How To Talk To Girls At Parties

Neil Gaiman

“Come on,” said Vic. “It’ll be great.”

“No, it won’t,” I said, although I’d lost this fight

hours ago, and I knew it.

“It’ll be brilliant,” said Vic, for the hundredth

time. “Girls! Girls! Girls!” He grinned with white

teeth.

We both attended an all-boys’ school in south

London. While it would be a lie to say that we had

no experience with girls—Vic seemed to have had many

girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister’s

friends—it would, I think, be perfectly true to say

that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and

only truly understood, other boys. Well, I did,

anyway. It’s hard to speak for someone else, and

I’ve not seen Vic for thirty years. I’m not sure

that I would know what to say to him now if I did.

We were walking the backstreets that used to twine

in a grimy maze behind East Croydon station—a friend

had told Vic about a party, and Vic was determined

to go whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t. But

my parents were away that week at a conference, and

I was Vic’s guest at his house, so I was trailing

along beside him.

“It’ll be the same as it always is,” I said. “After

an hour you’ll be off somewhere snogging the

prettiest girl at the party, and I’ll be in the

kitchen listening to somebody’s mum going on about

politics or poetry or something.”

“You just have to talk to them,” he said. “I think

it’s probably that road at the end here.” He

gestured cheerfully, swinging the bag with the

bottle in it.

“Don’t you know?”

“Alison gave me directions and I wrote them on a bit

of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S’okay. I

can find it.”

“How?” Hope welled slowly up inside me.

“We walk down the road,” he said, as if speaking to

an idiot child. “And we look for the party. Easy.”

I looked, but saw no party: just narrow houses with

rusting cars or bikes in their concreted front

gardens; and the dusty glass fronts of newsagents,

which smelled of alien spices and sold everything

from birthday cards and secondhand comics to the

kind of magazines that were so pornographic that

they were sold already sealed in plastic bags. I had

been there when Vic had slipped one of those

magazines beneath his sweater, but the owner caught

him on the pavement outside and made him give it

back.

We reached the end of the road and turned into a

narrow street of terraced houses. Everything looked

very still and empty in the Summer’s evening. “It’s

all right for you,” I said. “They fancy you. You

don’t actually have to talk to them.” It was true:

one urchin grin from Vic and he could have his pick

of the room.

“Nah. S’not like that. You’ve just got to talk.”

The times I had kissed my sister’s friends I had not

spoken to them. They had been around while my sister

was off doing something elsewhere, and they had

drifted into my orbit, and so I had kissed them. I

do not remember any talking. I did not know what to

say to girls, and I told him so.

“They’re just girls,” said Vic. “They don’t come

from another planet.”

As we followed the curve of the road around, my

hopes that the party would prove unfindable began to

fade: a low pulsing noise, music muffled by walls

and doors, could be heard from a house up ahead. It

was eight in the evening, not that early if you

aren’t yet sixteen, and we weren’t. Not quite.

I had parents who liked to know where I was, but I

don’t think Vic’s parents cared that much. He was

the youngest of five boys. That in itself seemed

magical to me: I merely had two sisters, both

younger than I was, and I felt both unique and

lonely. I had wanted a brother as far back as I

could remember. When I turned thirteen, I stopped

wishing on falling stars or first stars, but back

when I did, a brother was what I had wished for.

We went up the garden path, crazy paving leading us

past a hedge and a solitary rosebush to a pebble—

dashed facade. We rang the doorbell, and the door

was opened by a girl. I could not have told you how

old she was, which was one of the things about girls

I had begun to hate: when you start out as kids

you’re just boys and girls, going through time at

the same speed, and you’re all five, or seven, or

eleven, together. And then one day there’s a lurch

and the girls just sort of sprint off into the

future ahead of you, and they know all about

everything, and they have periods and breasts and

makeup and God-only- knew-what- else—for I

certainly didn’t. The diagrams in biology textbooks

were no substitute for being, in a very real sense,

young adults. And the girls of our age were.

Vic and I weren’t young adults, and I was beginning

to suspect that even when I started needing to shave

every day, instead of once every couple of weeks, I

would still be way behind.

The girl said, “Hello?”

Vic said, “We’re friends of Alison’s.” We had met

Alison, all freckles and orange hair and a wicked

smile, in Hamburg, on a German exchange. The

exchange organizers had sent some girls with us,

from a local girls’ school, to balance the sexes.

