ALICE PRYDE

BY XAINIA

[ part 5 ]

Her stepfather grunted, "You don?t look as if you?ve slept much over the weekend!" He shifted his backside irritably on the hard cushioned bench of the dining area in the trailer. "You sure it was this girl?" He searched for the name. He gave up. Instead he scratched a bare armpit and tilted a bottle of beer to his mouth.

"Charlene!" Alice supplied the name. She smiled. She still ached from the savaging she had received from the two Warton brothers, especially Jessop on two consecutive nights. She could find no fault with her stepfather?s prognosis. She had slept very little. On each occasion the men had taken possession of her body, they had brought her to an excruciating, screaming climax; she had not believed that it was humanly possible to come so often. She had read in one of her friend?s teen magazines that less than 5% of American females experience an orgasm regularly when they have sex. "Poor luck on them!" she thought. "I can blow off just by being tied up by Benjamin or spanked by Jessop!"

"?.and not some boy you were with?" Her stepfather let his eyes wander from the flickering television to the girl?s highly acceptable shape. He had started thinking about her in bed. He reckoned that, if he did not curb his imagination in this direction, it was only a matter of time before?. He let his thoughts evaporate into a limbo, but he was aware of his growing erection.

"No," replied Alice with absolute assurance, "it definitely wasn?t a boy!" She smirked and made for her bed space. The man was drunk, she had decided; there was a distinct glaze in his eyes.

"There?s a letter from your mother." He indicated the official grey envelope lying on top of the television cabinet. Alice stopped short. She turned and stared at the man. "She?s in prison," he said. He gulped another mouthful of beer. "In Baltimore." He wiped his mouth. "She is due for parole in another six months." He laid the bottle on the veneered surface that served as a dining table. "She wants to come back to live with us!"

Alice gaped in disbelief. After a while she managed to ask, "How did she find us?" She felt sick in her stomach. Her stepfather was a jerk to live with, a real pain in the exhaust system, but on the whole he was harmless, all talk and no cock, as she described him to her friends in school; her mother was something quite different.

"Her lawyer hired a private detective." The man pointed a finger at the cabinet. "There?s a letter from the lawyer too. He says she is only entitled to parole if we take responsibility for her. Otherwise the bitch stays locked up." He lifted the bottle to his lips.

"What?s she in for?" Alice found the question inordinately hard to formulate. Her mind was in turmoil. She found that she had no feeling at all for the woman who had deserted her as a child. She could scarcely remember anything about her that wasn?t nasty. She remembered being bound hand and foot and left outside the trailer in torrential rain while her mother serviced client inside. She remembered also being tied naked but for her knickers to the bench in the dining area and being felt up by her mother?s men friends who was waiting their turn to join her in bed. She remembered her mother beating her solid until she was bleeding. She remembered her mother mainlining with a dirty needle injecting its discolored point into a dirtier thigh. She remembered her mother as a drunken slut who refused to cook a meal for her children or wash either their clothes or them or herself.

"Complicity in armed robbery, would you believe!" The man gurgled; it was his equivalent of laughter. "Held up a filling station with two of her boyfriends. Could have been an accessory to murder. The cashier was shot in the face, but he survived. She got a reduced sentence for turning state?s evidence against her accomplices, who have sworn to get even when they get out."

"And she wants us all to forget and forgive?" Alice had had enough. "And protect her?" She turned away in distaste.

The man said, "It?s either you or her!"

Again Alice stopped. She glared at the man in bewilderment. "What do you mean?" she asked. Her throat struggled with the question, her mouth was dry, her tongue seemed too heavy to be used for articulation. She noted the empty rye bottle at the man?s feet, and the empty beer bottles littered around the cabin.

The stepfather smirked. "She?s your flesh and blood, not mine!" His eyes scanned up and down Alice?s body. "We?ll talk about it tomorrow," he said. "I don?t want the drug-crazed bastard bitch back any more than you do. And I don?t want to bring another woman in, but I need some company in bed, and satisfaction!" His attention returned to the television. "Think about it!"

"Use your hand!" Alice turned away as in a dream

. The man glared at her. "And what the hell do you think I?ve been doing these past six years?"

She muttered to herself, "I have sleep to catch up on!" She checked the red circle on her calendar before automatically stripping down to her panties. "Monday or Tuesday!" She emitted a little cynical laugh of resignation. "Bleeding Monday or Tuesday!" She climbed into her tight little cot, claustrophobic after the massive beds at Mrs. Kilowsky?s house, and fell instantly into a dream-filled troubled sleep.

