so she was sitting on the edge on it. She paused to tug at her socks which had slipped slightly and then to smooth out the wrinkles that had developed at the wrists of her long woollen gloves. Satisfied, she swung her legs up onto the table and rolled herself onto her stomach. She flipped the skirt of her dress down into place before offering her hands behind her back.

“It’s getting hot in here,” Monica commented as the heater started to have an effect on the room temperature. She unwound the huge grey scarf she had been wearing wrapped around her neck and pulled up over her chin and shed the outermost of the several layers of cardigan she was wearing.

“I need to lose a layer too,” Nina agreed, removing her scarf and hooded fleece.

“I’m only just about getting comfortable,” Miss Pennywright commented.

“Me too,” Dr Darkwood agreed, hugging herself dramatically.

“You can borrow my scarf if you like,” Monica offered jokingly.

“Well...” Dr Darkwood began then hesitated, “...actually, yes please.”

The chemistry teacher was already warmly dressed in a thick navy blue sweater with an equally thick cardigan in a slightly lighter blue on top. A pair of grey tweed culottes came to just below her knees and below that could be seen the legs of a pair of navy blue woollen tights with narrow horizontal pink stripes disappearing into a pair of chunky grey socks. Presumably her outdoor footwear was somewhere else with her coat. She arranged Monica’s scarf to go over her head and then looped it once around her neck to hold it in place.

“Thank you, Monica. That feels better already,” Dr Darkwood said as she sorted out the rope that had previously been used to tie her colleague to the chair.

“Can I help?” Nina offered.

Dr Darkwood handed Nina a tangle of rope then set to work to use the length she had already straightened out. She arranged Miss Pennywright’s arms so that her forearms were parallel across her back with the fingertips of each hand just reaching the opposite elbow. She found the middle of the long length of rope she had ready and used it to form a binding around the art teacher’s wrists. Working quickly and confidently, Dr Darkwood deployed the doubled rope to form a quite complex harness going around Miss Pennywright’s arms and chest both above and below her bust, in both cases cinched between her arms and body, and over both shoulders, progressively building up a bulky knot in the middle of her back. Dr Darkwood ran out of rope several times doing this, but each time took another piece from Nina, doubled it and hitched it onto the length already in place.

Nina was fascinated by the obvious skill that Dr Darkwood exhibited tying her colleague up.

“How’s that, so far, Layla?” Dr Darkwood asked.

“OK, I think,” Miss Pennywright replied, “but I’m definitely not going anywhere until you say so.”

Dr Darkwood changed her position so that she could tie Miss Pennywright’s legs next. Nina followed so that she could keep handing her rope. From her new vantage point, Nina could see that Miss Pennywright’s skater dress was actually a genuine ice skating dress, effectively a leotard with an attached skirt worn over her opaque chocolate brown tights.

Miss Pennywright’s legs were bound at the ankles and both above and below the knees, each binding being formed as a wrap and cinch.. Dr Darkwood carefully adjusted the tension of the rope at the knee bindings so that they wouldn’t over-tighten when her legs were bent. With that done, she lifted Miss Pennywright’s feet and gently eased them towards her bottom until there was an angle of about 45 degrees between her thighs and lower legs.

“Not too tight?” Dr Darkwood asked.

“No, I should be fine like this, Chrys,” her colleague confirmed.

Nina handed the chemistry teacher another piece of rope and watched as it was deftly tied in place linking Miss Pennywright’s ankle binding with her chest harness.

“Are you sure everything’s OK before I gag you?” Dr Darkwood asked.

“I wouldn’t be able to take this all day, but I should be fine for as long as you need,” Miss Pennywright assured her.

Dr Darkwood tied the thick white cloth gag in place between her teeth much as it had been for the chair tie.

Nina glanced round at Monica, aware that she had been busy sketching while she had been helping Dr Darkwood.

“Good action sequence,” Monica said.

Nina went across to Monica and looked over her shoulder as she showed her the last few pages in her sketchbook. While Miss Pennywright was being tied up, Monica had done a series of lightning sketches of the process in black felt pen with shadows indicated using a broad grey marker pen. They were naturally lacking in detail and quite scribbly but captured the action dramatically and dynamically.

“I need to do more stuff like that,” Nina commented approvingly. “It would stop me getting bogged down in detail all the time.”

While Nina had been looking at Monica’s work, Dr Darkwood had positioned a lamp under the glass-topped table so that it uplit Miss Pennywright in the way that she wanted.

Nina pondered what she should do next and decided to go in much the direction that Monica had. She went to the art materials cupboard and selected a bullet-pointed black felt pen and a selection of broad-tipped markers in a range of useful colours. She explored various possible vantage points and eventually settled herself sitting on the floor with her back supported by the leg of a table so that she was looking up through the glass table top at Miss Pennywright. She took a deep breath and then set to work sketching directly in felt pen, knowing she had no way to correct mistakes. She filled in the colours in Miss Pennywright’s clothes and skin in solid blocks of colour with the marker pens, relying on layering to achieve the tones she wanted. Nina wasn’t satisfied with her first effort, but felt more confident in the technique having tried it out and immediately embarked on a second try. She was quite pleased with the result, especially as it was very different to any of her usual techniques.

“Success second time round?” Dr Darkwood asked as Nina stood up.

“Not bad, but it would be better with a bit more practice,” Nina replied showing her drawing first to Dr Darkwood then to Miss Pennywright, who nodded her approval.

“Does anyone know if Miss Badelaine is in school today?” Nina asked.

“I saw her in the staff room earlier,” Dr Darkwood said, not looking up from her drawing, “but I’ve no idea if she’s still here.”

“I think I’ll go along to the library and say ‘hello’, if she’s there.”

Nina thought about putting her drawings into her schoolbag but decided it was still too damp, so she settled for putting them in her personal folder in one of the big storage drawers in the art room.

“Thanks for letting us all draw you,” she said to Miss Pennywright as she put her fleece and scarf back on before heading out of the room.

Nina realised that it probably wasn’t any colder in the corridor than it had been before, but it certainly felt that way after the comparative warmth of the art room with the heater on. She paused to wrap her scarf across her mouth and zip up her fleece with its hood up.

* * *


Nina encountered no-one else on her walk to the library. She suspected that many of the few staff and students who had made it into school had already gone back home. She was therefore pleased to see that the lights were on in the library. She let herself in and announced herself: “Bonjour ma’m’selle Badelaine!”

There was no reply, but Nina could hear someone moving around, so she went further into the library to investigate. She found Miss Badelaine standing on a chair reorganising the books on a high shelf. She had a stack of books expertly cradled between her left forearm and her body and smaller piles of books were lying on a nearby table. As ever, Miss Badelaine was taking no chances with the weather. She was wearing a pair of shorts that Nina hadn’t seen before, almost knee-length with a bold Aztec-style pattern, majoring on reds, oranges and yellows. They were in a thick, rather fuzzy-looking fabric, which made Nina wonder if they had been made from a blanket. The colour was picked up by the sunset-orange v-necked sweater she wore. There was a bright red woollen scarf wrapped around her neck and tucked into the top of the sweater. A second scarf, black and enormously long and wide, was looped more loosely around her neck and hung down below her knees. A huge hooded cardigan in deep maroon offset the bright colours a little. It was open at the front and came down below knee level. The maroon of Miss Badelaine’s cardigan was echoed by the slightly brighter red of her woollen tights that were visible below the hem of her shorts and above her black knee-length socks, which had a pair of narrow yellow bands just below the top. On her head, Miss Badelaine was wearing a black open-faced knitted balaclava hood with a long tail and a pompom at the back, which Nina recognised as being in the same style as was worn the librarian’s favourite storybook heroine, Fantômette. Over the top of the hood was a pair of bright green cable-knit earmuffs. From the hiss of a bass track that Nina could just make out, it was obvious that the earmuffs incorporated a pair of headphones. Miss Badelaine was swaying gently and shelving books rhythmically to the beat of a soundtrack only she could hear.

Nina tried a louder greeting: “Bonjour ma’m’selle Badelaine! Bonne année!”

The librarian looked around, startled. “Nina!” she exclaimed, “Bonne année!”

Miss Badelaine stepped down from her chair and carefully put her stack of books down on the table. She ignored the hand that Nina was holding out in greeting and instead grabbed the girl by the shoulders and planted a kiss on each cheek.

“Bonne année!” the librarian repeated, sliding her headphones down around her neck. “Tu vas bien?”

“Très bien, merci,” Nina replied politely, a little shaken by the greeting. “Et vous?”

“Très bien aussi. C’était bien Noël? Tu as eu beaucoup de cadeaux?”

“Une nouvelle bicyclette,” Nina offered, taken aback by this onslaught of French.

“Chouette! Quelle genre de bicyclette?”

“Um...” Nina began, but her limited command of French deserted her under pressure. “It’s a hybrid bike, fitted with road tyres so it will be good for my ride to school,” she explained.

“Surely you did not cycle to school in this weather?” Miss Badelaine said, gesturing towards the window, where the snow could be seen still falling gently.

“I borrowed my mum’s mountain bike, but I still ended up pushing it most of the way here,” Nina admitted. “What about you? Did you manage on your moped?”

“Alas, no – I did not even try. I had to walk.” Miss Badelaine nodded towards her office, where Nina could see through the open door a long black PVC raincoat hanging up and a pair of black wellington boots. “And then I discovered that the school was really closed.” A very Gallic shrug followed and then she added, “But it’s an opportunity to rearrange things to make a little more shelf space before everyone comes back.”

“Would you like some help?” Nina offered.

“Yes, please,” the librarian replied, sounding genuinely grateful. “I have done most of the sorting already. If you pass the books up to me, it will save me time getting up and down off the chair.

They soon fell into a rhythm. Miss Badelaine was introducing a little space into each shelf of books by transferring books down to the next shelf. As the work proceeded, the number of books to be moved increased and part of Nina’s role was to keep them in order on the table before passing them back up to the librarian. There were also some books that were waiting to be re-shelved and their places were marked by pieces of paper inserted between books already on the shelf. Eventually, they reached a long gap between classifications.

“C’est tout – merci beaucoup!” Miss Badelaine said, jumping lightly down from the chair.

“I was glad to do something useful,” Nina said. “All I’ve done this morning is crossword puzzles and pictures.”

“What do you intend to do next?”

“I was thinking of going to the canteen for some hot soup and then going home before the weather gets any worse.”

“A wise plan,” Miss Badelaine concurred. “May I accompany you?”

Nina waited while the librarian collected her coat and boots from the office. While she was waiting, she noticed a new addition to the library notice board:

Accommodation wanted:

Female French student seeks accommodation with a family. Non-smoker, neat habits, willing to assist in household chores, can cook. Can also offer private French tuition.

If you can help, please contact Chloé Badelaine
on 07700 900 535
or +33 6 31 41 59
or email chloeb@courrielexpress.fr



“Is this you looking for accommodation?” Nina asked.

“Yes – I’m in a student hostel at the moment and it doesn’t really suit me well. It’s a bit cramped and noisy.”

Nina took out her phone and used its camera to photograph the notice. “I’ll tell my mum. She was talking about the possibility of getting a lodger in our spare room.”

“Ça serait très agréable,” Miss Badelaine commented, apparently as much to herself as to Nina.

The librarian, now wearing her boots but carrying her coat over one arm, ushered Nina out of the library and locked the door.

Nina hoisted her schoolbag onto her back and set off for the canteen with Miss Badelaine, whose rubber boots squeaked slightly with every step on the polished floor.

* * *


On their way to the canteen, Nina and Miss Badelaine took a slight detour so that Nina could visit her locker. Nina retrieved her trainers, socks, mittens and balaclava from Miss Kowalska’s now deserted classroom. The heating pipes had done their work and everything was now dry and invitingly warm, except for the trainers which were still slightly damp.

Nina paused to take off her gym shoes and sports socks. She put the socks in her schoolbag to go in the laundry basket at home and the gym shoes in her locker. She pulled her purple and white hockey socks on and up over the legs of her tracksuit trousers then put her trainers on. She used her cycle helmet as a carrying basket and put her ski mask and mittens into it, put her rainsuit over one arm and relocked her locker.

Nina and Miss Badelaine chatted about the Christmas break which had just finished as they made their way through the now almost completely deserted school to the canteen. They were relieved to discover that there were still two of the serving staff on duty and that hot soup was still available. They settled down with a bowl of chunky vegetable soup each accompanied by a hunk of crusty bread and a mug of hot chocolate.

Suitably warmed, Nina and Miss Badelaine made their way to the exit door to put their outer layers back on before braving the weather again.

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Doctor George's stories
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Soraka
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Post by Soraka »

Nina and the Lodger Part 2: …and Back Home

Ready to go back out into the snow, Nina wriggled herself into her unwieldy rainsuit and pulled up the zip that ran from crotch to throat level. She had already decided that cycling was out of the question so, once she had her ski mask back on, she pulled up first the hood of her fleece jacket then the one on the rainsuit. She pulled the zip up the last few centimetres so that it was snugly under her chin then centred her scarf at the back of her neck on top of the rainsuit. She pulled one end across her mouth and the other around her throat, knotting the ends behind her neck. She decided that she might as well add the goggles she had borrowed from her mother for good measure and fitted them over the ski mask, sliding the elastic down into place at the back of the rainsuit hood. Making sure the key to her bicycle lock was in her right hand, she pulled on her mittens then lifted her schoolbag onto her back.

“Ready,” Nina announced, turning to face the librarian.

“Moi aussi,” Miss Badelaine said, her voice slightly muffled.

The librarian was now dressed in black from head to toe with only her eyes visible. She had wrapped her long black scarf not only across her mouth and nose but also across her forehead, her hazel-coloured eyes showing in the narrow gap between the two bands of wool. Her scarf-covered face was framed by the hood of her black shiny PVC raincoat, which was snugly belted at the waist and which, with her shortish stature, came down almost to her ankles, just the feet of her black wellingtons showing below. Her hands were covered by bulky mittens in black faux leather and the black leather satchel she used as a handbag, with its strap diagonally across her body, completed the all-black ensemble.

Nina pointed out the notice taped to the door, stating that the school would be closed the next day. Miss Balelaine nodded in acknowledgement then pushed the door open.

The snow was still falling but had eased slightly since Nina’s journey to school. The wind was however, if anything, stronger and was not only making the falling snow almost horizontal but was also lifting the snow on the ground into swirling eddies and heaping it in drifts.

Nina and Miss Badelaine trudged across the almost deserted car park to the bicycle racks. Despite the protective awning above, Nina’s bike was now buried half way up its wheels in wind-driven snow. She unlocked it and fastened the lock around the back carrier then hung her helmet from the crossbar by its strap. After hauling it out of its snowdrift, Nina bounced the bike on its tyres to knock most of the remaining snow off the frame.

Nina began the long push home, the librarian accompanying her towards the school gate, when a voice called out just behind them: “Would you two like a lift?”

With two hoods up and a scarf tied around her face and neck, Nina had to turn her whole body to see the speaker. She saw a tall woman in a dark pink hip-length parka with a lighter pink fake fur trim around the hood. The legs of a pair of grey culottes were visible below that, coming down just below the tops of a pair of sturdy wellington boots in bright Barbie pink. The woman’s face was hidden by a navy blue ski mask which left only her eyes and mouth visible through the openings which were edged in red. The only real clue to her identity was the pair of rectangular spectacles with pale blue lenses that appeared to have been put on after the ski mask by threading the legs in through the eye-holes. Her blue woollen gloves matched the mask as did the scarf knotted around her neck on top of the hood.

“Dr Darkwood?” Nina ventured.

“Yes – it is Nina isn’t is?”

“That’s right, Miss,” Nina confirmed.

“And Chloé Badelaine,” the librarian added.

“That’s very kind, Miss,” Nina said in reply to the chemistry teacher’s offer, “but I’ve got a bicycle.”

“That’s OK,” Dr Darkwood countered. “I’ve got a Land Rover!”

“In that case, yes please,” Nina said enthusiastically.

“What about you, Chloé?” Dr Darkwood asked.

“Merci, mais non. I do not have far to go and I quite enjoy being out in the snow...” The librarian hesitated then said, “...quand je me suis emmitouflée comme ça...” After a few seconds thought, she located the right idiom: “...when I am all wrapped up like this.”

Dr Darkwood led the way to a dark green Land Rover. “I’m afraid it’s going to be a fairly chilly ride,” she said. “It’s pretty basic even as Land Rovers go.”

Nina noticed that the back of the vehicle was like a pick-up truck covered by a canvas tilt, but it was only when Dr Darkwood opened the rear door to lift the bicycle in that she realised that the back of the cab was open to the carrying space behind.

“I’m sure it won’t matter, bundled up like this,” Nina reassured her teacher.

With the bicycle safely stowed, Dr Darkwood settled herself into the driving seat and reached across to unlock the passenger door. Nina climbed up into the leftmost of the two passenger seats and fastened her seatbelt. Dr Darkwood asked Nina where she lived and was given an address and directions.

Dr Darkwood started the engine then loosened her scarf and flipped the hood of her parka down before swivelling round in her seat to look out of the back as she reversed the Land Rover out of its space.

Miss Badelaine waved as they passed her shortly after pulling out of the school gates onto the road outside. There were few other pedestrians in view and almost no other traffic, although there were plenty of cars abandoned at the sides of the road.

“Sorry, but the windscreen is starting to mist, so I’ll need to turn the ventilation right up,” Dr Darkwood said, manipulating a control.

“I don’t think I’ll notice dressed like this,” Nina pointed out.

“Nor me – who needs a heater when you’ve got a woolly mask on?”

“You don’t usually drive this do you?” Nina asked.

“No, this belongs to my brother’s farm.”

“Doesn’t he need it today?”

“No – the snow’s too deep up there today. He’s using a tractor to see to the sheep and lent me this to get down to school.”

“You didn’t know school would be shut today either?”

“I never bothered checking,” Dr Darkwood admitted with a laugh. “There have been occasions when we’ve been axle-deep in snow up there and there’s been hardly anything down here in the town.”

The conversation fell silent for a few minutes, then Nina said, “I knew you liked manga, but I didn’t know you were working on one yourself.”

“I’ve been tinkering with ideas for it on and off for ages, but it was only over the Christmas break that I decided to try blocking out the complete story as page roughs.”

“Miss Pennywright seemed to know all about it already if she was posing for you,” Nina pointed out.

“I met up with her for a drink between Christmas and New Year and showed her what I’d been doing. She pointed out some of the drawings where I’d had problems. I told her it was just a pencil rough, but you know that eagle eye of hers – she can tell when you fundamentally don’t know how to draw something. Anyway, she got very excited and insisted that I needed a model for some of the scenes I had in mind, and today was the first session of that.”

“You must be well on with it if you’re already doing final drawings.”

“Not as far as I thought I was,” Dr Darkwood said with a laugh. “What I was doing today is really only a more polished level of study. I also need to work on the story some more. When I tried explaining it to Miss Pennywright, it was obvious that bits of it really don’t hang together.”

“Can you tell me what it’s going to be about?” Nina asked. “Or is it a secret?”

“Not very secret. It’s a quest story. The central character is a teenage girl trying to rescue her mother and little sister. The mother is a scientist who might just be on the brink of solving the world’s energy needs with something that might or might not be cold nuclear fusion. She’s been kidnapped along with her younger daughter by a big faceless corporation who want to force her to work for them. It’s not clear whether they want to exploit the development themselves or to suppress or subvert it. The older daughter, the heroine, is trying to rescue her mother, but at the same time, the corporation is trying to kidnap her.”

“And it sounds like she gets tied up a lot,” Nina deduced.

“She does, and I play it for laughs a lot of the time,” Dr Darkwood replied, “because, this girl has a special power. When she sneezes, the knots holding her come undone so she can get free.”

“I can see the comedy there – achoo! and the ropes are just a heap on the floor.”

“Not quite. It’s more limited than that – just the knots come undone, so she still has to disentangle herself from the ropes.”

“What about tape or chains?”

“No – it only works on knots, but the villains take a while to work that out.”

“What if she’s tied up but without any proper knots, just the ends tucked under?”

“Then she’s stuck – it only works on knots.”

“Doesn’t that mean that the bad guys will eventually work out how to keep her tied up so they can kidnap her?”

“It would, but remember, she still has to disentangle herself from the ropes, so she gets a lot of practice squirming out of rope and a consequence is that she inadvertently trains herself to become quite an efficient escape artist.”

“That’s a brilliant. I love the way all that grows out of one idea,” Nina said.

“One fairly silly idea,” Dr Darkwood pointed out.

After a long pause for thought, Nina commented. “Your heroine can’t wear shoes with laces. If she does and she sneezes, they’ll come undone and she’ll trip over them.”

“Of course!” Dr Darkwood exclaimed. “I never thought of that twist – can I use it.”

“Please go ahead. What about her hair? Will braids come undone?”

“I thought of that. That’s why she wears a short bob – her mother gave up trying to braid it when she was little.”

“And friendship bracelets – they’ll come unknotted and annoy her friends,” Nina added delightedly.

“So they will,” Dr Darkwood said thoughtfully. “I think I know how to introduce the story now. I’ll begin with the heroine (who still doesn’t have a name) as a very young girl and she falls over her laces when she sneezes and her hair explodes out of its plait, both to her mother’s despair.”

“Turn left here,” Nina prompted, interrupting the conversation.

After a few more turns, they were in the residential street where Nina lived.

“I think you might need to reverse into our driveway to turn round,” Nina suggested. “I can pop out and shovel it clear for you.”

“No need,” Dr Darkwood told her. “That’s the whole point of driving a Land Rover.”

Dr Darkwood reversed neatly into the driveway, stopping a metre or so short of Suzanna’s snow-covered car.

As Nina was helping Dr Darkwood extract her bicycle from the back of the Land Rover, the front door of the house opened and Nina’s mother appeared, but stayed under the shelter of the porch. “I thought I heard an engine,” she commented.

Despite having just come from inside the house, Suzanna was almost as warmly dressed as her daughter and the teacher. All that was visible of her face was her eyes and mouth through the openings in a chocolate brown ski mask with cream horizontal stripes. The mask was tucked into the high collar of a heavy sweater in the almost black brown of bitter chocolate. The yoke of the sweater was decorated with an intricate Icelandic-style pattern in white, cream and a lighter brown. The brown theme was also picked up in a lighter shade by her ankle-length cord skirt. The toes of a pair of Ugg boots protruded from under the hem of the skirt. For good measure she had a pair of mid-brown fingerless gloves on her hands and a huge cinnamon-coloured shawl draped around her shoulders.

“Dr Darkwood took pity on me and gave me a lift home,” Nina explained.

“It’s just as well she told me who you are,” Suzanna commented with a laugh as she shook the teacher’s hand.

“Maybe we should all wear name tags in this weather,” Dr Darkwood suggested.

“You could walk past your own child in the street with everyone dressed like this,” Suzanna agreed. “Would you like to come in for a cup of tea or something?”

“That’s very kind of you, but I need to get up to my brother’s farm before the snow gets any worse than it already is.” Dr Darkwood gestured vaguely to the north-west. “We’ll probably be snowed in tonight, but it would be much worse to get snowed out!”

While this conversation had been going on, Nina had wheeled her mother’s mountain bike to the garage and put it away. She returned with her goggles pushed up onto her forehead. After retrieving her schoolbag from the front seat well of the Landrover, she thanked Dr Darkwood for the lift once again and watched as the teacher manoeuvred out of the driveway and off down the road.

