Click

In picking up the radio my thumb rested on the ribbed volume dial and clicked it from off. A tinny wall of static scratched out of the speaker. I jumped. I’d been sorting my office, moving a box of the old man’s things, the radio included. I nudged the other dial a few millimetres - it had been knocked a little off station with the years in that box - and there it was, as it was every morning and Sunday lunchtime when I was a kid: Radio 2, AM, muffled and washy.

Unbelievably, 22 years, 8 months and 2 days after he took his last breath on the fourth stair of the house where he’d lived the last 34 years of his life, the radio still had what he did not: a little life left in the battery.