'Tales of a Carer No. 3' by Peter Hodges

She's got wireless headphones now. She wanders the house looking like one of those moon-men out of a fifties' comic: glassy-eyed and abstracted, things clamped on the ears, an aerial looped like a tiara except it's black and plastic and not at all regal but modern and oozing communication. But not to me.
"Shush, I'm listening." Not to me of course. Or to you. Not to anyone but to it: the book, the blessed Talking Book.
It's wireless headphones now. No longer tied by wire to the machine that lives in the living room. Free to wander now. I never know where she is. In the loo, in the kitchen, sorting washing in the laundry. It's like a disembodied soul about the house.
My doing of course. I bought them, those wireless headphones. Currys--£35--and a spare set of batteries. Technology was never so good, so easy, so cheap, so impossibly non-communicating. The very impossibility of it, of ever getting a word in. Oh Lord, now where is she? I call out but….
"Shh-h-H-H-H!"
She's in the garden! Through the gate at the top and into the vegetable patch. Now down again, the front garden. It must be the last chapter, it has to be the last chapter--the hero gets the girl or gets shot, or the plane's about to crash. The very climax of it, and I sneak a peek through the curtains. Oh Lord, she's coming in, running. Missed a word, I'll be bound. Nearly knocks me over in the hall, into the living room, smacks the player, searching back.
"SHHH-H-H-H…! "
My heart races… but now she sits. And at last a smile comes and with it glorious peace. "So it was him after all. I knew all along." The headphones are hung up and she's my wife again. "Put the kettle on, there's a dear."