Part of the trouble – I’m not making excuses – was undoubtedly the extreme earliness of the hour. Melpomene and I had been forming an acquaintance at Paddington Station for weeks. Every Monday morning at around about eight thirty-four she stepped off the express bringing her from Swansea, which was around about the time that I stepped off the tube from Ladbroke Grove, looking for something to happen to me on my way to the train for Oxford. Sometimes we were just able to snatch a cup of coffee together, at others our encounter was so brief as to allow only an exchange of hopeless smiles. This Monday morning, maddened by platform changes and late alterations to timetables, we turned our backs on the whole system – porters, ticket collectors, the public address system, the lot – and made straight for a hotel. We were in our room, undressing, before some of the more conventional guests had taken breakfast. Even now, as Melpomene rapped out orders and I rummaged for my lost penis, the sound of cutlery and the smell of bacon wafted up the stairs and under our door. A greater than I might not have been ready to do his worst at such an hour.

But Melpomene seemed to have no understanding of the inappropriateness of the time and the conditions to the deed. There was a quality of impatience in her voice, a growing irritation in her pleas not to be spared, that told me she was blaming failure on me. Me! I was becoming so angry myself that if it hadn’t been my inability to beat the shit out of her that had made her that way, I would have beaten the shit out of her.

I still wasn’t going to use my shoe, though. I have always been a bit of a puritan when it comes to the introduction of foreign bodies as aids to intimacy. Instead, in desperation, I dipped my head forward, like a feeding parrot, and I sank my teeth into her rump.

‘Ow!’ she cried. ‘Oh! Ow! Ouch! Jesus!’ Her voice ringing with the music of the valleys, her backside bucking on my knee.

Because I owed her, because I had failed her when I’d flailed her, I held on with my teeth. Think about it: it was the very least that I could do.

‘Ouch! Jesus!’ she cried again, as I bit deeper up to my gums in her. ‘Jesus! No! No!’