He smirked. Then he reached into the packet and ate another cracker.
“You absolutebastard! You couldn’t have mentioned—”
“You told me to shut up.”
“I didn’t mean…fuck, it’s getting worse, it’s spreading, my whole—” Lex straightened up, eyes watering, lips swollen and tingling and furious, and looked at Barnaby with an expression that was split evenly between outrage and something much more dangerous. His chest was heaving. His pupils were blown wide. He looked like a man who had just discovered that pain and want could occupy the same space quite nicely.
Lex grabbed the packet of rice crackers from Barnaby’s hand and threw it on the ground. Then he seized Barnaby’s jaw with both hands and kissed him again.
This kiss had intent behind it, and a heat that had nothing to do with capsaicin. Lex’s thumbs pressed into the hollows beneath Barnaby’s cheekbones, tilting his face upward, and his mouth moved against Barnaby’s with a slow, deliberate thoroughness that made Barnaby’s knees soften. The bags sliddown his arms. He could taste the sting of chilli transferring between them, could feel the swollen edge of Lex’s mouth dragging across his lower lip, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care about any of it. He leaned in, and Lex made a low sound against his mouth that Barnaby felt in the base of his spine.
A sharp, scandalised noise cut through the silence.
Barnaby pulled back. Lex pulled back and they both turned towards the source of the noise.
A woman who could not have been younger than seventy-five was standing three metres away on the pavement, clutching the lead of a very small, very fluffy white dog. The dog was vibrating with indignation, much like the woman herself.
She wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were on the ground, where the packet of FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION RICE SNACKS lay scattered across the pavement in a spray of red crumbs and torn foil.
She spoke rapidly and emphatically, in Japanese.
“Oh God,” Barnaby said. He released Lex, stepped back, and bowed. “Sumimasen.” He bowed again, deeper. “Sumimasen, sumimasen.”
The woman was not finished. She gestured at the packet, then at the pavement, then at a bin that was visible on the corner twenty metres away, the implication of which was devastating in its clarity. She had standards. This was her neighbourhood. Whatever these two enormous foreign men had been doing with their mouths was their own concern, but the wilful desecration of a public footpath was a matter for immediate and vocal correction.
Barnaby reached up, grabbed the back of Lex’s neck, and forced his head down into a bow.
“Ow. What—”
“Bow. Now. You threw the packet.”
Lex bowed. It was graceless and shallow, and Barnaby pressed harder until he was bent almost in half at the waist.
“Sumimasen,” Lex said, to the pavement.
They dropped to their knees and began picking up rice crackers. The woman supervised, arms folded, delivering a running commentary in Japanese that neither of them understood but both of them felt in their bones. Her dog strained at its lead, sniffing at the debris.
Barnaby gathered crumbs into his palm. Lex scooped the torn packet off the ground and stuffed it into one of the convenience store bags. A cracker had rolled into the gutter, and Barnaby crawled forward to retrieve it, his knees scraping on the pavement.
The poodle lunged. It snatched a cracker from the ground and crunched it between its tiny teeth. It swallowed, licked its chops, and looked around for another one.
The woman gave them one final look. Then she tugged her dog’s lead, turned on her heel, and walked away down the street. The poodle trotted along beside her, tail high, having eaten the cracker without breaking stride.
Barnaby stood up. He brushed off his knees, looked at Lex, who was still on the pavement with a handful of chilli crumbs and a split lip that was now swollen to twice its original size, and said: “That poodle takes spice better than you do.”
Chapter Nine
Lexwon his gold on a Wednesday.
The final had gone four rounds, because the Cuban was good. Properly good. He was built like a shipping container with hands that moved faster than they had any right to for a man that size, and a jab that caught Lex twice in the second round hard enough to rearrange his thinking on the subject of pain tolerance.
But Lex was better. Yeah, there were a couple of moments during the second round when he doubted it. But he knew he had the upper edge by the end of the third, when the Cuban’s footwork started to drag and his guard dropped a centimetre on the left side. That was when Lex put him down with a combination that started in his hip and ended somewhere in the region of the poor bastard’s temporal lobe. The referee counted to eight. The Cuban got up. Lex put him down again, and this time he stayed, and the noise that came out of Ryogoku Kokugikan was the loudest thing Lex had ever heard in his life.
He stood on the podium with the anthem playing and the medal heavy around his neck and he thought:two. Fucking magic number, that. He hadtwoOlympic golds. Alexander Edward Murphy from Barking, who used to nick Freddos from the corner shop and whose nan had sewn his first pair of boxing shorts on a machine she’d got from a car boot sale, now had two golds.
He thought about his nan. He thought about his coach, who was crying in the front row; something that they would definitely never acknowledge between themselves. He thought about his mum, who was watching from a flat in Dagenham with thirty members of their extended family.
Then he thought about Barnaby, and what he was going to do to him tonight, and had to arrange his hands over his crotch in a way that he hoped looked serious and sportsmanlike rather than an attempt to hide a public stiffie.
