The Body in the Clouds (18 page)

‘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?'

‘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.

‘I'm sitting on top of the world,' she began to sing, holding her hands out to him, and as he took them, they turned in the smallest circle, slowly, so slowly, around and around, humming 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 few seconds. But he stood there rigid, his knees locked, his back straight.
I can hold onto 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 harbour'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 harbour'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 perched 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 further and further 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, absent-mindedly 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 too 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

T
he 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
. He tore off the paper as he ordered a beer. It was a cream-coloured 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 Houyhn–hnms . . . 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.