Holly’s Story

I

Corrugated iron and plywood

       “It’ll be alright.”

       Those were the words of my roommate Kit as she embraced me.  I had just lost my job serving at The Black Cauldron Tavern.

       “And it’s rent day today,” I sobbed.

       “Yes I know,” Kit soothed, “you did remember that it’s gone up this week?”

       I looked at her aghast.

       My name is Holly and I’m poor.  Desperately poor.  Kit and I live in a shack on Grand City’s slum, commonly just known as the Shacks.  Corrugated iron and plywood create our home of 12 by 6 feet.  At least it was right on Shacks Beach, meaning we could wash in the clear blue Illakian Sea.

       That shack was, like many others, rented at extortionate rates off Lord Black, who owned a lot of land on the Shacks and in Grand City as well.  Our contract with his company stated that he could as much as double the monthly rent at any point, and I had forgotten that it had gone up by 10 lira to an unbelievable 60 lira a month, each.  Bearing in mind that I only earned five lira a day from the Cauldron, you can see how extortionate it was for a small square of land, but Black’s properties were always the cheapest, because he could control market prices by owning so much land on the Shacks.

       It turned out that I was L10 short on the rent, but the collector at Lord Black’s office said that someone would be round to collect the rest in the rest week. But that in turn gave me an even worse problem – tomorrow I would have to pay the poll tax of five lira, and I now did not have a single penny.  It was no use asking Kit for help; though she wouldn’t admit it she was as desperate as I was, because she had sold all of her clothes except a long shirt.  One of our biggest problems to us poor is that clothing and textiles is taxed heavily.  All I can afford at the moment is a tattered grey bikini that I bought at a state confiscations auction.  And you have to have clothes; as well as been humiliating, being nude in public is now also illegal.

       I lay awake that night wondering what to do.  Kit was not in for most of the night; she was out getting enough money to cover her tax tomorrow.  But I would not stoop to Kit’s activities to earn money.  I love Kit, but we have different principles.  For Kit was a whore.  Almost all shack girls were prostitutes once; it was seen as the only way to earn good money while not needing good clothes or housing.  But then the new Emperor came to power and started cleaning up Illakia morally.  About a year ago, prostitution had been outlawed (for the woman), so had public nudity and curfews and the such had been introduced, making life doubly harder for poor women as poll taxes and clothes taxes went up at the same time.  Most, like Kit, continue under the radar, risking the punishment, and who can blame her really.  But I was scared; I had seen too many good girls from these streets been strung up publicly and being branded and flogged.  And my mother as always had an influence.

       My mother had died when I was 14.  She had been just as poor as me now, and there was no help for poor mothers.  I had never known my father.  My mother was a hooker, and all she wished for was that I didn’t follow her down that path, having a child by an unknown father.  Her dying wish has remained with me to this day.

       Shack girls were sometimes called waifs by superior middle class types in Grand City because to their eyes we all looked the same.  We didn’t eat a lot.  My old wages of five lira only really left me one or two lira a day to feed myself with (after taken out savings for rent and tax and clothes costs, because these cheap clothes don’t last long), which was enough for about one meal.  Not feeling hungry in itself was considered a luxury.  So we were all thin and all tanned, because we did not wear much clothes in the boiling beach weather of the Shacks.

       I tried to get comfy in my bed – a salvaged mattress on the floor.  The floor of the shack was basically the sand of the beach, with cardboard at the entrance and a stolen piece of carpet in one corner we laughingly called the living room.  A draft breezed in from the ill-fitting door straight onto my bed and I shivered.  I was naked (wearing the same bikini 24 hours isn’t good for you) and I had a thin white cotton sheet which just covered my thighs, which was the only bed covers we could afford and which we shared.  For washing we used the sea; for toileting we used a bucket which was thrown into the sewer; for water we used the only state relief, the right to two pints of fresh but invariably boiling hot water; for cooking we had to try to buy as much cooked food as possible, which cost more, because lighting a fire was so time consuming and dangerous.

