The Body in the Clouds (36 page)

‘Let's go up by the mouth of the old stream,' said Charlie, steering him through the crowds and across to the wide forecourt whose fountain marked the place where the settlement's first, quickly exhausted stream had splashed into the harbour. There were the birds, the frogs, the echidnas, the lizards in bronze; a curling curve suggesting rocks; a curling curve suggesting leaves. ‘Do you remember how Gramps used to say they'd been peeled off one-and two-cent pieces,' she said, ‘and that's why they were all brown?' She leaned forward, her fingers just touching the very top of the water. ‘It must have been so pretty with the ferns and the she-oaks and the lilies along here.' She flicked drops of water onto the fountain's surface, watching them catch the light and disappear. ‘What do you think—about Gramps? What do you think about it, Dan?'

Dan slid his hand along the bronze skin of a goanna, his fingers registering the hard metal that formed it while his eyes followed the texture of its skin, scaly, and a little baggy, but certainly reptilean. There was nothing like this in England, he thought.
They must have looked monstrous
. He wondered how long it had been since a goanna wandered through this part of town. He wondered what he wanted to say to Charlie.

‘Well,' he said at last, ‘I'm not really one to talk about appropriating— sometimes when I tell the story, I say it was
my
grandfather who flew.' He watched her carefully, but she barely reacted, her fingers still toying with the water. ‘We all borrow things, don't we? Nudge the truth a bit now and then. But he was a good grandfather—for me, as much as for you. And there's no harm in it, is there? It doesn't change anything we think about him. It doesn't change how much we loved him, does it?'

‘Love,' she said, her own hand moulded around the smooth bronze stone on which Dan's goanna sat. ‘We never talk about that, do we. I don't mean'—fast, across a kind of fear that fell on his face—‘anything soppy. I just mean family, us that way. I missed you, Dan, I really missed you. I'd do things, and see things—stuff happens, you know, and there are certain people you want to tell about it.'

The things he might have told her. Dan thought of random moments with Caro, of holidays and nothing weekends, of flying over the Matter-horn, of the light under the Waterloo Bridge and the way that one little cloud had shone, illuminated, on his birthday.

‘I should've rung home more; talked to Mum more, talked to you—I meant to. I was always promising myself I would.' The water around his fingers now felt silky; it would be lovely, he thought from nowhere, if it was big enough to submerge him. He could lean all the way forward into it. He could wash away his tiredness, wash away the flight, wash away all the things he'd meant to do or say and hadn't. It felt like that kind of space. ‘It's not even that you get busy,' he said. ‘It's just—it was never quite—never quite the right time. And I always knew I could just fly home if I wanted to.' He shook his head. ‘Poor old Joe.'

‘Poor old Ted,' said Charlie quietly. She was very still, her only movement her fingers flicking at the water again. Her grandfather: their best friend, the person who had filled them up with stories and adventures, who'd taught them, if nothing else, that it was perfectly possible for them to fly—however they wanted to take that. She'd done better than him at that, thought Dan; photography against banking wasn't much of a contest. Gramps's mantra: ‘Anything you want to do, anyone you want to be.' They hadn't realised how literally he knew that could be taken.

And Gramps had been right to invoke Dan's own father: fleeing a country, picking a new name, ending up in a life that held his mum, him, in a whole other piece of the world. When he was young, it had never really mattered to Dan who else his father might have been, and as he got older, his dad dead years already, he hadn't wanted anything other than to hold onto what little he remembered. His mother had nodded. Gramps had nodded. As he'd said to Caro, he'd happily take his mum to the place his father had come from, if she ever wanted to go. But he wasn't that interested in knowing more himself.

‘So I figure,' said Charlie suddenly, ‘that it's like Jesus coming through the heads. The way Gramps told the story, sometimes it was just a story, sometimes Gram had been there, had seen it happen herself. Sometimes Gramps had—and sometimes it was just something he'd heard someone talking about that might happen one day.'

Her face scrunched up a little—Dan thought it was against the glare of the sun, then saw the tears on her cheeks. ‘I know it doesn't matter,' she said, ‘I know it shouldn't change anything. But I did mind about the flying. I minded that it wasn't him, that he hadn't done that. I started imagining these little threads running away from his words—him telling us, and us telling someone else, who passed it on to someone else, and one of those threads might have led right back to Roy Kelly or Vince Kelly or whatever his name was. What would he have thought?' Her fingers kept busy, brushing back and forth, back and forth, across the water, making tiny waves, and her shoulders shuddered as she sighed from somewhere low and deep.

‘The last few years, Gramps got into this history stuff, all the old Sydney stuff, settlement and the British, and then, later, the bridge. He was really taken with it. I thought at first it was just that he wanted new things to talk about, new stories to tell. Towards the end, he said it was because Joe Brown had always been interested in it, and he wanted to do it for him. We found some fantastic stories—the day someone thought they saw an alligator here; the day someone said they'd found gold here.' She laughed. ‘And then there were whole days when nothing had been written down—no record of anything in a journal or a letter.' As if Sydney might have skipped that twenty-four hours altogether—or something so impossible had happened that the whole settlement had united around it in silence.

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 realised 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 south-east 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 centre 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 patrolling it now. But there's some bloke lying in a hospital who tried to basejump 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 metres? All these other versions of the body in the clouds.'

‘The what?'

‘The 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 realised, 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 fringe 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 harbour 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 colour 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 realised 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 kerb 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 recognise 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 back seat a woman, thrown forward by the sudden stop, frowning and cursing as the car, shockingly, lurched forward again, through screams, and stopped.