The Fight

The Fight

Draft 1 19 June 2009

Mark could feel it coming. He was frightened. Very frightened. He wasn’t a fighter. Not really. There had been that time in Marseilles. Kids at school got to hear about it and that had given him a reputation that he had used to blag his way out of a few uncomfortable situations at school. Mainly he’d avoided crossing the most violent boys, and somehow he had been lucky that none of them had decided to test him. Now he could feel his luck running out – big time.

He had heard about Fat Raps even before he was an apprentice. Everybody had heard of him, he was just about the most brutal teenager around. Fat and ugly, he had grown up mean and got his pleasure from throwing his weight around, beating up and torturing anyone he could. The first time Fat Raps eyes locked-on to him was Mark’s first day in his new job. He was being shown around, and when he was brought into the fettling shop Mark felt a chill run down his spine. Saw the mean little piggy eyes staring cruelly and intently at him from a face covered in blackheads and boils. Looked down at the huge hands with fingers like sausages covered in rough tattoos. Mark had felt his own hands start to shake with fear. He’d been told that was the only problem with being an apprentice, at Railway Repairs, that you would get regularly beaten up by Fat Raps. The ghoulish smile that played across Fat Rap’s thin lips increased Mark’s concern that the prophecy might be true.

Mark had been apprentice fitter at Railway Repairs for less than a week. He was suddenly immersed in a world that he never could have imagined. Railway Repairs was a small-scale blast furnace that manufactured cast-iron components for railway wagons, mainly brake blocks. It was part of a larger conglomerate – Stellington’s – that managed repair and maintenance and a wide range of engineering applications at different sites in the east midlands, with branches specialising in railway engines, buses and trucks and with maintenance contracts to serve engineering business needs such as local colliery lifting gear. That’s what the recruitment brochure said anyway.

When the advert had come up in the local paper, Mark’s dad had advised that, since Mark had already made it clear that he wanted to leave school as soon as he could, and that he was interested in mechanics, getting an apprenticeship that was part of the Stellington’s group would be too good an opportunity to miss. His mum had warned him that some of the people were a bit rough, but Mark had boldly responded that he could look after himself ok. Mark’s dad pointed out that promising young apprentices were likely to get the opportunity to work at different Stellington Plants so there would be plenty of different experiences and opportunities to try things out.

Work started at 7.30 each weekday morning, and Mark found himself joining the queue to clock-in. More than five minutes late and your pay was docked an hour. He wasn’t used to getting up so early, it was a shock to the system. Most of the staff worked in ‘the pool’, meaning that they worked as hard as they could to get a wage bonus for meeting production targets. There were two blast-furnace chimneys, each lit on alternate days. The main production area was like something out of a Victorian novel – Mark had seen the drawings of children down the mines at school, and instantly recognised the scenes before him. A raised up narrow-gauge railway carried trains made up of barrows of sand-moulds around on the rails to the furnace, where the hot metal was poured in. Once they had been ‘cast’, men heaved the train on, pushing by hand, to where a set of vibrating rails tipped out the spent sand and flung the freshly cast blocks into bins where they were left to cool before being taken to the fettling shop for cleaning. The whole thing was loud, noisy, hot and pretty well how hell might be. The pool seemed happy in their work, helping each other so they could all earn the bonus, and sharing the dangers of working with the hot metal together. When they all clocked off and hit the showers at 4.30 pm, the singing, joking and general sense of tired satisfaction made him think of the seven dwarfs.

As an apprentice fitter Mark joined what were seen as the elite group of mechanics who kept all the machinery functioning – compressors, pumps, fork-lift trucks, everything, right down to the plumbing in the toilets – he told his mum after the first couple of days of induction. The fitters were seen as skilled men, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t some characters amongst them. The oldest, Fred, seemed as if he must be at least 100 to Mark. He rode an ancient motorbike and sidecar, but was a brilliant welder, the first time he watched him cut a sheet of steel-plate to repair a section of the blast chimney, he thought that he was watching a robot, so steady were the movements of the burner across the steel.

