The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “Whenever I can, here and there,” said Ted. It had been harder the past year, with more men hunting for work and fewer shifts offered to each to try to spread the work around.

  “Come talk to a mate of mine tomorrow,” said Joe, “who owes me a favor. We’ll see what we can do.”

  Early the next morning he was waiting for Ted, as he’d promised, steering him towards the foreman as though Ted was his oldest friend, to see what jobs might be on offer.

  “Be grand to be up in the air,” said Ted, taking in the line of the bridge, the two curves firming against the sky. He still hadn’t made twenty-one, but he was sure there were a lot of blokes fudging things like this to get themselves some work.

  Joe’s arm swept out at the twinned arches as if they were his old friends too. “You’re as bad as my wife,” he said, “hankering after putting your feet where thin air should be. Makes no sense to me unless I’m being paid to do it.” He shook his head. “The way your toes ache at the end of each day from clinging on up there. There are some say it’s easier as you go . . .” He shook his head again. “There are some who go up the first day, turn round and go straight down again and never go back. Dunno what stopped me doing the same—apart from the pay packet at the end of the week.” He laughed. “So where are you staying, mate?” And offered a room just like that—“Well, a veranda, really, but glassed in, and with a comfy spot to sleep.” A stop or two on the ferry and much closer than Ted’s gran’s out at the beach, and it was Ted’s for the taking, he said, once they knew about a job.

  “What about your missus?” asked Ted.

  “Glad of the company,” said Joe. “She’s greedy for stories about this place—you’ll see what I mean. Besides . . .” He paused. “Someone else putting in, you know; it all helps.”

  Around them, the day was already busy, men making dark shapes against the metal, dark shapes against the sky, their hats like bits of punctuation. The noise was tremendous. Ted had never got his head around the mechanics of the thing, even after all these years. How did you get up there—and how did you stay up? How did you hear what anyone said? How did you brace yourself against the high clear space you had to stand in, move in, work in? It was amazing. Top of the world.

  The foreman clapped Joe on the shoulder, asked after his wife, looked at Ted—“I’ll see what we can do”—and then at his sheets, his vacancies. There was work on the water, he said: someone was wanted for the barges that ferried the men about, the barges that ferried the pieces of bridge to the point where they could be hoisted into the sky. “Okay, son?” Shifts, shillings.

  A hand held out, Ted shook it, and that was that. He was a proper part of it at last, even if he had to keep looking up.

  The particulars of the thing: scores of men in the shops, on the ground, on the water, on the structure itself, fitting, bracing, heating rivets, driving rivets, driving cranes, rigging, painting, cutting, finishing, moving, yelling, running and flying up into the air as each section was winched into position. Across to the north from Dawes Point, the real center of activity thumped and hummed in great sheds, built where rocks had been blasted away—the first assault of noise the project had made on the city, years ago now—and where each piece was brought as close as possible to its final shape before it was let outside and moved along to fit into the bridge that was growing. Shading his eyes against the morning sun, Ted was sure he could see the walls of the shed pulsing with everything that was happening inside them. Sitting on top of the world.

  Ferried out to the harbor’s center then for the first time, he looked up again, noted how far the south side had inched ahead of the north, as if it was showing the way, lighting a path. It still felt as if chance, or alchemy, was more likely to make the two halves meet than any effort of lines and math and angles. But at least it was getting closer now, the southern end moving towards the point that would take it as far as it could go, the northern end catching up, catching up. It had taken just two years for the arch to get this far.

  And then, thought Ted, it’ll look like a rainbow. A rainbow—his head, his shoulders, his chest shuddered, as though, his mum would have said, a goose had walked over his grave.

  “Here,” he heard someone call, “take that end and bring it round.” And that was it; he’d begun.

