The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  “Jesus—sorry.” One of the girls had lost her footing, falling into the path of the car and jumping back, wide-eyed and gasping. The driver pulled into the curb and Dan wondered for a moment if he was going to check that the girl was all right, or abuse her for being in the way. But, “It’s this building,” he said. “Just ask at the desk and they’ll buzz you up.”

  “How much do I . . . ?”

  “Taken care of. Just ask at the desk and they’ll let her know you’re here.”

  More than a decade ago, in his taxi to the airport, Dan had imagined Charlie walking back to her single room in the hollow of one of Sydney’s grubbier inner-city streets. Nice that life’s going well, he thought as the heavy glass doors opened automatically to let him in.

  The elevator pushed up far enough and fast enough to make his ears pop twice, the hall beyond its smooth doors quiet and sepulchral with thick, dark carpet and too many mirrors. He looked left, right, left again, heard a door click somewhere, and saw a line of light widening in the gloom.

  “Charlie?”

  “Down here. I’ll just hold the door open so we don’t lock ourselves out on top of everything.”

  “On top of . . .” Trying to turn his case into her doorway, hug her, and make some proper greeting, and then it seemed as if the wall had fallen away from her apartment and he was about to be sucked off the edge of its dangerously high floor. He staggered against the vertigo, his arm reaching for the sofa.

  “Bloody hell, Charlie,” he said. “Look at your bloody view.” It reached across the air his plane had just breached, out towards the thin line of purple-blue hills that rose up from the city’s plain, eighty, ninety kilometers away or more. Between this here and that there, the city poked up glass and metal and steel. Angular shapes caught the morning sun and gave way to the colors and shapes of cheek-by-jowl living intercut with trees, water, road. So many windows up so close; so much space so far away.

  “Your heights thing,” she said. “Sorry.” She watched as he steadied himself and took half a step forward, unsure of how to get back to some kind of greeting. In the end, he stepped back again and balanced on the arm of the lounge.

  “This is some place you’ve got. It’s good to see you. I didn’t know which perfume to get. How’s Gramps?”

  “Don’t worry about the perfume. You should call your mum, let her know you’re here.” They were frozen, awkward, in the wide, light room, and the silence lasted a little too long. Then, “Good flight?” asked Charlie, but her voice was flat.

  Dan rubbed his eyes. “Weird flight,” he said, blinking. “Near-death experience when another jumbo cut underneath us just out of London. Spent the transit stop looking for a lost boy’s family. Then the old man sitting in front of me died halfway to Sydney. And I was having the weirdest dreams—Gramps’s story, you know, diving off the bridge; I don’t know where I thought I was, or what I was thinking. I was him, but it wasn’t him. I don’t know.” It sounded nonsensical, disconnected and abbreviated like that.

  Charlie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and the silence thickened again. “Do you want a shower or something?” she said finally, crossing into another room and coming back with a towel. “You’ll feel better when you’re a bit less scruffy.” That was more like her voice, and she threw the towel at him, smiling at last as his hand jumped and caught it. “Have a shower. I’ll make coffee. Then we can talk. Bathroom.” She pointed away from the wall of glass.

  Pulling his shirt over his head, he could smell the cake of soap he’d used in the airport. He shook his limp hair, peered at himself in Charlie’s mirror, wished she’d said, “But you still look the same, you haven’t changed at all,” as if those phrases would have had some extra power, like spells or incantations. Leaning closer under the bright yellow light, he clocked the freckles, the lines, the pastiness of his skin after so many British summers. The marble bench was cool under his hands, against the tops of his legs. A few days ago, he thought, I was on a Ferris wheel with Caro, and then Charlie rang, and then I saw her photo in a tube station on my way to work, and now—he squinted—and now I’m here. He rubbed at his eyes until he saw flecks of silver, purple, blue behind their lids, and when he opened them again he almost swooned. Like I saw her yesterday. Like this is nothing out of the ordinary. I don’t know where the fuck I am.

