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Speaker

The boy extended the aerial and clicked the switch to ON and out of the static from the little transistor radio a voice said:
When I found the little transistor radio at the church bring-and-buy, I’d already been in there for as long as I’d been a little boy at home, eating spaghetti with grated cheese and getting bathed.
Click.
The thing was that he was a little boy and he’d found this little transistor radio at the church bring-and-buy.
Click.
I’d known my own doorstep, known wet slate roofs and the sky through twigs, and all the while I’d also known the smell of warming dust, hidden components and the soft light behind the faceplate. Let me out, I’d often shouted, but it was only when I got the radio up to my bedroom that I heard my own small cries from behind the frequency dial.
Click.
He’d brought this radio up to his bedroom.
Click.
Let me out, said the voice he was certain now was his own. ‘I can’t,’ he whispered into the speaker’s grill. He was twisting the tuner now. He wanted to lose himself in the static of moderate to heavy rain putting money in the pockets of ordinary men and women carried far from the disaster on the wind and howling at the border where their desperate need was met with Vaughan Williams’s ‘Serenade in A Minor’ to conclude this evening’s broadcast.
Click.
‘If I let you out,’ whispered the boy, cradling the little radio under his bedclothes, ‘who will do all the voices?’