  Joe talked most of the way home, onto the ferry and up the river a way, and then a walk with a “Right here” and a “Left here, mate,” and Ted almost at a run sometimes to keep up. “So that’s that, mate, you’re here now with a solid job and a place handily close—left again, mate, and we’re almost home.” A tidy garden, thick with roses that his mum would envy, and the stairs up onto the porch glaringly clean.

  “Rolling along,” he sang softly, “just rolling along.”

  The front door was open, showing a hallway that ran right through to the back. More green there, and the late day’s light brushing it golden like the moon on water. Looking down for the first step, Ted caught the edge of a shape, something dark, as it moved across the lit tunnel of the house’s passage. When he looked up, the light was clear again, unimpeded.

  “Around here for your things.” Joe’s boots were off—Ted struggling with his balance and his laces—and he padded through the house to a louvered room with a cane lounge, a knitted blanket, a couple of cushions, a book splayed open and facedown.

  “The missus,” said Joe. “Always reading something.”

  Gulliver’s Travels. His mum had read it to him when he was a kid, all the little people and the big people and the faraway places and Laputa, the flying island—he’d loved that; never more embarrassed than the time he asked his teacher, fanning the pages of the classroom’s atlas, why he couldn’t find Laputa on any of the maps. He blushed again thinking about it now.

  “Us in there,” said Joe, gesturing to one of the windows that gave onto the veranda, “and a bath at the back. I need a wash.” He went through another door with Ted, still holding his bag, in his wake. Cold water into a basin and a big cake of yellow soap on the side. “It’s the worst part of the gig, that you bring it home every day,” said Joe, rubbing up suds. “Not so much as a tub to get the muck of it off your arms, and you’re scratching the bridge off your skin and out of your ears and from under your nails until bedtime.” Joe had his face, his arms, covered in lather as he looked up and caught Ted’s eye in the mirror.

  “Joy,” he said, but it wasn’t the soapy water, his clean hands. It was his wife, standing in the bathroom doorway behind the two of them, a clean towel held out towards Ted. “This is Joy,” said Joe. And the woman smiled.

  “It’s getting so dark these evenings,” she said. “Come into the kitchen for some tea when you’re ready.” And then, turning to Joe, “Let’s hear what stories you’ve brought for me today.”

  Dan

  AS THE great wheel swung slowly towards the top of its arc, London sprawled away, a mess of roofs and shadows with spots of light coming up here and there as the daylight faded. So many people, so many stories: Dan liked how easy it was to disappear into the city’s multitudes. He liked that the sheer mass of it still let him feel separate, invisible, even after a decade.

  In one of the wheel’s glass pods, he steadied himself against the handrail and looked carefully along the curve of glass as it moved through the air. He could manage the inevitable rush of vertigo if he stretched his gaze incrementally; look all at once and he’d swoon. But there was the sky, there was the horizon, there were buildings and trees and then the river below, punctuated by its bridges—Vauxhall, Lambeth, Westminster, the rail bridge into Charing Cross, Waterloo Bridge beyond that and, around the sweep somewhere, Blackfriars, the fine line of the Millennium Bridge and Tower Bridge with its famous opening arms all farther downstream. Dan liked the slightness of the Millennium Bridge, so fine it looked like it had been drawn onto the city in the palest of pencil. He liked the buttresses and ridges that held Waterloo Bridge in place—so plain above, with elegant and gliding curves beneath. After mor
e than ten years, he thought, these two bridges were probably the shapes in London he knew best, yet he still wasn’t confident he could have drawn them from memory. How many pylons? How many arches? He could never remember.

  “What time did you say you’d booked the restaurant?” Behind him, Caroline rested her chin on his shoulder, its movement tapping a rhythm into his flesh as she spoke. “Did you get a chance to check that everyone had the details?” Dan’s gaze shifted from the world outside to their reflections in the glass. He saw his own face: skin speckled from too much Australian sun years before; dull brown hair that used to lighten in those summers; eyes an indeterminate color with more lines and creases around them now, and around the corners of his mouth too. At least the suit’s sharp, he thought, brushing imagined dust from its shoulders. They’d looked out of place, him and Caroline, in their city suits, queuing for the ride with tourists in zip-up jackets and sneakers.

