Chapter Fifteen: ANNETTE'S JOURNEY
Annette stared glumly at the litre carton of fruit juice; then at a two pint milk carton and then looked down at her slender body and flat stomach. How on earth could she find room for something the size of those cartons inside her?
It seemed impossible, but somehow she was going to have to soon, when she went shopping in London with Emma and her mother after taking a quarter of one of Geraldine’s diuretic pills. Not for the first time since she had been forced into this, she regretted upsetting the other All Day Girls with her pedantic logic. She wasn’t the first person to find that having an IQ of genius level did not make her popular, even in such an academically orientated school at Elmdene. Too many things came too easy for her, even when she didn’t want them.
Last summer’s holiday in Spain, for instance; a plain skinny girl, she had been expected to be a flop with the boys, but her fluent Spanish had made her a hit with the local studs, and she could drink all night without having to queue to squat in the disco’s filthy loos. Never mind how much her bladder ached at the end of the evening, or that her boyfriend had been a lousy lover, the other girls had still despised her. Was there any way she could make the task easier? If she was so bright, why couldn’t she come up with some original idea to help her wait? The ‘cork up the cunt’ that girls so often joked about was no good. She had tried it and it simply did not press in the right place to do any good at all. Nor did pulling a strip of cloth tight between her legs, that didn’t press in the right place either.
Anyway, logic (there she was again) said that blocking her pee hole was not going to help her sphincter hold out, though enough girls seemed to think it did. Nor could she think of any way that she could let her pee out without it being noticed. Emma had already selected a well- fitting pair of faded blue jeans for her to wear, together with the skimpiest of knickers. She searched the Internet, and the medical sections of Elmdene and Pacton libraries to see if there was any antidote for diuretics, or any drug that would inhibit the production of urine. She learned a lot about diuretics, but nothing that would help her. She was not even sure that the effect was proportional to the dose, which made her test even more worrying.
Depressed by this latest thought, she welcomed a visit from Erica, who wanted help with some maths problems. She could solve these in her head, and over coffee afterwards she confessed how worried she was about the coming journey, and her failure at finding a way to help her wait.
“You’re getting all worked up about nothing,” consoled Erica. “The only thing you need to remember is that you have a much bigger than normal bladder, and that in these situations you can always manage somehow to wait just that little bit longer. Don’t ask me how, but I know that your body can always find that bit more strength, your bladder stretch that tiny bit more, and you can hold on. It’s entirely a mental thing, will-power, confidence, you just have to make yourself hold it.”
“But what about Geraldine? She completely lost control on the train. And Pauline? Twice she wet herself in the final. Logically, there has to be a limit to what you can hold.”
Erica shrugged off these protests. “Geraldine was drugged, a massive overdose compared to you next week. Pauline admits that in the contest she knew it didn’t really matter if she wet her pants, and that she thought she had been holding more, and more desperate, on that rugby coach, when she simply could not contemplate wetting herself in public.”
Annette had to admit that Erica was making sense. “So what do you suggest I do?” she asked.
“You should be really stretching you bladder to bursting point at least once a day, just to get it used to being full, to tone up your holding muscles. Think positive. Convince yourself that you can wait. Its going to be a lot easier than any waiting contest. All the desperate time is going to be on the train, so you can sit on your heel, and with a bit of ingenuity you should be able to hold yourself in an emergency without anyone noticing. You are allowed to go when you get to Oxford Street, so you haven’t got to walk about for ages, which would be the real killer.”
Annette followed Erica’s advice. She drank glasses of water before and after breakfast, and throughout the morning, so by lunchtime her bladder was bursting; then forced herself to wait until the end of lessons at four o’clock. She would be sitting on her heel all the afternoon, trying to conceal her desperation, so by the end of the week she knew every trick for getting the maximum help from this without revealing her need. She had even worked out that the best shoes to wear were her trainers with thick heels that pressed right into her, just where she needed the most pressure.