The series of shocks continued with the art class on Monday morning. Marshall Hammond, the handsome teacher, made a meal of uncovering the latest masterpiece. "We have had a look at the Old Masters from Holland and Italy, the over-rated English school and even the almost unknown Scottish colorists, Salvador Dali and the sex-crazed surrealists." He threw a series of questions about some of the great artists they had referred to in past lessons. Alice held her own when it came to providing answers. "It?s time we came a bit nearer home." Hammond smirked. "It is a little known fact that we have produced some internationally acclaimed artists." He toyed with the cloth draped over his latest print. "Apart from James Abbott McNeill Whistler, I wonder if anyone present has a merest ghost of a clue to another American master or another American masterpiece other than Whistler?s Mother?" He let his gaze flit from one blank face to another.

"Benjamin West!" Alice was surprised. She knew that Benjamin West had been an artist who had painted some famous portraits in New York and then sailed for Italy. "And the Death of General Wolfe!" But she had not intended to say what she said. She had been thinking of Benjamin Warton.

Marshall Hammond smiled. "Sweet Alice, as usual, has done her homework." The rest of the class snickered. "But setting national sentiment aside, both West and Whistler, Americans by birth, left our shores for other climes and preferred to be associated with our late colonial masters rather than with the peasantry of their native soil." He posed dramatically, one hand on the drape. "America for the Americans and all that trash apart, can anyone name one truly American artist to class alongside the Europeans?"

Alice felt the cold shivers zip along her spine. "Benjamin Warton," she said. The sensations created by being spread-eagled on Benjamin Warton?s bed were reproduced inside her.

Marshall Hammond blinked. "Sweet Alice surpasses herself!" he exclaimed. "Ask a million people from downtown San Diego to Limestone, Maine, and everyone will mention Whistler and a few will have a stab at West, but none but our own Sweet Alice will have a two dime bum?s idea of who the hell Benjamin Warton was!" He pulled the sheet away from the painting. "Behold the work of America?s greatest native painter! One of the wonders of the New World!" The shock was sickening. Alice blinked. "This is the Slave Girl by Benjamin Warton (1799 to 1871), and I would favorably compare it with anything done by a Rembrandt or a Jan Van der Meer, Gainsborough or Constable or any of the great Italian masters."

Alice felt icy fingers tearing her insides apart. She repeated the dates with a quivering voice. That was impossible. Benjamin Warton was as real and as fully alive as Marshall Hammond; for one thing, Benjamin Warton had been where Hammond had not. She had felt Benjamin Warton?s potentially impregnating seed burst into her, as surely as had his brother?s.

"In the early twentieth century there was a tradition that Warton, the eldest in a family of four boys and a girl, had been born on the last stroke of midnight on the first of January in the year 1801, making him the first-born American of the nineteenth century. The tradition arose because of his painting called The New World New Century?."

Alice Pryde felt the sickness grow in her stomach. The implication of the teacher?s words was too horribly spine-chilling to be believed. Benjamin Warton was no ghost. There was nothing in the exquisite pain she had endured in the expert hands of his brother Jessop that could be remotely described as insubstantial or illusory. There were marks on her body to prove their reality.

Marshall Hammond analysed the painting in great detail. The overhead projector even magnified the finger smudge made by Alice. It revealed the quality of the materials used by the artist, the man declared with confidence. "So much so that many critics believed that the injury to the masterpiece was self-inflicted ? almost as an exercise in quality control by the painter."

The bell sounded for the end of the lesson. As far as Alice Pryde was concerned, it was also the end of any profitable learning for the day. By the last class she was drained of energy and vitality. She made for the homeward bound school bus in a daze.

By the last mile before the trailer park, the bus had disgorged most of its screeching, squealing passengers. Alice Pryde sat alone; her brother Jake, sitting at the front immediately behind the driver, made a pretence at driving the vehicle. She was quite convinced that the boy was not the complete hundred cent dollar. She stiffened. Mike McIllally, the star of the school football team, a boy totally overwhelmed by his own assessment of his sex appeal, shifted his near-adult frame from the back of the bus to sit beside her. His constant companion, Joseph Rougan, trailed after him and hung over the seat behind.

"Get lost, McIllally," snapped Alice when the boy suggested some heavy petting. And when his hands began to encroach on the girl?s private property, she wriggled and struck out. "I?m warning you, McIllallly! Leave me alone!"

McIllally pinned her back into the seat. "Listen, Pryde! I?m trying to do you a favour." He released his grip and let his hand wander down the girl?s front. "Relax! You know you like it!"

Rougan laughed. "All he wants is a tiny bit of finger!"