“Better come in before the house gets even colder,” Suzanna urged.

Nina followed her mother into the house and parked her schoolbag at the bottom of the stairs. Sitting down on the bottom step of the stairs, Nina removed her damp trainers, then progressively stripped off her outer layers of clothing until she was down to her school sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers. She put the trainers in the utility room next to the kitchen with the intention of putting them through the tumble drier later. Her damp socks went straight into the laundry basket. After examining her fleece and tracksuit trousers, she decided that they would benefit from 30 minutes or so in the tumble drier so she put them into the machine and set the timer. Her rainsuit simply needed to be hung up and allowed to dry, which she did. She laid her scarf along the top of a warm radiator and put her mittens and ski mask on another.

Now feeling a little chilly in tights and a sweatshirt, even though she had thermal underwear and a polo shirt on underneath, Nina went to find her mother.

As expected, Suzanna was already back at work on her laptop on the dining room table.

“Hello, sweetie. How was school?” Suzanna asked, swivelling around in her chair.

“Cancelled,” Nina replied darkly. “I’ll tell you all about it later, but I need a hot shower and lots more warm clothes right now.”

“Shall I get you some lunch?”

“I had soup just before we left school, so I’m all right for now. A cup of tea would be magic though,” Nina suggested. Her eyes strayed to the mug next to Suzanna’s computer. “Are you really drinking tea through a straw?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“So I can do it without taking this off, silly.” Suzanna tugged at her knitted mask.

“Oh!” Nina responded, light dawning. “That’s really clever.”

“Not just a pretty face,” her mother retorted.

* * *


Nina went up to her bedroom and selected clothes to wear for the rest of the day. She laid them out on her bed ready to put on as soon as she was out of the shower. Nina consulted the display on her alarm clock, which, amongst other things showed the current temperature. She was shocked to see that it read just 9 degrees centigrade indoors and decided that she was definitely not going to wash her hair just then. Instead, she brushed her hair out and re-braided it into the single plait that was her preferred everyday style.

Nina spent a long time luxuriating under the hot water before venturing into the cold outside the shower enclosure. The bathroom window and mirrors were streaming with condensation by the time Nina emerged. She dashed back to her bedroom wrapped in a towel and with her hair still in the plastic shower cap she had worn to keep it dry.

Once Nina had pulled on a pair of long johns and a long-sleeved thermal top then a pair of warm black woollen tights and a thin round-necked grey sweater, she stopped shivering. Proceeding a little less frantically, Nina systematically added the rest of her layers. She pulled on a pair of over-knee socks in black and grey stripes then her warmest pair of leggings, in ribbed black wool and as thick as a heavy sweater. It was rarely cold enough to wear that pair. She added her grey slipper socks, pulling them up over the ankles of the leggings. A bottle green ski mask came next. Nina took a moment to glance in a mirror to see that the openings were properly centred on her eyes and mouth. She reached behind her and tugged at her plait to straighten it then wriggled into a medium weight bright green sweater with a high neck. She adjusted it so that the sweater’s collar covered the neck of her ski mask and so that her plait hung vertically between her shoulder blades under the sweater. Nina pulled on a pair of black fingerless gloves and smoothed the wrists up over the sleeves of her sweater before adding her outermost layer, a thick round-necked sweater belonging to her mother, It was a deep viridian green with a zigzag pattern around the yoke in grey and black. It was a little loose on Nina’s diminutive frame and she had to fold back the ends of the sleeves, but came well down over her bottom for warmth like a short dress. Nina finished off with a black circle scarf, also belonging to Suzanna, which she wrapped around her neck three times, forming a cosy collar below her chin.

Nina picked up a pair of warm grey mittens to put on later if her hands got cold and headed downstairs.

* * *


Nina found her mother in the kitchen, pouring the requested mug of tea.

“I put the kettle on as soon as I heard you coming out of the bathroom,” Suzanna explained. “I didn’t think you would linger over getting dressed in this temperature.”

“Certainly not!” Nina exclaimed, then added, “I hope you don’t mind me borrowing your sweater.”

“Not at all – we need all the clothes we can get today,” Suzanna assured her. “Would you like to borrow one of my long skirts as well? It’ll be too long on you, but you’re probably fat enough to fit one with all those layers on.”

“I’ve got two more layers and long socks on under my leggings, so I’m fine thanks,” Nina replied, taking a mug of tea from her mother’s hands, with, she noted, a straw already in place.

“So school was cancelled, but you didn’t come straight back home?” Suzanna asked as they sat down in the dining room.

While sucking at her tea from time to time, Nina described the events of her day, including unmasking one of the crossword setters for the local newspaper, the unusual impromptu life-drawing class and the librarian’s search for accommodation.

“So that explains this,” Suzanna said, showing Nina a printed copy of Miss Badelaine’s notice.

“Yes, I bluetoothed it to the printer from my phone when I was getting ready for my shower.”

“Do I take it you’d like me to offer her the room I was thinking of renting out?” Suzanna asked.

Nina hadn’t expected to be drawn into what she regarded as a decision belonging to her mother, so was a little taken aback. “Well...” she began, stretching the word out for thinking time, “she seems like a very nice person and I like her a lot, but I can’t tell what she would be like to live with.”

“I’ve never met her, because it’s usually only teachers I see at parents’ evenings. Do you think I should ask her to come around here and discuss it with her?”

“Yes, I think you should,” Nina replied, feeling very grown-up to be consulted like this.

“Very well,” I’ll do that. Suzanna said firmly. “No time like the present.”

Suzanna picked up her mobile phone, which was lying on the table next to her laptop and keyed in the UK mobile number. She and Nina litened to the ringing tone go on for several repeats until a recorded voice cut in: “This is Cloé Badelaine’s voicemail. Please leave a message after the tone and don’t forget to include your phone number. Merci.”

Speaking clearly, Suzanna gave her name, the reason for the message and her number then hung up. “Was that Miss Badelaine’s voice on the recorded message?” she asked Nina.

“Yes, she often puts in bits of French like that, even when she’s speaking English.”

“I love the accent,” Suzanna commented with a smile.

“It gets stronger when she gets excited and talks too fast,” Nina pointed out, also smiling.

“I can tell that you like her. I’ll see what she has to say when she returns the message,” Suzanna said. “What are you going to do with your unexpected afternoon off? You can’t possibly have any homework to do.”

It was hard to read the expression on Nina’s face with so little of it visible, but her shy grin and the twinkle in her eye were unmistakable. “It’s a few days since I tried any escape practice. Have you got time to tie me up?”

“Better go to the toilet after that huge mug of tea,” Suzanna advised. “I’ll get the stuff out while you’re gone.”

* * *


When Nina discovered her mother’s unusual skill at escaping from being tied up, she naturally demanded to be taught how to do it too. Suzanna warned her daughter that there is no easy path to becoming an escape artist and that it would inevitably involve a lot of fruitless struggling to master each of the techniques involved. Nina rather enjoyed fruitless struggling, so wasn’t in the least daunted at this prospect. Suzanna started with simply tying Nina’s wrists behind her back and her ankles together. Nina had proved an apt student and was fairly soon escaping four out of five attempts. When they progressed to a chair tie, Nina seemed to hit a barrier and, so far, had failed to escape even once.

By the time Nina returned from her trip to the bathroom, her mother had set one of the dining chairs in the middle of the kitchen floor where there was good light and space to work. Alongside it was the plastic storage box that contained Nina’s stash of rope.

“Let me be clear on my remit before I start,” Suzanna said. “Do you really want an escape challenge or are you just angling to be trussed up for a couple of hours?”

“I really want to try an escape. I still haven’t managed to crack your allegedly easy-peasy chair tie and it’s getting frustrating. Can I have another go at that, please?”

“OK – at least it’s nice and quick for me to do. It’s pretty cold in the house, so you might want a pair of gloves on.”

“I thought of that,” Nina said, showing the thin black woollen gloves she was wearing in place of the fingerless ones she had put on earlier. “Thin enough that I can work on knots wearing them, but still enough to keep my fingers warm,” she pointed out.

“Right, then, sit down and let’s make a start,” Suzanna instructed briskly.

Knowing the routine, Nina sat on the chair, shuffled herself back on the seat and lifted her arms out of the way. Her mother wrapped half a dozen turns of rope around her waist and the back of the chair and knotted it at the front.

“Comfy?”

“I’ve got so many layers on, I can barely feel the ropes!”

Without being asked, Nina put her hands behind her back and positioned them palm to palm. Suzanna knelt down on the floor behind the chair and wrapped a length of rope three times around Nina’s wrists. She carefully pushed up the sleeves of Nina’s layers of sweaters so that the rope was bearing just on the single thickness of her black gloves. With the coil of rope in the correct position, Suzanna formed four cinching turns between her daughter’s wrists and knotted the ends of the rope above the binding.

“Not too tight?”

“Just perfect, I think.”

“OK, tuck your elbows in for the next bit.”

Suzanna selected one of the longer pieces of rope and wrapped it around her daughter’s arms and chest and the back rest of the chair, positioning it just above Nina’s elbows and pinning her arms to the woodwork.

Nina squirmed a little in her bonds. “That feels about right,” she said. “I still don’t understand why I can get out of having my hands tied like this nearly every time, but I can’t get out of exactly the same thing if I’m tied to a chair as well.”

“It must just be that little bit less freedom to move your arms,” her mother suggested.

“I suppose so, but I’m determined to master it.”

“I’ll do your legs next,” Suzanna said, rummaging in the box again.

Nina put her legs against the front legs of the chair and watched as her mother tied them in place at the ankles and then the knees, using simple uncinched bindings.

“Easy-peasy chair tie all done,” Suzanna announced. “Would you like a gag and blindfold too?”

Nina hesitated. “I’d quite like a gag, but I’m nice and warm with my woolly mask on and I’ve got it tucked into my sweater. I don’t really want to get cold if you to have to take it off.”

“I think I can solve that,” Suzanna said. “Just wait here...”

“Very funny, Mum,” Nina muttered as her mother left the room.

“Ta-da,” Suzanna said on her return, something black in her hand.

“What is it?”

“It’s a knitted head bag, but one for people like us who don’t have crazy frizzy hair like Callie and Theda.” She held up the knitted object for Nina to inspect.

“So just a balaclava with no holes then?”

“Yes, but a slightly loose one.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Theda gave two of them to me to keep as a surprise.”

“I thought she might have something to do with it,” Nina said knowingly. “How does that help the gag?”

“I’ll show you, if you’ve nothing else to say.”

“Go ahead.”

Suzanna produced a crumpled-up white handkerchief with a flourish and held it in front of her daughter’s face. Nina opened her mouth and allowed the it to be pushed inside.

“Now we put the bag over your head.” Suzanna rolled up the head bag so that she could smooth it down over Nina’s ski mask without displacing it then tucked the hem inside the scarf around her neck.

“Now there’s still nothing to stop you pushing the hanky out of your mouth, so I’ll do this...” Suzanna tied a short scarf in blue and grey stripes, one that she had previously found ideal as a gag, across Nina’s mouth on top of the black knitted head bag, positioning it below her nose and knotting it securely at the back of her head.

“Now, if I’ve got that right, there’s too much friction between the scarf and the head bag and between the bag and your mask for you to dislodge anything. Am I right?”

After some exploratory twists and turns of her head, Nina nodded her agreement.

“I tried one of the head bags when Theda gave them to me, so I know you can still see a bit through it, so I’ll do this too...” Suzanna tied a short yellow scarf across Nina’s eyes and plunged her daughter into darkness.

“I’ll leave you to it and see how you’re getting on in an hour or so, but I must get back to my work now.”

After a moment or two, Nina could hear the faint sound of her mother typing in the next room. She began her quest to find some slack in the rope around her wrists.

* * *


True to her word, Suzanna returned to the kitchen a little over an hour after tying Nina up, partly to check on her but also to put the kettle on for more tea.

Nina’s head was slumped forward and it was obvious from her slow, rhythmic breathing that she was fast asleep. Suzanna put her mug down next to the kettle and stroked the top of her daughter’s head to wake her gently. The steady breathing was interrupted by a snort and Nina raised her head.

“You were asleep and you’re still tied up,” Suzanna said. “Do you want me to untie you now?”

It was obvious from the pause that followed that Nina’s thought processes were still a little sluggish. She shook her head.

“Are you still going to see if you can escape?”

There was no pause this time before Nina responded with a nod.

“Shall I give you another half hour?”

No reaction.

“A whole hour?”

Nina nodded.

As Suzanna settled down to work again, her fresh mug of tea beside her, she could hear the sounds of Nina’s escape attempt going on. There were small squeaking sounds from the chair legs as they slid slightly on the vinyl floor as Nina struggled with her ropes; there were the occasional creaks from the chair itself and a succession of grunts from behind Nina’s gag.

When Suzanna looked up from her work some time later, she realised that she could no longer hear her daughter struggling. She looked at the time, noting that it had been 35 minutes since she had woken Nina up, and went to investigate. Nina turned her head as her mother entered the kitchen, so she obviously wasn’t asleep.

“Does this mean you’re stuck?” Suzanna asked.

Nina nodded.

“Untie you?”

Nina replied with something muffled that might possibly have been, “Gag off,” so Suzanna removed her gag and blindfold then pulled the knitted bag from her head and retrieved the handkerchief from her mouth.

After swallowing and making a throat-clearing noise, Nina said, “Thank you,” a little hoarsely. There was another short pause before she continued, her voice sounding perfectly normal now, “I can find some slack, so that’s progress, but no matter what I try, I don’t seem to be able to do anything with it. If I keep going today, I’m just going to hurt my wrists.”

“So just untie you now?”

“Umm... not sure. How long are you going to be working today?” Nina asked.

“I’m still working my way through the emails that arrived during the Christmas break, so another couple of hours, I should think,” her mother replied. “Why?”

“I was wondering if you’d have time to tie me up again? Not for escaping, just for being tied up this time.”

“I’ll get you out of this first and I want to see the state of your wrists before I agree to anything,” Suzanna said firmly.

Nina nodded her agreement, so her mother quickly freed her from the easy-peasy chair tie that had defeated her so thoroughly.

As soon as she was able to, Nina peeled off her gloves. Suzanna inspected the red marks on her skin then said, “No more rope – I don’t want you going to school tomorrow with rope marks showing.”

“No school tomorrow,” Nina reminded her.

“Even so, no more rope today,” her mother repeated.

“Scarves?” Nina offered hopefully.

“That would be OK. Go upstairs and fetch the set of tying up scarves Theda gave you at Christmas,” Suzanna instructed. “And while you’re up there you should probably use the bathroom again. When you get back, I want gloves, mittens and socks on your hands to protect those wrists.”

Nina scampered upstairs while her mother tidied the discarded rope back into the storage box.

* * *


When she returned, Nina was clutching a double armful of scarves, some in a variegated mix of pinks and greys, others in a similar mix of blues, greens and greys. When she reached the kitchen, she released her burden in a heap on the floor. As her hands were reduced to useless paws by the thick grey socks covering them, there was little else she could do to put them down.

“You brought both sets,” Suzanna observed.

“I didn’t know what you had in mind, so I brought the lot,” Nina explained.

As an extra Christmas gift, Nina’s cousin Theda had given her and her mother each a set of robustly knitted scarves specifically designed for playing tie-up games. Nina’s set were the pink ones and Suzanna’s the blue-green ones. The scarves were all about 15 centimetres wide with lengths ranging from about a metre to the 4 metre long monster in each set. In addition, each set included a purpose made gag and blindfold, narrower than the binding scarves and in the case of the gag with a further narrowing to go between the wearer’s teeth.

“Any ideas how to use these?” Nina asked.

“Oh, yes!” Suzanna declared with gusto. She rummaged through the hear and picked up a scarf which she placed across the chair seat from front to back, the ends hanging down to the floor in front and behind. “Sit there and I’ll see what I can do.”

Nina took her seat then said,” You’ve already worked this out haven’t you, Mum?”

“I may have given it some passing thought,” her mother admitted lightly, hanging her shawl over the back of another chair in order to work unencumbered.

Over the next fifteen minutes, it became obvious that Suzanna had indeed worked out exactly how to deploy both sets of scarves as she systematically immobilised her daughter.

“There, how’s that?” Suzanna asked.

“Very secure,” Nina replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever been any more thoroughly tied up.”

Nina was sitting bolt upright on the chair with her arms in the classic straightjacket position. There was a scarf around her waist holding her back to the chair, but that was almost invisible under those that had followed. Her arms and upper body were swathed from elbow to shoulder with one of the 4 metre scarves. With her arms crossed, only a short scarf was needed to link each wrist to the top of the adjacent back leg of the chair. Her forearms were lashed together and immobilised by a scarf going down between her legs and two more up over her shoulders all fastened together behind her. Nina’s legs were bound at the ankles and below the knees, each binding being a simple lashing with the ends of the scarves tied to the chair legs. Two more bindings between those, similar but without being tied to the chair legs, almost completely hid her legs from ankle to knee. Another binding held her legs together above the knees and the remaining 4 metre scarf was wrapped over her legs and under the chair seat, reaching from her knees to her hips.

“I’ve just got the gags and blindfolds left,” Suzanna said.

“I’ve only got one mouth, so I don’t think you can use all of them,” Nina pointed out.

“True,” her mother conceded, “and I think I’ll need to take your mask off to use them properly.”

Suzanna removed Nina’s scarf and ski mask, taking care not to disturb the hair braid that was tucked down inside her sweater. “Ready?” she asked.

“Go for it,” Nina invited.

Suzanna pulled the black knitted head bag down over her daughter’s head then located her mouth and pulled the centre of a knitted gag back into it, drawing in a fold of the hood. She knotted the gag securely behind Nina’s head then tied a blindfold across her eyes.

“See you about tea time,” Suzanna said, planting a kiss on top of her daughter’s wool-covered head.

Nina heard the click of the electric kettle being switched on again followed by the rattle of another mug of tea being made. Shortly after that, the distant sound of typing re-commenced.

* * *


“So, how was it?” Suzanna asked her daughter as she progressively freed her.

“Amazing,” Nina replied. “Very secure and snug and warm and sort of huggy all over. Fun to wriggle against even though I knew I couldn’t get out.”

“Pretty much what you wanted then?”

“Yes, thank you,” her daughter confirmed. “What about you? Did you manage to catch up with work.”

“Pretty much. Every email is now at least acknowledged, even if I haven’t done all the things they ask for yet.”

“And all I’ve done is to sit here,” Nina observed a little guiltily.

“Unexpected days off school are to be enjoyed,” Suzanna said firmly. “Any idea what you’re going to do tomorrow?”

“Depends a lot on the weather,” Nina replied. “Is it still snowing?”

“I haven’t looked since it got dark and I shut the curtains.”

Nina was now completely free, so she was able to accompany her mother to the front door, which they opened cautiously. A lot of snow was swirling around, illuminated by the orange light of the sodium street-lights, but it was obvious that this was entirely due to the wind. Overhead, the sky was inky black and studded with stars. After gazing at the scene for a few moments, they shut the door and hugged each other for warmth.

“Tea time?” Suzanna suggested.

“Is there any of that chilli left?” Nina asked, referring to a pot of chilli con carne that Suzanna and she had made on Saturday evening.

“There was last time I looked in the fridge, and I don’t see how you could have sneaked any while you were all tied up.”

“Oddly enough, I was starting to think about food just before you untied me.”

“Perhaps we should use that as an incentive for your escape practice,” Suzanna suggested with a grin.

“So I only get fed if I escape and get it myself? I could starve if I don’t manage to crack that chair tie!”

“There’s a thought,” Suzanna commented. “Maybe we could write a book about it and promote it as ‘The Houdini Diet’?”

“There could be a special range of branded handcuffs!”

“And straitjackets for the really committed dieters!”

“Now I’m really getting hungry,” Nina said, opening the fridge. “What shall we have with the chilli?”

“Don’t mind,” Suzanna replied. “Baked potatoes? Rice? Couscous would be quickest.”

“Baked potatoes,” Nina said. “Perfect comfort food for a cold winter evening.”

“And a pot of tea while they’re in the oven.”

Nina selected two potatoes from the vegetable drawer, scrubbed them under the tap and dried them off. Her mother turned the oven on, oiled, salted and wrapped the potatoes in foil then put them in to bake.

Nina filled the kettle and switched it on then took the opportunity to go upstairs to use the bathroom after her long spell of enforced immobility. When she returned, she had extracted her braid from under her sweater and was wearing a pull-on woollen hat, a ski mask being incompatible with eating the baked potato and chilli she was looking forward to.

* * *


After whiling away the time waiting for the oven by drinking tea and chatting together, Suzanna and her daughter settled down to their meal at the small table in the kitchen. For the practicality of eating, Suzanna had reluctantly relinquished the warmth of her ski mask and folded it into a watch cap to wear instead. They had been eating for a few minutes when the lights went out.

“Don’t move – I’ll get a candle lit,” Suzanna said.

Unable to see anything in the sudden darkness, Nina listened while her mother pushed her chair back and made her way across the room to the cupboard where the emergency candles were kept. There was the sound of Suzanna rummaging in the cupboard by feel then the distinctive rasp of a match being struck.

Suzanna returned to the table carrying a small metal lantern with glass sides and a tea-light candle burning inside it. She put it down on the table together with a compact electric torch.

Nina picked up the torch and stood up. “I’m just going to pop upstairs and look out to see if it’s just us or if the whole street is out.”

With the small pool of white light illuminating her path, Nina trotted upstairs and went first to her own bedroom then her mother’s, looking out of each.

“It’s amazing,” Nina reported when she returned. “The whole town seems to be out. Apart from starlight and occasional car headlights, it’s completely pitch black outside.”

“I thought something like this might happen,” Suzanna commented as her daughter resumed eating.

“Why?” Nina asked between mouthfuls.

“Well, high wind and snow is a good combination for ice building up on power lines. If the whole town is out, it’s probably either wires come down or even a pole down or broken.”

“Not quick to fix then?”

“Could be all night if there’s a pole gone down.”

“I’m glad we heat with gas,” Nina commented.

“We do, but the controls and the pump are all electric. It will have shut down as soon as the power went. With the wind still blowing hard, we’re going to get cold tonight.”

“And no power means no electric blanket and no hot water bottles either,” Nina said, suddenly realising how dependent they were on electricity.

“And no dishwasher and no hot water,” Suzanna said, stacking the plates next to the sink.

Nina felt the kitchen radiator and discovered that it had already cooled quite noticeably. “I might just head for bed early before it gets really cold, she said.

“Sounds like a good plan,” her mother agreed. “We could share for warmth, if you like.”

“Yes please,” Nina replied without hesitation.

* * *


By the light of a second lantern, carefully positioned so that it was not at risk of being knocked over and starting a fire, Nina took off her slipper socks, her thick black leggings and her outermost two layers of sweater. She quickly used the bathroom, cleaning her teeth in cold water, then returned to her bedroom, where she put on the fleece sleepsuit that she had worn the previous night, black with a pattern of multicoloured stars, with attached feet and mittens and a hood.

Nina picked up a pair of woollen gloves, a scarf and a knitted ski mask, all in black, and headed for her mother’s bedroom, taking her lantern with her. She paused just as she was about to leave her own room, glancing at the tangle of tying up scarves that she had brought upstairs with her and left in a heap on her bed, to be sorted out in the morning in daylight.