  Standing under the running water, he was almost split in half by the shower’s pressure, full and hot. He could feel every muscle in his shoulders, his neck, his back, could feel himself letting out a long deep breath that he didn’t remember taking in. He was in Sydney. It had been a long flight. Everything would be fine. Maybe Gramps was fine—maybe it had turned out to be nothing. Good to be here, wherever here was. Up in the air and Charlie on the other side of the door. It felt like home. He turned the tap to full cold, wincing against the water’s icy needles—hadn’t done that for years. Every day until he left for England, he’d finished every shower with the cold tap on full, icy water pricking his skin. It was a nod to summer, to cold showers after long swims, but in England the showers never had enough pressure, the summers never had enough heat. He’d never even been tempted to try. Here, in Charlie’s bathroom, he adjusted the taps without thinking. It really did feel like home.

  She was sitting at the table, facing the window, her coffee in front of her and a second mug at the seat opposite. “So you don’t have to look at the view,” she said, pointing. “Better? Find everything you need?”

  The coffee was strong, dark, and hot; it ate into the roof of his mouth as he took too big a gulp. Turning a little, he braved a glance at the window and what lay beyond.

  “Don’t you find it distracting?”

  “I’m not here that much,” she said, blowing across the top of her mug. “Your mum rang, while you were in the shower—she’s coming over, be here lunchtime or so. We had a late night, that’s why we thought we’d send someone to pick you up instead of coming ourselves. I thought your mum could use a bit of a sleep-in.” The quiet push of her breath across the coffee. “Of course I still see her all the time; and yes, she lets me know how you are . . .” This in response to some question playing across his face. “Anyway, so Gramps,” she said. “Turns out,” another long pause. “Gramps, yes, he passed away last night—we were just back from the hospital when you rang.”

  Dan felt his throat tighten and his eyes water, and the coffee seared another line from his mouth down into his chest. I knew, he thought, I did know. And I should have . . .

  He was crying properly now, and he rubbed hard at his eyes with his sleeves, like his six-year-old self. Caro was right: I wanted to be here. And now she’ll never meet him, never hear him tell his stories. Which seemed suddenly the worst and loneliest thing.

  He swallowed again, a mouthful of the dry, locked-in air, and reached over, unsure whether or not to take Charlie’s hand. “Charlie,” he said, leaving his fingers near hers, on the table but apart. “Was it—did he—I’m so . . .” He saw himself standing too close to the space beyond a train platform, saw the silver bullet of another plane closing fast and near, saw the dull grey skin of the Russian man, his stillness.

  “Pneumonia; he was pretty frail the last couple of winters. Even stopped walking down to the bridge in the end, although he managed every day till last year. And then he stopped getting out much at all. At least he wasn’t in the hospital long—he didn’t like being there at all. Your mum kept trying to work out ways we could kidnap him, but she’s—well, your mum’s not as young as she used to be either. These years since you left, mate—” an iciness nipped at the end of the clichéd word, “it’s a bloody long time. Still—” She finished her coffee. “Good that you’re here now.”

  “The night you rang: Caro had just told me I should come home—she thinks I should work out which side of the world I want to be on.” He tried to smile, surprised by how much he already wished she was with him. “And then I spoke to you, about Gramps. And then the next morning I was standi
ng opposite a poster at the tube station and I realized it had one of your photos on it. Gramps and Mum’d think it was a sign.” He shrugged; she mirrored his movement. “One of those photos where you were trying to flatten the bridge out, shoot straight along the front so you lost the arch altogether. You still shooting it, Charlie? You ever find a way to get up there?”

  She glanced at her watch. “We could walk down now, if you want. Easy there and back before your mum gets here. I’ve tried to walk down most days since Gramps stopped.” Glancing at her watch again. “I just need to call a couple of people, if you want to . . .” She waved towards the sofas, her other hand already reaching for the phone.

  Dan stood, took a couple of steps towards the window, his eyes watching the changing size of his reflection rather than anything on the other side of the glass.

