Ink spills from the corners of my mouth. It stains the page like a bruise, but I don't blot it out. I want the paper to be touched like flesh, to be turned blue, black, red, like a body - that woman's body I watched once thrown through a door in Leeds.

    She must have been young then, though I was so much younger she seemed old to me, old and stuffed with cheap food, her flesh sagging like a sofa. Pam, she was called, and she'd once been a hairdresser, which - being a kind of feminist in those days - I held as a subversive art. Where, after all, lay Samson's strength but in his flowing locks, and where his castration but in his wife Delilah's dexterity with the knife? And maybe that's what scared Pam's husband: the professional black-handled shears she still kept in the kitchen drawer, tucked away beneath oddments of string and wool and combs for lice. Not that she'd used them in a lucrative way for years. The only time they came out now was on the three kids, who never got taken to school but raced round the terraced house all day like truanting ants.

    I was staying in the attic, having bought the house, waiting for the five of them to move out. Their new mortgage had fallen through, and I'd agreed to let them stay till they could find another. I sat beneath the rafters studying, trying to write - all my life print's been my very blood - trying not to hear the raised voices that would fly up the staircase every night. I was perched on a double mattress on the floor, copying out words. I didn't want these wings battering at my door.

    That night, though, the noise was worse than usual and I felt compelled to go down. Maybe I could do something to help, take the kids out of the room at least. Maybe the presence of a stranger would turn down the heat. I was naive then. I didn't know aggressors relish witnesses, and instead of calming Ted, the husband, my entrance goaded him further. I already knew the gist of the argument, he'd repeated it often enough.

    He was accusing Pam of having an affair with Pete, the ex-lodger who'd recently vacated the attic. I'd met Pete briefly. He was one of those swarthy, beefy blokes, a rough and ready blond who drove trucks, the kind Liz Taylor married. Admittedly the mattress upstairs was well worn, and the whole house had a seedy feel, but I sensed instinctively Ted's words were unjust. I'd seen Pam and Pete together, and knew neither of them thought her worthy of an affair. Nor would Ted have dared accuse the man to his face. Pete was twice his size. He could have picked up Ted and hurled him like a jar across the room. As Ted was doing now, with Pam. He had his wife - she too almost twice his size - in his arms, off the floor and through the kitchen door before my own fingers had left the hall door handle.

    The panel through which Pam smashed was one full sheet of frosted glass, patterned in swirls. It was also the back door of the house. Many times since, I've thought it must be an image from a dream: the raw jagged hole, the shards of glass, the crumpled body in the snow, the ambulance siren.

    We only overlapped a few days more. Time enough for Pam to return from hospital on crutches, her broken leg and arm plastered, gashes sewn, acceptance of Ted's apology intact. I was helping her pack the contents of her kitchen drawers, and when I heard this, passed her the hairdressers' scissors in disbelief.

    `You're not staying with him?' I said. `You can't let a man treat you like that and get away with it. Where's your self-respect? What kind of example are you setting the kids?'

    Pam shrugged. Her face was fat with tiredness. `Where else can I go? With no money and three little 'uns? Anyway, Ted didn't mean it. He just forgot himself, what with the house falling through, and the move.'

    And the scissors were shoved into a cardboard box with a bundle of grey tea-towels and chipped mugs.

Ink spills from the corners of my mouth. I sweat it. I feast on it. What life could beat this life, the writer's life, regurgitating and eating the written word? Turning the pages fast now to see this other woman, this time in an upmarket lingerie store in Bath. Lingerie, such a suggestive sound - lazy, yet evocative - perfect for this delicate Belgian lace, this flesh coloured bra which will make her small breasts more seductive.

    I watch the woman as she slides back the rich lined curtain and steps into the carefully lit changing room. Maybe it's her age - she's somewhat past the years that are best for vanity - or maybe she's worried it's nearly closing time, but she seems a little uneasy being here, reluctant to see herself in the glass. She's rushing at the job of stripping off, as impatient as an anorexic racing through forced food, keen to get it over with.

    She raises her arms and starts to peel off her top. But the long sleeved shirt twists and sticks around her neck and as it scrapes over her head she's trapped in the act of fighting the tight fabric. That's how she sees herself in the mirror, arms up, bare, their underside revealed. And she freezes, thinking it must be an image from a dream. From elbow to armpit, and all along the sides of her breasts, her flesh is black, the colour of the stillborn. The edges of the stain are uneven: clumsy splodges of ink, joined up bruises.

    Forcing herself to wake - for even horror can be quite mesmeric - she quickly pulls the shirt back down, nervously looking round as though someone might be spying. It's absurd, after all. It couldn't have happened to her. Wasn't she a feminist? She wouldn't have let herself be thrown across a room, nor shaken so hard that the fingerprints etched themselves deeper than acid. She wouldn't tolerate it. That's why she's hurrying into her coat and marching out of the shop, leaving the man she loves to make all the apologies to the sycophantic saleswoman, letting him explain that the Belgian lace bra, for all its appealing beige prettiness, doesn't quite fit.

    In the precinct, the shops are about to close, but the door to the old-fashioned stationers is still ajar.

    `Do you have fountain pens?' she asks, out of breath at the desk. `You know, the filling kind?'

    `Filling kind?'

    `Yeah. Not cartridges, but the ones you use with real bottles of ink?'

    The sales assistant has dark roots showing beneath his cropped blonde hair and a mobile bulging from his pocket. Either he wanted to lock up on time, or he thinks anyone writing by hand belongs in the ark. He fumbles in a drawer.

    `Something like this?'

    It's a fat pen, wine coloured, with a fine gold nib.

    `Perfect.'

    `You needn't think I'm getting you that for your birthday.' The man has finally caught up with her. `I thought you wanted a bra.'

    She doesn't reply. She's handling the pen, remembering how she used to get ink over her hands at school, the wrinkled side of the mid-finger first, then over her knuckles, palms, cheeks, chin. It would spill from her mouth. It would ooze from her lips.

    `What are you grinning about?' the man asks.

    She shakes her head. `Nothing.'

    `Yes you are. You're thinking about something.'

    It's true. She's thinking how she'll write a story about passion and passivity, feminism and post-feminism, love and mistakes. She's thinking how the pen is mightier than the penis. There. She smiles again. Those are the words she's been longing to write for a long time.

    `Ink spills from the corners of my mouth. It caresses the page. There can never be enough of it. Ink. Ink. Ink....'