Perth has been baking. Day after day with the temperatures in the high thirties or above forty degrees Celsius. Nights in the mid-twenties. My garden wilts, as do I. I feel for the people on building sites as I drive past, my car’s air-conditioner insulating me from the reality of the air temperature. It’s been hotter inland and up north. Hot enough that it makes me feel wimpy complaining about how hot it has been here. I complain anyway, even though I get to stay inside. I sit at my computer and write. I sit in the lounge room and read, half watching the cricket that is on in the background. We run the air conditioner for more hours than feels right. At night, we open the house, hoping that whatever breeze there is will stir the stale air and replace it with something fresher. It’s not guaranteed that fresher air is available.
I get up early and delight in the relative cool of the morning, the sun low in the sky and the shadows long and cool. It is the only time I can bear to walk or ride. Later, with the sun high and the shadows short, the air gets heavy with heat.
We go to the beach almost every day, dropping our towels on the sand and walking into the cool water. The water is noticeably warmer here in the Indian Ocean than in the Southern Ocean we swam in on holiday. The air is warmer too and the water is refreshing. Enlivening. I float on my back and look up at the sky. I worry about stingers. I react badly to the little jellyfish that sometimes come in close to the shore. Their trailing tentacles are full of stinging cells that fire on contact. They’re not exactly dangerous, unless you are anaphylactic to them. Fortunately, I’m not, but I do welt up. The stings feel like an electric shock, a sudden jolt in the clear blue. Rob doesn’t react to them, brushes them off and is left with a slight red mark that quickly disappears. They give me welts that itch unbearably but hurt if I scratch them. I take antihistamines and rub cream on them. When stung, I stand under a boiling hot shower as soon as I get home from the beach because research shows that is the best way of killing any stinging cells remaining on the skin. Still, the welts usually take weeks to settle down on me. The worst stings I have had have been when stingers somehow get inside my bathers. Suffice to say that’s nasty.
I swim tentatively through the water, the memory of previous stings haunting. For days and weeks my nerves are unnecessary; there are no stingers.
Then one morning as I swim, I feel something on the underside of my upper arm, a light tingle rather than an electric shock. I gasp and stop swimming, treading water, peering beneath the surface. My arm isn’t exactly hurting so maybe I imagined it. I swim on. When I get home, there is a definite discomfort in the soft skin on the underside of my arm. I go through the hot shower routine but forgo the antihistamines. The next day there is a rash of itchy spots, as if I have been attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes. I lather it with aloe vera and try not to scratch. I scratch anyway. For days, I worry at it and stay away from the beach, knowing I got let off lightly. Rob goes to the beach without me. ‘Any stingers,’ I ask when he gets home. He shakes his head. Damn, I think, I should have gone.
So I do. I am back in the water and it is delectable. The feel of it around my body, cooling my skin, cooling my blood, cooling my bones. I can’t stay away. I need to be immersed in the salt water. It is my sanity in this heat. I stay inside the shark net and swim, arm over arm, the water soft between my fingers. Then I panic, thinking of stingers again. I roll over and backstroke. At least my face won’t get stung. I open my eyes and look up. A pair of ospreys is perched on a tall pole on the groyne. I stop swimming and watch them watching the fishermen. They flit and circle, land again. I swim on, backstroking across the water. The sky domes blue above me, the ocean swell rises and falls below me, the coolness of the water soothes me. There are no stingers. At least, not today.
Thanks for reading,
Jill
This is my first year with air-conditioning. I think I picked a good summer for needing it. This heat just seems to go on and on and on. Do the stingers ever get you on top of your bathers Jill? If not why no go for long sleeve and long leg bathers?
Love this piece Jill. I was writing to a friend only this morning about how the heat just keeps dragging on. I love your line about running the air conditioning longer than feels right. Each day I hold off for as long as I can before succumbing, but eventually you just have to give in :)