Cloudland

by Lisa Gorton

  Cloudland

  Cloudland

  Lisa Gorton

  Pan Macmillan Australia

  First published 2008 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Text copyright © Lisa Gorton 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Gorton, Lisa.

  Cloudland.

  ISBN 978 0 330 42377 9.

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Typeset in 12.5/16 pt Cochin by Post Pre-press Group

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Cloudland

  Lisa Gorton

  Adobe eReader format

  978-1-74198-213-8

  EPub format

  978-1-74198-272-5

  Mobipocket format

  978-1-74198-331-9

  Online format

  978-1-74198-390-6

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  For Kelso

  Contents

  Endless Rain

  England

  Thin Air

  Cloudians

  The Cloud Palace

  The Citadel

  Speaking Statue

  Snugs

  Fracta

  Stratum

  Flight

  Refuge

  Waking

  Altovia

  The Megalith

  The Tunnel

  Mist

  Lost and Found

  The Cave

  Alkazia

  Matches

  Calling

  Ice Fire

  Breaking

  The Rising

  Home

  Acknowledgements

  I thank my publishers at Pan Macmillan – above all, Anna McFarlane, for her generous support and perceptive suggestions. It has been a pleasure to work with her and with all the wonderful editors who improved various drafts: Brianne Tunnicliffe, Ali Lavau and Julia Stiles. I’m also grateful to all those who gave early and, in some cases, late drafts a good deal of time and careful thought: Antoni Jach, Kim Kane and Eva Mills. Thanks to Will Gorton for helping with the letter. John Wentworth helped most of all.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Endless Rain

  Lucy found her seat on the plane. It was still raining. Outside, three workers in fluoro jackets loaded the last suitcases. Beyond them, the airport was almost deserted. In the last hour of daylight, its buildings and asphalt had faded to the colour of rain. Lucy felt as though it had been raining forever. Some days the rain beat upon the roof, some days it came in like mist, but it never stopped.

  She remembered waking in the night at home, stumbling half asleep to the car where her father sat waiting, staring into the tunnel its headlights made. The silence of the pine forest had gathered around them and they had said nothing. They had driven down the mountain listening to the windscreen wipers’ soft complaining sound. Her father had eased the car around boulders in a litter of mud on the road. At the last turn, driving from the forest shadows onto the highway across the plains, they had seemed to come all at once into morning: a low white sky and the air dull with rain. They had passed a farmhouse sunk in water. The family had rigged up a makeshift shelter of corrugated iron and hay bales on the flat roof of their shearing shed. Lucy had seen a woman sitting on a chair up there with a rifle across her knees.

  The highway had taken them through the outskirts of the city. Its flooded suburbs were deserted. Lucy had seen houses with dark windows smashed in jagged shapes. Most people had fled to government camps in the hills: tent cities of tramped mud, where last week a man had stabbed his brother-in-law in a fight over a loaf of bread.

  Before the rain, they would have needed three hours to drive to the airport. Now they drove all day, keeping to high ground, taking small roads around the flooded valleys. They had to stop for police checks at every big crossroad. Near the airport, the highway diverted onto a railway bridge across the river. ‘Look at that!’ Lucy’s father had slowed the car. She had thought at first he was pointing to the bloated cow, bumping among beer cans and plastic bags in an eddy of the river. ‘Amphibians,’ he had whispered, and then Lucy had seen them: ten or twelve people huddled on loosely roped scraps of wood – doors and the top of a kitchen table. They were all in wetsuits and their hair hung down their backs in knobbly strands. Seeing a girl sorting through garbage, Lucy had imagined diving as that girl would dive into the muddy sway of floodwaters, into rooms with clothes still swaying in the cupboards, books on the bookshelves, all lost …

  The pilot spoke over the loudspeakers. In the aisle, near the front of the plane, a smug-faced flight attendant brandished a life jacket. Lucy looked away from the window, trying to turn her thoughts from the rain. The plane was only half full. People needed permission to travel now. They’re all going to a hospital somewhere, reflected Lucy, looking at the other travellers. For a death or a birth. She couldn’t see any other custody children.

  She had always liked flying. She liked the stunned hush that fell over people when they were killing time, waiting for the plane to land. More than that, even, she liked flying through cloud, looking out the window at its white, weightless mass, so full of light it made a silent hum. This time, though, waiting for the plane to take off, she just felt washed-out and sad. She caught sight of her suitcase, tucked under the seat in front of her. It had belonged to her grandmother and it was still covered with the tatty corners of cruise tickets. Near the handle, the canvas was peeling away. Why did some things, familiar things, seem more real than people? Maybe because it was so much simpler to care about them. They were just as they seemed; they didn’t have plans or secrets.

