CHAPTER NINE

Lilly Tells her Story. Marina is spellbound!

Afterwards the friends met in Mr Marcelinus’s  house. Lilly was dressed now and had cleaned herself up. But her face bore the marks of her recent hard fought duel. One eye was closed and she had a bruise on one cheekbone. And Marina knew that under that expensive gown was a body covered in bruises. But Lilly was as alert and vivacious as ever.

"I wish you'd give up this fighting, Lilly." said Angelina. "Stop it while you still have your looks!"

"I thought the marks on your back would have faded more by now!" said Marina, whose curiosity about the rather fresh looking scars had been rising ever since Lilly had  stripped for the fight. "It's been nearly four years since they whipped you and yet they look as bad as they ever did - worse, even!"

"They did fade away quite nicely for  a few months." laughed their Amazon friend. "Then I ran into a very serious spot of bother in the shape of a jurisdiction where they used the whip a lot, and they used it on me - many times! I never had a chance to heal until three months ago when I finally left their ungentle custody! My bare back received simply loads of whippings, more than fifty in fact, Marina! All of them administered in a tin pot little country where I spent two years, most of that time breaking rocks, getting flogged and fighting off my fellow prisoners."

Marina had known it! Lilly had been through more trouble since they had last met! And now she was to be told all about it! She and Angelina looked eagerly at their friend, who continued her story.

“While I was first in that country I kept getting arrested for illegal fighting. I had a fight a week - two some weeks and was raking in the cash! But I got caught a few times. That, as you must realise, is an occupational hazard for me! The first few times they hauled me in, I was given a choice of  hard labour or a lashing. I chose  lashes each time! I can take a whipping but I couldn’t afford to lose income by being in the joint! It started two weeks after I arrived in their country with ten fairly gentle lashes for the first offence,  then twenty appreciably more vigorously applied ones for the second - and so on up to fifty real sizzlers for my fifth brush with their law! That fifty really made me jerk and twitch, but I kept my mouth shut! They were laid on by a master craftsman!  The other fighters were allowed to go free with only a ticking off or a small fine, but I was different! That's what comes of fighting naked! That is the price of sticking to your principles in the face of bigotry and intolerance! They really didn't like it! The crowds who came to watch me lapped it up, but not the stupid cops - or the dumb judges!

"I made plenty of cash while I was there, although each time a fight was raided the cops took all the takings - and kept it for themselves the corrupt scum. So for three months I was fighting pretty well all my bouts with a raw back. I can assure you that being forced back on to the ropes, which my far from sporting opponents all tried to do to me, was agony! But I only lost one fight!

 "When I was arrested for the sixth time they threw the book at me!  They were getting really angry with me! I suppose it was because I wouldn't cover myself up to fight and also I kept beating their best women fighters and quite a few men, too! It's a pretty macho place and they took a very dim view of my knocking out their guys, especially when one was the police chief's son! Maybe they thought that sixty lashes was too much for me to take in one go, so they sentenced me to thirty lashes, followed by nine months hard labour, and then another thirty at the end to sort of round off the experience! It was damned hard work they had me doing, believe me! They said that since I seemed to like fighting naked I could serve my sentence that way - not even shoes were allowed me - even when the weather got cold, which it certainly did for about five months of the year! I worked in a quarry and they made sure I was kept at it until I dropped! They made me do two seven hour shifts every day with a couple of three minute drink and food breaks. I was kept at it for seven days a week and three hundred and sixty five days a year! And the others worked only one eight hour shift. By Golly, I was worked hard! I was mostly crushing rocks with a thirty pound hammer and if my arms weren't going up and down without pause for four hours at a time, or if my rhythm slowed down, I got a good, solid taste of the overseer‘s whip - which I didn‘t like! I couldn’t avoid his attentions altogether but I slaved like a Trojan to keep it to a minimum! Even in winter, with a hard frost,  the sweat poured off me all day.    

"I got into a prison fight in my first week, while I was still sore as hell from my introductory flogging. Some woman was rude about my naked body and I thought she needed teaching a lesson! They gave me  thirty more for that. Three guards had me tied up and were laying into me within seconds of my knocking the woman out. Very efficient!

