The Body in the Clouds (20 page)

‘Do you have anything that smells like white roses?' But that was Caro's perfume, and who was he buying for—Charlie, ahead of him, or Caroline, behind?

The young girl, thin herself in a paper-thin silk dress, frowned at him. ‘You know the name, sir?' He shook his head.

Walking towards the transit lounge again—it was unbelievable how much he wanted to be strapped back into his narrow seat and on his way—he chose a couple of magazines at random from a newsstand, one hand fumbling for his phone while the other fussed with unwanted change. He redialled Charlie's number without thinking and stood in the middle of the busy concourse, listening to it ring.

‘Hello?'

‘Charlie? Charlie? Hey, hi, it's Dan. Listen, I'll be home tomorrow—I don't know if you got my messages—and I'm just in Singapore staring at all these perfumes. Do you want me to get you something?'

‘Dan?'

‘Did you get my messages? I'm on my way. Charlie?'

‘Dan. I'm sorry, my phone's been turned off. I haven't listened to any messages for a while. What did you say about perfume?'

‘Are you all right, Charlie?'

‘Your mother's here—did you want to talk to her?'

His mother? What time was it? ‘Sure—are you all right?' But she'd put her hand over the mouthpiece; he could hear something muffled, some discussion, and then his mother's voice saying, ‘No, no, just tell him I'll pick him up in the morning.'

‘It's an early flight,' he said, as if his mother might hear. ‘It gets in at half-six or something—I'll get a cab, really. Tell her I'll get a cab.'

‘Half-six,' said Charlie, sounding like herself at last. ‘Half-six—listen to you, Mr Britpop.' A long pause. ‘Okay, so we'll see you tomorrow then?'

‘Charlie, are you all right?'

‘We'll see you tomorrow,' she said again. ‘It's great you're coming.' And the line clicked while he stood for a moment, watching the seconds tick by on his phone. He disconnected at last with the slightest pressure of his thumb, looked back towards the perfume shop—too hard—and then forward towards his gate.

The Russian woman and her father were just going in, the old man frail and hunched in a wheelchair with a hand-knitted blanket across his knees. What had they done to pass the time, Dan wondered, watching the woman struggle with her folder of passports, tickets, documents. Someone from the airline stepped towards the old man's chair, and the woman dropped everything—paper everywhere—putting her hands up: ‘No, no, please, I am fine, he is fine.'

‘A certificate, ma'am, you should really have a doctor's certificate so we know that it's all right for him to fly.'

‘We came through—we came to London. From London today. There was no problem, there was nothing with this.' She was trying to scoop everything off the floor and sort through it at the same time. ‘
Izvi'nite
,
pros'tite
, please, please.'

‘He looks so unwell—we just need a doctor to say it's all right for him to fly. You do understand, don't you?'

The old man, sallow and still until now, raised one hand as if he wanted to interject. His daughter dropped the folder of papers again as she tried to soothe him, to tuck his papery skin back under the blanket's woolly warmth.

‘All right,' said the flight attendant at last. ‘Come through here and we'll sort this out—we don't want to inconvenience everyone else.' And she took Dan's boarding pass and slipped it abruptly through the electronic reader. ‘Mr Kopek, thank you.' She paused over the name. ‘Are you travelling with them?'

‘No, no—well, yes, they were on the same plane as me coming from London.'

‘You're not Russian?'

‘No—Australian.'

‘Good.' She blushed. ‘I'm sorry—I didn't mean that. It's just so difficult with the language and no doctor and . . .' She waved her hands. ‘Sorry for the wait.'

Walking towards the airbridge, he passed the Russians, tucked away to one side like a problem to think about later. He settled into his own seat; Cynthia appeared, settled back into hers.

‘Nice break?' she asked, as if they'd both just taken a holiday.

‘Nice,' said Dan. The now-familiar family filed into its four seats, the smaller Dan asleep against his father's shoulder. His mother smiled across the aisle, raised her hand in half a wave towards Dan, and the plane filled up around them. Clipped into his belt, eyes forward, he could hear the flick of magazine pages as passengers anticipated their next movie, their next designated dinner and breakfast. And then came a sigh, like the sound that came with delayed trains in London's Underground, and people began to realise how long they'd been waiting.

