ChubWizard - Light Fingers, Heavy Consequences. Ch 4: A Very Bad Day

There was a belly in her lap.

Kestra looked at it for a long time. It looked back at her, in the way that a belly can, with the dark little dimple of her navel sunk deep into it like a thumbprint in dough. It was round and pale and soft, and it was resting on the tops of her thighs, spilling gently over the front of her trousers where the belt used to be. The waistband had vanished beneath it. Her top had given up on any pretence of covering it and had retreated to somewhere just beneath her chest, where it clung on in a tight black roll.

She blinked.

The belly was still there.

"Huh," Kestra said, in a very small, very calm voice.

She lifted one gloved finger and, with the care of someone checking whether a sleeping dog was dead, poked it.

The finger sank in. Up to the first knuckle. The belly wobbled outward from the point of contact in a slow, soft ripple, jiggled once against her thighs, and settled back exactly where it had been.

She felt the poke. From the inside.

Kestra screamed.

It went out across the Fenmoor like a startled heron, high and shrill and very long, and three hundred yards away a flock of ducks exploded out of the reeds in panic. Up on the willow branch, the black crow, which had apparently followed her out of the tower at some point, fluffed its feathers and settled in like a man taking his seat at the theatre.

"No," Kestra said, when she had run out of scream. "No. No, no, no. Nope. Absolutely not. That is somebody else's. That belongs to a baker. That belongs to a bishop."

She grabbed it with both hands. That was a mistake. It filled her hands. It was warm and heavy and it squished between her fingers, and there was so much of it that her hands didn't even meet in the middle. She let go as though it had burned her. It bounced.

"Bloating," she said rapidly. "It's bloating. Gas. That honey stuff, it fizzed, it must have fizzed, I've got a bellyful of fizz, that's all, I'll just..."

She sucked in. She sucked in harder than she had ever sucked in her life, until her ribs creaked and her eyes watered and the tendons stood out in her neck.

The belly moved in by perhaps the width of a coin. Then, the instant she ran out of breath, it rolled back out with a sort of gentle, cheerful flop, as if it had humoured her and was now done.

"Oh gods," Kestra whispered. "Oh gods, oh gods. It's real. It's all real. It's fat. I'm fat. There's fat on me. Where did it come from?"

The crow cawed. It sounded exactly like laughter.

"Shut up!"

She scrambled to get up. That was when she discovered that getting up was now a process with several distinct stages. She tried to swing her legs under her the way she always did, in one smooth motion, and found that her belly was in the way. She tried to lean forward to get her weight over her feet, and her belly squashed into her thighs and pushed back. She rocked once, twice, then rolled onto her hands and knees with a grunt that she would deny ever making, and pushed herself up from there, swaying, and stood.

Everything came with her a moment later.

She felt it all arrive. The belly dropped forward and swung. Her chest, considerably fuller than it had been that morning, bounced heavily inside the straining knit of her top. Her backside settled behind her with a weight that tugged at the waist of her trousers. Her thighs, which had been neat and lean and well separated for her entire adult life, pressed together from groin to knee with a soft, warm, squishing contact that made her freeze in horror.

"My thighs are touching," she said faintly. "My thighs are touching each other."

She tried to take a step. The insides of her trousers whispered against one another with a long, slick, unmistakable shhhff. She took another. Shhhff. It sounded like a broom on a floor. It sounded like someone very large walking down a quiet corridor.

"No," she moaned, and staggered to the edge of the ditch.

The water had gone still again. Its surface was black and smooth, and when Kestra leaned over it, it showed her a face.

It was her face, in the same way that a portrait painted by an enthusiastic uncle is technically of you. The red eyes were hers, wide with horror. The pointed ears were hers, though they now poked out of the sides of her head from between a pair of plump, round, rosy cheeks that hadn't been there this morning. The neat little chin was hers. It was just sitting on top of a second chin, a soft pale cushion that bulged out under her jaw and pressed against the top of her turtleneck collar.

The collar. It used to sit loose and elegant at her throat. Now it was digging into her neck, and the flesh above it puffed slightly over the edge, like a tart overflowing its crust.

"My jaw," Kestra whispered. "I had a jaw. I had a jawline. People commented on it. Poets. A poet once compared it to the edge of a crescent moon." She turned her head left, then right. Her cheeks wobbled. "Where is it? Where did it go? It's under there. I know it's under there."

