The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

“She’s got to be a she; that big curve. She’s going to be so graceful when she’s done.”

  “It’s going to be big, for sure, pushing itself up and over the top of everything,” said Ted. “No one will ever be able to get lost here again—all you’ll have to do is climb a hill and work out where the bridge is and orient yourself to that. Feels like you could stand up and scrape the sky . . .” And before he could change his mind, he was on his feet, on his tiptoes reaching up and up and up. He laughed, heard Joy laugh at the same time. There it was—perfectly timed: their shooting star. He dropped down beside her again.

  “I’m glad Joe brought you home.” She took his hand again and squeezed it. “You’re a grand friend to both of us. You know that, don’t you? Joe thinks the world of you, and it’s nice to have someone to read with, someone else to look for stars with, someone to tell me more stories. And now, here we are, all the way up here. What a thing to remember, eh, when I’m ninety and you’re coming to visit me, all young and spry and busy?”

  “It’s grand of you both to have me,” he said. “Who’d have thought, meeting Joe that day, and it all turned out like this.” The knot, the apprehension, in the pit of his stomach gripped and tightened again. Magnificent, yes, but they still had to get down.

  On the water below a boat blew its horn and he started and sat up straighter, as if he’d been caught and reprimanded.

  “I wonder what the time is,” Joy said. “I’ve no idea how long we’ve been up here.” She flexed her arms, and Ted mirrored the movement. His legs were getting stiff and his feet were getting cold.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess we should think about working our way down.”

  “Next time I’m going to come up here and wait all night for the sunrise, see the tracks they say the boats leave on the water,” said Joy, adjusting her scarf. “Do you think many people will come up, when it’s done? Do you think they’ll see any sign we were here?”

  “There is something nice about being up high,” said Ted, “about getting up as high as you can, to see exactly where you are.” As for evidence, some part of him suspected that their footsteps would be set on the bridge’s steel as surely as those boats’ paths were set on the water—who could hope to be invisible in this most visible of places?

  “And then some people jump, don’t they?” said Joy, and so simply, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “I suppose that will happen; I suppose they’ll come. Although it seems a shame to do it in such a beautiful place.” The city looked so separate, and so inviolable—surely nothing could be big enough to make someone try to jump into it. “I knew a girl who was scared of heights, but she was fascinated by the idea of falling—could almost feel herself being dragged towards the edge, sometimes.”

  He didn’t like this, but didn’t know what to say against it that might change the direction of her sentences. He thought about the cold, and the climb down, and their long walk home. He looked out to the east, trying to press every piece of the view onto his mind’s eye. Then Joy stood up and it felt like the whole world tilted and swayed; it looked to Ted as if she’d forgotten how to stand, how to be tall. Instinctively he reached out and grabbed her ankle, and the shock of the touch made her stagger, just half a step. The steel seemed suddenly so narrow.

  “It’s all right,” she said and he said, “It’s all right,” at the same time. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “I’ve got you.”

  She stood very still, very quiet, and he pushed himself up to stand next to her. He could feel the earth falling away from him as he rose taller above the steel. It was terrifying; it was wonderful. He wanted to stay up in the air forever.

  She began to sing his top-of-the-world song, holding her hands out to him, and as he took them, they turned in the smallest circle, slowly, so slowly, around and around, singing Al Jolson to each other. They reached the end of the line.

  “Dancing through air,” sang Ted, replacing the words.

  “Or just dancing on air,” suggested Joy, and she turned to walk, footlength by footlength, towards the end of the cord. Ted swallowed, followed, found himself leaning out too towards the empty space at its end. “It is kind of seductive,” said Joy, pulling back. And they sat, wiggling forward until their feet, their shins, their knees were dangling in space.

  Ted shivered. The silence seemed to be growing, more and more of its layers ringing in his ears. Another boat moved across the water below; a bird called out from the shore somewhere, and he caught the smell of smoke again, like the smell of wood burning in Joy’s kitchen stove, and looked around for a fire’s brightness.