  He was heading for forty, and the idea made him pull up his shoulders, pull in his stomach. When he stood like this, he was taller than Caroline, and she would lean her head more often against him. When he slouched, she stood taller and apart. She was younger than him, five years or so, and her face had the smooth whiteness of English summers. He was never certain about the color of her eyes—they seemed to change from blue to green—but he knew perfectly the texture of that pale smooth skin. “Like rose petals,” he’d said the first time he touched it. He still remembered the way her smile had spread then. Five years ago—she was as old now as he had been when they met, as if she’d caught up. He watched as she tucked her pale hair neatly behind her ears: she did this whenever she wanted him to concentrate on what she was saying.

  “Sweetheart? Did you check everyone knew what time to come? I can message them now . . .” Her fingers were already tapping her phone: she knew him too well. “Hopeless, Dan, you’re hopeless.” She shook her head as she clicked her phone off and put it back in her bag. But she smiled, resting against his shoulder again, and he reached across to grab her hand.

  “Look at the lights, Caro,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to come up here.”

  “That would be because it’s such a touristy thing to do. And because you hate heights, Dan, which begs the question why you wanted to come up here at all.” And her voice was different then—frustrated, or maybe tired. It had happened once or twice these past few weeks, and out of nowhere, it seemed to Dan, so that he was never sure what had caused it. And it passed, it always passed: now Caro squeezed his hand a moment, and leaned in while she scanned the view below. “Still, it’s your birthday.” And she kissed his cheek so suddenly that he recoiled a little, startled, and wished that he hadn’t. He heard her inhale, too slowly and for too long, before she spoke again, but she said nothing about his recoil, just: “How high do you think we are?”

  “One hundred and thirty-five meters,” he said promptly, and was relieved when she laughed.

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “It’s a meter higher than the bridge at home—it stuck in my mind when I read it.”

  She shook her head, laughed again, but the sound was a little forced. “That bloody bridge. It’s always on your mind, isn’t it—home?”

  The night they’d met, camping in Kent with a bunch of mutual friends, they’d watched the stars twinkle, counting satellites, listening to the big silence and feeling like they were the only people on the face of the earth. There was a village a mile or so away. His hands pulling the warmth from a mug of tea, he’d told her stories from the other side of the world, his home—nothing stuff, he thought, that just about anyone must know. But she’d listened to them as if he was the most exotic creature she’d ever met. He’d told her about his city, Sydney, and the places on the harbor where the old bush still grew down to the shore. He’d told her about the birds that laughed, the birds that shrieked, the birds that called and yodeled. He’d told her about Sydney’s big bridge, like a rainbow of steel. And she’d laughed and said that she thought he was in the business of money, not poetry.

  The warmth of that laugh: he’d felt it infusing him, and so he’d kept talking about Sydney’s light, Sydney’s space, about the best place, at the foot of the bridge’s southern pylons, to sit and gaze at the view. He’d told her stories about the bridge being built, about the men who’d made it. He’d told her about the men who’d lost their footing, slipped, and perished. And he’d told her about one man who’d slipped and dived into the water and come up “alive, marvelously alive.” Her eyes had shone with the miracle.

  “What a fabulous story,” she’d said. “Where did you hear it?”

  “I know the man who did that,” he’d said. “It’s my—he’s my grandfather—well, my . . . I grew up with that story.” He’d taken a mouthful of tea, so hot it felt dry in his mouth, and then he’d swallowed and said, “Like flying.” But she’d heard the swallow as “I’, I like flying, and said yes, she did too. He didn’t correct her. And the story wasn’t his grandfather’s—it was Gramps’s, Charlie’s grandfather’s, the closest thing Dan had to a grandfather but not, as Charlie liked to remind him, actually his.

