Chapter Twenty-Six
Florence had invented a game.
The rules, as far as Barnaby could determine, were as follows: he threw the squeaky hedgehog; Florence retrieved it at full gallop, claws scrabbling on the parquet.
She deposited it into his dangling hand with the reverence of a priest handling a communion wafer; and then she stood, tail thrashing, eyes enormous, vibrating with the absolute conviction that this — this exact throw — would be the one that finally satisfied her.
It never was. Barnaby threw the hedgehog again.
He was stretched the full length of the sofa with one arm hanging over the side, his stockinged feet propped on the armrest and a cushion wedged behind his neck at an angle that would have made his physiotherapist wince.
The television was on. A couple on screen were arguing about whether a holiday in Tenerife counted as a romantic gesture or a passive-aggressive commentary on their relationship.
Barnaby had been watching for forty minutes and could not have identified either of their names under oath.
Florence deposited the hedgehog into his hand.
It was warm and damp and had been squeaked so many times the mechanism had developed a wheeze, like a set of bagpipes with a slow puncture.
Barnaby threw it without looking. Florence launched herself across the sitting room, her ears streaming behind her, and collided with the magazine rack.
His mobile was on the coffee table. He’d checked it an hour ago.
There was a photo from Lex of a bruise on his left forearm, no context, followed three minutes later by morozov’s got nothing.
that’s from the heavy bag and then, eleven minutes after that, miss you tho x.
Barnaby had replied with a single aubergine emoji, which was their unspoken code for I miss you too, even though I refuse to be sentimental about it.
Lex had been at Malik’s since six that morning.
The Morozov fight was five weeks out, and the training camp had swallowed him whole.
They’d agreed that Barnaby would stay at Chester Square during the camp.
Lex needed to sleep nine hours, eat four thousand calories a day, and train with an intensity that left no room for a man who wanted to talk about Meridian’s canter transitions over dinner.
Barnaby needed to not be the reason a world-class heavyweight lost his focus five weeks before fighting a Russian.
It was the sensible arrangement, but Barnaby still hated it.
Florence returned with the hedgehog. Barnaby threw it towards the fireplace. The television couple had reconciled and were now shopping for a villa in Málaga, which struck Barnaby as premature, given that they’d been screaming at each other about suncream allocation four minutes ago.
The door to the sitting room opened.
Perry stood in the doorway. He was in joggers and a hoodie, his hair unbrushed, his mobile gripped in his right hand with the screen facing inward against his thigh. His face was wrong. The colour was high in his cheeks.
Barnaby swung his feet off the armrest and sat up. “What’s the matter, Per?”
Perry walked to the television and turned it off. The Málaga villa vanished mid-tour. He turned to face Barnaby, and his jaw worked once before he spoke.
“I need to tell you something, and you have to promise me that you won’t lose your head until I’ve finished explaining everything.”
Florence trotted over with the hedgehog. She pushed it into Perry’s shin, but he didn’t even look down at her.
Barnaby’s stomach tightened, because he’d never seen his younger brother like this.
Perry had never, in his experience, ignored an invitation to play from Florence.
Whatever was happening behind Perry’s eyes was controlled, which meant it was bad enough that even Perry knew that this wasn’t the time for him to flail.
“Sit down, Perry.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Then stand. But tell me what’s going on.”
Perry’s thumb moved against the edge of his mobile.
“There’s a spreadsheet. From the Tokyo Olympics.
A…a game, basically, that some of the male athletes were running.
A points system for…” He stopped. His throat moved.
“For sleeping with people. A conquest thing. A league table, almost, if you know what those are. They had a WhatsApp group and a shared Google Doc, and they ranked everyone. It’s vile, all right? It’s properly vile.”
Barnaby went still.
“A swimmer’s ex-girlfriend has leaked it. Screenshots of the Doc, the WhatsApp messages, names, scores, the lot. She found it on his laptop and she’s put it everywhere. It went up on Twitter three hours ago and it’s already on the Mail Online and the BBC are running it on the ten o’clock.”
Florence had given up on Perry and was circling back to the sofa. She dropped the hedgehog onto the rug and sat beside it, her tail still.
“Barns.” Perry’s voice cracked on the name. He was looking at Barnaby his eyes bright and wet, his lower lip caught between his teeth. “Lex was in on it.”
The room contracted. The walls didn’t move. The lamplight didn’t change. But the space between Barnaby and everything around him shrank to a point, a single fixed coordinate in his chest, dense and cold.
“And you were mentioned.”
Barnaby held out his hand. “Give me your mobile.”
Perry didn’t move. His grip on the device tightened, his thumb pressing white against the case. “Barns, I don’t think you should—”
“Perry.”
His brother handed it over. The screen was already open to the screenshots. Someone had compiled them into a thread, neat, chronological, damning. The first image was a photograph of Barnaby.
He recognised it before his brain had finished processing what it meant.
His own face, slack in sleep, his lashes dark against his cheeks.
