Small and unseen.

The air had the heavy, arid quality of an English Summer heatwave. Not as oppressive as a country that knew real heat, of course, but for those used to changeability in the weather, three weeks of blue sky and not one drop of moisture from it were heralds of a parched desert.

Maria looked at the ground beneath her feet as she walked along the hedgerows, and it reminded her of pictures she had seen of desert places; cracked, yellow earth, spiky cacti, the bleached skulls of animals. It was an odd thought, surrounded by a landscape that, despite the lack of rain, was as verdant green as the English countryside ever is in August. The cracked dirt beneath her feet wasn’t yellow, it was a dull, dusty grey. She passed an old beech tree, gnarled and brown-barked, leaves still in the shiftless air. She was thirsty and she had left without a water bottle.

Her father’s anger had still been reverberating around the house when she took her opportunity to slip out through the back door and through the fence panel that swivelled limply on its one remaining nail. She wondered if her mother would have soothed him by the time she returned, and how long she could remain out without it stoking his resentful temper again.

She had been walking for 40 minutes now, the white gloved hands of Mickey Mouse on her watch pointing to the six and halfway between the two and the three. The hottest part of the day thrummed thickly around her, and she felt the beginnings of a headache from squinting. She didn’t have water, and she was way out in the fields now. She looked around to get her bearings. She’d gone further than she thought while she had been preoccupied with the memories of Dad’s door slamming and the punch that had connected with the sideboard, and made a booming noise that made her jump even as she recalled it.

She should probably turn back. If she carried on this footpath she would only reach the waste ground by the side of the dual carriageway. Her lips stuck together a little, and the saliva in her mouth felt thick. Looking around, she saw an old barn, the corrugated iron walls peeled back at one corner, and a battered water trough beside it.

Getting into some shade would be a good thing, and as she swallowed and the saliva disappeared, she even thought wildly about maybe putting her head in the trough and drinking like an animal. The thought was enough for her to turn through the gap in the hedge and walk towards the barn, her burgundy velour trainers slipping a little because of the sweat on her unsocked feet.

Maria was disappointed, when she reached the trough, to find it as dry and dusty as the ground beneath it, but she took a breath and walked around it into the shadow of the barn. Continuing past the twisted flap of corrugated iron, she stood in front of the open end of the makeshift structure. It was a skeleton of bolted together dark red girders, and the corrugated iron that had been connected to the girders didn’t meet uniformly along each edge, so that as she looked inside it gave the impression of unusual jigsaw shapes punctuated by bright lines of the daylight beyond.

She had hoped it would be cool inside. It was not. The metal structure of the barn seemed to have concentrated the abnormal heat of the last three weeks into a hothouse, and it took only a second or two in there to convince her that it was more comfortable to simply sit in the shade by the door.

Sitting cross legged, wisps of hair sticking to the light glow of sweat on her forehead, Maria looked out over the fallow field, and at the far edge, she noticed someone riding a BMX, the neon orange tyres skidding and making plumes of dust with each trick. For a minute or two, she was mesmerised by the way the heat haze, which was such an unusual phenomenon in England, quivered through the floating dust. Then she realized the rider was David, a boy she found intimidating and aggressive at school.

Suddenly, she felt exposed, as though one second she had been in a landscape of her own making, and the next she had been thrust, unprotected, into someone else’s. She didn’t want to speak to David, and she didn’t really want him to see her. On instinct, she scrambled backwards, not even standing fully, like she was a crab scuttling back behind a rock. Inside the gloom of the barn, her nostrils filled with an oddly sickening scent mix of diesel fuel and hay. Before her eyes adjusted to the shift in light, the heat enveloped her, sucking the glow on her forehead into beads of sweat. Her t-shirt clung to the small of her back as she pushed herself to standing and moved to the side of the doorway, to look out across the field unobserved.

The BMX skidded and twisted on the dry ground, and Maria felt jealousy bubbling. She had wanted a BMX bike, and had been given a ‘Little Shopper’ with a little white plastic basket between handlebars adorned with pretty iridescent ribbons. She had ridden it once, and vowed to never touch it again after hearing the guffawing whoops of David and two other boys on the corner by the Post Office.

Here was David now, who would never have been given a Little Shopper, who spoke over her in school, riding freely on a summer day, oblivious to her need for solitude away from the angry man at home. She felt the sweat begin to dribble down the back of her neck, the backs of her knees clammy with it, the threads of denim at the bottom of her thigh length cut off shorts sticking to her skin. She was thirsty to the point of madness. She looked down and in the dry earth beside her feet, she saw a tiny white flower, petals clustered, boldly growing next to the rusty girder and the bent iron sheeting, and now she felt something new.

She was indignant. Why was she hiding? Why was she the one holed away in a rusty old barn, not riding a bike because she was embarrassed, running away from a house where her father’s mood dictated everything? Why was she running?

She looked at Mickey Mouse again, who told her that she had been out for over an hour now. It would take less than that to get home, and stick her head under the blessed relief of a cold tap. Once again, the thought of water propelled her forward, this time away from the barn.

The sudden shift in temperature from sweltering back to merely hot was as marked as though she had plunged into cool water, and more than that, that indignance propelled her into a run, which managed to create the illusion of a breeze on her sweat damp skin.

The sudden movement caught David’s attention and the BMX halted its manoeuvres. Maria sped quickly over the field towards the hedge and the path home, and she heard him shout something indistinct. When she reached the hedge, she stopped and turned back.

“I won’t make myself small any more!” she yelled, and spun on her heel, resuming a cantering pace which she maintained for at least half the way back.

By the time she reached home, it was a little after four, and she was breathless and battling a stitch under her ribs. She slipped in through the back door, and saw her mother at the sink. Maria pushed past her, swivelled the mixer tap round and spun the blue-rimmed cold tap a little too quickly. She cupped her hands beneath the steady stream of water and threw it over herself, then stuck her mouth in the flow and drank.

“Maria! You’ll catch it if he sees you not using a glass!” her mother chided, exasperated.

Gasping and refreshed, Maria stood back, wiped her dripping chin and looked at her mother. Here was her mother now, who appeased and soothed, who kept the peace, and prevented anything ever changing. The indignance coursed through Maria. The stagnant heavy air of summer seemed like it was the atmosphere of her life, and she remembered the relief of creating her own breeze as she ran through it.

“He never sees me, mum,” she said. “And I don’t care.”

With that, she left her mother, mouth ajar, in the kitchen, grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl that only ever contained apples because that was all Dad liked, and went to her room, plotting ways she would stop being small and stop hiding away, sweating about being seen.