“The other women could see how strong I was - without a stitch on me all day and every day, how could they not! And they kept challenging me to fight them. You know me!  I never turn down a challenge!  I had twenty more fights during those nine months with the same penalty each time! As if that wasn’t bad enough, four months into my sentence, I punched a guard who had really pissed me off - cheeky bastard, trying to grope me! I got all of fifty lashes with a much heavier whip for that piece of gross insubordination and they told me they would double my closing thirty at the end of the nine months! And when I thought my time was up and I had taken my sixty lashes with no more than the odd gasp and thanked them at the end like a good girl, instead of showing me the door, the bastards told me I must serve twelve more months for general bad behaviour and get another sixty lashes at the end of that!

“Even I, with my Stoic acceptance of life’s little setbacks,  was a bit stunned at such far from happy news! It was the middle of winter, with the coldest weather still to come!  I vowed not to prolong my stay even further by hitting any more guards!  I asked to see the Warden and put it to him that in future I would only fight when challenged, but that I would always have to accept a challenge, as a woman of honour, and would never back down even if it meant spending the rest of my life toiling in that quarry. He looked almost friendly and agreed that, as long as I stopped actually starting  fights,  he'd not extend my sentence further. He said instead of getting more time I'd get more lashes for fighting and eighty at the end. I thanked him. That was the nearest thing to friendship that was shown to me in all my time there!

"Of course I did get into more fights! Twenty five more!  I genuinely had no choice if I wanted to keep my self-respect! And my punishment went up to fifty lashes per fight! But I could take it by that time! I started out pretty tough and by then I was ultra tough - still am! The minute I'd done my extra year, and with a bleeding back after that eighty lashes, they chucked me out of the country, scarcely giving me time to put my clothes back on - clothes that I hadn’t worn for the best part of two years!  They hardly fitted, especially around the arms and shoulders! I spent a week shopping for new clothes before getting back to fighting!  I was extremely glad to leave, despite having to say goodbye to a sweet girl, who'd most likely forgotten me by then!

“I made a fair amount of bread there, in the three months before my involuntary departure for the quarries, and wired it to my account back home! And the interest had mounted up during the time I was inside being fed for free! I said ‘inside’, but most of my time was spent outside of course. Apart from my two years in the prison here, that was the longest term I’ve  spent in jail - so far!  And it was easily the most painful.  In the other countries I usually just got a week at most. But almost two years of  incessant back breaking work, naked in all weathers, did wonders for my physique and stamina! I lost a bit of weight, but I gained in muscle strength. I’m not just stronger, I’m a whole lot harder. You saw that today!"

“And you had plenty of fights!” said Marina. “That must have been fun - for you!”

“Highly enjoyable, even when I lost! But I was paid for them in lashes and I‘d have preferred money! I have my financial security in old age to consider! I don't know how much time I have left! Just one bad fight could end my career.”

"I'm surprised you didn't move on after the first flogging, Lilly! it must have clear that you'd come to the wrong country to follow your occupation!" said Angelina looking at her with a mixture of admiration and disgust at the way her former lover had gone so completely off the rails. "What on earth possessed you to stay and keep getting bigger and bigger ones? And risk being put away? You liked it, didn‘t you? You sicko!”

"There was a girl I was stuck on. I didn't want to leave her. She  fancied me as hopelessly as I adored her, even though at first she thought I was too much like a man for her taste! ( I like to be hairy for the fights. Makes me look that little bit more fearsome!)  I was so totally besotted with her that I couldn't tear myself away from her sweet darling embraces! She had the sweetest cunt, Angelina and the softest skin! What one will put up with for love!

“She’d treat my back after my floggings with such tenderness! After my fights I’d flex my biceps for her to admire and she’d bite hard on them with her sweet little teeth! I can still see the marks if I look hard enough! I haven't heard from her since they threw me out. I was allowed to write to her and to you, but I didn’t say too much. It would have upset her terribly to know even a tenth of the things they were doing to me. She had a kind and soft heart!

“And - yes, I didn't find those two years of torment entirely bad - far from it! Learning to cope with extremes of pain, hardship and loneliness was good for me and I welcomed it. There were times when I felt close to despair, but I fought it and I beat it. The experience left me stronger in so many ways!"

“If only I had known!” said Angelina. “I have loads of contacts all over the world. And if all else failed I could have bought you out! You should have said how long you were in for. From your letter, I thought it was a much shorter sentence. A month or two would have been a salutary lesson and done you good, but twenty one. Poor Lilly!”

Lilly said nothing.

“Lilly wouldn’t have thanked you, or I bloody well hope she wouldn’t!” said Marina. “Don’t you see? She got herself into that mess. She’s a big girl now and it was up to her to fight her own battles, face the consequences of her actions and, ultimately,  get herself out of it by being a good girl, working hard, accepting challenges, taking her floggings  and not punching out any more guards! Right, Lilly?”

