You are listening to the Radio

2013

Voices, disembodied because I gave them no credit, rose from the radio on the kitchen table.

It was simply background noise. Something to deny the present and its pain. A companion maybe but not with a voice that mattered.

No friends left to support.

None left to disregard.

But then I would not have had it any other way.

Drowning in solitude of my own choosing.

Anyone foolish enough to have you as a friend cannot be worthy of your attention.

My gates were closed to the world so that I could not hurt them anymore and they could not hurt me in their turn.

My ear caught a few streaming words from the box:

“No peace in Ireland”.

When had it ever been otherwise? I tried to listen to what they were saying but I couldn’t. There was some inner compulsion which led me away from the messages, from the box.

I poured myself another measure and watched the rich amber liquid swirl in the glass. I sipped its bitter taste. Now there was a friend. It didn’t talk. It was simply effective. It took all the voices away, all the screams, the yells, the inner anguish.

But even then I knew it to be a false friend too.

I took the radio switched it off and threw it in a waste paper bin.

At the same time I took the glass I had poured and washed it down the sink.

I went outside into my grounds and smelt the air.

In this late spring season after another downpour, the sour odour of wet earth and of newly cut grass.

An end.

Not a beginning.

I wandered further past the door, down the path to the drive and across it to the paddock.

I went in and played with the dogs in their kennels.

My ear was caught again by the sound of another radio. I had forgotten that I played them music throughout the night to help them sleep.

This time I heard more clearly what was said.

“Three dead in a fire in London’s East End.”

I pondered on what I heard. And I wondered if they were not the lucky ones.

They would have had full lives, difficult partners and screaming brats. Maybe they lived on the breadline. Maybe they didn’t.

Of a Saturday evening they would perhaps go to the pub and carouse with the rest of them. But they were humanity in one of its forms and like all of them struggling to make it work.

But then I realised, I didn’t want to make it work.

All I wanted and had ever wanted was to make it count.

A completely different concept.

And in the end I hadn’t made it count. I had failed.

The notion of treating others as you wish they would treat you had always been a guiding principle in my life. The sorrow however I had found was that the good you do is often neither returned nor remembered, but the bad you do is followed by vengeance, accompanied by rejection and rarely if ever forgotten.

But then, no-one could ever hate me more than I did myself; for who I was; for what I had done; the devil I had become. Illness might explain but could not and would not ever excuse. Guilty as charged. No excuse for the inexcusable. No defence for the indefensible.

I stroked the dogs and locked the paddock gate, marching purposefully back to my house now.

I saw the radio in the bin and reached for it.

I smashed it on the kitchen tiled floor.

Then I reached for the drawer.

© 2013 James Hanna-Magill