The girls, our age, more or less, were raucous and

funny, and had more or less adult boyfriends with

cars and jobs and motorbikes and—in the case of one

girl with crooked teeth and a raccoon coat, who

spoke to me about it sadly at the end of a party in

Hamburg, in, of course, the kitchen—a wife and kids.

“She isn’t here,” said the girl at the door. “No

Alison.”

“Not to worry,” said Vic, with an easy grin. “I’m

Vic. This is Enn.” A beat, and then the girl smiled

back at him. Vic had a bottle of white wine in a

plastic bag, removed from his parents’ kitchen

cabinet. “Where should I put this, then?”

She stood out of the way, letting us enter. “There’s

a kitchen in the back,” she said. “Put it on the

table there, with the other bottles.” She had

golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful. The

hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that

she was beautiful.

“What’s your name, then?” said Vic.

She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his

crooked white grin and told her that that had to be

the prettiest name he had ever heard. Smooth

bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like

he meant it.

Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the kitchen,

and I looked into the front room, where the music

was coming from. There were people dancing in there.

Stella walked in, and she started to dance, swaying

to the music all alone, and I watched her.

This was during the early days of punk. On our own

record players we would play the Adverts and the

Jam, the Stranglers and the Clash and the Sex

Pistols. At other people’s parties you’d hear ELO or

10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you

were lucky. During the German exchange, the only LP

that we had all been able to agree on was Neil

Young’s Harvest, and his song “Heart of Gold”

had threaded through the trip like a refrain: I

crossed the ocean for a heart of gold… .

The music playing in that front room wasn’t anything

I recognized.

It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group

called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I’d been

given for my last birthday, of strange sounds made

by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had a

beat, though, and the half-dozen girls in that room

were moving gently to it, although I only looked at

Stella. She shone.

Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding a

can of lager. “There’s booze back in the kitchen,”

he told me. He wandered over to Stella and he began

to talk to her. I couldn’t hear what they were

saying over the music, but I knew that there was no

room for me in that conversation.

I didn’t like beer, not back then. I went off to see

if there was something I wanted to drink. On the

kitchen table stood a large bottle of Coca-Cola,

and I poured myself a plastic tumblerful, and I

didn’t dare say anything to the pair of girls who

were talking in the underlit kitchen. They were

animated and utterly lovely. Each of them had very

black skin and glossy hair and movie star clothes,

and their accents were foreign, and each of them was

out of my league.

I wandered, Coke in hand.

The house was deeper than it looked, larger and more

complex than the two-up two-down model I had

imagined. The rooms were underlit—I doubt there was

a bulb of more than 40 watts in the building—and

each room I went into was inhabited: in my memory,

inhabited only by girls. I did not go upstairs.

A girl was the only occupant of the conservatory.

Her hair was so fair it was white, and long, and

straight, and she sat at the glass-topped table, her

hands clasped together, staring at the garden

outside, and the gathering dusk. She seemed wistful.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” I asked, gesturing with

my cup. She shook her head, and then followed it up

with a shrug, to indicate that it was all the same

to her. I sat down. Vic walked past the conservatory

door. He was talking to Stella, but he looked in at

me, sitting at the table, wrapped in shyness and

awkwardness, and he opened and closed his hand in a

parody of a speaking mouth. Talk. Right.

“Are you from around here?” I asked the girl.

She

shook her head. She wore a low-cut silvery top, and

I tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts.

I said, “What’s your name? I’m Enn.”

“Wain’s Wain,” she said, or something that sounded

like it. “I’m a second.”

“That’s uh. That’s a different name.”

She fixed me with huge, liquid eyes. “It indicates

that my progenitor was also Wain, and that I am

obliged to report back to her. I may not breed.”

“Ah. Well. Bit early for that anyway, isn’t it?”

She unclasped her hands, raised them above the

table, spread her fingers. “You see?” The little

finger on her left hand was crooked, and it

bifurcated at the top, splitting into two smaller

fingertips. A minor deformity. “When I was finished

a decision was needed. Would I be retained, or

eliminated? I was fortunate that the decision was

with me. Now, I travel, while my more perfect

sisters remain at home in stasis. They were firsts.

I am a second.