I eventually got some sleep and woke up early.  Kit was not home.  I worry for her safety at times.  I had decided that to pay my tax, I would have to sell everything I own this morning.  I would have to worry about finding a job another day.  I could list all my personal possessions in on breath; one bikini, one mattress.  I just hoped it was enough.

       I stood up and slipped that grey bikini on.  The sun was creeping in under the door.  I guessed it to be around eight o’clock, which would give me enough time to get down the market, which also had a bumper day on tax day.

       I was about to open the door to go and have a quick wash in the sea when it opened for me.  In walked two muscular guys, no less six-four in height.  As the blocked the sunlit doorway, I cowered backwards, taken aback.

       “You Miss Cable?” the first guy said.

       “Yes,” I replied hesitantly.

       “I’m Devon Mann and this is Harland Stuart, and we represent the letting agency of Lord Black.”

       Bailiffs.  Come to collect Black’s precious missing L10.  Shit.

       “H-how can I help?”

       “We’ve come to collect a missing ten lira that was not paid in rent,” Mann said.  “Lord Black’s company has been very generous by guaranteeing that if the outstanding value is paid today no penalty charges will be incurred.”  I remembered that one of the other ridiculous clauses we were made to sign up to is that Black can impose penalty charges of 200 per cent of the outstanding value per day - meaning I would have to pay L20 tomorrow, L40 the day after and so on – with him able to claim our bodies as slaves when that figure reached L500, an extremely cheap slave.

       “I don’t have that money.”

       “That’s okay Miss Cable,” said Mann, “as you may know your lease allows the company to repossess any personal property you may have as payment. Mr Stuart here is a trained evaluator.”

       “Oh.”

       “Now Miss Cable, what in this room is your own property?”

       “Just my bed. Everything else is my roommate’s.”

       “Okay,” Mann said casually, “how much for the mattress.”

       Stuart looked at it with concentration.  Did they give evaluator certificates out for nothing these days?  A thug bailiff with a bad haircut?

       “Bad condition,” Stuart grunted, “say seven?”

       Mann sucked through his teeth in mock anxiety.  These guys were making my skin crawl.

       “Not enough Miss Cable,” he said.  “Now what can we do?”  I shrugged.  These guys were also scaring me.  “What else do you own Miss Cable? Clothes?”

       My bikini! “Oh yes, this is mine,” I said, subconsciously covering me body at their stares.

       “How much for that, Mr Stuart?”

       “Bad condition. Probably not useable again for clothes, just fabric. Could get three lira in an auction.”

       “Well, look at that!” Mann exclaimed mockingly.  “Are you prepared to hand over that bikini to pay off your debt?” he asked sickeningly.

       Get this over with?  Six lira tomorrow I make that.  That’ll just keep growing if I can’t pay tax.  Get out of this now.

       I turned away from them and undid my bra, looping it off my shoulders with one arm across my breast throughout.  I held out the bra to them and one of them took it.

       “I’m glad you saw sense Miss Cable,” I heard Mann gloat.

       With my back to them I used my free hand to unhook my panties off my waist and then stepped out of it, moving my hand in front of my crotch.  I heard Mann come over behind me to pick up the panties.  His breath was hot on my body as he leaned into me.

       “Good girl Holly,” he snarled at me.  I shivered.  I yelped as he planted his grubby hand on my ass cheek.  “A little bird told me you’re out of work Holly,” he said, “I know plenty of bars where you could work for Lord Black.”  Black’s strip joints; even Kit looked down on them.

       “Fuck off,” I built up the courage to say.

       “Feisty,” Mann laughed as le left, Stuart picking up the mattress.  “Good day to you Miss Cable!”

       Kit found me lying naked on the floor, crying in anger and shame, my body quivering in trepidation.

       In my hand was leaflet posted on the door asking all women with surnames A-M to present themselves at nine o’clock at the Shacks Registry Office to pay poll tax.

