by Ashley Hay
Whereas Caro was probably almost home by now, clattering back to the city, her lap full of the replacement white roses he’d bought her that morning. “I’ll ring you, or I’ll text,” he’d said, and she’d hugged him and said, “No you won’t: I know you. Just go and see. Go and see how your Gramps is. I’ll talk to you when you’re back again.” She’d seemed happy he had a reason for going that wasn’t about her. So he’d kissed her, brushed his fingertips across her cheek, and walked through customs with his senses full of the flowers, their texture, their perfume. Ten days he’d be gone; he wondered if the roses would last that long.
“I lose all sense of time on planes,” said the woman on the aisle, tilting her own screen to read the distance. “It can say fourteen hours and I can know how long fourteen hours is in a regular day, but time feels all different when you’re just sitting here hurtling along, doesn’t it?” She held out her hand. “My name’s Cynthia,” she said.
“Dan,” said Dan. No one had ever introduced themselves to him at the beginning of a fourteen-hour flight before. It felt ominous.
“Don’t worry,” said Cynthia, “I’m not going to talk to you all the way home. You are going home, aren’t you? I just think it’s really strange that we’ll spend all this time so close to each other, and you’ll clamber over me for the loo, and we won’t even introduce ourselves.”
“I always find it really hard talking on planes,” said Dan, and he hoped he sounded firm. “Really hard to hear over the engines—you know, all that noise you forget about as soon as you’re back on the ground.”
“That film they made about the American plane that crashed into the field on September 11,” said Cynthia, raising her voice a little. “Did it have that kind of furry noise underneath all the sound-track stuff, or did they mask it all out?”
“I never saw it,” said Dan. He hoped there was nothing else to say, watched as she opened a shiny magazine.
“A clairvoyant once told me I was going to meet the love of my life on a plane,” said Cynthia. “But then I went back to her a couple of years later and she said I was going to die in a plane crash. It made me a bit doubtful about flying for a while. I think that’s why I started to introduce myself to people when I was up in the air—to feel a bit more at home in case she was right the second time, and to keep my options open in case she was right the first.”
There was nothing to do, thought Dan, but smile, nod, and find something to read—in a hurry. He put his hand into his bag, his fingers working through shapes and textures: a pullover, a plastic water bottle, something smooth and round—he groped at it and saw Gramps’s watch, shining and lovely in the palm of his hand. He smiled. It was nice to be traveling with it again. But as he pulled out the first book his fingers found—his journal—he realized that the book he’d meant to bring was still sitting at home, next to his bed. Fourteen hours with someone who consulted clairvoyants, and no book. The watch smooth and cool in one hand, he pulled a pen from his coat pocket with the other. Beneath his feet, he could feel the sharp angle of the plane’s ascent.
“Of course, I’m married now,” said Cynthia, “so you don’t need to worry about that.”
“Just about the dying then,” said Dan.
“Sorry?”
He shrugged. “It is really hard to hear, isn’t it?” There was something wrong, he knew, in not wanting to keep the conversation going, like the rudeness of getting into a cab and not wanting to talk to the driver. “Sometimes I think I must be going deaf,” he said, an arbitrary and untrue excuse. And he creaked open the pages of the empty book. Even so far into the year, with another almost in sight, nearly every page was blank.
At the beginning of every winter, every year he’d been away from home, Dan had gone into a big bookshop in the city and chosen a journal for the imminent new year. He’d taken it home, shrink-wrapped in plastic, and he’d put it carefully on the table next to his bed. On New Year’s Eve, he would unwrap it and write all his details onto the first page: name, address, passport number, work email, his mum’s number on the other side of the world as the one to call in an emergency—he read the number slowly now and wondered what Caro would have made of that.
On New Year’s Day, he’d open the book, uncap a new pen, and try to think of something to write about the night before. He’d try to think of one observation, of one line that was beautiful, or unexpected, or generous—something worthy of being the first sentence in a whole new year. Gramps had opened the first year after the war by telling Charlie’s grandmother how lovely it was going to be falling in love with her again. You could build a family, a history, on a story like that. It was the kind of line he must have worked on through the deathly mess of the years they’d been apart.
Dan never came up with anything like it. And after an hour or so, he’d leave the top few lines blank so that he could fill in his great sentence later, and then start a bullet-point list of resolutions. Call Mum once a week. Go to the gym. Save more money. One year, more hungover and tired than usual (one of the boys had put a company credit card down for the bar tab; it had been a big night), he’d written more extreme promises. Propose to girlfriend—he couldn’t remember now if he’d even had one when he wrote that, let alone if it was Caroline. Go to Antarctica. Run a marathon. And at the end of the list, the usual: call home more often, call his mum, call Charlie. He hadn’t done any of those things. He never kept any of his resolutions, and only rarely got around to writing anything in the journal again for the rest of the year, although sometimes, late on a Sunday night, he felt that he ought to. Gramps would have insisted. “Keep your stories, boy, remember what you’re doing and where you are—it’s your immortality.” But the books stayed blank; the days slipped by. He never ran a marathon or proposed to anyone. And he called home as infrequently as ever.
