As soon as the sun dropped behind the houses over the road, putting the front of their house in shade, Hannah pushed past Sacha and sat down on the sofa outside the front door. Soon Shelly came to join them; she'd been having a shower and hadn't bothered drying herself properly, preferring to let the water cling to her coolly, and her hair hung in long damp ropes down her back.

"What are you guys doing out here?" she asked Hannah and Sacha.

"Talking about the weather" Hannah answered lazily.

"You serious?" Shelly smirked. "Sorry I missed it."

"There's nothing wrong with talking about the weather" Hannah countered.

"Well I guess it's better than talking about the football" Shelly allowed.

"Feel that" Hannah said as the cool breeze picked up from the south, from the unseen bay. "How are you not gonna talk about that?"

"I wonder if it's a hold-over" Sacha mused to neither of them in particular. "From more agrarian times. Before people had air-conditioning and heating and insulation -"

"We still don't have insulation" Hannah interrupted.

"- when the weather was more, you know, fundamental" Sacha continued, unimpeded.

"Why would talking about the weather have held over this long?" Shelly asked. "What, you think people are passing it down from generation to generation?"

"Why not?" Sacha said. "There's obviously something fundamental about it."

Hannah turned into the breeze. "It's, like, the only thing that's the same for everyone. Everyone who's in the same place has to deal with the same weather. So what else are you gonna talk about? We all have different work, and we all live in different houses and we all have different shit to deal with, but we're all getting rained on the same or getting burned by the same sun or cooled down by the same wind. So why wouldn't we talk about it?"

"Okay," Shelly said, "sure. But there's only so many ways you can say 'This breeze is nice'." Still, she thought as she felt it on her face, it really was nice.