Mrs Fred

Did she exist?

Fred talked about his wife occasionally. Mainly he referred to her as "the wife" or even "her indoors". (I think he'd watched too many episodes of Minder). But he never let on too much about her, and never mentioned her name. He would only mention her at all in context of what they had been doing, as in: "Me and the wife were watching Minder last night..." I mentioned this to somebody at Dunhill's in Brentford once and they said no one had ever seen her.

After a while I began to wonder if Fred really did have a wife or whether this was all a fantasy. But looking at Fred's clean, ironed shirt, and thinking about his complete lack of competence and lack of imagination, I guess it was true, and that Mrs Fred really did exist. For the life of me I can't imagine what she was like.