When Nina entered her mother’s room, Suzanna was wriggling her way into the heavy Icelandic sweater she had been wearing as her top layer earlier.

“Layering up?” Nina commented unnecessarily.

“Warmest PJs,” Suzanna replied, pointing to her royal blue pyjama trousers, “woolly tights and a sweater underneath and this monster on top.” She tugged at the hem of her heavy sweater. “Not to mention two pairs of socks,” she added. “Hat and gloves to follow.”

Nina grinned in reply then said, “You tied me up twice this afternoon. I was wondering if you’d like me to return the favour.”

“That’s a thought,” Suzanna acknowledged, “but how would it be if we went one better and tied each other up?”

“There’s nobody to untie us,” Nina pointed out practically.

“True, but we’re both pretty good escapers, so I’m sure we’d get loose eventually and you don’t have school tomorrow, so it doesn’t matter if it takes us a while.”

“OK, I’m up for it,” Nina said, “but you’ll have to tell me what to do so it all works out.”

“Let’s get the tying up scarves and I’ll work out how we do this,” her mother suggested.

Nina brought the armful of green and pink scarves through from her own bedroom while Suzanna carried one of the lanterns, keeping it well away from anything that might be a fire risk.

With the lantern safely positioned in Suzanna’s bedroom in addition to the other one that Suzanna had used while she changed for bed and the scarves dumped on a chair, Nina listened attentively while her mother explained the plan for their game.

Suzanna folded back the duvet so that the full length of the mattress was exposed down one side then she and Nina sat down there side by side. Suzanna pulled a pair of thick grey gloves on and sat with her hands out in front of her. Nina used one of the scarves to form a snug cinched binding around her mother’s wrists.

“How’s that?” Nina asked.

Suzanna experimented with the feel of the binding then said, “Just perfect.”

“Are those gloves going to be OK when you’re tying my hands?”

“I don’t think I could tie knots in rope very easily with these on, but big chunky knots in scarves should be easy.”

Nodding her acknowledgement, Nina disentangled the 4 metre scarf in her mother’s set from the heap of scarves and wound it around her upper arms and body. She managed four complete turns around her mother, placing the scarf above her elbows and below the curve of her bust and formed a secure knot at one side, where it would be harder to reach.

Nina selected three more scarves and used them to bind Suzanna’s legs at the ankles and both above and below her knees. She used simple lashings without cinches, knowing that it would be almost impossible for her mother to kick her legs free with them bound in all three places.

“Your gag hasn’t been used, so it’s still nice and dry,” Nina said. “Would you like me to use that or something else?”

“I’d like to try the same arrangement as I used on you for your second tie up,” her mother replied.

Nina felt the two black knitted head bags with her fingers to see which was the unused one. She pulled it down over her mother’s head and tucked it into the collar of her sweater. “Ready for gag?” she asked.

“Ready,” Suzanna confirmed.

Nina eased the centre of the gag into her mother’s mouth together with a fold of the head bag then knotted the ends behind her head. She tied the blindfold on in the same way. Lastly, she handed Suzanna the scarf that would eventually be used to tie her own wrists.

Suzanna sat quietly waiting while Nina set about arranging as much of her own tie-up as she could. First, she blew out one of the lanterns then transferred the other one to the top of a bedside cabinet. Next, she gathered together the binding materials she would need. She pulled on her ski mask, adjusting it so the mouth and eye holes were in the right position then she started the process of immobilising herself with her own gag. Nina used a long sock borrowed from her mother with a knot tied part of the way along its length. She pushed the knot into her mouth and tied the ends together just below her left ear, so that she wouldn’t be lying with a knot uncomfortably placed under the back of her head. The mask needed a little further adjustment so that the edge of the mouth opening wasn’t pulled into the sides of her mouth by the gag.

With the gag as comfortable as she could make it, Nina blindfolded herself with a black sleep mask, pulling the elastic well down at the back of her head. Once she was satisfied with the way it sat, she pushed it up onto her forehead, above the eyeholes of her ski mask. Nina raised the hood of her sleepsuit and then wrapped her scarf around her neck and the lower part of her face to keep the hood up. She pushed the ends of the scarf down inside the sleepsuit and then tugged the zip up firmly to keep them in place.

Nina began her own tying in earnest by using three scarves to lash her legs together at the ankles and then above and below her knees, just as she had done to her mother. Winding the 4 metre scarf around her own arms and body proved to be trickier than she anticipated, but with a certain amount of squirming and tugging, she was able to make it reasonably tight. Tying the ends was quite difficult with the restricted movement available to her arms but with perseverance she achieved a respectably secure knot.

Nina’s progress shuddered to a halt as she realised that the next step she envisaged was utterly impossible. She had intended to blow out the candle in the remaining lantern, but she was not only gagged but had a scarf wrapped over her mouth on top of that. She briefly considered untying her arms again and ungagging herself, but that would mean trying to redo those stages in darkness after blowing the candle out.

After pondering the situation for a moment, Nina decided on a course of action. She opened the small glass door in the side of the lantern that gave access to the candle. Next, she bounced herself up onto her feet and began a precarious blend of hopping and shuffling to get herself to the bathroom. It was completely dark there, so she had to find and turn on a tap by feel in order to dampen the fingers of one hand. She laboriously worked her way back, sat down on the edge of the bed again and with the wet fingers, pinched out the candle flame.

Nina blinked in the immediate and total darkness. Normally some light leaked into the bedrooms at night from street lights but, with the power cut, it was utterly black. She felt around to locate her gloves and pulled them on then wriggled her hands into the attached mittens on her sleepsuit.

There was nothing else that Nina could do to tie herself up so she was dependent on her mother for the final steps that they had agreed between them. She slid off the edge of the bed onto the floor and turned around so that she was kneeling in front of Suzanna with her legs vertical from the knees up and her back straight. She tapped her mother on the back of the hand to show that she was ready and then crossed her wrists in front of her.

Suzanna felt her daughter’s hands to locate them then used the scarf she had been provided with to tie her wrists, binding them both horizontally and vertically and finishing off with a secure knot. Nina was impressed. at how little her mother seemed to be hampered by having her own wrists tied together.

Nina briefly tested the security of her wrist binding and grunted an acknowledgement to her mother. Still kneeling, she sat down on her heels and leaned forwards until she felt her mother’s fingers stretching out to locate her face.

Suzanna gently felt her daughter’s face, taking care not to poke her in the eye, then pulled her sleep mask down into place. A vaguely affirmative-sounding grunt from Nina confirmed that she had done it successfully.

With the binding done, Suzanna swung her bound legs up onto the bed and shuffled herself across to the far side, insinuating herself under the folded-over duvet when she encountered it.

Nina had the slightly more difficult task of getting herself back into bed. She raised herself up onto her knees again and tried to shuffle herself forward but with her legs tied the way they were, there was no way she could do that. She settled for toppling forwards onto the edge of the bed. By a combination of pushing with her toes and pulling with her bound hands, she managed to squirm her way back onto the bed somewhat inelegantly. Once there, it was relatively easy to shuffle herself across next to her mother.

Once she felt her daughter settle alongside her after a series of thumps and bounces interspersed by grunts and sounds that she suspected were gagged curses, Suzanna did her best to flip the turned-back duvet so it covered Nina as well.

With the limited use of her hands and with some more kicking and wriggling, Nina managed to get the duvet over herself. She relaxed for a moment then nuzzled against her mother in lieu of a kiss and did her best to wish her a good night.

Suzanna returned the muffled greeting as well as she could through her own gag.

Nina knew that it wasn’t particularly late, despite the total darkness making it feel much later, and wondered how long it would take to get to sleep. In the event, after only a few minutes of listening to the wind buffeting outside, the total darkness, the warmth of the layers enveloping her and the coziness of her mother’s presence alongside her conspired to lull her into deep sleep.
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Soraka
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Post by Soraka »

Nina and the Lodger Part 3: Snow Day

There was a moment of disorientation for Nina when she woke up bound, gagged and blindfolded until she remembered that she and her mother had tied each other up and shared a bed for warmth. She rolled over to try to locate her mother but found the other half of the bed empty. She was not entirely surprised, given her mother’s skill as an amateur escape artist. Nina rolled back and pondered the situation. If her mother had already got up, that suggested that it was already morning, but she had no idea how early or late.

Her wrists were crossed in front of her and tied with a scarf. Another scarf was tied around her upper arms and chest. Her hands were covered by the attached mittens of her fleece sleepsuit and she had a pair of gloves on under that. On that basis, she was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to effect an escape herself but she thought she might just be able to do something about her gag and blindfold.

Nina lifted her hands as far up in front of her as she could, curling her back and neck forward to bring her face closer to her hands. The scarf that she had wrapped around the lower half of her face and the hood of her sleepsuit bunched up as she did so, impeding her attempts to get at her gag. She bent her neck a little further and tried to reach the sleep mask covering her eyes. She managed to flip it with her right thumb and caught a brief glimpse of light. After several more attempts, she managed to push it up so that her left eye was uncovered and her right eye only half covered.

Even with Nina’s limited vision, it was obvious that there was some daylight but that it was possibly still fairly early and not fully light yet. She rolled herself over in an attempt to see her mother’s alarm clock. She pushed a mound of duvet out of the way and saw that it was about quarter past eight.

There had been a power cut the previous night. There was nothing that Nina could see that proved one way or the other whether it was back on. She thought that the room felt warmer, which would suggest that the heating had come back on, but the way that she was bundled up and with only one eye exposed, it was hard to tell.

Nina debated with herself whether she should attempt to get to her feet and to hop her way down to the kitchen but concluded that it would probably lead to disaster on the stairs. She decided to wait until her mother came looking for her.

As it turned out, she didn’t have long to wait before Suzanna breezed into the room. “Ah! You’re awake,” she said. “Do you want me to untie you?”

Nina replied with a nod.

It took only a few minutes for Suzanna to free her daughter, who immediately made for the bathroom with some urgency.

Nina reappeared a few minutes later, wrapped in a towel. “Doesn’t seem nearly as cold today,” she commented to her mother, who was disentangling and tidying away the heap of tying-up scarves from the previous night’s adventure.

“The power’s back on, so we have heating today,” Suzanna replied, “and the wind’s dropped to almost nothing, which makes the real difference. It’s not ripping the heat away from the house like it was yesterday.”

“Still snowy outside?” Nina asked as she wriggled into a thermal top and long johns.

“Have a peep through the curtains,” her mother invited.

“Wow,” Nina commented, her head pushed between the curtains and her breath fogging the window. Low winter sun from a cloudless blue sky was illuminating a sparkling white scene. The previous night’s wind had heaped the snow into deep drifts in some places while sweeping the ground almost clear in others.

“Still cold though,” Suzanna pointed out. “I was out refilling the bird feeders just now and the outside thermometer was showing minus 5 centigrade.”

“Won’t need so many clothes as yesterday, though,” Nina said as she came away from the window, hugging herself warm.

“No,” her mother agreed. “I’m fine like this.”

Suzanna was wearing the heavy green Nordic-style sweater that Nina had borrowed the previous day over a pair of black leggings. In addition, she had on a black circle scarf wrapped several times around her neck as a warm collar and a pair of dark green socks which were just visible over the tops of a pair of worn-out Ugg boots that she liked to use as slippers in really cold weather.

“I’ve got woolly tights on under the leggings and another sweater under this one,” Suzanna pointed out. “I hope you don’t mind me borrowing my sweater and scarf back.”

“Um, no – they are yours after all,” Nina said a little sheepishly.”And that sweater is vastly too big for me, even though it’s gorgeously cosy.”

Suzanna left her daughter to finish getting dressed and went back downstairs to the kitchen.

* * *


When Nina joined her mother a few minutes later, she had followed her lead in dressing in a heavy sweater and leggings. The sweater was the new pink one that her cousin Theda had given her for Christmas and the leggings were black with a satin sheen to them. A pair of calf-length pink socks were pulled up over them.

“Are those cycling leggings you’re wearing?” Suzanna asked.

“I’ve got woolly tights on underneath, so they’re warm enough,” Nina replied.

“But you’re planning to go out on your bike?”

“Patsy texted me last night and suggested I came round, seeing as we both have the day off.”

Patsy Aysgarth was in the same year at school as Nina and one of her closest friends. They had a shared enthusiasm for art and were both regulars at the after-school life-drawing class that was run by Miss Pennywright, the art teacher.

“And you think you’ll make it on your bike?” Suzanna persisted.

“Actually, I was hoping to make it on your bike,” Nina admitted. “I’m guessing the roads will be reasonably clear by now and that the mountain bike tyres will cope with whatever snow is left.”

“I wasn’t planning to use it today, so feel free,” her mother invited. “Now – breakfast – how about a proper fry-up?”

“Good idea.”

After an intense quarter hour of collaboration, Suzanna and Nina settled down to a cholesterol-laden but delicious breakfast of sausages, fried eggs, baked beans, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes with a slice of fried bread each.

Nina was carefully mopping up the last of the egg yolk on her plate with the remaining corner of the fried bread when there was a cartoonish boi-oi-oing sound, the tone announcing a text message on Nina’s phone.

“Patsy?” Suzanna speculated.

“Could be,” Nina agreed. “May I be rude and see if it is?”

“Go ahead – you’ve finished anyway,” her mother replied.

Suzanna gathered up the plates and carried them to the sink while Nina retrieved her phone from the windowsill where she had left it after coming downstairs.

Suzanna turned round as she heard a gasp and a delighted squawk of laughter from her daughter.

“It’s not a text message, its a picture,” Nina said, handing the phone to her mother without comment.

Suzanna took the phone and turned it round to look at the screen. It was a remarkably sharp and well-composed shot of a plump middle-aged woman roped to a chair and gagged with a white cloth between her teeth.

“Looks like the Aysgarth sisters have staged a mutiny,” Suzanna commented, studying the image. As she did so, another message tone sounded.

“Another picture?” Nina asked.

“I think it was a text,” her mother replied, handing the phone back.

“It was,” Nina confirmed. “It says ‘See email for video’.”

“My laptop is already on – I was checking the weather forecast earlier,” Suzanna said, leading the way into the dining room.

Nina logged into her email account. The email was actually from Patsy’s older sister Charley and consisted of a single smiley. Nina set the attachment to download and watched as the green progress bar advanced across the screen.

The video showed a more comprehensive view of Mrs Aysgarth’s predicament. The camera was hand-held but skilfully handled as it executed a complete circuit of the chair-bound victim. Mrs Aysgarth was wearing a navy blue sweater with a green quilted gilet waistcoat on top. Her long skirt was a lighter shade of blue and just short enough to show the bright green legwarmers she wore over what appeared to be thick grey socks. Her wrists were bound together behind the backrest of her chair with white rope. More rope was wound around her arms and body and threaded through the vertical wooden bars that formed the chair back. Her ankles were tied together and the binding hitched back to the centre of the diagonal braces that linked the four legs of the chair in a horizontal X shape. If her knees were bound, it was presumably under her skirt as no rope could be seen. Several turns of ropes passed across Mrs Aysgarth’s lap and under the chair seat. Her greying wavy brown hair was pulled in to the sides of her head by the white gag between her teeth.

As the camera progressed around the bound and gagged woman, Charley’s twin sister Jo, Patsy and their youngest sister Jennifer (always known as Jen-Jen) all appeared in the view, confirming that Charley was the camera operator. On its second circuit of Mrs Aysgarth, the video showed close-ups of her face, her bound ankles and her wrists.

“I’ve seen more secure wrist bindings,” Suzanna commented.

“Do you think she might get out of that?” Nina asked.

“That depends on how good an escapologist she is.”

“You mean that you’d get out of it, but you’re not sure if she could?”

Suzanna grinned. “Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean,” she admitted.

“It looks like they’re having fun, so I’ll go and join in if that’s OK by you,” Nina said.

“Fine by me – I’ll load the dishwasher, then I need to get down to work.”

Nina headed back upstairs to brush her teeth and to get ready to go out.

* * *


When Nina returned to the kitchen, she was dressed ready to go out. As on the previous day, she had chosen her one-piece rainsuit as the top layer for cycling. “To catch spray from the tyres and in case I get splashed by passing traffic,” she explained.

“I hope you’ve got better shoes than yesterday,” her mother prompted.

“My jelly boots,” Nina explained. She pointed to her ankle boots, shaped like Doc Martens, even down to the corrugated edges to the soles, but moulded from transparent PVC, so that her pink socks were visible. “Not ideal for cycling,” she conceded, “but better than getting soaking wet feet.”

Under her cycling helmet, Nina was wearing a black ski mask with just two eye holes and no mouth opening. As she was wearing a pair of mirrored cycling glasses on top of the knitted mask, the overall effect was a little disconcerting.

“Those glasses really make it look as thought there’s nobody home,” her mother commented with a laugh.

Nina accordingly adopted a stiff robotic gait as she allowed her mother to kiss her then made her way to the back door.

* * *


Nina’s optimism in choosing to cycle proved justified. There was very little traffic on the side streets that would take her to her friend’s house and the remaining snow on the road surface was easily negotiated on the mountain bike’s capable tyres.

The standard protocol at the Aysgarth house was for Nina to let herself in through the gate leading to the back garden, lean the bike up against the house and to announce her presence using the back door bell.

Nina was more than a little surprised when the door was opened by Mrs Aysgarth. She was still dressed as Nina had seen her in the video except that the gilet was gone and the top layer was now an oversized red and green tartan shirt liberally spattered with paint. Her hair was pulled into girlish bunches with elastic bands Nina knew that Mrs Aysgarth worked as a freelance illustrator and a selection of disreputable shirts like that were her preferred work-wear.

“That has to be Nina dressed up like that,” she said. “Do come in – and Happy New Year to you.”

“Happy New Year,” Nina replied automatically.

“I managed to quell the insurrection, in case you’re wondering why I’m not still tied up,” Mrs Aysgarth said as she ushered Nina past her and closed the door.

Nina had been in this house many times before and knew that the approved routine was to leave outer wear and outdoor shoes in the small lobby between the outside door and the kitchen. Accordingly, she shed her helmet, ski mask, boots, rainsuit and mittens but keeping on her black fingerless gloves.

“The girls are all in my studio,” Mrs Aysgarth said as she held the door to the kitchen open for Nina.

Nina was surprised as Mrs Aysgarth’s studio was normally off-limits to the girls, who had their own shared project room elsewhere in the house, but she followed without comment.

“As I said, insurrection quelled,” Mrs Aysgarth said, leading Nina into the studio.

There was an easel set up with an art board on it. The composition had already been sketched in as underdrawing in a soft brown pencil and some of the background had been blocked in in paint. The subject matter was the four daughters of the house. The twins, Jo and Charley were sitting on wooden chairs. They were hard to tell apart but generally made life easier for others by having very different tastes in clothes. Jo was wearing a soft Viyella dress in a red and green printed Paisley pattern. The dress was almost knee-length with dark green woollen tights underneath. The turned down collar showed over the top of a red cardigan buttoned up to the neck. Charley wore a pair of tight-fitting denim jeans tucked into thick yellow socks with an orange cotton sweatshirt over a white polo shirt. Both twins had inherited their mother’s wavy brown hair. Jo wore hers loose while Charley’s was pulled back into a ponytail. The chairs were side-by-side, facing towards the easel but turned slightly apart from each other and the girls were securely tied to them with white cotton rope. Both twins’ hands were out of sight behind their chairs. Their upper arms and bodies were encircled by several turns of rope. Additional rope was tied around each girl and her chair at waist level. Jo’s legs were tied together at the ankles and below her knees with the ends of the ropes secured to the chair legs while Charley’s legs were apart and tied separately to the legs of her chair at ankles and knees.

Patsy was sitting on the floor immediately right of Charley’s chair, dressed in a long dark blue sweater and a pair of bright pink leggings tucked into thick white socks. Her knees were drawn up in front of her and her arms were hugging her legs. Her ankles were bound with the same cotton rope that had been used to tie her older sisters. It was wound several times around them and cinched between. Her wrists were bound in much the same way and the wrist and ankle bindings were tied together with several turns of rope wrapped around both cinches. With her arms stretched forward, the sleeves of Patsy’s sweater had slid well up her arms but her skin was protected from the rope by a pair of long pink fingerless gloves which matched her leggings. A complicated-looking binding secured Patsy’s legs above the knees and also held her upper arms in place against them.

Jen-Jen, the youngest of the four girls was also sitting on the floor, cross-legged next to Jo’s feet. She was wearing a hooded onesie in golden-brown fake fur with the hood thrown back. Her feet were covered with a pair of socks in a similar colour. Like her older sister Patsy, Jen-Jen’s hair was a mop of red curls. Her ankles were tied together where they crossed and her wrists were tied palm-to-palm resting on top of them and the two bindings linked together. Unlike her sisters, she had been tied up with slightly shiny bright green rope.

The four girls grunted their acknowledgement of Nina’s arrival through the white cloths they all had tied between their teeth.

“My mum said that she didn’t think your hands were all that securely tied when we watched the video,” Nina commented to Mrs Aysgarth.

“I had a suspicion that video had been sent to you,” Mrs Aysgarth replied. “No, my hands weren’t that well tied so I managed to get loose fairly quickly.”

“And you turned the tables on them?”

“They pretty much turned the tables on themselves,” Mrs Aysgarth explained. “Jo had been foolish enough to say I could tie them up if I got free.”

“I wondered how you got all four of them.”

“Technically, only three of them. Jen-Jen wasn’t involved in tying me up, but she said she should get tied up because she’d heard it was happening and then came to watch.”

“I suppose I ought to be tied up as well on that basis,” Nina said. “I sort of came to watch too.”

“Not that it would be any hardship, from the tales I’ve heard about you,” Mrs Aysgarth pointed out.

“None at all,” Nina assured her with a smile.

“I’d better check with your mum – it wouldn’t do just to truss up my daughter’s friends willy-nilly.”

Mrs Aysgarth left the room and Nina could hear her making a telephone call but was unable to distinguish the words. She wasn’t quite sure what she should say or do with the four Aysgarth girls all bound and gagged and staring at her, so she just stood and waited, feeling a little awkward.

“I quote: ‘Truss her up for the rest of the day if you feel like it.’,” Mrs Aysgarth said on her return. “These four will get fidgety if I keep them waiting too long, so I’d better tie you up and park you in a corner so I can get on with it.”

“I’d really like to be able to watch you working if that’s possible,” Nina requested.

Mrs Aysgarth looked around the studio for inspiration then moved a cardboard box from the seat of a tall draughtsman’s chair which she positioned just behind where she would stand to work. The chair was constructed like a typist’s swivel chair but tall enough for use at an old-fashioned drawing board. Unlike a typing chair, the central column branched out into four stubby feet rather than having wheels and there was a footrest attached to the column.

“Brilliant,” Nina said, climbing onto the chair.

“I ran out of rope tying those four up, that’s why Jen-Jen is tied with the remains of an old skipping rope. I think it will have to be green garden twine for you.”

Nina tried to get comfortable on the tall chair while Mrs Aysgarth was out of the room. She discovered that her legs were too short to reach the footrest so she settled for sitting cross legged.

“Are you going to be all right sitting like that?” Mrs Aysgarth asked on her return.

“I do lots of gymnastics so I’m quite flexy,” Nina explained. “I’ll be fine.”

“Right then, hands behind your back and I’ll get started.”

