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Police’s ‘Roxanne’ on the impervious commuters.
    Dominik swore under his breath.
    For the following five evenings he returned to the station. In hope.
    Only to come across a succession of buskers playing Dylan and the Eagles with varying shades of success, or singing operatic tunes to pre-taped orchestral accompaniments. No violin player. He knew buskers had appointed locations and hours, but he had no way of finding out what her schedule was. For all he knew, she could have been a totally unregulated performer and unlikely to make a further appearance there.
    Finally, he called Claudia over.
    It felt like a revenge fuck, as if he had to punish her for not being another, imperiously positioning her on all fours and taking her more roughly than he was in the habit of doing. She said nothing, but he knew it was not to her taste. Holding her arms across her back, brutally gripping her wrists and forcing himself inside her as far as he could reach, ignoring the dryness, basking in the burning fire of her innards as he kept on pumping with metronomic precision, perversely watching her arse yielding under the intense pressure he was applying below, a pornographic vision he shamelessly wallowed in. Had he been gifted with a third hand, he would have cruelly pulled her hair back at the same time. Why did he get so angry at times? Claudia had done nothing wrong.
    Maybe he was getting tired of her and it was time to move on. To whom?
    ‘Do you enjoy hurting me?’ she later asked him as they sipped drinks in bed, exhausted, sweaty, troubled.
    ‘Sometimes I do,’ Dominik answered.
    ‘You know that I don’t mind, don’t you?’ Claudia said.
    He sighed. ‘I know. Maybe that’s why I do it. But does that mean you like it?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m not sure.’
    The customary post-coital silence that often divided them returned and they drifted into sleep. She left fairly early in the morning, leaving an apologetic note about an interview of some sort, just a strand of her red hair on the pillow to remind Dominik she had spent the night.
    A month went by, during which Dominik no longer played any classical CDs when he was home alone. It just didn’t feel right. The end of term was soon approaching and he felt the urge to go travelling again. Amsterdam? Venice? Another continent altogether? Seattle? New Orleans? Somehow all these destinations he had once freely indulged in no longer held the same attraction. It was a most unsettling feeling and one he had seldom experienced before.
    Claudia was back in Hanover spending a few weeks with her family and he just hadn’t the energy to seek someone else out for fun and pleasure, and there was no one from his past he felt any inclination to spend time with again. Neither was this a time for friends or relatives. There were days when he even came to the conclusion that his powers of seduction might have abandoned him for parts unknown.
    On the way to a film screening at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank, he picked up a free newspaper from a vendor lurking outside the station entrance at Waterloo and casually stuffed the folded freesheet into his tote bag and then forgot all about it until mid-afternoon the following day.
    Halfway through the paper, Dominik came across a brief item of local news that hadn’t made that morning’s Guardian , in a section called ‘News From the Underground’, which more usually related tales of weird lost and found objects or silly stories of pets and commuter rage.
    A violin-playing busker had been inadvertently caught in an affray the previous day while performing at Tottenham Court Road station, it appeared. A group of regional drunken soccer fans passing through on their way to a match at Wembley had become involved in a large fight in which London transport officers had been obliged to forcibly intervene, and although not directly involved, she had been severely jostled in the process and dropped her instrument, on which one of the guys