He blamed the time difference, the amount of time his job consumed. He never really meant to let his silences run so long, always felt at least a little guilty when he found a message from his mum, wondering why she hadn’t heard from him in so many weeks. But their conversations were so desultory, he thought—he was in his routine, she was in hers. What was there to say, other than that he was still on one side of the world, and she was still on the other?
His record of calling Charlie was even worse—partly, he told himself, for want of exciting things to tell her, and partly, he assured himself, because she called him so infrequently too. “You get to the end of the day,” she’d say in their sporadic calls, “and, well, you know.” Besides, his mum told each what the other was doing. He could believe they were as close as ever.
Staying at Caro’s place half the week was another excuse—no matter how many times she offered her phone. “I’ll call later, I’ll call tomorrow,” he’d say, and she’d shake her head and shrug. She could talk to her mother three times before lunch, could text people without even looking at the keypad. Had she meant it about not calling her? Dan was never sure about things like that.
On the screen in front of him, the little aeroplane inched out of England and on towards Europe. Dan clicked the lid on and off his pen a few times. I’m flying home, he wrote on the first line of that day’s page. His writing was awkward and irregular, like it still belonged at high school. He made another dot of ink on top of the full stop and watched as it flared across the paper. What next?
The aeroplane on the map nudged a little farther across the solid green lump of land. He wrote: I tried to call Charlie and she wasn’t home. I left messages. He frowned. I asked after Gramps. Gramps would know what to write on a page like this. The aeroplane on the screen is too big for the land it’s flying over. We’ll be on the other side of the world in less than a day. The woman next to me thinks she’s going to die on a plane. They should give you a clock and a compass when you board. Caro will be home by now—I can’t remember the last time I traveled without her. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to Charlie properly. I can’t remember what Gramps looks like—what he looked
like when I left. I don’t think I even have a photo. But I’ll be home tomorrow, on the other side of the world.
He stared at the next block of blankness, willing it to fill.
Next to him, Cynthia had taken a book out of her bag too, moving her feet—in bright red socks—onto the spare seat between them. She held the book out at arm’s length to read, the way Dan’s mum did. Dan thought, She must be older than I think she is. He thought, I wonder if Mum’s got glasses by now. It was a book of instructions for writing a memoir, and she was underlining things with a pencil. Above their heads, the seat-belt sign flashed on, and a disembodied voice told them they were heading for some turbulence.
“I’m sure it won’t be today,” said Cynthia, without looking up from her page.
Once, years before, and before Caroline, Dan had looked out of a plane’s window on his way to Greece and seen the Matterhorn, perfectly clear and familiar among the Alps below. Its rocky faces had gleamed and sparkled in the sun and there was snow glistening on its peak.
Gramps had a terrible story about the seven men who’d first climbed to its top; how four of them, roped together, had fallen to their death on the way down. “Men will do anything,” Gramps had said, “to get up in the air.”
But what about all the people who’ve hiked to its summit after that? Dan had wondered, gliding above it, trying to get close to the sky—and here we are whizzing over the top. Easy. He’d meant to write to Charlie about seeing it; he thought that later on his holiday he’d even bought a postcard of a white building against a blue ocean to hold the story. But he knew, as he looked out through the window at the bank of clouds below, that if he dug down far enough in his bag he’d probably find the card, still blank and scrunched into an inside pocket with a few Mythos bottle tops and a hotel receipt. Funny, the things you never got around to doing. Now Caro wrote all the postcards when they traveled. Sometimes he added and Dan on the bottom. His mother called it carelessness, laziness, but Dan, if he thought about it, suspected that Charlie not only heard any news he’d told his mother, but that she still heard, somehow, every story he meant to tell her. When they were kids, they’d made tin-can telephones to run through the fence. One Christmas, Gramps had bought them walkie-talkies. Charlie in particular had loved the idea of making words move through air—she wanted Dan to leave his walkie-talkie on in his room while his mum read to him, so she could hear the stories too. Her mum had died, she pointed out with the child’s pragmatism she would never lose, and she only had Gramps’s voice left for storytelling.
The plane shuddered, Dan’s stomach lurching with it as his fingers tightened around his pen. It didn’t bear thinking about, the power of the air, if it could hurl a jumbo jet up or down or from side to side so casually, so easily. The plane jolted as though its nose was falling forward, and a woman hurrying along the aisle grabbed at the headrest of Cynthia’s seat, and clutched her hair by mistake.
“Izvi’nite, pros’tite,” said the woman, patting at Cynthia’s head and slipping into the row of seats in front of them. Cynthia smiled at her, accepting the apology.
“Did you see them boarding the plane?” she said to Dan. “Russian, I think, and the old man isn’t well. The crew didn’t want to let him on without a doctor’s certificate or something—they were just in transit, apparently, and trying to get to Australia. He’s supposed to have some operation there. He was in a wheelchair. It must have been before you got on. Must be her father.”