  She thought of her father walking out of the airport with his shirt wrinkling over his shoulders. He would still be driving home, she realised. Already, he would be thinking about climbing the stairs into the turret, gazing up through its glass roof at the clouds. He was a meteorologist, and he spent hours calculating wind patterns and staring at the sky. He would settle into his armchair with his computer on his lap, forgetting about dinner, snacking on chocolate bars he kept in a box by his feet.

  Lucy thought, If I ever need to choose a side, I’ll side with the Amphibians. A woman from the Citizen Safety Guard had come to speak once at school. ‘In the CSG,’ she had boasted, ‘we get food, water and a gun of our own.�
�� The woman had been cheerful in an empty way but her eyes had been dull, as though she’d been looking at the rain so long it had washed away her memories. These days, most people had eyes like that, even the ones who lived on high ground. If you tried speaking to them, they made you repeat everything you’d said. They stumbled over phrases: last year and next year. They only spoke about last week or tomorrow.

  Finally, the engines started. Strings of rain on the window slid back. The runway turned shiny with speed. With a jolt, they lifted into the air and Lucy’s vague unhappiness changed into something cold and certain. She was going the wrong way, to England, Christmas and next year, when all she wanted was to go back: back home, back to last summer, before the rain ruined everything. She pictured her mother, cuddled on the couch with her new husband and their baby daughter, Isn’t-She-Adorable. Every time Lucy thought of them, she could see them leaning over the bassinet saying: ‘Isn’t she adorable?’ ‘Just adorable!’

  The plane was climbing steadily now, through rain and clouds into a sudden openness. Up here, above the weather, the air was black and still. Lucy’s thoughts loosened and drifted until at last, she fell asleep. When she woke up it was dark outside and dark in the plane. Some passengers were crouched under thin beams of light, reading. The rest were slumped asleep with their mouths hanging open. She thought how ugly strangers looked when they slept. Their faces fell out of their usual expressions and showed the pouches of purple flesh under their eyes, their caterpillar brows and the veins on their cheeks.

  She turned back to the window. At that moment, a line of light divided the darkness. The sun was rising. She saw the sky fade, then all at once start shining, pale green, pink and smoky yellow. The light that shone on the clouds seemed to contain every other colour. Even its shadows were pale blue, not black. Lucy was tired but she didn’t feel like sleeping anymore. It was so peaceful, looking at a place where there was no rain. She sat for a while without thinking. There was only the plane and, further off, two clouds – one bright, one dark – skimming towards it.

  When she saw how fast those clouds were travelling Lucy sat up, fully awake. The bright cloud smashed into her window so hard she expected the sound of a crash and the silence was strange. She rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again a pattern of shadows in the cloud took shape. Lucy felt a jolt of shock. There was a face – a boy’s face – in the cloud. No, he was the cloud. There was a boy made of cloud, staring at her.

  Lucy’s bones felt numb. She looked at the other passengers. The man across the aisle had his head on his shoulder; his body was heaving and collapsing in time with his snores. The woman in front of him was staring at the TV screen. Lucy turned back to the window. The cloud boy was still there. His hair was white, and his lips and eyebrows, and he was so pale the light shone through him. His eyes were grey but at the centre, where his pupils should have been, there were flecks of white. If he hadn’t been watching her so intently, Lucy would have thought he was blind. His mouth kept moving as though he was trying to tell her something but all she could hear was the roar of engines. She touched the window. It was shivery-cold.

  Then the light that shone through the cloud boy faded. He looked dirty, suddenly, and thin. The second, darker cloud was close now, massed behind him. A pounding started in Lucy’s ears, louder than the engines, as she realised it wasn’t a cloud chasing the boy – it was a creature, a bundle of black skin with the look of rags. It had no eyes, no mouth, nothing you could call a face, but it reached out fronds, as if tasting air, and in this way, dragged itself to the cloud boy. Even in the plane, behind the window, its malice brushed cold fingers over Lucy’s skin.

  Like a living shadow, it poured over the cloud boy’s shoulder. He pressed his face against the glass, so close Lucy could see his feathery lashes. He was scrabbling at the window, trying to find something to hold, when the creature slithered across his face, covering his eyes. With a sudden tug, it pulled the cloud boy back. The next instant, Lucy found herself staring at blank blue sky.

  CHAPTER TWO

  England

  ‘Fasten your seatbelt!’ A flight attendant stood in the aisle, glaring down at Lucy. Lucy saw his lips opening and closing. Still she couldn’t fit the sounds he made into words. She could hardly believe the other travellers were still there: the man across the aisle blowing his nose, the woman in front of him lost in a book; the world whirring away, just as it had been.

  ‘I said, fasten your seatbelt! We’re about to land.’

  ‘Maybe not all here,’ said the man across the aisle, gazing at Lucy and tapping a finger against the side of his head.

