The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  It was Charlie’s weather-journal photos that had piqued her grandfather’s curiosity; where Dan had asked what she was trying to show, or prove, her grandfather had understood them. “You’re looking for overlaps, coincidences, aren’t you, love? Bits of time between now and then that are the same?” It had taken a while, but he’d finally found a picture of the old brick dug up when the bridge’s foundations were being built. “Just keep going down through the layers and you’ll find intersections,” he’d said, sliding it across the table towards his granddaughter.

  “And remember when you dug this out, Gramps? And you took Gram down to see it?”

  “First day, pet, yes . . .” And only later, after, Charlie realized how little he’d told her about where it had been found, and what else had been there, and what kind of day it had been, no matter how many times she’d asked.

  “They reckon it was from the old observatory,” her grandfather had said, “and I thought that was pretty right because it was such a good place to sit and watch—there were blokes over by that pylon saw that dive off the bridge, and sometimes when I went back there, after the war, I felt I could just about see it myself. Powerful bit of time when someone flies instead of falling.”

  Riffling through Charlie’s photos as he spoke, he’d settled one on the top of the pile, tapping it square. On the left of the picture, a record of the weather one spring day in 1791—the wind coming in from the southeast before the sunrise of a cloudy day, with a little rain at noon. On the right, a series of narrow panoramas of the same day, more than two hundred years later—the cloud in the morning, the rain at noon—taken from the site of the old observatory where those first eighteenth-century readings had been made.

  Charlie held the stack still in her grandfather’s hands: in the center of the modern midday, something had jarred and blurred, marring the image—she wondered how she hadn’t noticed it before. But as she frowned, her grandfather pulled it up towards his eyes, adjusting his glasses.

  “Well, well,” he said, “there it is. There it is.”

  “And he asked me if he could have it,” said Charlie to Dan. “The first one of my pictures he’d ever asked for. He put it on the lowboy with that postcard of Icarus’s foot disappearing into the water—remember? The dive. He said it was the dive.”

  Sitting beside the imitation stream, Dan ducked his head a little lower to look back to the bridge. “Kelly’s dive,” he said. Kelly with the soft Irish accent, snapping himself into a somersault, or in a high hospital bed aching where the boot leather had been peeled from his thighs. Kelly, with the newspaper men pinning his words with their pencils. Should he tell Charlie he’d dreamed all that? Should he tell her that those old tin-can phones were still whizzing stories between them, even around the world? Maybe it was like climbing the bridge without her, a story not told, a thing not explained.

  “Do you reckon we could climb it?” he said. “Not with that clipped-on mob, but just on our own?”

  “They’d have us for terrorists,” said Charlie, laughing. “There are security blokes patroling it now. But there’s some bloke lying in a hospital who tried to BASE jump from it in the middle of the night, except his chute didn’t open. He’s been in hospital months now; I thought about asking him if I could photograph him—is that too macabre? I’m thinking about starting a new series of shots—him and that amazing German woman, the paraglider who got sucked up into the clouds in a storm. It took her higher than Mount Everest. And she survived. Did you read about that? And the Frenchman who’s planning to freefall from forty thousand meters? All these other versions of the body in the clouds.”

  “The what?”

  “The indigenous people who were here before the British, before us, I guess, they believe that you come from the clouds when you’re born, and that when you die, your bones stay in the ground but your body goes back up. It was one of the first things the British learned from them when they arrived: the bones in the ground; the body in the clouds.” She picked at one of her fingers while Dan waited for her to go on. “Sometimes, I realized, Gramps did tell the story about diving off the bridge as if it had been somebody else, and once he said he wondered if it was possible to move differently through the air in this place because there’d always been people here who believed that that was what happened—when you began to live, as much as when you died.” She pushed her hair back and it flickered against the wind. “Different kinds of resurrection, I guess. It’s a wonder he didn’t have me driving him around the harbor to sit and wait for that Second Coming. Gram did sit there waiting, for a while, you know. That story was true.”