Nina reached behind the backrest of her chair and crossed her wrists. Mrs Aysgarth pulled a length of string off the ball that she had brought in from the kitchen and wound it around Nina’s wrists. She was careful to use a lot of turns of string, to mitigate against the very thin binding material cutting into her skin, going both horizontally and vertically and finishing off with a tiny knot.

“Comfy?” Mrs Aysgarth asked, with only the tiniest hint of irony.

“Not bad,” Nina acknowledged.

Mrs Aysgarth took another length of string and tied Nina’s legs together where they were crossed.

“Now for the fun bit,” Mrs Aysgarth said as she squatted down beside Nina’s tall chair. She pulled the end of the string away from the ball and fastened it to the chair underneath the chair seat. Paying the string out from the ball as she worked, she wound the string around Nina’s waist and over her lap in many different directions, going under the chair seat each time. When she broke the string and tied it off to the support for the backrest, Nina was enmeshed from the waist down in a web of green string holding her down to the chair.

“I see where this is going,” Nina commented with a grin.

“I’m sure you do,” Mrs Aysgarth said. “Now sit up straight, please.”

Nina straightened her back for the next stage. As she expected, Mrs Aysgarth started by tying the end of the string to the chair, fastening it to the hinge on the back of the backrest. She wrapped the string around Nina’s arms and upper body, pinning her arms to her sides, going many times around her waist, under the backrest and over both her shoulders.

When Mrs Aysgarth finally broke the string and fastened off the end, Nina was Securely enwebbed from the neck down. “Wow,” she said, summarising her predicament.

“Now, you get a bit of this stuff,” Mrs Aysgarth said, producing a roll of something yellow.

“What is it?”

“If you want the technical description, it’s non-woven viscose cleaning cloth, basically it’s J-Cloth on a roll,” Mrs Aysgarth explained. “It’s what I use to wipe my brushes and it makes very good stuffing for a gag.”

Nina opened her mouth and allowed Mrs Aysgarth to push the wad of cloth into her mouth.

“And you get one of these, just like my girls,” Mrs Aysgarth said, producing a large square of white cloth with a flourish.

“Unh?” asked Nina.

“What is it?”

Nina nodded.

“Well, if you really have to know, it’s a muslin nappy liner,” Mrs Aysgarth explained, “but don’t worry – it hasn’t been anywhere near a baby’s bottom. I use these for cleaning too, but they get washed and reused.”

She deftly folded the muslin into a band, pulled it back between Nina’s teeth and knotted it behind her head.

Nina was just getting used to the feel of her gag when Mr Aysgarth appeared at the studio door. Nina had met him on previous visits to the house and had seen him at various school functions. She knew that he worked from home as a freelance journalist and could presumably work on despite the weather as long as the internet was working.

“Hello Nina, Happy New year and welcome to the madhouse,” Mr Aysgarth said after looking at the plight of his four daughters and their friend.

Nina mumbled something back through her gag and nodded enthusiastically by way of reply, but Mr Aysgarth had already gone about his business.

“Now perhaps I can get some painting done,” Mrs Aysgarth said, picking up the broad brush she had been using for the background.

Nina watched as Mrs Aysgarth worked the brush in a jar of water to soften the paint that had dried slightly while she had been away from the painting. She squeezed the bristles out with one of the muslin cloths then picked up some more paint from the white china plate she was using as a palette. Nina noted that she was using a brush well over a centimetre wide, more the sort of thing that one might use on a window frame than a painting. There was a selection of browns, greys and white on the plate and Mrs Aysgarth was using these to achieve a warm grey background with a slight variation in texture.

After a surprisingly short space of time, Mrs Aysgarth had completed the background, going slightly over the pencil drawing in places. She stood up and took both plate and brush into the small bathroom adjacent to her studio. Nina could hear a tap running and assumed that the equipment was being cleaned.

Mrs Aysgarth returned empty-handed and took another white plate from a shelf under a small table that held tubes of acrylic paint. Without hesitating, she squeezed out a series of blobs of colour: two reds, one purplish, the other orangey; two yellows, one with a hint of orange, the other more lemon; a chrome green; ultramarine and cobalt blues; burnt umber and, lastly, titanium white and Mars black. Nina knew that a lot of the magazine and book cover work that Mrs Aysgarth did involved people and faces and guessed that this must be her standard portrait painter’s palette.

After another look at her subject matter, Mrs Aysgarth picked up her brown pencil again and sketched in a little more detail on the underdrawing, also repairing the bits that the background colour had overlapped. “I use brown for this so it won’t show through the paint on faces,” she explained.

Mrs Aysgarth selected four brushes, all conventional long-handled artists’ brushes, three surprisingly broad to Nina’s eyes and one narrow. She quickly mixed several blends of paint on the white plate and started painting immediately, beginning with the area around Jo’s eyes. “I always start with the eyes. If you get that right, everything else just follows as you work outwards.”

With a surprisingly few strokes of the brushes, Nina was impressed to see an instantly recognisably image of Jo’s face appearing. A little creepily, the eyes were just white blanks at this stage. Once she reached Jo’s hairline and collar, she switched, again without hesitating, to Charley. “Chin up a touch and look a little more to your left,” she instructed.

Charley’s face appeared just as quickly as Jo’s then Jen-Jen and Patsy followed. Nina was fascinated by Mrs Aysgarth’s technique. The paint had more water and acrylic medium in it than Nina would have expected, giving the paint a creamy consistency. (She tried to remember all the questions she needed to ask when she was next allowed to speak.) The brushwork looked amazingly random, which Nina had noted before with Mrs Aysgarth’s work. Up close, it just looked like a mess of brush strokes but as you stood back, there was an amazing amount of detail that was somehow implied by the paint but quite invisible under close inspection. The colours were a surprise to Nina as well. There were definite strokes of blue, green and purple shades going in, but the overall effect just looked right for the shadows and highlights of skin. Patsy’s and Jen-Jen’s pale, freckly skin and the twins’ slightly more olive tones were all somehow implied using the same range of colours.

Mrs Aysgarth moved on to the twins’ clothes next, starting a new palette on a clean plate with the stronger colours needed. She filled in the bits of the chairs that were visible at the same time.

With Jo and Charley largely finished, but still with blank white eyes, Mrs Aysgarth turned her attention to their hair, using the palette of facial colours and mixing a series of rich browns. Once again, there were some surprising hints of purple and green in the colours that were laid on the board, but somehow they just implied hair.

“The white should be dry enough for me to do their eyes next,” Mrs Aysgarth commented as she picked out the twins’ brown irises and the younger girls’ blue using the small brush.

“Charley, can you open your eyes wide for me,” Mrs Aysgarth instructed her daughter. She paused, then added, “And blink.”

Mrs Aysgarth applied two tiny dots of white using the wooden end of a brush handle. “Getting her to do that gets just enough tears flowing for me to see where the highlights go on the eyes,” she explained.

The two younger girls’ red curly hair went in next, seen against their older sisters in both cases. Nina noted the tricky operation to brush lightly to give the impression of transparency to the outer reaches of the girls’ hair, showing the colour of the older girls’ clothes behind.

Both Jen-Jen and Patsy had their hands in full view unlike Jo and Charley, whose hands were tied behind their chairs. Mrs Aysgarth painted the younger girls’ hands next then filled in Patsy’s clothes, leaving the area adjacent to her hands until last to allow that paint to dry.

“Fur is always difficult,” Mrs Aysgarth said as she mixed a range of colours for Jen-Jen’s onesie. To Nina’s eyes, her brush technique didn’t look significantly different, but somehow the suggestion of furriness emerged from the paint as it went onto the board.

Mrs Aysgarth mixed a small selection of light greys. “Now for the fun bit,” she said as she started to depict the ropes securing her daughters. Nina was impressed at the sense of the texture and roundness of the rope that Mrs Aysgarth achieved with apparently little effort. A little shading and highlighting of the adjacent areas of paint made the ropes look as if they were pulling tightly into the girls’ clothes.

Continuing with the same range of colours, Mrs Aysgarth filled in the girl’s gags working on top of the skin-coloured paint which was now completely dry. Using the flesh tones again, she completed the shaping of her daughters’ lips and the slight shadows cast by the gags on their cheeks. She squeezed out a little alirazin crimson onto the plate she had been using for flesh tones and applied it delicately using a clean small brush to pick out the girls’ lips and then used tiny specks to mark the carunculae, the little red blob in the inner corner of each eye. “This stuff is almost transparent,” Mrs Aysgarth explained, so you can just coat it on top and the shading shows through from underneath.

Mrs Aysgarth mixed a blob of bright green on her palette, leaving it only partly blended together so that she had a choice of strong green shading off to white depending on where she dipped her brush. Using another small brush, she deftly added a few touches of green to Jen-Jen’s ropes, which she had initially painted in white. It took very little, mostly in the shadows, to suggest that the rope was wholly green.

Stepping back from the painting for the first time, Mrs Aysgarth looked at the overall effect of her work. Nina noticed that only a little over two hours had passed since she started it. She stepped forward and made a few minute adjustments then said, “I think that’s done. What do you think, Nina?”

Nina studied the picture again then turned her head to face Mrs Aysgarth and nodded, not that there was much else she could do to express her opinion.

Mrs Aysgarth put down her paints and brushes on the small table by her side and then walked behind Jo, freeing her wrists and removing her gag before doing the same to Charley. “Can you four mastermind some lunch while I do something with Nina?” she asked.

“Can do,” Jo replied as she started untying the remaining ropes holding her to her chair. “Did you have anything in mind?”

“There’s some pizza bases in the freezer. Perhaps you could improvise from those.”

“Improvised pizza sounds dangerous,” Charley pointed out. “Mozzarella and strawberry?”

“Or pepperoni and banana?” Jo suggested.

“...with extra anchovies,” Charley added, giggling at her own joke.

“Remember you have to eat what you cook,” Mrs Aysgarth reminded them as she returned to her painting. She tested the lower right corner with her finger, then using a fine-pointed black marker pen, she signed it ‘Elizabeth Garsdale’ and dated it. Nina knew that Mrs Aysgarth used her unmarried surname for professional purposes, so it came as no surprise.

By this time all four girls were free of their bonds. “What are you going to do with Nina?” Patsy asked, coming over to inspect the painting.

“I though it would only be fair if I did a picture of her too, now I’ve done you lot,” her mother replied. “Could you get those chairs out of the way and move Nina across to where you were sitting?”

Jo and Charley took the chairs out of the room while Jen-Jen and Patsy gathered up the discarded ropes and gags. Mrs Aysgarth moved her easel aside and all four girls lifted Nina on her chair and set her down approximately where the twins’ chairs had been.

Mrs Aysgarth set the finished painting aside to harden fully and mounted a wooden board on the easel, to which she clipped a sheet of pre-stretched watercolour paper.

The Aysgarth girls expressed general approval at their mother’s work then trooped out towards the kitchen.

“How long are you going to be doing Nina?” Jo asked just before she left the studio.

“Half an hour, maybe 40 minutes tops,” her mother assured her. “This is going to be really quick and sketchy.”

Mrs Aysgarth did nothing for a long time, just staring disconcertingly hard at Nina. Apparently satisfied with what the had learned, Mrs Aysgarth picked up fine-pointed technical pen and started drawing.

Nina did her best to hold her pose. It was incredibly frustrating to be able to see that Mrs Aysgarth was working with intense concentration and very quickly, without being able to see what she was drawing. She tried to distract herself by focussing on other aspects of the studio. Although it was perfectly accurate to call it a studio, the room was adapted from an ordinary ground-floor room of the Aysgarths’ house. It had a single window, which faced north and consisted of a pair of glazed doors flanked by a smaller window each side. There was a translucent white roller blind across the top of the window, which had been pulled down a short distance, presumably to moderate the very bright cold light from the sky. The view through the lower parts of the windows was dominated by the wall of a garage, which was painted white and on a sunny day like today was dazzlingly bright. The light was further controlled by a white fabric screen on a tall metal stand which, Nina realised, must add a soft side-light to the subject matter. Nina was annoyed with herself for not appreciating this when she was looking at the effects of the arrangement from the artist’s point of view.

Mrs Aysgarth put down her pen and adjusted the easel so that the picture was almost horizontal. Nina realised that she had lost all track of time and had no idea if this signalled the completion of the work. It became apparent that there was more to do when Mrs Aysgarth took out a box of watercolours and a selection of brushes. She left the room for a minute or so, returning with a glass tumbler half-filled with water.

“I’m doing a quick watercolour wash, so I need to keep the paper flat to make sure I don’t get any runs,” she explained to Nina.

Once again, Mrs Aysgarth’s movements suggested that she was working very rapidly. She had not been working with the watercolours for long when Jo appeared at the studio door.

“Pizza in 10 minutes?”

“Can you make it 15?”

“No probs,” Jo replied disappearing from view again.

Mrs Aysgarth worked on for some minutes longer then rinsed her brushes in the water and put them down. “Done,” she declared. “Time to untie you, Nina?”

Nina nodded. She wasn’t in any actual distress sitting tied to her chair, but she had passed the point where she could honestly say that she was truly comfortable.

Taking up a pair of scissors from a drawer, Mrs Aysgarth proceeded to snip through the twine securing Nina and then untied her gag. Nina removed the soggy packing from inside her mouth and tossed it in the bin in which Mrs Aysgarth was gathering up the pieces of string.

“May I look?” Nina asked.

“Go ahead.”

Nina dropped down off the tall chair and walked behind the easel. She was impressed at what she saw. It was an ink and wash sketch as she expected. Despite the few lines used and despite the gag in Nina’s mouth, the likeness of her was very good. Most of the string had been drawn in as single lines, but judicious use of green watercolour gave the impression of both thickness and texture. The wash similarly suggested the texture of her sweater and socks, while a subtle highlight gave her leggings their slight Lycra sheen. Her hair clearly showed the slight fluffiness of a braid plaited several hours previously and not maintained since although it was drawn as a scribble of lines and an almost random spatter of several shades of brown. When Nina looked closely at it to see how it had been done, the picture dissolved into a mess of lines and colour. It was only when she stood back a little that everything resolved back into a picture of her.

“Wow,” Nina said in admiration, lost for anything more articulate.

“When it’s completely dry, I’ll sign it and you can take it home.”

“Thank you,” Nina said. “Cool addition to the family gallery!”

“Food!” Jo announced, appearing at the studio door once again. “That’s really good,” she added, spotting the completed painting. “I love the way you’ve sort of implied texture with highlight.”

Nina noticed that Mrs Aysgarth was looking at Jo with slightly narrowed eyes but she followed Nina into the kitchen without making any comment.

There turned out to be a selection of four large pizzas: bacon and mushroom; pepperoni and bell pepper; tuna and courgette and one with concentric rings of different cheeses with a few olives scattered on top. Nina was relieved that none of the threatened bizarre combinations had materialised.

The large table in the kitchen easily accommodated the seven people present for lunch. As they ate, Nina was enthusiastic about the painting techniques she had watched and how much she intended to work on her own technique. “I’m going to try to do the ink and wash thing the way your mum does it next time we have life class at school,” she said, addressing Patsy and Charley who were sitting next to each other.”

Jen-Jen seemed to be highly amused by something and could barely keep still on her seat. Nina glanced at Mrs Aysgarth, who hadn’t said much since the beginning of the meal and had a peculiar half-smile on her lips. Puzzled, she looked around the table, but could tell nothing from looking at Patsy, the twins or their father.

“Go on, Jen-Jen,” Mrs Aysgarth prompted. “You’re bursting to tell her.”

“That’s not Charley!” Jen-Jen said excitedly, pointing at Charley. “And that’s not Jo!” she added, pointing at Jo.

“Argh! You’ve done that twin thing again,” Nina exclaimed, realising that they had exchanged clothes. “You fool me every time.”

“They catch me out sometimes too”, Mrs Aysgarth admitted. “I spotted that when ‘Jo’ called us in to lunch it was really Charley, but I’m not sure how long before that they swapped.”

“I’m afraid I just go by the clothes,” Nina said. “I’ve never been able to tell them apart otherwise.”

“I think that’s true for nearly everyone outside the family,” Mrs Aysgarth agreed.

“Even Jo’s boyfriend,” Patsy pointed out.

There was a sudden silence in the room. Nina looked at Patsy and then at the twins, but couldn’t work out what was going on.

“I think that’s probably best kept in the family,” Mr Aysgarth advised, breaking the awkward chill in the atmosphere.

“Eric is ancient history now, his family has moved away and Nina is practically family, so it probably doesn’t matter,” Jo said.

“It might not matter to you, but Charley might disagree,” her mother suggested.

“We might as well drop the other shoe and tell Nina,” Charley said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “She’ll probably worm it out of Patsy anyway.”

“If you’re sure,” her father said, “but Nina ought to treat this as confidential.”

Nina said nothing but solemnly made a ‘cross-my-heart’ sign.

“Well,” Jo began, “I had a sort of on-and-off relationship with Eric, who was in the year above Charley and me at school. It was never terribly serious – we just used to hang out together and went to the occasional film. There was one occasion when I just didn’t feel like going out, but rather then let him down, Charley agreed to stand in for me. We thought it would be a good joke if she pretended to be me, so I lent her my clothes and my ID for getting into the cinema. We thought Eric would see through the ruse immediately, but he didn’t. He went the entire evening without ever suspecting he wasn’t with me.”

“I wasn’t sure what to do,” Charley said, picking up the story. “I suppose I should have just let him in on the joke at the end of the evening, but I was worried that he wouldn’t see the funny side and would be angry at the deception.”

“And I should have told him next time I saw him at school, but I chickened out for the same reason,” Jo said. “The next time I went out with him, it really was me and he didn’t say anything to suggest he knew what had happened so I didn’t say anything either. It would probably just be a private joke between Charley and me if that had been all that happened, but it was obvious from what Charley said afterwards, that she was much more taken with Eric than I was, so we did it again.” There was another pause, this time with Jo looking awkward. “And again. Several times,” she added.

“I really wanted to find a way to switch to being myself to be Eric’s girlfriend rather than pretending to be Jo, but we were in too deep and I couldn’t work out a way of doing it,” Charley explained.

“Didn’t your mum notice that you were going out dressed as Jo?” Nina asked.

“We were careful not to be spotted,” Charley replied. “We had a narrow squeak once and I only got away with it because it was cold and I was all wrapped up in a hat and scarf.”

“I overheard Charley talking to Mum as if she was me and I did a quick change into her clothes to cover,” Jo explained. “Fortunately, Mum never got a good enough look at me that evening to spot what we’d done.”

“So how long did this go on for?” Nina asked.

“About two months,” Jo admitted in a small voice. “Eric was actually seeing Charley more often than me and the deception was getting harder and harder to sustain.”

“We had to brief each other, so Eric wouldn’t catch either of us not knowing something that she should,” Charley added.

“Eventually, my conscience got the better of me and I told Charley that it was cruel of us to go on treating Eric this way. I said that I was going to tell him that I didn’t think the relationship was going anywhere and that I was going to end it in the kindest way I possibly could.”

Charley took a deep breath then said, “I could see the force of Jo’s argument, but I didn’t want it to end and we had an enormous row about it. I was so worked up and so anxious to stop Jo going out that I managed to overpower her and tie her hands behind her back with a pair of tights. After that, there was no going back – I gagged her and trussed her up as well as I could with socks and tights and scarves and things and shoved her into the bottom of our big wardrobe.”

“And nobody heard this going on?” Nina asked.

“Apparently not,” Jo said, “and, believe me, I was making as much noise as I could.”

“So what happened next?”

“Busted,” Charley said. “I dressed in Jo’s clothes and went downstairs only to meet Mum in the hallway. She took one look and asked me why I was going out in Jo’s clothes. I told her not to be silly and that I was Jo. She just said, ‘No you’re not, you’re Charley.’ I denied it and told her that Charley was upstairs, but Mum wasn’t having any of it.”

“If she’d just given a reason for being dressed in Jo’s clothes, I’d probably just have regarded it as one of those weird things daughters do, but all this denial was making me smell a rat,” Mrs Aysgarth explained.

“I really had no option but to go upstairs with Mum, having claimed to be Jo and told her that Charley was up there. I think I’d run out of excuses by that stage. Once we were in our bedroom, we could hear Jo raising Cain inside the wardrobe and I really was well and truly busted.” Charley paused in her story and looked down at her hands, apparently too embarrassed to continue her story.

Mrs Aysgarth picked up the tale. “I was actually surprised that Charley had managed to overpower her sister like that. They’re pretty evenly matched, but if anything, Jo is probably the stronger of the two.”

“Element of surprise,” Jo explained.

“I lifted her out of the wardrobe to free her,” Mrs Aysgarth continued. “It wasn’t a very tidy tie-up but it seemed to be pretty effective. Her wrists were tied behind her back with a pair of black nylon tights then socks and scarves had been used to tie her legs at the ankles and knees and a couple of other places and there were a couple of long scarves around her arms. She’d been gagged with a hanky in her mouth and another one between her teeth and a scarf over her mouth and nose. Like I said, untidy but effective.”

Charley had recovered enough to continue, “Of course, once Jo was untied, the whole sorry story came out and Mum went ballistic.”

“It was the continuing deception of Eric that I was most angry about and the fact that Charley was prepared to tie Jo up and impersonate her to keep it going,” Mrs Aysgarth explained.

“So, I went out as I had planned to and dumped Eric in the kindest, politest and most graceful terms possible,” Jo said, picking up the story. “So much so that I had to stop him from apologising to me. We had a coffee together for old times’ sake and parted amicably – job done.”

Charley took a deep breath. “Meanwhile, I spent the evening tied up in the bottom of the wardrobe.”

“I thought it was only fair, seeing as that was what she was prepared to do to her sister,” Mrs Aysgarth explained.

“It’s symmetrical, I suppose,” Nina acknowledged. “Jo goes out with Eric in place of Charley pretending to be Jo and Charley gets tied up the way she tied Jo up.”

“Not quite,” Charley said. “I think Mum used every inch of rope she could find on me – wrists behind my back and rope around my waist, arms tied to my sides, ankles tied, and knees, and thighs, hanky stuffed in my mouth and a thick sock between my teeth and the other sock as a blindfold.”

“I admit I was making a point,” Mrs Aysgarth acknowledged.

“Wow,” Nina commented, unable to think of anything else to say.

“That wasn’t the end of it,” Charley said, now apparently over her embarrassment. “The next morning was a Saturday and Mum was debating grounding me at home instead of letting me play hockey. The only thing stopping her was the thought that it would be letting the rest of the team down.”

Jo now looked embarrassed. “And then I said something really stupid. I told Mum that Charley could stay home if I took her place on the field. We were in different school teams that year and that day happened to be playing different schools at different locations and times, so it would just about be possible to pull it off.”

Charley continued the story. “So Mum got the rope out again and I spent the morning tied to a chair and she gave me the full works again – wrists behind my back, rope around my waist and chest and over both shoulders, knees and ankles tied to the chair legs and a gag and blindfold again.”

“I protested,” Jo said, “but Mum was decided, so I dressed in Charley’s hockey kit and remembered that she likes to wear cycling shorts under her skirt rather than the full-length leggings I always wear. Mum drove me to the match and I played in Charley’s place. I was put in to play right attack, which suited me fine – it’s the only time I’ve ever managed to score three goals in one game.” Jo paused.