The footballer nodded agreement. "What?s wrong in that?" He jabbed a thick fist up under the girl?s skirt. At the same time, he produced a flick knife, the blade of which he flourished in front of the girl?s face. Then he halted his advances as a hand grasped him by the throat in a grip if steel.

"You hard of hearing or something, McIllally?"

Mike McIllally tried to twist his head round, but only the eyes moved ? to meet the stolid face of the school geek. The boy could not believe what was happening. Nor could Alice. The blade was slowly withdrawn. The geek was holding the footballer?s wrist. There was an unmistakable snap and McIllally screamed in pain. The knife dropped to the floor of the bus. The driver made every effort not no notice, but the bus gave a slight swerve. Joseph Rougan moved to lift the weapon. The geek stamped viciously and Rougan joined in his companion?s lament as the bones of his right hand splintered.

"Stop the bus!" the geek called out to the driver. "These creeps want to walk the rest of the way home." He escorted Rougan and McIllally to the door of the vehicle. "And if ever you as much as look at Alice Pryde again," he told the pair confidentially, "I?ll wrench off your limbs, rip out your eyes and make mincemeat of your genitals!"

Alice tried not to notice; it was no great deal to have the school geek defend your honour, nor would it do much for her reputation. But when she looked up there was no geek. She assumed he had left the bus with McIllally and Rougan. Nevertheless, it produced a weird twinge in her nether regions. If Benjamin and Jessop Warton lived out their lives in the nineteenth century, what of Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Not to speak of the school geek!"

Alice struggled through the school week. On Friday afternoon she was utterly incapable of any constructive rational process or any self-initiated physical activity. When she finally made the trailer, followed at a great distance by her brother Jake, she went to her cabin and fell fully clothed on to her bed. She was instantly unconscious and slept soundly for fourteen hours.

When she woke, some sort of cholera had been discovered on the trailer camp. Two families were infected; three adults and seven children were removed to an isolation unit. The entire area was to be evacuated and the people subjected to intense medical inspection. For a week and a couple of days, Alice Pryde, her brother and stepfather were transferred to a sterile unit fifty miles from home. When they were finally allowed to return to their mobile living space, they found it wrapped in a kind of cellophane. Pinned to the wrapping on the door was a sheet of instructions from the local medical authorities telling them precisely what to do if ?any of the following symptoms appear within the next four weeks?. There followed several lines of childishly simplified directions; it was naturally assumed that people living in caravans possessed the minimum amount of brain tissue and the lowest possible intelligence quotient. It was only when they had unwrapped their home and acclimatised themselves to the heavily disinfected atmosphere that Alice Pryde noticed the calendar with its red rings. It battered into her understanding: she was at least two weeks overdue. Since her periods started at the age of eleven, she had been as regular as the sunrise, never more than two days late.

Two weeks later, Alice Pryde fainted in the last class of the day. She was transported home by the teacher, a woman who asked a stream of pointed and embarrassing questions which Alice found extremely difficult to answer. After all, how was it possible for her to have misbehaved with someone who died more than a century before? And no, most certainly, her stepfather had not been intimate with her! Nevertheless, she could not ignore the fact that her abdomen had lost that smooth hollow, flatness or that the bathroom scales clearly indicated that she had added more than ten pounds to her body mass in the past month. Nor the fact that on Saturday morning following her fainting fit she was sicker than the sickest dog she ever saw, and reprised the week?s eating. She had also been constipated for the past week. Which all added up to the inevitable conclusion. Which of course everybody got wrong. And Alice, her brother and her stepfather were whisked off to the isolation unit fifty miles away and subjected to every known test for cholera over the next three weeks.

When the obvious dawned on the medical authorities, and after another set of exhausting examinations, the gynecologist was incredulous. He shook his head; it was an attempt to return to some sort of normalcy in his routine. "It is a text-book case," he said, "but I must confess: I have never experienced anything like it. It is a syndrome every medical student reads about, but rarely comes across in practice." He rose and sauntered thoughtfully around the massive wooden desk to stand in front of the man. "Your stepdaughter has a phantom pregnancy." He explained the progression from natural conception to birth, the bodily changes and the accompanying symptoms. "They are all there!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "In Alice! Everything is there! Except the fetus!" He waved his hand in the air to emphasise the vast emptiness of the womb. "Everything but a fertilized ovum. There is simply nothing there!"

"Which lets us off the hook," said Jake. He snickered stupidly. His stepfather fetched him a hefty smack across the back of the man. But the man was thoughtful. It could quite easily have been?.

Again his thoughts percolated into nothing.