Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay Read Free Book Online

by the renewed, Job-like escalation of itching, made her understand the word
torture
.
    Then one day came the radio. Installed beside her bed, turned on. She escaped on the highways of the air. The Archers, John Drainie (reading a story she would never forget about a woman strangled by her long scarf when it caught in the wheel of her convertible), Max Ferguson as Rawhide, theweather, the farm broadcast. Once, as part of the farm broadcast, there was a horse auction with all the sounds of buying and selling, while in the background a young girl sobbed. There were suffering people in the world besides herself, Gwen learned. There were people who were heartbroken.
    Thinking back, it was a childhood of warts, wens, carbuncles, poison ivy, and trench mouth, this last affliction treated with gentian violet, her gums painted an astonishing violet-blue. Buttons were lost in the schoolyard. Shirts torn. All this was before television, though not technically. But her parents remained in the pre-television era, doing without one, eventually cancelling their subscription to the
London Free Press
. Living in silence, except for the radio.
    The dusty pale pink of calamine lotion.
    In her bedroom loose white curtains moved in the breeze. A sleeping-porch spacious with lack of anything but a white bed and bedside table and straight-backed chair and chest of drawers—and the movement of air through screened windows as gauzy curtains swelled inward. In another part of the house the telephone rang. But not here. Not in this outpost of quiet.
    And over the radio one night came the story of John Hornby, and something happened that she had almost despaired of ever happening. From having been locked in (at the end of a chapter, the poison-ivy chapter), she entered somebody else’s life and saw it from beginning to end. A man who starved to death. A man whose mistakes caused the death by starvation of his two young companions. A blue-eyed, soft-voiced, lucid madman, who courted hardship and seemed absolutely fearless. Gwen liked him enormously and fell under the spell of the desolate North.

 
     
 
    “YOU CAN TELL SO MUCH about a person by hearing his voice,” said Dido. She was in Eleanor’s kitchen, drinking up her coffee. The radio was on in the background, an announcer introducing choral music.
    “I wonder,” replied Eleanor, who’d gone to church that morning, reviving a habit she’d given up years ago. “I wonder how much you can really tell.” She remembered what her father had said about hearing Stalin on the radio in 1943: he had the warmest, sturdiest, most trustworthy voice he’d ever heard.
    Dido’s hands were wrapped around her coffee mug. Her hair was loose, her reading glasses in her pocket. “Gwen sounds like she’s falling asleep on air. I can’t listen to her.”
    “Give her time,” said Eleanor.
    She knew more about Gwen’s past than Dido did, she knew Gwen had been having troubles with her family, she’d run away in a sense. But even if Gwen hadn’t confided in her, she would have assumed something was wrong. There was her strange pallor, which made Eleanor think of Byron’s ivory-pale skin, the result of overeating, then eating nothing, and since she’d watched Gwen starve herself at breakfast only to overindulge at dinner, she guessed the girl might beself-denying and gluttonous, in turn. There was her consistently drab wardrobe, and not a trace of makeup or bit of jewellery.
    “She seems to want to erase herself,” Eleanor said, “so it’s strange she’s on the radio. It must be hard to have everybody listening to you.”
    “Or does she want to draw attention to herself?” Dido, impatient, swept her dark hair off her face. “She’s always talking to me about how bad she looks. I don’t mean to say,” altering her tone, “that she’s aware of how she talks. I don’t think she knows herself very well, actually. Anyway,” she said abruptly, “let’s get back to me.”
    Their eyes