Chapter Three
The Tokyo Tumble Tally had been Darius’s idea, which meant it was structurally unsound, morally indefensible, and already in full swing by the time Lex got back to his room after dinner on the second night.
The premise was simple. You had nineteen days.
You had a Village full of the most physically elite human beings on the planet, pre-sorted by nation and sport.
You had condoms distributed by the crate, a shared dining hall the size of an aircraft hangar, and the implicit understanding that what happened in the Olympic Village stayed in the Olympic Village.
The Tally ran on a points system. Darius had built it on a shared Google Doc during the flight over, and the rules were straightforward:
log your conquests
tag the sport
assign the base score
attach a picture
Base scores ran by sport. Endurance athletes (runners, swimmers, cyclists) were a five.
Team sport players were a seven, because you had to isolate them from the herd.
Combat sports were an eight, on account of the inherent risk that they might hit you.
Artistic sports (gymnastics, diving, etc.) were a nine, because they were beautiful and they knew it.
Then there were modifiers.
Previous medal winner: plus ten. Current world-record holder: plus fifteen.
Endorsement deal with a major corporate entity: plus five per brand, capped at three.
Someone whose nation had a current geopolitical conflict with your own: plus twenty, because nothing sharpened the thrill of a shag quite like the abstract possibility of it causing an international incident.
Gender and orientation were open categories.
The Tally was an equal-opportunity operation.
Darius was exclusively interested in women but had once, while extremely drunk in Marbella, kissed a Portuguese kickboxer on the mouth and described it afterwards as “not bad, actually. Though a bit scratchy,” which the group had unanimously agreed counted for partial credit.
Lex was…well, Lex didn’t think about it in categories. He thought about it in specifics. He’d had girlfriends, he’d had a few lads, and he didn’t see the point of drawing a line between the two when the whole exercise was about finding someone whose body made his brain shut up for five minutes.
The top-ten list was where things got competitive.
It lived on a separate tab. Ten targets, ranked by estimated difficulty, refreshed every forty-eight hours as new intelligence came in.
The scoring was cumulative: base sport value, plus modifiers, plus a subjective difficulty rating agreed upon by group vote.
The highest tier, the God Tier, had only ever been occupied by one category of athlete in the history of the Tally, across three Olympic cycles and two World Championships.
Russian gymnasts.
They were, by universal consensus, the most beautiful and least approachable human beings in the Village.
They moved through the dining hall in formation, ate in silence, and looked at you with the flat disinterest a house cat reserved for a particularly unimpressive moth.
They had bodies that bent in ways that challenged the basic principles of anatomy, and an institutional hostility to small talk that bordered on performance art.
Nobody in the Tally’s history had ever successfully pulled a Russian gymnast. They were the white whale.
The Everest. The guaranteed hundred-pointer that nobody would ever cash in.
Lex was lying on his narrow Village bed, ankles crossed, scrolling through the group chat on his mobile with a grin that was becoming increasingly difficult to suppress.
The Tokyo Tumble Tally
Lex: Right lads. I’ve got a nomination for the God Tier
Darius: go on
Lex: Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester. Eventing. British. Marquess of something. I don’t know what a marquess is but I think it means his dad owns a county
Mick: eventing is horses yeah?
Lex: Horses yeah. Posh horses. Not like your uncle Dave’s knackered thing at the Romford fair
Darius: base score?
Lex: nine. artistic sport adjacent. man rides a horse in a top hat for one of the rounds. I’ve googled it. it’s called dressage. the horse does a little dance. he wears a fucking TAILCOAT
Darius: that’s not artistic sport that’s just being rich enough not to care about looking like a prat
Lex: NINE.
Mick: what are his modifiers
Lex: no medals yet but this is his first games. no endorsement deals that I can find, probably because his family has more money than Nike. BUT here’s where it gets good. here’s where i earn my place in this group
Lex: difficulty rating: GOD TIER
Lex: I tried to talk to him at the airport. he put on headphones
Lex: I tried to talk to him at the gym. he literally ran away. on a treadmill. increased his speed to escape me faster
Lex: he is the coldest, frostiest, most absolutely buttoned-up man I have ever met in my life. makes the Russian gymnasts look like the welcome committee at Butlin’s
Darius: sounds like he just doesn’t fancy you mate
Lex: INCORRECT. his ears went pink
Mick: his ears went pink
Lex: PINK. confirmed tell. I touched him on the back and he went rigid. full body. like someone had plugged him in
Darius: you touched him??
