The temperature continued to rise. Rachel became more and more psyched. She paced impatiently waiting for the resumption of hostilities and couldn’t resist taunting Laura who, still on her beanbag, was checking her scalp and looking more injured than I had previously realised.
‘Cheats don’t prosper. You push it again and you’ll get it straight back from me, bitch’.
I had never seen Rachel say anything with such aggression. This brought Laura to her feet, and Kev had to restrain her.
‘Fuck you. You want a catfight or don’t you, you stupid cow? We’re not playing at it. Fight me or fuck off and leave the money here.’
‘Fuck you’ snorted Rachel, increasingly confident that this was going to be her night.
I motioned Rachel to back off and told Kev to get Laura back to her corner. Then we met in the middle and tried to have a conversation out of earshot.
‘This is getting out of hand’, I warned him. ’You wanna let them continue?’
‘I ain’t gonna stop them’, he said, ‘and they both want it, don’t they? How ‘bout we scrap the three minute round and let ‘em fight until we get submissions?’
We checked with our fighters. They wanted it. Boy, did they want it.
As the fight unfolded, Laura escalated the violence and Rachel tried to follow suit. The hairpulling standing-clinches continued but now Laura was starting to use her powerful legs to good effect. With hands tied up in each other’s hair and Rachel backed up against the wall, Laura’s knee thrust hard into the outside of Rachel’s injured thigh and got the response she was wanting. Rachel buckled, but she didn’t drop.
‘Oooh, that hurt ya, didn’t it?’ taunted Laura vindictively. And then she did it again. A sharp intake of breath from everyone on the bed.
Taking a step backward, hands still locked in hair, Laura then kick-pushed Rachel in the stomach, sending her slamming back into the wall so that Rachel’s head thudded against the plasterboard. Before she could recover, Laura swarmed her. A stamp-kick to the same thigh and then a knee to her midriff soon had Rachel sagging to the floor. Laura pulled her over by the hair and, smiling, stood on my girl’s stomach, pressing down hard with her foot. That cruel smile came over Laura’s face again. They were giving everything, thrashing and fighting like wild animals.
Somehow, Rachel got away and made it to her feet but Laura was onto her and there was nowhere to hide. Rach, clearly hurt, was now at Laura’s mercy and there was no whistle to save her this time. Laura piled in, establishing a front headlock, once again backing Rachel up. A heel kick landed on Rachel’s shin, another knee to the thigh. As Rach soaked up the punishment, Kev rose to his feet in excitement.
‘You’ve got her, Laur, she’s going!’
I could barely watch. With Rach still caught in the headlock, Laura swung her free arm to land three sickening punches to Rach’s rib-cage. Lycra was no protection whatsoever. Rach sagged.
‘Hey, no punching!’, I shouted from the bed. The rules we had agreed explicitly forbade body punching.
‘Let them go at it’ said Kev, happy that his girl was coming out on top.
Laura stopped punching but the damage was done and Rach was on the floor again. This time Laura was merciless, letting go of the hair at last but now stomping on Rach’s prone body.
‘Come on Kev, kicking and stomping are not the same thing!’ I protested, outraged, whilst all hell was breaking loose in the corner of the room. Each stomp hit its target, and each time Rach yelped like a wounded animal. Without taking his eyes off the fight, Kev shrugged.
‘Have. Some. Of that!’ Each word was punctuated by Laura’s heel crunching into Rachel’s side.
With the final exclamation, Rachel cried ‘Okay! Okay! I give! I give!’ and rolled over into her corner.
That may or may not have been the first sub in the fight, but it was the first one that I can remember from this vantage point nearly three decades later.
Immediately, and unforgettably, Laura turned away from the stricken Rachel and beamed at us all on the bed, alternately pumping her open-palms to the sky in mini fist-pumps. She was sweetness and light again, dancing like a ten year-old girl, as if those moments of brutality had exorcised her ill-will. Or maybe she was just trying to turn us on. If so, she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The whole room, me included, wanted to fuck this supreme creature in her moment of superiority. I could barely take my eyes off her even though the crumpled electric-blue heap she had left on the beanbag was Rach, who lay curled up facing the wall, her body heaving silently as she choked back tears.
