Chapter Six
Barnaby had never been to a boxing match, and it showed.
He’d arrived twenty minutes early, which was his first mistake, because it meant he had to sit in the stands at Ryōgoku Kokugikan and absorb the atmosphere without the buffer of the event itself.
The arena was designed for sumo, and it carried that history in its bones: the high ceiling, the raked seating, the sense of ritual built into the architecture.
But the Olympic organisers had stripped the sumo trappings and replaced them with a raised boxing ring at the centre of the floor, surrounded by a press of officials, cameras, and television cables that snaked across the ground like exposed veins.
The noise was extraordinary. This was not the contained enthusiasm of an equestrian crowd, where the applause was polite, and nobody would dream of shouting while a horse was on course.
The arena thrummed with a low, sustained roar.
Music blared between bouts as people stamped their feet in time to its beat.
A group of men four rows ahead of Barnaby were already standing, shirtless, with flags painted on their chests, and the fights hadn’t even started yet.
He sat very still in his seat, grossly overdressed, and held his accreditation lanyard in both hands. His internet rabbit hole deep-dive had been a mistake.
He’d done it the previous evening, after Lex had left the common room, because the alternative was lying in his narrow Village bed thinking about Lex’s hand on his hair.
So he’d opened his laptop and typed Lex Murphy boxing into the search bar, and what came back rearranged something fundamental in his understanding of the man he’d been sharing a sofa with.
Lex Murphy was not, as Barnaby had lazily assumed, a moderately successful athlete who’d been tapped on the shoulder for the Olympics because other more commercially successful British boxers were busy doing whatever boxers did on their downtime.
He was one of the highest-paid heavyweight fighters in the world.
His professional record was twelve wins, no losses, nine by knockout.
He headlined cards in Las Vegas. His last fight purse, reported by a tabloid that Barnaby would normally never read, was somewhere north of fifteen million pounds.
He had endorsement deals with Nike, and with a watch brand Barnaby recognised from airport advertising.
Barnaby had sat with this information for a long time.
Fifteen million pounds for one fight. He tried to reconcile that figure with the man who had rubbed the top of Barnaby’s head last night with a tenderness that had no business existing inside those punch roughened hands, and then walked out of the room as though he hadn’t just dismantled every defence Barnaby had spent a week constructing.
Barnaby’s frame of reference for wealth was ‘inherited’, and that came with a very specific set of behaviours: restraint, discretion, and the quiet assumption that money would always just kind of be there.
You might not be very liquid, but you could sit in your draughty old manor home surrounded by masterworks of art, priceless furniture, thousands of acres of countryside, and have a few tiaras in the family vault. The Fitznorman-Bicesters had six.
Lex wore his success like the Louis Vuitton luggage he’d hauled through Narita: visibly, and unapologetically.
He didn’t modulate himself for the room or perform humility.
He was exactly as loud and exactly as present as he wanted to be, and he had the bank balance to back up every square inch of space he occupied.
It was, Barnaby was forced to admit, impressive. Deeply, uncomfortably impressive.
The arena lights shifted. The announcer’s voice cut through the noise in Japanese, then English, introducing the quarter-final of the men’s super-heavyweight division.
Lex’s opponent entered first. He was Kazakh, tall and rangy with a long reach, and the Kazakh contingent in the upper tier erupted as he climbed through the ropes.
He bounced on his toes, rolling his shoulders, his face set in the flat, sealed-off focus that preceded any serious competition.
Barnaby knew that face. He wore it himself in the start box before the countdown began.
Then there was Lex.
He came down the aisle with his hood up and his hands wrapped, with his corner team flanking him.
The British section of the crowd surged to their feet, and the noise shifted register, becoming sharper and more fervent.
Lex moved through it without acknowledgement.
His eyes were fixed on the ring. His jaw was set.
Barnaby’s breath caught when Lex climbed through the ropes and shed his robe.
Under the overhead lights, every line of him was amplified.
The broad shelf of his shoulders. The thick slabs of his pectorals, tapering to an economical waist. His arms, wrapped to the wrist, the tape pulling taut over the tendons of his forearms when he flexed his hands.
Barnaby had spent a week watching Lex clown around the Village, and none of it had prepared him for Lex in that ring. All of it had been built toward this single, precise use.
He was still staring when the bell rang.
Lex stayed in the centre of the ring and let the Kazakh come to him.
His guard was high, his feet planted, and he moved with a patience that bordered on insolence.
He was waiting. Barnaby could see it in the stillness of his hips, the way his weight sat just behind his front foot.
He was inviting the attack, daring it, and when the Kazakh threw a right hand that Barnaby saw coming from three postcodes away, Lex slipped it.
His head moved two inches to the left and the punch sailed past his jaw.
Lex came back with a short and sharp jab that connected with the Kazakh’s ribs and made the man’s body fold inward.
The crowd roared. Barnaby’s fingers tightened on his lanyard.