  The morning sun, risen directly behind the building in which he stood, was igniting the glass in the windows that faced him; he could almost feel the movement of the Earth as it turned towards the huge warm ball and piece after piece of the city lit up. Below, people were moving into their days—some jogging, some walking, some with their arms raised for taxis.

  At the west-facing wall, Dan pressed his toes against the glass and worked his gaze down. Someone was crossing against the lights, too slowly for the traffic, although Dan realized after a moment he was only imagining the honking and the yelling from this entirely silent and sealed room. All he could hear was the hum of an air conditioner and the low mutter of Charlie’s voice. Poor old Gramps; poor Charlie, obviously struggling, the way she skirted around it, away from it. He wished he’d had something better to say. Tipping his forehead to touch the window, keeping his breathing slow, he watched as a man at the lights hit the pedestrian button again and again, so impatient that he finally looked up, way up, in exasperation. Dan was sure their eyes met.

  He took half a step back again, lowered himself down to sit, trying to pick out buildings where he’d worked years before, buildings where friends had lived, probably didn’t anymore. He leaned forward and looked north along the street.

  But there was no trace of the bridge, obscured as it was by a nest of skyscrapers, metal and shiny reflective glass. It seemed wrong that the city’s panorama could be missing its most identifiable piece. No matter how far he moved, he couldn’t bring it into view, and he straightened at last, staring at all the windows and walls in front of him, wondering if this was Sydney at all—it could be anywhere. He lay down, his fingers patting the carpet’s pile, and he wondered what Charlie meant exactly about his mum not being as young as she was, and his eyes closed, heavy.

  “Dan?”

  Sitting up too fast, his feet jerked against something hard—a table, the frame of a chair—and his hands pushed him up out of sleep. Brown carpet. Cream sofas. The huge thick window next to him. A complex light shade hanging from the ceiling above. For a moment—a breath, maybe long enough to count to three—he had no idea where he was.

  “Dan?” A hand on his shoulder and he turned to see Charlie there as the world slithered back into place, back into time. He squeezed her fingers, felt the pressure of the warmth they returned. “Where’d you go?” The ice had gone out of her voice, and she kept hold of his hand, smiling. “I’ve got so many things to tell you.”

  “About Gramps?”

  “Kind of. Come on—let’s get out before you fall asleep again.” And as she pulled him up, he steadied himself against her, gave her the hug he’d missed on the way in.

  “I’m glad I came,” he said.

  Going down in the lift, he tried again, and failed, to piece together the shapes and turns of the streets that would connect where they were to where they were going. Dear Caro, he thought, imagining a postcard, an email, a text, You’ll be pleased to know that Sydney’s streets have rearranged themselves while I’ve been away so it’s not just London that I can’t pin down. I’m walking with Charlie; I came too late; I wish you were here. The higher sun shut his eyes into a squint as soon as he stepped outside, narrowing the tunnel of space he could see, and he strode out fast to keep up with Charlie’s pace.

  When they were little, when they came into the city, sometimes by ferry down the river, or by a train that clattered across the famous bridge, Dan and Charlie played a game, imagining everything disappearing, winding back to a Sydney that was only dirt tracks and rough tents and penned pigs and cows, not roads and pavements and smelly exhaust fumes. Gramps started them on it, telling them what the space had looked like around the bridge’s big footprints—all through the industry of its creation, and then back further, back to tents, and trees, to British men in red coats, some with guns, some with compasses and telescopes, and then back before that again. Then Charlie began reading about remnant places, like the sand dunes below Kings Cross that people remembered from four or five decades earlier, when work on the bridge began. And it had kept them busy every trip after that: “Maybe this was a swamp; maybe there would’ve been great trees here; reckon you’d have had a view out forever from the top of this hill.” Charlie took to hunting for parts of the city where what had been there was still allowed to poke through—the waterline at the end of the Botanic Gardens where you could stand on the bumpy sandstone ledges with your feet in the harbor’s coolness, the bushy reserves beyond the zoo and Middle Head on the opposite shore, still thick with birds and angophora, lizards and eucalypts. She sought out the little markers the city put down for other things that had changed or disappeared: the discs that marked the line of Circular Quay’s foreshore as it had been in 1788 when the British came ashore; the pretty fingers of metal and glass that laid down the line their stream had taken, that one channel of running water that had dictated their choice to come here in the first place, and to stay.