“Soon I must return to Wain, and tell her all I have

seen. All my impressions of this place of yours.”

“I don’t actually live in Croydon,” I said. “I don’t

come from here.” I wondered if she was American. I

had no idea what she was talking about.

“As you say,” she agreed, “neither of us comes from

here.” She folded her six-fingered left hand

beneath her right, as if tucking it out of sight. “I

had expected it to be bigger, and cleaner, and more

colorful. But still, it is a jewel.”

She yawned, covered her mouth with her right hand,

only for a moment, before it was back on the table

again. “I grow weary of the journeying, and I wish

sometimes that it would end. On a street in Río, at

Carnival, I saw them on a bridge, golden and tall

and insect-eyed and winged, and elated I almost ran

to greet them, before I saw that they were only

people in costumes. I said to Hola Colt, ‘Why do

they try so hard to look like us?’ and Hola Colt

replied, ‘Because they hate themselves, all shades

of pink and brown, and so small.’ It is what I

experience, even me, and I am not grown. It is like

a world of children, or of elves.” Then she smiled,

and said, “It was a good thing they could not any of

them see Hola Colt.”

“Um,” I said, “do you want to dance?”

She shook her head immediately. “It is not

permitted,” she said. “I can do nothing that might

cause damage to property. I am Wain’s.”

“Would you like something to drink, then?”

“Water,” she said.

I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another

Coke, and filled a cup with water from the tap. From

the kitchen back to the hall, and from there into

the conservatory, but now it was quite empty.

I wondered if the girl had gone to the toilet, and

if she might change her mind about dancing later. I

walked back to the front room and stared in. The

place was filling up. There were more girls dancing,

and several lads I didn’t know, who looked a few

years older than me and Vic. The lads and the girls

all kept their distance, but Vic was holding

Stella’s hand as they danced, and when the song

ended he put an arm around her, casually, almost

proprietorially, to make sure that nobody else cut

in.

I wondered if the girl I had been talking to in the

conservatory was now upstairs, as she did not appear

to be on the ground floor.

I walked into the living room, which was across the

hall from the room where the people were dancing,

and I sat down on the sofa. There was a girl sitting

there already. She had dark hair, cut short and

spiky, and a nervous manner.

Talk, I thought. “Um, this mug of water’s going

spare,” I told her, “if you want it?”

She nodded, and reached out her hand and took the

mug, extremely carefully, as if she were unused to

taking things, as if she could trust neither her

vision nor her hands.

“I love being a tourist,” she said, and smiled

hesitantly. She had a gap between her two front

teeth, and she sipped the tap water as if she were

an adult sipping a fine wine. “The last tour, we

went to sun, and we swam in sunfire pools with the

whales. We heard their histories and we shivered in

the chill of the outer places, then we swam deepward

where the heat churned and comforted us.

“I wanted to go back. This time, I wanted it. There

was so much I had not seen. Instead we came to

world. Do you like it?”

“Like what?”

She gestured vaguely to the room—the sofa, the

armchairs, the curtains, the unused gas fire.

“It’s all right, I suppose.”

“I told them I did not wish to visit world,” she

said. “My parent-teacher was unimpressed. ‘You will

have much to learn,’ it told me. I said, ‘I could

learn more in sun, again. Or in the deeps. Jessa

spun webs between galaxies. I want to do that.’ “But

there was no reasoning with it, and I came to world.

Parent-teacher engulfed me, and I was here, embodied

in a decaying lump of meat hanging on a frame of

calcium. As I incarnated I felt things deep inside

me, fluttering and pumping and squishing. It was my

first experience with pushing air through the mouth,

vibrating the vocal cords on the way, and I used it

to tell parent-teacher that I wished that I would

die, which it acknowledged was the inevitable exit

strategy from world.”

There were black worry beads wrapped around her

wrist, and she fiddled with them as she spoke. “But

knowledge is there, in the meat,” she said, “and I

am resolved to learn from it.” We were sitting close

at the center of the sofa now. I decided I should

put an arm around her, but casually. I would extend

my arm along the back of the sofa and eventually

sort of creep it down, almost imperceptibly, until

it was touching her. She said, “The thing with the

liquid in the eyes, when the world blurs. Nobody

told me, and I still do not understand. I have

touched the folds of the Whisper and pulsed and

flown with the tachyon swans, and I still do not

understand.”

