The café, the bar and the meeting

It's a café with a window table free. You want the window table. You've got a book and forty minutes and a coffee you've already ordered, and the table is over there, past six other tables with people at them. You stand with the cup and you look at the route. You'll have to walk past the couple, and the man with the laptop, and the two women who are laughing at something, and then sit down on your own, in the window, where the street can see you too. You take a table by the wall instead. It's fine. You didn't want the window that much.

Or it's a bar, and your friends are at the far end, and between you and them is the whole length of the room, and you know exactly how you walk when you're being watched, which is badly. Or it's a meeting, and you have a point to make, and you've made it four times in your head and each time you've heard how it sounds, and by the time there's a gap in the talk the point has been made by someone else, worse, and everyone nodded. Or it's the kerb outside the bus stop, where your foot went sideways and you did a small, ridiculous hop, and for the rest of the afternoon your face is hot.

These are invented, but I'd guess one of them is close. Some words. The room is anywhere the feeling arrives, and it's usually a public place with strangers or near-strangers in it. The audience is the imagined set of people in the room who are noticing you, remembering you and coming to a view. The beam is the feeling of being lit and looked at, the heat on the skin, the awareness of your own arms. The headcount is your estimate, when the beam is on, of how many people saw. The mark is the thing you believe is on show, the stain, the haircut, the flush, the wobble on the kerb. The run-up is the practising before the room, the route, the sentence, the outfit checked twice. The sting is afterwards, on the way home, when you go over it. And the shoe count is an exercise, which chapter 19 is about, that takes a minute and answers the headcount with a number.

Before you go on, do one thing. The next time the beam comes on in a room, before you do anything else, make the headcount. How many people in here noticed. Write it down, or say it to yourself as a number. Then, slowly, look at the room and count how many people are actually looking at you, right now, and how many are looking at their phone, their coffee, their friend, their own shoes. Write that down too. You'll want both numbers in chapter 3.