Al-Britannia, My Country by James Fergusson

Author:James Fergusson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2017-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

8

Men Behaving Badly

Bradford

IT WAS OBVIOUS the bout was going to be short from the moment the fighters stepped into the cage. The Asian one, Hassan Mahmood, didn’t skip so much as bounce around its edges, like potassium in water in a school laboratory experiment. He climbed and even straddled the top of the high mesh fencing, from where he flexed the square slab of his chest and roared, like King Kong on the Empire State. His supporters, standing teetering on chairs ranged too close behind me, bayed back their approval. It was the highlight of their big Saturday night out in Bradford and they were almost as pumped up as their champion. His opponent, a wiry professional flyweight from Stockport called Reece Street, seemed no pushover with his jug ears and Charles Atlas stomach muscles, yet he shuffled his feet and looked at the floor when Mahmood came circling with his hard man’s stare, their faces inches apart.

It was hot as well as deafening in the Bradford Hotel’s windowless conference hall, which by this late stage in the evening smelled strongly of beer and marijuana as well as sweat. The police had been called, twice, to break up fights in the 700-strong audience. On the second occasion they had passed a message via the compère in the cage, a beefy Asian ex-boxer (and ex-policeman), that the evening would be cancelled and the conference hall forcibly shut if the audience didn’t sit down and behave. The marshals had been losing their grip all night and now, as the penultimate fight got under way, they lost it completely. I ducked aside as the mob surged from behind through the ringside seats, overturning chairs and kicking over beer glasses, clambering the cage where their champion was already pummelling the flyweight from Stockport.

‘Fuck him up, Haz!’ they shouted. ‘Fucking destroy him!’

They wore sharp shirts and sharper haircuts, carefully parted moptops over short back and sides, sometimes with natty patterns etched out with a razor. It was my first encounter with suburban Asian rudeboy culture and it didn’t feel comfortable. One or two of them hung back and filmed the melee on their phones, whooping at the anarchy they had unleashed on the desperate marshals. Some of them seemed very young.

Adil, an ex-gym fighter himself and my companion for the evening, tapped my shoulder and leant towards my ear.

‘This is when we use the phrase “Fucky Paki”,’ he yelled, rolling his eyes.

It was not, I reflected, a phrase that I could ever use. Adil, as a Pakistani Pashtun, was more entitled. I had asked him some weeks before to show me the ‘real’ Asian Bradford and this was what he came up with. It was good of him to bring me because, as he said, he didn’t like fight nights as much as he once did. For most of the evening he sat scowling with his arms obdurately crossed, an incongruous woolly hat crammed down over his head.

‘They’re not from Bradford, that lot,’ he added. ‘They’re from Dewsbury.

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