In every room, the radio’s tuned to screaming. There’s no context, no explanation, just the sound of human voices shaped to a sound that’s both less and more than language. It might just be hundreds – the number you’d get in a school hall, say, or a medium-sized hospital – but it could easily be all eight-billion-plus of us, each ripping the air apart with the only sound that expresses what it is to be alive in times like these. All the stooped old men playing boules in village squares, all the sharp-eyed women snipping stalks in narrow gardens, all the boys and girls holding hands and running through the shallows of a rumbling sea: all screaming, fit to shatter glass and stun the magpies from out of the sky. And I, of course, am screaming, too, my eyes crushed shut and my jaw stiff and burning. One of these days, the radio will fall silent, but these batteries seem to last forever.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
.