Qing stood by the door, not wanting to come all the way into the lounge. She looked around. I hoped she was looking for me, so I made a “great to see you” face and waved, a wavelet really, with movement only from the wrist.

At the time I thought she was ignoring me. More likely, though, she couldn’t see me through the fug of marijuana smoke that swirled between us, underlit by the green and red glow of two coloured lamps. They were the room’s only light.

She frowned and said, “Well, it’s been a good par-ry. Thank you for a grea evening. But I’m going home to bed.”

I wondered if I should get up and say goodbye to her, try to get her number, try to walk her home, try to get into her bed with her, and that sort of thing. But I’d only had the start of a conversation with her, because we were interrupted before we’d got far with it. I didn’t feel that I had enough of a basis for doing that. So I sat where I was.

Qing looked back at the door she’d come through, and then at the room again.

“But. If anyone wants to come to bed with me… Well, I think I’d like to be fucked. Or fuck someone. Anyone here. Anyone?”

I don’t know what you’d expect to happen, if a pretty woman makes that offer to an entire room, or to anyone who happened to be in it. From a sample of one – I’ve never seen something like that happen again – the answer is that nothing at all happens. People didn’t look at each other, or smile, or make “you go” gestures to a friend, or put their hands up.

No-one moved. Including me.

So Qing shrugged. “Oh well, then.” She opened the door. “Good night.”

And she left. Various people said good night in return, but most were still a bit non-plussed by her offer. They could have thought it was gauche, but instead they knew it had been brave enough to be cool. But their reaction hadn’t been cool, and that had also worried them. They were cool too, weren’t they? And yet they’d reacted like a grimace of maiden aunts.

I was still thinking. I didn’t care about being cool. No-one there knew me, and nothing they said or thought could be as important as Qing and her bed.

It was her skinny but cute pajamaed bum that decided me. That bum was about to wiggle out of the room, on its way to a lonely bed. Well, that would be just a waste. A stupid waste.

So I got up, finally, and walked over people’s legs and belongings, until I’d reached the door. The corridor was dark. “Qing?”

Back at the party I met a blind French philosopher. Let’s call him Louis, because his name is nothing like Louis. He’s famous enough to be in a magazine (which was why I recognised him), but they didn’t put him on the cover. Still, it was odd to run into him in a provincial university town.

We talked about an argument he was having with an American philosopher about free will. They disagreed over the way in which free will isn’t real. It had got quite heated.

But he was getting bored with his one fan, and he asked if there were any ‘ot girls in the room. So I went up to a girl with long red hair, and breasts the shape of beehives in a tanktop. I asked her name, and then led her over.

“Louis, Rachel, I think you two should meet. You’re both interested in cooking, and baseball. And surfing, and 90s rock. Look, I’ll just leave you to it.”

I left, as promised. My introduction had been unhelpful, but I was confident that Louis would be able to parlay his (I expected) complete ignorance of baseball into something charming and impressive. Rachel was probably pretty clever, too.

After that I talked with another woman, but she was keen on making her lack of interest in me absolutely clear, so I said, “oh, excuse me a moment”, as if I’d just seen someone, and took myself elsewhere.

What a waste

“Elsewhere” was the kitchen, where a girl in a tight olive dress wanted me to help open her champagne bottle. That was a promising start, but then she started talking about the Bauhaus school’s influence on women’s fashion, which she was studying. Stupidly, I failed to disguise my contempt for all things Bauhaus.

I thought we were having a conversation, in which disagreement helps keep it lively. But she hated being disagreed with, and the people who did that terrible thing. We parted, mutually unimpressed. But I could be as unimpressed as I liked: I’d still blown it as a sex-and-fun opportunity. Sex and fun is way more important than Bauhaus. 

I decided I should shut up and dance. But first, I sat on the arm of the couch, watching the party. 

The over-the-shirt grope. But Louis had moved on.

In the corner Louis had his hand inside Rachel’s tanktop. She was fending him off but laughing. The laughter seemed to be real. Anyway, it was Louis who had his back to the wall.

