A storm arrives, and the city remembers how to rain

The first storm of the summer comes when nobody is quite ready. One afternoon the sky is the flat, washed-out white of the past weeks, the air heavy enough to lean into, and then, by late afternoon, the light turns a colour that has no name. The clouds bank up over the western blocks, bruised on their undersides, and the streetlights come on by mistake, at four in the afternoon, as if the city itself has decided the day is over.

You notice it before you hear it. The traffic noise drops, the way it does in a snowstorm, though there is no snow here. The cicadas, which have been running the soundtrack of every evening for a fortnight, fall silent. A wind gets up that is not the usual warm, lazy air but something with direction, flipping the awnings and carrying the dust off the road in little spirals. People on the pavements start to walk faster without quite knowing why. The city behaves like an animal that has sensed something coming before its owners have.

Then the rain arrives the way summer rain does here: not a shower but a wall. The first ten seconds are a kind of violence, big drops that drum the awning and turn the hot asphalt dark in a spreading stain, and within a minute the gutters are running. The people who did not find shelter stand under the eaves of shopfronts, laughing slightly, not because it is funny but because there is nothing else to do. The ones who were caught on two wheels abandon the bikes and stand over them, protecting the machine more than themselves.

What is strange is the silence that follows. Under the roar of the rain the city goes quiet in a different register. The usual hum of compressors and traffic is swallowed, and for half an hour the only sounds are the water and the drumming on whatever roof is closest. You stand at the window and watch the leaves, which have been grey with dust since spring, turn suddenly a deep, alive green. The plane trees along the road, which one has been walking past for months without really seeing, are transformed.

A storm of this kind is a reset the city did not ask for but quietly needs. For weeks the heat has been building, the pavements have been radiating back the afternoon, the air has tasted of concrete. In an hour the temperature drops, the dust is washed out of the air, and the whole place smells, for the first time this year, of wet earth and wet leaves. The people who were irritable and slow in the heat emerge afterwards walking differently, as if something tight has been loosened.

By evening the sky has cleared and the roads are steaming. The drains have done their work, the awnings are dripping, and the city is already forgetting that it was alarmed a few hours ago. The cicadas start up again, a little tentatively, as if checking that the afternoon really is over. One walks out into the residual warmth and realizes that the season has, in the space of a single storm, properly begun.