       It was ten to nine.

       

To be continued

II

Not a cent

My first problem was getting to the registry.  If I walked down the Main Shacks Road in my current nude state I would be in jail before we even started on tax paying.

Kit agreed to let me use the small white sheet that had once been on my bed; fortunately I had dumped it on Kit’s bed before the bailiffs had come.  We fashioned that into a sarong-cum-loin cloth.  To cover my breasts Kit worked quickly, ripped a sleeve off her long shirt, and tied it round my chest to cover my nipples.  We picked up our ID cards from under the carpet piece, and ran to the registry.

At the Shacks Registry Office, one of the few permanent buildings in the Shacks, there was a queue.  The authorities had agreed to build a registry office especially for the Shacks - until then an unofficial district that had sprung up on the seaside - because of the workload the Shacks provided, with taxes, enslavements, births and deaths quite common here.  Kit and I joined the queue, just on time.  They shut the gates after us; anyone who did not make it now would be prosecuted for tax avoidance, the maximum penalty for which was enslavement.  We showed our ID cards to an official at the door, who checked our names off on a list.  The police would now go after anyone not ticked off on that list.

The registry office was a small building, so the business of these mass tax collections was done out in the forecourt.  Desks were laid out for each letter of the alphabet.  There was also a desk with a queue of fully clothed men, giving an official one lira each - the poll tax for men being five times less than for women, enabling much more social mobility for men.  The rest of the yard was women, mostly thin and tanned and some as scantily and desperately dressed as I was.  I felt a pang of embarrassment at my state, but that was replaced by the fear that I would be facing debtor’s jail.  It really was generous of Kit to allow me to use the fabric, as it would only be seized as debt repayment.  I gave Kit a hug and went to join the ‘C’ queue.

“I’ll see you soon,” she comforted.

Eventually I found myself at the front of the ‘C’ queue.  There was an official at a desk with a list of names.  Many other officials were rushing round in the background.  The Shacks Registry Office would be the busiest in the city today, as paying tax like this was only a resort for those who didn’t have a bank account that the state could take money out of automatically.  Nobody in the Shacks had a bank account.

       “Name?” the official grunted.

       “Holly Cable.”

       “ID?”  I gave him my ID card.  He looked up.  “Five lira please, Miss Cable.”

       This was it.

       “Er,” I stammered, “I don’t have it…”  I winced in fear.  The official merely looked up, in annoyance at his time being wasted.

       “What money do you have on you, Miss Cable?” he said irritably.

       “Nothing,” I said with a dry throat, “not a cent.”

       “Well, Miss Cable, I must remind you that failure to pay full poll tax on demand in cash results in the tax being doubled to ten lira automatically before any other action is taken.”

       “Yes sir.”

       “Okay,” the official said, waving his hand to some guards.  “You are being arrested for failure to pay poll tax on demand.”  Two guards now stood beside me.  “These gentlemen will take you to see the evaluator on duty today; if your debt to the state can not be salvaged from amongst your possessions, you will be sent to debtor’s jail. Do you understand?”

       I nodded my head.  My throat was too dry to speak, and I was barely containing the tears that were welling up in the corner of my eyes.  One of the guards grabbed my wrists behind my back and cuffed them with tie wrap handcuffs.  Some of the girls in the queues around me were now staring intently.  The guards powerfully grabbed an arm each and escorted me into the registry office.

       I was sat down on a bench in the waiting room of the office.  Three other girls, as skimpily dressed as I was, were already sat on the bench, like me handcuffed.  I waited nervously.  Clearly there were two evaluators working today; one girl was escorted into one office and the other into another office.  From this last office, a girl – a typical Shacks girl who was no older than 17, tanned and skinny with scrawny blonde hair – was unceremoniously ushered out, crying.  She was totally nude.  Clearly the clothes she had been wearing had been enough to pay off her debt.  She would now have to try to get home or procure some clothes from the market outside very quickly using presumably the only thing she would now own and be able to pay with, her body.  If the police, who were now crawling the streets for tax evaders, were to pick her up, she would find herself back in trouble.