  ‘The parents ought to warn us,’ said the flight attendant, seizing Lucy’s seatbelt and fastening it himself.

  Lucy barely noticed. She was so stunned her mind kept fixing on random details: the way the flight attendant combed oiled hair across a bald patch on his head. ‘I can’t think,’ she whispered to herself, pressing her hands against her eyes. A moment later, the plane thumped down.

  ‘England!’ breathed the man across the aisle, pressing his plump hands together.

  In a daze, Lucy followed the other passengers off the plane, down a long corridor with fluorescent lights that made everyone look queasy and tired. She was moving so slowly people kept shoving past. When she stepped out of Customs at last, Lucy tried to force herself back to reality. She told herself that she had arrived, she was in London – but the whole set-up seemed bizarre. She had never seen the airport so empty. Everything looked toy-sized under its high steel roof, and people’s teeth seemed too big for their faces.

  Lucy pushed through swing doors into the Arrivals Hall. Searching the crowd of expectant faces, she felt that old familiar click of disappointment: her mother wasn’t there. Lucy put her suitcase down and stood watching families hug each other while couples shared out bags. The hall emptied out. The quieter it got the more Lucy could hear: trolleys rasping over the linoleum, the flurry of different conversations. Finally, Lucy was the only one left.

  After what seemed like an age, a man in a blue shirt, straining at the buttons, came down the escalator and waddled towards her. ‘Lucy Wetherley?’ She nodded. ‘We’ve been calling you over the PA,’ he said accusingly.

  She had barely registered the announcements, their words lost in noise and static.

  ‘A message from your mother,’ he added after a pause, passing Lucy a sweaty scrap of paper with BUS 98 written on it in thick red texta. ‘She called to say the little one’s poorly and would you mind catching the bus?’

  Lucy could almost hear her mother’s pretty, gasping voice, her flustered charm persuading this official stranger to leave his comfortable chair and find her precious little daughter.

  He laid his fleshy hand on Lucy’s shoulder. ‘Do you need help, love?’ He was bald but he had a bristly moustache, which made his lips look like fat worms. ‘It’s not safe these days …’

  ‘I’ll be fine on my own.’ Lucy shrugged him off, grabbed her suitcase and walked outside to the bus shelter. She felt she was watching some news footage about a girl, tired but otherwise ordinary, who stepped out of the airport through sliding doors and faded, step by step, into thin air. It was raining, of course: the kind of rain that leaves you soaked before you notice you’re getting wet. A boy about Lucy’s age huddled in the bus shelter. He was all in black – black jeans, black Converse sneakers and a black jumper – and so skinny he looked like a fold-up person.

  Lucy sat at the far edge of the bench. The boy’s eyes slipped over her. ‘Good to see someone else isn’t wanted here either.’ He had a posh person’s way of speaking, as though his mouth was rounder than other people’s, but his voice didn’t seem to belong to him. The rich ones at school had money in the way they looked at people, as though they were judges awarding marks out of ten. This boy was looking at Lucy in the pleading way of people like Katrina Timms, who had to eat her lunch in hidden corners of the school, chewing endlessly on her sandwich.

  Lucy ha
dn’t told anyone about her parents’ divorce. She felt almost humiliated by the intimacy of it – all their tears and squabble. ‘My mum’s held up, that’s all,’ she said. ‘Because of the weather.’ That was how people spoke of it now: the weather – as though that word held all the mystery of what was happening to them. They never spoke of the rain.

  The boy took a box of matches from his pocket. She heard a match strike. He slid an envelope into the flame.

  ‘I’ve been waiting here an hour. They say they’re running emergency schedules, which means they’re hardly running buses at all.’ As he spoke, the boy kept turning the envelope, watching its flames run from the wind. It was one of those official envelopes; its plastic rectangle caught fire with a popping sound and left a chemical taste in the air.

  ‘So how come no-one’s meeting you?’

  He smirked. ‘They haven’t the slightest idea where I am. I’ve just burnt the letter telling them I was kicked out of boarding school, meaning I’ve got a week to kill before they expect me home.’ He shook the last fragments of envelope into the air and watched the ashes float, spinning, out of the bus shelter until they fell straight down under the soft weight of rain.

  ‘You flew here? How did you get a permit?’

  He shook his head. ‘I caught the bus. I was hoping for a flight to Paris but they wouldn’t let me on the plane.’ He pursed his lips and blew out a sigh. ‘I’ve decided I’ll give myself a little London break instead. No uniform, no muscle-faced rugby heroes …’

  His self-pity sounded like boasting. Lucy shrugged and let his voice lose itself in the sound of rain. She noticed they had built a sandbag wall around the airport, plastered with neon-coloured advertisements for dinghies and water purifiers. Around it, the floodwaters made a black lake.