The rain seems to follow an identical pattern which I've seen repeated at least four or five times during the last week. Naturally, the first time it happened was in the middle of the night, so that I woke with a fright, disoriented and clueless as to what was happening.
First comes a dramatic drop in temperature, and wind; a strong-willed breeze entirely at odds with the placid calm of the good weather here. We don't have panes of glass in the windows in the guest house; instead, there are horizontal slats of glass which work in the same way as a Venetian blind. They're almost permanently kept open – it truly amazes me that the climate here is so stable that houses can be built without need to provide for even the hypothetical possibility of bad weather – but even when closed they obviously don't seal. Hence the noise of the wind in the middle of the night was much the same as if I had been sleeping outside – and because of the density of leafy foliage surrounding the house, the wind makes quite a noise. Almost exactly the same noise, in fact, as crashing Atlantic storms make in the tossing, towering eucalyptus tree outside my parents' back door; I was instantly back in bed as a child, cowering under the blanket during a storm. Which in truth was almost exactly what I was doing now.
The air rushed and burst in through the window in the sitting room and out through the window in my bedroom, and then back the way it came. Back and forward, pushing and pulling through the rooms so that my mosquito net swung like a hammock on a rolling boat and the curtains billowed madly, giving shape to the wind. I heard thunder booming distantly away to the west and knew what was coming next. I thought the first faint flashes of lightening were just my eyes flickering in the dark, but one or two big ones set me right. I counted madly, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four... almost as a mantra to keep me safe. They were mostly very far away but as the storm progressed, the thunder rolled for a while at a steady eight one-thousand before peaking at a few brief, bright four one-thousand booms.
Lightening in the company of other people and electric lights can be exciting and a little thrilling. Alone at 5am, it is a different matter. I've never really lost a primitive child-like fear of lightening, an inherited condition like some ancestral awe of the inexplicable. Lightening and storms were the only thing that scared me witless and rigid as a child – they heightened the terrible loneliness and isolation of the night, the encapsulation of each individual in the darkness. The whole world takes on a different contour in the small hours; depression and anxiety magnify, we admit truths to ourselves which are inadmissible in daytime, time itself slows down and crawls. As adults we comprehend this as feeling like the only person left alive in the world. As children, we only know that there are terrible and eternal truths about our condition revealed in the dark. As a child I only woke at night and trembled during storms, and thus storms still take me back instantly to that primordial place of fear.
The rain began pelting down. Buckets of it, gallons of it. It sounded like a waterfall was passing overhead, like the whole River Nile was falling out of the sky. I suddenly realise that the windows are open – no rain is coming into the bedroom but the sitting room could be getting soaked for all I know. So I summon up very great courage and get out of bed and tiptoe to the next room, fighting the urge to cover my eyes with my hands.
I tip-toe, because fear always generates the bizarre but all-powerful instinct to make as little noise as possible. Who am I afraid of waking? Why don't I just turn on the light to reassure myself? I have no idea; these very obvious observations never cross my mind until I wake the next morning and laugh at the strange dimension of what passes during the night.
Nothing is getting wet – unlike home, the wind falls when it starts to rain so that the water drops vertically as arrows. I suppose its better to close the windows regardless; I open the mosquito screens which shutter the inside of the windows in order to tilt the slats of glass, gingerly, the way you might if a dangerous wild animal lurked outside. I gasp at the first burst of lightening but then start to notice the peculiar, murky purple light of the storm, and the glow in the sky from the lighted city under the rain. It is dream-like and almost beautiful, a subterranean twilight of a colour that doesn't exist in daylight. Lightening keeps flashing but not in forks; it simply lights up the sky for a moment as if explosions are taking place in the clouds, sometimes the whole sky, sometimes in small puffs which pick out a fluffy white cloud in the midst of the featureless gloom. I run back to bed, somewhat awed.
After half an hour of the deluge, the rain gradually softens and trickles off. The lightening grows very faint and although thunder continues to gently roll across the night for some time, it is only a lullaby to wash me back to sleep. The whole show is over within an hour, and the light from the window is no longer underwater twilight but the blue light of dawn. I feel soothed.
The same pattern took place twice during the working day at the office, and again the morning after that. By the time it came to Thursday night, when I was woken by rustling curtains and heavy rain, instead of straining every nerve to watch for the first coming flash with the frightened twitch of a rabbit, I just hoisted my blanket higher and turned over and went to sleep.
Capable of making a rational decision to sleep through a storm? I feel as if one of the great milestones of becoming an adult have been passed.
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