       “We’ll give you a ten-minute head start,” she was told on the way out.

       “Holly Cable!” a guard shouted from the other office.  I struggled to stand up and walked over to the door.  Once there I was pushed inside and the door was closed behind me.

       Inside a state official sat at a desk with papers and a box on it.  There were also three guards and an evaluator, identifiable by his white coat, who stood leaning on the desk.

“Holly Cable; owes ten lira,” the guard behind me announced to the room.  The official at the desk looked up at me.  He had being given my ID card and was writing my details on a form.

       “Start with the clothes, Ted,” the official said to the evaluator, sounding bored and flustered.

       The evaluator walked up so that he stood right in front of me.

       “Hmm,” he said surprisingly loudly.  “Seems like a simple piece of cloth and…,” he reached out a hand to fiddle with my top piece, “what seems like a sleeve of a shirt,” he concluded, speaking to the official.  He turned back to me.  “Is this right, girl?”  Again I could only nod my head.

       “How much for the cloth skirt thing?” the official asked.

       “Simple cloth sheet; merely two lira.”  I felt totally helpless as these two strangers appeared to barter my fate.

       “And the sleeve thing?”

       “Sleeve of a shirt; ripped, unusable again. Could only be used for fabric and then still no-one would buy it. Fifty cents if anything.”

       “So that’s two-fifty,” the official concluded.  He now looked up at me.  “Do you have any other property at all, Miss Cable?”

       “No sir, not at all,” I managed to say.

       “Bailiffs will check your residence anyway. For now, take the clothes.”

       “W-what…” I managed to say.  My throat was dry and I gulped.  I noticed I was sweating.  I had known this was coming but I was still shocked.

       “Miss Cable,” the official said impatiently, “these clothes, as your only property, will be taken as payment of your tax. They will be sold at auction within the week and the money raised from this will be deducted from your debt. As we estimate that this will be less than the 10 lira you owe, you will be sent to debtor’s jail. Understand?”

       “Yes sir,” I said reluctantly.  Of course I had known all that, but the reality of my situation was just hitting home.

       The plastic handcuffs were cut.  One of the guards was holding out the box to me.

“Strip please, Miss Cable.”

       Hesitantly, I unknotted the shirt sleeve and slid that off my torso, my left hand quickly covering my breasts and my nipples, and dropped it in the box.  In what was quickly becoming a repeat of yesterday’s humiliation, the guard continued to shake the box at me.  No privacy seemed forthcoming.  I knew that there would be no privacy in prison, but surely making me stand nude in an office in full daylight was taking it too far?  Reluctantly, I turned my back on the five men in the room and stood in the corner.  My right hand shakily undid the sheet around my groin and delicately dropped it in the box behind me, before coming back to cover my sex and my shame.  There was a tear strolling down my left cheek.  My body glistened in sweat from the oppressive heat and my all-encompassing anxiety.

       “Cuff her,” the official said.

       Before I had chance to respond, the guards forcibly grabbed my forearms from in front of me and again cuffed them behind my back.  I was horrified as they forced me by my shoulders to turn and face the room, revealing my uncovered body to the room.  The men seemed amused by my nakedness.

       “No…” I pleaded softly.  Despite being a Shacks girl, I could have counted on one hand the number of men who had seen me this naked – up to now.  What distressed me more though was my inability to bring my cuffed hands back to shield my privacy.  The men seemed unconcerned about my distress.

       “Holly Cable,” the official said grandly, standing up, “you have been arrested for failing to be able to pay poll tax, and will be sent to debtor’s jail until such a time as those debts have been paid off through your labour and the sale of your possessions. The state is free to incarcerate you immediately.”

       Two guards took a firm grip each on one of my upper arms, so firm that it hurt.  I could no longer control my emotions and I let out a sob.  The guards pushed me forward and out of a side door in the office.