She stretched her bladder like she never had before, and as her capacity seemed to increase, so did her confidence. The other girls decided that instead of taking her tablet before she left the school, she could delay until they had a coffee stop halfway to London. Emma said her mother normally stopped there, and as long as she had a full cup of coffee, Annette could even go to the loo when Emma and her mother did. At first she thought this was a bonus, but then realised that is was a hidden trap. She had to drink more coffee, and she was losing her only escape route. Once they had left the service area, there were no more loos until Oxford Street; it would be wait or wet herself.
Not leaving anything to chance, since she was a scientist, Annette went back to the Internet and the libraries, to get details of each London Underground station. There was a public loo at Oxford Circus, but she could not find a plan to show exactly where. By then she expected that every second would be vital, and knowing where to go might make the difference between dry and wet jeans. Erica dismissed these fears.
“If there’s a loo there, it will be sign-posted,” she said. “Keep calm, don’t panic. Stop still, twist your legs in a knot, and assess the situation. It’s a busy station, there’ll be porters to ask. Hold your crutch if it’s really bad, if people notice, so what? Don’t make a move until you know where the loo is, running about like a headless chicken is the worst thing you could do.”
It all made sense, Annette admitted, and she tried to ignore her fears that by then she would already be so desperate she would be wetting herself. Alison and Tracy had joined Erica in trying to encourage her, and did their best to build her confidence. They all knew that there was nothing like worrying about wanting to go to make you want to, and if Annette went into this anxious, then she was going to fail.
Finally, as they left her study on Friday evening, after a last attempt at building her confidence, they agreed that there was nothing more they could do. Annette was on her own, facing the stark choice, wait or wet, she had no other option. Watched by half the All Day Girls, Annette had drunk exactly what she had to, not a single drop more, during the last 24 hours, and was dressed exactly as specified. Thin little knickers and jeans tight between her legs, to show any leak as soon as it happened. In a show of confidence, Annette didn’t take spare knickers with her, saying they would not be needed, though, as Caroline bluntly said, there was no point in having dry knickers to wear under soaking jeans. Emma’s mother was easy-going and friendly, insisting that Annette called her Deborah, “Please not Mrs. Halley-Parker or Debbie.”
Annette was surprised how quickly they reached the service area, where, without any encouragement from the girls, Deborah stopped and went straight to the loo, walking rather more quickly that was dignified. This gave Emma the chance to witness Annette taking her quarter tablet, though Annette would have much preferred to have put this off until they left the café.
In the loo, as she tried to squeeze every last drop of pee out of her bladder, she tried not to think how badly she might want to go before she saw the inside of another loo. For the rest of the journey Annette did her utmost to keep a lively conversation going, hoping that this would keep her mind off her bladder, and the ordeal to come. It worked at first, but slowly, inexorably, she began to feel the first warnings from her bladder. At first she could ignore them, persuade herself it was imagination, nerves, anything but a need to pee, but when they reached the station she most definitely wanted to go. Standing up, then walking, increased this need to a level when any sensible person would have been actively looking for a loo. Annette tried not to worry about this, but in her plans for the day, she had not even been wanting to go at this stage.
It was a terminus station, there was a train waiting, so Annette tried to hurry Emma and her mother to make sure they caught it. Instead, Deborah decided she wanted a loo first. Annette needed neither to be reminded about loos, nor risk missing the train, becoming more worried as they looked all round the station, and then in the adjacent shopping arcade without success. At first Emma had been enjoying the extra stress that this delay was causing Annette, but not wanting make her task impossible, finally told her mother it was obvious there wasn’t a loo there, and she would just have to cross her legs until the reached Oxford Street.
