The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  Another voice cut through the darkness. Was there anyone on the plane who spoke Russian? But no one raised their hand this time, and the Russian woman stayed sitting, smaller, in her seat, the blanket pulled over her knees.

  “I don’t think she’s all right,” said Dan to the next attendant who passed. “Isn’t there anything—she spoke some English before; we talked about rivers and books.” He didn’t know if he should try to talk to her again, or should leave her, just sitting, with the now-empty seat beside her.

  The flight attendant shook her head. “We’ll do everything we can when we get to Sydney,” she said. “There’ll be someone waiting to meet her there.” She frowned. “But are you all right, sir? Is there anything I can get you?”

  “No, no,” said Dan quickly. “No, it’s nothing to do with me; I’m fine.” It sounded more flippant than he intended; he’d just wanted the Russian lady to know someone was thinking about her.

  Between the seats, he tried to catch her eye, to smile, to make some acknowledgment of something. But the woman’s eyes were closed tight, whether she was sleeping or not. To have come this far, thought Dan. He wondered if she’d be able to stay in the city she’d been sure would help her father. He wondered if he should give her his number—not that he’d be in the country for much more than a week—or his mother’s number, or Charlie’s.

  He wondered if it really was Charlie’s grandfather he’d been worried about at the beginning of the flight, or if it had been some presentiment about this old man who’d died above the world and in front of him. He closed his eyes and saw nothing but tired darkness, suddenly aware that he was rubbing the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other, but gently, rhythmically, like the light touch of a face washer or a handkerchief. His own skin felt smooth; his own skin felt warm.

  Ted

  IN THE days after Kelly fell—or dived—Ted kept falling back into that moment. Coming in on the ferry, something would disturb the water’s surface and he saw again the waterspout a man could make when he hit the water from a hundred or more feet up. Walking by the workshops, someone would shout, and he heard again the calls that had followed Kelly’s line through the air, through the water. Brushing against some softness—a cushion, a curtain, the next-door cat that wandered in sometimes—he felt the velvet of Jacko’s ears between his fingers, felt the dog stiffen, himself stiffen and saw a man in the air and dropping down, one, two, three seconds and into the blue.

  At home, Joy clipped any mention of the incident from newspapers and magazines, reading aloud the columns where Roy Kelly had talked about the accident. A couple of broken ribs and his boot leather jammed fast up around his thighs—they were his only injuries. And the papers said he was smiling; the papers said he was laughing: “ ‘I am often working near the edge of the bridge,’ ” she read, “ ‘and on many occasions I have thought to myself, “Now, if you ever fall, Roy, you had better make sure that you hit the water feet first or head first.” So when I slipped and fell today, I concentrated upon saving my life—’ ”

  “ ‘Upon’?” Joe cut in. “ ‘Concentrated upon’? Kelly? That’s fancy newspaper talk that is. Poor bloke probably couldn’t speak for trying to breathe.”

  “ ‘—upon saving my life,’ ” Joy continued. “ ‘I hit the water. I went under. There was a roar of water in my ears. My lungs felt as though they would burst. Then I came to the surface. I was alive, marvelously alive.’

  “Marvelously.” She paused. “Now there’s a word.” Caught up by the story, by the moment, by the miracle, she made Ted tell her again and again about seeing it—couldn’t believe Joe had missed the fall, the surfacing, the messy rescue when Roy Kelly was again almost drowned by someone’s enthusiasm in trying to drag him out of the water. “Away on the other side,” she kept saying. “Of all the days to be away on the other side of anything.”

  Joe shook his head, muttered, “Too much, too much.” Which Ted heard, but didn’t acknowledge.

  “ ‘Marvelously alive,’ ” Joy read again. “How magnificent to feel marvelously anything.” She took a deep breath, her fingers marking her place on the page.

  “ ‘I tried to clutch something, but there was nothing there to clutch and down I went. I turned a somersault—’ ”

  “I guess that bloody diving came in handy after all,” from Joe.

