Sister Pact 2 snippet. Frances and Lizzie in captivity.

“Are you up for another challenge?” Frances asked.

Lizzie’s magnificent eyebrows practically hit her hairline. “Oh yes, darling...anything.”

Frances stood and wandered to the doorway checking no one was outside listening. “I think we need to see if we can drive a wedge between Brian and some of the lambs.” Frances held up her hand to silence her mother as Lizzie opened her mouth, her expression rapturous. “We need to be subtle mother, pick out targets. Sew quiet seeds of discontent. Get them to switch alliances. With everyone permanently baked, it shouldn’t be that difficult. What do you think?”

Lizzie beamed and said, “It’s like The Secret Army” and then in a loud stage whisper, “Viva la revolution.”

Frances rolled her eyes. They were hardly trying to smuggle British airmen out of Nazi-occupied France. “I’ve been working on Orion and Jenny, and Ken’s already a fan but I reckon we could get Sonny on our side, what do you think?”

“Oh yes,” Lizzie agreed readily. “He’s the most amiable man I’ve ever met.”

“Good,” Frances murmured. “You two seem to have developed a bit of rapport so do you want to have a crack at him?”

Lizzie’s smile dried up. Des even raised his head as the petting was abruptly cut off.  “Frances Sutcliffe are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

Frances blinked at the shrillness of her mother’s tone. Again with the melodrama. “Relax, Mother, I’m not asking you to sleep with him.”

“I should hope not, young lady. Subjugating myself to a patriarchal oppressor - ”

Frances’s splutter interrupted Lizzie mid flow. “You just said he was amiable.”

“Goes against all my feminist principles,” Lizzie continued undeterred. “Did Emmeline Pankhurst do time in prison so I would have to prostitute myself for my freedom?”

“No,” Frances said belatedly when she realised the question had not been rhetorical.

“No she did not,” Lizzie agreed. “I refuse to use my body to bedazzle a man. I will not use my sexuality as a weapon even though my libido has been awakened with the roar of a thousand lions.”

Frances screwed up her face. “Oh, eww, mother, too much information.”

Lizzie gave her daughter a patient smile. “You young people think that everything shrivels and dies as you get on in years. Oh Frances,” she smiled dreamily, “It gets better.”

She sighed and took up stroking Des again who looked a lot happier than Frances to hear about Lizzie’s awakened sexuality.

“It’s like the power of the great earth mother pulses inside you and you become this insatiable, flowering, ripe,” she petted Des long furry belly more quickly with each adjective, “deliciously juicy vessel with this voracious craving for gratification.”

Frances gaped at her mother and for the first time in her life wished she’d been born deaf. And the way Lizzie was rubbing Des, blind may also have been advantageous. 

“I just meant be nice to him,” she said lamely. “Not,” Frances said quickly as her mother opened her mouth again, “Like that. Just you know...interact like a human being with him, laugh with him, talk about his interests, what he did before becoming a lamb. You know...normal stuff.”

Not warped Wicca, Earth Mother, juicy vessel mumbo jumbo.

“Oh...of course,” Lizzie agreed. “Leave it to me.”

Frances nodded and smiled ignoring the ominous Jaws music playing in her head.

Sister Napped outtake #3

Frances has just met her kidnappers, a cult called The Lambs of the Apocalypse.....

“Come on,” a gentle voice said next to her elbow, “I’ll take you to your room.”

Frances, reassured by the kindness of the voice and Ken’s defence of her – and that there must be a “room” somewhere in this wild Gondwanaland (hopefully with a flushing toilet) - pocketed Des. She didn’t protest as Zeke took her by the elbow.  She was utterly knackered, her wrists, ankles and now knees hurt like hell and she needed to pee so badly her sphincter was barely holding its own.

But tomorrow, these so-called-lambs were going to fear her silence!

“Zeke, is it?” Frances asked as she stumbled along beside him trying to see by the light of one flame.

“That’s right.”

“Is there a loo in my room? I really am very desperate to...”

God, the final indignity, having to talk about bladder function to a strange man who was part of what she could only assume some elaborate kidnapping scheme, or at the very least a bizarre form of practical joke.

Just as well they’d kidnapped her instead of Joni. Her sister’s Woolworth’s bladder would never have withstood the rigours that Frances’s has been put through – there would have been an accident in the back of the car for sure!

“Spend a penny,” she ended lamely.

“We have drop toilets,” Zeke informed her. “This way,” and he peeled off to the left.

How on earth he could even see where he was going was beyond Frances. She did notice that Zeke, who towered over her and whose hand at her elbow felt as big as a meat cleaver, also had the most prominent eye-balls. Remarkably so. They could surely have won him the part as Geoff Goldblum’s stunt double in The Fly.

They were obviously an asset in this apparent black hole.

“Here we are,” Zeke said as he opened a door Frances had practically run smack bang into.

A waft of composting waste, human and vegetable, permeated the dank night air and sat in her nostrils like giant globs of fetid snot. 

Frances, who had quickly become reaccustomed to five star facilities, guessed suddenly that drop toilet was not a euphemism for a loo with an adjustable seat height. But considering she was ready to squat where she stood and empty her bladder in front of a bug-eyed man, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Zeke placed the torch handle through a metal ring inside the door. “That should help you see what you’re doing.”

Frances smiled weakly, not absolutely sure she really wanted to know what the inside looked like or even what she, Frances from Kew, looked like inside it, but human bodily functions knew no dignity. “If I’m not out in a minute you have my permission to come in and get me,” she murmured as she held her breath and went in.