  But Caroline had looked so pretty, so attentive in the firelight, Dan would have said anything to keep her there. And his city, Sydney, had rebuilt itself in his memory as he trawled it for more stories to tell her. Which were mostly Gramps’s anyway. His stories were the ones Dan carried with him. When he’d left home and come away, he’d told himself it was because he wanted to find some of his own stories for a change. But it was still Gramps’s stories that he told. They were adventurous. They were seductive. And if knowing a man who could fly couldn’t get you a girl, then what could?

  “I want to go there sometime,” Caroline had said at last. “People are always going, aren’t they—they just buy a ticket and that’s it—but it seems so impossibly far. A whole day of flying.” And before he could wonder if he should offer to take her, she’d leaned in and kissed him and he’d felt her petal-soft skin for the first time.

  “Like rose petals; like a white rose.”

  Through the glass, now, he watched the planes heading towards Heathrow. It still amazed him how many you could count, load after load of passengers flying out, or flying in, or flying home. Nine, ten, eleven; it was the wrong time of day for them to be coming from his side of the world. Antipodean planes mostly landed in the mornings, arriving with each new day. He followed the line of one jumbo down and down towards the airport—too fast; his stomach turned and he felt his throat tighten.

  Seeing him tense, Caroline brushed her hand along his arm, held it over his hand, tight, on the rail. “This thing you have about getting up above cities,” she said. “Makes no sense if you really do have a fear of heights.” And although she smiled, it sounded for a moment as if she might not believe this to be true of him anymore.

  “And would it have been so much trouble to check that everyone knew about tonight?” She let out a long sigh. “It’s not that hard to call people, you know.”

  “I like trying to work out how cities go together,” he said, ignoring her last sentence and kissing her cheek to compensate for flinching earlier. “And you have to admit I’ve taken you up some pretty good towers over the years.” He looked down at London. “I still can’t fit all these pieces together, and I’ve been here—” He shrugged, unsure how it could have been ten years.

  Caroline shrugged in return, staring into the fading colors of the day as her frown deepened.

  “Look at that cloud,” said Dan quickly, turning her towards the one tiny shape that glowed gold with the last sun. “It looks like there’s a light inside it.” But she shook her head as her phone began to beep with returning messages.

  He let her go, surveying the sky while her fingers tapped again behind him. His cloud was an island marooned in a vast sea, and below it, like an underscore, ran a streak of vapor from a plane, its hard line just beginning to soften.

  He leaned forward,
his thumb rubbing the palm of his other hand until its skin felt warm. The way that one little cloud caught the light. Dan shifted his head from one side to the other, trying to decipher its shape. It was strange that it seemed so familiar. Could a cloud look familiar? Could you have déjà vu looking at a cloud? He turned towards Caro to ask her, but she was looking down, as if she was trying to work out how long it would take to reach the ground.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It won’t matter if we’re a bit late—it’s my birthday, after all.”

  “It’s a bit rude,” she said. But she was beside him again, her pale hair spreading across his shoulder. “Looks like a comet’s tail,” she said at last, nodding towards the blurring line of vapor as it caught the last of the sun’s light.

  “That bloody comet,” he said, hoping she’d laugh. The night they’d met, she’d seen a comet, picture-book perfect and sitting low along the horizon. “Look,” she’d said, pointing, “look, look out across from that tree.” He’d looked, looked out across from every tree, but he hadn’t seen it. Part of him, he suspected, hadn’t believed it could be real. Shooting stars and satellites were one thing, he’d teased her later, “but who gets a comet on their first night together?” And she’d teased him about looking in the wrong place at the wrong time. “But I was looking at you,” he’d said, laughing.

  So when she told people the story of how they met, she talked about the comet. When he told people the story of how they met, he talked about how surprisingly cold a spring night could be. He did wish he’d seen it: it made hers a better story than the one he told.