The Body in the Clouds (14 page)

‘Still a bit of poetry in your mercenary soul, isn't there,' Charlie would have said.

And maybe he always thought of Charlie, too, because there she was, looking exactly as she'd looked the last time he saw her, years ago now. He couldn't see himself, but he could see that she was sitting in the day he'd left home. She was sitting where they'd sat on the harbour's edge, as if she'd been there all the time, if he'd thought to look.

Stretching his arms, Dan looked along his row; there was an empty seat next to him, then a woman with her eyes closed. Beyond her came the thin public space of the aisle, and then a family sitting father, child, child, mother, across to the next aisle. On the other side of the plane, a woman, an empty seat, and a man leaning forward to look too—just as Dan was—so that for a moment he thought he was looking at a mirror somehow, the reflection only ruined by the asymmetrical family in the middle. Dan rubbed his hands across his eyes as the man at the other end of the row pulled a book from the seat pocket, and the illusion was broken. The plane lifted itself free of the ground, and Dan cupped his hand around the little screen in front of him. Thousands of kilometres to go.

Whereas Caro was probably almost home by now, clattering back to the city, her lap full of the replacement white roses he'd bought her that morning. ‘I'll ring you, or I'll text,' he'd said, and she'd hugged him and said, ‘No you won't: I know you. Just go and see. Go and see how your Gramps is. I'll talk to you when you're back again.' She'd seemed happy he had a reason for going that wasn't about her. So he'd kissed her, brushed his fingertips across her cheek and walked through customs with his senses full of the flowers, their texture, their perfume. Ten days he'd be gone; he wondered if the roses would last that long.

‘I lose all sense of time on planes,' said the woman on the aisle, tilting her own screen to read the distance. ‘It can say fourteen hours and I can know how long fourteen hours is in a regular day, but time feels all different when you're just sitting here hurtling along, doesn't it?' She held out her hand. ‘My name's Cynthia,' she said.

‘Dan,' said Dan. No one had ever introduced themselves to him at the beginning of a fourteen-hour flight before. It felt ominous.

‘Don't worry,' said Cynthia, ‘I'm not going to talk to you all the way home. You are going home, aren't you? I just think it's really strange that we'll spend all this time so close to each other, and you'll clamber over me for the loo, and we won't even introduce ourselves.'

‘I always find it really hard talking on planes,' said Dan, and he hoped he sounded firm. ‘Really hard to hear over the engines—you know, all that noise you forget about as soon as you're back on the ground.'

‘That film they made about the American plane that crashed into the field on September 11,' said Cynthia, raising her voice a little. ‘Did it have that kind of furry noise underneath all the soundtrack stuff, or did they mask it all out?'

‘I never saw it,' said Dan. He hoped there was nothing else to say, watched as she opened a shiny magazine.

‘A clairvoyant once told me I was going to meet the love of my life on a plane,' said Cynthia. ‘But then I went back to her a couple of years later and she said I was going to die in a plane crash. It made me a bit doubtful about flying for a while. I think that's why I started to introduce myself to people when I was up in the air—to feel a bit more at home in case she was right the second time, and to keep my options open in case she was right the first.'

There was nothing to do, thought Dan, but smile, nod, and find something to read—in a hurry. He put his hand into his bag, his fingers working through shapes and textures: a jumper, a plastic water bottle, something smooth and round—he pulled at it and saw Gramps's watch, shining and lovely in the palm of his hand. He smiled. It was nice to be travelling with it again. But as he pulled out the first book his fingers found—his journal—he realised that the book he'd meant to bring was still sitting next to his bed. Fourteen hours with someone who consulted clairvoyants, and no book. The watch smooth and cool in one hand, he pulled a pen from his coat pocket with the other. Beneath his feet, he could feel the sharp angle of the plane's ascent.

‘Of course, I'm married now,' said Cynthia, ‘so you don't need to worry about that.'

‘Just about the dying then,' said Dan.

‘Sorry?'