She pushed her fingers into the soft underside of her chin, searching for bone, and found it eventually, a long way back. The second chin squished out around her fingers.

Kestra made a high, keening noise.

This face had looked back at her from the tall mirror at the Goose only that morning. She had called it gorgeous. She had blown it a kiss. She had, in point of fact, done a great deal more than blow it a kiss, and with a lurch of horror she found she couldn’t stop picturing it now: that same room, that same glass, and this face in it instead, round and pink and double-chinned, eyes half-closed, while her plump little hand slid down over...

“No,” she whispered. “Don’t. Don’t think about that. Never think about that again as long as you live.”

She straightened up and, against her better judgment and out of pure habit, took inventory. She always took inventory. 

Her arms first, because they were nearest. The jacket's half-sleeves had been loose and swingy this morning. Now they gripped her upper arms like a pair of anxious hands, and beneath them the soft flesh of her arms pushed out in pale swells, round and smooth where the lean little curves of muscle had been. She raised one arm experimentally. The underside of it swayed. She lowered it. It swayed back.

"Wings," she said hollowly. "I've got wings. Bingo wings. Like my great-aunt Sylvaine."

The bracers on her forearms had disappeared into the flesh around them, each one pressing a deep groove. Her gloves were stretched tight as sausage skins across the backs of her hands, and her fingers, poking out of the fingerless ends, were short and plump and dimpled at the knuckles. She flexed them. The leather creaked like an old door.

"My hands," she said. "My working hands. How am I supposed to pick a lock with these? These are biscuit hands. These are hands for holding biscuits."

Her stomach growled at the word biscuit.

"Not now!"

She looked lower. Her chest had swollen into something heavy and round that pushed the black knit of her top out in front of her like a shelf. The thin chain of her necklace, which used to lie flat against her breastbone, now dangled off the edge of that shelf and swung free, the little gold pendant twinkling at her as if nothing at all were wrong. The crossed straps over her ribs had sunk into her sides. Above and below them, her flesh pushed outward in soft rolls that she could feel when she twisted, a squeeze of extra softness along her back and sides that hadn't existed when she'd buckled them that morning.

The top itself was in serious trouble. It had been made to end a hand's width above her navel. It now ended a hand's width above where her navel used to be, which was to say it had become a sort of wide, tight black band around her chest and nothing else. The knit had stretched so thin across the front that she could see the lighter skin beneath it in places.

"That was imported," she said, near tears. "That was Selvarran wool. The man said it would hold its shape forever."

And below that, the belly, sitting out in the open air in all its pale, round, unapologetic glory. Below the belly, the very top of her trousers, the waistband button straining so hard that it had begun to tilt sideways in its buttonhole. And below that...

She turned around and looked over her shoulder, which took more turning than it used to.

The leather trousers had been tailored for a slim, perky little backside. What they were now containing was a great deal more than that, and they were doing it under protest. The glossy black leather was stretched so tight across her rear that it had gone smooth and shining as polished glass, every stitch along the seams pulled into a taut little line. The back pockets, once neat and squared, had warped into stretched, gaping ovals perched high on two big round cheeks. When she shifted her weight, everything back there shifted with it, a heavy, rolling bounce that she felt more than saw and that kept going for a moment after she'd stopped.

She stopped moving entirely. It jiggled once more, all by itself, and was still.

"That's... that's not..." she began, and could not, for the life of her, figure out how to end that sentence.

Somewhere under all of it, she remembered, were her abs. She had counted them that morning. Six. She pressed her fingertips into the front of her belly, searching for them the way she’d searched for her jawline, and her fingers sank and sank into warm, yielding softness and found nothing at all. Not one. Not even a rumour of one.

And all of it, every new pound, every roll and swell and dimple, had been packed onto a body that barely came up to a human’s shoulder.

She saw it now with dreadful clarity. On a tall woman, this much weight might have spread out. Someone might have called it statuesque. On her it had nowhere to go but outward. She was nearly as wide as she was tall. She was round from every angle: round face, round arms, round belly, round bum, round thighs sitting on two short little legs that looked as if they’d been borrowed from someone else’s much smaller body. She looked like a dumpling. A dumpling with pointed ears.

“Small bottles,” she said in a hollow voice. “The finest perfumes come in small bottles.”

