Chapter Four #2
“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 is that.”
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.”
“Squid ink.”
“Crisps. Squid ink flavour. They’re quality. I went to 7-Eleven with the lads earlier.” He said this as though it were a perfectly normal sentence, as though squid ink crisps were just the done thing and 7-Eleven were 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.
“What kind?”
“Egg and cress.”
Lex nodded slowly. His expression was neutral. “And the lobster bisque? You try that?”
“Yes,” Barnaby said, without hesitation. “It was very good.”
“And how’d you rate the beluga caviar scrambled eggs? In the hot food section?”
“Highly. But I was more fond of the bisque, actually.”
Lex stared at him. “You’ve never set foot in a fucking convenience store in your entire life, you posh fucking liar.”
Barnaby’s ears went hot. A hot flush climbed his neck, crawling across his cheekbones. He leaned forward, reached into the bag of squid ink crisps, and put one in his mouth as a stalling manoeuvre.
It was atrocious. It tasted exactly the way it smelt; briny, faintly sulphurous, with a lingering aftertaste of marine decay. His palate, trained on twenty-five years of good cheese, proper wine, and Eleanor’s roast dinners, revolted.
“Lovely,” he said.
Lex watched him with naked delight. “You’re dying.”
“I’m not dying. They’re perfectly pleasant.
” Barnaby reached into the bag and took another one.
His body begged him not to. He ate it anyway, because capitulation was not an option, and he would rather digest whatever deep-sea abomination the Japanese snack industry had cooked up than give Lex Murphy the satisfaction of seeing him spit it out.
He did not return to his end of the sofa.
Lex turned back to the television, where a woman in a yellow bodysuit was approaching a gauntlet of swinging padded arms. He settled into the cushions, one arm stretched along the back of the sofa behind Barnaby’s shoulders.
Not touching him, but close enough that Barnaby could feel the warmth of it.
“Right, so the rules are: if she makes it past the first three arms, she gets to pick a door. Behind the door is either a prize or a man in a foam suit who tackles her into the pit. But here’s the thing; you can tell which door’s got the foam man because the handle wobbles.
Watch. See? Wobble. That one. Foam man. Guaranteed. ”
“There is no way you’ve worked that out.”
“I’ve been watching this for two hours, Barns. I’m basically fluent in Japanese Game Show now. Right, she’s going for the left door. No, no, no, that handle wobbled! That’s a foam man door, love, what are you…YES! Foam man. Called it. Absolutely called it.”
Barnaby ate another crisp. The taste was not improving. He ate it anyway.
On screen, the woman in yellow climbed out of the foam pit laughing, covered in something that sparkled under the studio lights. The audience cheered. Lex cheered with them. Then he grabbed Barnaby’s wrist and hoisted his arm above his head, waggling it in a victory wave.
Barnaby snatched his arm back. But the laugh that escaped him was real, small, startled as it was. He reached into the bag again and took another crisp.