“I’ve never managed three goals,” Charley continued, “but of course everyone thinks I have, only it was really Jo and I can never put the record straight.”

“And I can’t claim the credit either without giving us away,” Jo added.

“What a tangled web we weave...” Mr Aysgarth commented, quoting the proverb.

Nina glanced at Mrs Aysgarth, who wore a pained expression, clearly feeling her daughters’ hurt.

Jo picked up the story again. “I changed into my own hockey kit in the car and Mum drove me to my own match. I made it through the game, but I didn’t do very well as I was so completely knackered from already having played a full game that morning. I ended up feeling as if I’d let my own team down.”

“Not a good day for anyone,” Nina commented. “Thanks for telling me. I promise I’ll keep it to myself.”

There was a silence around the table as if no-one knew what to say next.

Patsy broke the conversational impasse by changing the subject. “Mum, you’ve painted us while we were tied up; shouldn’t we get a chance to paint you tied up?”

“If you recall,” Mrs Aysgarth replied, “it was you lot who tied me up after breakfast this morning. I only got to tie you up because I escaped.”

“But we were tied up a lot longer than you,” Patsy persisted.

“So you were,” her mother conceded, “but that’s only because your effort was so easy to escape from.”

“Jo stayed tied up the whole time you were painting,” Patsy countered. “She could have got free any time.”

“I could have,” Jo admitted, “but I didn’t want to spoil the game.”

“Jo’s a brilliant escaper,” Patsy explained to Nina.

“I started learning after getting tied up by Charley,” Jo explained.

“I’m trying to learn to escape, but I’m not very good at it yet,” Nina said.

“There’s not a lot of daylight left today if you want to draw me tied up,” Mrs Aysgarth said standing at the window.

“Do we know if school will be open tomorrow?” Charley asked.

“No, but the website will tell us,” Jo said, taking out her smartphone. She connected to the internet then the school site. “Closed tomorrow but open again Thursday, subject to confirmation,” she read.

“Well, can we do it tomorrow?” Patsy asked. “And can Nina join in?”

Mrs Aysgarth heaved a deep sigh then said, “All right – I don’t see why not and, yes, Nina will be welcome too.”

“Don’t expect me to join in,” Jo said, speaking as the non-artist of the family.

* * *


Back at home that evening, Nina was tied to a chair and struggling fruitlessly with her bonds. Once again, she was failing to make any progress escaping from her mother’s ‘easy-peasy chair tie’. No matter how she twisted and turned her hands, she couldn’t seem to find the slack in her wrist binding that seemed so easy to find when she wasn’t tied to a chair. She grunted in frustration through her gag as she squirmed helplessly.

“That’s half an hour,” Suzanna said, coming into the dining room, where Nina was attempting her escape. “I’m going to untie you before you do any serious damage to your wrists.”

Nina mumbled something incomprehensible and gave up her struggle. “It’s frustrating,” she said as soon as she could speak again, “I know I can get out of this wrist binding but I just can’t seem to get the same action to work when I’m tied to the chair.”

“Would it help to watch me doing it?” Suzanna offered as she untied the knots securing her daughter.

“We’ve tried that twice and I still can’t get it. I think I’ll just have to keep practising until I can figure out what my hands have to do.”

“Let’s see your wrists,” Suzanna instructed.

Nina pulled off the fingerless gloves she was wearing and slid the sleeves of her sweater back to expose the bare skin of her wrists. There were faint red marks and an imprint of the knit of her gloves on the skin.

“Not too bad, but don’t make it worse by tying yourself up at bedtime,” her mother advised.

“That’s another thing I want to learn – how to tie myself up,” Nina said.

“Not too difficult,” Suzanna said, “but the better you get at escaping, the harder it gets to tie yourself up so that you can’t escape.”

“Complementary skills I guess,” Nina commented, nodding her head in understanding. “You’re easily the best escaper I know – can you tie yourself up so that you can’t get out?”

Suzanna hesitated for a moment then replied, “I’m pretty sure I could, but obviously I don’t try in case I succeed and there’s nobody to rescue me.”

“There’s always me,” Nina pointed out.

“Yes, but you’d want to be tied up too and then we’d both be stuck!”

“I’ll settle for learning to escape first,” Nina said. “I think I’ll head up to bed now. I might read for a bit, but I promise I won’t tie myself up.”

Suzanna gave her daughter a goodnight hug and a kiss and watched as she headed for the stairs.
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Soraka
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Post by Soraka »

Nina and the Lodger Part 4: Another Snow Day

Nina was awakened by a hand gently shaking her shoulder.

“You asked me to make sure you were awake before eight,” her mother’s voice said. “It’s about ten to now.”

Nina, who had been curled up on her side in bed, rolled over onto her back. Instead of her face being visible, all that showed inside the hood of her sleepsuit was a featureless black shape.

“Head bag for warmth?” Suzanna asked, referring to the black knitted hoods that Nina’s cousin had given them as a gift, essentially balaclavas with no openings.

“Eff,” replied Nina. “Cam oo ep ip off?”

“Are you wearing a gag under that thing?” her mother asked after managing to control her laughter.

Nina nodded.

“And you can’t get out by yourself?”

Nina pushed back her duvet and held up her hands, demonstrating that the thumbs of the sleepsuit’s attached mittens were empty. She scrabbled at the tag on the zip fastener on the sleepsuit to show that she couldn’t grip it to pull it down without use of her thumbs.

“OK, keep still and I’ll get you out of there.”

Nina let her arms drop and Suzanna pulled the zip right down to where it finished at Nina’s crotch. She pushed the sleepsuit’s hood back and pulled the black bag up off her head. Underneath the head bag was another black balaclava, this one the more conventional kind with a single opening for the wearer’s eyes. The part covering the lower part of Nina’s face was pulled between her teeth and back into her mouth by a black sock tied around her head. The partner sock was tied across her eyes as a blindfold. Suzanna carefully removed the socks then pulled the balaclava off her daughter’s head revealing a shock of untidy hair.

“Do you need help to get out of the sleepsuit too?” Suzanna asked.

“Yes please – I’m not sure if I can do it on my own.”

Suzanna helped Nina to sit up then pulled the sleepsuit down, tugging its sleeves off her daughter’s arms. As it came off, it revealed the pair of long socks that were covering Nina’s hands and were pulled up over the sleeves of the sweater she was wearing.

“Yes, that would stop you doing much with your hands,” Suzanna observed as she helped Nina remove the socks, “but how did you get into all this in the first place without using your thumbs?”

“I did the blindfold and gag and the head bag first,” Nina explained. “I already had my legs in the sleepsuit and the socks for my hands were ready beside me, so I could find them and put them on even though I couldn’t see. I just had to put my hands in and then wriggle to get the top half of the sleepsuit on and putting the hood up doesn’t need thumbs.”

“But surely the zip does?” her mother suggested.

“I threaded a piece of string through the tag on the zip before I covered my head and hands. I was able to grip one end in each hand, just using them as paws and pull the zip up that way. Once it was up, I just let go with one hand and pulled the string out. It’s probably on the floor somewhere.”

“Ingenious,” Suzanna acknowledged. “Ingenious but utterly bonkers.”

“Well, last night, I promised not to tie myself up at bedtime and I didn’t,” Nina pointed out.

“Utterly bonkers,” Suzanna repeated as she left the room to allow Nina to finish getting out of her nightwear.

* * *


“Dramatic black,” Suzanna commented as Nina arrived in the kitchen, now fully dressed.

“Well, I wasn’t sure which sweater to wear and when I picked my black one, everything else sort of followed.”

Nina was indeed dressed entirely in black. The thick black sweater had a round neckline which showed the roll-neck of the much thinner sweater she wore underneath. A pair of black calf length socks were pulled up over her black cycling leggings. Her hands were partly hidden by a pair of black fingerless gloves and a black knitted headband was pulled down over her ears.

“I didn’t think you liked that headband much,” her other commented.

“I don’t wear it much because if it’s cold enough to need my ears covered, it’s usually cold enough to want the top of my head covered too,” Nina explained. “I’m wearing it today to keep my hair out of my eyes when I’m drawing. The bits at the front are just a little short to stay anchored in the plait.”

“I thought you usually wore an alice band for that.”

“I do, but I couldn’t find a black one,” Nina admitted with a smile.

“Fair enough,” Suzanna conceded. “Now, breakfast – do you want a big one again this morning?”

“Not thanks – two days running would be a bit much. Egg on toast would be just fine.”

Suzanna’s hesitation suggested that if Nina had wanted to go for a big breakfast, she would have been happy to join her. However, she nodded her agreement and said, “Me too. If you do the toast, I’ll do the eggs.”

* * *


It was a little after nine o’clock when Nina and Suzanna had finished washing the breakfast things and had put them away.

“I’d better get ready to go out,” Nina said. “Patsy said to be at her house for half past nine.”

* * *


Nina reappeared again a few minutes later wearing her yellow cycling jacket and a pair of black waterproof trousers. Her feet were in her jelly boots as they had been the previous day and her head was covered by a black ski mask with only her eyes visible. Her helmet and cycling mittens were in one hand and the small green plastic fishing tackle box she used to carry art materials in the other.

“Do you want to borrow these again? It’s just started snowing.” Suzanna offered Nina the goggles she had borrowed for the abortive first day back at school. “It’s not very heavy, but it might be fairly unpleasant for cycling.”

Nina went to the kitchen window and looked up. In contrast to the previous day’s bright sunshine, the sky was a uniform white with small snowflakes drifting down. “Not too bad, but the goggles would be welcome.”

Nina allowed her mother to settle the goggles down over her balaclava and then buckle her helmet on as if she was a small child. A kiss on her balaclava-covered cheek and a pat on top of her helmet signalled that she was satisfactorily prepared in her mother’s view. “Bye, Mum – see you later,” she called out as she let herself out of the kitchen door.

* * *


The ride through the snow proved not to be at all arduous, the only problem being reduced visibility during occasional heavier flurries. She reached the Aysgarth house a little before half past nine. She propped her mother’s mountain bike, which she had borrowed yet again, against the back of the house, unhooked the bungee cord securing her art box and rang the back door bell.

The door was opened by Jo. “Hi Nina, we’re just about ready to start,” she said holding the door for Nina to pass then closing it behind her.

Nina quickly removed her mittens then her helmet, goggles and balaclava before taking off her cycling jacket and sitting down to get her boots off so that she could take the waterproof trousers off.

“We?” Nina queried. “I thought you weren’t joining in today...”

She hesitated and looked Jo up and down. The Aysgarth girl was wearing a heavy v-necked sweater in a brownish grey with Icelandic-style patterns around the yoke and the neckline in dark brown and cream. Her deep blue cord skirt, which came just below her knees, set off the colours of the sweater well and contrasted with her mid-brown woollen tights and grey socks. The collar of a roll-necked sweater exactly matching the tights was visible under the thicker v-neck.

A suspicion formed in Nina’s mind. “...unless you aren’t Jo.”

“Got it!” the girl exclaimed. “I’m Charley.”

“In a skirt? In winter?”

“Yes, I know – I was questioning Jo’s sanity wearing skirts in weather like this and she challenged me to try it.”

“And?” Nina prompted.

“And actually it’s not bad,” Charley admitted. “The skirt is really heavy cotton cord, so it’s nice and cosy, and I’ve got long johns on under my tights. And...” She paused for dramatic effect. “...I’ve got these!”

“Ohmygod!” Nina exclaimed as Charley lifted her skirt to reveal a pair of white cotton directoire-length bloomers on top of her woolly tights. They were quite a loose fit except where they were gathered by elastic just above her knees.

“That’s the sort of thing my cousin Theda would wear,” Nina said.

“ ‘Cousin Theda’ as in Theda Wolf-Bassenthwaite as in Wolf’s Clothing?”

“Yes, that’s her,” Nina confirmed.

“I’m pretty sure that’s where Jo bought these,” Charley said.

“How do they feel?”

“Really warm,” Charley replied. “This many layers would be impossibly bulky under trousers but it’s really quite comfy with a skirt.”

“Until you go outside on a windy day,” Nina pointed out.

“Until then,” Charley agreed with a grin, leading Nina, who had now shed her outer layers, to her mother’s studio.

* * *


True to her word, Mrs Aysgarth was already securely tied to a chair ready to be drawn and painted. To Nina’s surprise, Jo was sitting alongside her, also tied to a chair.

Mrs Aysgarth seemed to have chosen her clothes specifically to provide the maximum number of colours and textures to her audience of artists. Her skirt was cotton cord printed with Paisley pattern in shades of green and gold. It was calf-length but pulled up to about knee level by the ropes securing her. Showing below the hem of the skirt was the edge of a white cotton petticoat decorated with embroidered flowers. Mrs Aysgarth’s mustard-yellow woollen tights picked up the colours in her skirt as did the olive green socks showing above her sheepskin slippers. She was wearing a sage green cowl-necked sweater with a golden ochre knitted waistcoat buttoned over it. The waistcoat was in turn covered by a heavy bottle green cardigan which had been left unbuttoned. Her shoulders and the upper part of her arms were covered by a crocheted shawl in a rich red-brown colour. The ends of the shawl were presumably tied or pinned behind her.

The ropework anchoring Mrs Aysgarth to her chair was impressively thorough. Her hands were out of sight behind her back and there was a band of four or five turns of rope around her arms and body above her bust. Another similar band below her bust and just above her elbows was also cinched between her arms and body. A pair of ropes came over one shoulder, down to the lower of these bands of rope then back up over the other shoulder. A further band of rope was around her waist, securing it to the backrest of the wooden chair. Mrs Aysgarth’s ankles were lashed together and the rope cinched between them. The ends of the rope were fastened off to the front legs of the chair and another short rope linked the binding to the point where a pair of wooden struts linking diagonally opposite chair legs crossed in the middle. A similar binding held Mrs Aysgarth’s legs together just below her knees and it was the ends of this rope going out to the tops of the chair legs that prevented her skirt from dropping to its full length. Another two bands of rope were tied around Mrs Aysgarth’s legs just above her knees and at mid thigh. Both of these were wrapped around on top of her skirt. The one above the knees had the ends of the rope taken over the sides of the chair to the tops of the front legs while the one at thigh level was fastened under the chair seat.

Jo was also dressed warmly but without the exuberant layering. Her upper half was clad in a warm high-necked sweater in horizontal rainbow stripes while below she wore a blue denim skirt over red woollen tights with grey slipper socks. Her binding was much like her mother’s but her shorter skirt allowed the binding above her knees to be cinched and the band of rope above her bust was cinched between her arms and body which would have been impractical in her mother’s case because of the shawl. Like Mrs Aysgarth, Jo was not yet gagged, but unlike her, she was blindfolded with a black scarf.

Having stopped in her tracks at the sight of the two bound women, Nina had been absorbed in her fascination at the ropework and had quite forgotten her manners. She rectified the matter with a belated greeting. “Good morning. That’s very impressive tying up – who did it?”

“It was Henry,” Mrs Aysgarth said, referring to her husband. “He always makes a very neat job of it.”

“Neat and very secure by the look of it,” Nina commented.

“Not totally secure, I hope,” Jo said. “I’m going to try to escape while you’re busy drawing Mum.”

“That’s why she’s blindfolded,” Charley explained. “So she didn’t get any clues from seeing how Mum is tied up.”

“I’d want all the clues I could get in her place,” Nina commented, moving to see how the two prisoners’ hands were tied.

Mrs Aysgarth and Jo both had their hands tied in exactly the same way. Their forearms were positioned so that they were horizontally across their backs with the left arm above the right. Their wrists were bound together with several vertical turns of rope and the binding cinched horizontally. The bindings were also linked upwards to the large complicated knot on each woman’s back that gathered together the chest and shoulder ropes and also downwards to their waist ropes. Mrs Aysgarth was wearing a pair of striped mittens in several shades of green while Jo was wearing a pair of blue fingerless gloves, presumably to aid her escape attempt. Nina couldn’t imagine how Jo had any hope of escaping from the web of ropes around her.

“We’re going to move Jo into the kitchen so she’s not taking up space here in the studio and so we don’t get distracted by her struggling,” Charley announced. “Ready for some heavy lifting?”

Patsy and Jen-Jen were sitting on the floor side-by-side, their chosen vantage point to watch their father tying up their mother and big sister. At Charley’s prompting, they stood up. Jen-Jen was wearing a knee-length grey sweatshirt dress with elbow-length sleeves over a pink and white striped long-sleeved t-shirt and a pair of pink leggings tucked into grey socks. The dress was gathered at her waist by a pink scarf tied around her middle as a belt and a white circle scarf was looped twice around her neck. Patsy was in blue denim dungaree shorts. She had a pair of black woollen tights underneath with light blue and white over-knee socks on top. Her warm roll-necked sweater under the bib and braces of the dungarees was a close match on the socks. A glittery silver belt added a touch of sparkle to the outfit.

Jo wasn’t actually a particularly heavy load with four pairs of hands on the job. Charley and Patsy took the back corners of Jo’s chair while Nina and Jen-Jen took the lighter front corners. Manoeuvring through doors required careful co-ordination, but it was only a few minutes later that they successfully set her down in a clear area of floor in the kitchen.

“Now for the fun bit,” Charley said, taking off a black scarf she had been carrying hung around her neck. She wrapped it across Jo’s face, covering her mouth and nose and overlapping the lower edge of her blindfold then bunched it together for a second turn. “Open you mouth, sister dearest,” she instructed as she positioned the scarf so that it pulled the first layer back between Jo’s teeth. Satisfied with the result, Charley tied a double knot behind her twin sister’s head.

“We need a record of this,” Charley remarked to no-one in particular as she left the room. She returned a few minutes later with her laptop, which she placed on a kitchen counter top. She clipped a webcam to the edge of a high shelf and plugged it into the computer. She checked the camera’s view, adjusted it slightly and then set it to record.

“Now we leave her to struggle to her heart’s content,” Charley said, ushering the others out of the kitchen.

Jo responded with an unintelligible mumble.

Back in the studio, Mrs Aysgarth was waiting patiently. “What’s the time?” she asked Charley when the four girls were back in the room.

“Just gone quarter to ten.”

“Shall we set a time limit of half past twelve then?” Mrs Aysgarth suggested. “That will give you over two and a half hours for your artwork and we’ll be in good time for lunch afterwards.”

“If that’s all right by you, Mum,” Charley replied. “It really has to be your call.”

“Half past twelve is fine for me,” her mother confirmed. “Not that I’m in much of a position to enforce it,” she added with a laugh. “Can I have my gag now, please?”

Patsy was ready with a disposable cleaning cloth and a green tartan scarf. She pushed the cloth into her mother’s mouth and positioned it carefully behind her teeth then tied the scarf in place as a cleave gag. She adjusted the scarf both for her mother’s comfort and for appearance and arranged the knot neatly.

Patsy positioned herself to get an oblique front view of her mother. She had a stool and small table to work at and had equipped herself with pencils, technical pens in a variety of thicknesses and a selection of broad-tipped coloured marker pens.

Charley positioned herself to get the opposite oblique front view to her sister and Jen-Jen settled herself on the floor between them, equipped with a pad of plain white paper and a jam jar full of assorted felt pens. She started out sitting cross-legged but soon switched to sprawling on her tummy.

With the most obvious ones already taken, Nina spent a few moments scouting for a suitable view. She eventually chose an unconventional rear oblique view, only hesitating because she had used exactly the same view to draw Miss Pennywright, her art teacher, two days previously. On balance, she decided, the angle had a lot going for it. It offered a much more interesting view of the ropes securing Mrs Aysgarth and it was partly back-lit, making it quite dramatic.

“Mrs Aysgarth,” Nina asked, “are those flip-top mittens you’re wearing?”

The reply was a single nod of Mrs Aysgarth’s head.

“Would it be OK if I folded back the top of one of them so I can see your fingers?”

Another nod.

Nina hooked a finger inside the top of the mitten nearest her and Mrs Aysgarth curled her fingers to make it easier to fold it back, revealing the red glove underneath. There was a small button on the back of the mitten to hold the top back; Mrs Aysgarth bent her wrist so that Nina could get at it. Nina stepped back to see the overall effect and was pleased at the small slash of red amongst the greens, tellows and browns of Mrs Aysgath’s outfit.

As Charley and Nina had both decided to work in acrylics, it was convenient that there were two easels available. Charley was doing a straightforward painting on board to get more practice ahead of the forthcoming mock exam for her A-level art course, so she simply used her mother’s normal setup. Nina had something more ambitious in mind, an extension of a technique that she had been experimenting with at home. She started by taping a large piece of tracing paper to a white board and mounting it on a spare easel.

All four girls worked away in silence for some time.

“You know, wavy hair is really quite hard to do manga-style,” Patsy remarked, sounding exasperated with herself. She was doing experimental sketches on a small drawing pad before applying the results to her main drawing. An accumulation of screwed up paper was building up under her table. She was still working in pencil and hadn’t even touched her pens yet.

By contrast, Jen-Jen was powering through a whole series of rapid drawings. “Could I borrow your big coloured pens, Patsy,” she asked. “I’d like to try flat colour instead of scribbly colour on a few of these.”

“Go ahead,” her sister invited. “I won’t be needing them for ages yet.”

Charley was wearing a pair of headphones to blot out room noise and was working steadily, glancing at the clock from time to time. Her acrylic style was very different from her mother’s, using broad brushes and a palette knife to build up a deeply-textured impasto on the art board. Her strategy was to apply a series of refinements to the whole of the picture, so that once she was past the beginning stages, no part of the painting would be significantly less finished than any other. This was her insurance policy against running out of time under exam conditions.

Nina had done a quick drawing first in pencil then in black marker pen, deliberately very sketchy in appearance and carefully not overworked it. Once she was satisfied with her progress, she removed the tracing paper from the backing board and carried it across to the window, where she taped it to the glass.

“If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, you should know that we have a lightbox upstairs in our work room. Would that help?” Patsy asked.

“Is it big enough?” Nina asked.

“It’s a bit bigger than A2, maybe 45 by 60 centimetres, so your paper should fit.”

“In that case, it sounds perfect.”

“Come upstairs with me and I’ll show you,” Patsy invited.

The two girls went upstairs and returned a few minutes later, Nina carrying the lightbox and Patsy its power cord. The lightbox was lit by white LEDs inside, so it was less than a centimetre thick and not at all heavy. Nina was about to put it down on a table when it dawned on her that it could probably be clamped to the easel she was using as if it was a piece of art board. She quickly switched the backing board for the lightbox, taped her tracing paper to it and then a sheet of thick white watercolour paper on top. When the light was switched on, her drawing was just sufficiently visible for the next stage of her work. The bright border where the paper didn’t quite reach the edges of the lightbox was a little distracting, but easily cured with a few strips of black gaffer tape.

Nina squeezed out a selection of acrylics onto one of the white china plates that Mrs Aysgarth used as palettes. She deliberately chose to exaggerate the intensity of the colours in Mrs Aysgarth’s clothes as she mixed her colours. Using the line drawing behind her paper as a guide and working quickly with quite broad brushes, Nina blocked in the colours using bold strokes to bring out the drama of a woman helplessly bound to a chair and gagged. She deliberately avoided building up a thick layer of paint, both so that it would dry quickly and so that she would have a reasonably smooth surface to draw on.

Jen-Jen changed her position several times, sometimes sitting on the floor, sometimes standing or perched on a stool. She did a whole series of rapid drawings from each angle. Nina noticed that she would occasionally remove a page from her pad and set it aside rather than simply folding it over the back. She guessed that these might be the ones that Jen-Jen thought were her most successful efforts.