His approach seemed to be to say something clever and then grab the woman and paw her like a drunken gorilla, or maybe the young Gerard Depardieu. But it seemed to be working. Being blind means you get to do a lot of touching. And a French accent lets you get away with all sorts of things. 

Anyway, introducing them was likely to be my one sexual achievement for the night. I sat for a bit longer, mildly displeased with myself. 

And then the door that led to the corridor and the bedrooms opened and Qing, the girl in pyjamas, walked in.

But – because I was starting to wonder why I had a friend who showed no sign of liking me much – I played only Schoenberg’s Gurreleider and some Schnittke quartets on the drive. I’d occasionally glance at Mikey, and he seemed a little more unhappy every time. Ah, passive-aggressive me. Still, it kept me amused. And I like Schoenberg and Schnittke.  

Anyway, the party was fun. There was a skinny girl there, wearing those pajamas that girls from mainland China sometimes wear, until they take a look at what the local Chinese girls are wearing. I didn’t notice her at first, but a group of us had gone out for an expedition to the playground in the park across the road. Most of them, inevitably, were stoned. 

I wasn’t, so when we came to a sort of revolving cylinder thing for kids to run in, making the cylinder turn while they ran in place, I put my feet apart and braced my hands against the top (well, it was the top at that stage in its spin), and I managed to stay in place, revolving while the cylinder revolved. It was showing off, but I was curious to see if I could do it.

When I’d done one and a half revolutions, and I was upside down, supporting myself with my arms, a girl said, “Wow! Who is that?”

It was the Chinese girl, on her knees, crawling into the cylinder. From my place, upside down with my head close to floor level, I noted the front of her blouse falling up to expose her breasts, which – though still smallish – seemed to be bigger than a skinny girl should have.

So I tumbled down, and rolled until I was on my hands and knees facing her, my eyes level with her face rather than her nipples. I said, “Hi, I’m Jaime.”

She said, “Qing. My name’s Qing.”

“Ching? Oh, Qing. Nice to meet you.”

“Are you at uni here? I haven’t seen you before.”

“Nah.” I told her the town I lived in. “I just came for the party.”

“Ahh? Who do you know, here?”

“Well, not a soul, actually. I drove up with some guy who wanted a lift.”

“Oh? Then how -?”

But that was all she said. Some guy crash-tackled her from behind and dragged her out of the cylinder with his arms round her waist. So I figured that she had a boyfriend and that was him, and I went back to the house where the party was on.

Intro

I hope you don’t mind, but I’m taking a short break from the Raylene saga. I’ve got another story I’ve been meaning to tell for a while. Seems that it’s time.

Mouth to mouth

I once went to a party in a small town, held by a group of students from the local university, where I was made an odd sexual offer.

This town was in the high plains, so it was icy and snowy in winter, and clear and chill in the summer. It was a beautiful place, with forests, a river, and nearby mountains, but it was cold at the best of times.

The combination of small town and cold means that the students there don’t have a lot of entertainment options, and they spend a lot of time in bed to keep warm. So if one student suggests to another that they sleep together, that student has to be fairly repellent before they’ll be turned down.

The result is that by third year pretty much every student at that university has had sex with everyone in their faculty, at least the people that are even vaguely fuckable, and they’re starting to work on the more distant faculties.

So psych students sleep with agricultural students, anthropology students sleep with business studies students, and plant sciences students start sleeping with Ancient History and Language students. It’s Sodom, Gomorrah, and cats fucking dogs.

I came to the party – a trip of about 140 miles – because a friend had invited me. He, Mikey, wanted to spend the week-end fucking his  girlfriend before he dumped her. She was waiting for him to come and collect her, and she didn’t know about the new girl Mikey had found in my town.

I knew Mikey was a bit of a jerk, but I didn’t know any of that. Yet. Mikey had invited me because I had a car, so that if I went to this party I’d probably give him a lift there and back. That was his way of demanding a favor without having to acknowledge it, or me.

Still, I felt like a road trip, so I packed a spare shirt, a change of underpants and socks, and a toothbrush. And, after a pause while I thought about the odds, condoms.