She looked down at herself, past the shelf of her chest and the great pale curve of her belly, to where the toes of her boots peeked out underneath like two shy animals.

“And the finest lard,” she whispered, “comes in small barrels.”

The thigh strap had worked itself up into a sort of tourniquet. Her thigh bulged out above and below it in two soft round swells, the pouch pressed half flat against her leg, and when she bent to unbuckle it she found that bending was now a negotiation. Her belly folded against her thighs. Her chest pressed down on her belly. Her breath shut off like a stoppered bottle. She got her fingers on the buckle, panting, and just as she found the prong, it snapped clean out of its hole on its own.

The strap flew loose and slapped her across the back of the thigh.

"Ow!"

The crow laughed so hard it nearly fell off the branch.

Kestra straightened up, red-faced and puffing, and pointed a dimpled, trembling finger at it.

"You knew," she said. "You knew. You sat there in that library and you watched me walk down those stairs getting fatter and fatter and you didn't say a single word."

The crow tilted its head, as if to say that she had told it to keep quiet, and it had been a very good bird.

"Traitor."

She stamped her foot, which was a mistake, because everything jiggled. Her belly bounced against the top of her trousers. Her backside bounced. Her cheeks wobbled. Her chest gave a heavy, delayed little heave. For a moment her entire body seemed to quiver in sympathy with the stamp, like a jelly set down too hard on a table.

Kestra stood perfectly still until it all stopped. Then she sat back down on the bank. She sat down a little too fast, and her backside hit the ground with a muffled, fleshy whump, and the trousers made a sound.

It was a small sound. A tiny, final, thrip.

She felt cool fen air touch the back of her right thigh, high up, in a place that had never in its life been touched by fen air.

Kestra closed her eyes.

"That was the seam," she said, to the sky. "Wasn't it. That was the seam."

The sky offered no opinion.

She reached around behind herself and felt for it, and found it: a split the length of her palm running along the seam under her right cheek, the leather gaping open, her own soft skin swelling out through it like rising bread pushing up out of the tin.

She started to laugh. It was not a nice laugh. It went on too long and got higher toward the end, and somewhere in the middle of it she noticed that she was also crying.

"Two hundred crowns," she wept. "Two hundred crowns, these trousers. Hand-stitched. Hand-stitched. The tailor in Varrow measured me four times. He said I had the figure of a dancer. He said it was a joy to work with such clean lines. Clean lines!" She grabbed a handful of her own hip and shook it at the crow. "Look at these lines! Do these look clean to you? This is a smudge! I'm one big smudge!"

The crow regarded her hip with polite interest.

She let go of it. It settled back into place with a soft little bounce.

For a while Kestra just sat there on the bank, sniffling, while the fen wind ruffled her ponytail and her belly rose and fell with her shaky breathing. Her mind went around in circles. It was very good at going around in circles. It visited several different places, in several different moods, in no particular order, and then it went around and visited them all again.

First it went to fury.

"That hag," she snarled, sitting bolt upright, which made her belly bounce. "That poisonous, conniving, bog-dwelling, pastry-brained old crone. Featherfoot. Featherfoot! She wrote it in capitals! She did that on purpose! Who does that? What kind of sick, twisted, petty, spiteful old witch leaves a pretty bottle out right at eye level with a lying label on it so that a perfectly nice girl walks by and..."

She trailed off. Somewhere at the back of her mind, the honest voice pointed out that the kind of witch who did that was the kind whose silver box was currently sitting in her jacket pocket.

"...So that a perfectly nice girl walks by," Kestra repeated, more quietly, "and drinks it. Without being asked. In the middle of a robbery."

She was silent for a moment.

"Fine," she muttered. "It's clever. It's a horrible, evil, clever trap. I'll give her that. I hope she chokes on it."

Then her mind went to bargaining.

There would be a cure. Of course there would be a cure. Witches always kept the cure right next to the curse, everybody knew that, it was basic professional practice. It would be in that cabinet, one shelf down, and all she had to do was go back in and find it. She turned and looked at the tower.

She looked at the ditch, which she would have to cross. She looked at the rope, which had very nearly dropped her into the water when she'd been at least a stone lighter than she was now. She looked at the pale, too-many-eyed shape that had drifted back to the surface and was now lying just under the duckweed, watching her with the patient affection of a dog outside a butcher's.

