The recording

Source: an original fiction extract.

“The recording was only forty seconds long. Cass found it on an old phone while clearing a drawer: her grandfather describing how to mend a garden gate. She had filmed him because he kept forgetting that she had never used a drill. In the video, his face was mostly outside the frame. There were his hands, the hinge and a strip of sunlight on the grass. Cass pressed play again before calling her younger brother into the room.

The speaker rasped around the edges of his voice. Each word arrived wrapped in a faint dry crackle, like paper being unfolded carefully after years in a box. Behind him, a bird repeated three clear notes. His hand entered the frame, broad and steady, then withdrew. The camera wandered towards the grass, caught the bright toe of Cass's shoe and returned too late to the hinge.

Her brother watched without speaking. Then he said he did not remember their grandfather sounding like that. Cass told him of course he did. He shook his head. In the recording, the drill started and drowned out the next sentence. Cass remembered the sentence perfectly, or thought she did: something about not forcing the screw. Her brother asked her to turn it up. She turned it up, but the missing words did not return.

They watched it five more times. On the sixth, her brother laughed. Cass stopped the recording. He pointed to the corner of the screen. Just before the drill began, their grandfather had tried to move a beetle from the wood with one enormous finger. The beetle had climbed onto it. He had waited, patient and faintly annoyed, for it to choose another route. Cass had never noticed. She played the recording again without watching the hinge.

That evening, she saved copies in two places and wrote down what she knew about the day. Beside the uncertain sentence, she put a question mark. Her brother added a drawing of the beetle. When they finished, the recording was still forty seconds long. It did not contain everything they wanted. Cass left the sound at its ordinary volume and watched her grandfather wait.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the fragile and incomplete quality of the recording. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.