Subtitles: On

"You've put them on again." "I haven't touched them." "Nadim. There are words at the bottom of the screen. Someone has put them there." "It remembers from last time." "It remembers because you turned them on last time." Farah reached for the remote. Nadim, who had it, moved it in a manner he would later describe as "instinctive". They'd been having this argument since roughly the second month of living together, which was four years ago, and it had never been resolved because neither of them had ever been wrong. Nadim's position was that television these days was mixed by people who hated the human ear, that every actor mumbled, that the music was always louder than the dialogue, and that subtitles were a simple accessibility tool no different from glasses. Farah's position was that she had watched films for thirty-one years without a running commentary at the bottom and she wasn't going to start now, and that reading the line before the actor said it killed every joke stone dead. "Name one joke it's killed." "The thing with the goat. Last week." "You laughed at the goat." "I laughed on the subtitle. I should have laughed on the goat. That's a different laugh." Nadim considered this. He had a scientist's instinct for the fair point and it had cost him many arguments. "Compromise," he said. "Go on." "I'll turn them off. But if I say 'what' more than three times in an episode, they go back on." "Twice." "Three's standard." "Two's the deal." He turned them off. The show resumed. It was a crime thing set in Scotland with a lot of rain and a detective who spoke, in Nadim's view, exclusively in vowels. Ninety seconds in: "What did he say?" "He said the body was found by the loch." "Fine. One." Four minutes: "What?" "She's his ex-wife. He didn't say it, it's implied." "That's not a what, that's a plot question." "It's a what." "That's not fair. I'd have needed that with subtitles too." Farah paused the show. She looked at him. He looked at her. On the screen a very wet Scottish man was frozen mid-vowel.

"You're on two," she said. "I'm on one and a plot question." "Nadim." He held out for another six minutes. It was, he felt afterwards, a heroic six minutes. Then the detective's boss said something in a corridor, a whole sentence, and there was music over it, and Nadim felt the word rising in him like a sneeze. "Wh" Farah hit the button on the remote before he could finish. The words came up at the bottom of the screen. The boss's sentence appeared in full and it was, they both agreed, quite an important sentence. "Right," said Farah. "But I'm choosing the next show. And it's going to be one where they enunciate." "There isn't one." "There's got to be one." They watched the rest with the words on. Farah laughed on the joke, not on the subtitle, twice, and didn't mention it.