  “ ‘—and then I remembered that I must concentrate upon—’ ”

  “Upon again?” Joe scoffed, swishing water around the sink, flicking the dishcloth over the dish rack.

  “ ‘—upon entering the water either headfirst or feet first. I waved my arms and screwed up my body in an effort to do this. I began to fall down feet first and I almost felt satisfied. I clasped my right hand over my nose and my mouth. And then I hit the water. Unfortunately, I was not quite upright, otherwise I don’t think that I would have been hurt at all. I did not go under very far, and it seemed only an instant from the moment I fell from the bridge to the time that I was struggling on the surface. Struggling and alive.’

  “Struggling and alive.” She sighed. “It’s like something from the movies, isn’t it? I’ll never be able to look at him the same way again. I wonder if he’ll keep diving, when he gets out of hospital? Wonder if he’ll go back to the bridge?”

  It was evening, and a cool breeze was coming up from the water. Outside, in the garden, leaves and petals rode the current of the strongest gusts, and Ted paused, a stack of clean plates in his hands and his eyes distracted by a flash of white roses shaken free from their stems. The petals lifted a little way, and then, becalmed, began to float back down to the ground, tiny parachutes, or shards of dislocated cloud.

  “I should pick a bunch of those to take round to his wife,” said Joy, catching the end of the movement. “What a thing, to be told your husband had fallen, to be thinking the worst, even if it was only a second before you found out he’d survived.”

  “Do you think they’ll give him the money, even though he fell off and he’s alive?” Ted hadn’t meant the question to sound so blunt, but if you fell off, if you died, your family got some kind of compensation, a hundred pounds or so. Which was a peculiar kind of accountancy or reckoning, now that he thought about it.

  “An envelope of pounds couldn’t buy you much of a miracle,” said Joy, “and I guess Kelly’s already had his one of those.”

  She smoothed the newspaper and stepped back into her recitation—the moment Kelly described as his worst: “ ‘When I hit the water and went under I felt afraid for the first time. I could hear nothing, see nothing, and feel nothing except the terrific pain in my side from my broken ribs. My brain was not functioning. And then I was on the surface again, striking out automatically for the buoy. With almost a shock I realized that I was alive. I could have shouted for sheer joy.’ ”

  Ted smiled, remembering the relief of the moment after Joy’s body had wavered on the arch; the exhilaration of Kelly, coming up for air, coming up to breathe.

  “Miraculous,” she said, “whatever you think about the flowery language, Joe. We think it’s miraculous, on this side of the kitchen.” She nodded at Ted. “Better than Smithy, better than Bradman, and even better than that Second Coming that never came.”

  Ted laughed; he liked it when she made these jokes about her own extremity.

  But Joe was shaking his head. “I’m not saying it’s not tremendous Kelly’s alive; I’m not saying it’s not extraordinary. But you know—” He paused to shrug. “There it is, done now, and all those ‘upons’ and ‘sheer joys.’ In any case, they say he’ll be back at work in next to no time.”

  “I just think it’s irresistible.” Joy was staring into the garden, watching the wind brush its colors across the green. “You wait, it’ll be told again and again. It’ll be the story everyone knows. It’ll be bigger than the bridge itself.”

  Joe shook his head again. “Nope, the bridge is the big story—always has been, always will be. A year’s time, two,
when the thing’s open and we’re all rushing across it, no one’ll remember Roy Kelly and his miracle. No one’ll remember when it wasn’t there, let alone what it took to make it. We’ll be doing well to remember the names of the boys who didn’t survive.”

  Later, lying in the bath with his ears under the water, Ted thought about the end of the fall, about what Roy Kelly had said about being under so much water you could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing. In the bath, lying still, everything was magnified. Small sounds from around the house—from its pipes, its other room, its other people—pressed into the water and grew. A series of heavy clunks that was some nearby piece of plumbing. The sound of footsteps reverberating on the other side of the hall. Joe’s voice, distorted into roundness, sending next-door’s cat back into its own garden.

  Imagine if the harbor had worked the same way, amplifying all the sounds of the bridge, all the sounds of the city, all the sounds of the boats to and fro and up and down the river.