  “I’m glad we came,” he said, “but we should go now.” His hands behind him, he pushed himself up; she was already standing by the time he’d steadied himself. She was leading him now, back along the steel, her feet finding the shape of its curve.

  They were halfway down when it happened; he couldn’t tell if she tripped, if she took an extra step out towards the emptiness, but she was falling away from him—hanging on hard to his hand as her scarf shook itself free from her hair. It was only two steps, three at the most, and it was done in a moment. But he stood there rigid, his knees locked, his back straight. I can hold on to her; I can hold her here. She grabbed his arms and righted herself as one of her shoes—a delicate little thing—fell from her pocket, bounced on the metal, and went down, spinning like the coin, through one, two, three, four seconds and into the water. The scarf fluttered, caught by the wind and almost in reach.

  “Leave it,” Ted said sharply as her balance shifted and her arm shot out. “It doesn’t matter.” And then he heard the splash her shoe must have made—so huge that he frowned, and looked down past the face of the bridge to see a spout of water spray white and high above the harbor’s dark blue. No shoe, dropped from any height, could have thrown the water up so high—he knew that from all the tools and rivets and bodies and bearings that had gone over the side of the barge. Joy stood against him, shivering, one hand clutching her one shoe so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  His mind was spinning with not really knowing, not really seeing, exactly what had happened.

  He said, “But what was that?” And he turned, crouched down, and looked out towards the middle of the bridge through the wide box frames of its struts. The water was calm; not so much as a ripple. “Maybe someone was sitting on the other side,” he said. “Maybe they dropped something just as you stumbled—or maybe something else fell off.” These seemed dangerous things to put into words.

  He tried again. “Maybe it was a bird, diving for something.” Which was better. “But there’s nothing there now”—to himself. It was as close as he’d come to the frightening, stomach-grabbing moment in his dream.

  “What happened, what was it?” she asked, fussing with her hair and avoiding his eyes.

  “Something—I don’t know—something that could make a huge splash, like a whale,” he tried. “I don’t know. I didn’t know what you were doing.” The wind was picking up, and stripes of cloud were beginning to cover the stars. “It’s getting cold. We’ve got to get down. We’ve got to get home. We’ve got to go.” And he stepped around in front of her and began to walk, looking only at the raised pockmarks of the rivets as they appeared in front of his feet.

  They ran back along the beginnings of the roadway—Joy wearing one shoe on one foot, both of Ted’s socks on the other, and Ted with his shoes scraping and rasping against his cold bare skin. Ducking through the fence, they skittered down the rough-cut sandstone to the harbor’s shore and its great hulking docks, diminished now by the bulk of the thing that was growing overhead.

  “All right,” she breathed then, standing with her hands on her hips as if she was sizing up something they were about to do, rather than what they’d just done. “All right.”

  Above them, the caretaker’s dog barked at last as they ran past the wharves and their sheds. Dank sandstone walls rose up, the city perc
hed on top of them; there were stairways and alleys cut in here and there, and they stank of urine and something rotten. Men were sleeping all over the city now, makeshift camps in the city’s parks spreading farther and farther as more people were turned out of their homes, more people came in looking for jobs. With the certainty of the middle of the night, Ted was suddenly more wary of potential threat, or violence, than he had been of the danger of scampering up hundreds of tons of steel in the darkness. He ran faster, felt Joy striding out to keep up with him, and on they went around the edge of the land and closer, with every step, to home.

  In the shadow of one warehouse, he could see a cluster of bodies, a couple of blankets, a drum with the dregs of a fire sputtering in its cavity, and he steered Joy across to the other side of the road—“Shh, shh”—as if they were passing a nursery of gently sleeping children. From nowhere, from the darkness, an old man in a shabby red coat reared up, growling and railing and smelling of drink. He reached out for Joy as Ted stepped back onto the road, pulling her with him, and the old man staggered two steps and turned in at a flight of sandstone stairs that seemed to climb nowhere. Ted pictured him up there, watching their two heads running fast along the road, two points getting smaller and smaller.

