The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  Inside, preparing to sleep, he picked up a pile of pages, tapped them into alignment, and found himself checking again the different workings of where his observatory actually sat on the face of the earth: 33°52'30"S 151°20'E according to one calculation, about a mile out from that according to another, and perhaps as far off as 33°51'10"S by another reckoning.

  Perhaps, he thought, yawning, it’s actually floating around somehow, unmoored and mobile like Gulliver’s island of Laputa or one of the Frenchman’s balloons.

  Ted

  HE CAME up to the front of the house, his head full of the swirling couples he’d just seen at the pictures, and for a moment the turn of her movement matched the turn of some remembered dance as it whirled through his mind. The two doorways between them framed her—the mottled greens of her dress, the woolly green of her cardigan, against the greens of her grass, her flowerbeds—like a painting. He paused, looking and listening, but there was no sound in the house. A kookaburra chortled from the street lamp above him.

  Stepping onto the front veranda, Ted’s feet landed naturally on the boards that would not creak and he felt some different sense of belonging. Another step, then he eased open the fly-screen door and paused again. Along the hall and out in the yard, Joy was bending down for something and for a second he couldn’t separate the green of her clothes from the green of the garden—it was as if she’d disappeared. The screen door snapped shut behind him, and she stood up at the noise, seeing his shape in the hallway. One hand waving, the other full of flowers, she called something that he couldn’t hear. But he smiled, waved back, and pointed towards the bathroom, miming the water, the soap.

  She was arranging the flowers—white roses—in a bowl when he came out, and she held them up for him to admire. “I said, we’ve got our chance,” she said—no hello, nothing small about the day. “Joe’s gone to help someone with a move; won’t be back till tomorrow. Smell these.” She took a deep breath, her nose close to the petals. “Aren’t they beautiful? We had these at our wedding; they always make me smile.”

  Ted leaned forward, breathed in. There was something like vanilla in the fragrance, something almost smoky, and something that felt like satin in his nostrils. He touched one of the blooms, and a petal came away in his fingers—it was like velvet, and so soft it felt wet somehow.

  “The crunch if you bit into one—would it be more like an apple or a pear, do you think?” asked Joy, pulling a petal from another bud and rubbing it between her own thumb and forefinger. “Terrible if they didn’t taste as good as they smell.” She set the vase down in the middle of the table, brushed her hands against her skirt, and smiled at him. “So we’ll go to the bridge tonight?”

  He felt his guts twinge and tighten, and he grabbed at the back of a kitchen chair. “Back tomorrow,” he heard himself say, “of course—and the move. I should’ve offered to help.” Joy was smiling, almost laughing. He’d never felt more terrified in his life. Imagine ever saying he wanted to sneak off and do such a thing, let alone that they would go together. His mind skittered through a thousand things that might happen, that might not happen, that might go wrong, to pull up against one solid fact: he wasn’t even sure he knew how to get onto it. His fingers worked at the softness of the rose petal; it was creamy, comforting. “Well then,” he said at last, “I suppose we’ll go after tea.”

  “It’ll be magical,” she said. “It will be perfect.” She looked as if she might clap her hands. “Really, it will be the most amazing thing to do. Standing up there, up in the air: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about it.”

  Up we go, thought Ted. Top of the world. He closed his eyes as she ran through her plans: they could catch the ferry in, walk through the Rocks, climb up from the south.

  “We’ll need to take a bone or something for the dog,” he said. “There’s a dog, Jacko, at the south end and I’ve only met him once. Hear he barks like billyo, but . . .”

  “I’d give up a chop for that,” said Joy. “And there’s a nice one here ready for him.”

  She’s not going to let us out of this, thought Ted. “Joy,” he began, but she turned and put her finger to her lips.

  “Shh,” she said. “It’s terrifying. But think of all those people who’ve snuck up before us. Safe as houses, they all say, and I know the way—Russian George told me. It’ll be fine. Come on, come on.”

