MIRANDA. She’s not perfect. Nobody is perfect. I’m not perfect. Our readers aren’t perfect. I need you to point out the ways in which this woman is not perfect.

SAM. But she is.

MIRANDA. Have you got a girlfriend?

SAM. No. I told you –

MIRANDA. I’m sorry, you did, I was listening, I just, right now I’m a bit all over the place, I’ve got the painters in.

SAM. Sure.

,

MIRANDA. That wasn’t a metaphor for my menstrual cycle, I do actually have people in, painting my flat and it means everything is covered in dust sheets and I can’t find anything, it’s a fucking nightmare, so I’m a bit distracted.

So you said, I’m sorry, you did, you did have a girlfriend but you don’t any more.

SAM. Yes.

MIRANDA. And did you love her, this girlfriend?

,

Did you love her?

SAM. Yes.

MIRANDA. But properly. Properly love her. Not just because you’re – what, twenty-one, twenty-two?

SAM. Twenty-four.

MIRANDA. Twenty-four, right, and even though she wasn’t actually The One, as in you couldn’t see her as a long-term life partner, the mother of your children, et cetera, for the time being she would do, you liked her enough so that when she said ‘I love you’ it was easier just to say it back than open up a whole hornet’s nest of hurt feelings and recrimination, so you allowed her to think that you loved her, that this was actually going somewhere, and you allowed her to think this for, say, five-and-a-half years, even though during that time you were, well, not actively on the look-out for other, but certainly, entertaining other, certainly open to, certainly keeping, you know, one eye on the market, you don’t mean you loved her in that way?

SAM. No.

MIRANDA. No!

She laughs.

Just me then!

MIRANDA moisturises her hands.

So you loved her? Properly loved her?

SAM. Yes.

MIRANDA. You found her sexually attractive?

SAM. Well, yeah. Of course. Very.

MIRANDA. But sometimes I expect, you noticed something, a little thing perhaps and that thing brought you up short, perhaps you noticed it when she was in the shower, washing herself, or maybe after sex, when you were lying in bed together naked.

SAM. I don’t – I’m not sure what you’re –

MIRANDA. A small thing. A mole that made you feel sick to look at it. Or a fungal infection in the toenails.

SAM. No. No I don’t –

MIRANDA. Not even something as noticeable as that even, just maybe, a sagging, somewhere. Or a texture.

SAM. A texture?

MIRANDA. To the skin, a roughness or a dimpling.

SAM. Yeah well, that’s just – skin, isn’t it?

MIRANDA. And once you’d noticed it, you couldn’t stop noticing it.

SAM. That’s just what skin does.