Lex did it again. And again. He goaded the Kazakh with his positioning, and with the saucy angle of his chin. Every time the Kazakh committed, Lex was already somewhere else, and his counter came back clean and precise.
He hadn’t expected to find boxing beautiful.
He’d braced himself for the noise and brutality of it.
What he got was art dressed up as violence; the economy of Lex’s movement, the way each punch began somewhere deep in his body and arrived at its target with no seeming intervening thought.
Barnaby was leaning forward in his seat, his weight shifting with Lex’s, his shoulders turning a fraction each time Lex threw a punch.
By the end of the round, the Kazakh had stopped coming forward. He was circling, resetting, giving ground he hadn’t intended to give. Lex let him have it. He stood in the centre of the ring with his gloves up and watched the man retreat.
The bell sounded. Barnaby exhaled as he watched Lex drop down onto his stool.
His corner swarmed him. They plied him with water and a towel, as his coach spoke rapidly into his ear.
Lex spat into a bucket and tipped his head back while a hand pressed an enswell to the skin beneath his left eye.
His chest was heaving. Sweat ran in sheets down his neck and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone.
He looked up, and his gaze swept the stands. It tracked across the British section, past the flags, clearly scanning the crowd. As ridiculous as it may be, having known the man for only a week, Barnaby knew that Lex was looking for him.
When he found him, Lex’s roaming gaze stopped. Across the width of that arena, through the heat and the noise and the thousands of people between them, Lex looked directly at him, and Barnaby smiled.
He didn’t plan it. He didn’t run it through the series of filters that normally governed what his face was permitted to do in public. He simply looked at the man sitting in the corner of that ring, bloodied and breathing hard, searching the crowd for him specifically, and he smiled.
Lex’s mouth guard was in. His face was flushed and beginning to swell beneath the left eye. He gave Barnaby a single nod, fast and tight, and then his corner was pulling him back, talking strategy, and the moment closed.
The bell rang for the second round.
Lex came off the stool like a different fighter.
His patience was gone. He pressed forward, cutting the ring, driving the Kazakh back toward the ropes at a pace that he’d held back in the first round.
His combinations came faster, sharper, the punches linking together in sequences that Barnaby couldn’t track individually.
The crowd was on its feet. The noise was deafening.
Every punch carried an extra degree of flourish, every slip held an additional half-second of hang time where he let the missed blow whistle past his jaw just a fraction closer than necessary.
He was performing. At one point, after a slip so outrageously close that the Kazakh’s glove brushed his jaw on the way past, Lex’s eyes flicked to the stands.
It was fast: a fraction of a second, gone before his guard reset, but Barnaby knew Lex was making sure that he had seen it.
The fucking show-off.
The Kazakh landed a hard right to Lex’s body.
Barnaby flinched. He actually flinched, his shoulders pulling inward, his hands gripping the edge of his seat.
Lex absorbed the impact, and came back with a left hook that snapped the Kazakh’s head sideways and sent his gum shield spinning in a white arc across the canvas.
The referee stepped in. The Kazakh staggered, found the ropes, and held on. The count began, and somewhere during it the sound in the arena reached a fever pitch that Barnaby felt in his chest.
The Kazakh beat the count. The round continued, but the ending was already written.
Lex stalked him for another forty seconds, his movements controlled and unhurried.
When the final combination came, it was three punches thrown so close together they looked like a single movement.
The Kazakh dropped to one knee. The referee stepped between them, arms wide, and the arena detonated.
Lex threw his head back and roared, letting out a primal sound, and Barnaby was on his feet before he really understood what had happened.
His hands were raised over his head. His body had bypassed his brain entirely and decided that the appropriate response to this moment was to leap to his feet in a packed arena full of strangers.
Around him, the British contingent was screaming.
Somewhere to his left, a woman he had never met seized him in a full embrace, sobbing into his shoulder.
Barnaby patted her back. “There we are,” he said. “Well done us.”
In the ring, Lex turned. His face was swelling properly now, the skin beneath his left eye darkening.
His lip was split in the corner. The referee held his arm aloft, and Lex’s corner erupted, climbing through the ropes to reach him.
But Lex was looking past all of them, straight into the stands, and when his eyes found Barnaby, standing, hands raised, being openly wept on by a stranger, he grinned.
It was big and oafish, and distorted by the gum shield still wedged between his teeth.
It was the least attractive expression that a human face had ever directed Barnaby’s way, and yet he threw his own grin right back at Lex.
He couldn’t help it. His face split wide open in a grin that matched Lex’s, stupid and unguarded and entirely unlike any expression he’d ever allowed his features to display in public.
He held it until he noticed the group sitting three rows ahead of him.
Two of Lex’s friends were looking directly at him.
One nudged the other, who quickly flashed Barnaby a look.
Their heads moved close, and one of them laughed, before darting another glance his way.
Barnaby sat down.
He pulled the cuffs of his sleeves over his wrists and straightened them, one then the other, smoothing the fabric with precise little motions. He crossed one ankle over the other, the British spectator offering measured support to a countryman’s athletic success.