  There were so many things that could go wrong. It might not be fine. And when Joe found out—when Joe found out. Ted practiced the words in his mind: We just wanted to climb it, Joe, you know we did, and we . . . He’d be saying this when they were safely at home. And of course Ted was dying to get up there as well. To walk up that big metal frame, up into the sky and the clouds and the stars. He took a deep breath, flicked the rose petal out through the open window, and squared his shoulders again.

  “After tea,” he said, “we’ll get the ferry.” He could hear her humming as she went back into the yard—humming his song. I’m sitting on top of the world . . .

  Rolling along, he thought to himself, but he couldn’t manage the tune. All right then.

  This is what I’ll do, thought Ted, trying to convince himself that the nervousness he felt was excitement, not fear. I’ll go out through the front gate and I’ll tell myself that it’s just like looking at the stars. I’ll get onto the ferry and I’ll tell myself that it’s just like going in to work. I’ll walk through the Rocks and I’ll tell myself that it’s just like going for a drink. I’ll get onto the site and I’ll tell myself that it’s just like going to see the foreman. I’ll get onto the arch and I’ll climb along the cords. I won’t think anything. I won’t think about anything. And when I get to the top—

  Joy, with her coat on, was already on the front path. “Let’s go,” she called, and it occurred to Ted that if he walked slowly they might miss the ferry. But his pace sped up to match hers. He was sure he was going to be sick, sure something bad was going to happen, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to think about what the bad thing—the worst thing—might be. The worst thing would be getting caught. Which he knew wasn’t true.

  From where they stood on the ferry’s deck, the boat seemed low in the water, as if they were closer to its surface and skimming along. It made the foreshores—the bays, the coves, the walls they passed and the wharves—look so much higher, more looming, more imposing.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” said Joy. “Isn’t it wonderful to be out on the water at night? Don’t the lights look pretty?”

  The voids between the house lights, the streetlights, seemed darker, more menacing than usual. This must be how burglars feel, how murderers feel, how lovers feel, thought Ted, and blushed, as if even thinking the word was somehow dangerous, somehow sneaky. In the darkness, he could see Joy’s silhouette leaning towards the water as if she was urging the boat on. Ted sat back a little as the ferry cut under the space the bridge would soon entirely fill, took in the diminishing slice of sky that still gaped between the arch’s disconnected arms.

  “It looks a lot higher at night,” he said. But Joy was smiling, still smiling, and she tied the knot on the scarf that covered her hair a little tighter as she tilted her own head back to take in its size.

  “It’s all right,” she said, “I’m terrified too. I’m just imagining that we’re walking out to look at the stars.” He wondered about taking her hand, as if he was just helping her to step over something, or helping his mum up some stairs—and as he thought about this, she reached over and took his. “The worst part is going to be not telling everybody—we’ll keep it our secret, won’t we,” she said, but it was a decision, not a question. “Are you ready?” And the ferry pulled in.

  The old stories Joe loved about this place. The first Englishmen sitting, watching, and waiting—and his astronomer, staring at the stars from the place where the bridge sprouted now. And then, later, the dark lanes and alleyways that ran away from that piece of land; men disappearing into tunnels that snaked beneath them and
waking up to find themselves on a ship and away across the ocean, indentured. That was its history—sailors, stars, and convicts chained to walls. Digging the first great holes for the bridge, Joe had found bolts in a wall where he was sure those convicts must have been chained, the way the caretaker’s noisy dog was chained tonight. The darkness felt heavier again.

  There was the hole in the fence, just like they’d been told. There was Jacko’s kennel; Joy had the chop out of the bag and in front of the dog before he could make a noise. There were the cranes and the barrows and the scaffolding and the cables and the rubble—and the pylon rising up towards them, pale and enormous like the way he imagined an iceberg. They were running fast by the time they reached the first section of steel, pulled up hard against it, panting. Joy eased her fingers out of Ted’s grip; his hand was stiff from holding on, sweating from fear, from exhilaration.