  She looked at her watch, at the sky. “We should keep going, get back for your mum,” she said, on her feet with a hand out to help pull him up. He felt her take his weight as he pushed himself away from the ledge he’d been sitting on, and wished he could just fall against her and sleep for a while. So far, so tired, and now he was confusing her grandfather’s face with the Russian man’s, pallidly inanimate and floating in front of his eyes. And Caro, Caro’s face seemed to have slipped away completely—he gagged a little, horrified, then made himself picture her building, her front door, her flat, and there she was, safely inside. Two in the morning in her world: he pictured her asleep, then wondered if she might be awake, wondering about him, staring out of her window at other windows, lit and dark. Funny, for a moment it was the view from his window he imagined for her, and for the first time he thought what a safe and warm thing it would be to know she was sitting at home—in their home—waiting for him.

  Overhead, high in the blue, came the faint buzz of an engine and Dan and Charlie both looked up to see an aeroplane cut straight through the middle of the cloud, creating a precise stripe in its wake that brushed the sky back from white to blue—the reverse of the usual jet stream. Dan arched his head further back so as not to lose sight of it, almost overbalancing against the angle. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” But the cloud was recovering, spreading straightaway and softening the sky’s color until it had returned to white less than a minute later.

  “I guess it happens all the time,” said Charlie, rubbing at her own neck, “and we just don’t notice it.”

  His eyelids heavy, his gaze just ahead of his jolting steps, Dan followed the sound of Charlie’s voice south, back towards her place. Her heard her say the word “orphaned” and realized she was talking about herself. He imagined the two of them now, from above, their heads bobbing along like mobile markers on a map. Such a paucity of family webbing out around them: his mum; a few second cousins; a great-aunt on Charlie’s side whom Dan couldn’t now place as springing from Joy, or Joe, or Ted. Two single points, moving together along a street: in his mind’s eye Dan was floating high above the image of their walk, clearing the tops of buildings and heading for the sky.

  They reached a curb and Charlie pulled Dan back as he made to step off into a stream of traffic again so that he bumped into someone next to him.

  “Sorry, mate,” said Dan. The man shrugged, his fingers busy on his mobile phone while his eyes stared at Dan’s face as if he was trying to recognize him—not as someone in particular, but as any sort of person at all. What do I look like to you? thought Dan, foggily. What are you seeing?

  Turning back towards Charlie, he saw another man come along the pavement opposite. He was older, dressed in decrepit layers of clothing and cradling a torn plastic bag. A brown dog bounced at his ankles, its tail high and happy.

  Neither dog nor man paused or registered the traffic, and at first Dan didn’t see what had happened, only that something was suddenly caught under the wheels of a car coming around the corner—a taxi, sleek and silver, and in the backseat a woman, thrown forward by the sudden stop, frowning and cursing as the car, shockingly, lurched forward again, through screams, and stopped.

  The dog freed itself, made for the gutter with a terrible swagger, and took two or three steps before it realized it was injured, it was in pain, and it sank on
to the concrete, unable to move any farther.

  It yelped then, but only once, heaved itself up again somehow, staggered, lurched, fell. There were so many screams cutting across its broken body, and then a terrible, nasty silence.

  “I didn’t know if that was a person or a dog,” said someone next to Charlie. “Not that one would be better than the other.”

  “I did not want to see that,” said Charlie quietly.

  Dan closed his eyes, seeing the furry rump trapped under the wheels, the way it had wriggled itself out and assumed—it knew how its paws worked, how its legs worked—that it could just stand up and walk away. He swallowed the taste of vomit, his breath bubbling horribly in his throat.

  The old man was crouched down next to his pet among a forest of legs, three or four people on mobile phones.

  “He’ll be right, mate,” said someone, but Dan wasn’t sure if he meant the old dog or the man—and wasn’t sure that it was going to be true of either of them.

