And he suddenly realised he was staring at Tariq in that awful noticing-someone-was-very-attractive-and-wishing-you-weremore-attractive way.
“What about, um, me?” he asked in an effort to distract them both. Which only made it worse because now Tariq was staring right back.
“Well, my options are plaster, Hilton, judgement, or France. And I think I’m leaning towards judgement.”
“Do I look particularly like I go around giving out apples?”
“It is a baking show. We’ll get to fruit eventually. But I more sort of meant you have a”— Tariq framed him in a finger square— “classical vibe.”
“Doesn’t that just mean ‘tiny penis’?”
Tariq’s eyes widened. “Um ...I ...How did you get there? Because I really didn’t mean to suggest anything about your penis at all. I’m sure your penis is, um, fine. Lovely even. But none of my business.”
“No, no ...” Paris waved his hands frantically. “I don’t want you to think about my penis. I didn’t mean to insert my penis into the conversation at all.”
“Look. I hope this won’t make me sound like a prude, but can we maybe have about ten percent less penis in this conversation?”
“I’m sorry.” Putting his rocket leaves aside, Paris curled up in a ball on the ground and covered his head with his hands. “It’s just I’m a classicist and, actually, in that era large penises were considered vulgar because they were associated with excess and the Greeks valued moderation. Plus there’s the idealisation of the youthful form to consider and some complex beliefs about fertility involving sperm losing heat if it has to travel too far along the ...um ...shaft.”
“You do know you’re making this worse?”
“I’m not making it worse. The ancient Greeks are making it worse.” Paris strongly suspected he should stop talking or change the subject, but his mouth and his inner ancient history nerd had other plans. “If you look at any art or sculpture from the era, the young men are always very athletic and always have very, very small ...phalli.”
“I just meant you looked handsome,” yelled Tariq over Paris’s penile babbling. “And sort of clean-cut. I didn’t think this was going to go the way it has apparently gone.”
“Neither did I. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be allowed.”
They were still frozen in a tableau of phallically induced embarrassment when a soft voice said “Tamir?” and Paris uncoiled to see universe-love-putting woman— who he thought might be called Gretchen— standing over them.
“It’s Tariq,” replied Tariq.
She nodded and smiled. “Mhm. I noticed you had a bit of an accident earlier, and I’m actually a qualified Reiki practitioner. So I wondered if you wanted me to do anything for you.” Her hands waved intrusively close to his face. “I can see your energy is somewhat disrupted.”
Tariq leaned backwards like he was entering a seated limbo competition. “That’s really kind of you, but I think my energy’ll be okay.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble.” Her hands pursued him as he pulled away, creating a kind of feedback loop that Paris suspected was going to lead to someone falling over very soon. “And you won’t feel anything. It’s not invasive like western”— she withdrew her hands briefly to make air quotes— “‘medicine.’”
Tariq looked the opposite of reassured. “I’m fine with aspirin, thanks.”
“You know that was invented by the Nazis.”
“Um,” said Paris. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“Yeah.” Tariq tried to nod without getting his face too close to Gretchen’s healing energy. “I think you’re getting it mixed up with Fanta.”
“You shouldn’t drink that,” she told them earnestly. “It’s full of chemicals.”
Tariq, who was practically supine now, opened his mouth, then closed it again. And then mercifully they were called back to the ballroom, so Paris could learn how terrible his cookies had been.
Judging was awful. They were lined up on their stools like they’d all been picked last for sports at school while Marianne Wolvercote and Wilfred Honey prowled— at least Marianne prowled, Wilfred more sort of ambled— up and down the table of cookies, pausing occasionally to scrutinise some unfathomable element of somebody’s bake.
“These,” declared Wilfred Honey as they approached Tariq’s tray of rather pale cookies, “are underbaked.”
Marianne Wolvercote nodded. “Yes, they don’t need long in the oven, but these are about two minutes short of long enough.”
They’d been firmly instructed not to react to the judges’ critiques for the blind bake, and Tariq did a far better job of that than Paris, because Paris knew the underbaking was kind of his fault. Even with the dough taking a while to cool, the first aiders hadn’t let Tariq back into the ballroom until it was slightly too late to finish his cookies properly. Tanya, at least, had not suffered too horribly from her part in the Great Refrigerator Catastrophe of season seven, with Wilfred Honey noting her cookies were “exactly the right level of chewy and a lovely golden colour.”
The rest began to blur, some too dry, some too moist, this a little too brown, that inexplicably two cookies short. And then it was Paris’s turn.
Until right then, he hadn’t quite been prepared for the enormity of having his baking judged by two professional baking people on an internationally syndicated television show.
It was, it turned out, a truly enormous level of enormity.
For a moment, he wondered why he’d signed himself up for such an obviously and objectively terrible experience. Then he remembered that he hadn’t. That Morag had signed him up for it and then inertia and Paris’s fear of saying no had done the rest. He’d have been angry with her, but the dread and anticipation curdling in his stomach like a truly ruined custard were pushing all other possible feelings out of the way.
“Now, these look promising,” said Marianne Wolvercote grudgingly, and Paris silently braced himself for the hammer-blow of criticism that was going to follow. “The colour’s good, the chocolate chips are evenly distributed and have neither overnor undermelted.”
“But of course,” Wilfred Honey added, “what really matters is how they taste.”
This was it. They were going to taste awful. They were going to taste titanically, cataclysmically, biblically awful. Paris was going to have used salt instead of sugar, or rabbit droppings instead of chocolate chips, and Marianne was going to try one and then say don’t eat that, Wilfred, which was the worst thing that she could possibly say.
“Now, that”— Wilfred Honey chewed meditatively— “is a proper biccy.”
Marianne offered the camera one of her rare smiles. “Yes, whoever baked this has done very well. The secret is to remember they carry on cooking for a while after you remove them from the oven, so when you first take them out, they need be a little paler than you might expect. These have a perfect texture and the flavour is spot-on.”
Oh God, he should never have let Morag sig— wait. What?
“I ... I ...won?” said Paris to Colin Thrimp’s camera operator a few minutes later. “I was so sure I’d messed that up. When they said it was me, I thought they’d made a mistake. But, um, obviously I’m really ... happy and grateful and ... a bit scared. Because there’s still the baketacular and now they’ll be expecting me to do well and I probably won’t.”