Patsy seemed to have got over her initial frustration and was working away steadily in pen, systematically rubbing out her initial pencil sketch as she developed the linework.

Charley had an air of grim determination as she worked. She had two separate palettes of colours in use and at least six brushes. Nina could only see the back of Charley’s art board from where she was standing. She would have liked to sneak a look at Charley’s technique but didn’t want to disturb her.

A little over an hour into their agreed two and a half hours, Nina realised that she had probably finished the colour phase of her painting. She turned off the lightbox to see how the paint looked without the reference drawing. It was actually quite hard to tell how successful the finished work would be, but she trusted her instinct to add a few touches of colour. She tentatively tested the paint surface with a fingertip; other than the paint she had just applied, there were very few seriously sticky areas. She judged that another ten minutes or so would be sufficient before she attacked the paint surface with marker pens and decided that it would be sensible to clean her brushes and palette while she was waiting.

Nina gathered up her used brushes, the plate she had been using as a palette and the now rather dirty tumbler of water she had been using for brush cleaning. She made her way towards the door, carefully stepping over Jen-Jen and around Patsy and was working out how to open it with both hands full when it opened to reveal Jo.

“I’m free!” Jo announced dramatically, if a little unnecessarily. She looked a little flushed and several strands of hair were stuck to her forehead with sweat, but otherwise she looked none the worse for her efforts.

“Wow,” said Nina, at a loss for anything indeed.

“Wow, indeed,” Charley echoed. “I really didn’t think you’d get out of that.”

“Umm, I wasn’t sure either,” Jo confessed. “I’m glad you filmed it though.”

“Did you stop the recording?” Charley asked.

“Yes, but I haven’t moved the computer or the camera.”

“I’ll do that later – we can watch the footage at lunch time.”

“I’ll look forward to seeing it,” Jo said, “but right now I need a long bath and a hair wash.”

There was a chorus of “Bye” and “See you later” as Jo left the room.

Nina took the opportunity to leave the studio, pulling the door shut behind her with one finger. As she washed her brushes and palette in the small bathroom next to the studio, she could hear Jo running a bath in the larger bathroom directly above her.

Before returning to her painting, Nina took a quick look into the kitchen. The chair that Jo had been tied to was still there, now surrounded by a tangle of discarded ropes and the scarves that had been used to gag and blindfold her.

Back in the studio, Nina paused to take a surreptitious look at Charley’s painting. She was very impressed: the drama inherent in the subject matter was brought out by vigorous brushwork and quite thick paint. Nina noticed that there were some quite surprising colours in the painting when she looked at individual brush strokes, but that they somehow still suggested natural colour, a technique Charley had presumably learned from her mother.

Nina moved back to her own easel to avoid distracting Charley, who was now fully focussed on her work again. Looking at her own work, after Charley’s, Nina wondered if she had been just too conservative in her use of colour, but decided that trying to change it now would be the way to disaster.

With the lightbox switched on again, Nina started on the linework for her painting. She had three thicknesses of black marker pen to work with: a fine-pointed one which was actually meant to be a laundry marker, a medium-sized bullet-pointed pen and an enormous one with a wedge-shaped point. All three contributed a heady whiff of xylene to the atmosphere in the studio. She tried to avoid simply tracing her initial drawing, trying instead to recapture the energy of her earlier work, by drawing Mrs Aysgarth from observation again, as if from scratch, with reference to her earlier drawing just to get the lines in roughly the right place. The roughness of the painted paper and the awkwardness of the larger pens tended to hamper the freedom of line she wanted but, as she drawing progressed, she was pleased to see it develop in much the way she had hoped.

Nina had completely ignored the ropes binding Mrs Aysgarth in the painted layer, she sketched them in as part of the drawn layer on top, but with no indication of the white web that the rope formed. After thinking for several minutes, Nina rummaged in her art box and took out a white paint pen, like a thick market pen, but loaded with acrylic paint. She shook it vigorously to mix the paint before using it.

“Sorry folks,” Nina said as the rattling sound from the ball bearing inside the paint pen made everyone look at her.

Nina sketched in a few white streaks among the black to bring out the ropework and to emphasise Mrs Aysgarth’s helpless predicament.

About three-quarters of an hour after starting the pen layer, Nina felt that she was in danger of over-working the painting. She capped her pens and stepped back from the easel. There were a few areas it was tempting to tidy up, but she was painfully aware from previous mistakes that tidiness often comes at the expense of destroying the liveliness of a picture. On balance, she decided that she had finished and signed the picture neatly in the lower right corner: NINA M in capitals, which she had adopted as it was easy to do with a brush, consisting entirely of straight lines.

Jen-Jen appeared to have stopped too. She gathered together the dozen or so drawings she had set aside and studied them critically. She discarded two of them then signed the rest with her characteristic signature: Jen with an exaggerated bar across the top of the J and jen again immediately below with no bar on the J.

“I think I’m done too,” Patsy said, putting down the marker pens that she had used to colour her drawing. She propped it up and stepped back to look at it afresh. Satisfied, she took a black pen and signed it rather formally as Patricia Aysgarth.

“I’ll just stop now if everyone else is,” Charley said. “I’ve just been fiddling and tweaking for the last five minutes or so and I know I’ll muck it up if I do too much of that.”

“It isn’t half past twelve yet,” Patsy pointed out. “Maybe we should just leave Mum for another ten minutes before we let her go?”

A snarl of protest from behind Mrs Aysgarth’s gag made her opinion on the matter quite clear.

“OK, let’s get you out of this then,” Charley said as she untied her mother’s gag.

“Thank you,” Mrs Aysgarth said once she had her voice working again. “This isn’t really uncomfortable as tie-ups go, but it’s stopped being fun, if you see what I mean.”

All three girls nodded their understanding as they worked at untying the ropes.

Five minutes later, Mrs Aysgarth was able to stand up a little stiffly. “I hope your pictures are good enough to make that worthwhile,” she said.

Charley’s painting was the nearest so it received the first inspection. “That’s a lot of painting to get done in two and a bit hours,” Mrs Aysgarth commented. “It looks like that technique is working out well for you.”

“It seems to be quite reliable with all the practice I’ve put in,” Charley replied. “I’ll have three hours in the actual exam, so I’m trying to make sure I leave myself some thinking time.”

“Well, if you can deliver that quality under exam conditions, I don’t think you have much to worry about,” her mother commented.

Patsy’s drawing was next. It was a bold ink drawing done Japanese manga style and coloured in with broad Pantone markers.

“I like that,” Mrs Aysgarth said. “It still looks like me, even though you’ve made me into a comic book character.”

“The hair was hard,” Patsy pointed out.

“I gathered that from the muttering that was going on. I wondered how you were going to do greying hair in flat colour, but it’s worked out well.”

Patsy had used a mid-grey as the main hair colour with a much ligher grey for the highlights and a muted brown for the shadows.

Jen-Jen had gone for a cartoonish approach. All of her drawings were in solid black line done with a black felt pen. Shading was done sparingly, either what she called ‘scribbly shading’, produced with the same cheap pens, or flat shading done with the professional marker pens she had borrowed from Patsy. There were a variety of views of her subjects, including several angles of Mrs Aysgarth, some of her sisters and Nina at work on their drawings and one of the whole group in which she had also included herself. Some of her drawings had just very slightly exaggerated features, others had gone all the way to outright caricature. In one she had drawn Nina in a characteristic pose raised up onto her toes and with her neck slightly stretched to see over her easel and to compensate for her own lack of height, a pose that Nina herself referred to as ‘doing the meerkat thing’. In another drawing, Jen-Jen had captured the same pose but drawn Nina as an actual meerkat. The drawings illustrated Jen-Jen’s talent for achieving a likeness with few lines: all the drawings were instantly recognisable as their subjects, even the one with Nina as a meerkat.

“Sorry, Nina, but I couldn’t resist,” Jen-Jen said.

“That’s what I get for calling myself a meerkat,” Nina replied with a smile. “And it’s much too good a cartoon to object to.”

“Jen-Jen can find the humour in just about any scene,” Mrs Aysgarth commented. “Her group drawing is priceless – fat woman tied to a chair and gagged and being drawn by four kids.”

Jen-Jen beamed with pleasure at the comments.

“Now Nina,” Mrs Aysgarth said, moving on to the last picture.

“I wanted to do the same sort of thing you can do with ink and wash but in a more robust medium,” Nina explained.

“You’ve certainly done that – it’s ink and wash on steroids,” Mrs Aysgarth commented. “Is this the first time you’ve used this technique?”

“Almost” Nina replied. “I did a smaller try-out at home when I thought of it, but it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. There doesn’t seem to be a way of avoiding doing the drawing twice and it’s hard to keep the final drawn layer as lively as the first.”

“It was a good thought of Patsy’s to find the lightbox for you.”

“It made the whole process a lot easier and I might even have got away with slightly thicker paper.”

“Paint on paper is never terribly satisfactory, but I can mount it on board for you when it’s hardened off a bit if you like.”

Nina got as far as “Yes, please,” but was interrupted by the arrival of Mr Aysgarth in the studio.

“I thought you’d still be tied up, Lizzie,” he said.

“I think I got time off for good behaviour.”

“Not that you had much scope to misbehave the way I left you tied up.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Mrs Aysgarth replied with a remarkably dirty laugh.

Mr Aysgarth blinked at the comment but merely said, “Lunch in about fifteen minutes if that suits everyone.”

“Time to tidy the studio and freshen up, then, girls,” Mrs Aysgarth said.

* * *


Nina took a little longer than she expected to tidy up her area and to return the lightbox to the girls’ work room where it belonged so, by the time she had used the bathroom, she was the last to arrive in the kitchen for lunch.

The food was Mr Aysgath’s work and consisted of a large bowl of chilli in the middle of the table with taco shells, tortillas, sour cream and a fresh salsa as accompaniments. Nina lost no time in catching up with the others in serving herself.

“Looks good,” Nina commented as she spooned chilli onto her plate. “I’ve never seen such tiny kidney beans.”

“They’re adzuki beans,” Mr Aysgarth explained. “Charley doesn’t like kidney beans, so I use these instead.”

“So is that a reliable way of telling you two apart?” Nina asked, grinning at the twins.

Before they could answer, Nina wrinkled her brow then said, “You’ve done it again, haven’t you? You’ve swapped clothes.”

One of the twins was dressed exactly as Nina had last seen Charley with a thick patterned grey v-necked sweater over a thinner brown roll-neck with matching tights and a blue skirt. The other one was wearing a blue and grey striped round-necked sweater over a black roll-neck sweater. She also had woollen tights matching her inner sweater and a grey checked skirt.

“She’s getting good,” Charley (in the striped sweater) commented to her sister.

“We’ll have to try harder,” Jo (in the Icelandic patterned sweater) replied. “What gave us away?”

“You washed your hair after your escape and it’s not quite dry,” Nina explained.

“Damn,” Jo said, feeling her hair and grinning ruefully. “We definitely have to try harder.”

“If you happen to have a bowl of chilli with kidney beans handy then it’s a pretty accurate way to tell us apart,” Charley confirmed, answering Nina’s original question.

“Not the most practical way, possibly,” Mrs Aysgarth pointed out.

“Do we get to see Jo’s escape?” Patsy asked, pointing at Charley’s laptop, which had been moved from its previous position but was still in the kitchen.

“OK to show it now?” Charley asked her parents.

“Yes, go ahead,” Mr Aysgarth replied. “I think we’d all like to see how she did it.”

Charley set the laptop at one end of the table and Mrs Aysgarth moved her chair so that she could see the screen. Charley resumed her seat one she had the video running.

“You probably ought to speed it up,” Jo suggested. “It took me ages to get going and well over an hour to get free.”

Charley leaned forwards and set the video to double then quadruple speed. Jo’s struggles became apparent as her movements took on the appearance of frantic twitching on her chair.

“Jump forward a bit,” Jo told her sister. “I think it must have been about 45 minutes before I really got a grip on the escape, but I couldn’t see the time because of the blindfold.”

Charley stepped the video to the 15 and then 30 minute mark with no apparent change in Jo’s situation. She advanced the video in 5 minute steps at the 55 minute mark, Jo had one hand free, so Charley backed it up by 5 minutes. Playing at double speed, the action didn’t look too frenetic while still allowing the video to be watched in reasonable time. Jo’s right hand appeared from behind her back at about 52 minutes she then spent some time apparently trying to reach her gag.

“I wasted a lot of time there,” Jo commented. “I was sure I would make better progress if I could only get the blindfold off. I could just get a fingertip to my gag, but I couldn’t shift it and I can see now that the blindfold was well out of reach.”

Jo’s free hand disappeared behind her back again and there was nothing to see on the video apart from small movements of her upper body.

“I really should have put the camera behind you,” Charley said regretfully. “All the interesting stuff is happening out of sight.”

“You might as well speed it up a bit,” Jo recommended. “It took me ages to get my other hand free.”

Charley did as her sister suggested and everyone watched as Jo’s image on the screen continued to make small movements of her arms and body, presumably working on the knots hidden behind her back. At last, her left arm came into view. Jo repeated the process of trying to reach her blindfold but with her left hand this time and was as unsuccessful as before.

“Having your upper arms tied to the chair in two places like that is really restricting,” Jo pointed out.

On screen, Jo’s hands disappeared behind her back again and the movements of her arms continued. It was apparent within a short time that the ropes securing her arms were loosening.

“Down to normal speed now,” Jo suggested. “Everything happens fairly quickly from here on.”

On the computer screen, the movements of Jo’s arms were becoming more distinct as she gained a greater range of freedom. The lower band of rope around her arms and chest was the first to come away completely as she pulled the rope through the knots from behind. It was fascinating to watch the free end of the rope run across her body as each successive turn was pulled away. The cinches holding upper band of rope came away next and Jo was able to lift the now loosened coil over her head. With her arms completely free, she was at last able to remove her blindfold and gag.

“That was a relief, I can tell you,” Jo said.

The Jo on screen looked around and spotted the camera. She gave it a thumbs-up and a cheery wave before proceeding to untie the rest of her bonds methodically, staring with her waist rope and working downwards to her ankles. Once she was completely free, she walked towards the camera and stopped the recording.

There was a clatter of applause around the table, which Jo acknowledged with a bow of the head.

“I wish I could do that,” Nina said. “I’ve been failing to escape from what my mum call an easy-peasy chair tie for about two weeks now.”

“Vital survival tactic with a sister like mine,” Jo pointed out with a grin directed at Charley. “I learned to do this after she tied me up to stop me finishing with Eric.”

“I think your boyfriends are safe from any further depredations from that direction,” Mrs Aysgarth said.

“I’m not sure I’m that interested in boys anyway,” Jo commented.

There was a sudden hush around the table and several members of the Aysgarth family exchanged glances.

“Jocasta Elizabeth Aysgarth, did you just come out?” Charley asked, not unkindly but with a broad grin on her face.

“I might have done?” Jo replied, making it sound like a question.

“That would explain a thing or two about you,” Charley observed, giving her sister a hug.

“But what about Eric?” Patsy asked.

“We went to the cinema a few times and hung out together and drank an awful lot of coffee but I didn’t do any kissing and cuddling when I was with him,” Jo explained.

“But I did,” Charley said, her eyes wide with surprise.

“Poor Eric,” Jo said after a long pause. “He must have thought he was going out with Jekyll and Hyde.”

“Maybe we should have briefed each other on that too,” Charley said.

“So, what about girls?” Patsy asked, pursuing her line of questioning.

“Not so far,” Jo said.

“Cough,” said Charley, saying the word rather than actually coughing. “What about Effie Lazenby?”

“Effie? OMG, that did get a bit sweaty,” admitted Jo, “but I didn’t really think of it like... er... like that.”

“Hmm...” Charley said thoughtfully.

“You don’t seem very surprised, Mum,” Jo said.

“I’m not,” Mrs Aysgarth replied. “Like Charley said, this really does explain quite a lot.”

“Dad?”

“I’m not really surprised either,” Mr Aysgarth admitted. “And this could be another way to tell our twin daughters apart.”

There was laughter all round as the family and Nina digested the implications of Mr Aysgath’s comment.

“Hen-ry!” Mrs Aysgarth warned, pronouncing her husband’s name as two distinct syllable, but entirely failing to keep a straight face.

The only one who hadn’t joined in the laughter was Jen-Jen. “I’m a bit confused here,” she said. “What just happened?”

“Let’s have a chat about it after lunch,” Jo suggested kindly. “Just you and me. I’ll do my best to explain and you can asks me any questions.”

“Isn’t she a little young for that?” Mr Aysgarth asked.

“Nonsense, Henry,” his wife replied. “She’s got three big sisters. I doubt if there’s much she doesn’t know already.”

Jen-Jen looked a little embarrassed as she nodded her head to confirm her mother’s opinion.

“So you’re learning to be an escape artist too?” Jo asked Nina, diplomatically changing the subject.

“Yes, my mum is really good at escaping and I asked her to teach me too.” Nina went on to explain that she was now fairly adept at getting out of a simple wrists and ankles tie, with her hands palm-to-palm and cinched. She went on to describe the ‘easy-peasy chair tie’ which had so far defeated her: wrists tied behind the backrest of the chair, rope around upper arms and body and the chair back, ankles and knees tied to the chair legs.

Jo clarified a few points then asked, “Have you tried escaping with rope around your arms and chest but not tied to a chair?”

“Not since I’ve been trying to learn escapology,” Nina replied.

“Fancy giving it a try?” Charley asked. “If you like, I could tie you up while Jo is having her chat with Jen-Jen.”

“I don’t have to be home till tea-time, so why not?” Nina said.

* * *


A few minutes after helping to clear up the lunch things, Patsy, Charley and Nina went to the bedroom that Patsy shared with Jen-Jen while Jo too Jen-Jen to the room she shared with Charley for their discussion.

“Let’s see an escape that you definitely can do first,” Charley suggested.

Nina allowed Charley to tie her wrists behind her back, using the binding that her mother used: three turns of rope around the wrists with the hands palm-to-palm followed by three cinching turns between them. Her legs were tied with two similar bindings at the ankles and just below the knees.

Perching on the edge of a chair to allow a good view, Nina demonstrated how she could force the rope to tighten on one wrist, allowing enough slack on the other one for her to progressively work her hand free. Within five minutes, she had full use of her hands and was able to untie her legs.

“I suspect that’s not quite as easy as it looks,” Charley observed.

“It’s really quick when it works, but sometimes I just can’t get out,” Nina admitted, “and this is the only wrist tie I can escape from so far.”

“Except when you’re tied to a chair,” Patsy pointed out.

“Except then,” Nina agreed.

Just then Jen-Jen and Jo came into the room.

“Hard questions answered?” Charley asked, giving her little sister a hug.

Jen-Jen nodded her head but Jo commented, “I think I may have more questions than she does – I’m still not sure which team I play for.”

“You’re still my sister, no matter what,” Charley said, including Jo in the hug.

“So how’s she doing?” Jo asked, obviously referring to Nina.

“Very good,” Charley replied enthusiastically. She went on to describe the escape that Nina had just performed.

“So, let’s try the same thing again, but with rope around here,” Jo suggested, indicating a line across her chest just below her bust.

“I’ll do the tying,” Charley said. “I know how Nina likes it now.”

While her sisters looked on, Charley tied Nina’s wrists ankles and knees in exactly the same way as she had before then added a band of rope wrapped four times around Nina’s chest and arms and knotted at the front.

“How does that feel?” Jo asked moving a chair so that she could sit down.

“About as tight as Mum ties it when she ties me to a chair,” Nina confirmed.

“Do you usually get gagged or blindfolded for escape practice?” Charley asked.

“Almost always gagged, sometimes blindfolded.”

“Blindfold is easy,” said Charley, pulling Nina’s knitted headband down over her eyes.

“I’ll find a gag,” Patsy offered.

“It ought to be black to go with Nina’s all-black outfit,” Jo pointed out.

“Are these too thin?” Patsy asked, holding up a pair of lightweight black knee-length socks.

“Should be OK,” Charley said, holding out a hand to take them. She balled one sock up and pushed it into Nina’s mouth then used its partner as a cleave gag to hold it in place.

“We ought to move her onto the floor for safety,” Jo suggested.

Charley and Jo lifted Nina off the chair she had been sitting on to be tied and laid her on the carpet.

“OK, you can start now,” Jo said.

Nina acknowledged the invitation with a grunt and started twisting her hands to manipulate the slack in the rope.

Charley moved the now vacant chair so that it was beside her twin sister’s chair and sat down. Patsy and Jen-Jen watched from the vantage point of Jen-Jen’s bed, the lower of the pair of bunk beds they shared.

It didn’t take many minutes for Nina to realise that she was in trouble. The trick of finding slack in the binding at the expense of tightening it on one wrist just didn’t seem to work. She guessed that it must be because her elbows were held tightly to her sides, restricting her freedom to twist her hands. She was determined not to let her audience down, so she persisted in trying to manipulate the binding to her advantage. She tried as many strategies as she could think of to work her hands loose, but to no avail. All the while the clock was ticking on, well past the five minutes or so that was all the time she usually needed to escape from a simple wrist tie.

After what seemed like an age of fruitless struggling, Nina abandoned her efforts and rolled onto her back. She tried to tell the Aysgarth sisters that she was giving up and asked to be released. It came out as an unintelligible mumble, but she hoped that her meaning would nevertheless be clear. She waited for helping hands to untie her, but nothing happened.

Several minutes later it was painfully obvious to Nina that no-one was going to untie her and that if she wanted to get free she would have to do it herself. She resumed her struggle with the rope around her wrists, but it was obviously futile and she gave up after a few more minutes.

After pausing to consider her situation, Nina remembered that she had escaped from a tie-up very like this some while previously. The rope around her arms and chest was not cinched, so it ought to be possible to work it up to her shoulders as she had done on that previous occasion. She started pushing outwards first with one elbow then with the other, trying to persuade the rope to slide upwards. It was desperately slow work, but Nina could feel the pressure on her arms climb progressively towards her shoulders. After what seemed an eternity of struggling, one final push outwards with both elbows persuaded the rope to slide the last couple of centimetres up over the curve of Nina’s shoulders to hang loose around her neck.

With the rope securing her arms now effectively off, Nina waited for a helping hand to lift the now useless coil of rope away, but she waited in vain. Clearly, she was expected to do this entirely on her own.

Nina rolled herself onto her front and worked her knees towards her head until her bottom was in the air and her upper body weight was supported on her forehead. At that point, it only required a shake of her shoulders to dump the rope into a loose coil on the floor. She rolled over onto one side and was completely free of it.

After a pause to refocus her concentration, Nina started on what was now a straightforward escape exactly the same as the one she had earlier demonstrated to Charley. The only difference was that her wrists were both feeling quite tender after her earlier fruitless escape attempt. Once again, it took her about five minutes to get her hands free. She pushed herself up into a sitting position and lifted her headband off her eyes. As she untied her gag, Nina looked around at what now seemed to be a completely deserted room.

“Where is everyone?” Nina asked as she leaned forwards to untie her legs.

Patsy’s head appeared over the edge of the upper bunk bed. “Sorry, you were taking so long that the twins got bored watching and went off to do something else instead.”

“And you went up there?”

“Um, yes,” Patsy admitted. “I’m reading a book to pass the time.”

