Chapter Five
By the third night, Lex had a system.
If the wrapper had a cartoon animal on it that looked like it was experiencing a manic episode, it went in the basket.
If the flavour description, loosely translated by his mobile’s camera, contained a word he’d never seen applied to food before like: seaweed butter or roasted soybean dust, it went into the basket.
If the item appeared to be a sweet potato that had been compressed into a stick and then coated in white chocolate, that went in the basket twice.
He’d nicked a mixing bowl from the dining hall and christened it The Lucky Dip.
It was stainless steel, industrial-sized, and was meant to be used for tossing salads for sixty people.
He dumped everything into it without sorting, leaving wrappers half-open, and carrying it upstairs to the third-floor common room like a man bringing an offering to a temple.
Barnaby was always there these days. Every night, on the same sofa, to do the same idiotic thing with him.
He never had to come right out and say come back tonight. He’d never texted Barnaby, though they’d exchanged numbers now. The common room existed outside the bounds of their normal interactions.
Lex dropped the bowl on the cushion between them and sat down.
“Right,” he said. “Tonight’s haul. We’ve got a prawn cracker situation, something that claims to be corn but is the colour of a traffic cone, and a sweet that I’m fairly sure is just a lump of bean paste wrapped in a leaf.”
Barnaby leaned forward and examined the contents of the bowl.
He picked up the bean paste sweet, turned it over, and bit into it.
There was a brief, involuntary tightening around his eyes.
His jaw moved slowly and his gaze drifted to the middle distance.
Then he swallowed, set the remainder down on the table, and said, “That’s quite good, actually. ”
“Liar.”
“It’s earthy. Subtle. You wouldn’t understand.”
Lex grabbed one and bit into it. It tasted like sweetened clay. “This is soil, Barnaby. You are eating flavoured soil and pretending it’s a delicacy.”
“It’s wagashi. It’s a traditional Japanese confection. They’ve been making them for centuries.”
“They’ve been eating dirt for centuries?”
Barnaby’s mouth twitched.
A smile! Lex added it to his running tally.
He now had three nights worth of data, hoarding the information like an overinvested research scientist. He noticed the way Barnaby’s left ear went pink before his right whenever he got huffy.
How his jaw tightened when he was about to laugh but didn’t want to.
He ate things he hated rather than admit defeat, which meant Lex could track exactly how disgusting something was by how many times he chewed before swallowing.
Anything under four chews was tolerable.
Anything over ten was an act of defiance against his own palate, performed purely out of spite.
The game show was already on. Tonight’s episode featured a man in a blue bodysuit navigating a corridor of doors that swung open at random intervals, each one releasing either a blast of confetti or a person in an inflatable sumo suit who body-checked the contestant into the wall.
The studio audience was in hysterics. A panel of presenters watched from a booth, their faces superimposed in small boxes in the corner of the screen, reacting with theatrical horror at every collision.
“Right,” Lex said, cracking his knuckles. “Blue Suit. What’s his story?”
On the second night, Lex had started narrating, doing voices for the contestants, and ad-libbing dialogue over the Japanese commentary. He gave each body-suited figure a name and a backstory.
“He’s a regional manager,” Barnaby said, not looking away from the screen.”For a mid-sized insurance firm in Osaka. He’s here because his wife signed him up as a birthday present, and he’s too polite to tell her he’d rather have had the golf clubs.”
“Tragic. Devastating. I hope he makes it past the sumo door.”
“He won’t. He’s leading with his left shoulder, which means he’ll over-correct when the door opens and expose his centre of gravity.”
“You can’t analyse a game show contestant’s centre of gravity when you’ve only ever seen him standing still.”
“I can. I do it with horses. The principle is identical.”
Blue Suit hit the sumo door. The inflatable figure erupted from behind it and launched him sideways into the padding. He crumpled to the ground with a theatrical grace that suggested he’d been expecting defeat. Barnaby nodded in satisfaction. “There. Left shoulder.”
Lex laughed and reached into the bowl. His hand closed around a packet of something pink and stamped with a cherry blossom design. He tore it open and held it out to Barnaby.
Barnaby took it, bit into it, and went still. His chewing slowed. He looked down at the cracker in his hand, turned it over, and read the wrapper.
“What is it?” Lex asked.
“Sakura.” Barnaby said it quietly, almost to himself. “Cherry blossom flavour.”
“Any good?”
Barnaby took another bite. He ate it slowly, and when he finished, he folded the wrapper neatly and set it on the arm of the sofa. “That,” he said, “was the first edible thing you’ve brought to this sofa.”
Sakura. Cherry blossom. Buy every single thing that’s this flavour.
He dug back into the bowl and pulled out something with a green packet. The wrapper had Japanese text and a small illustration of a whisk and a tea bowl. Matcha. He’d seen this one everywhere; matcha Kit Kats, matcha Pocky, matcha everything. Tokyo ran on the stuff.
Barnaby took one look at the packet and recoiled as though Lex had produced a severed finger.
“No.”
“You haven’t tried it.”
“I don’t need to try it. I know what matcha tastes like. It tastes like someone has composted a lawn and then strained it through a sock that someone’s worn for a week straight.”
“That’s very specific.”
“Vidal made me drink ceremonial matcha in Cardona. He insisted it was a transcendent spiritual experience. It was not. It tasted like hot lawn water, and I told him so. Then he didn’t speak to me for six hours, which was the most peaceful afternoon I’ve had in that principality.”