Lex’s Team GB jacket pulled up to his chin, the red and blue piping bright against the white pillow.
The Olympic Village bedsheets, institutional and thin, bunched beneath his shoulder.
Beneath the photograph, a message from a number saved as Lex M:
god tier: bagged. 100 points.
Barnaby’s thumb scrolled down.
The spreadsheet was colour-coded. Columns for name, sport, nationality, and a scoring system that assigned numerical value to each conquest based on difficulty metrics.
Brazilian beach volleyball: 15 points. Finnish swimmer: 20.
A Dutch sprinter who’d been crossed out and annotated with doesn’t count, she was already going home with someone else.
The cells were populated with shorthand and in-jokes that Barnaby could follow without context because the context was athletic men being crude about the people they’d slept with, and that language was universal.
His own entry was at the top of a separate tab labelled GOD TIER.
Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester. Eventing. UK. Male (ambiguous). Best friends with the actual King of England. Lex is obsessed. 100 points.
The leaked WhatsApp messages ran alongside the spreadsheet in a parallel thread. Barnaby read them in the order they’d been screenshotted, each one timestamped and attributed.
Darius: mate have you actually pulled the horse bloke yet or are you still following him around like a golden retriever
Mick: he’s buying him snacks. every night. from the 7-eleven. he’s COURTING him
Lex M: fuck off both of you
Darius: lex murphy. two time olympic gold medallist. brought low by a posh boy in white trousers
Mick: those trousers tho
Lex M: i’m going to win this. watch me
Darius: that’s not winning mate that’s catching feelings
There were more. Barnaby scrolled through them with a thumb that had gone numb.
The messages spanned the full two weeks of the Games.
Early entries showed Lex’s other targets — a Canadian diver, an Australian rower, a French judoka whose name appeared three times before being replaced by Barnaby’s — dropping off one by one as the late-night trips to the common room became nightly, became a ritual.
From then on, his was the only name Lex mentioned in the chat.
Mick: so are you still doing the tally or have you retired to become barnaby’s personal snack butler
Lex M: yes.
Darius: you absolute simp
And then, after a gap of three days that Barnaby could date precisely because it was the night of Lex’s gold medal win, there was the photograph of his sleeping face, Lex’s jacket draped over him, and the message.
Barnaby closed his eyes. The screen went dark against the inside of his eyelids and the afterimage stayed, bright and throbbing, his own sleeping face in a rectangle of light.
He had been a line item. A target with a point value and a difficulty rating, filed under Male (ambiguous) in a spreadsheet that ranked human beings by how hard they were to fuck.
Every late-night 7-Eleven run, every squid ink crisp and sakura sweet, every hour on the common room sofa while Lex catalogued his tells and reported back to a group chat, all of it had been gameplay.
Strategy. The accumulation of points towards a leaderboard that Lex’s friends had maintained with the attention to detail of a Fantasy Premier League.
His chest hurt, and not in the abstract way people described heartache when they wanted to be poetic about it.
His sternum ached as though something behind it had been struck, a deep, physical percussion that radiated outwards through his ribs and settled in his throat.
His breathing had gone shallow without his permission, the kind of breathing his body defaulted to in the moment before a cross-country fence when the distance was wrong and the horse was already committed.
Perry’s mobile shook in his hand. He looked down at it and realised there’d been no incoming message notification. He was really just shaking that badly.
He shoved the device back at his brother. Perry caught it against his chest, both hands coming up around it, and Barnaby saw a protective fury on his younger brother’s face, so naked that it frightened him.
Perry crossed the room in three strides and wrapped his arms around Barnaby’s shoulders.
The hug was tight and fierce, entirely graceless, Perry’s chin digging into the top of Barnaby’s head because his brother had two inches on him now.
Barnaby’s arms stayed at his sides. His hands were still shaking.
He let himself lean in. Just enough to feel the solid warmth of Perry’s chest against his forehead and the vice of his arms holding him upright. Perry smelled of the body spray he’d been wearing since he was sixteen.
“Perry.” His voice was steady. “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to talk to him.”
Perry’s hands stayed on his shoulders. His grip tightened once, hard enough that Barnaby felt the press of each individual finger through his shirt.
“Okay,” Perry said. “I’ll…run interference.”
Barnaby nodded. He stepped out of his brother’s grip, turned, and walked out of the sitting room. His footsteps were even on the stairs. His hand found the banister and held it. Florence’s claws clicked on the wood behind him, keeping pace, her nose bumping the back of his calf on every other step.
His bedroom was cool and dim. He didn’t turn on the overhead light. The bedside lamp was still on from that morning, casting its low amber circle across the pillow and the pale blue wallpaper. He took his mobile from his pocket and held down the power button.
He set it on the bedside table, face down, and got into bed with his clothes on.
Then he pulled the duvet up to his chin and curled onto his side, his knees drawn towards his chest, his hands pressed flat between his thighs.
Florence jumped onto the bed. She turned three circles in the space behind his knees, her body warm and heavy against his calves, and settled with a long exhale.