ONE

      MY LOVER LOWERS his headphones over my hair, then enters me. He thrusts stiffly and deep. Irish music swirls into my brain, a bow pressing down across a fiddle, teasing and twisting music from taut strings. My breath comes faster as his hands grip my buttocks, managing to rub his shoulder against the walkman’s volume control. The tune rises, filling me up. I close my eyes so that I can no longer see Luke, just feel his penis arching out and in. The set of reels change and quicken. I listen to a gale blowing across a treeless landscape, see a black huddle of slanted rooftops and drenched cows dreaming of shelter. The beat is inside my head from childhood, imagining an old shoe strike the stone flags and the hush of neighbours gathered in.

      Luke pulls my legs higher, positions a pillow under my tensed back. I don’t want to ever open my eyes. The music is so loud and quick it seems sweet torture. It courses through me. I can see his old face playing, that capped man with nicotined teeth and tufts of greying hairs in his nostrils. His eyes are half closed, his breathing laboured. He looks so infirm that he could hardly shuffle across the room, yet his hand flicks the bow back and forth without mercy. He squeezes the wild tune loose, an old master in utter control, coaxing out grace-notes and bending them pitilessly to his will, while the wind howls outside along sheep tracks known only to mountain foxes and to him. He is my peddler father, the wandering lone wolf tinker my mother would never speak of, whose restless soul must now be constrained in some isolated graveyard.

      My lover suddenly cries. I know I have drawn blood with my nails against his back. But Luke’s voice is lost beneath the reel spinning faster and faster. And I shout too, no longer caring who hears in that cheap hotel near Edgware Road, with no will left of my own. My voice is just one more note lost in the frenzy of a Donegal gale blowing itself out among the rocks beyond the house where my father once played. Then my scream is suddenly loud, piercing the rush of white noise as the reels halt and I hear my lover come, feeling his final thrusts before I twist the headphones off to look up. The same hairline cracks are on the ceiling. A fly blunders against the damp lampshade, clinging insanely to life in late November.

      ‘Did you come?’ Luke asks. That’s my own business. I stare back until he looks away.

      ‘Does your wife like you to fuck her like this? Or is she more the country-and-western kind?’

      We lie still after that. Why do I always need to hurt Luke? Is it my way of keeping any threat