The Body in the Clouds (9 page)

‘No matter how far you walked, mate, and no matter how far you rode,' suggested another voice, ‘I'd beat you both hands down running along that span.'

The running had always intrigued Ted whenever he looked up into the sky; the way feet must have moulded around the new surfaces so they didn't fall.
It's acrobatics
, he thought,
or a ballet
, the troupe of men perched in their crepe-soled shoes, their rubber-soled shoes, gripping edges and walking narrow lines. And it must have changed how they stood on the ground, too, changed the whole set and bearing of their bodies, the way the work itself hardened different muscles and strengthened different postures. That new tiredness in his legs from standing on the fluid movement of the barge—how long would it be before he took on some new shape to accommodate that?

Sitting among the men and their stories, Ted listened to a well-practised loop of the job's conditions: no washrooms, no locker rooms, no tearoom or canteen for your lunch, no five minutes on the job to rinse the grime off your hands at the end of the day—if you wanted to do that sort of thing, you did it in your own time. ‘And if you're up on the top, and you need to . . . well . . .'

‘If you need to go,' another voice said at last, ‘well, by the time it hits the water it would've disintegrated—there'd be nothing left. We're over four hundred feet up at high tide. So you do your business, and by the time it's halfway down it'll have dispersed. Some blokes,' another apologetic nod to Joy, ‘do it in a brown paper bag and let that go over the edge.'

Up there, in his top-of-the-world air? Ted shook his head at them, which only encouraged them.

‘Mate of mine says they—you know—on them shovels they use for feeding the fires to cook the rivets. Do their stuff on that, throw it off, cook the shovel clean, and then do their sausages on it for lunch. Handy piece of equipment, they say.'

‘Another bloke says he did his in a bag, folded it up, and threw it over. And as soon as he let it go, the bloody thing opened up, and went round and round and round and fell straight onto the top deck of one of the ferries. Bit of a shock for the passengers to have that fall out of the sky, I reckon.'

‘I'm up on the arch with Kelly the other day,' another speaker began. ‘You know Kelly—big bloke, a boilermaker.' The man's voice was excited with the new story he had to tell. ‘And we're talking this, that, nothing and the cricket—and he drops his spanner right into the harbour, stands there watching it fall all the way down, as if he half expects it to flip over and fly back up into his hand. It breaks the water with an almighty crack and he turns to me and says, “I suppose another man'll be going over there one of these days, like that spanner.” I said, “Don't be so damn silly”—sorry, Joy.' She smiled, shook her head. ‘ “Don't be so damn silly.” He dives on weekends, you know—one of those clubs with springboards and what-have-you. And I watch him looking up and down, and I keep an eye on him now. You don't want to go saying that sort of thing on a half-made bridge.'

A long silence in the darkness, cut by the sound of a cigarette's smoke being puffed into rings.

Then Joy coughed a little, pulled her cardigan tighter around herself, and said, ‘Someone was asking about Nipper's wife the other day. Came into the shop and asked if I knew how she was.' The silence thickened.

Swallowing the cold beer, Ted saw Joe's face tighten and frown. ‘Nipper Anderson?' he said, misunderstanding Joe's pause. This was a story he knew, a story he could tell. ‘I heard about that, how he went in and the people who dived in to fetch the body found it stuck as if it was sat down in mud.' He caught his breath. He felt his hands go sticky, rubbed them hard against his legs.

‘Steady, Ted,' said Joe. ‘Steady, mate, there are blokes here that were doing that diving.' But someone else had already picked up the recitation.

‘It was my first day up there, you know, getting the feel of it. One of the riggers was calling out, “Look at this place, over here, and the mountains over there, and there's a ship coming up the harbour.” Some of the blokes were joking around, saying they hoped the bridge would keep him on when she was done, so he could call all the attractions for people walking across underneath. Good bloke, the rigger, and it was nice to keep your mind off where you were, what you were doing, before you started to look around.'

