Chapter Twenty-One #2
Darius grinned. Lex watched Barnaby register the grin and recalibrate in real time, his formal register dropping a notch as he clocked that Darius was testing him, not mocking him. The shift was tiny, a fraction of looseness in his shoulders, the beginning of a dry smile.
Mick appeared next, towelling sweat from the back of his neck and holding a protein shaker the colour of radioactive waste. He looked Barnaby up and down. “You’re taller than I expected.”
“I’m five-eleven.”
“Lex said you were small.”
“Lex says a great many things that don’t survive contact with reality.”
Mick snorted into his shaker. Barnaby caught Lex’s eye, and the corner of his mouth pulled in the way that meant he was pleased with himself and wanted Lex to know it.
They moved to the pads. Lex held them up, shoulder-height, and called the shots.
Jab. Jab-cross. Jab-cross-hook. Barnaby hit them with increasing confidence, his gloves snapping against the leather, his feet shuffling forward and back in the stance Lex had drilled into him.
His rhythm was still uneven, but the effort was there, and by the third round his breathing was ragged and his ears were pink, which was Lex’s gauge for Barnaby’s level of exertion.
Coach Malik moved in closer. He’d been circling the gym floor for the past ten minutes, doing his rounds. Lex had seen him clock Barnaby within thirty seconds of their arrival. Now he was standing six feet behind Barnaby with his arms folded and his eyes narrowed.
Barnaby threw a cross. His back foot dragged.
“Get your fucking knees up, boy.” Malik’s voice cut across the gym floor like a ref’s whistle.
“You’re flat-footed. Keep your knees bent.
Stay on the balls. Every time that back foot goes flat, you lose your rotation, and if you lose your rotation you’re throwing arm punches, and arm punches don’t hurt anyone. Again.”
Barnaby reset. His knees bent. His weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet. He threw the cross again, and this time his hips turned, his foot pivoted, and the pad cracked properly under Lex’s hand.
“Better,” Malik barked. “Again. Faster. Jab-cross-hook. Don’t drop your guard between shots, keep your hands up, and if I see that elbow flare one more time I’m going to duct-tape it to your fucking ribs.”
Barnaby threw the combination. His guard stayed up. His elbow stayed tucked. The three shots connected in sequence, pop-pop-pop, and the rhythm was right for the first time. Malik grunted, which was his version of a standing ovation.
“Again. Ten more. Quick.”
Barnaby did ten more. He did them without protest, without comment, without even a trace of the glacial politeness that Lex had seen him deploy on anyone who presumed to tell him what to do. He just listened and hit and adjusted, his breath coming hard through his nose.
Malik turned to Lex. His eyebrows were halfway up his forehead, his mouth slightly open. He jerked his chin toward Barnaby.
“Who is he?” he asked quietly.
“That’s my friend Barnaby. From the Olympics. He’s a marquess, and a friend of King James’.”
Malik’s mouth went through a series of rapid adjustments. His eyes darted to Barnaby, who was shaking out his hands between his knees and breathing hard, then back to Lex.
“A marquess.”
“Yeah.”
“I just told a marquess to get his fucking knees up.”
“You did.”
“Is that — should I—”
“You’re all right.” Lex put his hand on Malik’s shoulder. “He’s sound.”
? ? ?
They left the gym at half six, Barnaby’s hair dark with sweat and his borrowed T-shirt clinging to his chest. Lex had unwrapped his hands in the locker room, checking the knuckles for damage, and found nothing worse than redness across the first two metacarpals.
Good form, for a beginner. He’d told Barnaby as much, and Barnaby had received the compliment with a curt nod that meant he was thrilled.
The evening air hit them outside, cool and diesel-tinged, and Barnaby breathed it in like a man surfacing from a dive.
Lex watched him take in the high street, the fried chicken place, the Coral, the bus shelter with its smashed panel, and waited for the flinch.
It didn’t come. Barnaby just stood there in Lex’s too-big shorts with his knuckles reddened, looking like he’d been dropped into Barking from a great height and had decided to make the best of where he’d landed.
“I’m starving,” Lex said. “Come on.”
The shop was called Best Kebab, which Lex appreciated for its confidence. It was three doors down from the gym, wedged between a betting shop and a nail salon, and the fluorescent light inside was the shade of yellow that made everyone look like they were recovering from jaundice.
Lex ordered two lamb doners, fully loaded, chips in the wrap.
“Chips inside?” Barnaby looked at the man behind the counter as though he’d just witnessed him commit a crime.
“It’s how you have it, Barns. Chips inside. Garlic sauce, chilli sauce, the lot. You don’t eat the chips separately. That’s psychopath behaviour.”
“Eating chips separately is psychopath behaviour?”
“In a kebab context, yes.”
Barnaby received his doner with both hands. The wrap was the size of a small child’s forearm and already darkening at the base where the sauces had begun their inevitable migration south.
They stood at the narrow counter that ran along the window. Outside, two kids on bikes were doing wheelies under the streetlight. A bus went past, half-empty, its interior lit blue. Barnaby lifted the doner to his mouth and took his first bite.
His technique was catastrophic. He bit from the top, which compressed the structural integrity of the entire wrap, and the bottom immediately gave way.
A chip slid free. Then a ribbon of shaved lamb.
Then a cascade of lettuce, tomato, and garlic sauce that landed on his wrist and ran down to his elbow in a slow, white streak.
“Oh, for—” Barnaby tried to repack the breach with one hand, which only widened the split on the opposite side. A second wave of filling dropped onto the counter.
“You can’t approach it from the top, Barns. You go in from the side. Rotate and bite.”
“It’s falling apart.”
“Yeah, they do that. You’ve got to really commit. Get your mouth around it before you lose any more.”
Barnaby leaned forward and took a larger bite. Garlic sauce hit his chin. A chip lodged at the corner of his mouth. He chewed with his eyes closed, and Lex watched a reluctant, furious pleasure shift into his expression.
“That’s good,” Barnaby said around his full mouth.
“Course it’s good. Best Kebab, Barns. The name’s a promise.”
Barnaby took another bite, wider this time, his jaw stretching around the girth of the wrap, and Lex grinned so hard his face ached.
“That’s right. Get it in.” He leaned his elbows on the counter. “I’ve seen you get your mouth around bigger.”
Barnaby choked. His hand flew up to cover his mouth, and his shoulders shook once before he locked them down. Garlic sauce dripped between his fingers. His ears went pink, then red, and when he looked at Lex his grey eyes were bright and furious, brimming with a laugh he was refusing to release.
Lex reached across and wiped a streak of garlic sauce from the corner of Barnaby’s mouth with his thumb.
He did it slowly, the pad of his thumb dragging across Barnaby’s lower lip, and Barnaby went still under the touch.
The fluorescent light turned his pale hair sallow.
He looked nothing like a marquess, and everything like a man Lex wanted to keep feeding for the rest of his life.
Lex licked the sauce off his thumb. “Eat your kebab, Barns,” he commanded, before turning his attention back to his own.