“What about Jen-Jen?”

“Should be on her bed.”

Nina stood up and looked at the lower bunk. Sure enough, Jen-Jen was there, lying on her stomach. Her wrists were tied behind her back with her hands palm-to-palm and her legs tied with cinched bindings at the ankles and knees. She was also gagged and blindfolded with a pair of long socks. She seemed to be fast asleep.

“She wanted to have a go at escaping too,” Patsy explained. “Having watched you escape earlier, she thought it looked fairly easy and she asked to be tied up the same way, so Jo and Charley obliged.”

“She seems to have dozed off.”

“I thought she was a bit quiet,” Patsy said as she climbed down the ladder from her bunk. She studied her sister for a moment then asked, “So how easy is it to get out of that?”

“Well, I’ve had a bit of practice now, but it’s taken me less than a month to get as good as I am now,” Nina explained.

“Could you tie me up like that?”

“Are you sure? It’ll probably take you ages to get free the first time you try, and I was planning to head home soon.”

“That’s OK,” Patsy assured her friend. “If I’m really stuck, one of the others will find me eventually and untie me.”

“Could be a long wait,” Nina pointed out.

Patsy answered by turning her back on Nina and offering her hands behind her back to be tied.

“You ought to have gloves to protect your wrists from the rope.”

Patsy found a pair of gloves and held her hands out again. Nina used the length of rope that had been used on her own wrists to tie Patsy’s then, after helping her sit on the floor, tied her ankles and knees.

“How’s that?” Nina asked.

“Quite exciting, knowing that I have a chance to get loose if I can do what you did.”

“So, all right if I leave you like that?”

“No,” protested Patsy. “You haven’t gagged and blindfolded me yet.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes – you’ll find socks in the third drawer from the top over there.” Patsy nodded in the direction of a chest of drawers.

Nina found a pair of medium-weight knee-length socks and used one to form a knotted cleave gag and the other as a blindfold. “All right now?” she asked.

“Um-hum,” Patsy replied, apparently satisfied with her situation.

* * *


Leaving Patsy to struggle with her ropes, Nina knocked on the door of the room that she knew Jo and Charley shared. “It’s Nina,” she announced.

“Come in,” a voice invited.

Nina let herself into the room, which was considerably more spacious than Patsy and Jen-Jen’s room, with space for two separate single beds. Both girls were lying on their beds. Jo was propped up on a pillow, reading a book while Charley was face-down with her wrists tied behind her back and her ankles and knees tied.

“Everybody’s getting tied up today,” Nina commented then went on to tell Jo that she was planning to head back home and that Patsy and Jen-Jen were both currently bound and gagged in their bedroom.

“I think they’re all just discovering that your escape trick isn’t as easy as it looks,” Jo said. “Charley got fidgety waiting for you to to do your second escape and said she could probably do it quicker than you. I know how hard escaping can be, so I challenged her to prove it.”

Nina went to have a closer look at Charley. She was tied up exactly the way Nina had been with her hands palm-to-palm, ankles and knees bound and cinched and a coil of rope around her arms and chest. She was gagged and blindfolded with a pair of black legwarmers.

“And?” Nina prompted.

“And you’re free while she’s still tied up – Nina one, Charley nil.”

“It didn’t quite work out as I hoped,” Nina admitted, going on to explain how she had to work the chest rope up over her head to escape.

“So your plan B worked, but she’s still stuck, so don’t knock it.” Jo nodded towards her bound and gagged twin sister to make her point.

“I’d like to get as good at escaping as you are,” Nina said.

“Be careful what you wish for – it might come true,” Jo advised.

“What’s wrong with being good at escaping?”

“I used to enjoy tie up games a lot, but it spoils things if you can get out of almost anything your sisters can do to you.”

“Isn’t there any way to keep you tied up?”

“Duct tape or handcuffs, but that’s not as nice as rope. Basically if I can wriggle into a position where I can reach a knot, I’ll be free eventually.”

Nina regarded this as a challenge. She thought for a moment then asked, “Have you got any string handy?”

“There’s that,” Jo replied, pointing at a ball of green garden twine sitting on top of a chest of drawers.

“That’s what your mum used on me yesterday?”

“Yes – Charley and I thought of reproducing the tie-up she did on you, but we haven’t got around to it yet.”

“If you like, I think I might just be able to tie your hands with that so you can’t get out,” Nina offered.

“Please do try,” Jo replied enthusiastically, closing her book.

“The string will be a bit rough on your skin. Have you got a pair of mittens that aren’t too thick?”

Jo stood up, opened a wardrobe door and pulled a pair of dark brown woollen mittens out of the pockets of a coat. “These?”

“Perfect.”

Jo put the mittens on, pulling hem up over the cuffs of her sweater, and turned her back to Nina, who had found a pair of scissors with the string. She wound the green twine around Jo’s wrists about a dozen times then secured it with a tiny reef knot and trimmed the loose ends. She had left a gap of about a centimetre between the older girl’s wrists. Using a separate length of string, Nina formed a cinch around the binding, again using about a dozen turns, pulling it snug but not overly tight around her friend’s wrists.

“Hands flat together now,” Nina prompted.

Jo pressed her palms together and Nina used more string to lash her thumbs together just above the knuckles and then to cinch that binding. She deliberately left long tails of string loose, which she then tied to the cinch on the main wrist binding.

“How’s that?” Nina asked.

“Cunning,” Jo replied. “I can’t do a thing with my hands, so I think I’m probably stuck.”

“I’ll use rope for the rest – it’s quicker,” Nina said.

Nina tied Jo’s legs at the ankles and below the knees, using cinched rope bindings then put four turns of rope around her arms and chest just above elbow level.

“You’ve found some more rope from somwhere,” Nina commented. “Your mum was complaining about running out yesterday.”

“Dad found some more in the garage,” Jo explained. “We seem to have quite a large stock now.”

“So, how does it all feel now?” Nina asked.

“Very secure – you’re good at this.”

“I’ve been taught well,” Nina explained. “You know my cousin Theda, don’t you?”

“Theda Wolf-Bassenthwaite? Yes, she was a couple of years above me at school. She was more Charley’s friend than mine, both being artists, but I’ve kept in touch and I’ve bought stuff from her mum’s shop. I didn’t know she was your cousin.”

“Really just an honorary cousin,” Nina conceded, “but she’s really good at... well, at...”

“Tying people up?”

“Yes – it just sounded a bit weird putting it as bluntly as that,” Nina said with a laugh. “Now you’re tied up, do you want a gag and a blindfold as well?” she added.

“Yes, please – I’m not properly tied up until I’m gagged,” Jo replied firmly.

“What should I use?”

“Look on the shelves on the right inside the wardrobe. You’ll find some old scarves there and there are hankies in the top drawer over there.” Jo indicated the direction with a nod of her head.

Nina retieved two rather stretched looking woollen scarves, one brown and the other grey. Both were quite short and had presumably been used for their intended purpose when the twins were much younger. “Looks like these have had quite heavy use,” she commented.

Jo just smiled in reply before opening her mouth to accept the wadded-up handkerchief. Nina pulled the grey scarf between her friend’s teeth and knotted it behind her head then blindfolded her with the brown one. She helped Jo lie face-down on her bed then said, “I’ll tell your mum where you are.”

* * *


Nina went back downstairs and started putting her outdoor clothes on. She intended to look for Mrs Aysgarth before leaving, but was pre-empted by Mrs Aysgarth finding her.

“Aren’t any of the girls seeing you off?” she asked.

Nina explained that all four the Aysgarth girls were currently tied up in their bedrooms and admitted that she had personally tied two of them up.

“That would explain why the house is so quiet and peaceful,” Mrs Aysgarth commented with a smile. “I’ll let them stew for half an hour or so and then see if any of them want to be turned loose.”

Nina thanked Mrs Aysgarth then went on her way, cycling home in the rapidly fading late afternoon light.
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Soraka
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Post by Soraka »

Nina and the Lodger Part 5: Back to School (again)

Nina pedalled her bicycle back from the Aysgarths house, wondering how long the four Aysgarth sisters would remain tied up. The snow flurries that had made her journey so unpleasant that morning had stopped and the sky had cleared to a deep navy blue with the brighter stars already visible as the afternoon faded into evening. It was bone-chillingly cold but Nina was quite comfortable with every last square millimetre of skin covered and goggles protecting her eyes.

Arriving home, Nina parked her bicycle (actually her mother’s mountain bike that she had borrowed for the day) in the garage and let herself into the house through the kitchen door. She quickly shed her outer layers of clothing. Her transparent jelly boots, her yellow cycling jacket, her black waterproof trousers and her cycle helmet all went into the hall cupboard. She left her mittens and black ski mask at the bottom of the stairs to take up when next she went to her bedroom.

Now dressed in sweater, leggings and socks, all in black, with a knitted headband covering her ears, Nina went in search of her mother. She followed the quiet keyboarding sounds to the dining room, her mother’s accustomed workplace.

As Nina entered the room, Suzanna raised one hand for a moment then carried on working. Nina understood that this signal meant that her presence had been noted but that her mother was engaged in something that couldn’t be interrupted so she waited quietly.

A few minutes later, Suzanna turned to face her daughter. “Sorry, I didn’t want to derail my train of though there. How was your day?”

“Fun, but weird,” Nina replied. She went on to describe the art project where she and three of the Aysgarth girls had drawn and painted Mrs Aysgarth tied to a chair, Jo Aysgarth’s amazing escape, her own two escape efforts and, finally, leaving the Aysgarth girls bound and gagged as she went home. She showed Suzanna the photographs of various events during the day on her phone.

“I see what you mean,” her mother said at the end of the exposition. “The more you know some people, the more peculiar they turn out to be.”

“How long do you have to work this afternoon?” Nina asked.

Suzanna glanced at the clock. “It’s half past four now, so I’ll pack up at five or half past at the latest. I was thinking we might eat about half past six. Why do you ask?”

“Would you have time to tie me up so I can try the escape with my arms tied to my sides again?”

“You’ve already had a hard time escaping from that today,” Suzanna replied. “Let’s see the state of your wrists.”

Nina pulled off her black fingerless gloves and pushed back the sleeves of her sweater. There didn’t appear to be any actual bruising, but there were angry red marks on both wrists.

“Upper arms in the same state?” Suzanna asked.

“I haven’t looked but they are a bit sore,” Nina admitted.

“In that case, the answer is definitely no. You’ve got school tomorrow and I don’t want you turning up with rope marks.”

“I can make sure I keep my gloves on all day,” Nina suggested.

“The answer is still no. You can’t be sure you won’t have to take them off for some reason and I don’t want a phone call from school telling me my daughter appears to have been tied up and do I know about this.”

“The answer to that would be ‘yes’,” Nina pointed out.

“Exactly – that’s why I don’t want to be asked.”

Nina’s face fell. “After I tied up Jo Aysgarth, I was quite looking forward to a bit more tie-up myself.”

“Well...” her mother said, looking at the clock again, “I suppose we could try something that won’t hurt your wrists.”

Nina looked at the grin on her mother’s face. “You’ve obviously thought of something – is this an escape challenge?”

“Definitely a challenge; probably escapable. Come upstairs if you’re up for it.”

* * *


Nina went up to her bedroom, picking up her mittens and ski mask from the stairs on the way.

“Don’t put the balaclava away,” her mother said, entering the room. “I can think of a good use for it.”

Suzanna dumped a bundle of assorted black knitwear on Nina’s bed. “All black to go with your outfit,” she commented. “Take your thick sweater off and we’ll make a start.”

Nina wriggled out of the heavy round-necked sweater she was wearing and dumped it on the bed.

“Now hang onto your sleeves while I put these over your hands.”

Nina tucked the tops of her fingerless gloves up inside the ends of the sleeves of the thinner black roll-necked sweater she was wearing and gripped the edges of the sleeves with her finger tips. Her mother pulled a pair of black socks over her hands. They were her mother’s and ankle length so, worn on hands, they came almost up to her elbows.

“Stand with your arms down by your sides and slightly behind you,” Suzanna instructed, picking up a pair of her own black woolly tights.

“You’ve done this to me before,” Nina pointed out. “When you wrapped me up in a blanket back in September.”

“That’s right, but this time there’s no blanket.”

Suzanna worked the tights up Nina’s arms until the crotch was at her shoulders so that the waist elastic ran across the back of her neck, down in front of her arms and across her back. She bunched the ends of the legs up and pushed them into Nina’s hands, instructing her, “Hang onto those while I get your sweater back on.”

It took some effort and adjusting to get Nina’s heavy sweater back on and settled comfortably and one of the legs of the tights needed to be rescued from up inside a sleeve but eventually Nina was ready for the next stage.

“Do the straitjacket thing and I’ll fasten you at the back.”

Nina put her arms in the classic straitjacket position so that her forearms were horizontally across her front. Suzanna pulled the legs of the tights round behind her daughter’s back until she had pulled most of the stretch out of them and knotted the legs together. “There’s enough spare leg her to make it a bit more secure, but I’ll leave you with a sporting chance,” she commented.

“I know what comes next,” Nina said, moving her feet so that her legs were well apart.

Suzanna picked up a black scarf, found the centre and hung it over Nina’s arms, so that one end hung in front of her arms and the other between between her arms and body. She then took both ends back between Nina’s legs and up to the tights across her back. She knotted them together then used the feet of the tights to make the knot a little more secure and stop it slipping from side to side.

“Legs together and sit on the edge of the bed now,” Suzanna instructed.

Nina did as she was told and her mother tied her legs together at the ankles and below the knees with a pair of black legwarmers, The bindings were tight but left as simple lashings with no cinches.

“Are you sure I can escape from this?” Nina asked.

“I’m sure it’s possible to escape,” Suzanna replied with careful emphasis. “Whether or not you can escape may be different.”

“It’s a bit late for me to back out,” Nina commented cheerfully, “so I’ll just have to see how I do.”

“That’s the nature of a challenge,” her mother pointed out, then added, “Do you want some photos for your scrapbook?”

“Yes please – the camera’s in the second drawer of my desk.”

Suzanna helped Nina to stand then took several pictures of her predicament, photographing her from both front and back. “It may need some Photoshop work to bring out the detail in all this black,” she said as she showed her daughter the results on the camera’s screen.

“I’ve managed to retrieve worse than that, so it should be OK,” Nina assured her mother.

“Sit down again and I’ll do your blindfold and gag,” Suzanna instructed.

With her mother’s help, Nina sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.

“Are you going to be wearing this tomorrow?” Suzanna asked, holding up Nina’s black ski mask.

“No – I’ll wear a purple one for going to school.”

“It won’t matter if this gets a bit damp then?”

“I thought that might be what you had in mind,” Nina said, her grin answering the question.

“That’s the second time I’ve had that done to me today,” Nina commented as her mother slid her headband down over her eyes. Her ski mask came next. Its only openings were the two eye-holes, which showed nothing but the black wool of the headband. Suzanna used a black sock to pull a fold of the mask back into Nina’s mouth and knotted it behind her head. She took a few more photographs then helped her daughter lie on the bed.

“It’s just gone quarter to five,” Suzanna said. “I’ll give you until about half past six and then untie you if you’re not free by then.”

Nina heard her bedroom door close. Rather than starting her escape attempt immediately, she spent a few minutes just enjoying the sensation of being very snugly tied up.

* * *


Nina woke with a start. After a moment’s disorientation and confusion while she remembered why she was bound, gagged and blindfolded, she realised that she had no idea how long she had been asleep and how much time she had left in the hour and three-quarters that her mother had given her to escape.

More as a matter of principle than for any other reason, Nina engaged in some vigorous is undirected struggling She was not surprised that nothing loosened noticeably and that she could detect no obvious weaknesses in her bindings.

She already knew that the key to escaping from a straitjacket, even an improvised one, would be to get at least one arm up over her head to bring the knot securing her arms to the front. She also realised that the scarf between her legs was there to prevent precisely that action. Her legs were tied together, but not as securely as she would normally expect from her mother. Maybe that was deliberate and that would be the key to escaping?

Nina kicked her legs enthusiastically and soon realised that she had a good chance of kicking off the legwarmer securing her ankles. If her legs had been tied above the knees as well as below, this would have been much harder or impossible to achieve, so possibly this was a deliberate weakness in her binding.

With a few more minutes vigorous kicking, her ankles were free. She heard a soft thud as the knotted legwarmer hit the floor. With the extra freedom of movement she now had, Nina concentrated on trying to dislodge her knee binding. Once she had persuaded it to slip below the curve of her calf muscles, it was quite easy to kick it off completely.

Taking a moment to regain her breath, Nina pondered what to do next. She still couldn’t lift her arms because of the scarf between her legs, so the obvious question was whether she could make the scarf not be between her legs. The knots were behind her back and completely inaccessible so the right approach might be to see if she could get a leg through the loop under her bottom. She splayed her right leg out to the side and bent her knee so that her heel was in contact with her thigh. She probed around with her toes, regretting that she had two pairs of socks on, which serious limiting their sensitivity. Eventually, she located the scarf, but discovered it was tight against her crotch.

She relaxed her leg and pushed both arms down as far as she could. She also wriggled her way up the bed a little in the hope that these actions would work some slack into the scarf between her legs. She felt around with her toes again and was delighted to locate the scarf and find that it was relatively loose. Hooking her toes under it was a different matter, she discovered. It took many fruitless attempts before she had her foot firmly in position.

Working her leg through the loop was also harder than she anticipated. It was only thanks to Nina’s own flexibility, due partly to her weekly attendance at the school gymnastics club, that she was able to force her foot well out to her left and the inherent stretchiness of the knitted scarf contributed to her eventually being able to straighten her leg so that the loop of wool slid up to her right hip.

With her arms now free to be lifted, Nina worked the sleeves of her makeshift straitjacket up to her shoulders and was then able to get the loop of the knotted tights up over her head.

Nina had anticipated being able to undo the knot securing the legs of the tights, but it was actually quite a complicated affair involving the tights and the scarf. With her hands covered by fingerless gloves, socks and the tights, she was completely unable to manipulate the knots to separate the legs of the tights.

It was obvious that Nina would need to be able to see to get any further and that she would need to be able to use her teeth. She reached behind her head and with a great deal of fiddling, she managed to untie the double knot securing her gag. With that off, she could grab the top of her ski mask and haul it off her head. Lastly, she pushed her headband up off her eyes and then off the top of her head.

Nina took another break; it was nice to be able to breathe freely again. She glanced at her clock. It was a little before quarter to six, so she couldn’t have slept for very long before starting her escape. After a minute or two, she began work on the troublesome knot with her teeth. It took a good five minutes of steady tugging to get to the point where she could get at the initial reef knot her mother had tied to link the legs of the tights.

With her arms able to move independently, Nina wriggled out of her thick sweater then the tights over her arms. She pulled the socks off her hands then looked at the clock again. It was five to six, so she had time to take a shower and freshen up before her mother came looking for her.

* * *


It was a little after half past six when Nina came downstairs and found her mother in the kitchen.

“In your PJ’s already?” Suzanna asked.

Nina was wearing her black one-piece sleepsuit with its pattern of multicoloured stars. The sleeper had a hood and attached feet and mittens. She had the hood thrown back and the mittens folded back so that she could use her hands. In addition, Nina was wearing the black scarf that had been part of the tie-up she had just escaped from, which was wrapped around her neck and tucked down inside the sleepsuit and was wearing her black fingerless gloves. Unusually, her hair was loose.

“After I’d had a shower and washed my hair, it seemed a bit silly to get dressed again,” Nina explained.

“And all bundled up in a scarf. I thought you’d be feeling warm after your shower.”

“I got a bit chilly when I was drying my hair – I wasn’t actually wearing anything at all at that stage,” Nina admitted. “I just felt like being really cosy – I’ve got woolly tights and a thin sweater on under this. What’s for tea?”

“I though Yorkshire rarebit would be good for a winter evening.”

‘Yorkshire rarebit’ was Suzanna’s variation on the classic Welsh rarebit toasted cheese dish, but substituting Wensleydale cheese for cheddar and Henderson’s Relish for Worcester sauce.

Nina inspected the bowl of grated cheese and other ingredients already mixed. “Perfect choice,” she commented.

“Poached egg on top?”

“Cholesterol special! – but yes please.”

“OK, you mastermind the toast and I’ll poach a couple of eggs,” Suzanna suggested.

The two of them worked together happily and eventually carried the end product through to the dining room: crisp toast topped with golden brown toasted cheese and a soft poached egg with mugs of tea to accompany it.

They ate in contented silence for a few minutes, then Suzanna said, “I met your friend Chloé Badelaine today.”

“About the spare room?”

“Yes, she phoned not long after you left to see Patsy this morning and I suggested that she came round to see the room and discuss arrangements.”

“And?”

“And she came round about twelve o’clock,” Suzanna replied. “She doesn’t take any chances when it cones to staying warm, does she?”

“Well bundled up?”

“Very – I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone wearing three scarves before.”

“Three?” echoed Nina in astonishment, despite being well aware of Miss Badelaine’s dress habits.

“She was wearing a shiny black PVC raincoat with an enormous black scarf around her neck and with the ends tucked through her belt at the front. She was wearing a sort of black woolly hood thing with a pom-pom on the back and had a bright red scarf wrapped across her face and down inside her coat. When she took the coat off, she had about three layers of sweater on under it with an extra scarf tucked down inside them.”

“Shorts and woolly tights too?”

“Shorts and a lot of woolly layers. She took off her Doc Martens and legwarmers to come into the house, which I though was very considerate of her, and there were overknee socks and tights or leggings underneath.”

“That sounds fairly typical,” Nina said with a grin. “What did you think of her?”

“Eccentric, but a lovely young woman,” her mother replied. “I like her a lot.”

“Did she like the room?”

“She declared it was ‘un délice’.”

Nina frowned. “Delicious?” she ventured.

“I think it means ‘a delight’,” Suzanna said.

“So she might take it?”

“We had quite a long discussion about rent and domestic arrangements, but I think we had already both made our minds up that Chloé and the room are perfect for each other. She insisted on taking me out for lunch to continue the discussion, but by then we’d already agreed that she should move in on Sunday.”

“Do we have to do anything to get the room ready for her?” Nina asked.

“Not much,” her mother replied, “and I can sort it out on Saturday when you’re helping at Aunt Callie’s shop.”

Both Suzanna and Nina had finished eating. They gathered the plated together and took them back to the kitchen where they loaded the dishwasher.

“Any plans for the rest of the evening?” Suzanna asked.

“Not really – I was organised for school on Monday, so other than checking my schoolbag, there’s nothing that needs doing.”

“How about a film then early to bed?”

“Sounds good to me. What film did you have in mind?”

“I thought we’d just look on Netflix and pick something. Maybe we need something suitable for the weather.”

Fifteen minutes or so later, mother and daughter had settled down together on the sitting room sofa. Suzanna had changed into her own sleepsuit, much the same as Nina’s, in fleece with feet, mittens and hood, but in chocolate brown with white polka dots. Like her daughter, she had also added a scarf, in her case an orange hooded one covering her hair, wrapped around her neck and tucked down inside the onesie. They had pulled a thick tartan blanket over their legs for extra cosiness as they watched ‘Frozen’.

* * *


“Getting up time,” Suzanna announced as she came into Nina’s room the following morning. She was pleased to see that her daughter had obeyed her injunction not to tie herself up in any way at bedtime, in the interests of a good night’s sleep before school and so as not to aggravate the rope marks she had acquired the previous day.