  It would have been blue, he thought, all blue, and that’s what I could see—that’s what I thought I could see in his eyes, when he came up, when he looked straight across to where I was standing. How much space had been between them? It was maybe half a mile, Ted knew, and yet he was certain that his eyes had met Kelly’s and that he’d seen their new bright color.

  He’d told no one about this and now, coming up above the bath water and ducking underneath again, he wondered if it would wash out of his mind sooner or later. Probably not, he reasoned, if, like Joy said, the story kept being told. And probably not if, the next time he saw Kelly, there were two blue eyes looking at him, that moment, trapped.

  In bed, one book forgotten under the pillow, Joy’s copy of Gulliver open facedown on the floor, Ted lay, tensed in the night’s darkness, toes pointing as far forward as they could and fingers taut on the mattress next to him like two arrowheads. He was Roy Kelly, tucked under the tight corners of hospital sheets, his ribs aching, and his skin weeping where his boot leather had been disconnected from the meld it had made with his legs. Joy said you could see the bridge from the roof of that hospital, from some of its windows. Ted was Roy Kelly, hobbling out of bed in the middle of the night, up to the roof, to check it was still there, the thing he’d defeated, the greatest dive he’d made. He was Kelly, leaning against a rail, picking out the darker arch against the dark night sky. He was Kelly, making an ordinary step and finding himself, extraordinary, in the air. He was Kelly, diving with blue above and blue below, and nothing but blue in between.

  He was asleep.

  Outside in the night, an owl called twice, three times, over the rattle of a window. Inside, Ted had stepped straight into the dream that had stalked him, an air gun heavy in his hands, his body stiff against the punch it made when he let its pressure meet the rivet, and all the bits and pieces of the bridge tightening and firming around him. His feet were planted, sure, on the metal framework and the light line of rope that marked out one boundary of the air in which he might stand lay taut across his back.

  Below, in the water, something shifted, and as he bent towards it—it looked like a gesture, like a wave, but he couldn’t see anyone there—he stepped out somehow, under the rope, and there he was, in midair. And down on the grass under the bridge’s heavy southern pylon a man stood, fussing at the ears of a dog and looking up at the disturbance. Looking up towards his flight.

  That was the first second, and he knew immediately—he must have been practicing this dive in his mind for years—that if he could fold himself into a tuck, he could use the force pushing upwards to flick himself straight, feet first, head up. Bend in the middle, bend in the middle, and use the wind rushing by to turn yourself—like the motion of a clock’s pendulum. If you can move your body fast enough, it will generate its own momentum. One chance, bend and straighten. You’ve got one chance to bend and straighten.

  That was the second second.

  The world blurred into blue, green, blue, red, blue, grey, blue, blue. He felt his hand move towards his nose, his mouth, trying to protect them from the surge of the harbor’s water.

  That was the third second, and he was awake, his body still trying to fold itself, to flip from falling head first to feet first, his stomach clamping the covers tight. There it was; there it was at last, the dream whose pieces he’d been catching, the dream whose story he’d scrabbled after. He’d dreamed Roy Kelly’s fall—been dreaming it for years.

  Turning onto his side to face the wall, he traced the shape of an arch, a rainbow, a rising sun with one finger. It should mean something, he thought, but he was buggered if he knew what. Still, there he was, smiling in the dark because he’d seen, at last, this familiar, fleeting sequence of images, and he’d seen for the first time the whole picture they made. A dream, just a dream, just a dream, he thought in time to the ins and outs of Joe’s snores from the other side of the wall. As if that one moment had been waiting for him, somewhere, all along.

  He traced another arch onto the wall. But what about seeing yourself standing somewhere else in a dream, when you’re in another person’s body, looking at yourself standing down on the grass with a dog? He rolled the other way, wriggled himself down a bit to look out the window.