Looking far from happy, Deborah gave up the search, and to Annette’s relief, they just got on the train before it left. Walking, and the talk of loos, had not helped Annette one bit. Getting on the train she classified her state as ‘bursting’ and even when she was sitting down with her legs tightly crossed she was not much better. She had hoped that a few minutes really clenching herself shut inside, forcing her pee back into her body was how she imagined it, she would feel better, but no. She tried so hard that she shuddered slightly with the effort, attracting a strange look from Deborah, and a more knowing nod from Emma, but nothing she did reduced her need to pee very much, and as soon as she relaxed she was a bad as ever.
She had estimated a hour for the train journey, and that seemed an impossibly long time to wait if her need to pee kept increasing at the rate it had been. She tried not to think about that. Maybe it was a fast train, maybe the drug had already done its worst, and she would not fill up much more, maybe…. The train stopped at the next two stations, destroying her first hope. Eleven minutes since they had started, ten more stations, that made the journey over an hour she calculated.
Please no! The stations must be closer as they got into town. And there was no escaping that she already wanted to pee significantly more badly, even with her legs plaited tightly, than when she had been walking. She could not cross them any tighter, even as she was it was making it pretty obvious she was dying for a loo, nobody would cross their legs so hard for any other reason. She uncrossed her legs, trying to sit normally for a time, but even knocking her knees together and squeezing her thighs, she wanted to pee far too badly to be able to sit still. Choosing a moment when she thought Deborah wasn’t looking, she tucked her right leg up on the seat under her, so the heel of her shoe was pressing into her crutch. That was so much better; she had her pee under control again, her need down to just bursting instead of creeping up to desperate level.
“Stay like this and you will be OK,” she told herself, and tried to believe it. Emma didn’t miss Annette sitting on her heel, and sooner that she had expected. Pointedly, she lounged back on the seat and sat casually with her knees apart, reminding Annette that she was just fine, no bladder problems at all. Annette tried to ignore her.
Another two stations gone, and still 45 minutes to go. Mentally calculating the journey time was too easy to be a distraction from her bladder pressure, and the result was worrying. The benefit of sitting on her heel had worn off already, and by the next station she was most definitely desperate. No actual danger of losing it yet, but far too uncomfortable to want to have to wait any longer. She tried to stir up a discussion to stop herself thinking about her bladder, to make time pass quicker, grateful that Emma was helping when she could so easily have been talking about rivers, waterfalls, floods, .. having a pee.
She snapped her mind back to Emma who was talking about her holiday in Florida. Concentrate on that, being hot, parched, dying for a drink not a pee. It was no good. More that half an hour to go, and she was seriously desperate. Her bladder was beginning to hurt, she could not ignore it, it was already dominating her thoughts. She had to get mind off her bladder pressure, she had to find someway of making time pass more quickly. The thought of another half hour wanting to go this badly was dreadful, but if she kept on getting worse.. No! it could not happen, the diuretic must be wearing off, there couldn’t be much more pee to come. She tried to find something to occupy her mind.
Mentally listing all the prime numbers seemed a good idea, but it was so difficult to concentrate. She closed her eyes, focused her mind, managed to get to 101, then Deborah interrupted, asking if she was tired or just day-dreaming.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said Deborah.
Emma was smirking, knowing what Annette would use the penny for, guessing that her thoughts were mainly centred in her knickers. Annette tried to compose herself, get back in control of her bladder. Deborah was waiting for her to answer. Her pee was getting worse all the time. In five minutes she had gone up from ’seriously’ to ‘absolutely desperate,’ and that was when sitting on her heel. She didn’t want to think what it would be like if she had to stand up.
“Three of us at school are setting up a web site. I was trying to compose HTML code in my head.” Something as technical as that would shut Deborah up, she hoped, because suddenly she didn’t want to talk any more. It was too much effort to hold in her pee to want to bother with anything else. Instead Deborah wanted to know what it was about, how it would be used, details that Annette could hardly concentrate on, nor, as it was the All Day Girls web site, could she reveal. Eventually Emma, who hated anything to do with computers, interrupted and saved her, then stabbing her in the back by asking her mother how her bladder was bearing up.
