“I was given the gift of a wireless when I was nine. It was more the gift of a talent than a link to the wider world, because the thing was broken, and therefore silent.” Frank was placing the spanners he’d used on the airplane back into the cupboard.
“And you fixed it.” Peter stood leaning on the workbench, his arms crossed tightly against the chill of the hangar.
“My father’s brother gave it to me. It seemed a luxury to have such a portable unit that I could claim for myself. My uncle didn’t know it was broken when he offered it, only knew that he wanted me out of his garden room, and so he told me to take it up to the bedroom, to listen to it where he would not be able to hear me.
“It wasn’t the voices and music on the airwaves that I was interested in, it was the tubes and wires that transmitted the sound. Up in my room, away from the fitful glare of my uncle, I peeled away the back of it. It was a gem, the vacuum tubes like a cluster of perfectly formed stalagmites. I removed the screws on the casing and pulled out the chassis with no clear idea of what I was doing. I ran my hand over the components, held the chassis in my lap as if I could intuit the workings through touch and proximity. Later I would have the language to make sense of each part—transformer, capacitor, resister—the poetry of mechanics.”
“It stays with you still, this language of poetry.”
“My talent is in mechanics; I only aspire to poetry.”
They packed the airplane away, the cold too much to work in, and covered it with the canvas draping. They would go to lunch, they decided. A pint and a warm fire would do them good. They tromped across the field to the car, with Frank still thinking back to that time at his uncle’s place. It was cold then, too. He’d worked on the wireless by the fireplace in his room, the air so draughty he would pull the bed covering around his shoulders. He ran his fingers over the tubes one by one, feeling something like a mystic, the art and science of the machine a mystery that held power he could perceive but not yet fully understand. He wanted to consult his uncle, wondering whether he dared ask if this were a knowledge common to adults.
The knowledge of adults, that, too, he was learning during his time with his uncle. He’d been sent to this northern home to recover from his surgery and allow his mother a rest. That’s what his father had told him, but his mother didn’t seem tired, more that she was unsure of all the talk around her, her words held back, especially with Frank, who would ask again and again when he would be well because he’d been promised he would be.
His father used words like resilience, robust, vigour—words that confused Frank. His uncle had been in a war, his father told him before Frank left, as if this held some meaning for the boy. When would he return? Frank wanted to know. Two months would soon pass, his father assured him.
But they hadn’t. Not at first, when his uncle left him in the hours between breakfast and dinner, telling him to walk the perimeter of the meadow as if that alone would fill a day. The neighbour’s son, a boy two years older, helped fill that clawing loneliness. Frank’s body splayed among the flowers by the side of the path, his leg aching from the rain that would arrive later in the day, and a voice jarring him from a dream of his mother so that when he opened his eyes, it was his mother’s face he saw, his own face collapsing into a smile that moved through his body in an instant, so that he sat up abruptly. The voice again, but not his mother’s, which rendered him further startled, and then threatened so that he jumped up to his feet, tipsy from the swift movement of his weak leg. Easy, the voice said, easy, this time with a hand reaching out to steady him.
He drew pictures, the boy did, of birds, foxes, badgers, things he saw in nature, which was stated in a manner that suggested a place with an address. The boy began joining Frank on his walks, and they enjoyed this exploration of their surroundings, of each other. They developed a coded language, ways of seeing, that drew a circle around them and chipped away at the lonely hours Frank spent on his own.
After a few weeks he and his uncle were invited to dinner by the boy’s father. Frank’s recollection of the evening was of dazzling lights shimmering off any number of surfaces—crystal, silver, mirrored glass—the talk so loud and certain that it floated over him, leaving him feeling that he was hidden from it, and that the boy, too, was hidden, with no one directing the conversation to either. It seemed obvious that they should use their secret language, their private gestures. They did not notice the raised eyebrows of the adults, they only knew the conversation around them marched on throughout the evening. Only later did he realize he’d failed somehow. His uncle fuming in a silence that lasted days, the only clue an utterance about his behaviour, and Frank, heartbroken, retreated to his room knowing he’d seen the last of the boy.
“I remember that the chassis felt alive, and I hugged it gently so as not to break the glass tubes.” They had settled into the pub, ordered pints of bitter, a couple of pies. “I looked down on them one by one, examining the clear tubes with the silver mirror-like spot on them, then found one with a white haze inside, one that did not look like the others. I jiggled it until it came loose, and when I pulled it out, I wrapped it in my handkerchief and put it in the drawer with my underwear.”
At this Peter laughed.
“Later, when I could sneak away, I spoke to the car mechanic, who explained that the tube had lost its vacuum and would need to be replaced. A week later with the help of the mechanic I bought a new tube and placed it in the vacant spot. I put the chassis back into the case and tightened the screws, then adjusted with the knobs until I was able to hear voices.”
“A feel for mechanics.” Peter tipped his beer toward Frank’s in congratulations of this feat. “To fix a wireless at that young age. Now, that’s a talent.”
But Frank could not tell him that in fixing the wireless, in listening to those voices, he’d been made to feel lonely all over again.