She looked at the hedge, which she had barely fit through with her hips at their previous size. She looked at her hips at their current size.

"I'd get stuck," she said. "I'd get stuck in the hedge and the hedge would eat me. Or I'd get stuck in the door. Or on the stairs. Oh gods, the stairs. I'd have to climb three floors of stairs." She put a hand on her chest. It sank in. "I nearly died coming down."

Then her mind went to despair.

"What if it's forever?" she whispered.

The words fell into the quiet like a stone into the ditch. She felt them sink.

"What if this is it? What if I'm like this forever? I'll never climb a wall again. I'll never fit through a window. I'll have to go through doors. Like a customer." Her lip wobbled. Her cheeks wobbled in sympathy. "I'll have to get all my clothes let out. I'll have to buy new clothes. I'll have to buy big clothes. Smocks. Tents. They'll measure me with a rope. They'll measure me with a ship's rope."

She put her face in her hands. Her hands were soft. Her face was soft. It was like resting a pillow on a pillow.

"And they'll laugh. Everybody in Lantern Street will laugh. Mags will laugh. Tobin will laugh, and Tobin has a face like a boiled boot. I'll walk into the Rusty Nail and the whole room will go quiet and then someone will say, Kestra, is that you? And I'll have to say yes. And then they'll say..." She lifted her head, red-eyed and blotchy. "They'll say, Kestra, you've let yourself go."

The crow made a sympathetic sort of noise.

"Don't you pity me," she sniffed. "Don't you dare."

Then her mind went to resolution, briefly and with tremendous confidence.

"Right," Kestra said, wiping her nose on the back of her glove. "Right. Fine. If it's fat, it's fat. Fat comes off. Everyone knows that. You just stop eating. I'll stop eating. I'll eat nothing but water and air and the occasional lettuce leaf, and I'll run up and down the Hollowmere bridge every morning, and in a month..."

Her stomach growled.

It was a tremendous growl. It started low and rumbled up and up through her whole middle until her belly actually quivered with it, and it went on for so long that the crow leaned in to listen. When it was done, a great wave of hunger came rolling up after it, deep and warm and aching, a hunger with honey in it, and butter and cinnamon and toasted almonds.

Kestra discovered that her hand had gone into her thigh pouch all on its own. It came out holding the emergency ration she kept there for long jobs: a hard little oatcake wrapped in waxed cloth, dense and dry and not something she had ever in her life actually wanted to eat.

She stared at it.

She unwrapped it.

She ate it in three bites, and it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted, and she licked the crumbs off the waxed cloth and then off her gloves, and then she looked around for more.

There wasn't any more. She realised what she had just done.

"That doesn't count," she said hoarsely. "That was medicinal."

The waistband button of her trousers, which had been holding the line heroically since the tower stairs, chose that moment to give up. It popped off with a crisp little tik, bounced off the tip of her boot, and rolled into the reeds. The waistband sprang open. Her belly, relieved of the last thing holding it in check, slid forward and down with a sort of long, soft, contented sigh, and settled a full inch lower into her lap.

Kestra looked at it. It looked comfortable.

It looked, in fact, rather nice.

The thought arrived so softly that she didn’t notice it come in. It simply sat down in her head, warm and golden, the way the honey had sat down in her stomach, and made itself at home. The fen was quiet. The wind was cool on her bare skin. And the belly in her lap rose and fell with her breathing, slow and round and heavy, and the sight of it was strangely soothing to watch.

Her hand drifted down and rested on top of it.

She meant to push it away, or cover it with her jacket, or do anything at all except what she actually did, which was spread her fingers and let her palm sink in. It was so warm. Warmer than the rest of her, as if the honey were still glowing somewhere deep inside it. The skin was smooth and tight across the top, and softer lower down where it folded over her open waistband, and when she pressed gently it gave, and gave, and gave some more, and then pushed back against her hand with a slow, yielding firmness that was nothing like anything she had ever touched on her own body.

“Huh,” Kestra said again, very quietly.

She gave it a little shake. Just a small one, a curious wiggle from side to side. The belly rolled under her hand like a waterskin, sloshing heavily one way and then the other, and the wobble spread outward into her hips and up into her chest, and she felt all of it, every soft, rippling inch, a long, lazy shiver of motion that went on after her hand had stopped.

