A little more rain

Rain scours the streets.  The wind drives it on, hurling it against the cobbles so that it bounces back up again.  It's coming down hard enough and fast enough that there's a thin film of water on top of the stones and it's a little like paddling when you have to splash your way through it.  William is sheltering under a tree, its spreading branches and still-green leaves holding the water at bay near the trunk.  Further out though the leaves pour steady trickles of water down that find their way down collars and necks, a quick, cold shock to the passer-by halted by the weather.
There's a roar in the distance, at the end of this street the cobbles yield to tarmac and lorries and trucks race each other to see who can leave the city first.  William shivers a little, he's worrying that the rain will become a thunderstorm and then he'll have to leave the shelter of the tree.  He fears the lightning more than he fears getting wet, even though he's wearing his only suit and he needs it for tomorrow when yet another client will be visiting the office.
A woman walks by, high-heels clicking on the stones, her head held high despite the rain side-swiping her in the gusts of wind.  Her hat is a pill-box, black, with little bits of fashionable netting draped here and there and offers her no protection at all; her blouse is thin and revealing in the rain, and her skirt is short.  William forgets for a moment about where he's stood and just gawks, his mouth hanging unconsciously open.  If she sees him she doesn't acknowledge him, and in a staccato succession of clicks she's gone again, another soaken-beauty walking the drabs streets of the city, brightening a rainy day with her presence.
William shivers again and decides that waiting here is pointless penance; the sky is a uniform grey and the rain looks set to carry on forever.  He will run out, run to the metro station and find a train home.  He will hang his suit in the bathroom and hope that it dries before the morning.  He will wonder about the woman all the way home, wishing he'd had the courage to step out and join her.

A lift full of rain

I staggered into the tube station reeling from the concussions of the raindrops against my head.  I've been caught in bad hailstorms before, where you stagger in from them bruised and bleeding, but that's the sky throwing lumps of ice at you: you expect a little collateral damage.  This time I was bruised and aching from the sky throwing water at me, and I didn't think it was entirely fair.
I got through the barriers with only the usual trouble.  I have one of their little cards named for some kind of seafood; a Kalamari-card or somesuch, but apparently being anywhere on my person is enough for it to corrode.  When I pulled it out of my pocket to press it against their cheepy, cheery little reader it had brown, rusty streaks on it, and it's made of plastic.  The reader squawked, and when I pull the card off and slapped it down again it cheeped like someone had set it on fire.  I tried a third time and this time it wailed a little but the barriers parted and I could get through. I noticed as I did that there was rainwater swirling around my feet and I was paddling my way to the lifts.
I didn't bother waiting for the lift, I get impatient and claustrophobic when people stand near me.  I headed round the corner for the stairs, and thanks to a slight incline in the floor, left the water behind.  I had to dodge a wheelchair rolling backwards at one point, but I was mostly relieved that the occupant wasn't trying to go down the stairs in it.  There are some tight, hairpin bends when you get below street-level.
There are one-hundred and twenty four stairs at the this station, and they break up into six flights of stairs, three landings, one hidden corner, four extra steps in places you're not expecting them, and a long corridor in the middle that makes you think you're almost at the platform when in fact you've still got three flights of stairs to go.  I figure the Victorians and Edwardians must have loved spending the day trying to figure out how to find the trains more than they wanted to travel on them.  I was the only person on the stairs, so I dripped my way along the corridors and down the flights in a squelchy kind of non-quite silence.
I was four steps from the bottom and in sight of the lift when it reached the floor and opened its doors.  No people came out, just a wall of water that sprayed past me down the tunnel to the north-bound platform.  It slowed its gush after a minute, but it didn't stop, and I realised that the rain must have managed to flood the station.
It slowed after another minute, and stopped after two more, but the lift looked dead and damp, and I figured that no-one else would be coming down now.  I thought about going back up, but my knees hurt at the best of times and climbing the stairs now would make me regret it.  I headed off to the south-bound platform, wondering what I'd find.

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.

Lemon drizzle

The rain was lemon flavoured this morning.  It wasn't really noticeable until you looked at the puddles, but it was also a pale yellow colour, not really lemony, but definitely not anything less pleasant.  Miles stood out in it for several minutes, his tongue stuck out to catch rain drops, enjoying the taste.
"The neighbours are watching," said Anna eventually.  She was stood at the window in her floral dressing gown smoking her second cigarette.  Ash clung defiantly to the end of it, and the red glow of the coal was barely visible.
"I don't care," said Miles.  "It tastes like lemonade used to taste."
"Back when it was all chemicals and additives?  That's a good thing?"
"I like it."
Anna shrugged, let the cigarette fall from her lips and screwed her slipper down on it, extinguishing it.  It was her bedroom, and she did as she liked in there, but Miles had banned her from having any soft furnishings unless they were flame-proof.  The she drew the curtains again and went off in search of clothes with a minimum of cigarette burns, permanent creases and dirty marks.
Miles let a few more drops of rain fall onto his tongue, and then looked around him.  At all the ground floor windows of the neighbouring houses curtains swished, looking for all the world as though a strong wind had blown through all the rooms.  He grinned, and started off to the bus-stop for work.