       The door led out into the backyard of the registry office.  In it there was a caged wagon waiting.  The wagon appeared to be split into about a dozen separate cages, and in about six of them there was a girl.  I was led up the stairs, crying uncontrollably by then, and into the central corridor of the giant cage.  I could now see that the wagon had six caged cells on each side and a corridor in the middle, with a caged roof covering the whole vehicle.  I was pushed into one such cell.  It was no more than a three-foot square and about seven feet in height.  The guards turned me to face outwards and cut my wrist restraints.  Impulsively, I reached to protect my nudity, but my arms were quickly and forcibly pulled upwards and locked into handcuffs that hung from a chain in the ceiling.  I cried as my ankle was locked into a shackle on the floor.  My body was now totally exposed.  I knew this wagon would be pulled to the debtor’s jail, with the public able to see that those who don’t pay the tax are made to make it up and were punished.

       I looked at the cell to my left.  In it there was another girl, predictably tanned and skinny with luscious brunette hair and a proud and sculpted face.  She, like me, was sobbing quietly.

       I had been a Shacks girl all my life but up to now I had managed to avoid the dreaded debtor’s jail.  But now, thanks to the bad management of the Cauldron making me redundant and the greediness and extortion of Lord Black’s company, I was naked, chained, and a debtor.  I had never felt so humiliated, exposed and worthless in my life, and I hadn’t even made it to prison yet.  I could blame all the bad things that have gone wrong for me this month, but no-one will listen; when the Emperor, the most divine being in the universe, commands a woman to pay his government five lira, then she has to pay, period.

       The wagon filled up, a scraggy blonde girl to my right now who was clearly no stranger to debtor’s jail, as she seemed quite relaxed about the whole ordeal.  The horses pulling the wagon began to move, and we began to move out of the yard.

       I was going to jail, and all for the want of five lira.

III

Grand City Debtors’ Jail

Fortunately the route from the registry office to Grand City Debtor’s Jail was not that far; somebody in their foresight had decided to build the debtor’s jail next to the Shacks.  However, it still took us down Main Shacks Road, bristling and busy.  People parted for the wagon.  I couldn’t have told you if I saw anyone I knew; I merely closed my wet eyes, not believing that my sex was being paraded down my main street.

       Eventually the wagon pulled into the courtyard of Grand City Debtor’s Jail.  I at last dared to open my tear-filled eyes.  I had expected to be let off immediately, but instead the guards did not seem to be rushing.  There were three wagons in the yard identical to ours, and out of each one the guards were releasing prisoners one-by-one, with a gap of about ten minutes between each release.  I cursed my position at the far end of the wagon.

       Eventually, well over an hour and a half since I had been arrested, the door to my cage opened.  My ankle was released, and then – blissful relief – my arms were released from above my head.  My shoulders hurt, but there was no time for resting, for my wrists were restrained behind my back again with a tie wrap.  Still naked, I was escorted from the prison wagon and into the imposing and utilitarian building of Grand City Debtor’s Jail.

       It transpired that the gap between prisoners being released was because they were seeing their ‘debt supervisor’.  Once I was in the building, I was sat on a seat outside the office of my supervisor.

       Within a couple of minutes, I was made to stand up again.  The guards escorting me knocked on the door and when a voice beckoned entry, they ushered me inside alone.

       I stared in absolute shock.

       He stared back in equal shock.

       

When I was a child, when my mother was still alive, I, like all children in Illakia, attended Sunday School.  Sunday Schools were primarily concerned with teaching the values of the Illakian Cult and how to be a good citizen, rather than literacy and numeracy, but were compulsory to all children in the Empire.  It was the only formal education I had received in my life.

