“The Jacaranda tree” — H. E. Bates
If the boy desired anything more than this it was to hear voices in the rejected radio-set that Paterson had thrown away and was now his own. Every evening, in his own hut of bamboo across the compound, he labouriously took the set to pieces in the light of a paper-shaded candle and laboriously put it together again. Every night he listened and waited. Nothing had so far happened to break the silence and bring the voices and music to him as they were brought to Paterson, but he did not doubt that, in time, if he were patient, something would.
The bungalow was two-storeyed, opening on to sleeping verandahs back and front. The nights were still cool enough for Paterson to sleep inside. On the upper back verandah slept the boy’s sister, and as he went upstairs with the tea at a minute to five he stood on the top of the stairs for a moment and listened and waited. She did not seem to be moving and he went on. In both the cool and the hot weather and through the short hot rains she always slept there. Ever since the day the boy had first brought her to the house Paterson had called her Nadia, partly because it was a name he liked, partly because he could not bother with Burmese names, beautiful though they were. In the same way he called the boy Tuesday: because that too was simpler and because Tuesday was the day he had walked in, dead-beat and smiling, from the country somewhere east of Shwebo.