*
"Lemon today, huh?"  Marcus was carrying an umbrella with an odd little gauge attached to the handle.  Miles pointed at it, still sipping his coffee.
"Acid co-efficient," he said.  His voice was deep and throaty, and seemed suited to his beard which birds could nest in.  "Despite the lemon flavour the rain is barely acidic.  If I had to be drawn on an opinion–" Miles snorted a laugh and scalded the back of his throat with coffee "–I'd say that we're seeing a definite regression back to pre-industrial levels of pollution."
"Have you told the press corps yet?"
"Meeting them at lunch tomorrow.  They're paying."
"Of course."  Both men laughed.
"So," said Miles cautiously, "not wanting to draw you on an opinion of course, but do you think the rain used to taste of lemon?"
"No," said Marcus, lowering his voice.  "Nor cinnamon, nor cardamom, nor candy-floss."
"Cardamom?"
"...you might have missed that," said Marcus thoughtfully.  "I think perhaps you were in the southern hemisphere for the monsoon."
"Yeah, that was wet," said Miles.  "Horizontal waterfall doesn't do it justice.  Didn't taste of anything much though."
"Yeah," said Marcus.  "But I think we've miscalibrated the weather satellites up here in the Northern hemisphere."
"We can't have," said Miles.  "We've checked them all with the geological core data.  We know the parameters, we've been over them sixteen times.  Sixteen, Marcus!"
"Lemon flavoured rain, Miles."



*
In the weather centre at last, Miles sat down at a terminal and tapped the screen.  It lit up, welcoming him, and he made a couple of quick finger gestures, drawing odd little geometric shapes on it.  There was a pause while the system spoke to a second system, which went via secure handshake to a third archival vault and requested some apparently random data.  Satisfied with the result, a message jumped back across the nodes, and Miles's screen bloomed with red and blue hues, finally coalescing into a password screen.  He entered a password using more touch-gestures, and only then did he have access to a limit suite of functions for Septentrionus, the weather-satellite director.
With a couple of taps and swipes he brought up the principal parameter screen and started checking the figures again.  He paused on the third row and re-read the figures there.  Then, shaking his head, he checked them against a book on his desk.  They were very different.
A swipe copied the data to a secure clipboard, and then he tight-messaged it over to Marcus.  Only a couple of minutes passed before a response came back.
"Response decodes to a recipe for lemon drizzle cake.  We have a joker in the system."
Miles sat back and wondered what the hell what happening to the weather.

Weather report

The weather report was blessedly brief, this time, but extremely confusing.
"The weather," said the meteorologist, a young, skinny man with bad acne, "will be mostly bendy." Then the news show segued to a discussion of the new "reasonable reporting" laws that had left the Daily Mail with nothing other than a knitting column and heavily-redacted reader's letters to publish.
"What was the weather report?" Tristan poked his head round the door, his blonde hair fluffy from the hair-dryer. I cringed inwardly, knowing how he'd react, and told him anyway.
"Mostly bendy?" He almost spat the words back at me. "What on earth is that supposed to mean? Didn't they say anything else?"
"They seemed keen to get away from it and on to the knitting," I said.
He smiled, momentarily distracted. "It's amazing isn't it? And I thought the Daily Mail would never be worth buying. But the weather, mostly bendy! How is that useful? How do I know if people are going to turn up for work tomorrow, when the weather forecast is mostly bendy? It's not like the old days is it, when the forecast would be for snow, and you'd know who'd be phoning in the next morning claiming that they couldn't open their front door for fear of triggering an avalanche."
"It wasn't that useful," I said. "They weren't as honest back then, they never said 'Tomorrow will be the wrong kind of snow, and the trains will stop running almost as soon as they start. I was trapped in East Croydon for two days because of that once."
Tristan's face recognised the horror of the situation, but he wasn't to be deterred from his problem with the current weather forecast.
"It's no better these days," he said. "Look at last Tuesday's forecast: Mobile trees. I mean, who looks at evaporation patterns and wind vectors and thinks, hmmm, this'll really annoy those trees, I bet they get up and start walking around?"
"We did get mobile trees, though," I pointed out. Our garden looked like a forest now, as something had apparently attracted them. We were also infested with squirrels.
"Great. So now we have accurate forecasts that we can't understand."
His head disappeared again as he returned to getting ready for work, and I relaxed a little. On the television some radio talk show host who'd been dragooned in to review the papers was complaining that the "reasonable reporting" law had left him almost without material for the fourth hour of his show.