He shrugged. ‘It is really hard to hear, isn't it?' There was something wrong, he knew, in not wanting to keep the conversation going, like the rudeness of getting into a cab and not wanting to talk to the driver. ‘Sometimes I think I must be going deaf,' he said, an arbitrary and untrue excuse. And he creaked open the pages of the empty book. Even so far into the year, with another almost in sight, nearly every page was blank.

At the beginning of every winter, every year he'd been away from home, Dan had gone into a big bookshop in the city and chosen a journal for the imminent new year. He'd taken it home, snap-wrapped in its plastic, and he'd put it carefully on the table next to his bed. On New Year's Eve, he would unwrap it and write all his details onto the first page: name, address, passport number, work email, his mum's number on the other side of the world as the one to call in an emergency—he read the number slowly now and wondered what Caro would have made of that.

On New Year's Day, he'd open the book, uncap a new pen, and try to think of something to write about the night before. He'd try to think of one observation, of one line that was beautiful, or unexpected, or generous— something worthy of being the first sentence in a whole new year. Gramps had opened the first year after the war by telling Charlie's grandmother how lovely it was going to be falling in love with her again. You could build a family, a history, on a story like that. It was the kind of line he must have worked on through the deathly mess of the years they'd been apart.

Dan never came up with anything like it. And after an hour or so, he'd leave the top few lines blank so that he could fill in his great sentence later, and then start a bullet-point list of resolutions. Call Mum once a week. Go to the gym. Save more money. One year, more hungover and tired than usual (one of the boys had put a company credit card down for the bar tab; it had been a big night), he'd written more extreme promises.

Propose to girlfriend—he couldn't remember now if he'd even had one when he wrote that, let alone if it was Caroline. Go to Antarctica. Run a marathon. And at the end of the list, the usual: call home more often, call his mum, call Charlie. He hadn't done any of those things. He never kept any of his resolutions, and only rarely got around to writing anything in the journal again for the rest of the year, although sometimes, late on a Sunday night, he felt that he ought to. Gramps would have insisted. ‘Keep your stories, boy, remember what you're doing and where you are—it's your immortality.' But the books stayed blank; the days slipped by. He never ran a marathon or proposed to anyone. And he called home as infrequently as ever.

He blamed the time difference, the amount of time his job consumed. He never really meant to let his silences run so long, always felt at least a little guilty when he found a message from his mum, wondering why she hadn't heard from him in so many weeks. But their conversations were so desultory, he thought—he in his routine, she in hers. What was there to say, other than that he was still on one side of the world, and she was still on the other?

His record of calling Charlie was even worse—partly, he told himself, for want of exciting things to tell her, and partly, he assured himself, because she called him so infrequently too. ‘You get to the end of the day,' she'd say in their sporadic calls, ‘and, well, you know.' Besides, his mum told each what the other was doing. He could believe they were as close as ever.

Staying at Caro's place half the week was another excuse—no matter how many times she offered her phone. ‘I'll call later, I'll call tomorrow,' he'd say, and she'd shake her head and shrug. She could talk to her mother three times before lunch, could text people without even looking at the keypad. Had she meant it about not calling her? Dan was never sure about things like that.

On the screen in front of him, the little aeroplane inched out of England and on towards Europe. Dan clicked the lid on and off his pen a few times.
I'm flying home
, he wrote on the first line of that day's page. His writing was awkward and irregular, like it still belonged at high school. He made another dot of ink on top of the full stop and watched as it flared across the paper. What next?

The aeroplane on the map nudged a little further across the solid green lump of land. He wrote:
I tried to call Charlie and she wasn't home. I left messages.
He frowned.
I asked after Gramps. Gramps would know what to write on a page like this. The aeroplane on the screen is too big for the land it's flying over. We'll be on the other side of the world in less than a day. The woman next to me thinks she's going to die on a plane. They should give you a clock and a compass when you board. Caro will be home by now—I can't remember the last time I travelled without her. I can't remember the last time I spoke to Charlie properly. I can't remember what Gramps looks like—what he looked like when I left. I don't think I even have a photo. But I'll be home tomorrow, on the other side of the world.