  “I don’t think we should stop,” he said between breaths. “I don’t think we should think about this.” And he went up the first ladder as easily as if he was going onto a roof after a missing ball. Hand over hand; foot after foot; his eyes on the rungs and his heart pounding. He cleared the first climb and straightened up for his first step onto the line of the arch, that magical curve made of so many straight parts. “Step onto the rivets, feel them under your feet, and kind of brace yourself against them—you can do it better in bare feet, I reckon.” He wondered where the certainty, the authority in his voice, came from; pictured Joe, with his shoulder under a wardrobe or a sofa somewhere.

  All I have to do is get her home, he thought, trying to reassure himself. Joe must have known Joy would seize this moment. He must have known he was giving her her chance.

  She was there, right behind him, her shoes in her pockets and her feet steadying themselves, beginning to grip.

  “It’s wider than I imagined, even when Joe said how wide—and it’s solid. Come on, let’s go.” She reached out for him and he caught her hand again. “Let’s go, come on: we’ve got to get higher, higher up.”

  One foot, then another; one step, then another. It was a still, clear night, just the thinnest sliver of moon making the thinnest gash in the black sky. Ted kept his eyes on his feet, one arm out for balance, one hand behind for Joy. Another step, another step—he wished he knew how far they had to climb, or had any sense of how far they’d climbed already. Then the gradient eased and changed under his feet and he slowed down, cut his steps in half.

  “Joe says they’ll lay steps along the edge,” he said, for want of something ordinary to say. “I guess everyone’ll be scurrying on up then.”

  The metal was cool under his feet, the knob of each rivet pressing into his skin like a marker. In front of him—ten or twelve paces—the color of the darkness changed. That was all there was. He stopped, lowered himself onto his haunches, and sat down; felt Joy easing herself down beside him. His knees were shaking, every nerve in his legs, his toes, his body tingling, and his voice cracked when he tried to sing, even quietly, his favorite song “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”

  Here he was.

  Beside him, Joy let out a long, long breath. A gentle breeze came through and he heard her whispering, “Oh.” Here they were.

  Ted looked at his feet, his skin pale against the dark metal. He looked at the rivets lined up across the cord. Eleven feet wide, and just like Joe had said, you could convince yourself it felt spacious. Ted took a deep breath, looked at the edge of the cord, and then looked out. There was the water, there were the lights of Sydney, and there, miles away to the east, was the line the coast made against the sky, the brushing flare of the lighthouse, the darker sky beyond. He shivered—huuh—and felt his whole body shake. He could smell salt air as it met the cleaner smell of cool wind blowing in from the south.

  “So,” said Joy quietly, “this is what it’s like to fly.”

  “Higher,” said Ted, “that must feel higher. And faster. But up in the air, yes.”

  She lay back carefully along the length of the steel, and he mirrored her movement, the top of his head almost touching the top of hers.

  “Those stars look pretty good.” He tilted his head from side to side, keeping his eyes on the sky. “There’s Sirius, and the Cross.” Below, Sydney had broken itself into the same patches of light and dark that the foreshore had shown to the ferry—the puddles of streetlamps, the inkiness of parks and gardens, the fireflies of sparse cars moving along streets, the reflections of boats on the water’s still surface.

  “As long as I know where they are.” He could sense her smiling. “You know where I met Joe?” she asked. “Down there under the southern pylons, when they were digging out all that ground, digging down through the years and the sandstone. He showed me the rooms where they reckoned the convicts had been tied up. He showed me a brick with 1789 carved into it—he took me onto the site one day and let me feel the shape of those numbers. Reckoned it was from the old observatory, where that astronomer lived in the beginning. Oh yes,” she said, laughing, “he says I make too much of things, thinking about this place, wanting to know all about it, taking its stories on, but he looks a long way back in the other direction. You know, he’s even had professors send him articles about what was here, and who.”

