Gods and Angels by David Park

Author:David Park
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781408866108
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-03-04T09:33:26+00:00

Heatwave

The city simmered in its own juices, a sealed cauldron of electrified, motorised and human sweat. The city wore half-moon damp patches under its arms and on the buses and tube trains commuters fanned their faces with the free newspapers and avoided pressing against each other in the fear that they would stick, flesh to flesh, an instant Siamese twin with a stranger. People clutched small bottles of water like sacred amulets and the glass of every touchscreen phone was smeared and puddled with fingerprints. On television endless experts talked about global warming while the DIY stores sold out of barbecues and garden furniture. Elderly people silently expired in lonely breathless rooms to a requiem of children’s voices from back gardens transformed into lidos, complete with plastic inflatable pools out of which water sloshed and lurched over the parched grass that no longer needed cutting and which was slowly turning brown like the pelt of a dying animal. In remote quarries young men died swimming in waters that were too deep and cold until someone came up with the idea of dyeing the water black. And the riot police sweltered in their RoboCop suits as petrol bombs quivered around them like red-lipped air kisses and when rivulets of sweat and fear coursed down their backs they dreamed of holidays in snow-capped mountains or on secluded beaches where they could take off every stitch of clothing and plunge into the sea’s cool embrace.

In their expensive, self-cleaning, triple-glazed and electricity-supplying glass-fronted house Marcus and Daisy sat in as few of their clothes as might be considered elegant and debated the purchase of curtains. It was anathema to Marcus who fought constantly to protect his sleek white-walled temple from his wife’s cluttered weakness of character that saw her, in their first year after moving in, backsliding against their agreed purity of vision and attempting to surreptitiously introduce family photographs, small ornaments and decorative touches that he dismissed as sacrilegious defacement of their home’s clean lines. As he had designed the house and supervised its construction in the hills overlooking the city, he took her betrayals personally.

‘The glass was supposed to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer,’ Daisy said. ‘It’s obviously not working.’

‘It worked in winter. Have you any idea how much money we saved on heating? But this is a heatwave – the highest temperature in thirty years,’ he said.

‘So it won’t work if it’s as hot as this and it could be like this every summer,’ Daisy said, lifting her leg lightly off the leather settee when she felt it sticking. It was suddenly important to her to hear him admit a failure. When none came she ended the silence by saying, ‘We need curtains.’

‘They’d look completely naff – they’d be completely wrong.’

‘I’m not talking about the sort of curtains you’re thinking of. I don’t mean heavy formal curtains.’

‘So what are you talking about?’ he asked, his irritation obvious in his voice as he stared at the huge windows that framed a cloudless enervated sky and down below the sweltering broil of the city.

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