Still keeping his eyes firmly on the road, Rhys gave another one of those expressive shrugs that let me imagine his face with perfect clarity. “I don’t know, but everybody else was laughing and I thought it’d be nice to join in. Besides, summus is a funny word. Sounds a bit sexual.”
“It does not sound sexual,” I protested. “You can’t say, ‘Baby, I want to summus you. I want to summus you all night long.’”
Ana with one n twisted around to look at me. “You’d be surprised. I get all kinds of weird stuff in my DMs.”
“You know,” I told her, “I don’t think I would be surprised.”
Alex was beginning to look crestfallen. “You didn’t tell me what you thought of my joke.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. “I think I’m not the target audience.”
“Really?” Alex looked perplexed. “It’s very simple. You see summus is the first-person plural of the verb to be—”
“Which means it’s Latin for are,” I replied. “Yeah, I worked that much out for myself”
“Then why didn’t you laugh?”
Why hadn’t I? I suppose on a meta level I had got the joke.
Fuck, why did every conversation with Alex end with me feeling like I was the one with the problem? “I think…I think to laugh, you need to understand it sort of…sort of instinctively?”
“Ah.” Alex nodded. “Makes sense. Moral of that story is to pay more attention to your Latin master.”
“I didn’t have a Latin master.”
For a moment Alex said nothing, then he laughed more authentically than I’d ever heard him respond to any joke I’d ever told him. “Ah, because the chap was English, you mean. Good one.”
“No, I mean because I didn’t learn… Tell you what, I’ve got a joke for you too.”
Alex sat upright. “Good-oh. Let’s hear it.”
“What’s a pirate’s favourite cheese?”
“I don’t know,” replied Alex dutifully. “What is a pirate’s favourite cheese?”
“Yarrr lsberg.”
Aaaand there it was. Dead silence.
“Yaaaarrrrrrrr lsberg,” I repeated.
“Why do pirates like Jarlsberg?” asked Alex with near-biblical innocence.
I buried my head in my hands. “Alex, you have just told me a joke in which the implicit association between pirates and the syllable arr is the basis of the whole punch line.”
“Yes, but Jarlsberg doesn’t begin with arr, it begins with yar.”
“Yar is a valid substitute,” I insisted.
“He’s right,” agreed Rhys. “I often say yar when I’m doing a pirate.”
For a moment, Alex seemed to be processing, but then he nodded. “Ah, well in that case I consider the joke excellent, and you may attribute my lack of laughter to my failure to understand it instinctively.”
Ana with one n turned back around in her seat. “What type of cheese do you use to lure a bear out of a cave?” she asked.
Barbara Clench poked her head around the seat in front. “I don’t know,” she said, “what kind of cheese do you use to lure a bear out of a cave?”
“Come-on-bear,” replied Ana with one n, doing a surprisingly effective impression of somebody waving a piece of camembert enticingly in front of a large predator.
I laughed at that. I thought it deserved it. And so did everybody else. Well, everybody else except Alex.
“Do bears eat cheese, then?” he asked. “I would have thought they preferred honey. Or maybe…wildebeest?”
“Terribly sorry,” said Alex, as he led us down a plush-carpeted corridor lined with portraits of rich, dead wankers. “It’s just as Miffy and I need separate rooms—can’t see the bride before the wedding and all that—we’ve taken the two best suites already and obviously there’s a bunch of family up for the weekend so we’re going to have to stick you somewhere a bit substandard.”
Until I met Oliver, being stuck somewhere a bit substandard was very much how I’d lived my life. “Don’t worry about it. And thanks for, um, you know. The rescue and everything.”
Pushing open a door, Alex waved us through. “Oh, think nothing of it. Always happy to help out a chum. Besides, it gave me something to do. Fearfully excited about tomorrow and all that, but it does weigh on a chap.”
The substandard room turned out to be significantly better than sleeping in a bus and, for that matter, a fair sight better than sleeping in most houses I’d ever lived in. It was… Unlike Oliver, I didn’t know what era it was. Somethingian where the something was the name of a king and/or queen, but that didn’t exactly narrow it down.