Enemies....... Written by Vic Davey

 Enemies are like flies. You want to swat them away, tread on them, squash them. But you can't and they just keep coming back. 

There was this kid at Senior school. Picked me out from day one for some reason and set about making my life a misery. He had two or three cohorts always with him and managed to catch me in the corridor after lessons, pinning me against the wall, if it wasn't stealing pocket money, it was destroying homework. He was a year or so above me, big, strong while I was a skinny 6 stone weakling, no way of fighting and I knew I would get no support from the teaching staff. If I snitched, it would make things worse. 

I was in terror until he left. Then a year or so later, so did I. I had no qualifications but the freedom I felt was unimaginable... that was the end of it, or so I thought.

I drifted from job to job for awhile. I just couldn't settle until I found somewhere where I was relatively happy. Albeit it was just in a warehouse, picker packer, that kind of thing but I was trained to use a fork lift and became quite adept. 

 I had been there about a year when we were called to a 'team meeting' with the Supervisor. There was to be a reorganisation, he had been promoted and was moving to another location. New staff had been recruited, including a new Supervisor.....

Imagine my horror when it turned out to be my old school nemesis! My hope that he wouldn't recognize me lasted about an hour after he arrived. He was just the same, now overweight and carried the same smirk on his ugly face when he realized who I was. The old fear returned. My legs shook and my palms sweated whenever he was around my area and he made sure he was around alot. 

Somehow he always found fault with whatever I did, either a stack wasn't exactly lined up, or a bin had encrouched onto the yellow line on the floor or the charging cable for the fork lift wasn't coiled correctly. He rode me, every day and I was ready to quit. I dreaded going to work...I didn't need this again.....

One day something clicked in my head. If I did cut and run I would only meet up with another bully at another time in another place. I couldn't run forever. Somehow it had to end.

 Late one Friday afternoon and I was called to the Receiving Bay to pick up some metal cages containing heavy truck components. I whizzed around, found the three cages and set off for the storage location. There were three similar containers already there that I knew had lighter contents. I was about to pull them out, slide the new cages in and stack the lighter ones on top one by one when my surly Supervisor turned up for my daily bollocking. 

"What are you doing"?

I tried to explain but he cut me off, said I was time wasting and told me he wanted me somewhere else, pronto and to just stack the new stuff on top. I objected but no use and then I blew. "You really want it done like that then you f....g do it! I'm out of here."

I climbed down from the truck and walked away, leaving him fuming and spluttering. I'd gone about twenty metres when I heard an almighty crash. I turned around and there he was, fork lift overturned and he buried under tons of metal. Squashed like a fly.

The Inquest found no fault with the Company, the deceased had ignored all Safety Policies. I was exonerated. Of course, I didn't mentioned the little lever on the fork lift I had deliberately left active when I got off. Well, he should have seen it, shouldn't he?