  At home, in the warm light of the kitchen, with her hair neat again and her sore feet soaking in a basin of water, Joy stirred an extra teaspoon of sugar into her tea, absentmindedly dropping the wet spoon back into the sugar bowl.

  “Who was he, do you think, that old man who shouted at us?” she asked. “What do you think he was trying to say? What do you think he saw when we ran by?”

  A tall woman with pale hair running through the night, running away from the graceful curve of a rainbow that she’d just conquered; the sky busy above with clouds and wind and stars, and another cloud of water surging up, disturbed below.

  “Magic,” said Ted. “He thought he was seeing something from an invisible world.”

  The answer hung in the air, a little large and unexpectedly poetic—an answer that was, as Joe would say, a bit too much.

  The quiet space of the kitchen held his words until his chair scratched against the linoleum.

  He drank his tea. He stared into the silence. He washed his face and went to his bed. And when he went to sleep, he was too exhausted to remember dreaming anything at all.

  Dan

  THE FLIGHT attendant’s voice shook Dan out of a frantic blurry dream where Sydney and London had jumbled together and he was running to catch a plane, a train, a cab, even a big old sailing ship for a minute. He was stiff, and there was an odd metallic taste in his mouth.

  For something that sounded graceful, even ethereal, flying was a brutal thing to do; this long tube of metal, its seats too small, the terrible, infusing roar of the engines. He pressed his temples, willing himself to ignore the rattling pulse of the plane’s movement as his view changed from clear sky to the tempting white nothing of clouds, then the jumble of an unfamiliar city, and then the long grey stripe of the runway up close and whizzing by. For half a day he’d been sitting in this strange nowhere of place or time. At least six months on a boat lets you walk around and breathe real air. He stretched his legs, laced his swollen feet back into their sneakers, and tried to imagine moving, let alone walking. Whoever was behind him stretched their legs too—Dan could feel the shape of knees, or maybe feet, pressing into the middle of his back. It was almost pleasant, almost friendly. Standing up took an immense act of will, and the plane began to empty at a processional pace.

  Ahead on the airbridge, the family from across the aisle still walked side by side in the same formation—father, child, child, mother—their hands linked together. They looked like an up-and-down city skyline.

  Dan sniffed deeply; he’d never noticed before how much airports smelled like hospitals. He needed a shower. He needed to change his shirt. He needed a drink, and something to read. He came onto the concourse, squinting against the bright lights, the banks of shops, the familiar brands that appeared in any city, and the food that belonged in other parts of the world. These places, trying to be everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  He paused at the bookshop, its light so bright that it looked like it was selling plastic imitations, like the glazed dishes of dim sum and noodles used to lure you into the world’s Chinatowns. A pile of the latest children’s wizard book teetered almost above Dan’s head as the little girl from across the aisle broke free from her family and darted under his elbow to grab at a copy—the whole stack swayed a little—pressing it hard against her chest. “All right,” said her mother, “but you’ll have to share it with your brother.” Dan smiled; he and Charlie had shared books, arguing about who got to take the book home, to put it on their shelf, at the end of each day. He looked at the rows of books: books about September 11, about the end of the world, about actresses’ lives, about how to be happy—he needed the drink first.

  Hitching his bag higher on his shoulder, he felt something sharp, something cornered, press against him. Investigating, he found a rectangular parcel, in brown paper, with Caro’s handwriting on the front. For the trip, she’d written, someone else’s story—and he went there too. It felt like a book—too late for all those empty hours. He tore off the paper as he ordered a beer. It was a cream-colored copy of Gulliver’s Travels, the last book he thought he’d read with Charlie in some lost set of school holidays. Lilliput, Blefuscu, Brobdingnag, the Houyhnhnms . . . Dan’s eye ran across the contents page with its brief summations. Laputa: he remembered Charlie’s voice telling them about the floating, flying island, how long they’d spent over the atlas, wondering in which piece of conveniently empty ocean it might appear next.

