As soon as radios were invented, people believed they could transmit messages from the afterlife, and the foggy notion that electromagnetic waves have supernatural clout has been with us ever since. The radio in this story, instead of receiving messages from the dead, prevents communication with the living.

Grace’s mother returns home early from the hospital after giving birth. She locks the baby in a bedroom and turns up the radio so she can’t hear the newborn crying. Grace is forbidden to phone her absent father because it’ll “scramble the sounds”. The radio must be tuned to a musical station – speech is intolerable.

Eventually, Grace’s mother decides that a single device is not enough to defeat the baby, and drafts in a record player for support. The two of them have to sit in the resulting dissonance and “listen for instructions, make sure we’re tuned in.” Her mother, slumped in a chair while her “face gleams dully in the small light of the on switch,” draws a very unsettling picture of the baby on a sketchpad. Attuned to the frequencies of horror in everyday objects and situations, Davies produces a brilliant, haunting conclusion.

In her fiction, Davies attends to sound as a multi-sensory experience, and deftly anchors her characters’ peculiar ways of listening in their material and historical surroundings. In this story, sonic technology allows tension to flow around the family network, and acts as a catalyst for post-natal mental upheaval.

Collected in Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful, Parthian, 2008