Dan leaned his head against the window, craning to see the old Russian man she said was in front of them. He could see a little bit of skin, very papery and pale, and thin hair that looked colorless rather than anything you’d call grey or blond. The woman’s face came into view; her smooth cheek and her eye were disproportionately large somehow. Must be something to do with only seeing part of her, thought Dan. She picked up a face washer and dabbed at the old man’s skin, murmuring gently. The tone of her voice didn’t change, didn’t waver as the plane made another sudden jolt, although Dan saw that she held the cloth above the man’s forehead a little longer, waiting for the strange air to pass before she tried to touch his skin lightly.
Outside the window, the clouds were so thick that the world below had disappeared and Dan was sure that if he’d been able, somehow, to step through the side of the plane and into the cool, white silence, they would be solid enough for him to stand on.
For years, when they were little, he and Charlie had daydreamed about cloud-walking, begging Charlie’s grandfather again and again for stories about making the bridge up in the air, up in the mist, up in the blue or white sky; for stories of planes flying through clouds, later, during the war. They imagined stringing tightropes between hot-air balloons; they imagined diving into a big tuft of white as if it was the local pool. They imagined being able to sculpt the soft whiteness into statues, mazes, whole cities of buildings. Dan shook his head: crazy-kid things to think of. That cloud he’d seen from the Eye on his birthday, he hadn’t even been able to decipher its shape. Yet lying on the grass unraveling the clouds had been part of every weekend, every holiday, every late summer evening after school. Primary school, he thought now. Surely they’d outgrown that sort of thing by the time they were in high school and mapping out their lives. “All I want,” Charlie would say at the end of every fantasy, “is to put my hand out and grab a great big chunk of white.” And then they’d argue about whether it would be wet or dry, hot or cold, until Gramps shut them up with stories about coaxing planes through white banks that loomed solid and cold—“towering cumulonimbus with spikes of ice at the top,” he said. They were the worst; the coldest and the worst. Dan shivered now; those spikes of ice, and how big were the clouds through the window if a plane, so big itself, felt small against their billows and curves? The floor, the ceiling, jerked up and bounced down again, and he heard Cynthia swear under her breath.
Surely not today, he thought, but some part of him didn’t feel sure enough.
Outside, one of the clouds had taken on the colors of a complete circle of rainbow. Dan smoothed his hand over the page in his journal and tried to draw its shape, marking in the divisions for the seven colors that he remembered from school, red through to violet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a rainbow, let alone flown past one, and he wished he could have made the picture in his journal look nicer than a blobby shape cut by black lines with the names of the different colors written in. A few years ago Charlie had sent him a postcard of a perfect white cloud haloed by a rainbow. He’d read the message three times before he spotted the credit along the bottom. It was one of her photographs. Where are you? she’d written. I’m making more pictures and wishing I could show them to you. And she’d copied a couple of lines of a poem by one of the world’s other Dans—if you’ve still got time for that sort of thing with your busy job and your mysterious Caroline. The lines written carefully in her neat handwriting:
My failing:
To see similes, cloud as something other.
Is all inspiration correspondences?
He wondered if he’d ever replied, ever acknowledged that the card had come. Yes, it was so easy to put off getting in touch with someone when you knew it could be as instant as email, as a phone call. This rush around the world used to take six weeks, six months. Now, he was one hour down; only twenty or so still to go.
He flicked through the blank pages of the journal again, thinking about Charlie’s cloud photo. The last series of her work he’d seen, she’d placed photographs of old weather records against photographs of the same days in her year—23 October 1789: At 10, a shower of small rain. 23 October 2002: Dust storm on the edge of Sydney. She was just as delighted when the days’ temperatures and tempers were completely different as she was when the weather repeated itself across the centuries.
“But what do you think it means, if they’re the same?” he’d asked her. “What do you think it tells you?”
She said, “It tells me something nice about ti
me, that sometimes it folds one way and something repeats, and sometimes it folds another and you end up somewhere different, with something new. It’s not science, Dan, it’s poetry.”
She hadn’t sent many pictures after the cloud—the occasional photo printed on a rectangle of glossy white card, announcing an exhibition; the odd one torn out of a magazine. And she always wrote across the middle of the images in thick black pen—It’d be nice if you were here, or, I thought you’d like to see where this ended up—so that he wanted to tilt them to make the black words slide onto the floor and leave the picture clear. He should have gone home for one of her shows—Caro always said she liked the pictures.
“Do you know what the weather’s been like back in Sydney?” he asked Cynthia, to compensate for his earlier evasiveness, and she shook her head. “It was a great day when I left—blue sky without a cloud. Be nice to land back into a day like that.”
“You’ve been away a long time?” she asked, and as Dan nodded, he realized he had forgotten how Sydney’s streets fitted together, forgotten the series of steps and turns you’d need to get from the main railway station down to the bridge. All jumbled now, like London. I should tell Caro, he thought. Might make her smile. Still, he remembered its sky, its big blue sky. He remembered Charlie turning her face up to the warmth of its bright sun—when they were kids, when they were grown up, when he was leaving.
He looked down into the clouds, now far beneath, and his eyes closed against the light. In a backyard on the other side of the world, he and Charlie used to lie and watch the jets draw their trails of vapor high across clear skies: yellow-orange at dawn, white at noon, red sometimes at dusk—maybe that was what had made the sky from the Ferris wheel feel familiar.