  In the backseat of the cab, the woman looked around blankly, uncertain of what had happened. Her eyes scanned the people on the pavement, caught sight of Dan—who raised one hand, wanting somehow to acknowledge her, to soothe her—and moved on. The cab driver took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and accelerated away before his hands were back on the wheel. “That woman,” said Dan, “she looked like the Russian woman on the plane.” He wasn’t even sure if this was true, but he wanted to give Charlie something to think about that wasn’t what she’d just seen. “She said she thought Sydney looked beautiful when we landed this morning. We talked about reading Gulliver’s Travels—I was thinking about when you and I read it, when we were young, but I couldn’t remember if we’d ever finished it.”

  Light and easy; the thought came out of nowhere.

  “I did not want to see that,” said Charlie again, stepping off the curb as the lights changed in their favor. “Come on, let’s go.” Stepping wide around the huddle on the footpath that was the dog, the man, the misery of it all.

  “I mean,” said Dan, running on, wishing he could stop and knowing he was making something worse now, not better, “it’s not much of a story to bring you, a man dying on a plane, and then his daughter running over a dog in front of us. If it was her; if it was—”

  “No,” said Charlie, stopping his words and balancing his gait as he weaved a little next to her. “But Gulliver’s better. Maybe we can start reading the same books again, just on different sides of the world. Then we can argue about what they mean and whether they’re good.” Smiling a little, leading the way.

  Dan smiled too, but he read books with Caro now—sometimes simultaneously, sometimes ones she’d just finished. And sometimes, just before they slept, she read him a page or two of whatever she was partway through, and he’d drift into a different sleep with the sound of her voice and its words like waves turning a little pulse against a shore. That, he thought now, was one of his favorite things about being with Caro. And there were never any arguments about it.

  Reaching Charlie’s building, reaching its elevator, Dan leaned back against the mirrored wall and let his eyes shut properly. His body felt even heavier as the cabin pushed up from the ground.

  “Here,” he heard Charlie say as the door opened, and he watched again as a triangle of light spilled again into the dark hallway from her opening door. “Here you are, I’ll make another coffee—try not to think about it.”

  His tiredness had reached a pitch somewhere between drunkenness and nausea, and he leaned in towards her bathroom mirror, splashing handful after handful of cold water onto his face.

  “Dan? There’s coffee.” His cup on the side of the table away from the view.

  He took another too-big, too-hot gulp. “So my mum,” he said, the skin inside his mouth tingling. He was trying not to think of the heaviness in his head. “You said she’s not as young—”

  “No, no, she’s fine—I didn’t mean you should worry. Just that she’ll be a bit more lonely. She was visiting Gramps, Ted, almost every day, and I’m away a fair bit, and you’re . . . on the other side of the world. She’s fine.” Charlie nodded. “I took some pictures last week, in the hospital. Here—I made some prints for your mum.”

  There was Ted Parker, wide eyes gazing out across the rooftops of the city view. And there was Dan’s mum, her hair a little darker, her face a little thinner than how Dan always pictured her, and her first pair of glasses tucked high on the top of her head. She was smiling; she was squeezing Gramps’s arm, she was happy. She was reassuringly herself.

  There you are, thought Dan. They didn’t matter, all those years on the other side of the world. But he knew that wasn’t quite right.

  “What did Mum say about the whole Ted thing?” he asked then, tilting the photo towards the light.

  Charlie smiled. “Not a lot. Said it didn’t change the person Ted had been and all he’d done for us. Said I was going to have enough loss to deal with without losing him before he died. And she did say, incidentally, that she’d never believed the story about flying off the bridge, was always terrified it’d make you want to climb up there and give it a go. I told her you’d piked out the last morning you were here, when we’d promised each other we’d climb up and see the sunrise. I didn’t tell her you’d gone up there years ago with some girl . . .” Seeing the look of surprise on his face, she said, “Somebody told me at a party once.”

