Rainy day

It was missling; that fine rain you get before it turns into a drizzle when the water's really just hanging in the air and making you wet by making you walk through it.  The taxis were on strike, the drivers holding out for the right to smoke inside their cars.  On days like this, when the world soaked through your raincoat and ruined your shirt before you'd reached the end of your garden path, you could understand their sorrows.  They were all huddled together under the porch of the convenience store, sharing roll-ups and stories about who they'd had in the back of their cab and what they'd do when Taxicab confessions came and asked them to be the star.  Their placards were propped up in a corner, the poster-paint they'd used to make them starting to run and render the text illegible.  The taxis were all queued up out front, blocking the bus-stop, all dark and empty and accepting no passengers.
They spat on me as I walked past.  I considered spitting back, but my mouth was as dry as a nun's knickers, and I was already too wet to notice a little more.  When the bus roared past, unable to stop and making good time as it aquaplaned its way down the road, it sprayed me with a sheet of dirty water thrown up from the surface of the road and I felt a little colder.
I walked down the street with a policeman's gait; slow and steady, saving energy for when I'd really need it.  I'd spent four weeks wandering around behind coppers on the beat learning that walk and being stopped repeatedly by them; apparently it's suspicious to want police protection so badly that you're willing to hang around with police officers.  I knew when I'd cracked it because they started ignoring me, assuming I was one of them but in plain-clothes, undercover.  I'd never be one of them; they wouldn't let me on the force or even into the Specials.  Even rats have standards in this town.
I passed the bus, tipped over on its side and its windows all smashed, a tyre exploded and scattered in rubber fragments across the road.  Dazed people were sitting on the side of it, having just crawled from the shell, pulling themselves from under fatter, more concussed people.  The driver was already sheltering in a doorway, lighting up a small cigar, a cigarillo as my Honduran father would have said.  My French father would just have sneered that such a thing would be considered worth smoking, and my Ecuadorean father would have tried to convince the driver to share.  My mother was a generous woman and I'd had many fathers, sometimes even for long enough to learn their names and well as their nationalities.
Car horns honked like lost seagulls, trying hopelessly to get past the bus.  There was half a lane left, and the oncoming traffic wasn't surrendering their advantage.  The roundabout at the top of the road was just visible from here and the queue of traffic coming towards the stricken bus was just starting to reach it.  When the roundabout seized up all hell would break loose; it controlled access to too many places on both sides of the river.  I allowed myself a difficult smile, feeling the scabs on my chin break open and start weeping; the underground system had an entrance up at the roundabout and maybe this was the way things were supposed to go.  I tramped onwards, hearing my shoes get wetter and wetter, squishing and splishing through puddles that only appeared when you stepped on the irregularly-laid paving slabs.
I'd just reached the underground station when the thunder rolled and the clouds broke and the rain changed from being invisibly present but inescapable into a solid wall of water that hit me like a hod-full of bricks.