She did it again. Slower this time.

Her other hand joined the first without asking her permission. Together they slid around the curve of her belly to her sides, where the soft new handles of flesh spilled over the top of her trousers, and squeezed. Her fingers sank in up to the knuckles. It felt like kneading warm dough. It felt like holding something precious. She found herself squeezing them gently, rhythmically, the way she might have tested the ripeness of a peach at the Hollowmere market, and a small, dreamy smile crept onto her round face.

“So soft,” she murmured. “Gods. How are you so soft?”

The honey-voice in her head hummed approvingly.

Her hands kept wandering. They roamed back across her middle and up, over the fat roll squeezed out beneath her tight band of a top, and on to the heavy new weight of her chest. She cupped it, and lifted, and felt the surprising, solid fullness of it settle into her palms, and let it drop again, and watched it bounce. Then down to her thighs, pressed together in the grass, plush and warm through the stretched leather, and she ran her hands slowly down the length of them and back up the insides where they met, and the leather squeaked softly under her gloves.

Somewhere far away, the humiliation was still there. 

And underneath the humiliation was something older, and far more dangerous. Habit. Her body knew this ritual by heart. The slow roaming of hands, the admiring, the squeezing, the warm curl building low down: it had done all of it a hundred evenings in front of a hundred mirrors, and it answered now the way it always had, eagerly and without hesitation, without stopping for one moment to ask whose body it was admiring. 

She could feel it at the edges of everything: the split seam, the lost buckle, the crow on its branch, the thought of Tobin’s boiled-boot face laughing at her in the Rusty Nail. It should have made her want to curl up and disappear. Instead, it had turned into something else, something hot and fizzing that coiled low in her belly and spread down from there. Every squeeze of her soft hips made it worse. Every jiggle made it worse. The more ridiculous she felt, the warmer she got, and the warmer she got, the more she wanted to keep going.

Her breath had gone shallow. Her cheeks were flushed a deep rose red, and it had nothing to do with the walk. She bit her lower lip, and her thighs shifted in the grass, pressing together, and a small, involuntary sound escaped her throat. A soft, breathy little moan.

The sound hung in the quiet fen air.

The crow, on its branch, slowly turned its head and looked at her.

Kestra froze.

Her hands were buried in her own hips. 

It was the ritual. Her ritual. The sacred, private, morning-mirror ritual that the big human had interrupted not eight hours ago, the one thing in the world she loved better than gold. And she had just performed it, faithfully, devotedly, with her eyes closed and her lip between her teeth, on this. 

Her eyes were half-closed. Her trousers were split open at the back, her belly was hanging out in the open air, and she was sitting on a muddy bank outside a witch’s tower, squeezing herself like a baker kneading bread and making noises she normally reserved for very good nights in very private rooms.

She looked at the crow. The crow looked at her. Neither of them said anything for a long, long moment.

“No,” Kestra said.

She yanked her hands away as if her own body had bitten her. The belly wobbled in protest. She ignored it.

“No. Absolutely not. We are not doing this. I am not doing this.” She grabbed the edges of her jacket and tugged them as far across her front as they would go, which was nowhere near far enough. “That was the potion. That was the honey. It’s in my head. It’s in my blood. It made me feel things, and I did not feel those things, and nobody saw anything.”

The crow blinked once, slowly.

“Nobody,” Kestra hissed, “saw anything.”

She sat bolt upright with her hands clamped firmly to the grass on either side of her, well away from anything soft, and breathed through her nose until the fizzing heat began to fade. It took longer than she would have liked. It lingered, warm and sweet and shameful, curling down in the pit of her stomach like a cat refusing to get off a chair, and every time she shifted her weight and felt her body jiggle, it stirred and lifted its head.

She did not shift her weight again.

“I am a professional,” she told the fen, through gritted teeth. “I am a dangerous, cunning, highly respected thief. I have robbed a duke. I have robbed two dukes. I do not sit in a ditch and fondle myself because some honey-drunk witch decided to turn me into a cushion.”

Her face was burning. She could feel the heat of it radiating off her fat cheeks. Of all the things that had happened to her today, she realised, this was by far the worst, because the belly and the thighs and the split seam had been done to her, and this... this little episode... she had done all by herself.

“That was the potion,” she muttered again, much less convincingly.

She went back to despair for a while.

