Summer Storm

SUMMER STORM

I love the moments just before a summer storm. You know the kind - your weather app's been showing little lightning bolts all day but you've actually got your umbrella for once so it probably won't bother, will it, you think, but you can never be sure; you in your open shoes with your blazer slung over your forearm with scant regard for creases because the sky may be a cool iron grey but the city is airless, a chrome-glass goldfish bowl full of lazy-making heat. It settles in your joints, makes you languid and liquid. Women slink feline in billowing skirts and skimpy shorts; men lounge sweat-dewed in the long grass that glows Technicolor green, watching the heatstroked world through narrowed eyes.

Everything's both restless and breathless, hurry but don't, a world on tenterhooks. Guffs of hot rank air like dragon breath send litter-leaves cartwheeling over the bleached pavement, ancient gum blobs metastasised and turned to sin-black tar, and it feels almost like some ancient natural law has been breached when the first unexpected drops come needling down into the hot thicket of your scalp, pinprick your sun-seared flesh.

At the mouth of the U-Bahn cavern, the grinning organ grinder's spinning insanity like candy floss in homage to the end of the world. Quick, take cover underground, before the fabric of heaven is torn asunder and the street turns to sea.