At the bus stop, a woman fiddled with a tube of sunscreen and a dotty pink parasol that protruded from the handlebars of her pushchair. The buggy was close to the kerb, its wheels facing the road, and I looked away, uncomfortable. You saw these random accidents all the time on the news. ‘It happened in the blink of an eye’ or ‘I only turned away for a second’. Children run over in their own driveways; toddlers slipping under the water of holiday swimming pools; kids running out into the street to catch a ball. But the woman spoke, forcing me to turn around and pull out an AirPod as I pressed ‘pause’ on my iPod. She was slim with long dark hair, not much more than twenty, her face bare of make-up.

‘D’you think it’ll rain?’ She nodded up to the sky as if scanning for invisible clouds and, for a moment, I froze. Talking to strangers wasn’t something I generally did. I looked up at the sky, too, my mind working to frame a reply.

‘Feels like it might,’ the woman said, and I knew what she meant – the morning’s wind had dropped to nothing, and there was a ripeness in the air; a feeling that something might pop and that that pop would bring the relief the very fabric of the city was waiting for.

‘How long can this go on for?’ she continued, unbothered by the fact I hadn’t replied, and then her bus hove into view, announcing its arrival with a long, drawn-out squeal of brakes, and I turned away.

The pavement was unusually deserted, the thrumming heat that bounced off the shop fronts and up from the tarmac of the road presumably having driven people to stay home during the hottest part of the day. Even the birds had fallen quiet. The heatwave had gone on so long people were adopting the siestas and late al fresco dinners of their European cousins, sleeping during the day and eating light suppers in gardens and on terraces as the sun’s warmth teased out the evening scent of the vegetation.