Ball Gags and Capitalists

You had a brutal week. Lots of internals about salaries and redundancies. The trade union continuing with its strike action. Politicians calling you incompetent. Headlines in the media comparing you to Mr Potato Head.

The new Chief Financial Officer pulling you aside, saying you should at least pretend to compromise.

You told him you were “all in” with the organisational changes and would never back down.

And the Board meeting, where you spelled it out to the Chair and non-executive directors, saying that their proposed annual bonus for you was completely unsatisfactory and needed to be higher.

Come Friday evening, you were pooped. You needed to treat yourself to some proper downtime before returning home to your family. So, you stopped off at Anne’s place. She knew what you liked better than anybody else. 

As you sat yourself in a big puffy armchair, she poured you a Japanese whisky, coming over to massage your shoulders and listen to you let off steam.

You told her what was on your mind:

1. Your wife’s fibromyalgia. It felt to you like a phantom, made-up illness. No wonder the doctors couldn’t find a cause.

 

2. Your son’s struggles at his private school and his freshly diagnosed ADHD. You felt sorry for your boy, but you thought it strange how, these days, everyone under the age of twenty seemed to be ‘neurodiverse’.

 

3. The outrageously insulting bonus proposed by the Board. The debate around remuneration in the UK was so immature as to be laughable. This country was light years behind how it rewarded and valued its star CEOs when compared to the US.

 

“How’s work been?” Anne asked.

“Don’t go there,” you replied, finishing the whisky.

“I’m interested in what you do,” she said, topping up the tumbler. “I saw you on the news, talking about the layoffs. How do you cope with people hating you like that?”

“It’s not personal. It’s natural to attack the figurehead,” you said.

“What about the death threats?”

“If I wasn’t doing the job, it’d be somebody else getting abused. It’s not about me per se.”

“Doesn’t it upset you?”

You shrugged and said, “The union is a snake. Someone has to cut off the head. It just happens to be me.”

“Fascinating,” she said. “What about the people you’re having to layoff? Isn’t there another way?”

“No, we’ll be faster and more efficient through new technology and a smaller labour force.”

She raised her knee, setting a spiked heel on the cushioned stool in front of you so her lacy black gown parted for you to see all that leg and thigh. “The same as before?” she asked.

“But harder,” you said, finishing your whisky.  

She took the tumbler, resting it on the table.

You followed her into the bedroom and saw the leather sheets and mirrored ceiling. A candle flickered next to the lube and bowl of condoms on a low cabinet. The room smelled of incense and perfume. She ordered you to undress, opening the lid on a leather box and pulling out the equipment she used to fasten you to the bed, gagging you and fixing on nipple clamps.

As she drizzled hot wax, you felt your brain relax. The decisions, conversations, the pressure of reporting the company’s financial performance every quarter to the markets, the vilification in the media, the parliamentary inquiry, your wife’s depression, and your boy getting into trouble with teachers at school, it all faded from your mind.

“You’re disgusting,” she said, whipping you with a riding crop. “You’re discharge. You’re a boil on the soul of humanity, filled with poisonous pus.”

That’s right, you thought.

“It’s greedy, psychopathic vermin like you that are destroying the planet,” she said, “ruining people’s lives for profit and personal gain.”

It was music to your ears.

She dangled a pair of elbow-length gloves in front of you.

You writhed and groaned.

She went to the box, snapped on the gloves and removed a wad of fresh green stinging nettles from a grip seal bag.

“Harder?” she said.

You forced yourself to nod.

She brushed the nettles against you like you had instructed.

It tingled. She kept dusting you and the pain built up. By the time she flipped you over, readjusting the restraints, the fiery sensation in your genitals was close to unbearable. Still, there was a part of you that wanted her to carry on. Bracing yourself because there was nothing quite like a woman with a strap-on to improve your state of mind. That’s something the box tickers in Human Resources could never understand.

It was normal to make a noise when she entered you. A mix between a cry and a gasp. Muffled, of course, due to the ball strapped to your mouth.  

At the last moment, you realised she hadn’t used lube. Instead, she was shoving nettles into your anus.

Something even you hadn’t requested.  

“How about this for ‘all in’?” she said.

And you emitted a different sort of sound.

More a deep throaty scream, as she rammed into you so hard you lost consciousness.

 

***

“He’s bleeding heavily.”

“Good.”

Voices faded in and out. Images flittered and spun.