       So I attended Grand City Shacks Sunday School up until my fourteenth birthday, every Sunday in my best rags (Mother always saved the best clothes and food for me when she was alive).  My best friend at Sunday School was a boy named Isaac Hartman.  We both turned 14 in the same month.  At that point, I was legally a woman and became saddled with the poll tax.  Isaac had excelled at Sunday School and was offered an apprenticeship course with the Imperial Guard.  On Shacks Beach that summer we had said goodbye, and we had kissed, my first kiss.

       Isaac returned the next summer, after a year’s training with the IG.  He was fitter, stronger and more intelligent, and could now read and write.  My mother had just died and I was having to fend for myself as a 15-year-old.  We had met up in the shack I was using at the time, my late mother’s, and the romance blossomed.  We made hot sweaty clumsy adolescent love, and he took my virginity and my heart.

       Isaac returned to the IG.  He never returned to the Shacks again; his parents had found fortune and had moved out, and I think he was self-conscious of his beginnings.  We lost touch and I never saw him again.

       “Isaac?” I said, not sure whether I believed my eyes.

       “Is that you Holly?” he asked back quizzically.  Isaac Hartman was now a proud and fit man, sat behind a desk with the insignia of a lieutenant of the Imperial Guard.  His green eyes looked up puzzled, while his chiselled jaw was open.

       I was momentarily overjoyed.

       “It’s great to see you, Isaac,” I exclaimed as I ran into the room.  I then stopped.  I remembered that while I was meeting my childhood sweetheart, I was naked and handcuffed, unable to hide my shame.  I blushed.  Isaac sensed my embarrassment.

       “How have you managed to find yourself here, Holly,” he said sympathetically, as he stood.  He picked up a box.  “Put some clothes on for goodness sake; here, this is your uniform,” he said as he picked out of the box and simple yellow cotton dress.  He moved behind me and cut the plastic handcuffs and gave me the uniform.  I gladly put it on.  The fabric was rough and uncomfortable.  The hemline was extremely high on my thighs, almost revealing some ass cheek, and it was equally low cut at the breasts, with a spaghetti strap.  On the left breast, the words ‘GRAND CITY DEBTOR’S JAIL’ were printed underneath the IG logo.  Across the chest the word ‘DEBTOR’ was printed in large letters right across.  I was merely glad to have it on.

       “Isaac,” I said a bit more excitedly now, “I can’t believe it’s you.”

       “I can’t believe it’s you either,” he replied.  “How did you get yourself in this mess? I thought you would have made it out of the Shacks years ago.”

       “It’s so hard, Isaac. The taxes keep going up but we don’t get paid more for the shitty jobs. I’ve been working flat out just to keep cloth on my back!”

       “But what went wrong this month?”

       So I told him my story, of the Cauldron shutting down, and of Black putting rent up, and the mad dash to pay tax.

       “Black really is a bastard,” he said.  “He always makes sure that rent day is the day before tax day, so he can get the first claim. And those legalistic contracts!”

       “When we signed up a year ago it was only twenty lira a month. It’s trebled now!”

       “How long are you locked in for?”

       “Three years.”

       “They’ll have you into three figures by then!”

       Isaac allowed me to sit and we chatted a bit more, mostly about old times.  After a while he looked at the clock and was suddenly serious.

       “Listen Holly, we haven’t much time left. I think it will be easier for both of us if you don’t mention that we know each other.”

       “Okay.”

       “And I must tell you the details of your imprisonment; that’s why you’re here anyway.”

       “Okay.”

       “Do you want hard labour or menial work? Hard labour isn’t too bad and pays more so will probably get you back out in a week.”

       “Sounds okay.”

       “Okay; I have a space for you on the human dynamo.”

       I shrugged, not knowing what that was.

       “Your debt will be reduced in accordance with your productivity at work,” he continued.  “Two lira a day will be added to your debt to cover clothing, food and other costs of housing you. If you have not repaid your debt in two weeks, whatever you owe will be doubled. You have no exemption from next month’s poll tax.”

       I nodded my head.

       “Okay, on you go, Holly. Remember; we don’t know each other.”

       “Yes. Thank you Isaac.”  I got up and left.