  At the end of the list of places Gulliver had visited was “New Holland.” Dan frowned, and looked again in case it was another word that he was misreading somehow. But no, there was Gulliver, going to the very place where Dan was going, the very place in which he and Charlie had sat, imagining themselves setting out in Gulliver’s footsteps. How could they have missed that? Maybe they’d never made it to the end of the book (although he thought they had). Maybe the holidays had finished (although he was sure other books had carried on into fresh, new school terms). Maybe they’d lost the book—though he remembered how seriously they took the task of putting the books on their shelves. He could almost picture the spines of the books they’d read running back through years to little-kid stories about wombats and puddings. He flicked through the pages, picking at a word here, half a sentence there. Here was Gulliver coasting past New Holland—yes, he did remember that. Here he was back in England. But then this other antipodean chapter, tucked in at the end. I began this desperate voyage on February 15, 1714–15 . . .

  Perched on a high stool in the bright bar, Dan pulled the beer towards him and took the first, satisfying sip. A long sigh, loud enough to make the man two stools along turn and look at him. Dan smiled, tilted his drink a little. The man didn’t smile back, looked at the counter; he looked a bit like the man who’d been at the other end of Dan’s row—Unless, thought Dan, everyone looks the same when they’re flying too fast over the surface of the earth. But in front of him was Gulliver, years away from home and probably presumed dead by all his family, finding himself a capacious canoe and making for Australia’s coast. His eyes brushed over the lines, following the book’s last days and nights and Gulliver’s canoe, until they both arrived at the southeast point of New Holland.

  “It’s stories we live by, Danny”—that’s what Charlie’s grandad said. He’d strung the two families—Charlie’s, Dan’s—together with stories, the coincidence of this, the sudden twist of that, and a gate he’d made in the fence between their two homes. There he’d been in the war, sending planes out over the very village in Europe where Dan’s father—“rest in peace,” Gramps dropped in automatically as he did at the mention of his own wife, or his own little girl, Charlie’s mother—had been growing up. Why, one of Gramps’s planes had probably bombed it once or t
wice. He’d pull out an atlas and find the very place. There it was, marked with a black spot, as if everything he said was proved true if a name was clearly marked on a map and Gramps could find it. Dan’s mother would stand at his shoulder, nodding, and Charlie’s grandad would smooth the atlas’s page with his hand. “And here we are now, here we are.”

  Dan’s mother understood stories—she’d married Dan’s father for his. Dan’s father, older than her and with a thick accent that she always attempted when she talked about him. Dan’s father, who’d walked out of the mess of Europe after the war, changing his name—his future, he’d said—as he went. She knew little about the place he’d come from, other than what it was called. And she knew little about his reasons for leaving. “When someone is willing to go so far,” she’d said to Dan once, “you might not want to know why.”

  Caro had been intrigued. “You don’t know what happened? You don’t know why he left? You don’t even know his real name?” And Dan would shake his head. Once or twice he’d thought of heading east from England, trying to find out, but nothing ever came of it. If his mum wanted to go, he’d said, he’d take her; for him, his dad was only the faintest outline of a gigantic shape, and the particular smell of a jumper, some cologne, of long-gone cigarettes and coffee. Names came and went in wars, it seemed—and Gramps had reassured him, not long after his dad had died, that half the blokes building the bridge had had at least a couple of names they answered to.

  Now, in this bland bar, Dan stared blankly at Jonathan Swift’s pages—even Swift’d had a handful of pseudonyms, he thought. Maybe it used to be an easier thing to do. He tapped the book against the bar, as if trying to settle its sentences, and something rammed hard into the legs of his bar stool, shaking him off balance so that he leapt to his feet and the book flopped onto the table, its creamy cover soaking up spots of beer and condensation. On the ground, bouncing against the stool, was a little boy, pale-haired and energetic. Dan turned his head. Did he look like the kid who’d been sitting across the aisle, or did he just look like any kid? The boy smiled and Dan wondered if it was because he’d recognized Dan, or would have smiled at anyone.