Oh dear! Why’d I have to go and say that? Miss Hahn grumbled.

The tangible Miss Hahn – the one who stood before me – the actual Miss Hahn who had just leaned over and pressed her lips against my ear to whisper …

Why on earth am I wearing that awful hair-clip? Miss Hahn wondered.

Aaargh! I can’t help it! I just can’t help it! Whenever I lay eyes upon the actual Miss Hahn I just feel all these terrible impulses … these overwhelming urges of … of impotent rage. Because I am in love with Miss Hahn – Aaaargh! – and I couldn’t be more unhappy about it! And worse still, Miss Hahn, with her strange, grey-green eyes and her over-large nose and her strong jaw and her wide, unpainted mouth patently despises me! Palpably so! Heartily! Yes! Despises me sufficiently to place a rotting shark – a rotting shark! What kind of a person even … even thinks like that (aside from some high-status members of the Neapolitan Camorra crime syndicate, of course)? – under my bed on the very day that I discovered my first wife—

Your only wife, Miss Hahn corrected me.

—had died!

Although I didn’t know that she had died, Miss Hahn excused herself, and you had just cruelly insulted my father’s dog on the beach. Although I accept that it’s hardly an adequate defence …

That’s hardly an adequate defence! I yelled back.

I just said that, Miss Hahn sighed. Oh, and you made me cry, she mused, and I never cry. Never! But I was blubbing like a baby. Now about that coat …

With the mention of the coat my hiccups promptly started up again. And there was a powerful whiff of …

Need I even say?

The actual Miss Hahn, meanwhile, was trying – and failing – to explain herself.

You … you really cried? I murmured, mortified. On the beach? After I … I really made you cry that day, Miss Hahn?

Now about that coat … Miss Hahn repeated.

Hic!

The actual Miss Hahn was now staring at me, very concerned. ‘Mr Huff?’ she was saying. ‘Won’t you at least say something? Please? Anything?’

Why am I conducting this strange conversation with you in my head, Miss Hahn? I asked the imaginary Miss Hahn. When the actual Miss Hahn is standing right in front of me? I scowled. Did I invent you, perhaps, simply to avoid engaging emotionally with the actual Miss Hahn? As a … as a conduit for my real feelings which I can’t actually … which I’m signally incapable of …? Or just because I’m so … so lonely and so … so desperate to … to be close to you that I literally …? Or are you actually the real Miss Hahn, Miss Hahn, and this curiously coarse and scruffy creature which stands before me is simply a …?

Hello? Hello? Miss Hahn?

The Miss Hahn inside my head had gone unusually quiet. I really had no idea what she was getting up to in there.