The fitters lost no time in explaining how they were a cut above the simple folks who worked in the pool, and that without their problem solving abilities the whole plant would soon grind to a halt.

The foreman of the fitters, Jock, was a stocky Glaswegian who was known to be an ex con with a hot temper, and looked like he could handle anything, right down to the scar across his chin from a knife fight. Mark did not find it easy to understand what Jock was saying most of the time, but he managed to gather that Jock had been in the army as an engineer, and had spent some time working in the gold mining in South Africa and working on a Dam building project somewhere else. Apparently he had been in prison for fighting, but that was a long time ago. He seemed to know everything about engines, electricity and engineering. Jock’s right hand man seemed to be Big John, an old Teddy boy with a heavy brow that Mark thought looked like a caveman, an enormous beer belly and the trademark teddy boy quiff, flecked with grey. Mark was fascinated with the problem of how the large ornamental belt could stop Big John’s trousers from falling down when it had to grip the underside of such a large beer belly.

Mark’s first confrontation with Fat Raps was on his third day at work. It was in the changing room, they all had a locker where they kept their overalls and working boots. Mark was sitting on the bench by his locker unlacing his work boots after Jock had told him he could get changed a bit early. There was no one else around. Fat Raps didn’t say anything; he just came over carrying a large adjustable spanner and banged it down hard on Mark’s hand. He looked up in shock. The pain was searing. The fingernail of his left little finger was split. Half fainting with pain Mark lurched towards the door to escape, but Fat Raps, surprisingly agile for his size, cannoned him into the wall.

Relief came as Jock and two other men entered the locker room. Jock called over to Fat Raps ‘Hey, Fat Raps, make sure you dinnae mek a mess in th’ locker room’.

Mark instantly understood that Jock was telling him to take his business outside to avoid the need to clean up blood. Mark had thought that Jock would keep Fat Raps in check. With a sinking feeling, he began to realise that Jock just turned a blind eye and didn’t care. As he heard Jock and the other men laughing loudly, it seemed that they actively enjoyed Fat Raps’ brutality, taking pride as he had heard some people did with their vicious dogs.

Fat Raps grunted and banged his locker door shut, then left the locker room without any further comment. The men continued to laugh and exchange stories with each other, ignoring Mark.

Mark, pale as a ghost, spent an age, with shaking hands, untying his bootlaces and putting on his trainers, which were spattered with scarlet drops of blood from his fingernail. Mark’s fear was that his ordeal was about to continue outside. He was in no hurry to leave. After some minutes Jock, without saying anything, went over to the first aid box and cut off a length of plaster. He gently picked up Mark’s hand and pulled him over to the sink where he rinsed the split nail in running water for a few moments, before gently dabbing it dry with paper towel. With practised ease he wrapped the plaster round the split fingernail, and joked quietly, ‘He’ll noo murder you inside’. The others guffawed loudly and Mark, who had started to feel slightly restored after these attentions, felt the sinking feeling of fear returning.

When he finally emerged from the locker room, Fat Raps was nowhere to be seen. Mark had never started his motorbike more quickly, dropping it straight into gear on the H stand and then skidding wildly across the empty car park before shooting out through the security gates at speed.

The next day he felt anxious, watching Fat Raps as carefully as possible whenever the opportunity arose. Most of the day it seemed that he was safe, Fat Raps and another fitter, Harry, were working on upgrading the water supply for the showers and were on the other side of the site, fixing piping to the walls. Mark was put with Big John to learn about the lubrication schedules for the four Bonser forklifts that the foundry relied on.