Lilly nodded. The more she saw of Marina, the better she liked her! No way ought she have missed a second of that twenty one months! It was all part of something she’d had to go through in order to be clean again. Marina was on her wavelength.

"Was it a female guard you hit at the prison?" asked Marina. She was thrilled to hear of Lilly's wild life and her senseless, almost suicidal, defiance of authority! Angelina, on the other hand, continued to look more and more aghast.

"A male one, darling! I broke the bastard's jaw. It was worth getting the fifty just to lay him out! I'd do the same and get fifty more if I was in that jail again! I can take the pain, Marina, and nobody pushes me around!"

Marina had a further question.

“Why did the other women keep challenging you when they knew what it would mean for you? Or were they flogged too?”

“Good question, Marina! They weren’t punished. And no fight was ever stopped until it was over - usually by me winning, although I didn’t win all my prison fights - not by any means. No chance! They worked me far harder than any of the others and kept flogging me too hard and too often! But I always gave a good account of myself and won thirty three out of forty five. And that was little short of miraculous considering I went into every single fight dog tired after fourteen hours extremely gruelling work! When I lost I was more than half asleep even before the punch that KO’d me! When I won, the loser was taken to be treated and excused duty for a day, but when I lost I was left to lie where I had fallen until I came round, probably in the morning - I was so tired anyway! The winner was rewarded by getting her sentence cut, and I got no treatment. And I still got to work just as hard. And I still got flogged!  Quite an incentive to win!

“No, Marina! The staff encouraged the other women to challenge me, partly because they enjoyed the entertainment but chiefly because they were under orders to get me into plenty of trouble; the authorities wanted me to be punished hard and often. And the women would have ganged up on me and beaten me unconscious if I had backed away from a challenge - not that I would have backed away - no fucking way would I ever back down from a fight! Either way I was in for a vicious beating of some kind! I later learned that the prison authorities had been given clear orders to make my stay with them  so horribly unpleasant that I’d never forget if I lived to be a hundred! A sort of Catch 22 situation!

“I was a foreigner and the women didn’t like that. The fact that I had no clothes also seemed to make them more hostile.  People can be horribly cruel to outsiders and in prison they are ultra cruel. And being exceptionally well built, as I think you will agree I am, is not entirely an advantage! There were people who just had to take a shot at me and see if they could beat me! But they didn’t wear me down! I had not one solitary friend among staff or inmates, but I came through!”

Marina had sat through all this tale of horrors with her admiration for Lilly growing by leaps and bounds. It was clear to Angelina that she worshipped her by now! Marina wanted to be this Superwoman’s companion and share, at least vicariously, in some of her wild adventures!

"Wow! It all makes my life seem a bit tame! It’s been  so deadly dull since I came home again! Have you any plans to retire soon? Angelina thinks you should and so did I until I saw you in the ring again today, but I seriously wonder if you're ready for the quiet life just yet! Was it really terrible getting all those beatings? It’s totally mind-boggling! Or did you get used to it?"

"Of course, Marina! It hurt terribly - as it was meant to. But I sort of got used to it! I managed to dissociate myself somehow from what was happening. It was as if I was watching someone else go through the pain and I was floating in the air, several feet away, hearing her being beaten and feeling nothing. Mind you, I kept floating back into my own body and that was hell! I'll strip off later on, and let you see my back close up  and you can touch it all over and feel how tough my skin is! Would you like that?“

Marina nodded enthusiastically. Angelina looked ill!  Lilly went on.

“And as for retiring, I'll wait until I've suffered a couple more knockouts. Then I'll pack it in! The last time I got KO'd, apart from the twelve times in that awful prison, which don’t count,  was a year ago in that same tin pot country, just after my second whipping. That was my second such loss. I was only out for less than a minute, though!"

"What does it feel it like, Lilly? Being knocked out?"  Marina simply couldn't hear enough about Lilly's exciting life!

"Odd. Really odd. You can still see what's going on, but it all seems miles away and voices sound sort of queer. And you want to get up but can't!  The first time, pretty early in my career, was different and a whole lot worse. I don't remember a lot of that fight, except that the cow was taking me apart! I gradually started to come round after twenty minutes and I was saying all sorts of silly things to people, insofar as I could speak at all with a badly broken jaw! After a day my head was clearer but I was still concussed.  I was in bed for a week and in the hospital for a while after that. But I had another crack at the bitch and managed to beat her. I lost a lot of blood in my second fight with her but I wouldn't give up. And she retired hurt! Coward! I never give up, even when I know I'm well beaten. Either I walk out of the ring as the winner or I'm carried out!"

