AS THE WEATHER WAS RAINING & COLD

I first learned I controlled the weather as my mood deteriorated toward my birthday, and so the blue skies greyed, the rains came, the wind blew and all that had been warm before was now cold. It grew colder as dates fell to the twenty-fifth. My birthday is at the end of August, and therefore at the end of summer, but the weather was quite unpleasant, quite un-summery, almost autumnal. It was no coincidence! I controlled the weather, most evidently, with the flashing unpredictability of my moods, as both of them sunk & rose together. Except they never seemed to rise! How would I celebrate these revolutions in the most dire of meteorological circumstances?

After all is said & done, I might assume that it suits me. Why, only last Friday the heavens opened as I left the office for home. How sad I was! and the streets were clear as most people cowered in doorways but I found this haute cuisine of rainfall very delicious. I lifted my skull and felt the rain fall on my face. When I arrived home, I was soaked through. Everything felt a little better, so I fell into a drunken state and thought about the twenty-fifth.

My mother celebrates her birthday month. The entire month of February is hers, to do as she pleases, to raise glasses when she wants. For those twenty-eight days, she can often be found drunk, bellowing—’It’s my birthday month!’ and so I do the same, in a quieter room, boxed in on four sides, the surfaces of my furniture becoming pageants of empty vessels that I am too lazy to clear.

It used to be that I would watch the weather report as I got changed in the morning, but my TV set isn’t even wired in any more. Every day must be taken as it is served. Every evening is a reaction. Won’t get so fat off wine. Eventually the bins will have to be emptied, and all is silent. In the mornings I feel terrible, but because sobriety doesn’t thrive in the sunrise, I drink for entertainment. The TV set isn’t wired in so there’s no weather report, and I walk into it fresh as I can be. I haven’t come since she made me. These days like Nico.

The day she broke up with me I knew it was coming. It was raining and cold. It was August and it was closer to my birthday than it had been before and I was as miserable & sad as the weather was raining & cold.

Her horoscope told her not to break up with me. (The weather didn’t care either way.) ‘We can’t break up because we aren’t together,’ she said. I never understand modern relationships. Human relationships are baffling. The stars told her not to break up, but she ignored them; they’re probably dead by now anyway. She looked up our sexual chemistry in the stars. She didn’t believe the stars, she told me. The stars said we wouldn’t have sexual chemistry. Like gods we proved the stars wrong, took them for a ride, had good fun and smiled laughingly as we kissed after coming. Like the beer cans and bottles of wine, condom wrappers lie on my floor for a while, and I walk them around the flat so that I see the gloss of their lubrication, I smile — I slip and slide over this tremendous summer ice.

We went to site, my friends and I — colleagues — and I. We drink together, so we are friends. I could not shake something and yet I disclosed nothing, listened to their problems on the tube and, battered by the horrific rattling of frogs and iron, we discussed other problems, feeling the rain dry on our skin. As we emerged on the far-western streets of London I went to light a cigarette but the wind, the wind blew it from my grip and it landed in a puddle. I reached in and picked it up, crushing it in my hand. I began screaming at it—’You fuckin cunt! Fuckin wind! You fuckin cunt! It’s summer! It’s August!’ I rolled another under a bus-stop. Exhaustion. I could not use the toilet properly and my dreams were leaving me dazed & confused every morning.

‘How’s it going with the French bird?’ my friend asked. Maybe he’s just a colleague.

‘I think she’s breaking up with me.’

And I spilled.

The rain fell in sharp sheets. Wind blew along the road. Out there is August cold. I had a hot coffee in one hand (warming) and a cigarette in the other (wet). I told him things like they were pub things. There are such things as pub things; the delicacies you only disclose when you’re five pints in. You had to walk along with your skull turned down because the rain stung. Cars drove past, through the blocked drains where puddles spun out like disregarded peacocks (!) and I would not speak many words. When we got to site one of the builders from Yorkshire told me he was staying in a hotel nearby, and was always in the bar, eating takeaways, away from his family, away from his wife. ‘Fuck me,’ I said —’You all right with that?’ He asked me if I was married—‘You married?’ No, I told him—‘No,’ holding up my left hand. ‘It’s not so bad, he told me—‘It’s not so bad.’

That evening she broke up with me. We wouldn’t speak again. All the star signs fluttered. I didn’t like how things went with human relationships, but I understood them and the way they went.