Barnaby reset. His knees bent. His weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet. He threw the cross again, and this time his hips turned, his foot pivoted, and the pad cracked properly under Lex’s hand.
“Better,” Malik barked. “Again. Faster. Jab-cross-hook. Don’t drop your guard between shots, keep your hands up, and if I see that elbow flare one more time I’m going to duct-tape it to your fucking ribs.”
Barnaby threw the combination. His guard stayed up. His elbow stayed tucked. The three shots connected in sequence, pop-pop-pop, and the rhythm was right for the first time. Malik grunted, which was his version of a standing ovation.
“Again. Ten more. Quick.”
Barnaby did ten more. He did them without protest, without comment, without even a trace of the glacial politeness that Lex had seen him deploy on anyone who presumed to tell him what to do. He just listened and hit and adjusted, his breath coming hard through his nose.
Malik turned to Lex. His eyebrows were halfway up his forehead, his mouth slightly open. He jerked his chin toward Barnaby.
“Who is he?” he asked quietly.
“That’s my friend Barnaby. From the Olympics. He’s a marquess, and a friend of King James’.”
Malik’s mouth went through a series of rapid adjustments. His eyes darted to Barnaby, who was shaking out his hands between his knees and breathing hard, then back to Lex.
“A marquess.”
“Yeah.”
“I just told a marquess to get his fucking knees up.”
“You did.”
“Is that — should I—”
“You’re all right.” Lex put his hand on Malik’s shoulder. “He’s sound.”
? ? ?
Theyleft the gym at half six, Barnaby’s hair dark with sweat and his borrowed T-shirt clinging to his chest. Lex had unwrapped his hands in the locker room, checking the knuckles for damage, and found nothing worse than redness across the first two metacarpals. Good form, for a beginner. He’d told Barnaby as much, and Barnaby had received the compliment with a curt nod that meant he was thrilled.
The evening air hit them outside, cool and diesel-tinged, and Barnaby breathed it in like a man surfacing from a dive. Lex watched him take in the high street, the fried chicken place, the Coral, the bus shelter with its smashed panel, and waited for the flinch. It didn’t come. Barnaby just stood there in Lex’s too-big shorts with his knuckles reddened, looking like he’d been dropped into Barking from a great height and had decided to make the best of where he’d landed.
“I’m starving,” Lex said. “Come on.”
The shop was called Best Kebab, which Lex appreciated for its confidence. It was three doors down from the gym, wedged between a betting shop and a nail salon, and the fluorescent light inside was the shade of yellow that made everyone look like they were recovering from jaundice.
Lex ordered two lamb doners, fully loaded, chips in the wrap.
“Chips inside?” Barnaby looked at the man behind the counter as though he’d just witnessed him commit a crime.
“It’s how you have it, Barns. Chips inside. Garlic sauce, chilli sauce, the lot. You don’t eat the chips separately. That’s psychopath behaviour.”
“Eating chips separately is psychopath behaviour?”
“In a kebab context, yes.”
Barnaby received his doner with both hands. The wrap was the size of a small child’s forearm and already darkening at the base where the sauces had begun their inevitable migration south.
They stood at the narrow counter that ran along the window. Outside, two kids on bikes were doing wheelies under the streetlight. A bus went past, half-empty, its interior lit blue. Barnaby lifted the doner to his mouth and took his first bite.
His technique was catastrophic. He bit from the top, which compressed the structural integrity of the entire wrap, and the bottom immediately gave way. A chip slid free. Then a ribbon of shaved lamb. Then a cascade of lettuce, tomato, and garlic sauce that landed on his wrist and ran down to his elbow in a slow, white streak.
“Oh, for—” Barnaby tried to repack the breach with one hand, which only widened the split on the opposite side. A second wave of filling dropped onto the counter.
“You can’t approach it from the top, Barns. You go in from the side. Rotate and bite.”