A snake coiled upwards and spoke to you, it’s forked pink tongue lashing out, fangs on show, telling you in a lisp that you were heartless. Evil incarnate. A bottomless well of sorrow. You thought about your primary school teacher, Mrs Hope, who had given you the same feedback. The snake got smaller and you floated away, drifting through the open window and ascending high above a city of glass, gliding through fluffy clouds, and you finally descended into a hanger-sized conference room. You found yourself standing on a grand stage, trying to give a speech to your employees, who you called ‘colleagues’, about your vision for the future and why the business must invest in technology to improve performance and productivity, and that painful decisions would have to be made. Huge sacrifices. Difficult choices. You realised you couldn’t get the words out properly. That you were undressed at the lectern with a silicone ball gag tied to your mouth, and the thousands of people in the audience were not your colleagues, they were CFOs in Jesus loin cloths with throbbing erections, nailed to eco-friendly crosses. You turned to the side of the stage, looking for help from your Comms team, your Chief Marketing Officer. You were supposed to be revealing your five-year plan for digital, AI-led reinvention, not addressing a crowd of horny and bleeding wannabe messiah CFOs.

Someone’s head was going to roll for this debacle.

And how could your team not have noticed that you were naked with a gag in your mouth before appearing on stage?

That was the problem nowadays, there was zero accountability.

“He’s convulsing.”

“Perhaps it’s toxic shock.”

The speech needed to be made. “These decisions,” you wanted to say, “were never easy, but we have to do what’s right for an organisation that is haemorrhaging money, that is too large in its current form to stay close to its customers and compete in a fast-changing business landscape. These are the harsh realities that we face together and without these cuts, these divestments, how could I, your CEO, your leader, be expected to receive a pay rise and a six-figure bonus, while also delivering dividends to our shareholders?”

No, no, that’s not what you meant to say.

To make matters worse, your wife, Deborah, stepped onto the stage with your overly sensitive son and said, “Can we go to church on Sunday with my mother?”

Cupping the microphone, you attempted to say, “Isn’t that a bit early in the morning for you to be getting out of bed?”

She deciphered your mumbles. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she replied.

Your voice took on a sarcastic, mocking tone as you said, “What about your fibromyalgia?”

She started sobbing and yelled, “You think I’m making this condition up? Do you actually think I want to feel this lousy all the time?”

The phoney Jesus CFOs were aroused by the argument.

Your wife and son ran off.

You heard a moan and turned to see the crowd of number crunchers on crucifixes ejaculate simultaneously.

You stood frozen, watching their milky white cum arrows arching through the air towards you. The colour and consistency were similar to when you squeezed the nettles in the fields behind the house where you grew up as a boy.

“He’s going into cardiac arrest.”

“No, I don’t think so, although he’ll be praying for a heart attack soon enough.”

Back on the bed, the snake craned over your body and hissed in your face. “The only head we’ll be cutting off, sunshine, is yours,” it said, sounding uncannily like Ray Croker, the General Secretary of the Trade Union.

 

***

Anne and Ray were working together. He came into the bedroom wearing a PPE suit and carried your limp body into the walk-in shower where he set about dismembering you. Once your head was detached, he held it aloft, strings of blood dripping onto the tiled floor, leaving the gag in your mouth.

“Who’s the snake now?” he sneered.

So, you found yourself existing in an earthbound limbo.

Forced to watch the captains and queens of industry get whipped, spanked and beaten on Anne’s bed of leather.

Ray and Anne were reasonably selective in who they chopped into little pieces. Mostly, it was the CEOs they killed.    

You realised how Anne skilfully probed each visitor for information.

She was gathering intelligence. It’s was all part of their grand plan.

Anne and Ray often talked about the coming revolution.

It was entertaining to watch what happened to your two-faced CFO. He was a smooth operator to be sure, stepping in as the interim chief executive after you were reported missing. He attempted to strike a deal with the union, making promises that could never be delivered on. Naturally, he didn’t reveal how the Board was trying to avoid the ongoing pain of restructuring as a publicly-listed business by pushing through a top secret take-private deal.

They were in late-stage negotiations with a sovereign wealth fund from the Middle East and a US private equity house.

Ray and Anne must have found out.

You watched as she tied your successor to the bed. He actually asked for the nettles.

It was unbelievable. First, he stole your job. Now he wanted your kink.  

Pleasingly, your fellow murdered chief executives agreed to ostracise him. They didn’t approve of interims and, like you, distrusted CFOs.

Not that any of you felt close or connected.

Drifting in a timeless hinterland, your emotions were long gone. You wondered if you ever had them to begin with.

You told yourself that you understood how the world worked in a way that ordinary people never did. You knew about balance sheets, financial institutions, pension funds, the language of investors, share preferences, buybacks, foreign exchange rates, private and public capital flows, and the politics of global trade.

The problem was that, out here, none of that seemed to matter anymore.

When you were alive, journalists fought to get in front of you for exclusive interviews.

And you liked to tell them: “It’s lonely at the top.”  

Only now you realise it’s lonelier still as a disembodied CEO in the land of the dead.