Animal beat

It feels like a giant's footsteps. That is my first thought, that something large is advancing across the airfield. The desk throbs with it, and the floor under my feet, a regular double-thump. Silent, but heavy. I can feel it all the way into my bones.

It's the drill, the girl at the desk beside me says. They're breaking up the old runway apron.

The beat continues into the afternoon, deep down from under the earth's skin. I know it is made of steel girders and pistons, but it still feels like an animal. A beast from a blind dark place. Out of the corner of my eye I keep watch on the tall office windows, waiting for its sloping shadow to stalk by.

When I leave work at the end of the day the memory of it clings to me, a resonance. Both fearful and thrilling.

Much later, I am sitting in the dark, looking down upon a shadowed stage. There are violins and keyboards, xylophones and cellos, but I have eyes only for the drums. The dance of the beat, its urgency, has caught somewhere inside me and I am transfixed. I think of metal and animal skin, dark earth and grinning mouths.

Show me, I ask him. We are sitting in a bar full of men, their chatter in a language I don't speak blanketing the walls thickly and pooling under the barstools. Show me how you play, I ask.

I have never seen him at the kit, but I don't need to. When we are together he plays me, unconsciously. He taps out a riff along my collarbone or hipbone, thrums a fluttering hearbeat on the inside of my wrist. It's always within him.

You're a snake, he said to me once. Snakes feel everything, through their skin. If you were walking a mile away a snake would feel you, every step.

He moves our drinks aside, puts his feet on my feet, his hands on my hands. Without taking his eyes off me he begins to tap out the beat. Marking time.

In my bones. In his hands. I am in thrall with words, but this, here, is something beyond words.

We are the only two in the bar. The men around us talk, voices rising and falling. I have forgotten how to speak.