By any candid accounting, he’d been wallowing. His company board had pushed him sideways, and he had relocated to a country where it rained six days out of seven specifically so he could do his wallowing in an environment more conducive to it than California’s aggressive sunniness.
He was not going to tell Colin Huxley any of that.
“Working on a few side projects, mainly,” he said. “I’m building out the home automation for the Ledbury Road place. It’s actually a pretty interesting problem. The existing wiring’s all over the place because the house is a hundred and twenty years old, so I’ve had the contractors run a parallel low-voltage system through the loft for sensors. Everything talks to a local hub instead of going through the cloud, because, you know, latency. Plus I don’t really love the idea of Amazon knowing what time I get out of bed. I sat next to Jeff at a dinner once, Colin, and I’d sooner hand my house keys to someone I’d just met at Paddington Station. Anyway…my home set up’ll control the lighting, heating, blinds, the lot. I want to be able to walk in the front door at six o’clock in winter and have the place already warm.”
“Mate. You can do all that on your computer, but you couldn’t manage a light bulb?”
Diwa felt the heat rise up the back of his neck. “My skills are highly specialised.”
“So you’re a computer guy, then?”
“Yes,” Diwa said, which was a massive oversimplification.
The food came. Colin’s plate landed with the heft of a small paving slab. Piled onto his sensible plate were two sausages, two rashers, a fried slice, mushrooms, beans, a tomato halved and grilled, a black pudding, and an egg. The corner of Colin’s mouth lifted in an unambiguous smile. He picked up his cutlery without ceremony and started in.
Diwa’s bowl arrived two seconds later. The brown rice sat under a fan of pink salmon sashimi, glossy with miso glaze, alongside edamame, pickled ginger, slivers of cucumber, and a small constellation of black sesame seeds. The lip-curl did its thing on the other side of the table.
“That’s your lunch, is it?”
“This is my lunch.”
“Cold and uncooked.”
“The salmon’s sashimi-grade, it’s beautiful.”
“Mm. Could do with some hotting up in the microwave.”
Diwa picked up a piece of salmon between his chopsticks and held it out across the table, charm-armoured, as he said, “Try it. Just one.”
Colin’s knife and fork stopped moving. He didn’t look up at the chopsticks, or at Diwa, but set a hand over his plate, fingers slightly spread, in a gesture that was so definitive that Diwa stopped immediately.
“No raw fish on my plate, mate.”
Diwa retracted the chopsticks. “Right. Yeah. No raw fish.”
Diwa watched the omega eat. Colin worked his way around the plate in a clockwise rotation, methodical, and every few mouthfuls he glanced over at Diwa’s bowl with that same slight curl at the corner of his mouth.
“Go on, then,” Colin said eventually, his fork loaded with a piece of black pudding. “Open up.”
“Open what?”
“Your mouth. You’ve been eyeing my plate for the last ten minutes.”
“I have not been eyeing your plate.”
“You have, mate. Open up.”
Diwa opened his mouth, mostly out of curiosity about whether Colin Huxley was actually going to feed him a piece of black pudding. Colin extended the fork the rest of the way, andDiwa took the offering. The chewy, mineral richness of the black pudding filled his mouth, and he nodded thoughtfully.
“That’s good,” he said. “What’s in it?”
Colin’s eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean what’s in it? It’s black pudding.”
“Yeah, but what’s it made of? It’s got that iron-rich thing going on, like organ meat, but the texture’s more—”
“It’s blood,” Colin said flatly. He was watching Diwa’s face, waiting for the reaction. “Pig’s blood and oats and a bit of fat. That’s what black pudding is.”
Diwa nodded again, processing. “Yeah, no, that tracks. It’s basically dinuguan, then.”
