Tim Dowling: the tennis has reached boiling point – and so have we

The Guardian

3 days ago

When the sun is out and the weather is hot, my office shed becomes sauna-like long before midday. By 11am, I retreat to the kitchen to work. By noon, the kitchen is also too hot to work in, and I move to the living room, where I find the oldest one and the middle one sitting on the sofa in the dark, their faces illuminated by their laptop screens.
'This is the place to be,' I say.
'The only place to be,' says the oldest. 'My room is like an oven.'
I have learned over a period of years that if I keep all the curtains shut, night and day, the living room will stay 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house in sultry weather. On certain days it becomes the only habitable room. Today is one of those days, by no means the first of the year.
'I picked the wrong day to work from home,' says the middle one, typing furiously, eyebrows knit in concentration. 'I could be in an air-conditioned office.'
'Me too,' says the oldest one, sipping from a steaming mug.
'What are you drinking?' I say.
'Tea,' he says.
'Hot tea?' I say.
'Hot drinks keep you cool in warm weather,' he says.
'No they don't,' I say.
'I feel cooler,' he says.
'Well, I don't,' I say. 'I can feel the heat coming off your cup from here.'
'I have a meeting,' says the middle one, standing up.
We spend the next four hours like this, with one of us occasionally leaving the room to conduct some private work business, only to return 20 minutes later flushed and sweaty.
'This is kind of depressing,' says the oldest one. 'Can we open the curtains?'
'No,' I say. 'Look.' I point to a spot on the wall where, thanks to a small gap at the top of the curtains, a thin stripe of sunlight is shining on the opposite wall – a stripe of such intensity that it looks as if it could set the paintwork on fire.
'Can we have the tennis on?' he says.
'Yes,' I say.
At some point the dog wanders in, crossing in front of the tennis with a rubber ball in its mouth, eyeing the three of us expectantly.
'Nobody wants to play with you,' I say. 'It's too hot.'
The dog releases the ball, which bounces once and lands in a boot. The dog tries to retrieve the ball and gets its head stuck.
'What are you doing?' says the middle one. The dog looks his way, with a boot on its head.
After the boot is removed, the dog squeezes itself into the gap between the sofa and the wall behind, and collapses there, panting. My phone pings once: a text from my wife.
'Mum will be home in half an hour,' I announce. 'And believe me, she will have things to say about the present arrangement.'
The match we're watching goes into a fourth set, which eventually progresses to a tie-break. Inevitably this is the moment my wife picks to walk in.
'What's happening in here?' she says. From behind the sofa, the dog's tail thumps twice.
'We're working,' says the middle one.
'You're watching Wimbledon,' she says.
'Just like in a real office,' I say.
'They don't have the tennis on in real offices,' she says.
'When were you last in a real office?' I say.
'When were you?' she says.
'That's my point,' I say. 'It could be exactly like this, for all we know.' There is a terrible scrabbling sound: the dog is trying to find its way out from behind the sofa.
'I still don't understand why it has to be quite so dark in here,' says the oldest.
'There's ice-cream melting in the back of the car,' my wife says.
'This match is on a knife edge,' I say.
Just before dusk, I allow the curtains to be opened for one hour, at which point it becomes clear that the room is in a terrible state: there are cups everywhere, cables running underfoot and shoes strewn across the floor alongside little piles of now unidentifiable things the dog has chewed up in the dark.
'I can't live like this,' my wife says.
'Me neither,' says the oldest one. 'I'm definitely going into work tomorrow.'
At 2am I cannot summon sleep in the tropical reaches of our bedroom. I think about taking my pillow down to the welcoming coolness of the living room, but I can hear the oldest one still watching telly in there, unable to sleep himself. I pick up my phone and look at tomorrow's weather, which promises more of the same. Then I think: but there's cricket tomorrow as well, all day.