She wasn’t the prettiest girl there, but she seemed

nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway. I let my

arm slide down a little, tentatively, so that it

made contact with her back, and she did not tell me

to take it away.

Vic called to me then, from the doorway. He was

standing with his arm around Stella, protectively,

waving at me. I tried to let him know, by shaking my

head, that I was onto something, but he called my

name and, reluctantly, I got up from the sofa and

walked over to the door. “What?”

“Er. Look. The party,” said Vic, apologetically.

“It’s not the one I thought it was. I’ve been

talking to Stella and I figured it out. Well, she

sort of explained it to me. We’re at a different

party.”

“Christ. Are we in trouble? Do we have to go?”

Stella shook her head. He leaned down and kissed

her, gently, on the lips. “You’re just happy to have

me here, aren’t you darlin’?”

“You know I am,” she told him.

He looked from her back to me, and he smiled his

white smile: roguish, lovable, a little bit Artful

Dodger, a little bit wide-boy Prince Charming.

“Don’t worry. They’re all tourists here anyway. It’s

a foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all

went to Germany.”

“It is?”

“Enn. You got to talk to them. And that means you

got to listen to them, too. You understand?”

“I did. I already talked to a couple of them.”

“You getting anywhere?”

“I was till you called me over.”

“Sorry about that. Look, I just wanted to fill you

in. Right?”

And he patted my arm and he walked away with Stella.

Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.

Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the

twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces

but, more important than that, they had whatever

strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it

is that makes a beauty something more than a shop

window dummy.

Stella was the most lovely of any of them, but she,

of course, was Vic’s, and they were going upstairs

together, and that was just how things would always

be.

There were several people now sitting on the sofa,

talking to the gap-toothed girl. Someone told a

joke, and they all laughed. I would have had to push

my way in there to sit next to her again, and it

didn’t look like she was expecting me back, or cared

that I had gone, so I wandered out into the hall. I

glanced in at the dancers, and found myself

wondering where the music was coming from. I

couldn’t see a record player or speakers.

From the hall I walked back to the kitchen.

Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an

excuse to be there, and, on the good side, at this

party I couldn’t see any signs of someone’s mum. I

inspected the various bottles and cans on the

kitchen table, then I poured a half an inch of

Pernod into the bottom of my plastic cup, which I

filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple

of ice cubes and took a sip, relishing the

sweet-shop tang of the drink.

“What’s that you’re drinking?” A girl’s voice.

“It’s Pernod,” I told her. “It tastes like aniseed

balls, only it’s alcoholic.” I didn’t say that I

only tried it because I’d heard someone in the crowd

ask for a Pernod on a live Velvet Underground LP.

“Can I have one?” I poured another Pernod, topped it

off with Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was a

coppery auburn, and it tumbled around her head in

ringlets. It’s not a hair style you see much now,

but you saw it a lot back then.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Triolet,” she said.

“Pretty name,” I told her, although I wasn’t sure

that it was. She was pretty, though.

“It’s a verse form,” she said, proudly. “Like me.”

“You’re a poem?”

She smiled, and looked down and away, perhaps

bashfully. Her profile was almost flat—a perfect

Grecian nose that came down from her forehead in a

straight line. We did Antigone in the school theater

the previous year. I was the messenger who brings

Creon the news of Antigone’s death. We wore

half-masks that made us look like that. I thought of

that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and

I thought of Barry Smith’s drawings of women in the

Conan comics: five years later I would have thought

of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie

Siddall. But I was only fifteen then.

“You’re a poem?” I repeated.

She chewed her lower lip. “If you want. I am a poem,

or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world

was swallowed by the sea.”

“Isn’t it hard to be three things at the same time?”

“What’s your name?”

“Enn.”

“So you are Enn,” she said. “And you are a male. And

you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at

the same time?”

“But they aren’t different things. I mean, they

aren’t contradictory.” It was a word I had read many

times but never said aloud before that night, and I

put the stresses in the wrong places. Contradictory.

She wore a thin dress made of a white, silky fabric.

Her eyes were a pale green, a color that would now

make me think of tinted contact lenses; but this was

thirty years ago; things were different then. I

remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs.

By now, I was sure that they were in one of the

bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.

Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were

talking nonsense, even if her name wasn’t really

Triolet (my generation had not been given hippie

names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the

Moons, they were only six, seven, eight years old

back then). She said, “We knew that it would soon be

over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the

universe who we were, and why we were here, and what

we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned

for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned

the words so that they would live forever,

unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of

flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out

its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across

the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when,

on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the

pattern would be decoded and read, and it would

become a poem once again.”

“And then what happened?”

She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as

if she stared out at me from her own Antigone

half-mask; but as if her pale green eyes were just a

different, deeper, part of the mask. “You cannot

hear a poem without it changing you,” she told me.

“They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited

them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming

part of the way that they thought; its images

permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses,

its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives.

Within a generation their children would be born

already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than

later, as these things go, there were no more

children born. There was no need for them, not any

longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and

walked and spread itself across the vastness of the

known.”

I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg

pressing against hers.

She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my

arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading

across my face.

“There are places that we are welcomed,” said

Triolet, “and places where we are regarded as a

noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately

to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does

contagion end and art begin?”

“I don’t know,” I said, still smiling. I could hear

the unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and

boomed in the front room.

She leaned into me then and—I suppose it was a kiss.

… I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips,

anyway, and then, satisfied, she pulled back, as if

she had now marked me as her own.

“Would you like to hear it?” she asked, and I

nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain

that I needed anything she was willing to give me.

She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the

strangest thing about poetry—you can tell it’s

poetry, even if you don’t speak the language. You

can hear Homer’s Greek without understanding a word,

and you still know it’s poetry. I’ve heard Polish

poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was

without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn’t

know the language, but her words washed through me,

perfect, and in my mind’s eye I saw towers of glass

and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest

green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I

could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.

Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don’t remember. I

know I wanted to.

And then Vic was shaking me violently. “Come on!” he

was shouting. “Quickly. Come on!”

In my head I began to come back from a thousand

miles away.

“Idiot. Come on. Just get a move on,” he said, and

he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.

For the first time that evening I recognized one of

the songs being played in the front room. A sad

saxophone wail followed by a cascade of liquid

chords, a man’s voice singing cut-up lyrics about

the sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and

hear the song.

She said, “I am not finished. There is yet more of

me.”

“Sorry love,” said Vic, but he wasn’t smiling any

longer. “There’ll be another time,” and he grabbed

me by the elbow and he twisted and pulled, forcing

me from the room. I did not resist. I knew from

experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out me

if he got it into his head to do so. He wouldn’t do

it unless he was upset or angry, but he was angry

now.

Out into the front hall. As Vic pulled open the

door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder,

hoping to see Triolet in the doorway to the kitchen,

but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at the

top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and

I saw her face.

This all happened thirty years ago. I have forgotten

much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will

forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of

life beyond death, it is all wrapped up not in

psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I

cannot believe that I will ever forget that moment,

or forget the expression on Stella’s face as she

watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I

shall remember that.

Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup

smudged across her face, and her eyes—

You wouldn’t want to make a universe angry. I bet an

angry universe would look at you with eyes like

that.

We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and the

tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning

storm was on our heels, a mad helter-skelter dash

down the confusion of streets, threading through the

maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop

until we could not breathe; and then we stopped and

panted, unable to run any longer. We were in pain. I

held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long,

into the gutter.

He wiped his mouth.

“She wasn’t a—” He stopped.

He shook his head.

Then he said, “You know … I think there’s a

thing. When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if

you go any further, you wouldn’t be you anymore?

You’d be the person who’d done that? The places you

just can’t go… . I think that happened to me

tonight.”

I thought I knew what he was saying. “Screw her, you

mean?” I said.

He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and

twisted it violently. I wondered if I was going to

have to fight him—and lose—but after a moment he

lowered his hand and moved away from me, making a

low, gulping noise.

I looked at him curiously, and I realized that he

was crying: his face was scarlet; snot and tears ran

down his cheeks. Vic was sobbing in the street, as

unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little

boy.

He walked away from me then, shoulders heaving, and

he hurried down the road so he was in front of me

and I could no longer see his face. I wondered what

had occurred in that upstairs room to make him

behave like that, to scare him so, and I could not

even begin to guess.

The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic stumbled

on ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him

in the dusk, my feet treading out the measure of a

poem that, try as I might, I could not properly

remember and would never be able to repeat.

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