Here comes the rain again

The servos and motors started whining, and the hydraulic arms began slowly to lift me, the excited children and the huge fibreglass eagles into the air.
I checked my seatbelt for a third time before the huge arms started to rotate us around tipping us onto an angle. From the top of the Flying Eagles ride in Wonderland I could see down the valley north of Abuja. I was looking at a huge bank of blue-grey clouds advancing on the city.
The middle of the cumulonimbus looked dense and impenetrable, but the sun shone brightly in the south, the light was yellow and made me squint when the ride brought us round. The water was dropping and advancing but it also seemed still, like the smoke that thunders over Victoria Falls.
But there was no real hurry, we had got off the ride by the time the rain came close. Looking into the heart of the approaching storm I could see the slews of rain falling, like water whips slashing the ground. From the ice cream stand we could see how the rain hit the expressway. The trees wailed in the distance and clouds of red dust were thrown up by the rain battering the ground. But standing with a cup of ice cream and a spoon, all I could hear were the children running around yelping in breathless excitement, as if they were having too much wild-eyed fun to breathe.
It was only when the wind started up that people started running for shelter. Avoiding the rain became a thrill ride, a stampede of little bandy legs and braided heads, giggle-crying and sandal-slapping up and down the path. It was infectious, I found myself jogging down to the arcade, even though I knew getting wet wouldn’t have been the end of the world. The smell of imminent rain hit me in the face, like a mouthful of soil.
“Hey bros, afraid of the big rain?” said a guard.
And then the rains were here.
Oh sure, there had been the shower a couple of weeks ago over Wuse, and the five dots of water that fell on the terrace of the Hilton pool from an otherwise completely blue sky. But I don’t think they really count.
The first time I saw a Nigerian rain storm, the power had gone in our old office and people gathered in the doorway where the light from outside came in. I stood with the wind lashing my face staring at the way the tree in the yard, which until a moment before had been a standing still in a stultifying heat, now moved like a sea anemone in a storm current.
“Have you never seen rain before?” asked Isa.
“Not like this,” I said.
At night I stood at the window looking into the mushrooming storm clouds lit up by the crack of lightning from inside. It looked like an air raid. Skeletal fingers of lightning spread across the sky in huge tree shapes. When I moved under the tin roof of my apartment I listened to the huge drops of rain hammer it with such force that I couldn’t believe the water wouldn’t come through at any moment. The drops sounded so large they could hold a fish, I thought.
Of course my part of Europe is famous for being wet -that’s why it’s so green. But the rain there is different, somehow. There are millions of different types of rain, from brief showers to three day downpours, to a kind of mist that hardly falls but soaks everything in an instant. There are parts of my country where I’m sure it rains every day. My friends who went to Manchester University used to joke that the whole of the country could be fine and sunny but on the weather map their city would have a black cloud over it.
But even so, I have never seen anything like Nigerian rain. It’s like a sporting event. I stood last night on the balcony of my apartment with the masquerade trees flailing about, staring at the volume of water falling. Across the compound a tiny bird was pressed into a ledge, hiding, one of the guards ran through the courtyard clothes totally soaked to his skin. The water fell on the bricks in swirls, like an invisible host of ballroom dancers swept the wet floor and churned it up in swathes. Outside, there are people who don’t have the shelter I do, and who may lose everything to the water. It was only this thought that stopped me from cheering on the storm.