Mil's Mailing List Mail #33

I just stepped out into the back garden to sample the fresh, pure December air, while having a cigarette. As I stood there prodding weighty philosophical questions with my keen mind, my eyes drifted from the lazy helixes of smoke twisting up in the still afternoon and moved along the flowerbeds on the edges of the lawn. They came to rest on a human hand - white and rigid - protruding from the soil.

I juggled several, related thoughts.

Clearly, Margret had killed someone and hidden the corpse by our abelias. This struck me as something of a cheek as, a couple of nights ago, we'd been having an argument which included this exchange (the argument started because I wouldn't tell her how I'd just done a card trick, by the way: that, within about eight sentences, it had shifted gears to this point is definitively Us):
Me: "…or a murder."
Margret: "Don't be stupid. That's not the same - I know you haven't murdered anyone." She stopped abruptly here; then looked at me sideways through cautious eyes, before accusingly adding, "Well… I don't think you have, at least."
At the time, I'd thought this was nothing more than a vague threat. Sort of, "Look - either you tell me how you knew I'd chosen the seven of hearts, or I'm going to do my damnedest to have you framed for an unsolved slaying." Now, gazing at those dead fingers reaching up towards the sky, however, I realised it was actually the result of transference: the voice of her guilty conscience. "Chk," I thought. "Typical."

Also, I reflected that she'd obviously found the time to dig the hole. Great. I'm crushed under so many deadlines that I don't have a spare moment even to trim my nails or to have my arm tugged briskly to pop that dislocated shoulder back into its socket, yet she has enough Me Time to hack out a makeshift grave. Absolutely Great.

Mostly, however, looking at that exposed hand provoked a pleasing sense of triumph. "Ha!" I smiled with satisfaction. "Not ten minutes ago she was moaning like hell at me for not cleaning under the toaster well enough - yet she can't even hide the corpse of her victim properly. We're going to have words about that when she gets back. Oh yes."

On closer inspection, it turned out that the hand was something Margret had obviously created the previous night, as a decoration: it was actually made from plaster that had been - I assume - moulded in a glove, then planted in the ground as a feature. So, it turned out, Margret was exonerated. (Well, you know, as exonerated as anyone else who thinks that a dismembered body part would be the ideal thing for a garden ornament, that is.)

The interesting thing is the greased ease with which I was able to assume - as, by implication, Margret had been with me two evenings ago - that she's bumped someone off. It's interesting as (presumably because Margret and I have been together for over a decade and a half) I'm fairly often asked by people from some corner or other of the media to suggest to their readers/listeners/viewers how I think couples can keep their relationships springy and vibrant. It seems to me that the secret turns out to be for both your minds to harbour the barely-covered suspicion that the other one of you is a killer. That 'incipient hunch that your partner is prone to homicide' really will stop you becoming complacent and taking each other for granted. Thus, relationships shouldn't look to some book like 'How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life', but rather to, say, the movie 'Jagged Edge'.

It's gratifying to realise that Margret and I were about sixteen years ahead of the curve on this one.

Anyway, I didn't intend to talk about all that. Actually, I intended to talk about something else entirely; that'll have to wait until the next Mailing List Mail now - there isn't room here. Unless, of course, I pop out for a cigarette before doing the next Mail, find that Margret's left a severed head on the lawn, and then have to put off what I was going to say yet again so I can rush up here and announce, "A-ha! Turns out it was a crafty double bluff!" Before I leave you, however, there are two things I need to say.

1) As you know, I finished Book 3 a while ago. It's not out until autumn next year, but the ceaseless, cruelly abrasive nature of novel writing is such that I'm already having to start work on Book 4. Now, naturally, being Mailing Listers, you all effortlessly attain a base level of intelligence and handsomeness that pops you straight into the 98th percentile of humans presently living on the Earth. What utterly delights seven to nine of my toes, however, is the fact that experience has shown me that on the Mailing List there is sure to be at least one specialist in anything I could possibly name. If I ever need to speak to, say, a paleoclimatologist, or a ship mechanic, then there will certainly be one among your number. Whatever I might, for some reason, need to explore - the details of farming practices in New Zealand, what one sees looking down a particular street in Hawaii, how it feels to be the only sixteen-year-old girl in Louisiana to have read a book, etc. - I know that, were I to ask, then the unfaltering pool of eliteness that is the Mailing List would be able to answer my questions. Well, for Book 4, it turns out I'd like to ask a few rather specific things about neurology (as Book 4 partly involves that much-overlooked area, 'the comedy of serious head injury'). So, are there any clinical neurologists out there who'd be so kissable as to drop me a line if they're prepared to submit to a little interrogation? If you're game, please give me a shout at:
dr.waldman.is.oddly.unavailable@ntlworld.com
Multiple thanks.

2) As was the case last year, both shivery affection and simple, British honour yells for me to include you, my dearest, darlingest Mailing Listers, on the list of people to whom I send my Christmas Card. It awaits an intimate tryst with your shining eyes at this secret rendezvous point:
http://microurl.com/mil/Xmas+2004

Right - I must leave you now to buy presents for lesser aunts. Feel free to discover a particle or strike out heroically towards distant rocky outcrops until I pop back in 2005.

Mil.

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