Chapter Seven #2
Diwa watched the omega eat. Colin worked his way around the plate in a clockwise rotation, methodical, and every few mouthfuls he glanced over at Diwa’s bowl with that same slight curl at the corner of his mouth.
“Go on, then,” Colin said eventually, his fork loaded with a piece of black pudding. “Open up.”
“Open what?”
“Your mouth. You’ve been eyeing my plate for the last ten minutes.”
“I have not been eyeing your plate.”
“You have, mate. Open up.”
Diwa opened his mouth, mostly out of curiosity about whether Colin Huxley was actually going to feed him a piece of black pudding. Colin extended the fork the rest of the way, and Diwa took the offering. The chewy, mineral richness of the black pudding filled his mouth, and he nodded thoughtfully.
“That’s good,” he said. “What’s in it?”
Colin’s eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean what’s in it? It’s black pudding.”
“Yeah, but what’s it made of? It’s got that iron-rich thing going on, like organ meat, but the texture’s more—”
“It’s blood,” Colin said flatly. He was watching Diwa’s face, waiting for the reaction. “Pig’s blood and oats and a bit of fat. That’s what black pudding is.”
Diwa nodded again, processing. “Yeah, no, that tracks. It’s basically dinuguan, then.”
“What’s dinuguan?” Colin struggled to copy Diwa’s pronunciation.
“Filipino dish. Pork blood stew, with vinegar and chillies and a shit load of garlic. You eat it with these little steamed rice cakes called puto. The puto are sweet, and the dinuguan is savoury and tangy and basically tastes like iron with a kick. We had it for breakfast a lot when I was a kid. My grandmother made it on Sundays.” He took another bite of his sashimi.
“I think the black pudding’s a bit milder, actually. The oats mellow it out.”
Colin set his fork down very carefully on the edge of his plate, and let his shoulders drop.
“You were trying to gross me out,” Diwa realised, grinning. “Weren’t you? You were waiting for me to spit it into a napkin.”
“I had hopes.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint.”
“You ate blood for breakfast as a child.”
“With sweet rice cakes. It’s actually delicious, I’ll cook it for you sometime if you’d like. How are you with chillies?”
Colin’s eyes drifted with great purpose to a point on the wall about six inches to the left of Diwa’s head. “I take it mild.”
“Like, mild mild?”
Colin’s head bobbed in a jerky nod.
Diwa pressed his lips together and looked very seriously at the saltshaker. He was not going to laugh. He was not going to mock. He was a guest in this country, and he had been raised better than that. “I’m not going to mock you,” Diwa said, with great dignity.
“Yeah, you are.”
“I’m not. I’m taking the high road. I respect your limits and boundaries. I’m going to make a mental note to adjust the dinuguan recipe and we’ll move on.”
“Going to make it bland for me, are you?”
“I’m going to make it appropriate for the audience.”
Colin made a small noncommittal sound that wasn’t a no, and picked his fork back up. The conversation was working. They had found a rhythm, and Colin seemed to be enjoying it. He was already thinking ahead to the next conversational topic when something cold and wet hit the top of Diwa’s head.
The bowl came down before Diwa registered the woman behind him.
The smell hit first, basil cutting through the tomato, then the wet weight of the sauce sliding warm under his collar.
A strand of penne clung to his shoulder.
When he blinked, the sauce in his lashes ran into his eyes and stung the fuck out of them.
“—new form of labour exploitation, you absolute parasite, do you have any idea what those people are looking at—”
The voice came from a woman in her mid-thirties maybe, and was pitched at a register that had every head in the café turning towards her and Diwa.
Diwa wiped sauce out of his eye with the back of his wrist and tried to focus in on her.
She was standing over their table holding her empty pasta bowl in one hand.
Her other hand was pointing at him, and there was sauce on her sleeve.
“—blood on your hands! Have you ever bothered to think about the actual literal psychological damage companies like yours have caused? My cousin worked for one of these companies in Lagos and now she can’t sleep, she can’t sleep!
You fucking tech bro, piece of shit. I’m sure your billions make it easy to look away. ”
The FT piece. It had run three weeks ago, there had been a flurry of emails, Orthos Analytics’ PR team had worked in overdrive, and things had moved on the way they always did in the AI industry.
Sam or Elon could always be counted on to do something new and stupid within the week, and the cycle would simply roll forward to another one of the titans.
The world had moved on. Diwa hadn’t, because now he knew what was in the datasets. Apparently this woman hadn’t either.
Colin moved. He was out of the booth and between the woman and Diwa before Diwa had registered that he was even standing. He had one hand flat against her shoulder as he eased her back from the table.
“All right, love,” Colin said, “that’s enough.”
“Get your hands off me. He needs to understand, so I’m making a point!”
“You’ve made it. Now off you go.”
She tried to lean past him, and Colin shifted his weight until she ran out of forward momentum.
One of the baristas appeared from behind the bar, ashen-faced.
He got a hand on the woman’s other shoulder and started murmuring about the police and could she please come with him.
She went, still shouting over her shoulder, the empty pasta bowl dangling from her fingers.
Colin turned round. “You all right?” He came round to Diwa’s side of the booth and bent at the knees so they were level.
His hand came up and hovered an inch from Diwa’s cheek.
He didn’t touch him. He was looking at Diwa’s eye where the sauce had gone in, and his other hand was already passing him a stack of paper napkins from the dispenser. “Diwa. You all right?”
“Yeah.” Diwa’s voice came out seemingly from a great distance. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
He wasn’t fine. He needed to leave. Every single person in the café was looking at him, and he was going to throw up if he had to sit in this booth for another thirty seconds.
He fumbled his wallet out of his back pocket with sauce-slick fingers and pulled out everything in it. Then he dropped the lot on the table.
“Diwa, mate—”
“I need to go.”
He was already standing. Colin straightened with him, hand half-raised, and Diwa moved past him towards the door without waiting to see if he followed. He could hear Colin behind him, picking up his bag. Then the door was opening, the cold London air hitting Diwa’s face.