The Hottest Day

The day that it happened was the day that was too hot to work. It was so hot that we all slip-slid in our shoes. Our shirts shrank saturated against our backs. Our fingertips traced silvery slug-like sweat trails across our foreheads as we ‘phew’ed for the fourth time that hour. The pavements outside baked. A crushed snail at the entrance to our office sizzled furiously. Judith Moon’s face puffed and reddened and by 11am she had left to go home to sit with her feet in the bath. In the office the fan cut the air like a palate knife cuts cake mix, folding it over and over. The waves rotated, swampy-hot. Dan Pearson smelt like crushed cabbage. The fax machine over heated and had a binary breakdown regurgitating sheet after sheet of 0’s and 1’s. Office Manager Valerie followed suit and shrieked, snatching at each piece of paper and stabbing the cancel button viciously. She flipped her sandals off under her desk and pitter-patted wet footprints across the regulation bottle green carpet. Lucy Miller went to get her sixteenth grape from the fridge. Each time she leant right in, rearranged the shelves like tetris, even ran a cloth along the bottom of the milk drawer. Valerie wasn’t happy. Lucy Miller was wasting electricity in an effort to stay cool. Dean Roe started talking gibberish and was sent home with a swab of damp kitchen roll across his forehead. Alex Crisp declared that she too was losing her mind and rattled off home on her bicycle. Valerie locked her desk drawer and left. She didn’t say goodbye, she didn’t even put her sandals back on. She walked barefoot into the car park and sped off in her Alpha Romeo.

Then there were three.

The email I was writing trailed off as my finger lazily prodded the pppppppp pppppppppp ppp. Jack Doherty swivelled on his chair and said that if it were not so hot we could mess around. Put cheese behind the radiator next to Val’s desk. Shave a crop circle into the carpet. Reset the franking machine replacing the company logo with an obscenity. Ellie Marr grinned listlessly. Instead, we sat in silence, rotating in our chairs, chins tilted towards the ceiling fans. After a few stuck minutes Jack said, let’s get out of here. Ellie logged off.

In the car park Jack declared he was going to go home, close all the curtains and drink beer. Ellie mumbled that she might go to Sainsbury’s freezer section. Maybe buy some frozen peas. I didn’t know what to do. Ellie dropped me at the end of my road on her way to Sainsbury’s. The little shop on the corner was still open so I went in to buy something cold. The shop was deserted except for two cashiers leaning behind the counter, backs against an electric fan. At the till I dropped my items down; a bag of ice, a tub of blueberry ice cream and a roll of fruit chews. The cashiers continued to mumble to each other as one of them scanned the barcodes. ‘He’s still out there’, one said. The other paused between bleeps of the handheld scanner and asked if she should phone the police. The other shrugged limply. I paid with a handful of silver and pressed the ice to my forehead as I left the shop.

Outside, a man stood in the middle of the pavement. I hadn’t noticed him on entering the shop. I paused and put the sweets into my shirt pocket. He had a sort of ageless face, dirty and shrunken, with keen blue eyes set deep in his head. He was probably old, but probably younger than he looked. Eyes that seemed to be looking at something that wasn’t there. I wondered if he might be mad. He wore too many clothes for a day like this. The hottest day. His trousers were stained and tucked inside too-big boots. He seemed to be wearing a bulk of layers on his top half, all covered with an oversized wax jacket. His hair was long, unruly, tied back with a red Post Office elastic band. He was motionless, just looking. I traced his eye line discreetly, out across the road, through the trees, into the church yard. Leading to nowhere. Looking at nothing. The ice was beginning to melt against my hip where I had balanced it like a baby. I had to clear my throat to speak. ‘Are you okay’, I questioned. I imagined he was someone’s grandfather, brother, father, out here on the hottest day, dehydrating to death. I imagined I was doing the right thing by asking, checking. He didn’t look at me. After a few moments, just as I began to feel self-conscious in the middle of the pavement gazing into this strange man’s face, he spoke.

‘I can’t move’, he said.

I distributed the bag of ice to the opposite hip. ‘Pardon’, I said, even though I had heard him. I have a habit of doing this, everyone tells me. Manufacturing extended moments before my response, by asking ‘pardon’ or ‘I’m sorry’…? There were a few languorous seconds before he repeated it. ‘I can’t move’. His eyes were still fiercely clamped on that invisible nothing in the distance.
‘Would you like me to call an ambulance?’ I asked gently. He breathed deeply. In, then out. The sigh was deliberate, like the silent response to a complicated question. He didn’t answer. I asked him again, would he like an ambulance? ‘You’re asking the wrong question,’ he said. His voice was small and cracked.

I looked about me awkwardly. The heat of the sun glazed the surface of the road, a slice of silver in the distance gleamed with the false promise of water. No cars streamed past, no people bustled. Everything was still. Still and silently baking.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, then paused, ‘what do you mean?’

‘It is not a question of what I would like but a question of what I need.’
The ice had now begun to drip along my hip, droplets fell off the hem of my skirt and trickled slow down my bare leg. I imagined that the icecream had formed a blueberry pond in a bottom of my plastic bag, the cardboard tub sodden, liquid ice cream seeping out at the seam.

‘And do you need an ambulance?’ I emphasised.

Again, he sighed, as if in preparation. Then he began speaking, slowly, quietly. He formed the words carefully, as if reading from a script, enunciating as best he could in that broken note. And I listened. The sun beat ultraviolet. The Birch trees opposite waved minute welcomes, each leaf caught briefly in a tiny breeze before falling still again. The sky reached a tranquil state of blue. The traffic lights on the corner beeped their safety message to no-one. A lonely blackbird on the church fence twittered suddenly and sprung from its perch. The hot damp air felt as sudden and as still as the silence after a siren. When he had finished speaking he paused momentarily and walked away, tracing the line of his thought across the baked tarmac and into the church yard.

I stood. In a house opposite someone propped a window open, momentarily looking out across the road as they did. I could hear a bird somewhere, calling. Another replied, building a syncopated song. The air was warm and still, still, still.

I could not move.