Fight: Part Two

Part two, of a tale in three parts. Go here for part one.  

I am not a fighter, in any sense of the word. 

I’ve always been small, and that’s part of it, but I think there’s something more fundamental at work. I’ve seen plenty of lads who were smaller than me but great at fighting. Wild terriers, possessed of the most unearthly anger, leaping and bouncing and snarling at the world around them. Some of them jumped and snarled at me, and I can tell you for sure - their punches hurt just fine.

No, it’s not really a size thing. I reckon that even if I’d grown up big and tall, my body developing upwards and outwards with the physique of a Greek god, I’d have still been reluctant to throw a punch. 

Is that true? Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe if we looked into alternative time, we’d find mirror-universe Rob, six foot tall and rippling with muscles, swaggering about the world like a king, smacking people round the head every time they got a fact wrong about Doctor Who. “No, it wasn’t Tom Baker in the One With the Maggots you tosser. It was Jon Pertwee, and its proper title is ‘The Green Death’. Now give me your lunch money.” 

Maybe the reality of being tough would change the paths along which my personality developed, and I’m just a slave to circumstance. Like that time I bought my first car with a two litre engine and discovered that, far from being a thoughtful and considerate driver as I’d always imagined, I was in fact the same kind of aggressive speed freak as everyone else - I’d just never had a powerful enough car to see that side of myself. 

Hmm. Anyway. Back to this universe: specifically the bit of it that contains my school playground in the late 1970s. 

There’s me, small and weak and glum, staring at the tarmac. Tuesday morning break. For twenty minutes we are cast outside into the miserable, cold, concrete deathtrap that surrounds the school, away from the nice, warm, good bit, inside, where the books live. Most of the kids charge into the break like an army of berserker demons. They love it, and go appropriately insane with noisy joy. I don’t know why. Kids are idiots, and the sooner I don’t have to hang out with them, the better. 

As if things aren’t bad enough already, it soon becomes worse because there, in front of me is John Butcher. I don’t remember him approaching me, he just seems to pop into existence a few feet away, as if in a dream or a particularly depressing video game. He wears the same kind of cunning, leering anticipation that a dog might have when considering eating whatever’s in your hand, even if the thing in your hand is a glove, or a book, or one of its own paws.

So this is it. The idiot king of the pugilists has finally got to ‘R’ in his mental inventory of “People I must punch, at least once”. And now, we have to fight.

To be concluded... in part Three