  Leaning out, Ted peered at the land below, erasing the lights, the movement, the development of the place until he could imagine only the smell of a fire and its dull, warm flicker, a wider silence, a wider darkness. He sniffed the air, sure, for a moment, he was catching the smell of wood-burning smoke.

  “Anyway,” Joy wriggled forward a little, “they kept digging, down and down through the rock. It was amazing how far down they had to go before they could start going up. All the holes they were going to loop the cables through to anchor the bridge to the ground—as if they were afraid it might float away otherwise, like a great big balloon. And then all of a sudden it began, piece after piece in space, working its way up here, higher and higher. I’d seen how it was burrowing into the ground; I’d seen those big cables tying it down. I knew it could take me up into the sky. And here we are. Here we are.”

  “My mum and me sat down there after the war,” said Ted after a while. “It was the day I realized my dad wasn’t coming home. Mum’d been to all these offices, trying to find out why they couldn’t at least send his body back; it was flu, in the end, after the war was over. I think she thought I understood what was going on, but I didn’t give up waiting for him for ages. We sat down there and I watched the water and the clouds and wondered how long Dad might be, and if he’d know to look for us down there, and my mum had a cry. It was a nice spot to sit.” He’d always believed he’d seen his first shooting star from the window of the train going home that night, but his mum said he’d slept soundly all the way. “I dreamed of coming back up to the city and waiting. I think I still thought I could just sit there and my dad would turn up, sooner or later.”

  He straightened himself as a boat made its way from the southern shore to the north, its wake fanning out like the train of a ballgown. All the stories the men had told him about throwing things, dropping things, letting things fall from all this way up—rivets hitting ferries; lunches hitting ferries; not to mention the slightly less tasteful human matter that went, blasé, over the edge. He felt in his pocket for a penny and flicked it, heads or tails, off the side of his finger with his thumb. He wasn’t sure what he was tossing for, he just sat watching the coin catch the light as it spun around and around, down into the darkness. He waited—it felt like an eternity—until he was sure he heard it splash. How far would a penny go down through the water? Was it heavy enough to sink? Would it bury itself into the mud, the sludge of the harbor’s bed?

  “Another thing for the future to find,” said Joy. “I wonder if they’ll ever trawl for the stuff that’s gone over already.”

  “I wonder if it was heads or tails,” said Ted. He was aching with trying to register every moment, trying to squash everything he could see in every direction into hi
s memory. “Maybe we’ll see a shooting star tonight—we should wish for something.” But sitting there, sitting with Joy, he wasn’t sure what he’d wish for next.

  “Tell me a story,” she said.

  Up in the air, against the inky night, he talked about the places he’d found where the bridge showed itself suddenly—the corners you could turn on city streets to find bits and pieces of its cage in the view, and then farther out, on the hill behind the racecourse, or right down beyond Botany Bay; out towards the southwest, out towards the northwest.

  “If there were people out there tonight, if there were people with sharp binoculars and steady hands, I guess they’d see us up here, couple of spots on this big smooth thing.” Joy sat up a little, lifted a hand and waved towards the four points of the compass.

  “I still haven’t worked out how it looks so big from some places, and so small from others,” she continued. “Even tonight, running along, getting closer and closer, it looked smaller than I imagined it would.”

  In the pocket of quietness behind their voices, Ted listened to the air around them. He could almost hear the squeak and drag of the stars through the sky—or was it the squeak and drag of the earth turning? It was the sound of the metal’s infinitesimal night-time movements, of the bridge pulling itself in a little here, back a little there. Against the soft turn of the breeze that brushed against him every so often, it sounded like a quiet, gentle song.

  “Can you hear it, Joy?” He held his hand up as if to pause the air, and the little creaks and moans rose above the ringing of the rest of the silence. “It’s bigger than you think, that sound, isn’t it? Makes me feel kind of small.”

  “I think she’s just talking to herself,” said Joy at last.

  “She?”