A deep breath—punctuation. ‘The clouds look really white, when you're that bit closer to them. And the noise, strike me, the noise was big: air guns and cranes and steel bashing steel, and rivets sizzling to white hot, everyone shouting, needing this, doing that, and underneath it all this huge noise that's the machines in the workshops below. And I heard someone say, so clear, “Righto, Nip, let's take another purchase.” This was Nipper.'

Another pause—the man might as well have been on a stage, spotlit. He held the audience in the palm of his hand, no matter how many times they'd heard this story before. Leaning forward, Joy's face was taut, her eyes shining.

‘Young bloke—just married, someone said—and his brother worked on the site too. Nipper had spoken for him to get a job, and they'd made him ambulance officer. Ambulance officer—you wouldn't believe it. Anyway, his mate calls for another grip, and then there's this noise, sharp. It's a spanner bouncing off Nipper's mate and jarring on the steel, and it's hit Nipper's mate because Nipper's dropped it. And Nipper's dropped it because he's lost his footing. His mate's hanging onto him, his mate's hanging on. He's got him by the foot, and he's holding him—and it looks okay, looks okay. This Nipper, he's only a little thing, looks like his mate'll hold him.

‘And then the mate's holding a sandshoe, that's all, just a pissing little sandshoe—sorry, Joy—and I'm standing there looking at the shoe and counting, waiting to hear a splash like a clap of thunder. Dunno why I didn't hear anything. Someone's shouting, “Get yourself straight.” And there were men running down off the bridge, down to the water, and they were diving in, going for the body, three or four of them. Him—' pointing to a man on the bottom step, who raised his hand, ‘and him.' He pointed to another further out on the grass, who nodded. ‘These men diving down, coming up, shaking their heads.

‘And no one said anything—do you remember? No one said anything at all.' He took a long puff of his cigarette, and stubbed it out in the dirt. ‘Then the whole site cleared, and we went home.' He wiped one hand across his eyes. ‘Bloody Nipper. You don't need a first day like that, Ted, I'll tell you that, mate. I'll tell you that.'

In the silence, Ted chewed at his lip and thought of the line he'd always had ready against his mum's fear, his gran's, that someone would give him his job up in the air and he'd end up tripping, falling down and down. ‘If you started to fall, it'd feel like flying for a second, wouldn't it?' But what did he know? If some dream could make you feel so thick and anxious, what could you say about finding yourself in a real moment like that?

‘Time, gentlemen,' said Joe, and the men stretched and stood and headed into the darkness, calling their goodbyes to Joy, nodding to Joe as he corralled the beer bottles into a crate. Ted could hear Joy inside the house, humming, could hear the stove being stoked and the kettle being filled. But as he turned to go in, Joe caught his shoulder.

‘Those stories, the ones like Nipper,' he said, his cigarette smoke hovering like a cloud in the glow of the house's lights, ‘she takes them on, you know. She makes a lot of them, feels them keen and deep. I try to . . . well, it's better to keep it a bit light and easy, isn't it, mate?' And he clapped his hand onto Ted's shoulder again as they stood a moment, like the younger and older version of the same shape, the same stance. ‘Anyway, good you could meet the neighbours. They're good men, good nights.' And he flicked the smouldering butt of his cigarette in a high arc through the air beyond the reach of the bright windows and into the garden's blackness.

Ted watched it rise and peak and fall, dropping down in the dark green somewhere like a lost rivet that had somehow worked itself away from its steel and followed these men home.

Dan

T
urning from the front door of his building, Dan saw something flare just beyond the corner of his eye—turned again and saw a man walking away as his cigarette butt rolled towards the gutter, its end glowing red. The morning was grey, skittering towards winter, and as the cigarette disappeared into the grating of a drain, Dan paused a moment on the gutter, wondering where it might end up, swirling below the streets towards a river, a sewer. At home, in Sydney, some grates had signs that told you which body of water the drain led to. Drop something here, it would end up there. There was probably a map that showed these tracks and all these veins, these arteries, clogging slowly, silting up.