Big John took him to the pub with Jock at lunchtime; he said that they should celebrate, as tomorrow was payday. They played darts and Mark was shocked at their mathematics skills, he had a hard time working out how to subtract his score from 501, let alone work out the possible winning combinations to aim for.
After more time looking at lubrication schedules Big John glanced down at his watch, then up at the big clock on the wall, before announcing that Mark should ‘Go and get changed now young-un.’ Mark wasn’t about to refuse orders, but he was feeling wary, and couldn’t help remember that the previous day’s confrontation had been from an early visit to the locker room. He tried to play for time and asked Big John if he would be getting changed now as well? John replied that he had a couple of private matters to sort out, tapped his nose a few times and grinned hugely. Mark gingerly made his way to the locker room. Empty. He got changed as quickly as he could, slipping the green fitters overalls into the locker, and swopping the steel-toe cap regulation foundry boots for his own steel toe-cap motorbike boots he had decided to wear instead of the blood-flecked Gola training shoes. He zipped up his leather jacket and put his bike helmet on, feeling that he was as well prepared as he could manage. He slipped out of the locker room and joined the queue by the clocking machine, waiting for 4.30 clocking-out to get started. Fat Raps was not to be seen (although, wearing his bike helmet, Mark realised, was not really very good for peripheral vision).

Soon enough clocking-out got started, with a brisk flow of cards through the machine and loud calls and shouts as workers made their way to the showers. Mark took his turn and then skirted round the side of the entrance along the way towards where he had carefully parked his bike.

His heart sank as he looked across to see a large figure sitting astride his motorbike. Oh no, Fat Raps is waiting for me. He glanced around in different directions, then ducked down against a wall and behind a car to think. It seemed possible that Fat Raps had not seen him yet, he had been gazing serenely across towards the shower block, not towards the side that Mark had been approaching. His heart raced and he found that he was beating his fist on his thigh to try and think through the possibilities.

Yes, it was true that, with luck, he might be able to get past Fat Raps and make it through the gate without being seen. It was a tempting option, with the downsides that he would not have his bike and the probability that he would only be postponing the inevitable. Echoing through his memory were the words that his dad had once uttered about how he had once had to confront a bully himself – ‘I’ve always heard it said that bullies are cowards, that you have to attack them, and that if you do, you’ll never have any more trouble, all I can say is that it worked for me…’ The story was how he had once punched Gary Sharples right on the nose, and had ended weeks of torture. Mark could see that if he didn’t confront the situation head-on, he would have to leave his apprenticeship, he spent a moment projecting where this might lead him, it did not seem to be a very promising direction.

Heart beating like a drum his mind was made up. He took a deep breath and rose, striding towards his bike in a determined fashion, visor pulled down he felt as ready as he ever could. Fat Raps lounged on the bike, grinning broadly as he saw Mark approach.
‘Get off my bike’ Mike shouted as loud as he could. In his state of anxiety his voice was hoarse and cracked, and heavily muffled by the helmet, it sounded ridiculously high pitched and Mark felt panic eating away inside him.
‘You cunt’ was all that Fat Raps replied as he casually swung himself onto the tarmac to tower in front of Mark.

Mark realised that it was now or never and drew his right arm back, then punched his fist as hard as he could towards Fat Raps. It was like a slow-motion nightmare. Fat Raps dodged to the side leaving Mark’s fist to connect with nothing but air. Then he gasped as his wrist was grabbed in what felt like a steel-vice – Fat Rap’s left hand held him immobile. He tried to kick, but Fat Raps saw that coming from a mile away as well and, again, dodged easily, punishing his ankle with a nasty clip from his own boot on the return. Mark was pleased that at least he was wearing a helmet. He tensed as he saw Fat Raps huge fist cannoning towards his chest. Although the leather jacket offered some padding, he still felt a sharp pain as it connected with his ribs. As the blow was repeated, Mark saw his opening, following the example of his opponent, he grabbed hold of his right wrist as it was withdrawn to prepare for another punch. The wrist was too large and fast for him to secure it as well as his own, but he did manage to grab enough of sleeve of Fat Rap’s denim jacket to give him a moment’s leverage. He jumped and pulled himself as high as he could before nutting Fat Raps as hard as he could in the face. Wearing the helmet made it hard to judge exactly, but he knew he had taken him by surprise and connected properly when he heard a howl of pain.