“Who’s Vidal?”
“His Serene Highness Prince Vidal of Cardona.” Barnaby said it the way most people said their postcode. “A friend of mine that I haven’t been able to shake since Eton, god help me.”
“Don’t you have any friends with normal names?”
Barnaby considered this. “James.”
“James.” Lex snorted. “James, King of the United Kingdom, Defender of the Faith, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and whatever other mad titles he’s got. That’s your actual example of someone with a normal name?”
“It is a normal name. It’s not his fault about the rest of it.”
“Right. Anyone else?”
Barnaby looked at him. The corner of his mouth shifted. “Lex.”
It landed before Lex was ready for it. A warmth spread through his chest that had nothing to do with the chilli crackers he’d been cramming into his mouth, and everything to do with the quiet, matter-of-fact way Barnaby had placed his name alongside a king’s, and claimed him as a friend.
Lex opened the packet of matcha treats and ate one. It was fine. Grassy, sweet and a bit odd, but fine. “You’re mental. These are decent.”
“You also thought the squid ink crisps were quality. Your palate isn’t a reliable instrument.”
“Like my body, my palate is a finely tuned machine.”
Barnaby smirked. “You’d be fine licking the bottom of a skip.”
Lex grinned and fished out a small red packet from the bottom of the bowl.
This one had a chilli pepper on the wrapper and Japanese text that his phone had translated, unhelpfully, as FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION RICE SNACK.
He’d bought it as a test. A trap, really.
This would make most people’s eyes water and their sinuses declare independence from the rest of their face.
He opened it, took one, and put it in his mouth.
His tongue ignited. Heat bloomed across the roof of his mouth and spread backward toward his throat, sharply chemical and building steadily. His eyes watered, and he exhaled through clenched teeth like a man who’d just been punched in the diaphragm.
“Fuck me,” he wheezed out.
Barnaby watched him with open interest. Then he reached into the packet, took one, and ate it. Nothing happened. His expression didn’t change. He chewed at a measured pace, and reached for another one. “These are rather nice,” he said.
“You’re joking.”
“Not at all. They’ve got a good kick. Reminds me of the Scotch bonnets Eleanor grows in the greenhouse at Chatham.” He ate a third one.”She puts them in her jerk chicken. I’ve been eating her jerk chicken since I was six.”
Lex stared at him. His own mouth was still on fire.
His lips were tingling. He could feel the heat tracking down his oesophagus like a slow-moving chemical spill.
Meanwhile, Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester, who looked like he’d been raised on cucumber sandwiches and the mildest of mild cheddars, was hoovering down FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION RICE SNACKS like it was a fucking digestive.
“That’s not right,” Lex said. “That’s not natural. You should not be able to do that.”
“Perhaps your palate isn’t as finely tuned as you thought.”
“My palate is dying, Barnaby. I can feel it dying. I’m going to taste nothing but pain for the next forty-eight hours.”
Barnaby ate another one and looked at him with an expression that was, unmistakably, smug. His grey eyes were bright, and there was that almost-smile again, right there on the surface.
On screen, a woman in a silver bodysuit was approaching the final gauntlet. Lex leaned forward, grateful for the excuse to look away from Barnaby.“Right. Silver Suit. Go.”
“She’s a retired schoolteacher,” Barnaby said, reaching into the bowl for another chilli cracker. “Specialised in primary maths. She’s here to prove to her former students that she’s still capable of physical excellence.”
“Brilliant. Beautiful. I hope she destroys every sumo in that corridor.”
“She will. Watch her hips. She’s got a low centre of gravity and she’s reading the door timing.”
Silver Suit made it past three doors and the audience lost their minds. Lex grabbed Barnaby’s wrist and pumped it in the air. Barnaby tolerated this for a few seconds before extracting himself. But his ears were pink, and Lex could feel the heat of his skin lingering on his palm.
They watched the rest of the episode. Barnaby ate seven more chilli crackers. Lex ate three sakura biscuits to cool his mouth down and accepted that his digestive system was going to make him pay for the FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION in six to eight hours.
At half three, Barnaby turned from the screen. The episode was between segments, the presenters bantering in Japanese over a graphic that seemed to be advertising the next round.
“Your fight is tomorrow,” Barnaby said.
“Quarter-final,” Lex said. “Yeah.”
“Then why are you here? You should be sleeping.”
Barnaby was right. His coach would have had him in bed by ten.
His nutritionist would have confiscated the bowl of snacks and dumped them in the toilet.
He shouldn’t be on a sofa at half three in the morning, eating Japanese snacks that were chemically restructuring his intestinal lining, watching a game show he couldn’t understand with a man who still technically qualified as a stranger.
He looked at Barnaby, at his pale hair falling across his forehead, and the way the blue light from the television caught his jaw and made him look younger. Softer.
“Maybe you’re my good luck charm, Bitchster,” Lex said.
He reached over and rubbed the top of Barnaby’s head. Just once. He let himself have one slow pass of his palm across that pale, fine hair. It felt like silk under his hand, cool and soft. His fingers trailed through it, and Barnaby went absolutely still beneath his touch.
Lex pulled his hand back, stood up, and stretched.
“Right,” he said. “I actually should get to bed. I’ve got an early start. Don’t eat all the sakura ones.” He walked out of the common room without looking back, and made it to the stairwell before his grin split his face wide open.