“I shall be very relieved when we reach Oxford Street,” she replied, “I’m already sitting with her legs crossed all the time.”
“I think I will need to go as well,” said Annette, trying to speak normally, making the biggest understatement of her life. The only reason she would not need to go would be if she had already peed in her jeans. They were stopping at another station, so she allowed herself to look at her watch again. Only three minutes since the last stop, it had seemed like at least ten. In that time she had gone from absolutely desperate to frantic and even beyond, almost to absolutely frantic, her highest classification. She was clenching herself shut inside constantly now, even with her heel pressing hard into her crutch. The slightest relaxation and she would pee, she dare not let up for a second. She had never been this bad before, not in actual danger of losing it when on her heel.
Ten minutes at least still to go! She could hold on if it didn’t get any worse, or if her bladder didn’t get tired, but she didn’t have much in reserve. If only she could switch off her kidneys until she was in the loo. The terrible thing about the journey had been the remorseless way her bladder had filled, the ever-rising desperation level, until she was off the scale at the top of absolutely frantic, and still three stations to go.
Another station, she could not believe it had only taken three minutes, it had seemed like an age, and she was worse. She had not thought it possible, but her bladder was hurting more, and the pressure! It was taking every ounce of her strength to hold it back. She could not possibly hold on for long in such a state, she could already feel herself tiring. She could not stand it any longer, she might as well give up the struggle and pee now, she would never make it to the loo, so why suffer any longer? This, she recognised afterwards, was the crisis of the journey.
As if to emphasise the moment, the train was waiting in the station with the doors open. She had virtually given up mentally, but her body was still hanging on. All her life she had been taught that big girls did not wet their knickers, they waited until they got to a loo. She remembered Erica’s encouragement, “somehow, you can always make yourself wait a bit longer, stretch your bladder a bit more” and her more practical advice, “hold your crutch if you have to, it won’t notice half as much as if you wet yourself.” She jammed her hand between her legs, forcing three fingers between her heel and her pee hole, crushing the soft flesh round her vagina hard against her pubic bone. She had always maintained that there was no logical reason why blocking a hole between her legs could stop pee escaping from her bladder several inches inside her, but, thank goodness, logic was defied, and holding herself reduced her from ‘about to go’ to ’screaming to go’ which five minutes ago she had though to be the absolute limit of her endurance.
There were only two more stations to go, she just had to hold out somehow. If she kept holding herself, she thought she had a chance. It was making her desperation obvious, but that was better than wet jeans. Emma had been watching her all the journey, trying to gauge her desperation level, and had noted when she had sat on her heel, and then the increasingly worried, strained look, the squirming, biting her lip, shuddering as she made an extra effort, and finally, the hand between her legs. She had always been shy about admitting she wanted a loo, so she could imagine how desperate Annette must be to hold herself openly, and moved her bag and coat to screen her from the rest of the passengers. Annette had thought “If it does not get any worse, I think I can make it,” but her kidneys were still in a drug induced frenzy, forcing more pee into her bladder that was already filled beyond bursting point.
“I can’t stand it any longer,” she thought, “If I don’t go I’m going to kill myself, my bladder will explode any second.” It was agony, and felt enormous, like a football inside her, and she could not believe her stomach wasn’t sticking out about six inches. Her left hand was resting on her abdomen, trying to cover the hand between her legs, and she could feel that she was swollen, and so hard, the pressure in her bladder must be enormous. If she had been in a competition, she would have given up now, but she could not even do that. She had no choice but to make herself wait, somehow she had to hold her pee a few more minutes. She closed her eyes and fought with all her strength to hold it, pressing as hard as she could, bearing down on her heel, clenching herself shut, one last supreme effort to wait that she could just keep up until the train was stopping and Deborah was saying “Here at last, come on girls, get a move on, I’ve got an urgent appointment at the nearest loo.” “Don’t get any worse! please don’t get worse, I won’t be able to hold it. Somehow I must hang on, only a few more seconds.” Annette thought, keeping right behind Deborah, hobbling because she was still holding herself, and because she had cramp in her right leg after sitting on her heel for so long.
