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which raised a faint smile.
    When I handed over one of the instruments we had available, he picked it up carefully, almost weighing it, calmly watching with fascination how the shop’s strip lighting reflected against the orange burnish of its wood, then passed his fingers sensually across its body as if it were a woman.
    I shivered before I could stop myself. No man had ever caressed me the way he was caressing that violin, and I suddenly felt both terribly aroused and jealous at the same time. He briefly looked up from his examination and our eyes met. It felt as if he had X-ray vision and could see right through my clothes. He looked pensive for a brief moment, as if he was speculating about the appearance of my concealed nudity. I blushed and looked away.
    The fleeting connection we had shared broke and he turned back to the violin, telling me he wished to arrange the rental we had discussed earlier, and I then had to busy myself with the paperwork and the necessary calculations.
    He filled out the forms and settled the deposit and the rental fees by credit card. His name was Dominik.
    I watched him stride out of the shop onto a windyDenmark Street and soon he was lost in the ebb and flow of the crowds.
    That night, back in my small room at the shared flat, I lay alone in bed, feeling cold but too lazy to get up and switch on the heater. I wondered endlessly about the woman Dominik had been getting the violin for, with my imagination veering off in all sorts of directions. I couldn’t understand my agitation. Why had such an insignificant encounter triggered such curious reactions in me?
    It was a night full of uncommon dreams. But no nightmares.
    David, who worked for a big firm of accountants a few streets away from the Denmark Street shop, rang me the next morning, suggesting we go on a date. I swiftly turned him down. It was as if this brief encounter with a total stranger had opened a window in my mind to new possibilities, to life being different. It made no sense, I knew as I argued with myself, but that was just the way I felt. And I didn’t have a clue as to what the next step should be.
    It happened with the next violin to cross my path.
    I had spent several weeks since my encounter with the enigmatic Dominik immersing myself in music again. I’d made a visit to my parents’ house to touch base, as I did occasionally for the sake of propriety, and taken advantage of the trip to pick up my old guitar and a couple of boxes of LPs and CDs I had left in my bedroom there, records I had spent much of my teenage years singing and dancing to in splendid isolation, and which had felt alien once I had left for Brighton and uni.
    It was like getting back on a bike again and my guitar-playing chops returned, rusty but not too unmelodic, even if I could only strum a few dozen tunes properly. But the music of Alice Cooper, Kiss, Free, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and all my old favourites was truly joyful all over again as I reacquainted myself with their loud sounds, albeit on headphones in deference to my flatmates.
    I would rush home from work whenever I wasn’t part-timing at the fetish club and spent whole evenings in my room listening to the forgotten music of my youth. Initially I had never been keen on punk but now, listening to much of it with a new perspective, I discovered a new appeal in the songs of the Clash and the Jam and others which I had seldom seen before.
    I was communing with music again and it was a blissful feeling. Like finding something that had been lost for ages.
    Dominik returned the rental violin on one of my days off a fortnight later so I never saw him again. Maybe it was for the best.
    It was late on a grey Saturday afternoon and Jonno, one of the other assistants at the store, and I were eager to close. It had been a miserable sort of day, drizzly, with customers few and far between and mostly indecisive or rude.
    A man came through the door and the two of us heaved a sigh of exasperation