"Can I be your manager, Lilly?" asked Marina, her face alive with enthusiasm. "I'd love to do it. My life is so dull! And you really get to live. You might be knocked around, hospitalised, locked up and whipped, but you live, Lilly! I'd like to live a little, too. How about it? I'm quite good at business and I‘d want no more than expenses!"

"I could use a manager, Marina! Are you sure you want to do this? You could get locked up too. I’m in a somewhat illegal business, dealing of necessity with some very shady types! I'd look after you inside, of course! You’d get round the clock protection from yours truly!  But prisons are bad places. I've been in several since we last met and none of them were holiday camps!"

"I'm very serious, Lilly! Very serious indeed!"

"You're worse than she is!" said Angelina angrily. "I thought you were going to help me talk her out of this awful life!"

But Lilly and Marina shook hands and Lilly had a manager!

“Well, Marina!” said a weary Angelina. “ I just hope you can contrive to keep this female psycho out of trouble. With you to guide her she may avoid too much more jail time! And although I love Lilly and wish her no harm, for her own good I hope she suffers those two knockouts pretty soon! Then we’ll all meet up again in England!”

EPILOGUE

Marina and Lilly - Lilly Finds Peace - Her own Painful Way

The pair were together for four years. Marina acted as Lilly’s trainer as well as her manager. She was a hard taskmistress and made sure that wonderful body stayed in first class shape. Lilly often joked that life had been easier in the quarries! She persuaded her fighter to cut down on her appearances and get some rest between her very bruising bouts Through shrewd bargaining she made sure Lilly earned as much as, or even more than, she had before their collaboration. It was thanks to Marina that Lilly stayed as fresh as she did and for so long.

Marina was adept at squaring the authorities in the many places the couple visited. Lilly suffered no more horrific damage to her back and spent only a week in jail, together with Marina who was thrilled to experience just a little of what her two friends had gone through. Lily suffered her first knockout after eighteen months. Once again she insisted on a rematch and got her revenge!

After she was catastrophically destroyed four years to the day after Marina had become her manager she proved herself to be a woman of her word and never fought again. Not that she was to be capable of it for many weeks!

It was a month after her last fight when a still convalescent Lilly had finally been discharged from hospital that the couple, who had been close friends but not lovers, returned to England. It was there that Lilly bumped into Karl again. They had quarrelled shortly after the escape and parted angrily. In no time at all the pair made up their differences and were married later that year. They had a tempestuous marriage, but never thought of parting again despite all their heated rows. In time things calmed down and Lilly became an almost placid wife and mother of three.

Marina returned to her normal humdrum life but would never forget those four exciting years on the road with her friend. She had watched every one of Lilly's many fights and thrilled to every bare-fisted, bone-jarring and bruising impact both those inflicted by her fighter on a long succession of losers and those that had landed on that strong body, finally destroying it at the end of a mammoth contest.

She had even been thrilled by the uppercut that brought her friend's remarkable career to its bone crunching, jaw breaking and bloody close. Marina was a connoisseur and saw immediately just what a beauty that one had been, coming at the end of an epic, hour long fight in which a desperate Lilly had fought to the bitter end against a merciless and relentless young clothed challenger who could more than match her nude opponent punch for punch and had a punishing answer to all Lilly had to offer.

The coup de grace was something Marina  would always remember as it lifted Lilly clean off her feet and sent her crashing into the corner post, spraying the crowd with blood and sweat! The victor had done a victory pose, arms raised in triumph, with the unconscious and shattered Lilly under her foot for a very long time until the cheers finally subsided. Lilly in the moment of victory would never strut over defeated rivals and would never dream of denying them the medical attention they might need, but she was forced to lie for many long minutes, senseless under the victor's foot. Finally a weeping Marina had been able to drive her friend to hospital, where she remained unconscious for more than three hours.

“She reminds me of myself at eighteen.” mumbled a still subdued Lilly of her destroyer a week after the fight when she was able to speak again, albeit painfully and indistinctly.

“I hope she enjoys her success. She certainly deserves it. It’ll all be over soon enough! And then what? But if she‘s anything like me, she‘ll never regret it! You know, Marina? I think she was Martha squaring her account with me. I‘m happy at last! I want a normal boring life from now on!”

“I’m glad you’ve found peace, dear! ” sobbed Marina “And that girl is no champion. For me, you will always be the champion!”


THE END