He felt answering stabs of pain in his thigh and shoulder as Fat Raps fought back fiercely with his boot and fist. He then felt the dreaded sausage fingers forcing their way inside the helmet, seeking the clasp that kept it strapped to his head. He tried again to kick and to punch to limited effect as Fat Raps, once again offering his favourite insult in celebration – ‘You cunt’ – removed the full face motorbike helmet painfully and roughly, tossing it aside. Mark dodged the first punch, then, as the second punch connected painfully with his jaw, and stars flashed in front of his eyes, he lunged and sank his teeth as deeply as he could into Fat Raps brawny wrist, that had held his own right wrist in such a steely grip all this time.

There was a roar like an enraged bull, and Mark’s teeth were nearly pulled out of their sockets with the violent retraction of the bitten wrist, he had to let go, and as he did he felt his head explode with pain as once again Fat Raps other fist connected with the side of his head.

His right hand was suddenly free, meaning that he was now free to move. Fat Raps was nursing his bleeding wrist not ready to mount a new assault straight away, Mark focused on the obvious target, feinting with his left foot and his right fist, before landing his steel-capped boot squarely in Fat Raps’ crotch. Another howl of pain as Fat Raps doubled up. Mark could see that this was his moment, he dodged behind the massive bulk, pulling at the long, greasy hair, then barging violently with all his weight until the body went down onto its side. Watching warily he retrieved his helmet and moved towards his bike. Fat Raps scissor kicked very fast, but Mark was able to jump clear, he brought the helmet down hard, twice, onto Fat Raps’ head in punishment, before judging that he had made enough space for his escape. He pulled the helmet back on his head and felt in his pockets for his keys.

Watching Fat Raps intently, he repeated his manoeuvre from the previous evening, starting the bike on the stand and dropping straight into gear for the most rapid exit he could manage, narrowly missing Fat Raps’ head as he sped out through towards the gates, reaching home in double-quick time.

Shaking, he entered the house and made his way to the bathroom to assess the damage. Later that evening at the dinner table his mother was shocked at the bruises on her son’s head and wrist. His left jaw was swollen and eating was painful. There were further bruises down his left arm and ribs. He refused to explain anything and went to bed early.

Next day, Friday, the end of his first week, he took the same precautions as previously, clocking-in slightly early, and wearing his bike helmet. He made his way cautiously to the Fitters’ locker room and sat in his jacket and helmet waiting for his workmates to arrive.

First in was Big John. ‘Hey Little ’un, you’re a soldier all bright and early’ he called, with a beautific grin on his face. I knew you’d come through. ‘I’ll be buying you the first drink mate, I’ve won £50 off Jock betting that you’d come off all right against Fat Raps!’

‘Wha?’ came Mark’s muffled response from inside the helmet. ‘Come on, you can take that off now, you won’t have any more trouble mate, let’s have a look at you.’

As the other fitters arrived, Mark was gradually made aware that their whole week’s sport had been spent betting on the outcome of the inevitable fight between Fat Raps and the new arrival. Big John had a son at school who had given him an account of Mark’s Marseilles trip including the fight he had there. On the strength of that he had bet a weeks wages that Mark would successfully fight Fat Raps before the end of the week.

He learned that normal performance for apprentices was to avoid him for at least a week, and then to take another week before either leaving (five previous ones, explaining where there were often vacancies advertised) or staying (the other apprentice fitter, George, who had already been there two years, was of Polish descent and over six foot tall, so not very typical).

Whilst Mark had been completely absorbed in fighting Fat Raps, the rest of the workforce had been watching intently, Jock and Big John had a grandstand view from inside Big John’s Humber Hawke, parked close by. Other fitters had taken position high up on the blast furnace gantry-walk, that overlooked the car park. If it had seemed a bit quiet and there had been such a clear exit, it was because no one was going to leave the premises before the bet was resolved.

As this was all explained to Mark over mugs of tea, Fat Raps was brought forwards to shake hands – ‘No hard feelings mate’ he said with what seemed like genuine affection as they shook hands. Mark felt a deep sense of relief as he gently sipped tea through his aching jaw. ‘Blimey, you’re a good fighter for a small one, you really got me a couple of times, not many people do that’.