Lex: friendly like!! a pat!! a companionable pat!! the boxers do it all the time!! it’s positive reinforcement!!
Mick: the way you people carry on in that gym is not normal
Lex: ANYWAY he’s god tier. hundred points. guaranteed win if you bag him. no one else is going to get near him because of his murder gaze. would be proper terrifying if it didn’t look like he’d splashed ninety quid on lash extensions. I’m adding modifiers
Darius: what modifiers he’s got no medals and no deals
Lex: CUSTOM MODIFIERS
Lex: +10 for being so posh he has a hyphenated surname that no one can pronounce
Lex: +5 for owning a trunk that weighs more than me
Lex: +5 for the fact that his sport requires him to wear WHITE brEECHES in public which is an act of sexual warfare that should be prosecuted at The Hague
Mick: white breeches??
Lex: TIGHT white breeches, Mick. I’ll send evidence when I have it. the man’s going to be walking around this village in jodhpurs and tall boots like he’s wandered out of a BBC period drama and I am SUPPOSED to just be NORMAL about it??
Darius: hundred points then
Lex: hundred points
Mick: orientation?
Lex paused. He looked at the ceiling. The Village accommodation was functional and impersonal. Just compact rooms with single beds, thin walls, and a view of a courtyard that smelt faintly of chlorine from the pool next door. He could hear someone’s music through the wall.
Lex: ambiguous
Darius: ambiguous how
Lex: ambiguous like I don’t know. he could be gay. he could be straight and just very uptight. he could be one of those boarding school lads who had a fumble with the head boy and now can’t make eye contact with men under fluorescent lighting
Mick: so you’re chasing a man who might be straight
Lex: I’m not CHASING anyone. I’m NOMINATING him for the tier list. different thing entirely. this is administrative
Darius: you’re chasing him
Lex: I’m conducting a strategic assessment
Mick: lol
Lex: ANYWAY he goes in at male (ambiguous) and the hundred stands. all in favour?
Darius: aye
Mick: wait
Mick: Lex
Mick: is your marquess blond
Lex: yeah why
Mick: posh blond? skinny? looks like he’s never been warm in his life? never been hugged
Lex: that’s the one
Mick: hang on
There was a pause. The three dots pulsed at the bottom of the screen.
Lex waited, scratching his jaw. His knuckles were still sore from the heavy bag that afternoon.
He needed to tape them properly before tomorrow’s session, but the tape was in his kit bag and his kit bag was across the room.
Getting up required effort he wasn’t prepared to expend.
Not while he was busy maintaining his dominance of The Tokyo Tumble Tally.
Mick sent a link.
It was a photograph from the front page of a broadsheet newspaper of two boys, maybe thirteen or fourteen, standing on a manicured lawn in morning coats and waistcoats, squinting against pale English sunshine.
One was dark-haired and tall for his age, already growing into the jawline that would later grace postage stamps and commemorative coins.
The other was blond, narrow, standing slightly behind and to the left.
The caption read: His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and the Marquess of Ashworth at the Eton College Fourth of June celebrations, 2013.
Mick: your boy’s best mates with the king
Lex stared at the photo. He zoomed in. The blond boy was unmistakably Barnaby.
He was half-smiling in the photograph, which was more than Lex had managed to extract from the adult version.
And next to him, one hand in his pocket, was King James.
Fourteen years old. Already carrying himself like someone who knew, on some bone-deep level, that his life did not entirely belong to him.
Lex: FUCK OFF
Mick: yep
Lex: he’s mates with the KING??
Mick: childhood mates by the looks of it. Eton together. there’s more photos if you google it
Darius: does that add points or remove points
Lex: that adds FIFTY POINTS is what that does
Mick: we said cap at a hundred
Lex: THE CAP IS ADVISORY
Darius: the cap is the rules Lex
Lex: FINE. hundred. but noted for the record that this man has a personal relationship with the head of state and that makes him the most protected shag target in the history of organised sport
Mick: the king’s not going to have you killed for pulling his mate
Lex: you don’t KNOW that Mick. these people still own castles. they might still have dungeons. I’m not saying it’s likely but I am saying there’s a non-zero chance