It hit 37 degrees today with no saviour sea breeze to beat off the unflinching light.

The heat is so much that all I can do is sit naked on the bed in front of our too-small fan and think about all the things I should be getting done that can't get done because of the sweaty afternoon sludge.

Even now I am a mask of perspiring ooze. To sit outside means dealing with flies and swatting at my face as they divebomb and nosedive willynilly. They are looking for hidration in the sweat pouring freely from my forehead and on down slowly turning my eyes into a suburnt red to match my arms.

I spent the morning in the laundrette concentrating in making the largest mushroom cloud I could in my tee-shirt from the ever-pouring armpit sweat.

I read Camus while the washing machines and dryers tumbled and slurped and mumbled and burped in the heat. The rhythmic hum sent me to a near stupor. I tried to focus on Camus' verbose musings on crime, punishment, the Almighty and Beelzebub, with my face supported by my arms on the desk.

I begun to count, a hobby of mine when bored. 8 Washers, 6 dryers. the old lady on duty pokes her nose in every 3 minutes to give the laundrette customers a look of disdain, she did this 8 times. There were 6 posters on the wall, two broken machines. Too many tiles on the floor to count, but 128 alone on the floorspace under my chair. 3 flies, then 2. 5 customers, I was the only one who stayed to wait on the cheaper self-service laundry.

I eventually had to approach the old woman with the disdainful looks. When I asked her for change she shrank from me, as old women tend to, and she shouted across to her daughter in Italian, who had been pottering busily about me in a summer dress. The sleepier I got the words that came from her mouth, that Italian that I don't speak, whose meaning was illusory to me, kept slurring themselves in my brain, slowly recurring like a lazy haunt. The more they did, the more I thought they contained mention to the strangest of words. I know that she saw me, then heard me speak because her eyes were locked on me. Then she moved away and shouted to her daughter. And when she did, she was definitely saying something about the Devil.

I wonder what part of the Devil she saw in me.

I wasn't wearing glasses and I normally always do. I don't tend to let people into my eyes unless I trust them.

The last time I was there, I set the rubbish bin right outside the laundrette on fire with a carelessly tossed butt. The old woman and her daughter had to heave 3 buckets of water into the bin to extinguish it and I heard her let free with a series of Italian curses in the low pitched high speed wine of the aged.

One of the dryers I used seemed to refuse to work for me. 3 wasted dollars later I had to go up to the curtain and get back my money. When the next customer went up to the Dryer, too soon for the “Out of order” sign to be posted up on it, they slipped in a dollar and it worked immediately. And the old woman bore witness to all of this, slowly tut-tutting in softly whispered Italian in a comfortable lounge chair. You sometimes just have a sixth sense that someone is watching you too close. And she was definitely on my radar.

And in all of this, Camus was still telling me about the Devil, painting him through the eyes of the romantics, who saw him as the ultimate fallen idol. A font from which no love or hate could again pour. An ace of poetic dandy cast out and left unable to feel joy or pain, or to see the suffering that he causes or understand it. A hobo, an incredible romantic icon, that of the brokedown beat-prince, ruined and all.

And the empathetic Devil appeals to me. And maybe the hypocritical God appealed a little too, though I shudder as I write this. And in all of this, the word diavolo playing slowly over and over in her soft Italian sulk in my brain.

I needed a tete-a-tete. Something combined in the stale heat, the flies, the humdrum of washing machines and my sublime unconscious made this strange moment, for me, out of thin air.

And in it all I needed to see the conclusion. So I sat there, trying not to ignore Camus, and waiting for the drier to ping.

I went up to the counter on the pretext of change for the dryer. I turned to the old lady and coughed up a quizzical glance. She mumbled something that again sounded too-eerily-familiar to the slow record in my brain, and returned to ignoring me.

I said “diavolo”? But quietly, like you mightn't hear it, in up-speak, questioning what she might have said to herself. She looked up again, not-too-sharp, and looked set to dismiss me again, as her daughter pottered around again collecting my change.

She poked an old finger at the book.

“The devil worked in that man, Camus.” she said in lilted but perfect and unflinching english. She seemed to spit out the words with a natural resentment of them, formed from a too-strict education in speaking them.

I looked at the book. “The devil, my husband's devil was the same one.”

“And you have that face too.”

Then she sighed.

“But, I don't know.”

Her hands went up in a dismissive gesture as she turned and ignored me again and went back indoors behind the curtain where I couldn't see her. I think she was waiting patiently until the devil was finished in her shop. I don't think she cared too much that I was there in the first place.