He buttoned his coat and began to walk to the station. He was dull with the heavy, vaguely nauseous feeling of not enough sleep—his mind had spent the night working its way around the triangle of Caroline, of Charlie, of Gramps, and the morning seemed littered with traces of each of them: a woman on the other side of the road had Caro's hair; a woman pausing on a street corner raised a camera to her eye as Charlie would; an old man sat on a bench in one of Gramps's cardigans, working on a crossword.

The sun pushed through the layer of clouds for a moment, catching the bright colour of a front door, the metallic sheen of a car, the rainbow of flowers in a florist's barrow—yellow gerberas, blue hydrangeas, the orange-and-blue flames of birds of paradise. He remembered them from childhood. A wave of perfume reached him: roses, three buckets of white roses, and he swerved towards the cart, caught by their sweet smell. Caro. He'd missed her beside him—spent an hour after he'd spoken to Charlie tossing up whether to follow her across London. There was Gramps to think about too, and Charlie had sounded so far away. And Caro had never looked so sad. Caro. He'd buy a bunch, take them to her at lunchtime, he thought, swapping a crisp ten-pound note for the roses. Their perfume was thick as he cradled them in his arm.
She'll like that, she'll be pleased
, he thought, then he frowned:
She'll be astonished
. He couldn't think of the last time he'd bought her flowers, yet it felt such an easy thing to pause, to buy, to carry.

Further along, he stopped at the stall where he always stopped, picked up a newspaper, folded it and tucked it under his arm before he realised he had no change in his pocket, and now no money in his wallet. The cash machine was two blocks away.

Every day for eight, maybe nine years he'd come to the same place and bought the same paper, exchanged a few words with the man in the hut.

‘Tomorrow? I've got no money on me,' he said, and was walking away as he heard the man say, ‘I can't do that.'

Dan turned. ‘Sorry?'

‘I don't do credit.'

‘But you know me—I've been coming here for years.'

It was obvious from the blankness of the man's face he had no idea who Dan was.

Dan shook the folds out of the paper and put it back on the pile, as red, as self-conscious, as if he'd been caught trying to lift it. It was the second potent blush he'd had to endure in less than twenty-four hours, and he was sure everyone walking past was staring at him. ‘Jesus.' His embarrassment turned to anger. He shouldn't have bought the bloody flowers.

His skin was cool by the time he got through the ticket barrier and onto the platform, but he sidled a little further than usual into the crowd of people, further into the mess of men in suits and women in optimistically light dresses, as if he didn't want anyone to notice that he was holding a bunch of roses instead of his paper.

A deep breath in—‘Fuck it'—and he started to scan the billboards and posters on the other side of the tracks to find something, anything, that he could read while he waited—anything to distract him from thoughts of what to do, of Caro, of Charlie, of Gramps, even just for a moment. He read about travel insurance, about car insurance, about some new credit card that promised the world. The message on the indicator board clicked over; the train that had been two minutes away would now be arriving in eight minutes' time, and a heavy sigh rattled along the platform. Dan moved a little further down. There was an alcove cut into the wall just beyond the vending machine. Eight or nine years of being at this station almost every day, and he'd never noticed it before. It was just deep enough to conceal a man, and carefully tiled like the walls around it; you could step in there and disappear.

Further along, he passed a woman with a huge bunch of white roses, exactly like his—the fragrance doubled as he passed. Two small children were holding hands and dancing, singing ‘Ring-a-ring-a-–rosies', while the woman—presumably their mother—stared absently across the empty tracks. ‘We all fall down,' and they did, their mother suddenly loud and sharp about the ‘muck on the floor and dirt on your clothes and mind the edge, please'.

But then she saw Dan, saw the flowers he held, and smiled.
Makes me look like a nice person
, he thought, noncommittal.

He moved further on again, wondering if it really mattered if he didn't read the paper. He'd have a look at the headlines on the net when he got to work. Anything he needed to know—currencies, mergers, government decisions—someone would tell him. Maybe he didn't need to bother with a newspaper at all. Although he'd miss the crossword, and the football; you had to read the paper on a Monday to see what had happened with the football. Still, it felt liberating now and he rocked back and forth on his feet, staring at the middle distance of the station wall.
Or I could buy one of those daggy crossword books like Gramps used to have
. He snorted: