Medium Wave

This week, we take a trip to all your favourite holiday locations: the zoo, the bandstand, the pier, the moon, the spider's web, the regret, the campsite. Then home in time to mend a haunted radio.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

We had a wonderful day at the old zoo, seeing all the different habitats. We felt the heat of the reptile house and bathed our feet where the penguins once swam. It’s astonishing to think that so many different creatures lived so close to us. We ate the last of our honey on dense, dry bread, and looked at the photographs, faded but beautiful.

Tuesday

The band played on as the bandstand sank into the lake. One last show, by the light of headtorches and battery-powered lanterns: the warden, as angry as anyone, would have let them play regardless, but there was a general will to spare him the trouble. When their boots were full of water and mud and unfunded splinters, they waded out, instruments held over their heads like rifles. There was one final round of applause, barely heard over the cracking of timber.

Wednesday

Ben and Emily loitered on the pier, mugging people of their doughnuts. Just one from each bag, mind, and if you said no they let you be. But very few said no. Most admired the cheek of it, and besides, a bag of five was too many. After another success they licked the sugar from their lips and their fingers, ready for the next. They were starting to feel queasy, but neither wanted to be the one to call a stop.

Thursday

I lived on the new moon and he lived on the old. I had only footprints and broken things to tell me what he had learned. What are we to do, so far from home but always tied to it? What are we to do with just thirty days in the sun? It is dark for him now, and I never met him. A small mercy.

Friday

We were caught twice over: once by the shrinking, and again by the web. Fear not, I said. A barrier has fallen. We can reason with the spider now. We can show it all that we understand of the world. But of the world we were caught in, we understood nothing.

Saturday

The next morning I didn’t remember, but I could feel it, the way you feel the grit in your eye long after it washes away, the way you taste the dirt in your mouth after you spit it out. I had a long, hot bath, a walk in the park, a cinema trip, another drink. But there’s no more forgetting what’s forgotten. When the teeth of my fear closed on me, there was nothing left but to remember.

Sunday

When breakfast was ready Jamie was still snoring away in his five-quid tent. Even from outside you could see the droplets where his breath had condensed on the plastic sheet. We grabbed a corner each and shook to make it rain, but on he snored. The zip wouldn't pull so we ripped the seam open. Inside was a snoring speaker, and a tunnel leading far and away.

I have been reading...

• Not very much, apparently! I am a little way into If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi, which follows Jewish resistance fighters stranded in Nazi-occupied territory. The clear, plain way Levi depicts their hardships is striking.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

Medium Wave

If the radio plays when it isn't plugged in then chances are it has batteries. If there is music between the stations then in all likelihood there is interference, or a pirate broadcast, or you simply have a musical imagination.

If it is in pieces on your bench, the speaker wires desoldered and the voltage regulator burnt out, and you still hear a choir, then of course it is only natural that you should begin to think of ghosts.