They came along the aisle then, the younger woman, the frail older man, and two flight attendants arguing loudly with a man in a suit. ‘Without a certificate, Doctor, we really shouldn't let him get onto the plane. Without a certificate from his doctor, he really shouldn't be flying.'

‘She says he goes to Sydney for medical treatment,' the doctor said, shrugging as he glanced at his watch. ‘She says they have flown this far already.'

‘But he looks . . .' One of the attendants gestured towards the old man. His skin was dull, his eyes closed, and his breathing shallow.

‘Is just cold. Please,' said his daughter, ‘there is a doctor for him in Sydney.'

‘He's flown this far,' the doctor repeated. ‘I can't give you a certificate without an examination, and there's no time for that—but if he's come this far . . .'

The other attendant sighed. ‘All right,' she said, ‘we've held everyone up long enough.' And turning to the Russian woman: ‘Do you need help getting him settled? Do you need any extra blankets?'

The woman shook her head. ‘You are very kind,' she said.

‘Then let's get going.'

As Dan learned again how to put on his life jacket, how to count the seats to his nearest exit, he felt the bustle and attention of the Russian lady settling her father. He could see the furrows of her frown, between the seats, but the expression beneath the frown was exactly that of the smaller Dan's mother when she'd turned and seen her little boy running towards her. And as he watched the Russian woman tuck the knitted blanket high around her father's throat, he thought suddenly,
It's Gramps—that's why Mum was there, whatever time it is. That's why Charlie's phone was off before.
He stared up at the seatbelt sign, bright and bossy, and his breath tightened. He wanted to call again, wanted to know. As the plane accelerated along the runway, he unclipped his seatbelt and tried to stand up. Cynthia's hand reached over, making him sit down.

‘There's nothing you can do,' she said, inclining her head towards the father and daughter in front of them. ‘I'm sure it will be all right. Poor girl.'

Dan leaned his head against the window again as the ground fell away, the asphalt, the city, the shape of the land. The clouds crowded in around him, and he lost the shape of Gramps's face in his memory. This time, he was certain he knew what that meant.

Us going up
, he thought,
and Icarus coming down.
There was a painting of Icarus's foot disappearing into the water—Gramps had a postcard of it on his lowboy—and a farmer or two, a whole shipload of people, going about their day, not even noticing the splash. Dan wondered now where it had come from, who'd sent it. It had sat propped up on the little cupboard as long as he could remember, and he would have bet it would still be there.
These days
, he thought,
there'd be thousands of us up in the air in planes, maybe seeing something, maybe noticing something, two wings on fire, plummeting towards the water. Wondering what on earth we'd seen
. His eyes felt heavy; his legs twitched a couple of times.

He was asleep before the flight attendant had made her first announcement.

Inside the Cloud

T
he white was thick, heavy and cold to the point of dampness; a hand held out from a face disappeared altogether and feet faded from view in the dense, still mist. It was quiet, and the clean smell of the air contradicted its solidity: it was ozone, or oxygen, or something pushed through purification.

From above, from some angles, tiny chinks opened to show the sudden sweep of an arm, the rush of running, the collision of a body with something hard, large, unexpected. But there was no noise, just the thick sound of silence.

In the dream, William Dawes counted his steps carefully. If he could get his bearings, if he could make out two fixed, distant points, he might calculate his position and work out where this strange space was. He sensed other movement, but could see nothing, and when he called out to hail whoever might be there—‘Good morning'; he still didn't know how to say it in the natives' language—the silence swallowed his voice down to nothing. Perhaps he'd been up in the Frenchman's balloon at last; perhaps he'd fallen out, his descent broken by this landscape of clouds.

He stopped a moment, completely motionless, and eased his fingers, outstretched like a specimen of a starfish, away from his face until they too disappeared. It was a surprising relief that they reappeared when he drew his wrist back in towards his body. If he squinted, he could make out the shape of a rainbow through this thick fog, although it seemed a more solid curve—maybe it was the roundness of a far-off English hill, and he had dreamed himself back home.

