The end of the summer

The last week of August is when the summer starts to know it is ending. The calendar still says August, and the heat is still the old heat — heavy, wet, sitting on the city like a wet towel — but something has changed in the light. The afternoons shorten without you noticing, and by six o’clock the embankment is already in shadow, though the air is still warm enough to walk in a shirt. The mosquitoes are worse, too, as if they can smell the closing.

Chizhou in late August is a place of small adjustments. The cicadas, which through July sounded like one long machine held against the tree tops, have slowed; their song is thinner now, with gaps in it, as if the oldest of them are running out of voice. The river is lower than it was in the plum rain, brown but settled, and the barges move past the wharf with less strain than they did in June. The old men who fish off the stone steps are still there, with the same rods and the same thermoses, but they sit a little later in the day now, because the morning sun is no longer quite so merciless.

The school list arrived in a message on the phone. My name is on it, and below it the names of people I do not know, in a class I have never walked into. The second year of high school starts in a few days, and the summer, which felt endless in July, has collapsed into the last of the freedom. The new timetable is pinned to the wall above the desk, and the textbooks I will not open until Monday are stacked on the chair, still in their plastic. My old uniform, washed and folded, is on the top shelf of the wardrobe, waiting.

I spend the afternoons on the embankment anyway. The heat has not left, and the river still moves south toward the sea, and Pingtian Lake, east of the city, is still the same flat grey it has been all summer. The pagoda on the hill above the lake watches the same stretch of water it has watched for centuries, and it does not seem to care which class I am in. The bicycle ride out to the lake takes twenty minutes, and on the way back the sun is lower, hanging over the far bank, and the river takes on the colour of old brass.

What changes at the end of August is not the weather but the feeling of time. In June the vacation stretched ahead like an empty road. Now the road has an end, and the end is a classroom, and the sound of a bell I have not heard in two months. The cicadas will still be singing when I go back, and the heat will hold into September, and the river will keep flowing past the city whether or not I am standing on the bank. But the summer is over, or nearly, and the next thing that arrives will be the school gate, and the new names, and the year that has to be got through.