  Stepping over one of these markers now, Dan said, “Remember when we worked out we were walking up in the air?” Two little kids, each holding one of Gramps’s hands, and he was telling them that what was left of the stream was now buried deep beneath their feet, that the level they were walking on now would have been up in the air for the first convicts, the first soldiers, the first few ladies.

  “Our feet up around their ears maybe,” he’d said. “Our feet walking up in the air.” Over the Tank Stream, around the line of the harbor, the city that day floating above whatever place the city had been one hundred, two hundred, thousands of years before. “Did we get lost? I can’t remember. We had a picnic, down by the harbor—and there was something else, wasn’t there? I always meant to ask Gramps what else happened that day.”

  “I can’t remember,” said Charlie. “But I remember that thing of walking on air—that felt miraculous,” she said as he went to take a step forward off the curb into the empty street and her arm flew across, blocking his chest. The light had changed; the traffic was coming. She hooked her arm through his, pulling him into step. He’d forgotten how tall she was, possibly even taller than him, if they turned back to back and both stood up straight, competing six-year-olds again. Long dark hair pulled back and perennially tanned skin. She looked great, hadn’t changed at all.

  “Like the people who were waiting for Jesus to walk across the water between the harbor’s heads,” said Dan. The way Gramps told that story, some days Dan and Charlie thought it really might have happened, back in the impossibly distant past of Gramps’s youth, and that he himself might even have seen it.

  “Another of Gramps’s miracles,” said Charlie, steering them left around a corner where Dan was sure they should have turned right. His feet braced against the steep slope of a hill, and by the time he looked up to orient himself they’d reached the huge buttressing wall that fed the roadway onto the bridge. There was a basketball court, tall skinny kids leaping high for the ball, higher for the hoop. Beyond its fence, with a heap of ratty plastic bags at his side, an old man in a tattered pink coat rocked back and forth on a bench, his eyes milky, his skin caked with dirt.

  “Been here for years,” said Charlie, heading
towards him. “As long as I’ve been coming. Seems to be so many more of them now. And you think, you know, he must be someone’s brother, someone’s mate—don’t they wonder where he went?” She reached down, put a handful of coins onto his stained cardboard plate. “I don’t know: I reckon most people don’t even see them anymore. This bloody government.”

  “Caro gets twenty pounds turned into pound coins every payday,” said Dan, “and walks along The Strand giving it to”—he pulled himself up against the word beggars—“guys like this.” He wasn’t sure he’d ever handed over twenty pence, let alone a pound. The noise of movement on the bridge, eight lanes of traffic, the clatter of trains north and south, surged above like a thundering cloud; a door in the bridge’s ramparts opened and a line of people in matching grey jumpsuits came out in single file and disappeared into another door a little way along.

  “Maintenance?” asked Dan.

  Charlie laughed. “You have been away a long time. Come on.” She led him around the last sweep of road that delivered them under the bridge’s Meccano to the place where it pushed itself out from its ramp of land, its ramp of road, balanced its weight on its one great big hinge, and leaned out to straddle the water and meet itself coming over from the other side.

  The morning he left, they’d met here, at the bridge’s southern feet, before sunrise, Charlie adamant they should find the old secret ways up and onto it, to start Dan’s last Sydney day one hundred and thirty-four meters up in the air.

  “Best view of the city,” Gramps always said. “Best way to remember it, from above, with the sun straight out to the east, the light coming up through all the silvers and golds, and the harbor starting to wake up. That time of day, you can see where all the night’s boats and ships have gone; their wakes leave lines etched on the water, and from up on the arch you can see them all.” But in the night’s last darkness, the bridge a greater and heavier darkness above them, Dan had shaken his head, declaring himself happy to watch the sunrise from the grass instead.