Sun-blush

The heat lies on us like a blanket. Like a layer of heated air, draped over the houses and lying thickly down the streets. To walk outside is to push through a wall of indolence, lifting each limb against the heavy pull of voluptuous, shimmering warmth.

Londoners are baking. Sun-blushed, hot-crushed, sweat-glazed. We are steam-grilled on the tube: the hot air blowing from the back of the seats only serving to lift wet, sad locks of hair and to press them across damp cheeks. Cotton shirts are multi-coloured terrain maps of a far-off desert: colours springing out under arms and in unsightly patches across backs, to mark out in darkened pink or blue, ‘Here be dragons’: a patchwork quilt of perspiration. Water bottles are clutched defensively: last weapon against head-spin, last hope against heat-slump, sun-drop. We stand slickly, our hot fingers blacked by the grilled heat of newspaper ink, feeling the telltale cold finger down our backs: a drop of moisture collecting, pooling, and running.

Pavements are dry-roasted and dusty. Roads glimmering with tar-perspiration.

Rules are suspended; they have melted away. We drift into work late, fanning ourselves with Mediterranean insolence. The corridor is hot, the kitchen is hotter: the warm air from the back of the fridge filling the room persistently like the breath of an ardent lover on your neck. Only the air-conditioning unit holds any release. We stand under it as if under a shower: it rains hard shards of cold air down on our pink skin like grains of icy sand.

Anything will double as a fan: a copy of the Metro, a leaflet handed out on the street. Even the movement of hands to whip warm air onto warmer faces is somehow sluggish. We have slowed …

… finally, slowed from our customary rat-race. Our skin is swollen smooth, seared to angry red by the sun’s relentless rays, and sticky to touch. Smeared handprints on surfaces show where we’ve been : gliding through the warmth, lazily outraged by work, lying sleepless and parched into the endless nights with no promise of release from the still, hot air. Tiredness seeps out of heated pores, flowing as slowly and relentlessly as lava, to wave new washes of warmth through already warm rooms, trains, and buses. We are steeped in heat: slow-turned on a spit over a lazy fug of coals glowing red, each burning with a slow hot element where our hearts used to be, marinated in a heady tropical glaze of factor thirty, sun-drowsed, heat-dozed.

Until we sit, stupefied, stunned out of all words, dreaming not of holidays, or of afternoons off work, but dreaming of ice: dreaming of cold so sharp you can cut the air into ribbons with the knife of your breath, and bury your head in a barbed wire scarf of snow.

Yours heatedly,

therumtumtugger

xxx