Lex caught his fist.
He caught it clean, his palm swallowing Barnaby’s knuckles whole. His fingers closed around Barnaby’s hand. There was no impact.
“You’re fuckingdisgusting,” Barnaby spat, attempting to yank his hand away. Lex didn’t let go. “What iswrongwith you? That’s absolutely rank!”
“Double wet willy,” Lex said, as though this explained anything. “Boxing tradition. You win a gold, you get the double wet willy. Ask any of the lads. It’s the rules.”
“It is notthe rules. There are norulesthat sanction putting your saliva in another person’s ear canals, you revolting git.”
“We’ve got two golds between us now, Barns. It had to be done.”
Barnaby’s brows furrowed. “Two golds?”
“Got one in Rio, 2016.” Lex said.
Barnaby hadn’t known. He should have Googled the man after the airport, at minimum. But he hadn’t, because Googling Lex Murphy would have been an admission of interest.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“‘Course you didn’t. You’ve been too busy running away from me on your little treadmill to do any basic research.” Lex was still holding his hand. His thumb moved. It did a slow pass over the back of Barnaby’s knuckles, and the gentleness of it was such a complete about face from the wet willy that had preceded it that Barnaby’s breath caught in his throat.
He was sitting very close to Lex. Now Barnaby’s knee was touching Lex’s thigh. Lex’s hand was warm around his as the television blared on. On-screen, the man in the red bodysuit had made it across the rotating log. The audience screamed. None ofit mattered while the pad of Lex’s thumb moved in slow, careful arcs across his skin.
“You take the win, Barnaby.”
The sound of his full name, not Barns, or Bitchster, quieted him. He turned his gaze upwards to meet Lex’s directly.
“I’ve watched three blokes I trained with get carried out of a ring,” Lex said. “One of them didn’t walk right after. You don’t sit with the bad bit and let it eat the good bit. That’s not respect, that’s just throwing away everything you’ve worked for. So you take your gold, and you feel shit about the rest. ‘Cos you can hold them both at the same time.”
Barnaby’s chin dipped, and his jaw went tight. Everything he’d held in since the tarpaulin went up, since the ambulance left, and he stood on the podium and smiled for the cameras, gave.
He pulled his hand free of Lex, pressed both palms flat against his thighs and sat with it. Let himself feel the grief and the guilt, and his latent pride in taking the gold all tangled together in his chest.
He opened his mouth to thank Lex, when the smell of something briny, acrid, and fundamentally wrong, reached him. Like a fishmonger’s bin on a hot day. “What,” Barnaby said, “in the name of God isthat.”
An open bag of crisps sat on the cushion beside Lex. The bag was black, printed with Japanese characters and an illustration of a bright red squid. The smell rising from it was profoundly offensive: a pungent cross between low tide and a printer ink cartridge.
Lex glanced at the bag. “Squid ink.”
“Squidink.”
“Crisps. Squid ink flavour. They’re quality. I went to 7-Eleven with the lads earlier.” He said this as though it were a perfectlynormal sentence, as thoughsquid ink crispswere just the done thing and7-Elevenwere a foodie destination. “Have you been?”
Lex was grinning at him with squid ink on his fingers, and Barnaby wanted, desperately, to be the person who went to 7-Eleven with his mates. “Of course I’ve been to a 7-Eleven.”
Lex’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “Yeah?”
“Yes. Obviously. It’s a…it’s a shop. I’ve been to shops.”
“What’d you get?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“At 7-Eleven. What’d you buy?”
Barnaby’s mind went blank. He had never set foot inside a 7-Eleven. He had never gone on a shopping run on his own. Most of his fresh vegetables and meat came from Chatham House grounds. He did not know what a 7-Eleven sold. Just that it was a convenience store. Beyond that, his intelligence was fatally limited.
“A sandwich,” he said.
