Heatwave

Claire had only known Petri for three months before he moved into her small top floor flat. Friends attributed her impulsiveness to the heat. It was the hottest summer in living memory. Petri was handsome and Scandinavian and worked in the local hospital. He was not blond. He liked skiing. This was as much as anyone knew.

On the day he arrived she opened all the windows and moved the only fan from her bedroom to the sitting room to create the illusion of air and space. They sat side by side on the sofa in the fan’s slight breeze. He smiled at her, saying, “I am sensitive to the heat.” He told her about his home town: “In the winter it is so cold you cannot walk outside. And it is always dark.” His words seemed to melt on contact with the air. It was the longest speech he ever gave.

The flat was above a restaurant and barely needed heating even in the winter. At the top of the stairs there was a washer-dryer and a large freezer, which opened upwards like a steel coffin. It was a fixture Claire secretly enjoyed. She liked to hoard food. When she showed Petri the freezer he opened it and pressed his hand to the frost at the edges. “For keeping cool,” he smiled.

By the following month the world had become hotter and stranger. Train tracks buckled and mosquitoes proliferated in low-lying areas. Someone went crazy in a northern city and murdered prostitutes night after night. Workers went on strike. The parks were empty after a rabies scare. There was an asthma epidemic. The newspapers talked about fevers and droughts and skin cancer.

Inside the white honeycomb of the hospital, Petri sweltered. The patients exuded sickly heat but shivered, and the windows were all locked shut. The white paint on the corridor bubbled in the humidity. Nurses stopped wearing underwear under their uniforms and surgeons took cold showers before going into theatre. Patients poured in and died in droves. People seemed to be frailer in the heat and died when they shouldn’t. They argued more, drank more, crashed their cars more, and died more.

It was cold only in the mortuary, which was all elegant blues and greys and a smell of cleaning fluid. The porters did not disguise their relief at being sent on a job down there. Petri seemed to be particularly lucky in this regard. His shifts seemed to coincide with a flurry of bodies. The other men called him Doctor Death and he smiled at their jokes. “Shit Petri, aren’t you getting tired of lugging bodies up and down to the basement all day?”

Soon all Petri seemed to do was go from room to room, collecting boxes on trolleys. They looked like cardboard coffins but with a flap of blue plastic sheeting over the top. He wheeled them down to the mortuary at a rate of about one an hour. There he would sit in the cold for a while longer with the mortuary technician, a thin ragged man strangely elated by the recent upturn in business. Petri concentrated on feeling each hair on his arms stand up in the chill. When the doctor arrived to sign the cremation certificate Petri would stand up quickly and push through the heavy doors, back into the heat.

When he got back to the flat, Claire wanted to go out. He shook his head. “Too hot.” She was upset, tears evaporating from her hot cheeks. She asked why he wanted to sit in the flat night after night where there was no breeze. There was a noise to the heat, seeping in through the windows and drowning her out. The roar of traffic and ambulance sirens and shouting. He made tall glasses of ice and sipped the melt water, the fan a foot from his nose.

At night it annoyed him, her lying next to him like a hot coal. The soles of his feet were burning. They lay on opposite sides of the bed, the sheet pulled taut between them. He lay with a bag of frozen peas on his forehead. By the following week he slept partly covered in frozen food, awaking to the smell of fish fingers.

He began night shifts. When he made his first trip to the mortuary the technician was not there. There was another body on the steel table, a head injury waiting for autopsy. Petri sat with her for a while, pressing her chilly blue-pink skin.

After a few days they hardly overlapped at all. Claire admitted to close friends that moving in so quickly had been a mistake. She noticed that the freezer was gradually emptying of food, and the layer of frost that encircled the food was thinning. She found squashed peas in the bed and left him a bad-tempered note about it. He wrote back so politely she felt embarrassed for the frosty tone of her own note. She tried to call him but remembered he had given up his phone. After that, there were no more peas in the bed. In fact, there were no more signs of Petri at all. Claire began to look for evidence of his having been in the flat. Nothing ever seemed to be disturbed. The bed was unruffled when she got home, but he was tidy. She left him notes, but he did not reply. She left biscuits out, as though trying to catch an animal.

Eventually she called the hospital. They said that Petri had not turned up for work in three weeks and that they had tried to call him but the only number that he left didn’t work. Claire put the phone down and sat in front of the whirring fan, thinking. The weather had still not broken. He was missing but she did not know who to inform. She knew very little about him. All he had left behind were clothes and a few books. Then a thought struck her. She stood up and walked to the top of the stairs. She opened the steel door and saw him lying there with a halo of frozen chips, his eyelashes tinged with white, too pretty to even scare her.