Tonight, saw Ian McDonald used as a pick-up.

Night. The bus. Enter the quiet, bookish boy with the soft skin, neat hair and trimmed beard. Brown. Head down, he stalks the bus aisle, coming to a stop at the very last standing position at the very back of the bus. Near me.

I'm sitting so that his book is in line with my hair line, I guess, but it's thick enough I can't see the cover. What I do is catch a glimpse of the name Ian McDonald on the top of a page. I crane my neck entirely, I realise later, unselfconsciously, trying to see *which* Ian McDonald he has. It's a pretty thick book, & I've got a hunch --

But I'm stymied by the blonde in black-&-white, who spies something I'm trying to discern: the image on the front cover.

"Ganesha," she says with a smile.

She's carrying a black leather jacket and her skin shines, it just shines. Her hair is carefully curled and it shines, too. I'd even call her sexy, though it's harder for me to gauge sexiness in a woman, hard enough to find in a man often times. (She said, wryly.) The blonde, she's on a bus heading out of town right after 7pm. She's going the wrong way, looking for a good time, dressed like that.

"Ah, yes," says the bookish boy.

The blonde begins to talk about Ganesha and his significance and the significance of the other image on the cover and then she stops.

"But you're trying to read it, I'm so sorry to be explaining," she says.

She can talk and smile and breathe and smile and smile and smile. Even I'm mesmerised.

"No, no, please. Explain away," says the boy in studious tones.

So I hear all the blonde knows about the figures on the cover, and then I hear the boy explain what's *inside* the cover, & how a certain figure is actually 'the god of quick-e-marts". And the blonde says, "I'm sorry, I don't know what that is." The boy explains, with reference to The Simpsons, and the girl laughs like he's hilarious or like maybe it's The Simpsons that are hilarious. Whichever. The boy mentions a city in the book and the girl knows all about it -- and here is where I'm *really* impressed -- the girl knows all about it because "the friends I'm living with just came back from there."

Oh ho ho, man! She's good. She even managed to work in the fact that she was living with friends, implying both a) she's single & b) she's desirable as a housemate. Hell, where do you go to learn skills like that?

I'm about to ask her out myself when my stop arrives & I have to make the most awkward exit from a bus I've made in about -- well, Sydney buses, what a freaking mess -- several months, lifting my bag over the heads of resistant passengers and briefly contemplating homicide when one huge-arsed bitch stalls, swollen like a blowfly, in the very middle of the aisle.

I squeeze off the bus, ejected like toothpaste from the split seam of a metal tube, & I pause at the pedestrian crossing. I'm full of amazement at how unexpected life can be, how sometimes life just offers itself up to you, belly-first, and insists you scratch it until its leg starts pistoning. I'm thrilled, actually. I'm immensely cheered. In my head I'm composing the rest of the story for these two unlikely lovers, picturing the home they'll make and the kinds of dinner parties they'll host. I'm grinning at the traffic and I turn briefly to look over my shoulder for no good reason and -- it's the smallest things you regret sometimes, you know, like that time you turned to look over your shoulder for no good reason -- and there's the boy with the beard and the book, head down, ambling towards the pedestrian crossing behind me. Reading.

Reading his book. That. Idiot. And I want to tell him he's an IDIOT. I don't care if he had to travel an hour past his stop and then back again, didn't he want to see how my story ended? Didn't he want to know about the dinner parties and the way she built a stylish, black-&-white home which he filled top to tail with books? Didn't he want to catch the mystery that sent that woman pinwheeling into his book cover? Didn't he wonder how it was a stranger on a bus could be so willing to talk about -- of all the crazy things -- quick-e-marts and gods? Didn't he want, right now, to get back on that bus and say, "Fancy meeting you here, what a one-in-a-million, what a lucky break to find each other in the chaos of this cluttered world, as if I'd ever let a chance like that go!" Huh? My god, didn't he?

But no, he was still reading his book, somnolent as a bumble bee in the heat.

I was so full of words I think he caught me staring and caught, on the tip of my tongue, an impatient query about the book or the woman or the bus or his level of cognitive ability. But I bit back, figuring he'd earned enough praise and unanticipated adventure from the universe for his choice of novel. Let him alone. Let him disappear back into his quick-e-mart world of gods and gorgeous women. And eh, in the end, head-down as he crossed the road, book held to his face, how could I blame him for that choice when I'd made so many both more and much less brave?

Must be a bloody good book, River of Gods. We should probably all read it. Probably on buses. So we can act like gods.