Margret [spotting Mil picking with his fingernail at the goo left on a CD case by the price label]: 'What are you doing?'

Mil: 'I'm talking to Mark using Morse code — he's at home right now holding one of his CD cases, picking up the vibrations I'm making.'

Margret: 'No you're not, you liar. You're lying. Why do you always lie? You liar.'

Mil: 'It works by resonance. You just have to practise for a bit to be able feel the plastic quivering — go over and get that Black Grape case, press it on to your nose, and we'll see if you can pick up anything.'

(There's the briefest flicker of indecision in her eyes; offering me, for one tantalising moment, the possibility that I'm going to spend the next ten minutes — 'What about this, then? Press it on your face harder.' — having quite simply the best of times… but then she grunts.)

Margret: 'Liar. You're just a liar.'

Mostly, however, we've got it smooth and efficient now. We don't have to think. She says, 'What are you doing?', I peer at her with irritation and expel air, we go on about our business. This morning, though, she came upstairs to the attic here while I was sitting in front of the computer doing some work on the net.

'What are you doing?' she asks.

Trying to concentrate on something, distracted and harassed, I reply with some degree of acerbic aggravation.

'What does it look like I'm doing?'

There's a beat, during which we hold each others eyes, unblinking.

It's immediately after this beat has passed that I realise I'm wearing no trousers.

There is, it's opulently redundant of me to add, a perfectly reasonable and innocuous explanation for why I'm browsing the web alone in my attic with no trousers on, but you're all busy people and I know you have neither the inclination nor the time to waste hearing it. As an image, however, it did rather undercut my sarcasm. Margret — in a brutally savage reversal of tactics — didn't speak. She merely raised her eyebrows and there, revealed, was a face that read, 'I have been waiting thirteen years for this moment.'

67

I was watching Mission Impossible and it was making me uneasy. Tom Cruise was doing something — infiltrating, probably, you know what he's like — and he was continuously describing the situation to his distant support buddies via his headset radio. For a while, I naturally assumed that it was simply Tom Cruise's big nose that was unsettling me and tried, using soothing visualisations and breathing exercises, to move myself, mentally, to a place where it wasn't an issue. But then — the realisation freezing my arm and abruptly halting a crisp's journey from bag to mouth — I had a small epiphany: 'Lawks,' I thought, 'This is my girlfriend.'

"Margret, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to wander around constantly articulating precisely what it is that you're doing at that moment, as though relaying it to an unseen control team somewhere. Possibly, on an alien mother ship, secretly orbiting the Earth. For example."

She does this all the time. 'Get some eggs from the fridge… here's the butter… and now a frying pan… What's in the cupboard? OK, we've got oregano… some basil… I'll go for the mixed herbs… Now I need some scissors…' Who is she talking to? It's certainly not me: for one thing, I can see what she's doing — and, further, am not interested — and for another, I sometimes hear her doing this while she's alone in a room in another part of the house. And — though, admittedly, there's often a huge temptation to think she functions like this — I don't believe it's because she simply has no idea what she's going to do until it's actually occurring and I'm merely listening to her keeping her mind informed about what it is that her body appears to be doing right now. Sometimes we'll be sitting down watching TV and she'll get up and say, 'I'm going to the toilet.' Why would anyone say that? Does she think I'm keeping a log for research purposes? Is she intimating that she needs help? Does she have reason to expect that she may be abducted halfway up the stairs and thus wants me to at least be able to tell the police, 'Well, the last time I saw her I know she was on her way to the toilet.' What?

Surely, it can only be that she's an undercover member of the M.I. team. Every time a van is parked near our house now, I imagine Ving Rhames is in it; 'OK, the toilet's at the top of the stairs — it's unguarded, but has a slightly bent hinge…'

Oh, and the first person to say, 'Well, if she's doing an impossible mission, then that'd be 'living with you' , Mil, wouldn't it?' gets a very slow handclap, OK?

68

The other possibility is that she's simply talking to the air. 'But that,' you say, 'would make her mad.' Yet, isn't there an idea that everything — water, rocks, fire, etc. — has a spirit, that everything is, in some way, 'alive'? Isn't that believed by some people? 'Yes,' you say, 'mad people.' Well, I certainly can't argue with you there (and don't wish to debate the theory with any Californians who are reading either, thanks), but I raise it as a possibility. Because, if we're looking for a mystic answer, she certainly regards the television as the Magic Box Full Of Tiny People Who Can Hear Her. If an actress says — as actresses seem highly prone to — 'I'm just going down into the cellar,' she'll often call out to her, 'Don't go down into the cellar!' Or she'll offer lengthy and detailed personal advice: 'No, don't send him that letter. He's just using you. Leave him and go back to Brian.'

I can watch a film many times. Margret thinks watching a film more than once (even worse — buying the DVD so that I can watch it whenever I want) is, well, I'm not sure there's a word to describe it. If she discovers me watching a film, says, 'Haven't you already seen this?' and I reply, 'Yes,' and continue to watch, she looks at me like I'd just confessed to being sexually aroused by livestock. A swirling mixture of incomprehension, contempt and with just a hint of, 'I knew it…' I realise now that this might be because she doesn't feel she's watching a film, but rather guiding the Tiny People through actual ordeals — a strain she doesn't want to have to endure twice.

I've tried telling her that TV doesn't work like that. That the people are just actors. But she just doesn't seem to get it. She throws back some nonsense about me compulsively sitting there, flooded with adrenaline, barking out the answers when University Challenge is on — clearly unaware that this is exactly what has made humankind so successful: the desire to test oneself against oceans, mountains, one's own deepest fears, or a selection of general knowledge questions. More disastrously, she also completely misses the point and starts going on about me shouting at the tennis on television or something. Incredibly, it seems she's unable to see the difference between her talking to actors, recorded on film, and my shouting, 'Go down the line!' while watching the television broadcast of a live match when, of course, in those circumstances there really is the possibility of my altering the course of play by vocalizing the sheer focussed power of my will. She still has an awful lot to learn about science, I'm afraid.