Obviously he does not call or text before he visits, where’s the fun in that? Instead I’ll be pottering around and next thing I know there’s a crash and there he is, close enough for me to smell the stink of his breath, claws out and roaring.

I’m easy to wound, one swipe and I’m a mess - in moments the floor is an Arthur Miller diagram of bloody footprints, of violence - broken crockery everywhere, there’s no time at all to pick the glass out of my feet because I can’t stop dancing.

Have you considered, he says, almost tenderly as he pins me to a cupboard, that you will always be abandoned because you’re so easy to leave?

Disposable, disposable he croons.

It has occurred to me, yes, but thank you as always for reminding me

What are friends for, you fucking dummy, you think you’re so fucking smart, you dumb bitch you fucking

and there’s no arguing with that logic is there? so I don’t, but try and go for his eyes instead. Aim for the soft parts, someone else told me once, and they did - it’s a miracle I have any soft parts left, but I do and I can feel every one of them singing now.

When I was young and first getting ransacked by this animal I thought this was a fight I could somehow win, and there were times when I managed to clap hands on say, a cast iron frying pan and knock him out cold.

But this is not that; he comes back.

He comes back, the most faithful of lovers, he comes back, the bastard. The trick, the only one I know is to keep dancing until we are both spent, and then lie down in the wreckage, his heavy paw over my shoulder, feign sleep until he’s fully peaceful and then slip away.