“Well, he likes cycling, so he liked that it was about a cycle path. Had to explain the play on words to him, mind, and he agreed with me that it didn’t work terribly well joke-wise but that no harm had been done and we shouldn’t hold it against you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks?”

“Anyway.” Alex clapped his hands and beamed. “Here’s my joke.” He cleared his throat. “What does a Roman pirate say?”

“I don’t know, Alex.” I thought it only fair that I go through the full joke-recipient routine. “What does a Roman pirate say?”

“Summus.”

Everybody laughed except me. Because I went to a state school. The annoying thing was I could probably work out why it was supposed to be funny from context. I mean it was a pirate joke. There’s only two endings to a pirate joke, and one of them is just an attempt to subvert the original ending. Even more annoying was that I was about sixty percent sure that at least one other person in the bus was in the same boat I was but had cruelly abandoned me to be the only one sitting here not laughing like some kind of uneducated, humourless joke pleb. “Rhys,” I asked, “why is that joke funny?”

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.”