Then, it was raining again. Rain that seemed to be rained upon by another rain, as if a second front had parked itself above the first. We went to sleep, and it was raining. We woke up, and it was raining. On an afternoon when there was a break in the rain and the city shone through the laundered air, I grabbed my helmet and got on my bike. By the time I was at the bottom of the hill, it was raining again. Waiting for the rain to stop, I sat in a cafe soaking and flicked through a rain-crinkled copy of the paper full of stories about the rain.

Growing up, the arrival of La Niña had usually been good news. The cooler, rainier weather it brought tended to mean the end of drought and wildfire. The hope that this would be case was especially acute in the late Australian summer of 2020, after months of the most extreme wildfires on record. By February, more than a billion and a half vertebrates had been killed and smoke had been sent high enough into the atmosphere to degrade the ozone layer. Our phones had surged with images of people huddled under ocean piers, puddles of aluminium that once had been cars, forests draped in pink retardant, cancelled skylines. It had been easy to think that the climate had reached a new baseline; that the country was now set to burn and burn until there simply no more fuel left. But then the rains had arrived, and the fires had been snuffed, and in the return of the cycle there lurked the desperate notion that all of it had just been an aberration.

Two years later, it was raining again. Each day, the fruit of the mother tree was driven out by the rain to splat off the polyurethane arch of the balcony and into the courtyard where it was pulverised by further rain and turned into a soupy, stinking jam that sprayed up and across everything. Fruit bats banked in front of the windows, close enough that you could see the veins in their wings and the orange oil of their chests. They hung upside down over the house in leather jackets welded at the spine to a juice-soaked body, screaming at each other while rained on, feasting upon the figs, ripping out twigs, and shitting out half-digested fruit to mix with the jam in the courtyard. Their distinctive scent pervaded the house, sweet and animal, heightened by the rain that did not end and kept the air close to the ground.

There had been early signs that 2020’s La Niña would be no balm, no return to normalcy. Everywhere the fires had burned, a deep, necrotic ash smothered the floor of the bush. With the first storms, this ash had phased into a toxic sludge that then slid directly into waterways—threatening new extinction events, sending conservationists rushing to evacuate galaxia fish from mountain rivers facing sedimental annihilation, and forcing the authorities to disconnect the largest freshwater drinking reservoir of Sydney. Months had gone by, and acid green epicormic had sprung from every blackened trunk of the bush—and yet it had not stopped raining.

There was no way to keep the water out. The ceiling leaked beside the TV; the floor below it was permanently stationed by buckets and towels. Bread went moldy in its bag within a day. The driest place in the house was the fridge. The city drifted in and out of view, sometimes misted, sometimes truncated at the top by low clouds, grey and grey-blue through the unrelenting humidity.

It was easy to imagine that Australia had settled on two modes of catastrophe between which it was doomed to alternate without end: fire and flood. What else was the rain but a means of feeding a new, tangled understorey that, once dead and dry, would fuel the next Black Season? Australia’s lot was to hope for a kind of temporal equatoriality, an in-between of two poles of permanent dysfunction, both made deeper by the warming of the atmosphere.

One evening, there was a truce of the spheres, and the rain ended for a while. In the quiet, the rumbles of the flight path melded with thunder out to sea, and twigs and berries pinged out of the mother tree. We caught a bus with a wet floor across town to meet friends at a bar, a kind of shack brooding over a sprawling public golf course built on former wetland, grubby for the fact it had been underwater two days before. The presence of the swollen river lingered: brown regolith left on the wide blades of buffalo grass, on the timber columns beneath the bar. The soil of the golf course had yet to rebound from the weight of the water. On the verandah, men smoked in plastic chairs. Inside, men sat in front of TVs slung from the ceiling with papers and schooners in front of them, chatting out the sides of their mouths with both eyes on the dogs.

On the TV above the bar played footage of fridges that had appeared on an island off the coast, abducted from houses in the floodplain. In another clip, SUVs floated down the street to the giddy screams of school children. A reporter said that a major tunnel was flooded; evacuation orders had been given to those who lived near the seaside lagoons. Up north, they found an old woman floating on a mattress in her attic with twenty centimetres of headroom. They had to cut her out. There were fourteen and a half metres of water above the street there, enough to cover the mother tree. We shook our heads and tried not to talk about the rain before a mile-thick arm of the ever-storm uncoiled across the city, and there was no sound but the rain.