Though this last was not entirely untrue, by the time afternoon came, we were shown the other side of summer. Skies darkened in that tense and ominous way that precedes a storm. An afternoon night. Rumbles of thunder - deafeningly louder when out by the lifts at work - then flashes over the sea - a yellow electric taste - the storm had arrived.
Despite a few forked lightning flashes over the sea, the storm was not as impressive as hoped for.
Summer storms seemed much more frequent when I was a kid back up in Scotland. I remember one time, deep in the summer holidays, in that strange deep-ness of summer that seems both remote from the beginnings of summer, and far from the school-sad end. I don't remember what year it was, but it was when we living in Forres, probably either the summer of 1983 or 1984. I have a vague memory that it may have been before our annual holiday down to England to see family.
Strange days they were; hours of packing and un-realness, plans for the fortnight in Wolverhampton and Worcestershire drawn up with my sister, as serious as plans for a war. Days that belonged nowhere.
This odd memory. I remember myself being alone in the house, but given my age, this seems unlikely, and only felt I was alone. I was in my room, at the back of 89 Drumduan Park, and there was a summer storm come. A storm far deeper and heavier than today's pale though diverting imitation. I remember through my narrow window, the boiling clouds, an angry and frightening vortex of bruises, and below them, the omnipresent Black Woods we said were haunted. Our house - the whole of Drumduan Park - the entirety of Forres - lay under those troubling trees.
I remember my room as being very tidy - a luxury, which further gives credence to the possibility that this was a before-holiday time - there was probably some reward / punishment scenario depending on the tidiness of said room.
A clean and hoovered carpet, all my toys and games and Doctor Who annuals neatly in my cupboard. I remember the carpet. I had chosen it myself; a red-lava abstraction, deep-sunset squares, the shade of dream-dusks and coal-fires.
I was playing cards, or rather, I was building card houses, -but thats not quite true either. I had neither the skill or patience to build cardhouses, so what I was doing was building card-mazes. One storey labyrinths, hearts and diamonds and clubs and spades precariously leant against one another and against the base of the wall below the window. Kings and queens and jacks and strangely sinister jokers as roofs. In this new storm-born night, I would imagine this other night in the maze I was building. These miniature corridors, haphazard tunnels, and wide yet tiny rooms. Hallways of temples in unexplored jungles, abandoned spacecrafts crashed on unmapped planets. Flashes of lightning flaring across the room, the black and serious shadow of the woods staring down - more some single entity than a collection of disparate trees, and as a soundtrack to all this, those continual peals of thunder, rolling down those long and haunted afternoons.
The memory is not connected to any other events, and every time there is a storm in summer, I always think of it. I don't know why.
