Boy? I knew that I oughtn’t to take offence. ‘Boy’, I reminded myself, was just a Welsh way of putting it, a mere tic of the patois for Melpomene who, despite her Caribbean colour and coconut smell, had been born in Maesteg, to the west of Swansea, where she had grown up wild among the choir boys and the prop forwards. ‘Boy’ wasn’t personal.

But it might just as well have been. I was, frankly, at my wit’s end. Ever since she had unclipped her skirt and assumed this aggressive posture of submission across my knees, issuing me with the most precise and detailed instructions for her chastisement, I had been belting away at her, first with my palms open, then with them closed, then with the skin drawn tight over my knuckles, then with my fingernails hooked like claws, but I had not once come even close to giving her what she wanted. I had succeeded only in tiring myself. My hands were sore. I had broken a couple of nails. Something had even gone in my back. If her flesh had been white I might at least have taken some consolation in seeing the marks I’d made, but that too was denied me. No matter what I did to them Melpomene’s buttocks sat up firm and shone back at me like polished aubergines. At best I could claim to have buffed up their patina.

My own buttocks were pressed into a painful and possibly permanent lattice design by the little wicker hotel chair in which I was trapped, and my penis, on the tip of which, when Melpomene first bent over me without her skirt, I could have balanced not just her but the whole of Maesteg rugby football club, was now vanished. It wasn’t just Melpomene who could no longer feel it throbbing against her belly, I myself couldn’t locate it anywhere. It was to all intents and purposes, gone; and my balls, if I was not mistaken, were shrinking by the second also. Some evolutionary process – Nature shedding what it had no further use for – had speeded up in me.