Musca domestica
The forecast unfurls like a fire,
day by day. The week before the heatwave
the Bureau of Meteorology reveals each day of the week to come, its seven-day
forecast pushing further into the near future to reveal what’s about to hit
Melbourne, and the rest of southern Australia.
At first it doesn’t seem as bad as it might: Monday is predicted to be
35 degrees, and though Tuesday will be 41 Wednesday will be 39. Somehow that 39 seems a comfort, a respite:
forty degrees Centigrade is a psychological threshold, and crossing it is
daunting.
By Monday the forecast has
worsened. There will be no respite,
however small, on Wednesday; we’ll have to wait until the end of the week for
the temperature to drop marginally below forty degrees. Then the forecast worsens again. By the time the heatwave begins, first thing
on Tuesday morning, the predicted temperatures are only getting higher. Tuesday will be 41 degrees. Wednesday will be 44. Thursday, Friday – they’ll eventually, and correctly,
be forecast at 44 degrees each, but by now we don’t care. By now we’re in it.
The heat on Tuesday is wicked but
not unusual: Melbourne
always suffers one or two days above forty degrees in summer. We endure them, we wait them out, knowing
that a change is coming soon. On Tuesday
morning we know from the forecast that a change won’t be coming any time soon
but it still feels like a normal hot summer day. As normal as a day above forty degrees can
feel. Before I leave for work I shut all
the doors and windows at home, and pull the curtains closed. It’s all I can do and I hope it will do, but
I know it won’t: there’s no insulation in the walls and this house breathes
with the weather. The heat leaks in,
unstoppably; I’m putting a bandaid on a severed artery. By the time I come home from work –
air-conditioned, comfortable – the house has heated up and my housemates have
reopened the curtains and doors and windows: it makes no difference now.
That evening, at dusk, we walk
down to Yarra Bend, where we’d once seen the fruitbats, Grey-headed Flying
Foxes (Pteropus
poliocephalus), skimming the river to drink. We anticipate that after a hot day they’ll be
particularly thirsty. The previous week
there’d been a similar heatwave in Queensland,
and I’d read that fruitbats had dropped dead from their roost trees in their
thousands. We watch Melbourne’s bats,
almost invisible in the dark, flutter down on their broad wings and dip their
chests in the water, mid-flight: the sound of the glancing impact is a cutting
noise, and each bat announces itself with a plume of white water and a line of
drips on the river that can be seen in the reflection of the bright, almost
full moon. At one point, unexpectedly,
rain – such a little rain – begins to fall, and the drops are icy cold; but the
air temperature, even after dark, is still thirty degrees. It won’t drop below thirty until just before
dawn, too late to make any difference.
At home the only way I can get to sleep is by stretching a damp towel
across my bed and lying on it. I’ll have
to do this for the rest of the week.
On Wednesday morning the heat is
apparent from the start: when I walk from my house to the train station; from
the train station in the city to the tram stop; from the tram stop to work. By 10am the temperature is already 35 degrees
Centigrade. The Bureau of Meteorology’s
website puts the midday temperature at 40 degrees. At lunchtime I walk briskly across the road from
work to a café, and when I arrive the black plastic of my sunglasses is hot to
the touch. The temperature by now is 42
degrees. Sitting by the window, inside
the café, I see a House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) hopping across the table outside, looking
for crumbs; it sees me but it looks almost unrecognisable: its feathers are
ragged, and its beak is unnaturally wide as it tries to pant the heat out of
its tiny body. It looks harried.
I stay away from home as much as
I can: after work I spend long hours in the State Library, or at the cinema,
both blissfully airconditioned. I don’t
return home until after dark, as if that makes much difference. At home my Cat (Felis catus) is enduring the heat
with unreadable silence and I’ve taken to recreating my damp towel arrangement
for her benefit, spreading a wet tea-towel on the kitchen floor for her; my housemates
report that when they returned from work they found her spreadeagled upon
it. The kitchen is by now full of flies:
in the heat they’ve appeared opportunistically, as if from nowhere, and they
buzz in clouds like black dust between the bare bulb above and the warm
linoleum below. When my housemates and I
walk to and from the laundry, or the bathroom, the flies arrange themselves
around our bodies, parting to make way for our passage. The noise of them sounds as if the heat
itself is humming.