After that she circled through fury again ("I'll burn the tower down, I'll burn the whole Fenmoor down"), bargaining again ("maybe if I stand on my head it'll all drain back up"), and a short, strange spell of denial during which she sat with her eyes shut and insisted out loud that she was still a size six and the problem was the light. When she opened her eyes, the light had not changed, and neither had she.

Then, eventually, she ran out of ways to feel and simply sat there, tired and enormous and sniffling, staring out at the empty grey fen.

"Fine," she said at last. "Fine. At least I got the box."

That was something. That was a great deal, actually. Four hundred crowns would buy a lot of new trousers. It would buy a lot of cake, too, said a soft, sweet, honey-flavoured voice from somewhere south of her ribs, and she told it to be quiet.

She reached into her jacket for the reliquary. The inner pocket had been pulled so tight against her side that she had to wrestle the box out with both hands, wriggling it free inch by inch while her soft side squished out around it. When it finally came loose she held it up to the light, cold and silver and lovely.

It rattled.

Kestra frowned. She held it to her ear and shook it gently. Something light slid around inside.

She worked her plump thumbnail under the lid and flicked it open.

Inside, on a bed of faded violet silk, lay a small folded card. Nothing else. She unfolded it. The handwriting was elegant, looping, and unmistakably amused.

Dear Thief,

If you are reading this, then you have found the box, which was very clever of you, and you have also found the bottle, which was less clever. I do hope you enjoyed it. It is my own recipe and I am rather proud of it.

The real reliquary is with me in Ashbury. I never leave it in an empty tower. Who would?

Please do leave the silver box on the doorstep on your way out. It belonged to my mother.

With warmest regards,

M. Greaves

P.S. You will find that you are rather hungry for a while. The honey cakes from the cart by the Hollowmere bridge are very good. I recommend the ones with almonds.

Kestra read it twice. Then she read it a third time, slowly, moving her lips. Then she lowered it and stared at nothing for a long time, while the wind blew and the crow preened and the bog-thing blew a single fat bubble up through the duckweed.

"For a while," she said finally. "For a while. What does that mean? A while? How long is a while? A week? A year? A witch's while? Witches live for three hundred years! A witch's while could be the rest of my life!"

No answer was forthcoming. The card said nothing more no matter how she turned it, and when she held it up to the light there was no secret writing on the back, only a small, neat doodle of a smiling cake.

Kestra crumpled it in her fist.

"I'm keeping the box," she announced to the crow. "Out of spite."

The crow cawed. Then it hopped down from the willow, walked over to her with a slow, rolling waddle, and looked pointedly from the box to the tower door and back again.

It was, Kestra could not help but notice, a very fat crow.

She stared at it. It stared back. Something in its beady black eye looked deeply, profoundly sympathetic.

"How long," Kestra whispered, "have you been like that?"

The crow made a long-suffering croak, and did not elaborate.

In the end she left the box on the far bank of the ditch, which was as close to the doorstep as she was willing to go, and propped the crumpled card against it, because the honest part of her felt Morwenna had earned that much. Then she hitched up her ruined trousers, which immediately slid back down beneath the curve of her belly, hitched them up again, and held them there with one hand.

She turned toward the Fenmoor road and Hollowmere, two long hours of mud away. Her thighs whispered together with every step. Shhhff. Shhhff. Her belly swayed. Her chest bounced. The split in her seat let in a cold, steady draught. After the first fifty yards she was breathing hard, after the first hundred she was sweating, and after the first quarter mile she caught herself thinking, with a sudden intense longing that frightened her badly, about almond honey cakes.

"No," she told herself, out loud. "No cakes. No cart. I'm going to sneak in by the back gate, and go straight to my room, and lock the door, and stay there until this... until it... until whenever a while is."

She walked on a few steps, thinking of the tall oak-framed glass on the wardrobe door, and of what would be waiting for her in it.

“And I’m throwing a blanket over that mirror,” she added, very quietly.

She walked on a few more steps.

"And if I see Bram," she added grimly, "I'll tell him I'm my own cousin."

Behind her, on the far bank, the fat crow fluttered up onto the silver box and settled itself comfortably on the lid. It watched her go, a small, round, angry, waddling silhouette against the wide grey sky, stopping every few minutes to hitch up her trousers and swear.

As security measures went, it had to be said, it was extremely effective.