He took a step back, and another, straining to hear the sound of footsteps, whether they were his own or someone else's, and found his back up hard against something solid. He slid down, crouching, and prepared to wait.

In the dream, Ted Parker was making his way down from the top of the bridge. It had become an endless climb and Joy was so far ahead of him she was already home. The night had ended and the dawn had come up through greys, silvers, until at some point all its colour and shape had faded completely and he was left in this blanketing mist, wondering how many more steps he needed to take until his feet reached the ground, reached the grass, reached the shore. One foot carefully in front of the other—he had no sense of how far he'd come, even if he was still heading down or had tricked himself somewhere and made a turn, to ascend again. If he could just get a glimpse of the horizon, of the coast, he could orient himself with the east and know the way home.

He stopped a moment, listening for his own breath, his own sigh, but the whiteness seemed to have leached all the sound from the world as well as its colour. He eased his fingers away from his face, their five points flexed like a starburst, and he flinched when they brushed against something smooth, solid, impenetrable. He turned, his back hard against it, his eyes scouring the white space above him for anything—a glimpse of the sun, a star, a lantern on a porch or on a ferry—anything that wasn't cloud. He made himself breathe slowly and evenly:
If this was happening when I was awake
, he thought distinctly,
I'd be scared by now.
He counted beats as he breathed: in, two, three; out, two, three. Slow, easy, gentle, like dancing with Joy on the unfinished half of the arch.
I'm sitting on top of the world
, he sang to his breathing's waltz, but the song made no sound.

He could see it now, above him, as he looked up—the arch, closed and complete, it seemed; a heavier shape against the whiteness that encased him. He laughed; no sound either. Back on the ground after all, but who knew where? Whether it was from fear or anticipation, every bone in his body ached.

In the dream, Dan Kopek was outside the plane, the great metal cylinder long gone so that he stood, clumsy but secure, on a cushion of cloud, and wondered how he was supposed to get home now. His arm pushed forward, fingers spread like a firework's flare and as wide as they could go. He watched as he moved them away from himself, saw them swallowed by the white. It felt cold, and clean, and almost wet—he'd have to remember to tell Charlie—and while some sections twirled around him like long, languid ribbons, others billowed, inviting comparisons. There was a boat. There was an angel. There was the great big curve of Gramps's bridge; a little knot of clouds down below even made the complementary geometry of the city's famous Opera House. Dan laughed, swallowing hard when he realised he made no sound.
Some dream
, he thought;
some trip.
He tried to pull a chunk of the whiteness away from itself, but his fingers slid straight through.

He began to walk, in his regular gait at first, and then more cautiously, more tentatively, his hands still lost somewhere out in front of him. Was he walking up, or down, or through? Was there a right direction? Was there a wrong one? He blew, gently at first and then more vigorously as a tiny space seemed to open out in front of him. He was sure there was someone nearby. He was sure that wherever this was, it was familiar. He was sure something was about to happen, and he hoped he'd be able to see whatever it was through the viscous, continuous white.

In the space below the south-east pylon of the bridge, Charlie tried to make herself invisible, speaking only when spoken to and standing back from the digging and the shouting. Every so often, she'd dart forward, grabbing a shot of a hand, a find, a moment. Another yell, and the fill in the first of the honeycomb of holes shook free.
Just like Gramps said
, she thought, clicking frame after frame. Here was the beginning of the lattice through which great steel cables had anchored the bridge's two halves to the ground.

‘Long way to go down yet,' said one of the workers, and Charlie nodded.

‘A hundred and eighteen feet long, and a hundred feet down,' she said, and then: ‘My grandfather worked on it. I grew up with all his stories.'

The man smiled at her. ‘Must add something to being here, knowing we're digging down to where he was all those years ago. Never know what else we'll find while we're here, eh? They found an old brick from 1789 when they were digging round here for the bridge in the first place.'