He stared at the next block of blankness, willing it to fill.

Next to him, Cynthia had taken a book out of her bag too, moving her feet—in bright red socks—onto the spare seat between them. She held the book out at arm's length to read, the way Dan's mum did. Dan thought,
She must be older than I think she is.
He thought,
I wonder if Mum's got glasses by now.
It was a book of instructions for writing a memoir, and she was underlining things with a pencil. Above their heads, the seatbelt sign flashed on, and a disembodied voice told them they were heading for some turbulence.

‘I'm sure it won't be today,' said Cynthia, without looking up from her page.

Once, years before, and before Caroline, Dan had looked out of a plane's window on his way to Greece and seen the Matterhorn, perfectly clear and familiar among the Alps below. Its rocky faces had gleamed and sparkled in the sun and there was snow glistening on its peak.

Gramps had a terrible story about the seven men who'd first climbed to its top; how four of them, roped together, had fallen to their death on the way down. ‘Men will do anything,' Gramps had said, ‘to get up in the air.'

But what about all the people who've hiked to its summit after that
, Dan had wondered, gliding above it,
trying to get close to the sky—and here we are whizzing over the top. Easy
. He'd meant to write to Charlie about seeing it; he thought that later on his holiday he'd even bought a postcard of a white building against a blue ocean to hold the story. But he knew, as he looked out through the window at the bank of clouds below, that if he dug down far enough in his bag he'd probably find the card, still blank and scrunched into an inside pocket with a few Mythos bottle tops and a hotel receipt. Funny, the things you never got around to doing. Now Caro wrote all the postcards when they travelled. Sometimes he added
and Dan
on the bottom. His mother called it carelessness, laziness, but Dan, if he thought about it, suspected that Charlie not only heard any news he'd told his mother, but that she still heard, somehow, every story he meant to tell her. When they were kids, they'd made tin-can telephones to run through the fence. One Christmas, Gramps had bought them walkie-talkies. Charlie in particular had loved the idea of making words move through air—she wanted Dan to leave his walkie-talkie on in his room while his mum read to him, so she could hear the stories too. Her mum had died, she pointed out with the child's pragmatism she would never lose, and she only had Gramps's voice left for storytelling.

The plane shuddered, Dan's stomach lurching with it as his fingers tightened around his pen. It didn't bear thinking about, the power of the air, if it could hurl a jumbo jet up or down or from side to side so casually, so easily. The plane jolted as though its nose was falling forward, and a woman hurrying along the aisle grabbed at the headrest of Cynthia's seat, and clutched her hair by mistake.

‘
Izvi'nite, pros'tite
,' said the woman, patting at Cynthia's head and slipping into the row of seats in front of them. Cynthia smiled at her, accepting the apology.

‘Did you see them boarding the plane?' she said to Dan. ‘Russian, I think, and the old man isn't well. The crew didn't want to let him on without a doctor's certificate or something—they were just in transit, apparently, and trying to get to Australia. He's supposed to have some operation there. He was in a wheelchair. It must have been before you got on. Must be her father.'

Dan leaned his head against the window, craning to see the old Russian man she said was in front of them. He could see a little bit of skin, very papery and pale, and thin hair that looked colourless rather than anything you'd call grey or blond. The woman's face came into view; her smooth cheek and her eye were disproportionately large somehow.
Must
be something to do with only seeing part of her
, thought Dan. She picked up a face washer and dabbed at the old man's skin, murmuring gently. The tone of her voice didn't change, didn't waver as the plane made another sudden jolt, although Dan saw that she held the cloth above the man's forehead a little longer, waiting for the strange air to pass before she tried to touch his skin lightly.

Outside the window, the clouds were so thick that the world below had disappeared and Dan was sure that if he'd been able, somehow, to step through the side of the plane and into the cool, white silence, they would be solid enough for him to stand on.