By the time they reached the escalator Annette thought she really had reached the end. She could feel her pee beginning to leak out of her bladder, almost reaching her knickers, and she simply did not have the strength any more to stop it. She was saved by the crowd on the escalator, which stopped Deborah walking up, and allowed her to twist her legs together, bend forward against Emma, and hold herself with both hands. Pressing with all her might, gritting her teeth, forcing her poor tired bladder muscles to clench shut one more time, she clamped off the leak, making such a mighty effort that before they reached the top she felt she was in control again. Walking was almost too much to bear. She was holding herself with both hands now, as Emma later said, making sure everyone knew she was frantic to pee. She didn’t care about that any more, her only concern was to try and press harder between her legs, to contain the enormous pressure in her bladder. How could she have ever thought that holding didn’t do any good? Logic meant nothing to her any more, the only possible chance she had of not wetting herself was to hold her crutch with both hands. If only there was some way she could press harder. After only five yards she could feel the leak starting again, but a queue at the ticket barrier gave her another chance to get control again.
“Look for the loos Emma,” she pleaded, “Please, please help me, I can’t wait any longer.” Emma was supposed to observe only, neither help nor hinder her finding a loo, but she had never seen anyone as desperate as Annette was, in such a state that she could hardly feed her ticket into the machine, and she couldn’t just stand by and watch her piss herself. Deborah, who obviously wanted to go badly, was already through the ticket barrier and was asking a porter where the nearest ladies was.
“Quick Emma, look for the Ladies, he said it was round to the right.”
Deborah was suffering a sudden agonisingly sharp need to pee, and was so embarrassed by being in such a state that she didn’t want to look at the girls, and so didn’t see how frantic Annette was. Openly holding between her legs with both hands, Annette didn’t care about anything except somehow keeping her pee back until she reached the loo. Her whole world was reduced to one little spot between her legs. If she could press there hard enough she might just manage to wait. Following her mother who had seen the Ladies’ sign and was almost running, Emma was guiding her, getting some money ready, because every second was vital for Annette now.
Annette was whimpering “I want to pee, oh quick! I want to pee so much,” as Emma jammed money into the turnstile and pushed her through. So near, she was right on the brink, she could feel the pee starting to leak out. She could not press any harder, even with both hands between her legs, but her last despairing effort was just enough to hold it until she was in the cubicle and kicking the door shut.
Doubled over, legs plaited, she had to release one hand to bolt the door, undo her jeans, then in one frantic move, let go of her crutch, rip her jeans and knickers down to her knees and drop onto the loo just as the first spurt of pee escaped, splashing the seat. At last she could release the full force of her pent-up pee. The pressure! Nothing she had ever seen or heard came close to the force she was peeing with. It was as if there was a fire hose at full bore aimed into the loo, a stream of pee that seemed about two inches in diameter blasting into the pan so hard it was going to crack it, then easing off to her more normal stream once the enormous pressure had been released, and going on and on, draining the contents of a bladder stretched to the absolute limit. The relief was so wonderful that even when she had finished she didn’t get up, continuing to try to squeeze some more drops out, savouring the release, massaging her bladder which still ached from the strain it had been under.
Only when she found Deborah and Emma waiting for her did she realise how long she had been in the loo, and wish she had timed herself, because it must have been a school record. Inside the first shop she stood with her legs apart, something that had been impossible for the last hour, so Emma could see her jeans were still dry between the legs. In fact, the gusset of her knickers was wet, sometime during the last frantic rush across the station some pee had leaked past her fingers, so technically she had wet herself, but not enough to get to her jeans. Only when the day’s events were analysed at the next All Day Girls meeting did she admit to that.