Chapter 2: The Canteen Campaign

Chapter 2: The Canteen Campaign

The canteen was a small, stuffy room with a lingering aroma of stale bread and burnt coffee. It was meant to be neutral ground, a brief thirty-minute armistice from the grime and noise of the workshop. For Kaelen, it was a chance to decompress, to let the coiled tension in his shoulders ease. He chose his usual table in the corner, a solitary post from which he could observe the room without having to engage. He unwrapped his sandwich, the memory of Geoff’s braying laughter and Thompson’s sneering "smoke signals" remark still clinging to him like the scent of diesel. He had managed to push it down, to file it away with the thousand other petty cuts, but the cold spark it had ignited still smouldered in his gut.

The door swung open, and the fragile peace shattered. Mark Thompson entered, his presence sucking the air out of the room. He grabbed a lukewarm tea from the urn, his movements loud and unnecessarily expansive, as if marking his territory. The usual banter between the other mechanics died down, replaced by a wary, watchful silence.

Thompson surveyed the room, his piggy eyes landing on Kaelen. A slow, malicious grin spread across his face. He didn't come over. Instead, he pulled up a chair at the central table, holding court among the handful of mechanics who were too slow or too sycophantic to find a reason to leave.

“Did you see that thing in the paper this morning?” Thompson began, his voice booming in the confined space. “Some professor, proper clever bloke, saying what we all know is true anyway.”

Kaelen didn't look up. He focused on the neat layers of his chicken and salad sandwich, chewing with a slow, deliberate rhythm. He knew this tactic. It was a verbal grenade rolled into the centre of the room, and he was the only one it was designed to wound.

“He’s got the data, see,” Thompson continued, leaning forward conspiratorially. “Charts and graphs and all that. Proper science. Proves that not all… you know… races… are born with the same kit upstairs.”

The clinking of cutlery slowed. Kaelen could feel the gazes of the other men flickering towards him, then quickly away. He saw Dave Williams, sitting two tables over, suddenly become intensely fascinated with a scratch on his fork. Geoff, the supervisor, was glued to his phone, a pathetic portrait of willful ignorance. No one spoke. No one challenged it. Their silence was a thick, suffocating blanket, a tacit agreement that made Kaelen feel as though the walls were closing in.

“It’s just biology, innit?” Thompson plowed on, emboldened by the lack of dissent. “You get dogs bred for racing, you get dogs bred for sitting on your lap. No one calls that racist. It’s just facts. Some people… they’re just built for… simpler things. Manual labour. Running fast. Not for the complicated stuff. Not for thinking.”

The words were aimed like missiles, each one programmed to land directly on Kaelen’s table. Manual labour. The insult was layered. Thompson was not only attacking his race but also sneering at the very profession they all shared, while simultaneously implying that for Kaelen, this was his natural ceiling. It ignored the complex diagnostic work Kaelen excelled at, the intricate understanding of mechanics and electronics that Thompson himself, a former mediocre mechanic, could never grasp.

Kaelen took another bite of his sandwich. His jaw ached from the effort of chewing slowly, of not clenching it until his teeth cracked. The storm inside him was no longer smouldering; it was a raging inferno. He imagined flipping the table, feeling the glorious, fleeting satisfaction of watching Thompson’s stupid, surprised face as hot tea and a plastic salt shaker flew at him. He pictured himself standing up and calmly, logically, dismantling the man’s pathetic, pseudo-scientific argument point by point until he was left sputtering in his own ignorance.

He did neither.

Because he also pictured the aftermath: the HR meeting, the accusations of him being ‘aggressive’, ‘difficult’, ‘playing the race card’. He’d be fired. No question. A skilled mechanic with a temper was a liability. A racist manager was just… a manager. In this place, the truth was irrelevant. The one who made the most noise, the one who disrupted the fragile, toxic peace, would be the one to lose. And Kaelen could not afford to lose his job.

So he sat. He ate. His face remained a mask of calm indifference. Every swallow was an act of rebellion. Every slow chew was a declaration that he would not be chased from this room. He would endure this verbal assault, this public humiliation, and he would give its architect nothing.

But the isolation was a physical weight. It pressed down on his chest, making it hard to breathe. The silence of his colleagues was louder than Thompson’s tirade. It was the sound of their cowardice, their complicity. They were all listening. They were all letting it happen. In this moment, they were all Mark Thompson’s men. Kaelen was utterly, completely alone, an island in a sea of silent assent.

Finally, Thompson seemed to run out of steam. Having asserted his dominance and poisoned the atmosphere to his satisfaction, he drained his tea with a loud slurp.

“Right,” he announced to the room at large. “Back to the grind. Some of us have got to do the thinking around here.” He shot one last triumphant, contemptuous look at Kaelen before swaggering out of the door.

Slowly, like a gramophone being wound back up to speed, the noise in the canteen returned. A cough here, a scraped chair there. Conversations restarted, but they were strained and artificial. The mechanics finished their lunches quickly, their eyes avoiding Kaelen’s corner. They were ashamed, perhaps, but their shame was a useless, passive thing. It changed nothing.

Kaelen was the last to leave. He meticulously gathered his rubbish, wiped his space with a paper napkin, and pushed his chair back under the table. The rage inside him had cooled, condensed into something hard, heavy, and infinitely more dangerous.

He walked back onto the workshop floor, the noise and the familiar smell of grease washing over him. The frontal assault he’d imagined in the canteen was a fool’s game. It was what Thompson wanted, what he expected. To fight this man, to truly beat him, he couldn’t use his fists or his voice. That was a fight he was guaranteed to lose.

He needed to find a different way. A smarter way. He had to fight Thompson not on his terms, but on his own. He needed to find the man’s weakness, the flaw in his personal machinery. He had to observe, to diagnose his enemy as he would a faulty engine.

The desire for justice had been forged into something new. It was no longer about making it stop. It was about making him pay. He needed a weapon, and in this place, a wrench and a strong arm weren't going to be enough. He needed a plan.