  She pushed another pile of photographs towards him: the cable tunnels from the bridge’s foundations, with other slivers of its size, its structure, its setting framed up in other shots. The men who’d found the old stone, she said—“the men who’d really found it”—had found a ring in the wall nearby and made up some story about it being a place where convicts were chained. “But it must have been the observatory, William Dawes’s observatory, and Ted and Joe were much more taken with the idea of him than with the idea of convicts and shackles and big heavy bolts.”

  Her index finger tapped at the side of one of the prints, touching its corner and bouncing back from the small pinprick it made. “Some guy, William Dawes,” she said softly. “Out here on the Sirius to watch for a comet that doesn’t come, and then all the things he gets busy with in the meantime—stars and maps and words and treks. This lovely description of it being Dawes’s job to amalgamate all the courses each person reckoned they’d walked during a day when they were out on an expedition, the coordinates of their compasses, the number of steps they’d taken. They said he could do it almost without interrupting a conversation.”

  Charlie had dug for this other, older man as far as she could, running up against the wistful letters of historians, writing as the bridge was being built, about how sad it was that someone like him should almost have slipped out of view altogether—so few papers, such little evidence. That place under the southeastern foot of the bridge—which Dawes had called Point Maskelyne, for the Astronomer Royal, to acknowledge the role of astronomy in the beginnings of Sydney—had ended up named to honor him instead. And then Dawes Point had had its earlier, gentler name brought back alongside it: Tarra. His name, and the older name, back in conversation. Someone had found the lists of words he’d collected from those first conversations he’d had; someone had found his meteorological records from that first observatory—the journals that Charlie had used for her photographs. But most of what he’d left, the ideas and information he must have generated, had disappeared from view.

  “Then again,” said Charlie now, clicking open the folder on her computer that held all her weather images, “there were those who said at the time that he wasn’t always visible to mortal eyes, so maybe he was always going to fade away, a little mysterious. ‘Not visible to mortal eyes’: I think that was one of Gramps’s favorite lines.”

  Dan watched the images dissolve one into the next; the blues and whites of the weather, the neat newspaper type of the modern forecasts, the careful handwriting, sepia, in ruled columns, of the eighteenth-century records. It was particular
handwriting, handwriting that had been concentrated on. Violent thunder. Pleasant cool breeze. Days when the sun was somewhat obscured. Days when the sun shone through the haze. Sea breezes. Hailstones. Sometimes a shower of small rain.

  “I imagined things to tell him in the end—I didn’t think he’d mind. I read about those early French aeronauts who went across the Channel in their hot-air balloons and I imagined William Dawes dreaming of building his own balloon and flying over this place he was mapping. I read about the Englishman who came up with the first classifications for clouds, a decade or so after Dawes was here, and I imagined Dawes staring at the shapes of clouds, wondering how they might be classified, and wondering about the stories they might hold. I read about the settlers and the Eora dancing, and I imagined William Dawes dancing slowly down by the water. His handwriting always reminded me a bit of yours.” She zoomed in on one of the columns of sepia text on her screen. “Like it never changed from the handwriting you learn at school.” She zoomed in again so the letters blurred and fuzzed. “Just the next round of stories, I guess.”

  Dan finished his coffee, stared at the brown sludge in the bottom of his mug, the same color as the journal’s text, as if its shape might hold something for him. He snorted; he’d be visiting Cynthia’s clairvoyant next.

  “My stories aren’t so great,” he said carefully. “Death and near-death experiences from a weird trip home. And then, that dog.” He felt like he should apologize. “I don’t think you need those stories in a week like this.” Straightening to smile, maybe to pat her shoulder or touch her arm, he caught the flick of something dark in one of her photographs and leaned towards the screen, his hand up to stop her clicking on to the next image.

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s it. That’s the one Gramps liked. I never see the movement straight off—but you’re right, there it is, in the middle. Right day. Right time. That’s the one he said showed the fall.”