The party

Fiction, about adults over 18. Almost nothing happens to her, which turns out to be the useful part. She went to find out whether she wanted an audience, and found out.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

What I had pictured, at thirty-eight, and I am aware of how this sounds, was candles.

What there was, on an industrial estate outside a city I do not live in, was a hired function room behind a print works, with a laminated sign on the door that said PRIVATE FUNCTION and nothing else. A man was having a cigarette by the bins in a dressing gown. He said all right, and I said all right, and that was the first thing that happened to me at a play party.

Sign-in was a folding table. There was a woman called Viv with a clipboard and a cash tin. She checked my ID against the name on her list, took eighteen pounds, and gave me a green wristband and a printed sheet.

Then she read the rules out. Not to me particularly, to the four of us who had arrived at the same time, and she read them the way you would read a fire briefing.

No phones out anywhere, at all, no exceptions. Ask before you touch anybody and ask before you touch the furniture.

If somebody says stop, that is the end of it and you do not discuss it. The two people in red T-shirts, Viv herself and a man called Des, are the ones you go to about anything at all. Wipe down what you use. There is squash and there are crisps in the small room and please do not take drinks past the doorway.

I found the briskness of it reassuring and slightly disappointing in exactly equal measure, which I think may be the whole story of the evening.

The room was a room. Dado rail, radiators with the covers on, a wooden floor with the lines of a badminton court still marked on it. Somebody had brought four lamps and turned the strip lights off, and it was still recognisably a hall you could have hired for a retirement do.

People had come in everything. A woman in a full corset and a woman in a fleece. A man in a suit that fitted him. Two people in jeans who I would not have looked at twice on a bus. The dressing gown from the car park turned out to belong to a retired civil engineer named Desmond who spent a large part of the evening in the small room talking to me about the M6 at Knutsford.

That was the first thing I had got wrong. I had expected a set. It was a village hall with the good lamps on.

The etiquette I had to learn on the spot, and I learned it by getting it slightly wrong.

You may watch. That is allowed and it is part of why people come. What you may not do is stand where the person being watched has to see you, or say anything, or arrive with a friend and murmur. There is a distance, about two arm lengths, that everyone else understood and I did not, and I drifted inside it while a couple were working at the bench in the corner.

A woman I had never spoken to caught my eye and moved her hand, twice, palm down, the gesture you would make to a car reversing. I moved back. She smiled at me and turned away and that was the entire correction, delivered and received in about a second and a half, and I have filed it since as a small masterpiece of manners.

There was one man.

I want to be accurate about this, because it was not frightening and I do not want to make it into a story it was not. He asked whether I was new. He asked whether I had come on my own. He asked what I was looking for, twice, in slightly different words, and he stood about a foot closer than the room required, so that I had begun the small business of turning my shoulder and thinking of somewhere to be.

Then Des was there in his red T-shirt, not fast, not dramatic, saying, "Andy. Give people room, mate." And Andy said something about only being friendly, and went, and Des asked me if I wanted a squash.

What struck me afterwards was not the relief. It was that I had already resigned myself to being polite to that man for another ten minutes, and it had not occurred to me that anybody else in the room would consider it their job. At home nobody would have. That is the argument for the whole exercise, in one incident.

I did one scene, with Rachel, who I came with and have known for two years.

Twelve, over the padded bench, nothing we have not done in her spare room a dozen times. It was the worst it has ever been and there was nothing wrong with any of it.

I could not get anywhere. Perhaps a third of me was in it and the rest was somewhere near the ceiling, running a commentary: somebody has stopped by the door, is my skirt where I think it is, was that noise a stupid noise, does the man by the lamp think I am doing this badly. All the attention that normally goes down into the thing was up and out and patrolling the room.

At eight I said the word. Rachel stopped instantly, put my cardigan round me, and asked if I wanted the small room. Nobody looked. Nobody made anything of it. Viv put a squash in my hand about ninety seconds later without saying anything about it, which I thought was the kindest thing anyone did all night.

Here is what I actually learned, and it cost me eighteen pounds and a train fare, which is cheap.

I had assumed for years that I wanted to be seen. Everything about what I like seemed to point that way: the being looked at, the standing there, the not being allowed to cover up. I had built a fairly detailed theory in which the logical end of it was a room full of people.

It is not. What I want is to be seen by one person, in a room with a door shut. The exposure I like is the exposure of being known by somebody specific, and an audience does not concentrate that, it dilutes it into nothing. Eight strokes in a badminton hall taught me something about myself that four years of thinking had not.

None of which means the party was bad, and I would be annoyed if anybody read it that way.

It was well run by people who were not being paid. There was a man whose entire function was to notice Andy, and he noticed Andy. I watched two people who have been doing this for twenty years work with a cane and I learned more in four minutes of standing at a respectful distance than I had from anything written down. I met Desmond. There were crisps.

I will go again in the spring. I will go for the small room, and the company, and to watch people who are good at it be good at it, and then I will come home and do the other thing properly, in the dark, with the door shut, with one person who knows me.