  “Lucky to have the job,” he heard his mother saying, “that’s all there is to it. Wherever it is, and whatever you’re doing, you’re lucky to have the job. Don’t make it more than that.” Eyes closed; eyes opened; eyes closed; eyes opened. And somewhere in between—he wasn’t sure if it was outside or inside his head—he saw the bright and speedy streak of a shooting star.

  Almost asleep again then, he fell into a deep dark-blue space that he recognized, for the first time, as the lowest point of that fall.

  On the other side of the wall, Joe’s snoring stopped at last and Ted pulled his blanket a little higher towards his chin. I’m sitting on top of the world, he thought, and then, Just flying through air, just flying through air.

  It was only a few weeks before Roy Kelly came back to work, presented with a medal—“gold,” said someone; “bronze,” said someone else—inscribed to mark the miracle. There were rumors he’d been given a watch too. Ted looked for it, new and shiny, on the boilermaker’s arm—he looked for the new bright blue in Roy Kelly’s eyes. But he never seemed able to get a clear look at either and, as the right angles of the suspended deck spread themselves back from the middle of the curve towards its landlocked ends, he saw less and less of the miraculous diver altogether.

  Less and less, then, of all the bridge boys; the backyard beers wound down at Joe and Joy’s. The job was rounding up, finishing off, and the stories the men told each other now on the rare nights they did still gather had turned away from where they’d come from and what they’d done to wondering what they might do next. The deck met the ends of its arch; the pylons took on their slick silver granite coating; the road came in layers of asphalt, concrete; the last of the sixty thousand gallons of thick grey paint went onto the steel.

  One last man fell, and died, and a team of painters was dispatched to clean his blood off the granite.

  The noise dulled and the bustle stilled. The barges stopped coming and going. The workshops sat silent. And the bridge looked like a whole bridge as the city adjusted to its shape, its size, to the way it could insinuate itself into so many different views and aspects. The tallest thing in Sydney’s profile, the thing that came closest to the clouds.

  And Joe, it seemed, was right. As plans for its opening hatched and bloomed, the memory of the structure’s evolution dimmed a little every day. It would be just another road that people walked along, already impervious to the time before, when it wasn’t there, and to everything that had happened in between. It would be just another road that people walked along, up in the air, between the blue of the sky and the water, as if it was nothing at all.

  But sometimes at night, the dream still blinked on and off inside Ted’s mind, and once, watching a ferry’s path across the water, he imagined sta
nding where Kelly had stood, standing like a diver with his toes curled over the edge of the steel, ready to push himself out and away and into the air. It was the buzz of an aeroplane that broke his daydream; men with newsreel cameras getting ready to make pictures of his bridge for the world.

  For three weeks, they tested it with every weight and strain they could think of—could it withstand winds of a hundred miles an hour? Could it withstand a change in temperature of more than a hundred degrees? Could it bear the weight of ninety-six railway locomotives, jammed in buffer to buffer?

  It could.

  Standing below by its southeastern foot, Ted watched the light change. If he stood long enough, he might see the precise angle of the sun that threw the bridge’s reflection perfectly onto the water, might see the creeping shadows of dusk as the air darkened almost to the darkness of the frame itself, right round to those early-morning stripes the night’s boats left behind. Overhead, the engines rolled on, one by one, paused, waited, and then began to roll off.

  As they puffed out of the sky and back onto the land, Ted crouched down again with Jacko, both listening to the machines’ fading thunder. It was an awkward squat—his feet often still felt like they were planted on the barge, suspended over the harbor’s movement. He supposed he’d get used to dry land again, after a while. Funny too to think of this land being under cover now, protected from the sky and all its weather by the roof of the bridge. Funny to think that the sky above it that he’d gazed at as a boy, the sky taken in by Joe’s patient astronomer, was blocked out completely, that the rain would have to find its own sneaky chinks and crevices to get through to the grass that would grow, smooth and obscuring, over all the disturbance of the bridge’s site and foundations. The long tubing tunnels that had snaked down a hundred feet into the land, into the bedrock, to hold the two halves of the arch apart from each other with that intricate web of cables, had been filled in, disappeared and buried as if they never existed.