On Thursday I go to a gig; on my
way there, ascending from Parliament Station, I pass a large Rat (Rattus sp.) drinking from a puddle left
by a sprinkler. Its black eyes are
almost popping out of its head in the heat; it looks half-crazed and it doesn’t
even notice me as I approach. I’ve never
been so close to a rat before, I can see every fur on its body, I can see the
quiver of the tiny pool of water as the rat laps it up with a thirst beyond
imagining – but then, when I take a step too close to it, it suddenly notices
me and darts back into the bushes, and I feel instantly guilty: this animal,
suffering in the heat, is still so scared of me that it would let itself go
thirsty before it would allow itself to be in my presence. I think about the animals, domestic and wild,
suffering through the heatwave. Before
the week began I’d expected to see dead birds, but I haven’t seen one yet at
all. The Silver Gulls (Chroicocephalus
novaehollandiae) that forever circle outside my office window have
seemed almost like mirages in the heat. Welcome
Swallows (Hirundo
neoxena) have flitted just outside the windows at work all day, pursuing
the insects that have been attracted by the building’s radiant heat. Photos begin to spread across the
internet of Koalas (Phascolarctos
cinereus), a animals that never ordinarily drink because they gains
all the water they needs from the leaves they eat, sitting in wading pools and
gratefully lapping up water from proffered bowls. Lightning begins to crack above Melbourne’s northern
suburbs, and eating an ice-cream for some respite I watch it arc down behind
Parliament House, splitting a darkening sky.
Later rain begins to fall, fat and slow, and I walk through it hoping
against hope for a break in the weather but there is none. Instead the storm-clouds make the heat of the
night suffocating.
By now the night-time temperature
is 35 degrees. Heat does not feel the
same after dark as it does during the day.
Without the sun’s radiance it’s a strange, unearthly feeling; as if the
night has gone wrong. As if in some
great cosmic accountancy the wrong column had been filled. Heat at night cannot be escaped: there’s no
shade to go to. It can only be endured,
and suffered through. At home my
housemates and I leave the doors open, hoping for some cool night-time air to
enter the house, but there is none and there’s not even any breeze to refresh
the stifling air inside the house.
At around four in the afternoon I
go onto the balcony outside my work’s eighth-floor office and the change is
here. The temperature is hot, but
bearable – almost pleasant. The wind is switched
direction, from north to south-west, and has increased in strength, and is
blowing hot as all the accumulated hot air of the last four days is slowly and
inexorably shifted like dust pushed by a broom.
Spontaneous parties are created: after work I join some friends for
drinks at an outdoor bar in the city and the crowd there seems almost delirious
with relief. Heat still radiates off the
buildings of the city but back home, away from all the concrete and glass, the
air is cooler. My housemates and I throw
the house wide open and grin and stand outside drinking gin and tonics, heavy
on the gin. My cat begins to purr for
the first time all week. Every time I
feel the cool breeze touch my face endorphins surge through my body, and I feel
lighter than air.
On Friday I wake with a sense of
excitement: this is it. This is the day
when the heat will finally break.
Knowing that, even the daytime temperature of forty-four degrees feels
somehow different: I don’t enjoy it as such but I start to appreciate the
strangeness of it, knowing that it will soon be gone. That afternoon at work is almost a write-off:
I’m so excited by the change that I spend all afternoon monitoring the Bureau
of Meteorology’s website, watching the change manifest itself on the wind radar
and creep up towards Melbourne from the western
edge of Port Phillip Bay. I feel a buzz of excitement as the Bureau
updates the temperature at each successive town on the way to Melbourne: as each one drops below forty
degrees, even the heat of thirty-five sounds blissful.
Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org
