“It’s not fine.” Paris wilted all over the lawn. “I hit you and then I thought I’d try to be funny about it. Who does that? I’m the school bully on a baking show.”
“Come on.” Slipping his arm through Paris’s, Tariq tugged him gently towards the buffet. “Let’s do lunch.”
“Oh, I’m not, I don’t think I can— ”
“How can you resist when we have these”— Tariq scrutinised the range of offerings— “beautiful coronation chicken wraps, some of which actually contain chicken, these lovely sandwiches, at least three of which haven’t disintegrated yet, and this ...thing, which I think is supposed to be a rocket salad but is actually just some rocket.”
Still not really wanting to eat anything, but definitely not wanting to seem ungrateful, Paris helped himself to a bowl of leaves that did, indeed, turn out to be nothing but rocket. And then he followed Tariq through the already-crowded tables to a grassy verge where they both sat down. It had taken them a while to get there because Tariq had stopped and said hi to pretty much everybody.
“We’ve been here two minutes,” said Paris. “How can you know so many people’s names already?”
Tariq smiled. “Oh, I’ve got a trick for it. What you do is, when someone introduces themselves, you visualise a famous person or something you’d definitely remember with the same name, and then you remember that.”
“Wait, there are tricks?” Paris had always suspected there were. That everybody else got some kind of be-good-in-social-situations manual that they were perversely refusing to share with him. “Nobody told me there were tricks. I just thought I sucked.”
“My mum’s a university lecturer. She says if you suck at something, it just means you haven’t learned to do it yet. Look”— Tariq pulled a knee up, resting an elegant hand on top of it— “I’ll give you a demo. So the guy in the dad cardy over there is called Rodney— and okay, he’s a bad example, because he’s called Rodney and the only Rodneys I can think of are someone who might be called Rodney Dangerfield and the younger brother on a sitcom my dad watches about— actually I don’t know what it’s about. But anyway, I remember Rodney because if you look at him and think if that guy had a name, what would it be, you immediately go Rodney.”
The man called Rodney was showing pictures of his kids to the thoroughly uninterested woman next to him. “He does look kind of Rodneyey,” admitted Paris.
“Rodneyey?” repeated Tariq, his eyes twinkling. “Are you sure that’s the right word?”
Paris thought about it. Probably too seriously. “Rodnesque? Rodnoid?”
“Rhodnodendron?”
“That sounds like a flower,” Paris pointed out.
“Well”— Tariq gave a little huff— “Rodnoid sounds like a thing you’d get called in the playground. And then you’d go crying to your mum and be all Billy Dawson called me a rodnoid again.”
“Who’s Billy Dawson?”
The smile was never far from Tariq’s mouth, and now it inched closer. “Don’t worry, honey. He’s a fictional bully.”
“But fictional bullies are the worst,” said Paris, realising too late that he’d sounded way more sincere than he’d intended to. He’d been aiming for light banter but had accidentally vomited up an off-putting hairball of personality quirks. “I mean, don’t you ever— like when somebody is mean in, I don’t know, a book or a film or on TV, and you can’t do anything about it because it’s not real, doesn’t that make you feel really ...” There was no good way to end that sentence. Or at least, no way that was both good and honest. Hitting a man in the face with a fridge was bad enough; hitting him in the face with a fridge and then telling him you were frequently made to feel helpless and nauseated by stock bully characters in children’s shows was probably a really bad call.
To his relief, Tariq agreed, or at least agreed with the lessmessed-up version of the sentence he’d obligingly filled in on Paris’s behalf. “Yeah, I get what you mean. Like you’ll really wish you could step up and do something, but you can’t because the thing you’re trying to step up and do something about only exists on a screen and the person you’re angry with is just an actor.” He smiled again. “But don’t worry, Billy Dawson gets his comeuppance in the end.”
“Oh.” Paris tried to recover his composure, although the spectre of the wholly invented Billy Dawson was still floating dimly at the back of his mind, calling him a rodnoid. “So ...who else did you do your trick on then?”
Tariq tilted his head as he considered the rest of the contestants. “Well, next to Rodney is Catherine Parr, who you can remember because she’s called Catherine Parr. And she definitely looks like she’d outlive Henry the Eighth.”
“She looks like she’d behead him to be honest. Oh my God.” Paris covered his mouth with his hands. “I can’t believe I said that.”
Tariq gave a theatrical gasp. “Wow. You’ve said a slightly catty thing about an unpleasant woman. You’re a monster.”
“Don’t.” Paris tried to fold himself inside himself like human origami. “I feel really bad.”
“I’m not going to tell her. That’d involve speaking to her.”
Still suffering the sting of his Henry VIII comment, Paris tried to summon some doubts to give her the benefit of. “She’s probably secretly nice. She’s probably just got resting crone face.”
“Nope. We had a five-minute conversation in which she told me it was inappropriate for a man to be wearing nail varnish on a family TV show and expressed surprise that my sister has a job.”
“You mean because ...” Paris realised there was no way to finish that sentence either.
Tariq laughed. “Yeah, I think so. Or she just thinks women shouldn’t have jobs in general, and I’m not sure which is worse.”
There was a crash from the buffet area as a thin, bespectacled man dropped his plate of sandwiches, backed up sharply, and knocked an entire tray of cutlery onto the floor.
“Now that,” Tariq went on, “is Bernard, who is nice but a bit hopeless. And you can remember his name because if you put a Saint on the front, you get a species of dog that is nice, but a bit hopeless.”
“Don’t they kind of rescue people when they’re stuck up mountains and things?”
“Yes, but look at their silly faces.” Tariq did an honestly not very effective impression of a St. Bernard. He was not, Paris felt, very well constructed for it, being slight and slim, with a narrow chin and strong cheekbones, and a noticeable lack of jowls or, for that matter, fur. He also had far better fashion sense, since he was wearing well-tailored trousers and a dark shirt with a delicately patterned, almost cowboy-style collar which made him look like the world’s most exquisite gunslinger.
Paris always envied men who knew how to dress. Since both his parents were in fashion, he was acutely and perpetually aware of how much better it was possible for him to look, which made actually trying to buy clothes a nightmare of second-guessing and self-recrimination. And so his wardrobe had, over the years, devolved into jeans, T-shirts, and oversized jumpers— one of which, despite the heat, he was currently wearing.