“What’s the weather like?” Nina asked, emerging from under her duvet.

“Still too dark to tell properly, but the sky is clear, so it’s probably going to be another cold sunny day.”

“School definitely back today?”

“I checked a few minutes ago and the ‘Back on Thursday’ notice is still on the school website.”

“I’d better get moving then,” Nina said, standing up and stretching.

“You take first go at the shower,” Suzanna suggested. “I’ll sort myself out after you’ve gone to school.

Nina nodded, noting that her mother was still wearing her sleepsuit, and headed for the bathroom.

* * *


When Nina came down to breakfast, she was wearing her school uniform of white polo shirt and grey skirt. Her concessions to the weather were the white long-sleeved thermal top under her shirt and the black leggings she wore instead of the purple or black tights she was supposed to wear.

“Will you be warm enough like that?” her mother asked.

“I’ve got woolly tights on under my leggings and I’ll get a clean sweatshirt from the utility room before I put my jacket on.”

Suzanna nodded her approval then said, “The bread’s looking a bit suspect – will hash browns be OK instead of toast with your egg?”

“Special treat,” Nina replied. “Shall I do them while you do the eggs?”

With both of them working together, breakfast was soon on the table. They briefly discussed the day ahead as they ate. Nina was concerned about the arrangements for Miss Badeleine coming to stay, but her mother assured her that there was very little that needed to be done.

A few minutes later, Nina was ready to go out. She now had her yellow cysling jacket and black waterproof trousers on with her black Doc Martens on her feet. She was already wearing her cycling helmet with a purple ski mask underneath and her school scarf wrapped around her neck and pulled up over the mouth vent of the mask. Her black cycling mittens were clutched in one hand.

“Are Docs OK for school?” Suzanna asked, looking at her daughter’s feet.

“Technically, no,” Nina replied, “but the rules are usually relaxed a bit in bad weather.”

“Better choice than your trainers for the weather,” her mother acknowledged. “Careful on the icy bits.”

“I will,” Nina promised. She tipped her head to one side to allow her mother to plant a kiss on her balaclava-covered cheek then let herself out through the kitchen door.

* * *


Unlike Monday, Nina’s was not the only bike to be parked in the school cycle rack. There were fewer than usual, suggesting that some girls had come by bus or begged their parents for lifts rather than braving the snowy streets.

Nina was a little self-conscious about her boots after her mother had queried it. She was relieved to see that unconventional footwear was possibly in the majority. She noticed lots of Wellington boots and some walking boots while some of the girls she knew were keen horse and pony riders were in rubber riding boots or stable boots. She was further relieved to spot several other pairs of Docs.

In Nina’s school, the beginning of the spring term was always overshadowed to some extent by the impending school exam week that would take place at the end of January. Accordingly, with the exception of non-exam subjects like PE and Religious and Moral Education, all her teachers were focussing on the revision sessions that they would be fitting into their pattern of lessons over the following three weeks.

Nina was in general a fairly able student so, although the exams were a source of concern for her, they held no real terrors. Her main strengths lay in maths and the sciences, where there was a framework of understanding to fit the facts into. As an avid reader, English was not a worry; she simply had to make sure that the prose and poems she was likely to be asked questions about were fresh in her mind. French was not too demanding with regard to grammar at the her level but required a lot of brushing up on vocabulary and standard phrases; she hoped that Miss Badelaine would be of some help there. Geography and especially history posed the greatest difficulty with facts to be remembered and events understood, but without the overarching framework of ‘how’ and ‘why’ that the sciences gave.

Accordingly, during the lunch break, Nina spent time at one of the computers in the library putting together a revision checklist for history.

“Bonjour, Nina,” Miss Badelaine said as she passed Nina’s seat. “Tu révises pour l’histoire?”

Nina though of replying in French but stopped at, “Bonjour,” continuing “I’m getting together a list of key events and topics for the 14th century.” She pointed at the document on screen that she was typing. “Edward I, wars with Scotland and Wales, Edward II, Battle of Bannockburn, Mortimer’s rebellion, mysterious death...”

“Ah, oui, I read about that mysterious death – the...” She hesitated. “Le tisonnier chauffé au rouge...” She sketched a long shape in the air with her fingers.”

“Yes, they say Edward II was killed with a red-hot poker up his...” It was Nina’s turn to hesitate as she realised how loudly she was speaking and just how unsavoury her next words would be. “Red-hot poker up his jacksie,” she continued in a whisper.

“I knew about Edouard Deux. There is a series of historical novels about that time – Les Roi Maudits by Maurice Druon. He goes into some detail about poor Edouard. But I did not know ‘jacksie’, Miss Badelaine said. “It means ‘derrière’?” She pointed at her own bottom.

Nina shook her head, blushing slightly.

“Ah! Le fondement?” Miss Badelaine made a small but significant upward-pointing gesture with her finger.

Nina nodded, avoiding the librarian’s gaze and now red to the tips of her ears.

“Ah, one learns,” Miss Badelaine acknowledged. “Perhaps better to change the subject. I met your mother yesterday. A most amiable lady. I shall enjoy living with you and Madame Margrave.”

“We will help you with the move on Sunday afternoon,” Nina said, relieved at the safer topic.

“Most kind. And perhaps I will also see you on Saturday?”

“I’ll be at Aunt Callie’s shop on Saturday,” Nina confirmed. She glanced around then added, “I’ve kept your job at my aunt’s shop private and not mentioned it to my mother.”

Miss Badelaine was silent for a moment, then said, “Maybe it is better that she find out after she has known me for a bit.”

Another student came up to Miss Badelaine, clearly wanting some help with something, so with a nod in Nina’s direction, the librarian went to see what she could do and Nina resumed her summary of history topics.

* * *


There had been some sign of a thaw about lunchtime, but the temperature was dropping steadily by the time Nina was going home and any surfaces that hadn’t been salted and gritted were becoming treacherously slippery. She pedalled her bicycle home carefully, paying attention to the traffic in the fading light and to the state of the road surfaces. Nevertheless, it was only a few minutes later than usual that Nina parked her bike in the garage and let herself in through the kitchen door, which she was surprised to discover was locked.

Nina went into the kitchen and put down her mittens which she had taken off to work the garage and kitchen doors then took off her helmet, balaclava and scarf. She took off her yellow cycling jacket then sat on a chair to take her boots off so that it would be easier to get her waterproof trousers off. She was just about to take her outerwear to the hall cupboard when her eye caught a note on the kitchen table. It was in her mother’s handwriting and, rather enigmatically, read, “Come and find me in my bedroom.”

Intrigued, Nina put her outdoor clothes away then took her schoolbag up to her room before going to her mother’s room. The door was closed, so she knocked politely. After hearing no response, Nina knocked again then tentatively opened the door.

The reason for the lack of response was immediately obvious: Suzanna was lying on her bed, securely bound with rope. Nina paused to admire the thoroughness of the tying. Her mother was dressed as she had last seen her, in her brown sleepsuit with the white polka dots. Her arms were secured behind her back in a rather comprehensive box-tie, with each wrist secured to the opposite elbow and two bands of rope around her arms and chest, one above and one below the bust. There was a further band of rope around her waist and pairs of ropes over both shoulders. Her legs were tied together with cinched bindings at the ankles, above and below the knees and at mid-thigh level.

Suzanna was lying face-down on top of the bed with the hood of her sleepsuit covering her head but turned her face towards Nina as she entered the room. Suzanna’s face was covered by a woollen ski mask in light and dark brown stripes. Where her eyes and mouth should have been visible there were just black ovals, giving her a rather alien appearance.

“Shall I get your mask off?” Nina asked.

Nina expected a nod in reply, but the only response was a slight tile of the head.

“ARE YOU WEARING EARPLUGS?” she asked more loudly.

Her mother nodded.

“DO YOU WANT THE MASK OFF?”

Another nod.

Nina carefully pulled her mother’s ski mask off to reveal one of the black knitted head bags her cousin Theda had made, essentially a balaclava with no openings. She removed that and could at last see at least some of her mother’s face. There was a broad strip of Elastoplast sticking plaster covering her mouth and going almost from ear to ear. Her eyes were covered by circular gauze pads secured with small squares of Elastoplast at her temples and across the bridge of her nose. Nina removed the gauze pads first, peeling the Elastoplast away as gently as she could.

“This is probably going to hurt,” Nina said, picking away at the edge of plaster across her mother’s mouth. With a firm grip on the fabric, she pulled it away steadily.

Suzanna screwed her eyes up at the discomfort of her gag being removed then, as soon as she was able, she pushed out the handkerchief that was stuffed into her mouth with her tongue.

“You told me it was dangerous to have a swallowable gag you could choke on if you were alone,” Nina chided as she extracted the foam plugs from her mother’s ears.

“I did, didn’t I?” her mother acknowledged with a grin.

Nina grinned back then said, “You can’t possibly have done this to yourself.”

“No, I had help,” Suzanna admitted. “I met up with Theda this morning for an early lunch and she came back and tied me up.”

“This morning?” Nina echoed. “So how long have you been tied up?”

“We met at half past 11 and she left here about 1 o’clock after tying me up.”

“About three and a half hours,” Nina said, glancing at her mother’s alarm clock. “Was this just a sudden whim?”

“Not quite. I realised that with Miss Badelaine coming to live here, there won’t be so many opportunities for games like this, so I thought I’d indulge myself today.”

Nina hesitated, caught in the dilemma between telling her mother what she knew about Miss Badelaine and continuing to keep Miss Badelaine’s Saturday job at Aunt Callie’s shop a secret as she had semi-promised. “Good point,” she eventually said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Nina was by nature a truthful girl and felt uncomfortable about this subterfuge, but nevertheless felt it incumbent on her to maintain Miss Badelaine’s anonymity. The discomfort evidently showed on her face as her mother asked, “Is there something bothering you?”

“Not really,” Nina replied, forcing a smile. “Would you like me to untie you now?”

“Yes, please,” Suzanna replied. “I think I’m going to indulge in a long hot bath after this.”

Nina worked away at freeing her mother, glad that the conversation seemed to have returned to safer topics.

* * *


Back in her own bedroom, Nina reflected that, even though she knew that Miss Badelaine enjoyed tying-up games, her mother was right: Miss Badelaine’s presence in the house would severely limit the opportunity for these games. Maybe there would be a way to bring everything into the open eventually, but for now, at least, things would be severely curtailed.

With that thought in mind, Nina decided to put into practice an experiment she had been thinking about for some time. She removed her grey school skirt and hung it in her wardrobe for the next day and returned her sweatshirt to the drawer for the same reason. She took her school polo shirt off and dumped it in the laundry basket then put on her heavy pink sweater over her white thermal top. She left her leggings and tights on.

Nina took the cardboard box full of rope and other tying-up items out of her wardrobe and set it on the floor. She sorted out a number of suitable lengths of rope, the handcuffs that Aunt Callie had given her some time before and a pair of fingerless gloves, placing them all on her bed.

As it would be increasingly difficult to do so later, Nina started by gagging herself. She slid a handkerchief down inside a knee-length sock, creating a fat bulge that she pushed into her mouth then tied the ends of the sock behind her head. The gag wouldn’t be entirely immune to being pushed out of her mouth with her tongue, so Nina tied a short scarf tightly across her mouth and nose to prevent this happening.

Nina’s next task was to prepare a coil of rope consisting of four complete turns secured with a single knot. The length was critical, so it took some experimenting and adjusting to get it right. Finally satisfied, she laid it aside ready for use later.

Sitting on the bed, Nina tied her legs together at the ankles and both above and below her knees. She used simple lashings without cinches so that her legs would be tightly bound together rather than being held slightly apart as cinched bindings would.

Nina adjusted her position on the bed so that she was lying with her head on the pillow then sat up with her legs stretched out in front of her. She picked up the remaining piece of rope, and wound it several times around her upper arms and chest, fastening it off with a knot at the front.

It was getting more awkward to move as Nina put the gloves on, pulling them up over the sleeves of her sweater. She then snapped one shackle of the handcuffs around her right wrist.

Still sitting upright, Nina manoeuvred the coil of rope she had prepared earlier so that it was behind her. She put her hands through the coil and then worked it up her arms until it was just above her elbows with the rope taut across the small of her back.

The next step was the last and the most difficult. Nina lay down on her back and stretched her hands towards each other across her tummy. The coil of rope holding her arms back meant that her hands could only just reach each other. Using the finger tips of her right hand, Nina positioned the empty shackle of the handcuffs so that it was around her left wrist. The handcuffs were the old-fashioned ‘darby’ pattern with D-shaped forged metal shackles, so all she had to do was to snap the straight part of the shackle into place to lock it. She bent her knees and rolled herself over to the left. Nina was lying on top of the duvet on her bed and she found it much harder than she expected to persuade the cuff to lock as the soft quilt yielded under the pressure she was applying. Finally, after adjusting her position several times and ending up almost face-down, she heard the dull click of the latch engaging.

Nina rolled herself onto her back again and assessed the success of her experiment. With the handcuff chain taut across her tummy, she had very little freedom to move her hands either up or down. The handcuffs were twisted at an angle relative to her wrists, but as they were the old-fashioned forged metal type with no sharp edges, that didn’t cause any real discomfort. The way her arms were tied put a little more pressure than she really liked just above her elbows but, again, there was no real discomfort. All-in-all, she judged it a success: she was utterly helpless but quite comfortable and she had done it all by herself.

After about half an hour contentedly staring up at the ceiling, Nina heard the door of her room open. She turned her head to see her mother looking down at her. Suzanna was now dressed in a sweater with a big cardigan on top and jeans with thick socks pulled up over them.

“I was wondering where you’d got to,” Suzanna commented. She examined her daughter’s predicament for a few moments then said, “Can I see how the ropes go across your back?”

Nina bent her knees and rolled herself onto one side so that her mother could see how she was tied.

“That’s really clever,” Suzanna complimented. “You’ll have to tell me later how you managed to get the handcuffs on.”

Nina rolled onto her back again and smiled up at her mother, although the effect was rather diminished by her gag and the scarf covering the lower part of her face.

“I take it you don’t have much homework, seeing as this is the first proper day of term?” Suzanna said, the tone of her voice rising to make it a question.

Nina replied by shaking her head.

“Shall I just leave you tied up until tea time then?”

Nina nodded.

* * *


“I’ll miss being able to do games like we did this afternoon while Miss Badelaine is here,” Suzanna said as she and Nina shared a meal of pasta with a piquant marinara sauce.

“Me too,” Nina replied. After a pause, she added, “I thought of that thing I did with the handcuffs a while ago and I wanted to try it out while we still had the chance.”

“It looks like a really good tie up,” her mother responded. “Comfy but really hard to get out of.”

Nina was relieved that her mother had taken the bait and moved the discussion away from Miss Badelaine. “I don’t think I could get out of it even if I had the handcuff key in my hand.”

“I was thinking about it while I was preparing the meal. I’ve an idea that I might just be able to escape if I could get at the key.”

“But how would you use the key with hour hands pulled apart like that?” Nina asked.

“I’d have to do something about the arm ropes first. The one around your chest and arms wasn’t cinched, so it ought to be possible to work it up to your shoulders and off that way.”

“The coil of rope that held my elbows back was pretty restrictive,” Nina pointed out. “It would be really hard to do what you’re suggesting.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy, I just thought it might be possible,” Suzanna said, defending her position.

“And even with that rope away, there’s still the one holding your elbows back.”

“True, but it might be possible to work that up to the shoulders too, and if you did that, then there’s nothing to stop you using the handcuff key.”

“I’m still not completely convinced,” Nina said. “Unless you want to prove it to me?”

“Was that a challenge I heard?”

Nina merely smiled, then replied, “Only if you want it to be.”

“OK, then, let’s get the washing up done and we’ll put it to the test.”

* * *


Twenty minutes later, Suzanna was sitting on the edge of her bed while her daughter tied her legs together. Nina had pulled her mother’s socks up to make it easier to form a neat band of rope at the ankles. Once she had repeated the process above and below the knees, she stood up and picked up her handcuffs.

“Are you sure you don’t want to take that huge cardigan off for this?” Nina asked. “I don’t see how you’ll ever get the rope to slide up over those sleeves.”

“I’m nice and warm like this,” her mother pointed out. “I’ll just take my chances.”

“If you’re sure. Now, fingerless gloves – do you want to borrow mine?”

“I’ll go with socks over my hands like we usually do,” Suzanna said. “I’m sure it won’t make any difference.”

“You’re just showing off now, aren’t you?”

“Not really – you needed to be able to put the handcuffs on yourself, but you’re going to do that for me and I’m sure I can handle the key with socks over my hands one I’ve got the ropes off.”

“OK, fair point,” Nina acknowledged as she handed her mother a pair of thick socks.

With the socks pulled up over the sleeves of her cardigan, Suzanna held her hands out for Nina to snap the handcuffs on.

Nina picked up a long length of rope then climbed onto the bed so she was kneeling behind her mother. She wound the rope around Suzanna’s arms so that went across her back and around her arms above the elbow, pulling the handcuff chain tight across her tummy. Once she had formed four complete turns of rope, Nina knotted the ends together.

“You know, if I cinched this rope, you’d be completely stuck,” she commented.

“But that would be a different tie-up,” her mother countered, “not the one I said I might be able to escape from.”

Nina applied the coil of rope around Suzanna’s arms and chest next. On herself, she had tied this about halfway up her upper arms, but this wasn’t an option with her mother. She settled for putting all four turns of rope below her mother’s bust and just above the rope linking her arms.

“Right, that’s you all tied up,” she said, clambering off the bed.

“Do I get a gag too?”

“I think it’s part of the deal,” Nina replied, surveying the contents of her mother’s sock drawer. “How big a gag would you like?”

“I liked the look of the one you did on yourself.”

Nina selected a pair of long socks and pushed a handkerchief down inside one of them. She pushed the bulge in the sock inside Suzanna’s mouth and tied the ends behind her head. She used a long legwarmer instead of a scarf to apply a second layer of gag. It was wide enough to go from above Suzanna’s mouth to below her chin. She knotted the ends just above the knot in the sock.

“Blindfold?” Nina offered.

Suzanna shook her head.

“OK, I’ll leave you to it and look in in about half an hour when when I’ve done my homework,” Nina said lifting her mother’s legs onto the bed, helping her settle comfortably and placing the handcuff key beside her.

* * *


Nina went back to her room and turned on her computer. She put her headphones on and selected a playlist before getting her books out.

As Nina had told her mother, there was very little homework to be done and as tomorrow was Friday and therefore only a half day at school, she could probably get away with leaving it until Saturday or Sunday. However, she was a conscientious student and also mindful that she had a busy weekend ahead of her.

With the music playing and with her concentration taken up with her work, Nina almost jumped out of her chair when she felt a tap on the shoulder about three quarters of an hour after she sat down.

“I thought you were going to look in after half an hour,” Suzanna said with mock severity after Nina had taken her headphones off.

“The time sort of ran away with me,” Nina admitted with a weak smile as she recovered from her fright.

“Just as well I can look after myself then.”

“I really didn’t think you’d get out of that. How did you do it?”

“Exactly the way I thought I could – I wriggled off both coils of rope around my arms then unlocked the handcuffs.”

“As hard as you thought?”

“Certainly not easy. I think your ropes were looser because you had to tie yourself up. Also, it was a bit more of a struggle for me because I have boobs to get the rope past.” Suzanna pointed at her chest to make her point.

“I’m really impressed,” said Nina. “There was no way I could have escaped on my own.”

“Maybe after some more practice sessions?”

“I still can’t do the easy-peasy chair tie,” Nina pointed out.

“More practice,” her mother repeated, then added, “How’s the homework going?”

“Another ten minutes and I’m done.”

“Any plans for after that?”

“You could tie me up again,” Nina suggested. “You’ve had two goes today and I’ve only had one.”

“OK, but no rope – I don’t want you going to school with suspicious marks on your skin.”

“Suits me,” Nina said happily as she put her headphones back on.

* * *


Twenty minutes after finishing her homework, Nina’s wish had been granted. She had changed into her black sleepsuit with the pattern of coloured stars, keeping on her tights and thermal top underneath for warmth and her mother had tied her up using six of the increasingly stretched and battered scarves that they kept for these games.

Nina was lying on her side on top of her bed with her knees drawn up. Her wrists were crossed and securely tied together with one of the scarves. Two more scarves had been used to tie her legs together at the ankles and above the knees, with both bindings cinched and the final knots placed behind her legs to be out of reach. A short scarf tied her wrists down to her knees, going round both bindings twice before being knotted, again with the knot carefully placed out of reach. A very long scarf was wound three times around her upper arms and chest just above her elbows. The last scarf linked Nina’s ankle binding with the scarf around her arms and chest, preventing her from straightening her legs and also from working the long scarf up to her shoulders.

Nothing showed of Nina’s face as her head was completely covered by a black knitted head bag framed by the hood of her sleepsuit. Underneath the head bag, she was gagged with a long sock knotted and pulled between her teeth and blindfolded with its partner. Although she could tip her head forward and bring her knees up so that her face touched her hands, the combination of the head bag and the sleepsuit’s attached mittens made it impossible for her to dislodge the gag or blindfold.

Nina lay there, enjoying the feeling of complete helplessness until she felt her mother gently shake her shoulder.

“Time to get untied and go to bed,” Suzanna said.

It took only a few minutes to release Nina from her bonds. As soon as she was free, she stretched her limbs, luxuriating in the feeling of freedom.

“A bit stiff?” her mother asked.

“Not really, but I can imagine being tied up like that for a long time might get really uncomfortable.”

“OK, if there are no ill effects, then you should visit the bathroom then go to bed.”

Nina looked at her alarm clock. “Half past nine already – definitely bedtime.” She hugged her mother before heading to the bathroom. “That was fun – thank you.”
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jayarieldrillowup
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Post by jayarieldrillowup »

A wonderful story.
'And behold one arose who once was thought to be dead and he spoke saying,"Heaven said I was too evil and hell said I was too good." Now he wanders forever as an immortal with magic as his birthright and as his curse.'
gaggedrock29
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Post by gaggedrock29 »

Wonderful
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GermanTUGFriend
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Post by GermanTUGFriend »

A wonderful chapter of the stories with Nina, her mother, Aunt Callie and Theda. But I hope it wouldn't be the final part of that stories, because I have something in mind for (maybe) a new part. Nina could discover more interesting stuff and things in the shop of Aunt Callie, she could try them on with the help of Theda or with Callies help. And finally there is Chloè - the new housemate for Nina and Suzanne. What about her and her love of bondage and TUG's ? Maybe Nina and Chloè can do one or another game together ? So let me know what you think about that....

Best regard from Germany and all the best for 2022 :) :)
No proper TUG without gagging and hooding ^^ And don't forget a blindfold ;)
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Solarbeast
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Post by Solarbeast »

[mention]GermanTUGFriend[/mention] This story is from a different user and is archived here by Sorako. So unless the original user from the story decides to come back, then there is no way to continue this story.
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GermanTUGFriend
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Post by GermanTUGFriend »

[mention]Solarbeast[/mention]

thank you very much for your explanation. So we can only hope that the original author will be back one day....
No proper TUG without gagging and hooding ^^ And don't forget a blindfold ;)
dupattaguy
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Post by dupattaguy »

These old stories are gold. I wonder where the author is now
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